The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (12 page)

afforded special privileges, given

medals. Its triumph in World War

Two has, if anything, become ever

more sacred to the country as the

years have passed. The role of the

prisoners in forging that victory has

been all but forgotten, however,

even though many of them had

committed no crime at all and

worked harder than anyone. They

were guilty only of being slightly

richer than their neighbours, or of

failing to join a collective farm, or of

telling a joke. Their torment is

largely unacknowledged in Russia

today.

Although Vladimir Putin in

2010, during his spell as prime

minister between his two stints as

president,

made
The

Gulag

Archipelago
compulsory reading for

schoolchildren in their eleventh year,

he does not encourage modern

historians to delve into the past. The

K G B’s files are closed to all but a

chosen few, and there has been little

acknowledgement of the oppressors’

guilt from Russia’s new supposedly

democratic government.

As the train rattled along, I had a

strange feeling that the suffering of

every one of those forgotten victims

had,

because

it

was

unacknowledged, hung around in

the air like the spirits of unburied

children. The haze would be purple,

I thought, and so dense that no

breeze could disperse it. As fresh

prisoners came to replace those who

died at work, the suffering built up

into a great pulsing tube. The tube

followed the railway line, until it

became

an

artery

linking

the

cancerous organs of the camp

system. To the north it flowed round

the bump of Inta, before ending in

the coal fields of Vorkuta. To the

south, it converged with dozens of

other tubes at the great beating heart

of the K G B headquarters on

Lubyanka Square. From there,

arteries spread in all directions.

Some stretched east and north

through Siberia to the camps of

Norilsk; others went beyond that to

the far east and over the sea – where

the purple congealed on the waves in

a loathsome slick – to the nightmares

that were Magadan and Kolyma.

As I lay sweating on my damp

bunk, the hallucination became real

for a second, and I could see the

purple outside the windows, filtering

the sunlight pouring into our

carriage. My neighbours did not

notice it. Perhaps they were used to

it. Almost everyone in the north is a

prisoner, or the child of a prisoner,

or the wife of a prisoner, or the

friend of a prisoner, or the jailer of a

prisoner. The purple miasma clings

to them all, and affects how they

speak and behave. It makes them

cautious

and

unfriendly

and

distrustful. It was only me, the

visitor, who could see it.

Most of my neighbours on the

train were returning from holiday,

still wearing T-shirts bearing the

names of Russia’s seaside resorts in

the Caucasus: Sochi, Anapa, Tuapse.

In the two bunks beneath me was a

middle-aged couple – he had a

moustache, she had tight shorts.

They kept themselves to themselves,

and rebuffed my occasional attempts

to chat. In fairness, my overtures

were self-serving. If I had made

friends with them, I could have

occasionally sat on their bunks. As it

was, I not only had no one to talk

with to pass the time, but had to pass

the time lying on my bunk looking

at the trees and checking my speed

calculation.

Our station stops were entirely

random. We would pull into what

looked like a decent-sized town and

chug out again after a couple of

minutes. Then we would wait for

half an hour at a platform carved out

of the forest, where there were no

shops and no one got on or off.

My two neighbours alighted at

the stop for Syktyvkar and were

replaced by two muscled lads in their

twenties. Much to my delight, they

invited me down to sit with them,

meaning I could get off my sweaty

mattress for the first time that day.

They regaled me with tales of

working on the North Stream gas

pipeline, which will pump gas to

Western Europe.

We drank beer and they swapped

tales of industrial accidents. A

comrade had slipped off the top of

the pipe and broken his leg. A

foreman had stepped back to check a

weld, fallen off the scaffolding and

broken his back. The other one

laughed at that. It was far worse, he

said,

working

for

foreign

contractors, since they make you

check your welds until there are no

leaks at all, and that takes hours.

One of them, Sergei, came from

Inta and had nothing to say in its

favour.

‘It’s a dying town,’ he said, and

asked where I would be staying. I

mentioned the name of the hotel, and

he just laughed. ‘If you can call it a

hotel.’

My heart sank a little as I

climbed back to my bunk for the

night.

When I awoke – it was hard to

call it morning, since it never gets

dark in summer this far north – the

black humps of the Ural Mountains

had heaved themselves over the

horizon to the east. They were

streaked with snow, and looked

menacing and old.

The man who drove me from the

station to town pointed out the last

working coal mine. Otherwise, the

town was sinking back into the

swamp it was born of.

‘I used to work in that one,’ he

said, as we passed another shuttered

working.

Father Dmitry, like most of the

prisoners who came through here,

worked in the mines. The pressing

need for coal of the war years had

passed by the late 1940s. Coal was

far more accessible and of better

quality in Ukraine. But the logic of

power in the gulag meant that the

bosses’ empires were untouchable.

To close the mines here would have

deprived someone of influence, so

the coal was hewn out of the ground,

loaded on to trucks and sent south to

feed the Soviet machine, whether it

was needed or not.

One story Father Dmitry liked to

tell was how, in the coal mine, he

asked the lift operator to hold the

controls while he spoke to people on

the level below. He lay on the

ground, with his head over the shaft

and shouted down to them. He

focused on the conversation and did

not notice when a comrade screamed

for him to get back, that the lift was

coming. The lift operator had

forgotten his promise, and the cage

was speeding down towards the

back of his head. At that point, a

Moldovan called Stan screamed ‘in a

voice’, Father Dmitry wrote, ‘of the

kind used at the front’.

He looked back, and the cage

passed within inches of his face.

‘Everyone was terribly worked up,

but I was calm, I somehow did not

sense the danger. I still don’t.’

Father Dmitry arrived in the

camps in 1948, the year the

government cracked down in earnest

on the freedoms Soviet citizens had

come to enjoy during the chaos of

World War Two. To show how alien

this was to what was happening

elsewhere in the world, 1948 was the

year when Britain founded the

National Health Service, when the

United States gifted Marshall Aid to

Western Europe, and when the

United

Nations

adopted

the

Universal Declaration of Human

Rights.

In 1948, the Soviet government

divided the inmates in two. The

prisoners called ‘criminals’ – those

guilty of murder, rape and other

ordinary crimes – were now housed

separately from those convicted of

political crimes. The number of

‘politicals’, who now got a tougher

routine, had increased. Among the

camp inmates were hundreds of

thousands of returning prisoners of

war – traitors for having surrendered

in battle. There were also unruly

elements from all the lands – Latvia,

Estonia, Lithuania, East Prussia,

Bessarabia, Karelia, Poland and so

on – that had been added to the

Soviet empire after the war. They

were all put to work.

Father Dmitry, a half-educated

peasant boy, was locked up as a

political

prisoner

and

thrown

together with professors and officers

and priests from all over Eastern

Europe. The camps were full of

Poles, Balts and Germans, and even

the occasional Westerner marooned

here by bureaucracy.

It was a university, and many of

the

lessons

were

brutal.

One

professor, Father Dmitry wrote,

complained about his treatment and

was locked in the punishment cell

immediately. The punishment cell

was four walls and no roof – in

winter. The professor came out

chastened and never spoke up again.

They were called by number –

Father Dmitry was K-956 – not by

name, and worked fourteen-hour

days until they were skeletal and

exhausted.

One

Lithuanian

became

so

emaciated that he gained extra

rations, but he did not eat them.

Something inside his brain had

snapped. He squirrelled them away

in his suitcase, until he was sent to

the hospital wing and died.

Prisoners could receive one letter

a year. They had ten minutes to eat

lunch.

‘From this hard life a lot of

people became grasses, informers, so

as to somehow ease their lives: many

of them were killed. One Lithuanian

informer was killed when he had just

a month until his release.’

From the earliest days of the

camps, prisoners had found solace in

religion. The violence between

different groups of prisoners, and

from guards, encouraged individuals

to form groups, to seek out like-

minded inmates to share their

troubles

with.

The

rituals

of

Christianity helped many of them

find comfort, and helped encourage

them to believe in a world outside

the

fences

and

tundra

that

surrounded them.

‘I stayed joyous and optimistic

for a long time, and then I too

suffered these bleak thoughts, that I

would never get out of there . . . My

only release was that there was

another life, there was God. He sees

all our sufferings. When I told the

prisoners that our sufferings would

end, they looked at me like I was a

baby who doesn’t understand life.

And when I told them I had been at

the front – so as to say that I wasn’t

a baby – they didn’t believe me.’

When Father Dmitry was in Inta

the prisoners lived in long wooden

barracks. Those are all but gone

now, having rotted into the muck

like many of the buildings that

replaced them. The conditions in the

Russian Arctic are so severe that the

weather will find the smallest

weakness in a building, squeeze its

way in like an infection and reduce it

to a hump of masonry and wood in

just a few years.

My car dropped me off outside

the Northern Girl hotel, identified by

a sign above a doorway in a block of

flats near the central square. The

lobby housed a cosmetics kiosk. At

the reception window was a blonde

woman who clearly spent much of

her spare time trying out the kiosk’s

products.