The Gulag Archipelago (89 page)

There was one political incident on the voyage. The steamers had to pass through La Pérouse Strait, very close to the Japanese islands. And at that point the machine guns disappeared from the watchtowers and the convoy guards changed to civilian clothes, the hatches were battened down, and access to the decks was forbidden. According to the ships' papers, foresightedly prepared back in Vladivostok, they were transporting, God save us, not prisoners but volunteers for work in the Kolyma. A multitude of Japanese small craft and boats hovered about the ships without suspecting. (And on another occasion, in 1938, there was an incident involving the
Dzhurma:
The thieves aboard got out of the hold and into the storage room, plundered it, and set it afire. The ship was very close to Japan when this occurred. Smoke was pouring from it, and the Japanese offered help, but the cap- tain refused to accept it and
even refused to open the hatches
. When Japan had been left behind, the corpses of those suffocated by smoke were thrown overboard, and the half-burned, half- spoiled food aboard was sent on to camp as rations for the prisoners.)

[Decades have passed since then, but how many times Soviet citizens have met with misfortune on the world's oceans—and in circumstances where it seems that zeks were not being transported—yet because of that same
secretiveness
disguised as national pride they have refused help! Let the sharks devour us, so long as we don't have to accept your helping hand!
Secretiveness
—that is our cancer.]

Short of Magadan the ship caravan got caught in the ice and not even the
Krasin
could help (it was too early for navigation, but they had been in a hurry to deliver laborers). On May 2 they disembarked the prisoners on the ice, some distance from the shore. The newly arrived prisoners got a look at the cheerless panorama of the Magadan of that time: dead hillocks, neither trees, nor bushes, nor birds, just a few wooden houses and the two-story building of "Dalstroi." Nonetheless, continuing to play out the farce of
correction
, in other words, pretending they had brought not simply bones with which to pave the gold-bearing Kolyma but temporarily isolated Soviet citizens who would yet return to creative life, they were greeted by the Dalstroi orchestra. The orchestra played marches and waltzes, and the tormented, half-dead people strung along the ice in a gray line, dragging their Moscow belongings with them (and this enormous prisoner trans- port consisted almost entirely of politicals who had hardly en- countered a single thief yet) and carrying on their shoulders other half-dead people—arthritis sufferers or prisoners without legs. (And the legless, too, got prison terms.)

But here I note that I am again beginning to repeat myself. And this will be boring to write, and boring to read, because the reader already knows everything that is going to happen ahead of time: The prisoners would be trucked hundreds of miles, and driven dozens of miles more on foot. And on arriving they would occupy new camp sites and immediately be sent out to work. And they would eat fish and flour, chased down with snow. And sleep in tents.

Yes, it was like that. But first the authorities would put them up in Magadan, also in Arctic tents, and would
commission
them there too—in other words, examine them naked to determine their fitness for labor from the condition of their buttocks (and all of them would turn out to be fit). In addition, of course, they would be taken to a bath and in the bath vestibule they would be ordered to leave their leather coats, their Romanov sheepskin coats, their woolen sweaters, their suits of fine wool, their felt cloaks, their leather boots, their felt boots (for, after all, these were no illiterate peasants this time, but the Party elite—editors of newspapers, directors of trusts and factories, responsible offi- cials in the provincial Party committees, professors of political economy, and, by the beginning of the thirties, all of them under- stood what good merchandise was). "And who is going to guard them?" the newcomers asked skeptically. "Oh, come on now, who needs your things?" The bath personnel acted offended. "Go on in and don't worry." And they did go in. And the exit was through a different door, and after passing through it, they received black cotton breeches, field shirts, camp quilted jackets without pockets, and pigskin shoes. (Oh, this was no small thing! This was farewell to your former life—to your titles, your posi- tions, and your arrogance!) "Where are our things?" they cried. "
Your
things you left at home!" some chief or other bellowed at them. "In camp nothing belongs to
you
. Here in camp we have
communism!
Forward march, leader!"

And if it was "communism," then what was there for them to object to? That is what they had dedicated their lives to.

And there are also prisoner transports in carts and simply
on foot.
Do you remember in Tolstoi's
Resurrection
how on a sunny day they drove them on foot from the prison to the railroad sta- tion? Well, in Minusinsk in 194-, after the prisoners hadn't been taken into the fresh air for a whole year, they had forgotten how to walk, to breathe, to look at the light. And then they took them out, put them in formation, and drove them the
fifteen
miles to Abakan on foot. About a dozen of them died along the way. And no one is ever going to write a great novel about it, not even one chapter: if you live in a graveyard, you can't weep for everyone.

A prisoner transport on foot—that was the grandfather of prisoner transport by rail, of the Stolypin car, and of the red cattle cars too. In our time it is used less and less, and only where mechanical transportation is still impossible. Thus in one sector of Lake Ladoga, the prisoners were sent on foot from besieged Leningrad to the
red cars
, nicknamed "red
cows
." They led the women together with the German POW's, and used bayonets to keep our men away from them so they couldn't take their bread. Those who fell by the wayside were immediately tossed up into a truck alive or dead, after their shoes were removed. And in the thirties, each day they sent off on foot from the Kotlas Transit Prison to Ust-Vym (about 185 miles) and sometimes to Chibyu (more than 300 miles) a transport of a hundred prisoners. Once in 1938 they sent off a women's prisoner transport the same way. These transports covered 15 miles a day. The convoy marched along with one or two dogs, and those who fell behind were urged on with gunstocks. True, the prisoners' possessions as well as the cooking pot and the food brought up the rear in carts, and this transport thus recalled the classic prisoner trans- ports of the past century. There were also prisoner-transport huts —the ruined houses of liquidated kulaks, with windows broken and doors ripped off. The accounting office of the Kotlas Transit Prison had issued provisions to the transport based on a theoreti- cal estimate of the time the journey would take, provided nothing went wrong on the way, without allowing for even one extra day. (The basic principle of all our accounting.) Whenever delays occurred en route, they had to stretch out the provisions, and fed the prisoners a mash of rye flour without salt and sometimes nothing at all. In this respect they departed from the classic model.

In 1940 Olenyev's prisoner transport, after disembarking from the barge, was herded on foot through the taiga (from Knyazh- Pogost to Chibyu) without anything to eat at all. They drank swamp water and very quickly got dysentery. Some fell by the wayside out of weakness, and the dogs tore the clothes off those who had fallen. In Izhma they caught fish by using their trousers as nets and ate them alive. (And in a certain meadow they were told: Right here is where you are going to build a railroad from Kotlas to Vorkuta.)

And in other areas of our European North, prisoner transports on foot were standard until the time when, on those same routes and roadbeds built by those earlier zeks, the jolly red cattle cars rolled along carrying later prisoners.

A particular technique for prisoner transports on foot was worked out where such transports were frequent and abundant. When a transport is being taken through the taiga from Knyazh- Pogost to Veslyana, and suddenly some prisoner falls by the wayside and can go no farther, what is to be done with him? Just be reasonable and think about it: what? You aren't going to stop the whole transport. And you aren't going to leave one soldier behind for everyone who falls. There are many prisoners and only a few soldiers. And what does that mean? The soldier stays behind for a little while with the fallen prisoner and then hurries on to catch up with the rest—alone.

Regular transports on foot from Karabas to Spassk were retained for a long time. It was only twenty to twenty-five miles, but it had to be covered in one day, with one thousand prisoners in each transport, many of them very weak. It was expected in cases like these that many would simply either drop in their tracks or else fall behind through the indifference and apathy of dying men—you may shoot at them but they still can't go on. They are not afraid of death, but what about clubs, the indefatigable beating of the clubs wherever they hit? They are afraid of clubs, and they will keep going. This is a tested method—that's how it works. And so in these cases the transport column is surrounded not only by the ordinary chain of machine gunners at a distance of fifty yards, but also by an inner chain of soldiers armed only with clubs. Those who have fallen behind get beaten. (As, in fact, Comrade Stalin prophesied.) They are beaten again and again. And even when they have no strength at all with which to go farther, they keep going. And many do miraculously get to the destination. They don't know that this is a
testing by clubs
, and that those who lie down and stay lying down and don't go on despite the clubs are picked up by carts following behind. That's organizational experience for you! (And one can ask: Why, then, didn't they take them all on carts in the first place? But where could enough carts be found? And horses? After all, we have tractors. What about the price of oats nowadays?) Such transports as these were still common in 1948-1950.

And in the twenties, transport on foot was one of the basic methods. I was a small boy, but I remember very well how they drove them down the streets of Rostov-on-the-Don without any qualms. And the famous order: ". . . will open fire without warn- ing!" had a different ring at that time, again because of a differ- ence in technology: after all, the convoy often had only sabers. They used to deliver orders like this: "One step out of line and the convoy guard
will shoot and slash!
" That had a very powerful sound: "shoot and slash!" You could imagine them cutting off your head from behind.

Yes, and even in February, 1936, they drove on foot through Nizhni Novgorod a transport of long-bearded old men from the other side of the Volga, in their homespun coats and in real lapty —bast sandals—wrapped around with onuchi—Russian peasant footcloths—"Old Russia disappearing." And all of a sudden, right across their path, came three automobiles, in one of which rode the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee, President of the Soviet Union, this is to say, Kalinin. The prisoner transport halted. Kalinin went on through. He wasn't interested.

Shut your eyes, reader. Do you hear the thundering of wheels? Those are the Stolypin cars rolling on and on. Those are the red cows rolling. Every minute of the day. And every day of the year. And you can hear the water gurgling—those are prisoners' barges moving on and on. And the motors of the Black Marias roar. They are arresting someone all the time, cramming him in some- where, moving him about. And what is that hum you hear? The overcrowded cells of the transit prisons. And that cry? The com- plaints of those who have been plundered, raped, beaten to within an inch of their lives.

We have reviewed and considered all the methods of deliver- ing prisoners, and we have found that they are all ...
worse
. We have examined the transit prisons, but we have not found any that were good. And even the last human hope that there is some- thing better ahead, that it will be better in camp, is a false hope.

In camp it will be ... worse.

Chapter 4
From Island to Island

And zeks are also moved from island to island of the Archi- pelago simply in solitary skiffs. This is called
special convoy
. It is the most unconstrained mode of transport. It can hardly be distinguished from free travel. Only a few prisoners are delivered in this way. I, in my own career as a prisoner, made three such journeys.

The special convoy is assigned on orders from high officials. It should not be confused with the
special requisition
, which is also signed by someone high up. A special-requisition prisoner usually travels on the general prisoner transports, though he, too, meets up with some amazing interludes on his trip (which are all the more extraordinary in consequence). For example, Ans Bern- shtein was traveling on a special requisition from the North to the lower Volga, to join an agricultural mission. He was exposed to all the overcrowded conditions and humiliations I have described, snarled at by dogs, surrounded by bayonets, threatened with "One step out of line . . ." And then suddenly he was unloaded at the small station at Zenzevatka and met by one single, calm, un- armed jailer. The jailer yawned: "All right, you'll spend the night at my house, and you can go out on the town as you like till morning. Tomorrow I'll take you to the camp." And Ans did go out. Can you understand what
going out on the town
means to a person whose term is ten years, who has already said good-bye to life countless times, who was in a Stolypin car that very morning and will be in camp the next day? And he im- mediately went out to watch the chickens scratching around in the station master's garden and the peasant women getting ready to leave the station with their unsold butter and melons. He moved three, four, five steps to the side and no one shouted "Halt!" at him. With unbelieving fingers he touched the leaves of the acacias and almost wept.