The Green Procurator
Values shift here, in Kolyma, and any one of our concepts – even though its name may be pronounced in the usual way and spelled with the usual letters – may contain some new element or meaning, something for which there is no equivalent on the mainland. Here everything is judged by different standards: customs and habits are unique, and the meaning of every word has changed.
When it is impossible to describe a new event, feeling, or concept for which ordinary human language has no word, a new term is created, borrowed from the language of the legislator of style and taste in the Far North – the criminal world.
Semantic metamorphoses touch not only such concepts as Love, Family, Honor, Work, Virtue, Vice, Crime, but even words that are quite specific to the world of the Far North and that have been born within its bowels – for example, ESCAPE…
In my early youth I read about Kropotkin’s flight, in 1876, from the Fortress of Peter and Paul. His was a classic escape: a daredevil cab at the prison gates, a lady with a revolver under her cape, an exact calculation of the number of steps from the guardhouse door, the prisoner’s sprint under fire, the clatter of horse hooves on the cobblestone pavement.
Later I read memoirs of persons who had been sent to exile in Siberia under the czars. I found their escapes from Yakutia and Verxoyansk bitterly disappointing: a sleigh-ride with horses hitched nose to tail, arrival at the train station, purchase of a ticket at the ticket window… I could never understand why this was called an ‘escape’. Such escapes were once called ‘unwarranted absence from place of residence’, and I believe that this was a far more accurate description than the romantic word ‘flight’. Even the escape of the Social Revolutionary Zenzinov did not give the feeling of a real escape like Kropotkin’s. An American yacht simply approached the boat on which Zenzinov was fishing and took him on board.
There were always plenty of escape attempts in Kolyma, and they were all unsuccessful, because of the particularly severe nature of the polar region, which the czarist government never attempted to colonize with convicts – as it did Sakhalin.
Distances to the mainland ran into thousands of miles; the nearest settlements were those surrounding the mines of Far Northern Construction and Aldan, and we were separated from them by a taiga vacuum of six hundred miles.
True, the distance to America was significantly shorter. At its narrowest point, the Bering Strait is only fifty-five miles wide, but the border was so heavily guarded as to be absolutely impassable.
The main escape route led to Yakutsk. From there travel had to be either by water or on horseback. There were no planes in those days, but even so it would have been a simple matter to lock up the planes reliably.
It is understandable that there were no escape attempts in the winter; all convicts (and not only convicts) dream fervently of spending the winter under a roof next to a cast-iron stove.
Spring presents an unbearable temptation; it is always that way. To the compelling meteorological factor is added the power of cold logic. A trip through the taiga is possible only during the summer, when it is possible to eat grass, mushrooms, berries, roots, or pancakes baked from moss flour, to catch field mice, chipmunks, squirrels, jays, rabbits…
No matter how cold the summer nights are in the north, in the land of the permafrost, no experienced man will catch cold if he sleeps on a rock, makes a mattress of grass or branches, avoids sleeping on his back, and changes position regularly from one side to the other.
The choice of Kolyma as a camp location was a brilliant one, because of the impossibility of escape. Nevertheless, here as everywhere, the power of illusion is strong, and the price of such an illusion is paid in bitter days spent in punishment cells, additional sentences, beatings, hunger, and frequently death.
There were many escape attempts, which always began when the first emeralds colored the fingernails of the larches.
The convicts who tried to escape were almost always newcomers serving their first year, men in whose hearts freedom and vanity had not yet been annihilated, men whose reason had not yet come to grips with Far North conditions so different from those of the mainland. Until then the mainland was, after all, the only world that they had known. Distressed to the very depths of their souls by everything they saw, the beatings, torture, mockery, degradation, these newcomers fled – some more efficiently, others less – but all came to the same end. Some were caught in two days, others in a week, still others in two weeks…
At first there were no long sentences for escaped prisoners. Ultimately, however, they were tried under Point 14 of Article 58 of the Criminal Code. Escape is a refusal to work and is therefore counter-revolutionary sabotage. Ten years was thus to become the minimal ‘supplementary’ sentence for an escape attempt. Repeated attempts were punished with twenty-five years. This frightened no one, nor did it lessen the number of escape attempts or of burglaries. But all that was to come later.
The enormous staff of camp guards with their thousands of German shepherds combined efforts with the border patrol and the vast army stationed in Kolyma and masquerading under the title ‘The Kolyma Regiment’. Together, these groups had more than enough manpower to catch one hundred out of every hundred escapees.
How could escape be possible, and wouldn’t it have been simpler to beef up the camp guards rather than hunt down those who had already escaped?
Economic considerations justify maintaining a staff of ‘headhunters’, since this is cheaper than setting up a ‘deadbolt’ system of the prison variety. It is extraordinarily difficult to prevent the escape itself. Even the gigantic network of informers recruited from the prisoners themselves and paid with cheap cigarettes and soup is inadequate.
This is a question of human psychology with its twists and turns, and it is impossible to foresee who will attempt an escape, or when, or why. What happens is often quite different from that which might have been expected.
Of course, all sorts of preventive measures can be taken – arrests, imprisonment in those prisons within prisons that are called ‘punishment zones’, transfers of ‘suspicious’ prisoners from one place to another. Many such measures have been worked out, and they probably lessen the number of escapes. There would have been even more attempts had it not been for these punishment zones situated deep in the taiga under heavy guard.
People do manage to escape even from punishment zones, however, while no one attempts to escape from unguarded work sites. Anything can happen in camp.
Spring is a time of preparation. More guards and dogs are sent in, and additional training and special instructions are the rule. As for the prisoners, they also prepare – hiding tins of food and dried bread, selecting ‘partners’.
There is a single example of a classic escape from Kolyma, carefully prepared and executed in a brilliant, methodical fashion. It is the exception that proves the rule. Even in this escape, however, a tiny insignificant thread was left that led back to the escapee – even though the search took two years. Evidently it was a question of the professional pride of the investigators, Vidokov and Lekokov, and considerably greater attention, effort, and money were spent on it than was normally done.
It is curious that the escapee who demonstrated such energy and wit was neither a ‘political’ nor a professional criminal, either of whom might have been expected to specialize in such affairs. He was an embezzler with a ten-year sentence.
Even this is understandable. An escape by a ‘political’ is always related to the mood of the ‘outside’ and – like a hunger strike in prison – draws its strength from its connection with the outside. A prisoner must know, and know well in advance, the eventual goal of his escape. What goal could any political have had in 1937? People whose political connections are accidental and insignificant do not flee from prison. They might try to escape to their family and friends, but in 1938 that would have involved bringing repressive measures down on the heads of anyone whom the escapee might have seen on the street.
In such instances there was no getting off with fifteen or twenty years. The political would have been a threat to the very lives of his friends and family. Someone would have had to conceal him, render him assistance. None of the politicals in 1938 tried to escape.
The few men who actually served out their sentences and returned home found that their own wives checked the correctness and legality of their release papers and raced their neighbors to the police station to announce their husbands’ arrival.
Reprisals taken upon innocent persons were quite simple. Instead of being reprimanded or issued a warning, they were tortured and then sentenced to ten or twenty years of prison or hard labor. All that was left to such persons was death. And they died with no thought of escape, displaying once more that national quality of passivity glorified by the poet Tiutchev and shamelessly exploited on later occasions by politicians of all levels.
The professional criminals made no attempts to escape because they did not believe they could succeed in returning to the mainland. Moreover, experienced employees of the camp police and the Criminal Investigation Service claim to have a sixth sense that enables them to recognize professional criminals. It is as if the criminal were stamped with the indelible mark of Cain. The most eloquent example of the existence of this sixth sense occurred during a month-long search for an armed robber and murderer. The search was being conducted along the roads of Kolyma, and an order was issued that he be shot on sight.
The detective, Sevastyanov, stopped a stranger in a sheepskin coat standing beside a tank at a filling-station. When the man turned around, Sevastyanov shot him in the forehead. Sevastyanov had never seen the bandit, who was fully dressed in winter clothing. It is impossible to examine tattoos on every passer-by, and the description given to Sevastyanov was very vague. The photograph was so inadequate that it too was of little assistance. In spite of all this, Sevastyanov’s intuition did not fail him.
A sawed-off shotgun fell from beneath the dead man’s coat, and a Browning pistol was found in his pocket. He had more than enough identification papers.
How should we regard this positive proof of a sixth sense? Another minute, and Sevastyanov himself would have been shot. But what if he had killed an innocent man?
The criminals had neither the strength nor the desire to return to the mainland. Having weighed all the pros and cons, they decided not to take any chances but to limit their activities to reorganizing their lives in this new environment. This was, of course, a rational decision. The thugs viewed escape attempts as bold adventures, but unnecessary risks.
Who would make a run for it? A peasant? A priest? I met only one priest who had attempted to escape – and that was before the famous meeting where Patriarch Sergei handed Bullitt, the first American ambassador, a list of all Orthodox priests serving sentences throughout the Soviet Union. Patriarch Sergei had had the opportunity to acquaint himself with the cells of Butyr Prison when he was Metropolitan. As a result of Roosevelt’s intervention, all members of the clergy were released in a body from imprisonment and exile. The intention was to arrange a certain ‘concordat’ with the church – an essential step in view of the approaching war.
Perhaps it would be a common criminal who would attempt to escape – a child-molester, an embezzler, a bribe-taker, a murderer? But there was no sense in these people’s attempting to escape, since their sentences (which were called ‘terms’ in Dostoevsky’s time) were short, and they were given easy service jobs. In general they had no difficulty in obtaining positions of privilege in the camp administration. Workdays were generously credited to them and – most important – they were well treated when they returned to their home towns and villages. This kindness could not be explained away as the Russian people’s capacity to pity the ‘unfortunate’. That attitude had long since become a thing of the past, a charming fairy tale. Times had changed, and the great discipline of the new society demanded that ‘the simple people’ copy the attitude of the authorities in such matters. This attitude was usually favorable, since common criminals did not trouble the government. Only ‘Trotskyites’ and ‘enemies of the people’ were to be hated.
There was another significant factor that might explain the indifference of the populace to those who had returned from the prisons. So many people had spent time in prison that there probably was not a family in the country in which some family member or friend had not been ‘repressed’. Once the saboteurs had been eliminated, it was the turn of the well-to-do peasants, who were called kulaks (the term meaning ‘fist’). After the kulaks came the ‘Trotskyites’, and the ‘Trotskyites’ were followed by persons with German surnames. Then a crusade against the Jews was on the point of being declared. All this reduced people to total indifference toward anyone who had been marked by any part of the criminal code.
Earlier, anyone who had returned from prison to his native village inspired in others guarded feelings (concealed or openly displayed) of animosity, contempt, or sympathy, while now no one paid any attention to such persons. The moral isolation of those marked as convicts had long since disappeared.
Former prisoners were met in the most hospitable fashion – provided their return had been sanctioned by the authorities. Any child-molester and rapist who had infected his young victim with syphilis could count on enjoying full freedom of action in those same circles where he had once ‘overstepped’ the bounds of the criminal code.
The fictionalized treatment of legal categories played a significant role in this regard. For some reason writers and dramatists wrote many works having to do with the theory of law. The law book of the prisons and camps, however, remained locked up under seven seals. No serious conclusions that might touch upon the heart of the matter were reached on the basis of service reports.
Why should the criminal element in camp have attempted to escape? The idea was remote from their minds, and they relinquished their fates totally to the camp administration. In view of all these circumstances, Paul Krivoshei’s escape was all the more remarkable.
Krivoshei’s name meant ‘crooked neck’ in Russian. He was a stocky, short-legged man with a thick red neck that was all apiece with the back of his head. His name was no accident.
A chemical engineer from a factory in Kharkov, he spoke several foreign languages perfectly, read a great deal, had a good knowledge of painting and sculpture, and a large collection of antiques.
A prominent Ukrainian engineer, he did not belong to the Party and deeply despised all politicians. He was a clever and passionate man, but greed was not one of his vices. That would have been too crude and banal for Krivoshei, whose passion was for enjoying life as he understood it – indulging in relaxation and lust. Intellectual pleasures did not appeal to him. His culture and vast knowledge combined with material possessions provided him with many opportunities to satisfy his baser instincts and desires.
Krivoshei had studied painting simply to be able to enjoy a higher status among those who loved and appreciated art and not appear ignorant before the objects of his passion – be they male or female. Painting had never interested him in the slightest, but he considered it his obligation to have an opinion even on the square hall in the Louvre.
The same was true of literature, which he read primarily in French or English and primarily for language practice. In and of itself, literature was of little interest to him, and he could spend a virtual eternity reading a novel – one page a night before falling asleep. There cannot be a single book in this world that could have kept Krivoshei awake till morning. He guarded his sleep carefully, and no detective novel could have upset his even schedule.
Musically, Krivoshei was a total ignoramus. He had no ear, and he had never even heard of, much less felt, the sort of mystical reverence Blok had for music. Krivoshei had long since learned that the lack of a musical ear was ‘not a vice, but a misfortune’, and he was quite reconciled to his ill luck. In any case, he possessed sufficient patience to sit to the end of some fugue or sonata and thank the performer – particularly if it was a woman. He enjoyed excellent health and was of a plump, Pickwickian build, in other words a shape that threatened no one in camp.
Krivoshei was born in 1900. He always wore either horn-rimmed glasses or glasses with round lenses and no rims at all. Slow and unhurried in composure with a high, arched, receding brow, he presented an extremely imposing figure. This too was probably intentional; his sedate bearing impressed the supervisors and lightened his lot in camp.
A man with no feeling for art and lacking that excitement characteristic of both the creator and the user of art, Krivoshei became absorbed in the collecting of antiques. He devoted himself to this hobby totally and with passion, since it was both interesting and profitable, and gave him the opportunity to meet new people. And, of course, this pursuit lent a certain air of propriety to his baser interests. The salary paid an engineer at that time was insufficient to permit Krivoshei to lead the opulent life of an antiques enthusiast. He lacked the means and could obtain them only by embezzling. There was no denying that Krivoshei was a decisive personality.
He was sentenced to be shot, but the sentence was commuted to ten years – an enormous punishment for the middle thirties. His property was confiscated and sold at auction, but Krivoshei had foreseen the possibility of such an outcome. It would have been strange indeed if he had not been able to conceal a few hundred thousand rubles. The risk was small and the calculation simple. As a common criminal and therefore a ‘friend of the people’, he would serve no more than half his sentence, accumulate workday credits or benefit from an amnesty, and then be free to spend the money he had salted away.
Krivoshei was not kept for long in the mainland camp, however, but was sent to Kolyma because of his heavy sentence. This complicated his plans. True, his confidence in the benefits of a criminal sentence (as opposed to a political one) and the manners of a member of the landed gentry was totally justified, and Krivoshei never spent a day in a work gang at the mines. He was sent to work as a chemical engineer in a laboratory in the Arkagalinsk coal region.
At that time the famous gold strike at Chai-Urinsk had not yet been made, and ancient larch trees and six-hundred-year-old poplars were still standing on the sites of numerous future settlements with thousands of residents. No one believed then that the nuggets of the At-Uriakhsk Valley could either be exhausted or surpassed, and life had not yet migrated northwest to Oimyakon, then the North Pole of cold. Old mines were exhausted, and new ones opened. Everything at the mines is always temporary.
The entire coal basin of Arkagala, which was ultimately to become the basic source of heating-fuel for the region, was at that time only an outpost for gold prospectors. The ceilings of the mines’ galleries were low enough to touch if one stood on a rail. They had been dug economically, ‘taiga-style’ in the expression of the camp supervisors, with pick and axe – like all the roads of Kolyma that extend for thousands of miles. These early mines are precious relics that hearken back to a time when the only other tool had ‘two handles and one wheel’. Convict labor is cheap.
Geological prospecting groups were not yet choking in the gold of Susuman and Upper At-Uriakhsk.
Krivoshei, however, clearly realized that the paths of geologists would lead them to the outskirts of Arkagala and thence to Yakutsk. The geologists would be followed by carpenters, miners, guards… He had to hurry.
Several months passed, and Krivoshei’s wife arrived in Kharkov. She had not come to visit him, but had followed her husband, duplicating the feat of the Decembrists’ wives. Krivoshei’s wife was neither the first nor the last of such ‘Russian heroines’.
These wives had to resign themselves both to the cold and to the constant torment of following their husbands, who were transferred periodically from place to place. The wife would have to abandon the job she had found with such difficulty and move to an area where it was dangerous for a woman to travel alone, where she might be subject to rape, robbery, mockery… Even without such journeys, however, none of these female martyrs could escape the crude sexual demands of the camp authorities – from the highest director to the guards, who had already had a taste of life in Kolyma. All women without exception were asked to join the drunken bachelor parties. Female convicts were simply commanded to: ‘Undress and lie down!’ They were infected with syphilis without any romancing or poems from Pushkin or Shakespeare. Treatment of convicts’ wives was even freer, since they were considered legally independent persons, and there was no article in the criminal code to protect them. If a camp supervisor were to rape a female convict, he always risked being informed upon by a friend or a competitor, a subordinate or a superior.
Worst of all – the whole colossal journey was meaningless, since the poor women were not permitted to visit their husbands. A promise to permit such a visit was always a weapon in the hands of a potential seducer.
Some wives brought with them from Moscow permission to visit their husbands once a month, on the condition that the husbands fulfill their production quotas and that their conduct be above reproach. The wives were not permitted to stay the night, of course, and the visit had to take place in the presence of a camp supervisor.
A wife almost never succeeded in obtaining work in the same settlement in which her husband was serving his sentence. On the rare occasions when a wife did manage to get a job close to her husband, the husband was immediately transferred to some different place. This was not a form of amusement invented by the camp supervisors, but official instructions: ‘Orders are orders.’ Such instances had been foreseen by Moscow.
Wives were not permitted to send any food to their husbands. There were all sorts of orders, quotas, and instructions that regulated the food ration according to work and conduct.
Could the guards not be asked to slip him some bread? The guards would be afraid of violating instructions. The camp director? He would agree, but she would have to pay with her own body. He didn’t need money, since he had long since been receiving a quadruple salary. Even so, it was highly unlikely that such a woman would have money for bribes – especially on the scale practiced in Kolyma. Such was the hopeless situation of the convicts’ wives. Moreover, if the husband had been convicted as ‘an enemy of the people’, there was absolutely no need to stand on ceremony with her. Any outrage committed on her person was considered a service to the country, a feat of valor, or at the very least a positive political action.
Many of the wives had arrived under three-year work contracts, and they had to wait in that trap for a return passage to the mainland.
Those who were strong in spirit (and they needed more strength than their convict husbands) waited for their contracts to end and left, never having seen their husbands. The weak ones remembered the persecutions of the mainland and were afraid to return. They lived in an atmosphere of debauchery, drunkenness, hangovers, and big money. They married again – and again – bore children and abandoned both their husbands and themselves.
As might have been expected, Paul Krivoshei’s wife was not able to get a job in Arkagala. She spent a short time there and left for the capital of the area – Magadan. A housewife with no skills, she got a job as a bookkeeper, found a place to sleep, and arranged her life in Magadan, where things were more cheerful than in the taiga at Arkagala.
But secret telegraph lines carried a cable from Arkagala to the Magadan chief of criminal investigations. His office was situated on virtually the only street in town, close to the barracks where Krivoshei’s wife was staying and which had been partitioned up into living quarters ‘for families’. The cable was in code: ‘Escaped: Convict, Paul Krivoshei, born 1900, Article 168, sentence 10, case number…’
They thought that Krivoshei’s wife was hiding him. She was arrested, but they couldn’t get anything out of her. Yes, she had been to Arkagala, seen him, left, and was working in Magadan. A long search and observation produced no results. Departing ships and planes were checked with special thoroughness, but it was all in vain; there was no trace of Krivoshei.
Krivoshei set off toward Yakutsk, away from the sea. He took nothing with him but a canvas raincoat, a geologist’s hammer, a pouch with a small quantity of geological ‘samples’, a supply of matches, and some money.
He made his way openly and unhurriedly along deer runs and the paths of pack animals, staying close to settlements and camps, never going far into the taiga. He spent each night in a tent or a hut. At the first small Yakut village he hired workers and had them dig test pits. That is, he had them do the very same work that he himself had formerly done for real geologists. Krivoshei knew enough about geology to pass himself off as a collector. Arkagala, where he had previously worked, was a final base camp for geological prospecting groups, and Krivoshei had managed to pick up their habits. His methodical manners, horn-rimmed glasses, daily shave, and trimmed nails inspired endless confidence.
Krivoshei was in no hurry. He filled his log with mysterious signs similar to those he had seen in geological field books and slowly moved toward Yakutsk.
On occasion he would turn back, stray off in a different direction, permit himself to be detained. All this was essential for him to ‘study the basin of the Riaboi Spring’ and for verisimilitude – to cover his tracks. Krivoshei had iron nerves and a pleasant outgoing smile.
In a month he had crossed the Yablonovy mountain chain with two Yakut bearers who were sent along with him by a collective farm to carry his ‘sample’ pouches. When they reached Yakutsk, Krivoshei deposited his rocks at the baggage section on the wharf and set off to the local geological office to ask that several valuable packages be sent to the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Krivoshei then went to the bathhouse and to the barber. He bought an expensive suit, several fashionable shirts, and some underwear. He then set off with a good-natured smile to visit the head of the local scientific society, where he was received in the most friendly fashion. His knowledge of foreign languages created a convincing impression.
Finding in Krivoshei an educated person (a rarity in Yakutsk), the directors of the local scientific society asked him to stay on a while longer. They countered his flustered protest that he had to hurry on to Moscow with a promise to pay his passage to Irkutsk at government expense. Krivoshei thanked them with dignity, but replied that he really had to be on his way. The society, however, had its own plans for Krivoshei.
‘Surely you won’t refuse, dear colleague, to give two or three lectures… on… any topic of your choice. For example, coal deposits in the Middle-Yakut Plateau?’
Krivoshei felt a knot form in the pit of his stomach.
‘Oh, of course, with pleasure. Within limits… you understand, without approval from Moscow…’ Krivoshei fell into profuse compliments of the scientific activity in the town of Yakutsk.
No criminal investigator could have put a more wily question to Krivoshei than had this Yakut professor, who was so favorably impressed by his scholarly guest, with his courteous bearing, and his horn-rimmed glasses. The professor, of course, merely intended to do a service to his home town.
The lecture took place and even gathered a considerable audience. Krivoshei smiled, quoted Shakespeare in English, sketched something on the blackboard and ran through dozens of foreign names.
‘These Muscovites don’t know much,’ the man who had been sitting next to the Yakut professor said during the break. ‘Any schoolboy knows about the geological side of his talk. As for those chemical analyses of coal, that has nothing to do with geology. The only thing bright about him is his glasses.’
‘You’re wrong,’ the professor frowned. ‘What he says is very useful; besides, our colleague from the capital has a gift for popularization. We should have him repeat his lecture for the students.’
‘Well, maybe for the freshmen,’ the man continued obstinately.
‘Stop it. After all, it’s a favor. You don’t look a gift horse…’
Krivoshei kindly agreed to repeat the lecture for the students, and it met with considerable success.
And so the scientific organizations of Yakutsk paid for their Moscow guest’s ticket to Irkutsk.
His collections – several crates packed with stones – had been shipped off earlier. In Irkutsk ‘the director of the geological expedition’ managed to have his rocks sent by post to Moscow, to the Academy of Sciences, where they were received and lay for years in the warehouse, an unresolved scientific mystery. It was assumed that this mysterious shipment must have been collected by some insane geologist who had forgotten his field and even his name in some unknown polar tragedy.
‘The amazing thing,’ Krivoshei later said, ‘was that no one anywhere asked to see my identification papers – not in the migrating village councils or in the highest scientific bodies. I had all the necessary papers, but no one ever asked for them.’
Naturally, Krivoshei never showed so much as his nose in Kharkov. He stopped at Mariupol, bought a house there, and used his false documents to get a job.
Exactly two years later, on the anniversary of his hike, Krivoshei was arrested, tried, again sentenced to ten years, and returned to Kolyma to serve out his time.
What was the mistake that canceled out this truly heroic feat, which had simultaneously demanded amazingly strong nerves, intelligence, and physical strength?
In the scrupulousness of its preparation, the depth of its concept and the psychological calculation that was its very cornerstone, this escape had no precedent.
An unusually small number of persons had taken part in its organization, but it was precisely this aspect that guaranteed its success. The escape was also remarkable because in this land of Yakuts where local residents were promised twenty pounds of flour for each captured escapee, a single person had challenged a whole state with its thousands of armed men. Twenty pounds of flour had been the tariff in czarist times, and this reward was officially accepted even now. Krivoshei had to look on everyone as informers and cowards, but he had struggled and won!
What error had destroyed the plan that he had so brilliantly conceived and carried out?
His wife was detained in the north and had not been permitted to return to the mainland. The same organization that was investigating her husband was also in charge of issuing travel papers.
This, however, they had foreseen, and she was prepared to wait. Month followed month, and her request was refused without explanation. She made an attempt to leave from the other end of Kolyma – by plane over the same taiga rivers and valleys through which her husband passed on foot. But, of course, she was refused there as well. She was locked up in an enormous stone prison one-eighth the size of the Soviet Union, and she could not find a way out.
She was a woman, and she became weary of this eternal struggle with a person whose face she couldn’t see, a person who was stronger than she – stronger and more wily.
She had spent the money she had brought with her, and life in the north was expensive. At the Magadan bazaar one apple costs a hundred rubles. So she got a job, but the salaries of persons hired locally, and not ‘recruited’ on the mainland, differed little from those in Kharkov.
Her husband had often said to her: ‘Wars are won by strong nerves’, and during those sleepless white polar nights she would whisper to herself these words of a German general. She felt her nerves were giving out. The stillness of nature, the deaf wall of human indifference, her complete uncertainty and fear for her husband exhausted her. For all she knew, he might have died of hunger along the way. He could have been killed by other escaped convicts, or shot by the guards, but she joyously concluded from the constant attention to her person on the part of a certain Institution that her husband had not ‘been caught’ and that her sufferings would be justified.
She wanted to confide in someone, but who would understand her, advise her? She knew little of the Far North, and she ached to lighten that terrible burden on her soul that seemed to grow with every day, with every hour.
But in whom could she confide? In everyone she met she sensed a spy, an informer, an observer, and her intuition did not deceive her. All her acquaintances in all the settlements and towns of Kolyma had been called in and warned by the Institution. All of them waited anxiously for her to speak openly.
In the second year she made several attempts by mail to re-establish her contacts with her acquaintances in Kharkov. All her letters were copied and forwarded to the Kharkov Institution.
By the end of her second year of imprisonment, this desperate half-beggar knew only that her husband was alive. She sent letters addressed to him poste restante to all the major cities of the USSR.
In response she received a money order and after that five or six hundred rubles each month. Krivoshei was too clever to send the money from Mariupol, and the Institution was too experienced not to understand this. The map used in such instances to indicate ‘operations’ is like the maps used in military headquarters. The places from which money orders had been sent to the addressee in the Far North were indicated by flags, and each place was a railroad station to the north of Mariupol. There were no two flags in the same place. The Office of Investigations was now obliged to turn its efforts to compiling a list of persons who had moved to Mariupol on a permanent basis in the last two years, compare photographs…
That was how Krivoshei was arrested. His wife had been a bold and loyal aide. It was she who had brought him the identification papers and money – more than 50,000 rubles.
As soon as Krivoshei was arrested, she was immediately permitted to leave. Morally and physically exhausted, she left Kolyma on the first boat.
Krivoshei himself served a second sentence as head of the chemical laboratory in the Central Prison Hospital, where he enjoyed certain small privileges from the administration and continued to despise and fear the politicals. As before, he was extremely cautious in his conversations and even took fright if someone made political comments in his presence. His extreme cautiousness and cowardice had a different cause from that of the usual philistine-coward. Things political were of no interest to him, for he knew that a high price was exacted in the camp for the ‘crime’ of making political statements. He simply had no desire to sacrifice his material and physical comfort. It had nothing to do with his intellectual or spiritual view of life.
Krivoshei lived in the laboratory instead of the camp barracks. This was permitted only to privileged prisoners. His clean, regulation cot nestled behind cupboards containing acids and alkalis. It was rumored that he engaged in some unusual form of debauchery in his cave and that even the Irkutsk prostitute, Sonya, was astounded by his knowledge and abilities in this respect. This may not have been the case at all, and such rumors may have been a total fabrication. There were more than enough female civilian employees who wanted to be ‘romanced’ by Krivoshei, a handsome man. He, however, always declined such advances carefully and insistently. They were too risky and carried too high a punishment, and he liked his comfort.
Krivoshei accumulated credits for workdays, no matter how few they might have been, and in a few years was released from camp, but without the right to leave Kolyma. This last circumstance did not trouble him in the slightest. On the day following his release he appeared in an expensive suit, an imported raincoat, and a well-made velour hat.
He obtained a position at one of the factories as a chemical engineer. He really was a specialist on high pressures. He worked for a week and asked for leave ‘because of family circumstances’.
’???’
‘I’m going for a woman,’ Krivoshei explained with a slight smile. ‘I’m going to find a woman at the bride’s market at the Elgen Collective Farm. I want to get married.’ He returned that very evening with a woman.
Near the Elgen Collective Farm, where only women prisoners worked, there was a filling-station. It was in the woods, at the edge of the settlement. Barrels of gasoline stood among the rose willow and alder shrubs, and it was here that the ‘freed’ women of Elgen gathered every evening. Truckloads of ‘suitors’ – yesterday’s convicts – would come in search of a bride. Courtship was a hurried affair – like everything in Kolyma (except the sentences), and the trucks would return with the newly-weds. If necessary, people could get to know each other in greater detail in the bushes, which were sufficiently large and thick.
In the winter all this would take place in private homes and apartments. Bride-picking naturally took much more time in the winter than in summer.
‘But how about your former wife?’
‘We don’t correspond.’
There was no sense trying to find out if this was true or not. Krivoshei could have given the magnificent camp reply: ‘If you don’t believe it, take it as a fairy tale.’
There was a time in the twenties, during the nebulous youth of the camps and those few ‘zones’ which were called concentration camps, when escape attempts were not considered a crime nor punished by an additional sentence. It seemed natural that the prisoner should attempt to escape, and it was the duty of the guards to catch him. Such relations between two groups of people both separated and linked by the prison bars seemed totally normal. Those were romantic days, when, in the expression of Musset, ‘the past no longer existed, but the future had not yet arrived’. It was only yesterday that the Cossack leader and future White general, Krasnov, was captured and released on his own recognisance. Mainly, it was a time when the limits of Russian patience had not yet been tested, had not yet been stretched to infinity – as was to happen later in the second half of the thirties.
The criminal code of 1926 had not yet been written with its notorious Article 16 (permitting criminal prosecution of acts not classified as crimes, but viewed as being ‘analogous’ to a crime), and Article 35 envisaged the use of internal exile as a form of punishment and created an entire social category of ‘thirty-fivers’.
When the first camps were set up, their legal footing was rather shaky. They required a lot of improvisation and, therefore, there was much arbitrariness on a local level. The notorious Solovetsk ‘smoke-house’, where convicts were forced to stand on stumps in the taiga to be eaten by the incredible Siberian mosquitoes, was an empirical experiment. The empirical principle was a bloody one, since the experiments were conducted on living material, human beings. The authorities could approve such methods as the ‘smoke-house’, and then the practice would be written into camp law, instructions, orders, directives. Or the experiment might be disallowed, and in such instances those responsible for the ‘smoke-house’ were tried by a military tribunal. But then, there were no long sentences at that time. The entire Fourth Division of the Solovki Prison had only two prisoners with ten-year sentences, and everyone pointed them out as if they were movie stars. One was the former colonel of the czarist gendarmerie, Rudenko, and the other was Marianov, an officer of the White Army in the Far East. A five-year sentence was considered lengthy, and most were for two or three years.
In those years – up to the beginning of the thirties – there was no additional sentence for an escape. If you got away, you were in luck; if they caught you alive, you were also in luck. It was not often that escaped convicts were returned alive; the convicts’ hatred for the guards developed the latters’ taste for human blood. The prisoner feared for his life – especially during transfers, when a careless word said to the guards could purchase a ticket to the next world, ‘to the moon’. Stricter rules were in effect during transfers of prisoners, and the guards could get away with a lot. During such transfers prisoners often demanded that their hands be tied behind their backs as a form of life insurance. The hope was that if this was done the guards would be reluctant to ‘write off’ a prisoner and then fill in his death certificate with the sacramental phrase: ‘killed during attempt to escape’.
Investigations of such instances were always conducted in a slipshod fashion, and if the murderer was smart enough to fire a second shot in the air, the investigation always produced a conclusion favorable to him. The instruction prescribed a warning shot.
At Vishera, which was the Fourth Division of SLON and the Urals branch of the Solovetsk camps, the commandant, Nesterov, would personally receive recaptured prisoners. He was a heavy-set man with dense black hair that grew on the backs of his long, white hands and even seemed to cover his palms.
The dirty, hungry, beaten, exhausted escapees were coated from head to foot with a thick layer of road dust. They would be brought to Nesterov and thrown at his feet.
‘All right, come closer.’
The prisoner would approach him.
‘Decided to take a stroll? That’s fine, just fine!’
‘Forgive me, Ivan Spiridonych.’
‘I’ll forgive you,’ Nesterov would say in a solemn sing-song voice as he got up from his seat on the porch. ‘I’ll forgive you, but the state won’t forgive…’
His blue eyes would become milky and lined with red veins. His voice, however, remained kind and well disposed.
‘Take your pick – a smack or isolation.’
‘A smack, Ivan Spiridonych.’
Nesterov’s hairy fist would soar at the head of the happy convict, who would wipe away the blood and spit out his broken teeth.
‘Get off to the barracks!’
Nesterov could knock anyone off his feet with one punch, and he prided himself on this famous talent. The returned prisoner too would consider the arrangement to his advantage, since his punishment went no further than Nesterov’s punch.
If the prisoner refused to resolve the matter family-style and insisted on the official punishment, he was locked up in an isolation cell with an iron floor, where two or three months of reduced rations was considerably worse than Nesterov’s ‘smack’.
If the escaped prisoner survived, there were no other unpleasant consequences – aside from the fact that he could no longer count on being lucky when prisoners were being selected for release to ‘unload’ camp.
As the camps grew, the number of escapes also increased, and simply hiring more guards was not effective. It was too expensive, and at that time very few people were interested in the job of camp guard. The question of responsibility for an escape attempt was being resolved in an inadequate, childish fashion.
Soon a new resolution was announced from Moscow: the days a convict spent on the run and the period he passed in a punishment cell after capture were not to be counted into his basic sentence.
This order caused considerable discontent in Bookkeeping. They had to increase personnel, for such complex arithmetical calculations were too much for our camp accountants.
The order was implemented and read aloud to the entire camp during head counts.
Alas, it did not frighten the would-be escapees at all.
Every day the ‘escaped’ column grew in the reports of the company commanders, and the camp director frowned more and more as he read these daily reports.
Kapitonov, a musician in the camp band, was one of the camp director’s favorites. He walked out of the camp, using his gleaming cornet as if it were a pass, and left the instrument hanging on the branch of a fir. At that point the camp head lost his composure altogether.
In late fall three convicts were killed during an escape. After the bodies were identified, the head of the camp ordered that they be exhibited for three days beside the camp gates – so that everyone had to pass them when leaving for work. But even this unofficial sharp reminder neither stopped nor even lessened the number of escapes.
All this took place toward the end of the twenties. Later came the notorious ‘reforging’ of men’s souls and the White Sea Canal. The ‘concentration camps’ were renamed ‘Corrective Labor Camps’, the number of prisoners grew exponentially, and escapes were treated as separate crimes: Article 82 of the 1926 criminal code laid down a punishment of one year, to be added on to the basic sentence.
All this took place on the mainland, but in Kolyma – a camp that had existed since 1932 – the question of escapees was dealt with only in 1938. From then on, the punishment for an escape was increased, and the ‘term’ was expanded to three years.
Why are the Kolyma years 1932–7 not included in the chronicle of escapes? At that time the camps were run by Edward Berzin. He had founded the Kolyma camp system and was the supreme authority where Party activity, governmental affairs and union matters were concerned. He was executed in 1938 and ‘rehabilitated’ in 1956. The former secretary of Dzerzhinsky and commander of a division of Latvian soldiers who exposed the famous conspiracy of Lokkar, Edward Berzin attempted – not without success – to solve the problem of colonizing this severe and isolated region and the allied problem of reforging the souls of the convicts. A man with a ten-year sentence could accumulate enough work credits to be released in two or three years. Under Berzin there was excellent food, a workday of four to six hours in the winter and ten in the summer, and colossal salaries for convicts, which permitted them to help their families and return to the mainland as well-to-do men when their sentences were up. Berzin did not believe in the possibility of reforging the professional criminals, since he knew their base, untrustworthy human material all too well. It was extremely difficult for professional criminals to be sent to Kolyma in the early years. Those who did succeed in being sent there never regretted it afterward.
The cemeteries dating back to those days are so few in number that the early residents of Kolyma seemed immortal to those who came later. No one attempted to escape from Kolyma at that time; it would have been insane…
Those few years are the golden age of Kolyma. The horrible Yezhov, who was a true enemy of the people, spoke indignantly of the period at one of the meetings of the Central Committee shortly before unleashing his own wave of terror that was to be christened the ‘Yezhovshchina’.
It was in 1938 that Kolyma was transformed into a special camp for recidivists and Trotskyites, and escapes began to be punished with three-year sentences.
‘Why did you escape? You couldn’t have had a compass or a map?’
‘We did it anyway. Alexander promised to be our guide…’
They were being held at a transit prison. There were three of them who had unsuccessfully tried to escape: Nicholas Karev, a twenty-five-year-old former Leningrad journalist, Fyodor Vasiliev, a bookkeeper from Rostov who was the same age, and Alexander Kotelnikov, a Kamchatka Eskimo and reindeer-driver who had been arrested for stealing government property. Kotelnikov must have been about fifty years old, but he could have been a lot older, since it is hard to tell the age of a Yakut, Kamchadal, or Evenk. Kotelnikov spoke good Russian, but he couldn’t pronounce the Russian ‘sh’ and always replaced it with ‘s’ as did all the dialect speakers of the Chukotsk Peninsula. He knew who Pushkin and Nekrasov were, had been in Khabarovsk, and was an experienced traveler. He was a romantic by nature, judging by the gleam in his eye.
It was he who volunteered to lead his young friends out of confinement.
‘I told them America was closer and that we should head in that direction, but they wanted to make it to the mainland, so I gave in. We had to reach the Chukchi Eskimos, the migrating ones who were here before the Russians came. We didn’t make it.’
They were gone for only four days. They had left in the middle of September, in boots and summer clothing, certain they would have no difficulty in reaching the Chukchi camps, where Kotelnikov had assured them they would find friendship and assistance. But it snowed – a thick, early snow. Kotelnikov entered an Evenk village to buy deerskin boots. He bought the boots, and by evening a patrol caught up with them.
‘The Tungus are traitors, enemies,’ Kotelnikov fumed.
The old reindeer-driver had offered to lead Karev and Vasiliev out of the taiga without expecting any payment whatsoever. He was not particularly grieved by his new three-year ‘add-on’.
‘They’ll send me to the mines as soon as spring comes. I’ll just take off again.’
To shorten the time, he taught Karev and Vasiliev the Chukotsk language of the Kamchatka Peninsula. It was Karev, of course, who had initiated the whole affair. He cut a theatrical figure – even in this prison setting – and his modulated, velvet-toned voice betrayed his frivolousness. It couldn’t even have been called adventurousness. With each passing day he understood better the futility of the attempt, became moody, and weakened.
Vasiliev was simply a good soul ready to share his friend’s fate. Their escape attempt had taken place during the first year of their imprisonment, while they still had illusions… and physical strength.
Twelve cans of meat disappeared on a ‘white’ summer night from the tent-kitchen of a geological prospecting group. The loss was highly mysterious, since all forty employees and technologists were civilians with good salaries who had little need to steal cans of meat. Even if these cans had been worth some fantastic sum, there was no one to buy them in this remote, endless forest. The ‘bear’ explanation was immediately rejected, since nothing else in the kitchen had been touched. It was suggested that someone might have been trying to get even with the cook, who was in charge of the food. But the cook was a genial sort who denied that he had a secret enemy among the forty men. To check the matter out, the foreman, Kasaev, armed two of the stronger men with knives and set out with them to examine the area. He himself took with him the only weapon in camp – a small-caliber rifle. The surrounding area consisted of gray-brown ravines devoid of the slightest trace of greenery. They led to a limestone plateau. The geologist’s camp was located in a sort of pit on the green shore of a creek.
It did not take long to find out what had happened. In about two hours the party leisurely climbed a plateau, and a worker with particularly good eyesight stretched out his hand: a moving point could be made out on the horizon. The search party went along the ridge of slippery tuff, young stone that had not yet completely formed. This young tuff is similar to white butter and has a repulsive, salty taste. A man’s foot will sink into it as if into a swamp, and when a boot is dipped in this semi-liquid, buttery stone, it is covered by a white paint-like substance.
It was easy to walk along the ridge, and they caught up with the man in about an hour and a half. He was dressed in the shreds of an old pea jacket and quilted pants with the knees missing. Both pant legs had been cut off to make footwear, which had already worn to shreds. The man had also cut off the sleeves of the pea jacket to wrap around his feet. His leather or rubber boots had evidently been long since worn through on the stones and branches and had been abandoned.
The man had a shaggy beard and was pale from unendurable suffering. He had diarrhea, terrible diarrhea. Eleven untouched cans of meat lay next to him on the rocks. One can had been broken open and eaten the day before.
He had been trying to make his way to Magadan for a month and was circling in the forest like a man rowing a boat in a deep lake-fog. He had lost all sense of direction and was walking at random when, totally exhausted, he came upon the camp. He had been catching field mice and eating grass. He had managed to hold out until the previous day when he noticed the smoke of our fire. He waited for night, took the cans, and crawled up on to the plateau by morning. He also took matches from the kitchen, but there was no need for them. He ate the meat, and his dry mouth and terrible thirst forced him to descend the ravine to the creek. There he drank and drank the cold, delicious water. The next day his face was all puffed up, and a gastric cramp robbed him of his last strength. He was glad that his journey was over – no matter in what fashion.
Captured at that very same camp was another escapee, an important person of some kind. One of a group who had escaped from a neighboring mine, robbing and killing the mine director himself, this man was the last of the ten to be captured. Two were killed, seven caught, and this last member of the group was captured on the twenty-first day. He had no shoes, and the soles of his feet were cracked and bleeding. He said that he had eaten a tiny fish a week earlier. He had caught the fish in a dried-up stream, but it had taken him several hours, and he was debilitated by hunger. His face was swollen and drained of blood. The guards took considerable care with his diet and treatment. They even mobilized the camp medic and gave him strict orders to take special care of the prisoner. The man spent three days in camp, where he washed, ate his fill, got his hair cut, and shaved. Then he was taken away by a patrol for questioning, after which he was undoubtedly shot. The man knew this would happen, but he had seen a lot in the camps, and his indifference had long since reached the stage where a man becomes a fatalist and swims with the current. The guards were with him the entire time and would not permit anyone to talk to him. Each evening he would sit on the porch of the bathhouse and watch the enormous cherry-red sunset. The light of the evening sun was reflected in his eyes and they seemed to be on fire – a beautiful sight.
Orotukan is a settlement in Kolyma with a monument to Tatyana Malandin, and the Orotukan Club bears her name. Tatyana Malandin was a civilian employee, a member of the Komsomol, who fell into the clutches of escaped professional criminals. She was robbed and raped ‘in chorus’ – in the loathsome expression of the criminal world. And she was murdered in the taiga, a few hundred yards from the village. This occurred in 1938, and the authorities vainly spread rumors that she had been murdered by ‘Trotskyites’. The absurdity of such a slander, however, was too obvious, and it enraged even Lieutenant Malandin, the uncle of the murdered girl. A camp employee, Malandin henceforth reversed his attitude to the criminals and the politicals in camp. From that time on he hated the former and did favors for the latter.
Both the men described above were recaptured when their strength was virtually exhausted. Another man conducted himself quite differently when he was detained by a group of workers on a path near the test pits. A heavy rain had been falling for three days, and several workers put on their raincoats and pants to check the small tent, which served as a kitchen; it contained food and cooking utensils. There was also a portable smithy with an anvil, a furnace, and a supply of drilling tools. The smithy and kitchen stood in the bed of a mountain creek, in a ravine about a mile and a half from the sleeping tents.
Mountain rivers easily burst their banks when it rains, and the weather was fully expected to pull its usual tricks. The sight that the men came upon, however, left them totally dumbfounded. Nothing remained. Where there had been a smithy with tools for the entire site – drills, bits, picks, shovels, blacksmith tools – there was nothing. Nor was there any kitchen with the summer’s food supply. There were no pots, no dishes – nothing. The appearance of the ravine had been totally changed by new stones brought down from somewhere by the raging water. Everything had been carried off downstream, and the workers followed the river-banks for several miles, but did not find so much as a piece of iron. Much later, when the water had receded, an enameled bowl was found in the rose willows growing on the shore near the mouth of the creek. This crushed and twisted bowl filled with sand was all that was left after the storm and the spring flood.
Returning home, the workers came upon a man in canvas boots, wearing a soaked-through raincoat and carrying a bag over his shoulder.
‘Are you an escapee?’ Vaska Rybin, one of the ditch diggers of the expedition, asked the man.
‘That’s right,’ the man answered in a sort of semi-confirming tone. ‘I need to get dry…’
‘Come with us to our tent; we have a fire in the stove.’ In the rainy summer weather the stove was always kept hot. All forty men lived in the tent.
The man took off his boots, hung his footcloths next to the stove, pulled out a tin cigarette case, shook some cheap tobacco on to a scrap of newspaper, and lit up.
‘Where are you going in such a rain?’
‘To Magadan.’
‘Would you like something to eat?’
‘What do you have?’
The soup and pearl-barley kasha didn’t tempt the man. He untied his sack and took out a piece of sausage.
‘You know how to escape in style,’ Rybin said.
Vasily Kochetov, an older worker who was second-in-charge of the work gang, stood up.
‘Where are you going?’ Rybin asked him.
‘To get some air,’ Kochetov responded and stepped over the threshold of the tent.
Rybin smirked.
‘Listen,’ he said to the escaped prisoner. ‘Pick up your stuff and get off to wherever you’re going. He just went for the boss – to arrest you. Don’t worry, we don’t have soldiers, but you had better get on your way. Here’s some bread, and take some tobacco. The rain seems to be letting up; you’re in luck. Just keep heading for the big hill, and you can’t go wrong.’
The escaped prisoner silently wrapped the dry ends of his wet footcloths around his feet, pulled on his boots, lifted his sack to his shoulder, and left.
About ten minutes later the piece of canvas that served as a door flung back, and the foreman, Kasaev, came in with a small-caliber rifle over his shoulder. With him were two other foremen, followed by Kochetov.
Kasaev stood silently while his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness of the tent. He looked around, but no one paid any attention to the newcomers. Everyone was busy with his own affairs – some were asleep, others were mending their clothing, others were whittling some complicated erotic figures from a log, and still others were playing the game bura with home-made cards.
Rybin was setting his charred pot, made from a tin can, on the glowing coals.
‘Where is he?’ Kasaev shouted.
‘Gone,’ Rybin answered calmly. ‘Picked up his stuff and left. What did you want me to do – arrest him?’
‘He got undressed,’ Kochetov shouted. ‘He wanted to sleep.’
‘How about you? You went out to get some fresh air, and where did you scurry off to in the rain?’
‘Let’s go home,’ Kasaev said. ‘As for you, Rybin, you had better watch your step or things are going to go badly for you.’
‘What can you do to me?’ Rybin said, walking up to Kasaev. ‘Sprinkle salt on my head? Or maybe cut my throat while I’m sleeping? Is that it?’
The foreman left.
This is one small lyric episode in the monotonously gloomy tale of men fleeing Kolyma.
The camp supervisor was worried by the number of escapees dropping in – three of them in one month. He requested that a guard post of armed soldiers be sent, but he was turned down. Headquarters was not willing to take on such expenditures on behalf of civilian employees, and they told him to take care of the matter, using the resources he already had at his disposal. By that time Kasaev’s small-caliber rifle had been supplemented by two double-barreled, center-firing shotguns that were loaded with pieces of lead – as if for bear. Nevertheless, these guns were too unreliable to count on if the camp were attacked by a group of hungry and desperate escapees.
The camp director was an experienced man, and he came up with the idea of building two guard towers similar to those in real forced labor camps. It was clever camouflage. The false guard towers were intended to convince escaped convicts that there were armed guards at the site.
Evidently the camp director’s idea was successful; no escaped convicts appeared on the site after that, even though we were not much more than a hundred miles from Magadan.
The search for the ‘first of all metals’ – that is, for gold – shifted into the Chai-Urinsk Valley along the same path that Krivoshei had taken. When that happened, dozens fled into the forest. From there it was closer than ever to the mainland, but the authorities were well aware of this fact. The number of secret guard posts was dramatically increased, and the hunt for escaped convicts reached its peak. Squadrons of soldiers combed the taiga, rendering totally impossible ‘release by the green procurator’ – the popular phrase used to describe escapes. The ‘green procurator’ freed fewer and fewer prisoners, and finally stopped freeing anyone at all.
Recaptured prisoners were killed on the spot, and the morgue at Arkagala was packed with bodies being held for identification by the fingerprint service.
The Arkagala coalmine near the settlement of Kadykchan was famous for its coal deposits. The coal seams were as thick as eight, thirteen, or even twenty-one yards. About six miles from the mine was a military ‘outpost’. The soldiers slept, ate, and were generally based there in the forest.
In the summer of 1940 the outpost was commanded by Corporal Postnikov, a man who hungered for murder and performed his job with eagerness and passion. He personally captured five escaped convicts and was awarded some sort of medal and a sum of money, as was the custom in such cases. The reward for the dead was the same as for the living, so there was no sense in delivering captured prisoners in one piece.
One pale August morning Postnikov ambushed an escaped convict who had come down to the river to drink. Postnikov shot and killed the prisoner with his Mauser, and it was decided not to drag the body back to the village but to abandon it in the taiga. There were a lot of bear and lynx tracks in the vicinity.
Postnikov took an axe and chopped off both hands at the wrist so that Bookkeeping could take fingerprints. He put the hands into his pouch and set off home to write up the latest report on a successful hunt.
The report was dispatched on the same day; one of the soldiers took the package and Postnikov gave the rest of the men the day off in honor of his good fortune.
That night the dead man got up and with the bloody stumps of his forearms pressed to his chest somehow reached the tent in which the convict-laborers lived. His face pale and drained of blood, he stood at the doorway and peered in with unusually blue, crazed eyes. Bent double and leaning against the door frame, he glared from under lowered brows and groaned. He was shaking terribly. Black blood spotted his quilted jacket, his pants, and his rubber boots. He was given some hot soup, and his terrible wrists were wrapped in rags. Fellow prisoners started to take him to the first-aid station, but Corporal Postnikov himself, along with some soldiers, came running from the hut that served as the outpost.
The soldiers took the man off somewhere – but not to the hospital or the first-aid station. I never heard anything more of the prisoner with the chopped-off hands.