The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (11 page)

After Father Dmitry’s arrest, and

while in detention, he dreamed of

Stalin with an axe, teaching his

friends how to kill people. He

dreamed of being brought before

Stalin in his underwear. ‘My

conscience would not allow me to

admit my guilt,’ he wrote later of his

dream encounter with the dictator.

‘To speak the truth would mean to

undergo torture. I decided to speak

the truth. How can I speak untruth

when there is so much suffering,

when I am standing before him with

bound hands, and he continued to

teach those around him how to

punish? And I woke up with that

feeling.’

He was not able to express such

nobility at his real trial, though he

won the small triumph of stopping

his tormentors from swearing in his

presence. He tried to justify his

poem’s criticism of Stalin by saying

that atheists killed the spirit of

people, but it was not an argument

that won him much ground.

Eventually the prosecutor told

him to write down his confession, to

write the words ‘I consider myself to

be guilty. I slandered Soviet reality.’

But Father Dmitry refused. He

said that he did not consider himself

guilty: ‘I spoke the truth. Come with

me, and I will show you what is

being done. I will show you my

suffering father, I will show you the

exhausted people.’

It did not sway his accusers. He

got ten years in the gulag for

distributing anti-Soviet poems. There

was no appeal. The village lad had

been through starvation, brutality,

the imprisonment of his father,

destitution,

war,

occupation,

conscription, injury, arrest and now

imprisonment. He was only twenty-

six years old, and his life was still

ahead of him.

As my train waited at one of the

little stations on the way back to

Moscow, an express thundered past

in the opposite direction. Despite the

noise they make, Russian trains are

rarely very quick, and I had plenty

of time to read the destination boards

bolted to the side of each carriage:

Vorkuta.

Vorkuta is in the far north and, if

I wanted to retrace Father Dmitry’s

route into the camps of the gulag, I

would need to take that train too.

After his sentencing, he was sent up

the rails to Inta in the Komi

Republic, at the northern end of the

Ural Mountains. By the late 1940s

Komi was one vast prison, where the

tundra took the place of a fence:

frozen solid in winter, impassable

swamp in summer.

Back in Moscow, the returning

Muscovites from my train streamed

on to the platform of the Kursk

station. Progress was slow, held up

by a crowd that had gathered to

watch an old drunk arguing with

three fashionable teenagers. He was

furious at some slight, and two

policemen had to hold him back as

he tried to swing punches. The

teenagers’ smug smiles and the

officers’ chuckles simply enraged

him all the more.

Eventually, the policemen tired

of the game and released his arms, at

which point he collapsed on to the

grimy, soggy tarmac and wriggled

like a turtle on a jar, shouting abuse

as the three teenagers walked away. I

went inside to buy my ticket north.

3

Father Dmitry was K-956

From my upper bunk, the forest

shuffled past very slowly. Every

kilometre a sign – a square of metal

or a neat little lozenge of concrete –

told me how far we were from

Moscow,

with

smaller

signs

counting off the tenths of a kilometre

in between. I mused about how

much paint it must take to keep them

bright and shining, and what on

earth they were for. The only

reasonable

explanation

was

to

provide something of interest for

passengers on the train to look at,

but it seemed an incredible amount

of effort for such a minimal reward.

After a kilometre or two, they lost

their appeal almost entirely.

The town of Inta, where Father

Dmitry served his sentence for

writing poems, is 2,000 kilometres

from Moscow. Getting there would

take thirty-six sweltering hours. I

scribbled a calculation, that is 55

kilometres

an

hour;

another

calculation: 34 miles an hour. If that

was our average between Moscow

and Inta, it was no wonder it felt like

we were going slowly. You can

drive more quickly in many built-up

areas, and this was very far from

being a built-up area. There were no

houses of any kind. The trees were

dense

and

monotonous:

solid,

prickly and dark.

Sometimes we would rattle

through villages, clutches of log-

built houses huddled close to the

tracks. But fewer than half the

houses had anything planted outside.

Most were still secure against the

weather, their roofs were whole, but

no one lived there. If someone did,

they would have filled every

available

hectare

with

potatoes

against the winter. Outside the

villages the fields were choked with

weeds: no livestock, no crops. The

only farm animals I saw all day were

a dozen geese in a garden.

One of the most striking statistics

about modern Russia is that, of the

153,000 villages in the country in

1989, some 20,000 have been

abandoned. Another 35,000 have

fewer

than

ten

people.

The

population has fallen faster in cities,

however,

meaning

that

the

proportion of Russians living in

villages has actually gone up over

that period. This is a practically

unique example of a modern,

developed country deurbanizing.

The economy of the far north has

all but vanished. It was based on

subsidized coal mines and, now the

subsidies are gone, as are most of the

factories that burned coal, so the

mines have not been able to stay

open. In Soviet times, workers

received special high wages for

working in the north, but those rates

are gone too. The knock-on effect of

the mine closures has touched

everything the Soviets created in the

Arctic. Shops cannot stay open

without people to buy their goods.

Factories cannot stay open so far

from their markets. The railway line

I was travelling on was built to tie

the Arctic into the Russian economy

but, that whole day, the only two

other trains I saw were passenger

trains. There were no goods being

shipped either north or south.

Somewhere to the north-west of

me, in 1923, the O G P U security

service, which would later be

renamed the N K V D, then the K G

B, then the FSB, opened its first

labour prison. That first link in what

became the chain of gulag camps

was on the Solovetsky Islands in the

White Sea. It opened when Father

Dmitry was just a year old. The

island camp held several thousand

men by 1925.

But

feeding

and

guarding

prisoners in such a remote location

was expensive. The government in

Moscow needed every rouble to

build its new economy. The camps

would have to pay their way. That

meant that, over time, they were

forced to evolve into profitable

enterprises. They did this by a key

innovation: feeding prisoners a

quantity of food proportionate to the

amount of work they did. This killed

off weaklings early, meaning that

non-productive inmates did not have

to be carried by those strong enough

to fell timber, make bricks, dig coal

or do any of the other tasks left to

prisoners in the fastnesses of the

Soviet state.

It was economically successful,

since it meant camps could be

pushed into areas barely habitable

and exploit their resources for the

first

time.

Decades

later,

this

expansion

was

chronicled

by

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Red

Army officer jailed for making jokes

about Stalin, who became the

historian of the camp system. After

his release in the 1950s, he collected

accounts from other former inmates,

and welded them together into a

great sprawling epic of oral history

that

he

called
The

Gulag

Archipelago
.

Solzhenitsyn compared the camp

system itself to a cancer, spreading

from its original point of mutation

on

the

Solovetsky

Islands

–

colloquially known as Solovki.

Camp officials were aggressive

cancer cells, the camps they set up

were the secondary growths. Instead

of voyaging up blood vessels and

lymph canals as cancers do in the

body,

the

metastasizing

prison

system spread up railways and

rivers.

‘In the summer of 1929 an

expedition of unconvoyed prisoners

was sent to the Chibyu River from

Solovki,’ he wrote. ‘The expedition

was successful – and camp was set

up on the Ukhta, Ukhtlag. But it,

too, did not stand still on its own

spot, but quickly metasta-sized to the

north-east, annexed the Pechora, and

was transformed into UkhtPechlag.

Soon afterwards it had Ukhta, Inta,

Pechora, and Vorkuta sections – all

of

them

the

bases

of

great

independent future camps.’

The conditions, he wrote, were

‘twelve months of winter, the rest

summer’. The camps expanded

rapidly in the 1920s and 1930s,

when the likes of Father Dmitry’s

father were imprisoned. But they

became still worse in the 1940s

when the war stretched the country’s

resources and left even free citizens

hungry, let alone prisoners. Work

norms increased, while food rations

were cut. According to statistics

published later, 352,560 prisoners

died in 1942, which was one in four

of the prison population. In 1943,

the death rate improved slightly, and

only one in five prisoners died:

267,826 people.

Solzhenitsyn wrote how nothing

was wasted on human comforts, not

even to honour the dead. ‘At one

time in Old Russia it was thought

that a corpse could not get along

without a coffin. Even the lowliest

serfs, beggars, and tramps were

buried in coffins,’ he wrote. ‘When

at Inta after the war one honoured

foreman of the woodworking plant

was actually buried in a coffin, the

Cultural and Educational Section

was instructed to make propaganda:

work well and you, too, will be

buried in a wooden coffin.’

More than two million people

died in the camps of the gulag

during the war years, many of them

building this railway line I was

travelling on. When Nazi Germany

invaded the Soviet Union, its troops

rapidly overran the rich coal fields

around Donetsk in Ukraine. Stalin’s

government, in desperate need of

fuel, charged the prisoners with

laying rails across the tundra to Inta

– founded in 1942 – and to Vorkuta.

The rails laid, the prisoners that

survived worked in the mines to

produce the coal to keep the factories

churning out bombs and guns.

The soldiers and the factory

workers

are

honoured

now.

Surviving veterans are greeted by

the president every Victory Day,