The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (35 page)

powder snow thrown up by the two

or three snowmobiles that had roared

off before us. Alexander twisted the

throttle and the wind cut into my

face and tore at my arms. I began to

wonder if he might be right about

the jacket. The cold was intense –

down to minus 40 and due to fall

still further in the clear conditions –

and physically painful.

The wooden houses of the

village flicked past as I tried to shield

my cheeks from the wind. By the

time we arrived at Alexander’s

single-storey home, I was rubbing

my face to get a bit of warmth back

into it. Alexander looked at me in

confusion.

‘Why didn’t you just face

backwards?’ he asked. I felt like an

idiot, since that had not even

occurred to me, and tried to create a

convincing lie for my stupidity.

‘I wanted to see where we were

going,’ I tried, hesitatingly. That did

not

even

convince

me,

and

Alexander laughed. He pointed me

at the door and went to put away the

snowmobile.

I entered a porch filled with

firewood. The doors were lined with

blankets, both for insulation and to

ensure a good fit in their frames. I

pulled off my boots, which were

tight against my three pairs of socks.

I wondered, when I realized how

cold my toes were, if my boots

might not be inadequate for these

conditions as well. When I passed

into the warmth of the house, a

smiling handsome woman was

waiting for me, Alexander’s wife.

‘I’m Natasha, but call me Auntie,

everyone else does,’ she said, and

we walked into the kitchen and she

put the kettle on. The main feature of

the room was a huge brick oven, as

large as Alexander’s snowmobile,

which gave off a pleasant heat.

Three cats and a kitten were perched

on top of it, among assorted pots and

pans. They watched me with

unblinking eyes as I sat at the corner

of the table and drank my tea.

Alexander finally bustled in, his

glasses iced over. He sat on a stool

by the stove and lit one of his rough

cigarettes. He scooped up a couple

of shovels full of dusty coal and

threw them into the fire. Then he sat

back and looked at me. Why, he

asked, had I come?

I explained that I wanted to

experience the conditions that Father

Dmitry had lived in. I wanted to feel,

if only for a short time, the kind of

conditions that he had endured and

the kind of torments suffered by

prisoners who refused to offer due

homage to the Soviet state. We

talked about that for a while, our

conversation then wandering on to

the conditions Alexander and his

family lived in. His youngest

daughter Dasha had now joined us.

He told me about hunting and

fishing, and the two women chipped

in with comments and suggestions.

‘I used to hunt bears, but what

do you kill them for? I don’t see the

need to do this any more, it’s for

young men,’ he said.

The next morning dawned pale.

Lying in the warmth of the blankets,

I could hear the wind moaning

around the house, and I pulled on

my two pairs of long underpants,

three pairs of socks, vest, two T-

shirts and trousers before getting out

of bed. A pale orange stain on the

sky was the sun poking its head over

the horizon to see if the Arctic was

warm enough for it. Before my

window was a rolling unbroken,

unscarred sweep of snow. To the

right was a small stand of birch trees.

Beyond was a tractor, its contours

smoothed by a drift that made it

almost unrecognizable as a man-

made object. A little outhouse was

off to the left, with snow pushed up

its walls in an elegant sweep. When

the sun finally persuaded itself to get

out of bed, it was so weak I could

watch it with the naked eye, and the

bright patches it left on the snow

seemed to emphasize the cold rather

than alleviate it.

Alexander, when I walked into

the kitchen, welcomed me with a cup

of tea. He was sitting on his stool by

the stove, smoking.

‘I don’t know how to tell you

this but it’s warm, it’s only minus

27. But the wind is 15 metres a

second and it bites,’ he said. The

little black kitten was scratching in

the coal by his feet, and I saw that

the coal doubled as their litter tray. It

seemed an elegant solution to burn

the cats’ toilet waste, since they

could hardly go outside.

Before

we

ventured

out,

Alexander

examined

the

mountaineering

jacket,

and

pronounced it inadequate. I would

have bridled at the slur but, to be

honest, after the cold of the previous

evening, I had my doubts about it.

He handed me a stiff blue coat as

used by the railway workers, then,

on seeing my boots, silently handed

me a fur-lined pair. Before I put

them on, he made me wear padded

dungarees too. Fully dressed – with

a jumper, scarf and hat as well as the

collection of undergarments I’d

donned in bed – I could barely bend

in the middle. I felt like a knight in

squishy armour.

Outside in the bright morning,

the cold was still startling. My

cheeks tingled, and I tucked my

fingers into the palms of my gloves.

Boretsky, the old man in Inta,

had said that the prisoners in the

gulag wore two pairs of quilted

trousers to work outside, with a daily

ration of just 600 grams of bread.

Here I was, full of a substantial

breakfast, in two pairs of long

underpants, trousers and padded

dungarees, and I was already cold. It

suddenly seemed a miracle any of

them survived at all.

In a memoir published in 2011,

Fyodor

Mochulsky,

a

Soviet

diplomat, recorded the early part of

his career when he oversaw a

convict-labour

railway-building

camp near Abez. This was before the

railway was finished, so they had to

take a steamer from Arkhangelsk on

the White Sea to Naryan-Mar, then a

smaller ship up the River Pechora,

then a smaller ship still up the Usa.

The boat, with its cargo of building

materials and food and prisoners,

froze into the ice before they reached

Abez, and they had to walk the rest

of the way, sixteen days, over the icy

crust that had formed upon the

freezing mud. Mochulsky’s horse

plunged through the crust.

‘The

horse

was

thrashing

around, and sinking even deeper into

the marsh,’ he wrote. ‘We all shared

a very worrisome thought: how will

we

explain

that

our

horse

disappeared when we arrive at the

Gulag Camp Administration? . . .

This crime, we all knew, had a

corresponding legal statute: ten

years’ imprisonment in the camps.

By now, we had worked so hard to

get that horse out of the quagmire

that we were losing our strength. We

were in total despair.’

That

thought

seems

to

encapsulate the bureaucratic insanity

of the gulag. The horse was not

pitied as a terrified living thing, but

protected only to avoid punishment.

Perhaps more terrible is that he, a

free man, should accept a ten-year

prison term as an appropriate

punishment for losing a horse

through no fault of his own. The

guards were hardly more at liberty

than the prisoners. The habit of

giving and receiving orders was so

engrained in both that it formed an

internal prison they struggled to

escape from.

When Mochulsky reached his

final destination, a logging camp far

in the wilds, the convicts had no

houses or shelter of any kind. ‘They

had scraped the snow off of several

metres of frozen ground in the shape

of squares, and had placed crudely

cut branches down as makeshift

beds. On top of these branches lay

the prisoners, dressed in their

greatcoats and army boots, “resting”

after their twelve-hour workday.’

Mochulsky, who appears to have

written the memoir to excuse his

own role as a cog in the world’s

largest-ever

killing

machine,

recounted how he had mobilized the

prisoners to build barracks for

themselves and made them warm

over the winter, and that they were

grateful to him. That was the winter

of 1940–1, when hundreds of

thousands of prisoners died.

Perhaps more telling is an

encounter he had later in Abez, with

a teenage girl. A cashier, she had

received a three-year sentence for an

accounting irregularity, and had

been raped for the first time before

she even reached prison. In her first

night in prison she was gang-raped,

and was repeatedly assaulted by

fellow inmates in transit camps and

the camp barracks.

‘How could I help her? In the

context of the camp, other than

feeling bad for her, I could do

nothing.’

The prisoners here were units to

be worked to death. They died in

their thousands, and were not

remembered. That morning, as

Alexander folded the fur blanket

over me on the snowmobile’s trailer,

he told me we would go to see the

remains of such unfortunates: graves

we had not seen in the summer,

which had not won even the slight

recognition of those in what is called

the ‘memorial cemetery’, where

Karsavin and the others were

remembered as individuals, rather

than ignored as random lumps in the

tundra.

We set off along the bluff above

the river, stopping to admire a

recently finished church, which was

built in memory of a young man

who had died on a fishing trip. A

little further on, towards the railway

and the great bridge that had tamed

the River Usa, we stopped and

Alexander pointed to our right. He

said something, but I could not hear,

my ears being tightly swaddled in

my woolly hat and my coat’s great

hood.

I looked in the direction of his

outstretched index finger and could

see an obelisk against a clump of

birches. It looked like a grave, so I

stepped off the trailer to get a better

look. I instantly vanished into the

snow up to the tops of my thighs. I

pushed back with my left foot, but

just sank deeper. My heavy clothing

blocked me from turning round, and

I was forced to lie full length on the

snow’s crust, heave myself round,

then pull myself back on to the

trailer with my gloved hands.

‘What did I tell you?’ Alexander

shouted, and I realized that the

unheard words had been a warning

to stay on the trailer.

The obelisk, he told me, marked

the grave of a boss’s daughter. I

asked why it was all on its own,

away from the main graveyard. He

laughed, and coughed on the smoke

of his cigarette.

‘It’s not all on its own, there are

dozens of graves over there but the

rest are for prisoners so they’re

unmarked. They’re

disappearing

back into the ground. In a few years,

you’d never know they were there.’

We swooped down the bluff,

past the site where the North Stream

gas pipeline will ford the river, and

out on to the ice. In my attempt to

reach the obelisk, snow had pushed

down into my boots and was

beginning to melt. We zoomed