The GULag Archipelago Volume 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

Chapter 1 The Ships of the Archipelago

Scattered from the Bering Strait almost to the Bosporus are thousands of islands of the spellbound Archipelago. They are invisible, but they exist. And the invisible slaves of the Archipelago, who have substance, weight, and volume, have to be transported from island to island just as invisibly and uninterruptedly.

And by what means are they to be transported? On what?

Great ports exist for this purpose—transit prisons; and smaller ports—camp transit points. Sealed steel ships also exist: railroad cars especially christened zak cars (“prisoner cars”). And out at the anchorages, they are met by similarly sealed, versatile Black Marias rather than by sloops and cutters. The zak cars move along on regular schedules. And, whenever necessary, whole caravans—trains of red cattle cars—are sent from port to port along the routes of the Archipelago.

All this is a thoroughly developed system! It was created over dozens of years—not hastily. Well-fed, uniformed, unhurried people created it. The Kineshma convoy waits at the Moscow Northern Station at 1700 hours on odd-numbered days to accept Black Marias from the Butyrki, Krasnaya Presnya, and Taganka prisons. The Ivanovo convoy has to arrive at the station at 0600 hours on even-numbered days to receive and hold in custody transit prisoners for Nerekhta, Bezhetsk, and Bologoye.

All this is happening right next to you, you can almost touch it, but it’s invisible (and you can shut your eyes to it too). At the big stations the loading and unloading of the dirty faces takes place far, far from the passenger platform and is seen only by switchmen and roadbed inspectors. At smaller stations a blind alleyway between two warehouses is preferred, into which the Black Marias can back so that their steps are flush with the steps of the zak car. The convict doesn’t have time to look at the station, to see you, or to look up and down the train. He gets to look only at the steps. (And sometimes the lower step is waist-high, and he hasn’t the strength to climb up on it.) And the convoy guards, who have blocked off the narrow crossing from the Black Maria to the zak car, growl and snarl: “Quick, quick! Come on, come on!” And maybe even brandish their bayonets.

And you, hurrying along the platform with your children, your suitcases, and your string bags, are too busy to look closely: Why is that second baggage car hitched onto the train? There is no identification on it, and it is very much like a baggage car—and the gratings have diagonal bars, and there is darkness behind them. But then why are soldiers, defenders of the Fatherland, riding in it, and why, when the train stops, do two of them march whistling along on either side and peer down under the car?

The train starts—and a hundred crowded prisoner destinies, tormented hearts, are borne along the same snaky rails, behind the same smoke, past the same fields, posts, and haystacks as you, and even a few seconds sooner than you. But outside your window even less trace of the grief which has flashed past is left in the air than fingers leave in water. And in the familiar life of the train, which is always exactly the same—with its slit-openable package of bed linen, and tea served in glasses with metal holders—could you possibly grasp what a dark and suppressed horror has been borne through the same sector of Euclidean space just three seconds ahead of you? You are dissatisfied because there are four of you in your compartment and it is crowded. And could you possibly believe—and will you possibly believe when reading these lines—that in the same size compartment as yours, but up ahead in that zak car, there are fourteen people? And if there are twenty-five? And if there are thirty?

The zak car—what a foul abbreviation it is! As, for that matter, are all the executioners’ abbreviations. They meant to indicate that this was a railroad car for prisoners—for zaklyuchennye. But nowhere, except in prison documents, has this term caught on and stuck. The prisoners got used to calling this kind of railroad car a Stolypin car, or, more simply, just a Stolypin.

As rail travel was introduced more widely in our Fatherland, prisoner transports changed their form. Right up to the nineties of the last century the Siberian prisoner transports moved on foot or by horse cart. As far back as 1896, Lenin traveled to Siberian exile in an ordinary third-class passenger car (with free people all around him) and shouted to the train crew that it was intolerably crowded. The painting by Yaroshenko which everyone knows, Life Is Everywhere, shows a fourth-class passenger car re-equipped in very naive fashion for prisoner transport: everything has been left just as it was, and the prisoners are traveling just like ordinary people, except that double gratings have been installed on the windows. Cars of this type were used on Russian railroads for a very long time. And certain people remember being transported as prisoners in just such cars in 1927, except that the men and women were separated. On the other hand, the SR Trushin recalls that even during Tsarist times he was transported as a prisoner in a “Stolypin” car, except that—once again going back to legendary times—there were six people in a compartment.

Probably this type of railroad car really was first used under Stolypin, in other words before 1911. And in the general Cadet revolutionary embitterment, they christened it with his name. However, it really became the favorite means of prisoner transport only in the twenties; and it became the universal and exclusive means only from 1930 on, when everything in our life became uniform. Therefore it would be more correct to call it a Stalin car rather than a Stolypin car. But we aren’t going to argue with the Russian language here.

The Stolypin car is an ordinary passenger car divided into compartments, except that five of the nine compartments are allotted to the prisoners (here, as everywhere in the Archipelago, half of everything goes to the auxiliary personnel, the guards), and compartments are separated from the corridor not by a solid barrier but by a grating which leaves them open for inspection. This grating consists of intersecting diagonal bars, like the kind one sees in station parks. It rises the full height of the car, and because of it there are not the usual baggage racks projecting from the compartments over the corridor. The windows on the corridor sides are ordinary windows, but they have the same diagonal gratings on the outside. There are no windows in the prisoners’ compartments—only tiny, barred blinds on the level of the second sleeping shelves. That’s why the car has no exterior windows and looks like a baggage car. The door into each compartment is a sliding door: an iron frame with bars.

From the corridor side all this is very reminiscent of a menagerie: pitiful creatures resembling human beings are huddled there in cages, the floors and bunks surrounded on all sides by metal grilles, looking out at you pitifully, begging for something to eat and drink. Except that in menageries they never crowd the wild animals in so tightly.

According to the calculations of nonprisoner engineers, six people can sit on the bottom bunks of a Stolypin compartment, and another three can lie on the middle ones (which are joined in one continuous bunk, except for the space cut out beside the door for climbing up and getting down), and two more can lie on the baggage shelves above. Now if, in addition to these eleven, eleven more are pushed into the compartment (the last of whom are shoved out of the way of the door by the jailers’ boots as they shut it), then this will constitute a normal complement for a Stolypin prisoners’ compartment. Two huddle, half-sitting, on each of the upper baggage shelves; another five lie on the joined middle level (and they are the lucky ones—these places are won in battle, and if there are any prisoners present from the underworld companionship of thieves—the blatnye—then it is they who are lying there); and this leaves thirteen down below: five sit on each of the bunks and three are in the aisle between their legs. Somewhere, mixed up with the people, on the people and under the people, are their belongings. And that is how they sit, their crossed legs wedged beneath them, day after day.

No, it isn’t done especially to torture people. A sentenced prisoner is a laboring soldier of socialism, so why should he be tortured? They need him for construction work. But, after all, you will agree he is not off on a jaunt to visit his mother-in-law, and there is no reason in the world to treat him so well that people out in freedom would envy him. We have problems with our transportation: he’ll get there all right, and he won’t die on the way either.

Since the fifties, when railroad timetables were actually straightened out, the prisoners haven’t had to travel in this fashion for very long at a time—say, a day and a half or two days. During and after the war, things were worse. From Petropavlovsk (in Kazakhstan) to Karaganda, a Stolypin car might be seven days en route (with twenty-five people in a compartment). From Karaganda to Sverdlovsk it could be eight days (with up to twenty-six in a compartment). Even just going from Kuibyshev to Chelyabinsk in August, 1945, Susi traveled in a Stolypin car for several days, and their compartment held thirty-five people lying on top of one another, floundering, fighting.[281] And in the autumn of 1946 N. V. Timofeyev-Ressovsky traveled from Petropavlovsk to Moscow in a compartment that had thirty-six people in it! For several days he hung suspended between other human beings and his legs did not touch the floor. Then they started to die off—and the guards hauled the corpses out from under their feet. (Not right away, true; only on the second day.) That way things became less crowded. The whole trip to Moscow continued in this fashion for three weeks.[282]

Was thirty-six the upper limit for a Stolypin compartment? I have no evidence available on thirty-seven or higher, and yet, adhering to our one-and-only scientific method, and remembering the necessity to struggle against “the limiters,” we are compelled to reply: No, no, no! It is not a limit! Perhaps in some other country it would be an upper limit, but not here! As long as there are any cubic centimeters of unbreathed air left in the compartment, even if it be beneath the upper shelves, even if between shoulders, legs, and heads, the compartment is ready to take additional prisoners. One might, however, conditionally accept as the upper limit the number of unremoved corpses which can be contained in the total volume of the compartment, given the possibility of packing them in at leisure.

V. A. Korneyeva traveled from Moscow in a compartment that held thirty women—most of them withered old women, exiled for their religious beliefs (on arrival all these women, except two, were immediately put in the hospital). Nobody died in the compartment because several of the prisoners were young, well-developed, good-looking girls, arrested “for going out with foreigners.” These girls took it upon themselves to shame the convoy: “You ought to be ashamed to transport them this way! These are your own mothers!” It probably wasn’t so much their moral argument as their attractive appearance which produced a reaction in the convoy guards, and they did move several of the old women out—to the punishment cell. But the punishment cell in a Stolypin car is no punishment; it is a blessing. Of five prisoner compartments, four are used as general cells, and the fifth is set aside and divided in two halves—two narrow half-compartments with one lower and one upper berth, like those the conductors have. These punishment cells serve to isolate prisoners; three or four travel in them at a time, and this gives both comfort and space.

No, it is not intentionally to torture them with thirst that the exhausted and overcrowded prisoners are fed not soup but salt herring or dry smoked Caspian carp for the whole of their trip in the Stolypin car. (This was exactly how it was in all the years, the thirties and the fifties, winter and summer, in Siberia and the Ukraine, and it isn’t even necessary to cite examples.) It was not to torture them with thirst—but just you tell me what these ragamuffins were to be fed anyway while being moved around. They were not supposed to get hot meals in prisoner-transport railroad cars. (True, there was a kitchen in one of the Stolypin car compartments, but that was only for the convoy.) You couldn’t just give the prisoners raw grits, and you couldn’t give them raw codfish either, nor could you give them canned meat because they might stuff themselves. Herring was just the thing, with a piece of bread—and what else did they need?

Go ahead, take your half a herring while they are handing it out, and be glad you got it. If you’re smart, you aren’t going to eat that herring; just be patient, wait, hide it in your pocket,

and you can eat it at the next transit point where there is water to be had. It’s worse when they issue you wet Sea of Azov anchovies, covered with coarse salt. You can’t keep them in your pocket; so scoop them up in the flaps of your pea jacket, or in your handkerchief, in the palm of your hand—and eat them. They divide up these Azov anchovies on somebody’s pea jacket, whereas the convoy guards dump the dried carp right on the floor of the compartment, and it is divided up on the benches, on the prisoners’ knees.[283]

But once they’ve given you a fish, they aren’t going to hold back on the bread, and maybe they’ll even throw in a bit of sugar. Things are much worse when the convoy comes over and announces: “We aren’t going to be feeding you today; nothing was issued for you.” And it could very well be that nothing was actually issued: someone in one or another prison accounting office made a mistake in the figures. And it could also be that it was issued but that the convoy was short on rations—after all, they aren’t exactly overfed either—and so they decided to snag a bit of your bread for themselves; and in that case to hand over half a herring by itself would seem suspicious.

And, of course, it is not for the purpose of intentionally torturing the prisoner that after his herring he is given neither hot water (and he never gets that here in any case) nor even plain, unboiled water. One has to understand the situation: The convoy staff is limited; some of them have to be on watch in the corridor; some are on duty on the platform; at the stations they clamber all over the car, under it, on top of it, to make sure that there aren’t any holes in it. Others are kept busy cleaning guns, and then, of course, there has to be time for political indoctrination and their catechism on the articles of war. And the third shift is sleeping. They insist on their full eight hours—for, after all, the war is over. And then, to go carry water in pails—it has to be hauled a long way, too, and it’s insulting: why should a Soviet soldier have to carry water like a donkey for enemies of the people? And there are also times when they spend half a day hauling the Stolypin cars way out from the station in order to reshuffle or recouple the cars (it will be farther away from prying eyes), and the result is that you can’t get water even for your own Red Army mess. True, there is one way out. You can go dip up some water from the locomotive tender. It’s yellow and murky, with some lubricating grease mixed in with it. But the zeks will drink it willingly. It doesn’t really matter that much anyway, since it isn’t as if they could see what they are drinking in the semidarkness of their compartment. They don’t have their own window, and there isn’t any light bulb there either, and what light they get comes from the corridor. And there’s another thing too: it takes a long time to dole out that water. The zeks don’t have their own mugs. Whoever did have one has had it taken away from him—so what it adds up to is that they have to be given the two government issue mugs to drink out of, and while they are drinking up you have to keep standing there and standing, and dipping it out and dipping it out some more and handing it to them. (Yes, and then, too, the prisoners argue about who’s to drink first; they want the healthy prisoners to drink first, and only then those with tuberculosis, and last of all those with syphilis! Just as if it wasn’t going to begin all over again in the next cell: first the healthy ones…)

But the convoy could have borne with all that, hauled the water, and doled it out, if only those pigs, after slurping up the water, didn’t ask to go to the toilet. So here’s the way it all works out: if you don’t give them water for a day, then they don’t ask to go to the toilet. Give them water once, and they go to the toilet once; take pity on them and give them water twice—and they go to the toilet twice. So it’s pure and simple common sense: just don’t give them anything to drink.

And it isn’t that one is stingy about taking them to the toilet because one wants to be stingy about the use of the toilet itself, but because taking prisoners to the toilet is a responsible—even, one might say, a combat—operation: it takes a long, long time for one private first class and two privates. Two guards have to be stationed, one next to the toilet door, the other in the corridor on the opposite side (so that no one tries to escape in that direction), while the private first class has to push open and then shut the door to the compartment, first to admit the returning prisoner, and then to allow the next one out. The statutes permit letting out only one at a time, so that they don’t try to escape and so that they can’t start a rebellion. Therefore, the way it works out is that the one prisoner who has been let out to go to the toilet is holding up 30 others in his own compartment and 120 in the whole car, not to mention the convoy detail! And so the command resounds: “Come on there, come on! Get a move on, get a move on!” The private first class and the soldiers keep hurrying him all the way there and back and he hurries so fast that he stumbles, and it’s as though they think he is going to steal that shithole from the state. (In 1949, traveling in a Stolypin car between Moscow and Kuibyshev, the one-legged German Schultz, having understood the Russian hurry-up by this time, jumped to the toilet and back on his one leg while the convoy kept laughing and ordering him to go faster. During one such trip, one of the convoy guards pushed him when he reached the platform at the end of the corridor, and Schultz fell down on the floor in front of the toilet. The convoy guard went into a rage and began to beat him, while Schultz, who couldn’t get up because of the blows raining down on him, crawled and crept into the dirty toilet. The rest of the convoy roared with laughter.)[284]

So that the prisoner shouldn’t attempt to escape during the moment he was in the toilet, and also for a faster turnaround, the door to the toilet was not closed, and the convoy guard, watching the process from the platform of the car, could encourage it: “Come on, come on now! That’s plenty, that’s enough for you!” Sometimes the orders came before you even started: “All right, number one only!” And that meant that from the platform they’d prevent your doing anything else. And then, of course, you couldn’t wash your hands. There was never enough water in the tank there, and there wasn’t enough time either. If the prisoner even so much as touched the plunger of the washstand, the convoy guard would roar: “Don’t you touch that, move along.” (And if someone happened to have soap or a towel among his belongings, he wouldn’t dare take it out anyway, simply out of shame: that would really be acting like a sucker.) The toilet was filthy. Quicker, quicker! And tracking back the liquid mess on his shoes, the prisoner would be shoved back into the compartment, where he would climb up over somebody’s arms and shoulders, and then, from the top row, his dirty shoes would dangle to the middle row and drip.

When women were taken to the toilet, the statutes of the convoy service, and common sense as well, required that the toilet door be kept open, but not every convoy insisted on this and some allowed the door to be shut: Oh, all right, go ahead and shut it. (Later on one of the women was sent in to wash out the toilet, and the guard again had to stand right there beside her so that she didn’t try to escape.)

And even at this fast tempo, visits to the toilet for 120 people would take more than two hours—more than a quarter of the entire shift for three convoy guards! And in spite of that, you still couldn’t make them happy. In spite of that, some old sandpiper or other would begin to cry half an hour later and ask to go to the toilet, and, of course, he wouldn’t be allowed to go, and then he would soil himself right there in the compartment, and once again that meant trouble for the private first class: the prisoner had to be forced to pick it up in his hands and carry it away.

So that was all there was to it: fewer trips to the toilet! And that meant less water, and less food too—because then they wouldn’t complain of loose bowels and stink up the air; after all, how bad could it be? A man couldn’t even breathe.

Less water! But they had to hand out the herring anyway, just as the regulations required! No water—that was a reasonable measure. No herring—that was a service crime.

No one, no one at all, ever set out to torture us on purpose! The convoy’s actions were quite reasonable! But, like the ancient Christians, we sat there in the cage while they poured salt on our raw and bleeding tongues.

Also the prisoner-transport convoys did not often deliberately (though sometimes they did) mix the thieves—blatari—and non-political offenders in with Article 58 politicals in the same compartment. But a particular situation existed: There were a great many prisoners and very few railroad cars and compartments, and time was always short, and so when was there time enough to sort them out? One of the four compartments was kept for women, and if the prisoners in the other three were to be sorted out on one basis or another, the most logical basis would be by destination so that it would be easier to unload them.

After all, was it because Pontius Pilate wanted to humiliate him that Christ was crucified between two thieves? It just happened to be crucifixion day that day—and there was only one Golgotha, and time was short. And so he was numbered with the transgressors.

I am afraid even to think what I would have had to suffer if I had been in the position of a common convict…. The convoy and the transport officers dealt with me and my comrades with cautious politeness…. Being a political, I went to hard labor in relative comfort—on the transports, I had quarters separate from the criminal prisoners, and my pood—my thirty-six pounds—of baggage was moved about on a cart….

…I left out the quotation marks around the above paragraph to enable the reader to understand things a little better. After all, quotation marks are always used either for irony or to set something apart. And without quotation marks the paragraph sounds wild, does it not?

It was written by P. F. Yakubovich about the nineties of the last century. His book was recently republished as a sermon on that dark and dismal age. We learn from it that even on a barge the political prisoners had special quarters and a special section set aside for their walks on deck. (The same thing appears in Tolstoi’s Resurrection, in which, furthermore, an outsider, Prince Nekhlyudov, is allowed to visit the political prisoners in order to interview them.) And it was only because the “magic word ‘political’ had been left out by mistake” opposite Yakubovich’s name on the list (his own words) that he was met at Ust-Kara “by the hard-labor inspector… like an ordinary criminal prisoner—> rudely, provocatively, impudently.” However, this misunderstanding was all happily cleared up.

What an unbelievable time! It was almost a crime to mix politicals with criminals! Criminals were teamed up and driven along the streets to the station so as to expose them to public disgrace. And politicals could go there in carriages. (Olminsky, in 1899.) Politicals were not fed from the common pot but were given a food allowance instead and had their meals brought from public eating houses. The Bolshevik Olminsky didn’t want even the hospital rations because he found the food too coarse.[285] The Bu-tyrki Prison superintendent apologized to Olminsky for the jailer’s having addressed him too familiarly: You see, we seldom get politicals here, and the jailer didn’t know any better!

Seldom get politicals in the Butyrki? What kind of dream is this? Then where were they? The Lubyanka didn’t exist as a prison at the time, and neither did Lefortovo!

The writer Radishchev was taken to the prisoner transport in shackles, and when the weather got cold they threw over him a “repulsive, raw sheepskin coat,” which they had taken from a watchman. However, the Empress Catherine immediately issued orders that his shackles be removed and that he be provided with everything he required for his journey. But in November, 1927, Anna Skripnikova was sent on a transport from the Butyrki to the Solovetsky Islands in a straw hat and a summer dress. (That was what she had been wearing when she was arrested in the summer, and since that time her room had been sealed and no one was willing to give her permission to get her winter things out of it.)

To draw a distinction between political prisoners and common criminals is the equivalent of showing them respect as equal opponents, of recognizing that people may have views of their own. Thus a political prisoner is conscious of political freedom even when under arrest .

But since the time when we all became KR’s and the socialists failed to retain their status as politicals, since then any protest that as a political you ought not to be mixed up with ordinary criminals has resulted only in laughter on the prisoners’ part and bewilderment on the part of the jailers. “All are criminals here,” the jailers reply—sincerely.

This mingling, this first devastating encounter, takes place either in the Black Maria or in the Stolypin car. Up to this moment, no matter how they have oppressed, tortured, and tormented you during the interrogation, it has all originated with the bluecaps, and you have never confused them with human beings but have seen in them merely an insolent branch of the service. But at the same time, even if your cellmates have been totally different from you in development and experience, and even if you have quarreled with them, and even if they have squealed on you, they have all belonged to that same ordinary, sinful, everyday humanity among which you have spent your whole life.

When you were jammed into a Stolypin compartment, you expected that here, too, you would encounter only colleagues in misfortune. All your enemies and oppressors remained on the other side of the bars, and you certainly did not expect to find them on this side. And suddenly you lift your eyes to the square recess in the middle bunk, to that one and only heaven above you, and up there you see three or four—oh, no, not faces! They aren’t monkey muzzles either, because monkeys’ muzzles are much, much decenter and more thoughtful! No, and they aren’t simply hideous countenances, since there must be something human even in them. You see cruel, loathsome snouts up there, wearing expressions of greed and mockery. Each of them looks at you like a spider gloating over a fly. Their web is that grating which imprisons you—and you have been had! They squinch up their lips, as if they intend to bite you from one side. They hiss when they speak, enjoying that hissing more than the vowel and consonant sounds of speech—and the only thing about their speech that resembles the Russian language is the endings of verbs and nouns. It is gibberish.

Those strange gorilloids were usually dressed in sleeveless undershirts. After all, it is stuffy in the Stolypin car. Their sinewy purple necks, their swelling shoulder muscles, their swarthy tattooed chests have never suffered prison emaciation. Who are they? Where do they come from? And suddenly you see a small cross dangling from one of those necks. Yes, a little aluminum cross on a string. You are surprised and slightly relieved. That means there are religious believers among them. How touching! So nothing terrible is going to happen. But immediately this “believer” belies both his cross and his faith by cursing (and they curse partly in Russian), and he jabs two protruding fingers, spread into the “V” of a slingshot, right in your eyes—not even pausing to threaten you but starting to punch them out then and there. And this gesture of theirs, which says, “’Til gouge out your eyes, crowbait!” covers their entire philosophy and faith! If they are capable of crushing your eyeballs like worms, what is there on you or belonging to you that they’ll spare? The little cross dangles there and your still unsquashed eyes watch this wildest of masquerades, and your whole system of reckoning goes awry: Which of you is already crazy? And who is about to go insane?

In one moment, all the customs and habits of human intercourse you have lived with all your life have broken down. In your entire previous life, particularly before your arrest but even to some degree afterward, even to some degree during interrogation, too, you spoke words to other people and they answered you in words. And those words produced actions. One might persuade, or refuse, or come to an agreement. You recall various human relationships—a request, an order, an expression of gratitude. But what has overtaken you here is beyond all these words and beyond all these relationships. An emissary of the ugly snout descends, most often a vicious boy whose impudence and rudeness are thrice despicable, and this little demon unties your bag and rifles your pockets—not tentatively, but treating them like his very own. From that moment, nothing that belongs to you is yours any longer. And all you yourself are is a rubber dummy around which superfluous things are wrapped which can easily be taken off. Nor can you explain anything in words, nor deny, nor prohibit, nor plead with that evil little skunk or those foul snouts up above. They are not people. This has become clear to you in one moment. The only thing to be done with them is to beat them, to beat them without wasting any time flapping your tongue. Either that juvenile there or those bigger vermin up above.

But how can you hit those three up top from down below? And the kid there, even though he’s a stinking polecat, well, it doesn’t seem right to hit him either. Maybe you can push him away soft like? No, you can’t even do that, because he’ll bite your nose right off, or else they’ll break your head from above (and they have knives, too, but they aren’t going to bother to pull them out and soil them on you).

You look at your neighbors, your comrades: Let’s either resist or protest! But all your comrades, all your fellow Article 58’s, who have been plundered one by one even before you got there, sit there submissively, hunched over, and they stare right past you, and it’s even worse when they look at you the way they always do look at you, as though no violence were going on at all, no plundering, as though it were a natural phenomenon, as though it were the grass growing and the rain falling.

And the reason why, gentlemen, comrades, and brothers, is that the proper time was allowed to slip by! You ought to have got hold of yourselves and remembered who you were back when Struzhinsky burned himself alive in his Vyatka cell, and even before that, when you were declared “counterrevolutionaries.”

And so you allow the thieves to take your overcoat and paw through your jacket and snatch your twenty rubles from where it was sewn in, and your bag has already been tossed up above and checked out, and everything your sentimental wife collected for your long trip after you were sentenced stays up there, and they’ve thrown the bag back down to you with… your toothbrush.

Although not everyone submitted just like that, 99 percent did in the thirties and forties.[286] And how could that be? Men, officers, soldiers, front-line soldiers!

To strike out boldly, a person has to be ready for that battle, waiting for it, and has to understand its purpose. All these conditions were absent here. A person wholly unfamiliar with the thieves’—the blatnoi—milieu didn’t anticipate this battle and, most importantly, failed totally to understand its vital necessity. Up to this point he had assumed (incorrectly) that his only enemies were the bluecaps. He needed still more education to arrive at the understanding that the tattooed chests were merely the rear ends of the bluecaps. This was the revelation the bluecaps never utter aloud: “You today, me tomorrow.” The new prisoner wanted to consider himself a political—in other words, on the side of the people—while the state was against the people. And at that point he was unexpectedly assaulted from behind and both sides by quick-fingered devils of some kind, and all the categories got mixed up, and clarity was shattered into fragments. (And it would take a long time for the prisoner to put two and two together and figure out that this horde of devils were hand in glove with the jailers.)

To strike out boldly, a person has to feel that his rear is defended, that he has support on both his flanks, that there is solid earth beneath his feet. All these conditions were absent for the Article 58’s. Having passed through the meat grinder of political interrogation, the human being was physically crushed in body: he had been starved, he hadn’t slept, he had frozen in punishment cells, he had lain there a beaten man. But it wasn’t only his body. His soul was crushed too. Over and over he had been told and had had demonstrated to him that his views, and his conduct in life, and his relationships with people had all been wrong because they had brought him to ruin. All that was left in that scrunched-up wad the engine room of the law had spewed out into the prisoner transport was a greed for life, and no understanding whatever. To crush him once and for all and to cut him off from all others once and for all—that was the function of interrogation under Article 58. The convicted prisoner had to learn that his worst guilt out in freedom had been his attempt somehow to get together or unite with others by any route but the Party organizer, the trade-union organizer, or the administration. In prison this fear went so far as to become fear of all kinds of collective action: two voices uttering the same complaint or two prisoners signing a complaint on one piece of paper. Gun-shy now and for a good long time to come of any and every kind of collaboration or unification, the pseudo politicals were not prepared to unite even against the thieves. Nor would they even think of bringing along a weapon—a knife or a bludgeon—for the Stolypin car or the transit prison. In the first place, why have one? And against whom? In the second place, if you did use it, then, considering the aggravating circumstance of your malevolent Article 58, you might be shot when you were retried. In the third place, even before that, your punishment for having a knife when they searched you would be very different from the thief’s. For him to have a knife was mere misbehavior, tradition, he didn’t know any better. But for you to have one was “terrorism.”

Finally, many of the people imprisoned under Article 58 were peaceful people (very often elderly, too, and often ill), and they had gotten along all their lives with words and without resorting to fisticuffs, and they weren’t any more prepared for them now than they had been before.

Nor had the thieves ever been put through the same kind of interrogation. Their entire interrogation had consisted of two sessions, an easy trial, and an easy sentence, and they wouldn’t have to serve it out. They would be released ahead of time: either they would be amnestied or else they would simply escape.[287] Even during interrogation, no one ever deprived a thief of his legitimate parcels—consisting of abundant packages from the loot kept by his underworld comrades who were still on the loose. He never grew thin, was never weak for a single day, and in transit he ate at the expense of the innocent nonthieves, whom he called, in his own jargon, the frayera[288]—“frayers,” or “innocents,” or “suckers.” Not only did the articles of the Code dealing with thieves and bandits not oppress the thief; he was, in fact, proud of his convictions under them. And he was supported in this pride by all the chiefs in blue shoulder boards and blue piping. “Oh, that’s nothing. Even though you’re a bandit and a murderer, you are not a traitor of the Motherland, you are one of our own people; you will reform.” There was no Section Eleven—for organization—in the thieves’ articles in the Code. Organization was not forbidden the thieves. And why should it be? Let it help develop in them the feelings of collectivism that people in our society need so badly. And disarming them was just a game. They weren’t punished for having a weapon. Their thieves’ law was respected (“They can’t be anything but what they are”). And a new murder in the cell would not increase a murderer’s sentence, but instead would bring him new laurels.

And all that went very deep indeed. In works of the last century, the lumpenproletariat was criticized for little more than a certain lack of discipline, for fickleness of mood. And Stalin was always partial to the thieves—after all, who robbed the banks for him? Back in 1901 his comrades in the Party and in prison accused him of using common criminals against his political enemies. From the twenties on, the obliging term “social ally” came to be widely used. That was Makarenko’s contention too: these could be reformed. According to Makarenko, the origin of crime lay solely in the “counterrevolutionary underground.”[289] (Those were the ones who couldn’t be reformed—engineers, priests, SR’s, Mensheviks.)

And why shouldn’t they steal, if there was no one to put a stop to it? Three or four brazen thieves working hand in glove could lord it over several dozen frightened and cowed pseudo politicals.

With the approval of the administration. On the basis of the Progressive Doctrine.

But even if they didn’t drive off the thieves with their fists, why didn’t the victims at least make complaints? After all, every sound could be heard in the corridor, and a convoy guard was marching slowly back and forth right out there.

Yes, that is a question! Every sound and every complaining cry can be heard, and the convoy just keeps marching back and forth—why doesn’t he interfere? Just a yard away from him, in the half-dark cave of the compartment, they are plundering a human being—why doesn’t the soldier of the government police interfere?

For the very same reason: he, too, has been indoctrinated.

Even more than that: after many years of favoring thieves, the convoy has itself slipped in their direction. The convoy has itself become a thief.

From the middle of the thirties until the middle of the forties, during that ten-year period of the thieves’ most flagrant debauches and most intense oppression of the politicals, no one at all can recall a case in which a convoy guard intervened in the plundering of a political in a cell, in a railroad car, or in a Black Maria. But they will tell you of innumerable cases in which the convoy accepted stolen goods from the thieves and, in return, bought them vodka, snacks (sweeter than the rations, too), and smokes. The examples are so numerous as to be typical.

The convoy sergeant, after all, hasn’t anything either: he has his gun, his greatcoat roll, his mess tin, his soldier’s ration. It would be cruel to require him to escort an enemy of the people in an expensive overcoat or chrome-leather boots or with a swag of luxurious city articles—and to reconcile himself to that inequality. Was not taking these things just one additional form of the class struggle, after all? And what other norms were there?

In 1945-1946, when prisoners streamed in not just from anywhere but from Europe, and wore and had in their bags unheard-of European articles, even the convoy officers could not restrain themselves. Their service had kept them from the front, but at the end of the war it also kept them from the harvest of booty—and, I ask you, was that just?

And so, in these circumstances, the convoy guard systematically mixed the thieves and the politicals in each compartment of their Stolypin, not through lack of space for them elsewhere and not through haste, but out of greed. And the thieves did not let them down: they stripped the beavers[290] of everything, and then those possessions migrated into the suitcases of the convoy.

But what could be done if the beavers had been loaded into the Stolypin cars, and the train was moving, and there simply weren’t any thieves at all—they simply hadn’t put any aboard? What if they weren’t being shipped out on prisoner transports that day, even from one of the stations along the way? This could and did happen—several such cases are known.

In 1947 they were transporting from Moscow to the Vladimir Central Prison a group of foreigners who had opulent possessions—as could be seen the very first time their suitcases were opened. At that point, the convoy itself began a systematic confiscation of their belongings right there in the railroad car. So that nothing should be missed, the prisoners were forced to undress down to their bare skin and to sit on the floor of the car near the toilet while their things were examined and taken away. But the convoy guard failed to take into account that they were taking these prisoners not to a camp but to a genuine prison. On their arrival there, I. A. Korneyev handed in a written complaint, describing exactly what had happened. They found the particular unit of convoy guards and searched them. Some of the things were recovered and returned to their owners, who also received compensation in money for those that weren’t recovered. They say that the convoy guards got from ten to fifteen years. However, this is something that cannot be checked, and anyway they would have been convicted under an ordinary nonpolitical article of the Code, and they wouldn’t have had to spend a long time in prison.

However, that was an exceptional case, and if he had managed to restrain his greed in time, the chief of the convoy would have realized that it was better not to get involved in it. And here is another, less complicated case, which probably means that it happened often. In August, 1945, in the Moscow-Novosibirsk Stolypin car (in which A. Susi was being transported), it turned out that there weren’t any thieves. And the trip was a long one, and the Stolypins just crawled along at that time. Without hurrying in the least, all in good time, the convoy chief declared a search—one prisoner at a time in the corridor with his things. Those summoned were made to undress in accordance with prison rules, but that wasn’t why the search was being conducted, for each prisoner who had been searched was, in fact, put right back into his own crowded compartment, and any knife, anything forbidden, could simply have been passed from hand to hand. The real purpose of the search was to examine their personal articles—the clothes they were wearing and whatever was in their bags. And right there, beside the bags, not in the least bored by the whole protracted search, the chief of the convoy guard, an officer, stood with a haughty poker face, with his assistant, a sergeant, beside him. Sinful greed kept trying to pop out, but the officer kept it hidden under a pretended indifference. It was the same situation as an old rake looking over little girls but embarrassed by the presence of outsiders—yes, and by that of the girls too—and not knowing exactly how to proceed. How badly he needed just a few thieves! But there were no thieves in the transport.

There were no thieves aboard, but there were individuals among the prisoners who had already been infected by the thief-laden atmosphere of the prison. After all, the example of thieves is instructive and calls forth imitations: it demonstrates that there is an easy way to live in prison. Two recent officers were in one of the compartments—Sanin (from the navy) and Merezhkov. They were both 58’s, but their attitudes had already changed. Sanin, with Merezhkov’s support, proclaimed himself the monitor of the compartment and, through a convoy guard, requested a meeting with their chief. (He had fathomed that haughtiness and its need of a pimp!) This was unheard of, but Sanin was summoned, and they had a chat somewhere. Following Sanin’s example, someone in the second compartment also asked for a meeting. And that person was similarly received.

And the next morning they issued not twenty ounces of bread—the prisoner-transport ration at the time—but no more than nine ounces.

They gave out the ration, and a quiet murmur began. A murmur, but in fear of any “collective action,” these politicals did not speak up. In the event, only one among them loudly asked the guard distributing the bread: “Citizen chief! How much does this ration weigh?”

“The correct weight,” he was told.

“I demand a re weighing; otherwise I will not accept it!” the dissatisfied prisoner declared loudly.

The whole car fell silent. Many waited before beginning to eat their ration; expecting that theirs, too, would be reweighed. And at that moment, in all his spotlessness, the officer appeared. Everyone fell silent, which made his words all the weightier and all the more irresistible.

“Which one here spoke out against the Soviet government?”

All hearts stopped beating. (People will protest that this is a universal approach, that even out in freedom every little chief declares himself to be the Soviet government, and just try to argue with him about it. But for those who are panicky, who have just been sentenced for anti-Soviet propaganda, the threat is more frightening.)

“Who was starting a mutiny over the bread ration?” the officer demanded.

“Citizen lieutenant, I only wanted…” The guilty rebel was already trying to explain it all away.

“Aha, you’re the bastard? You’re the one who doesn’t like the Soviet government?”

(And why rebel? Why argue? Wasn’t it really easier to eat that little underweight ration, to suffer it in silence? And now he had fallen right in it!)

“You stinking shit! You counterrevolutionary! You ought to be hanged, and you have the nerve to demand that the bread ration be reweighed! You rat—the Soviet government gives you food and drink, and you have the brass to be dissatisfied? Do you know what you’re going to get for that?”

Orders to the guard: “Take him out!” The lock rattles. “Come on out, you! Hands behind your back!” They bring out the unfortunate.

“Now who else is dissatisfied? Who else wants his bread ration reweighed?”

(And it’s not as if you could prove anything anyway. It’s not as if they’d take your word against the lieutenant’s if you were to complain somewhere that there were only nine ounces instead of twenty.)

It’s quite enough to show a well-beaten dog the whip. All the rest turned out to be satisfied, and that was how the penalty ration was confirmed for all the days of the long journey. And they began to withhold the sugar too. The convoy had appropriated it.

(And this took place during the summer of our two great victories—over Germany and Japan—victories which embellish the history of our Fatherland and which our grandsons and great-grandsons will learn about in school.)

The prisoners went hungry for a day and then a second day, by which time several of them began to get a bit wiser, and Sanin said to his compartment: “Look, fellows: If we go on this way, we’re lost. Come on now, all of you who have some good stuff with you, let me have it, and I’ll trade it for something to eat.” With great self-assurance he accepted some articles and turned down others. (Not all the prisoners were willing to let their things go—and, you see, no one forced them to either.) And then he and Merezhkov asked to be allowed to leave the compartment, and, strangely enough, the convoy let them out. Taking the things, they went off toward the compartment of the convoy guard, and they returned from there with sliced loaves of bread and with makhorka. These very loaves constituted the eleven ounces missing from the daily rations. Now, however, they were not distributed on an equal basis but went only to those who had handed over their belongings.

And that was quite fair: after all, they had all admitted they were satisfied with the reduced bread ration. It was also fair because the belongings were, after all, worth something, and it was right that they should be paid for. And it was also fair in the long view because those things were simply too good for camp and were destined anyway to be taken away or stolen there.

The makhorka had belonged to the guard. The soldiers shared their precious makhorka with the prisoners. And that was fair, too, since they had eaten the prisoners’ bread and drunk up their sugar, which was too good for enemies anyway. And, last, it was only fair, too, that Sanin and Merezhkov took the largest share for themselves even though they’d contributed nothing—because without them all this would not have been arranged.

And so they sat crammed in there, in the semidarkness, and some of them chewed on their neighbors’ chunks of bread and their neighbors sat there and watched them. The guard permitted smoking only on a collective basis, every two hours—and the whole car was as filled with smoke as if there’d been a fire. Those who at first had clung to their things now regretted that they hadn’t given them to Sanin and asked him to take them, but Sanin said he’d only take them later on.

This whole operation wouldn’t have worked so well and so thoroughly had it not been for the slow trains and slow Stolypin cars of the immediate postwar years, when they kept unhitching them from one train and hitching them to another and held them waiting in the stations. And, at the same time, if it hadn’t been the immediate postwar period, neither would there have been those greed-inspiring belongings. Their train took a week to get to Kuibyshev—and during that entire week they got only nine ounces of bread a day. (This, to be sure, was twice the ration distributed during the siege of Leningrad.) And they did get dried Caspian carp and water, in addition. They had to ransom their remaining bread ration with their personal possessions. And soon the supply of these articles exceeded the demand, and the convoy guards became very choosy and reluctant to take more things.

They were received at the Kuibyshev Transit Prison, given baths, and returned as a group to that very same Stolypin. The convoy which took them over was new—but, in passing on the relay baton, the previous crew had evidently told them how to put the squeeze on, and the very same system of ransoming their own rations functioned all the way to Novosibirsk. (It is easy to see how this infectious experiment might have spread rapidly through whole units of the convoy guards.)

And when they were unloaded on the ground between the tracks in Novosibirsk, some new officer came up and asked them: “Any complaints against the convoy?” And they were all so confused that nobody answered.

The first chief of convoy had calculated accurately—this was Russia!

Another factor which distinguishes Stolypin passengers from the rest of the train is that they do not know where their train is going and at what station they will disembark: after all, they don’t have tickets, and they don’t read the route signs on the cars. In Moscow, they sometimes load them on so far from the station platform that even the Muscovites among them don’t know which of the eight Moscow stations they are at. For several hours the prisoners sit all squeezed together in the stench while they wait for a switching engine. And finally it comes and takes the zak car to the already made-up train. If it is summertime, the station loudspeakers can be heard: “Moscow to Ufa departing from Track 3. Moscow to Tashkent still loading at Platform 1…” That means it’s the Kazan Station, and those who know the geography of the Archipelago are now explaining to their comrades that Vorkuta and Pechora are out: they leave from the Yaroslavl Station; and the Kirov and Gorky camps[291] are out too. They never send people from Moscow to Byelorussia, the Ukraine, or the Caucasus anyway. They have no room there even for their own. Let’s listen some more: the Ufa train has left, and ours hasn’t moved. The Tashkent train has started, and we’re still here. “Moscow to Novosibirsk departing. All those seeing passengers off, disembark…. All passengers show their tickets.…” We have started.

Our train! And what does that prove? Nothing so far. The middle Volga area is still open, and the South Urals. And Kazakhstan with the Dzhezkazgan copper mines. And Taishet, with its factory for creosoting railroad ties (where, they say, creosote penetrates the skin and bones and its vapors fill the lungs—and that is death). All Siberia is still open to us—all the way to Sovetskaya Gavan. The Kolyma too. And Norilsk.

And if it is wintertime, the car is battened down and the loudspeakers are inaudible. If the convoy guards obey their regulations, then you’ll hear nary a whisper from them about the route either. And thus we set out, and, entangled in other bodies, fall asleep to the clacking of the wheels without knowing whether we will see forest or steppe through the window tomorrow. Through that window in the corridor. From the middle shelf, through the grating, the corridor, the two windowpanes, and still another grating, you can still see some switching tracks and a piece of open space hurtling by the train. If the windowpanes have not frosted over, you can sometimes even read the names of the stations—some Avsyunino or Undol. Where are these stations? No one in the compartment knows. Sometimes you can judge from the sun whether you are being taken north or east. Or at some place called Tufanovo, they might shove some dilapidated nonpolitical offender into your compartment, and he would tell you he was being taken to Danilov to be tried and was scared he’d get a couple of years. In this way you would find out that you’d gone through Yaroslavl that night, which meant that the first transit prison on your route would be Vologda. And some know-it-alls in the compartment would savor gloomily the famous flourish, stressing all the “o’s,” of the Vologda guards: “The Vologda convoy guards don’t joke!”

But even after figuring out the general direction, you still haven’t really found out anything: transit prisons lie in clusters on your route, and you can be shunted off to one side or another from any one of them. You don’t fancy Ukhta, nor Inta, nor Vorkuta. But do you think that Construction Project 501—a railroad in the tundra, crossing northern Siberia—is any sweeter? It is worse than any of them.

Five years after the war, when the waves of prisoners had finally settled within the river banks (or perhaps they had merely expanded the MVD staffs?), the Ministry sorted out the millions of piles of cases and started sending along with each sentenced prisoner a sealed envelope that contained his case file and, visible through a slot in the envelope, his route and destination, inserted for the convoy (and the convoy wasn’t supposed to know anything more than that—because the contents of the file might have a corrupting influence). So then, if you were lying on the middle bunk, and the sergeant stopped right next to you, and you could read upside down, you might be fast enough to read that someone was being taken to Knyazh-Pogost and that you were being sent to Kargopol.

So now there would be more worries! What was Kargopol Camp? Who had ever heard of it? What kind of general-assignment work did they have there? (There did exist general-assignment work which was fatal, and some that was not that bad.) Was this a death camp or not?

And then how had you failed to let your family know in the hurry of leaving, and they thought you were still in the Stalino-gorsk Camp near Tula? If you were very nervous about this and very inventive, you might succeed in solving that problem too: you might find someone with a piece of pencil lead half an inch long and a piece of crumpled paper. Making sure the convoy doesn’t see you from the corridor (you are forbidden to lie with your feet toward the corridor; your head has to be in that direction), hunched over and facing in the opposite direction, you write to your family, between lurches of the car, that you have suddenly been taken from where you were and are being sent somewhere else, and you might be able to send only one letter a year from your new destination, so let them be prepared for this eventuality. You have to fold your letter into a triangle and carry it to the toilet in the hope of a lucky break: they might just take you there while approaching a station or just after passing a station, and the convoy guard on the car platform might get careless, and you can quickly press down on the flush pedal and, using your body as a shield, throw the letter into the hole. It will get wet and soiled, but it might fall right through and land between the rails. Or it might even get through dry, and the draft beneath the car will catch and whirl it, and it will fall under the wheels or miss them and land on the downward slope of the embankment. Perhaps it will lie there until it rains, until it snows, until it disintegrates, but perhaps a human hand will pick it up. And if this person isn’t a stickler for the Party line, he will make the address legible, he will straighten out the letters, or perhaps put it in an envelope, and perhaps the letter will even reach its destination. Sometimes such letters do arrive—postage due, half-blurred, washed out, crumpled, but carrying a clearly defined splash of grief.

But it is better still to stop as soon as possible being a sucker—that ridiculous greenhorn, that prey, that victim. The chances are ninety-five out of a hundred that your letter won’t get there. But even if it does, it will bring no happiness to your home. And you won’t be measuring your life and breath by hours and days once you have entered this epic country: arrivals and departures here are separated by decades, by a quarter-century. You will never return to your former world. And the sooner you get used to being without your near and dear ones, and the sooner they get used to being without you, the better it will be. And the easier!

And keep as few things as possible, so that you don’t have to fear for them. Don’t take a suitcase for the convoy guard to crush at the door of the car (when there are twenty-five people in a compartment, what else could he figure out to do with it?). And don’t wear new boots, and don’t wear fashionable oxfords, and don’t wear a woolen suit: these things are going to be stolen, taken away, swept aside, or switched, either in the Stolypin car, or in the Black Maria, or in the transit prison. Give them up without a struggle—because otherwise the humiliation will poison your heart. They will take them away from you in a fight, and trying to hold onto your property will only leave you with a bloodied mouth. All those brazen snouts, those jeering manners, those two-legged dregs, are repulsive to you. But by owning things and trembling about their fate aren’t you forfeiting the rare opportunity of observing and understanding? And do you think that the freebooters, the pirates, the great privateers, painted in such lively colors by Kipling and Gumilyev, were not simply these same blatnye, these same thieves? That’s just what they were. Fascinating in romantic literary portraits, why are they so repulsive to you here?

Understand them too! To them prison is their native home. No matter how fondly the government treats them, no matter how it softens their punishments, no matter how often it amnesties them, their inner destiny brings them back again and again. Was not the first word in the legislation of the Archipelago for them? In our country, the right to own private property was at one time just as effectively banished out in freedom too. (And then those who had banished it began to enjoy possessing things.) So why should it be tolerated in prison? You were too slow about it; you didn’t eat up your fat bacon; you didn’t share your sugar and tobacco with your friends. And so now the thieves empty your bindle in order to correct your moral error. Having given you their pitiful worn-out boots in exchange for your fashionable ones, their soiled coveralls in return for your sweater, they won’t keep these things for long: your boots were merely something to lose and win back five times at cards, and they’ll hawk your sweater the very next day for a liter of vodka and a round of salami. They, too, will have nothing left of them in one day’s time—just like you. This is the principle of the second law of thermodynamics: all differences tend to level out, to disappear….

Own nothing! Possess nothing! Buddha and Christ taught us this, and the Stoics and the Cynics. Greedy though we are, why can’t we seem to grasp that simple teaching? Can’t we understand that with property we destroy our soul?

So let the herring keep warm in your pocket until you get to the transit prison rather than beg for something to drink here. And did they give us a two-day supply of bread and sugar? In that case, eat it in one sitting. Then no one will steal it from you, and you won’t have to worry about it. And you’ll be free as a bird in heaven!

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday.

Look around you—there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn’t make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you’ll hear. Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of the Archipelago. They intertwine, touch one another for one night only in just such a clickety-clacking half-dark car as this and then separate once and for all. Put your ear to their quiet humming and the steady clickety-clack beneath the car. After all, it is the spinning wheel of life that is clicking and clacking away there.

What strange stories you can hear! What things you will laugh at.

Now that fast-moving little Frenchman over there near the grating—why does he keep twisting around, what is he so surprised at? Explain things to him! And you can ask him at the same time how he happened to land here. So you’ve found someone who knows French, and you learn that he is Max Santerre, a French soldier. And he used to be just as alert and curious out in freedom, in his douce France. They told him politely to stop hanging around the transit point for Russian repatriates, but he kept doing it anyway. And then the Russians invited him to have a drink with them, and from a certain moment after that he remembers nothing. He came to on the floor of an airplane to find himself dressed in a Red Army man’s field shirt and britches, with the boots of a convoy guard looming over him. They told him he was sentenced to ten years in camp, but that, of course, as he very clearly understood, was just a nasty joke, wasn’t it, and everything would be cleared up? Oh, yes, it will be cleared up, dear fellow; just wait.[292] Well, there was nothing to be surprised at in such cases in 1945-1946.

That particular story was Franco-Russian, and here is one which is Russo-French. But no, really just pure Russian, because no one but a Russian would play this kind of trick! Throughout our history there have been people who just couldn’t be con-tained, like Menshikov in Berezovo in Surikov’s painting. Now take Ivan Koverchenko, average height, wiry, and yet he couldn’t be contained either. Because he was a stalwart fellow with a healthy countenance—but the devil threw in a bit of vodka for good measure. He would talk about himself quite willingly and laugh at himself too. Such stories as his are a treasure. They are meant to be heard. True, it took a long time to figure out why he had been arrested and why he was considered a political. But there’s no real need to make a fetish of the category “political” either. Does it matter a damn what rake they haul you in with?

As everyone knows very well, the Germans were preparing for chemical warfare and we weren’t. Therefore, it was most unfortunate that because of some dunderheads in the quartermaster’s department we left whole stacks of mustard-gas bombs at a certain airdrome when we fled the Kuban—and the Germans could have turned this fact into an international scandal. At that point, Senior Lieutenant Koverchenko, a native of Krasnodar, was assigned twenty parachutists and dropped behind the German lines to bury all those invidious bombs. (Those hearing this story have already guessed how it ends and are yawning: next he was taken prisoner, and he has now become a traitor of the Motherland. Nothing at all like that!) Koverchenko carried out his assignment brilliantly and returned through the front with his entire complement of men, having lost not one, and was nominated to receive the order of Hero of the Soviet Union.

But it takes a month or two for the official nomination to be confirmed—and what if you can’t be contained within that Hero of the Soviet Union either? “Heroes” are awarded to quiet boys who are models of military and political preparedness—but what if your soul is afire and you want a drink, and there isn’t anything to drink? And why, if you’re a Hero of the whole Union, are the rats being so stingy as to refuse you an extra liter of vodka? And Ivan Koverchenko mounted his horse and, even though it’s true that he had never heard of Caligula, he rode his horse upstairs to the second floor to see the city’s military commissar—the commandant: Come on now, issue me some vodka. (He figured this would be more imposing, more in the style of a Hero, and harder to turn down.) Did they arrest him for that? No, of course not! But his award was reduced from Hero to the Order of the Red Banner.

Koverchenko had a large thirst, and vodka wasn’t always available, and so he had to be inventive. In Poland, he had gone in and prevented the Germans from blowing up a certain bridge—and he got the feeling this bridge really belonged to him and so, for the time being, before our commandant’s headquarters arrived, he exacted payment from the Poles for crossing the bridge. After all, without me you wouldn’t have this bridge, you pests! He collected tolls for a whole day (for vodka), and then got bored with it, and this wasn’t in any case the place for him to stick around. So Captain Koverchenko offered the nearby Poles his equitable solution: that they buy the bridge from him. (Was he arrested for this! Nooo!) He didn’t ask very much for it, but the Poles protested and refused. Pan Captain abandoned the bridge: All right then, to hell with you, take your bridge and cross it for nothing.

In 1949 he was chief of staff of a parachute regiment in Polotsk. Major Koverchenko was very much disliked by the Political Branch of the division because he had failed the political indoctrination course. He had once asked them to recommend him for admission to the Military Academy, but when they gave him the recommendation, he took one look at it and threw it back across the table at them: “With that kind of recommendation the place for me to go is not the Academy but to the Banderovtsy [the Ukrainian nationalist rebels].” (Was he arrested for that? He might very well have gotten a tenner for it, but he got away with it.) At that point, on top of all the rest, it turned out that he had given one of his men an unwarranted leave. And then he himself drove a truck at breakneck speed while drunk and wrecked it. And so they gave him ten—ten days in the guardhouse. However, his own men, who loved him with absolute devotion, were the guards, and they let him out of the guardhouse to go and have fun in the village. So he could have been patient through that guardhouse stretch too. But the Political Branch began to threaten him with a trial! Now that threat shocked and insulted Koverchenko; it meant: for burying bombs—Ivan, we need you; but for a lousy one-and-a-half-ton truck—off to prison with you? He crawled out the window at night, went over to the Dvina River, where a friend’s motorboat was hidden, and off he went in it.

And it turned out that he wasn’t just one more drunk with a short memory: he wanted to avenge himself for everything the Political Branch had done to him; and in Lithuania he left his boat and went to the Lithuanians, saying: “Brothers, take me to your partisans! Accept me and you won’t be sorry; we’ll twist their tails.” But the Lithuanians decided he was being planted on them.

Ivan had a letter of credit sewn in his clothes. He got a ticket to the Kuban. However, en route to Moscow he got very drunk in a restaurant. Consequently, he squinched up his eyes at Moscow as they were leaving the station, and told the taxi driver: “Take me to an embassy!” “Which one?” “Who the hell cares? Any one.” And the driver took him to one: “Which one is that?” “The French.” “All right.”

Perhaps his thoughts got mixed up, and his original intentions in going to an embassy had changed into something else, but his cleverness and his strength had in no wise lapsed: without alerting the policemen at the embassy entrance, he went quietly down a side street and climbed to the top of a smooth wall double a man’s height. In the embassy yard it was easier: no one discovered him or detained him, and he went on inside, walked through one room, then another, and he saw a table set. There were many things on the table, but what astonished him most was the pears. He felt a yen for them, and he stuffed all the pockets in his field jacket and trousers with them. At that moment, the members of the household came in to dine. Koverchenko began to attack them and shout at them before they could begin on him: “You Frenchmen!” According to him, France hadn’t done anything good for the last century. “Why don’t you start a revolution? Why are you trying to get de Gaulle into power? And you want us to send our Kuban wheat to you? It’s no go.” “Who are you? Where did you come from?” The French were astounded. Immediately adopting the right approach, Koverchenko kept his wits about him: “A major of the MGB.” The French were frightened. “But even so, you are not supposed to burst in here. What is your business here?” “… you in the mouth!” Koverchenko bellowed at them straight from the heart. And, after playing the hoodlum for them a while longer, he noticed that in the next room they were already telephoning about him. He was still sober enough to begin his retreat, but the pears started to fall out of his pockets—and he was pursued by mocking laughter.

And in actual fact, he had enough strength left not only to leave the embassy safe and sound but to move on. The next morning he woke up in Kiev Station (was he not planning to go on to the West Ukraine?), and they soon picked him up there.

During his interrogation he was beaten by Abakumov personally. And the scars on his back swelled up to a hand’s breadth.

The Minister beat him, of course, not because of the pears and not because of his valid rebuke to the French, but to find out by whom and when he had been recruited. And, of course, the prison term they handed him was twenty-five years.

There are many such stories, but like every railroad car, the Stolypin falls silent at night. At night there won’t be any fish, nor water, nor going to the toilet.

And the car is filled then with the steady noise of the wheels, which doesn’t in the least break the silence. And, if, in addition, the convoy guard has left the corridor, one can talk quietly from the third compartment for men with the fourth, or women’s, compartment.

A conversation with a woman in prison is quite special. There is something noble about it, even if one talks only about articles of the Code and prison terms.

One such conversation went on all night long, and here are the circumstances in which it took place. It was in July, 1950. There were no passengers in the women’s compartment except for one young girl, the daughter of a Moscow doctor, sentenced under Article 58-10. And there was a big to-do in the men’s compartment. The convoy guards began to drive all the zeks out of three compartments into two (and don’t even ask how many they piled up in there). And they brought in some offender who was not at all like a convict. In the first place, he hadn’t had his head shaved and his wavy blond locks, real curls, lay seductively on his big, thoroughbred head. He was young, dignified, and dressed in a British military uniform. He was escorted through the corridor with an air of deference (the convoy itself had been a little awed by the instructions on the envelope containing his case file). And the girl had managed to catch a glimpse of the whole episode. But he himself had not seen her. (And how much he regretted that later!)

From the noise and the commotion she realized that the compartment next to hers had been emptied for him. It was obvious that he was not supposed to communicate with anyone—all the more reason for her to want to talk with him. It wasn’t possible in a Stolypin to see from one compartment into another, but when everything was still, you could hear between them. Late at night, when things had begun to quiet down, the girl sat on the edge of her bunk, right up against the grating, and called to him quietly. (And perhaps she first sang softly. The convoy guard was supposed to punish her for all this, but the guard itself had settled down for the night, and there was no one in the corridor.) The stranger heard her and, following her instructions, sat in the same position. They were now sitting with their backs to each other, braced against the same one-inch partition, and speaking quietly through the grating at the outer edge of the partition. Their heads were as close as if their lips were kissing, but they could neither touch one another nor see each other.

Erik Arvid Andersen understood Russian tolerably well by this time, made many mistakes when he spoke it, but, in the end, could succeed in communicating his thoughts. He told the girl his astonishing story (and we, too, will hear about it at the transit prison center). She, in turn, told him the simple story of a Moscow student who had gotten 58-10. But Arvid was fascinated. He asked her about Soviet youth and about Soviet life, and what he heard was not at all what he had learned earlier in leftist Western newspapers and from his own official visit here.

They talked all night long. And that night everything came together for Arvid: the strange prisoners’ car in an alien country; the rhythmic nighttime clicking of the wheels, which always finds an echo in our hearts; and the girl’s melodic voice, her whispers, her breath reaching his ear—his very ear, yet he couldn’t even look at her. (And for a year and a half he hadn’t heard a woman’s voice.)

And for the first time, through that invisible (and probably, and, of course, necessarily beautiful) girl, he began to see the real Russia, and the voice of Russia told him the truth all night long. One can learn about a country for the first time this way too. (And in the morning he would glimpse Russia’s dark straw-thatched roofs through the window—to the sad whispering of his hidden guide.)

Yes, indeed, all this is Russia: the prisoners on the tracks refusing to voice their complaints, the girl on the other side of the Stolypin partition, the convoy going off to sleep, pears falling out of pockets, buried bombs, and a horse climbing to the second floor.

“The gendarmes! The gendarmes!” the prisoners cried out happily. They were happy that they would be escorted the rest of the way by the attentive gendarmes and not by the convoy.

Once again I have forgotten to insert quotation marks. That was Korolenko who was telling us this.[293] We, it is true, were not happy to see the bluecaps. But anyone who ever got caught in what the prisoners christened the pendulum would have been glad to see even them.

An ordinary passenger might have a difficult time boarding a train at a small way station—but not getting off. Toss your things out and jump off. This was not the case with a prisoner, however. If the local prison guard or police didn’t come for him or was late by even two minutes, toot-toot, the whistle would blow, and the train would get under way, and they would take the poor sinner of a prisoner all the way to the next transit point. And it was all right if it was actually a transit point that they took you to, because they would begin to feed you again there. But sometimes it was all the way to the end of the Stolypin’s route, and then they would keep you for eighteen hours in an empty car and take you back with a whole new group of prisoners, and then once again, maybe, they wouldn’t come for you—and once again you’d be in a blind alley, and once again you’d wait there and during all that time they wouldn’t feed you. Your rations, after all, were issued only until your first stop, and the accounting office isn’t to blame that the prison messed things up, for you are, after all, listed for Tulun. And the convoy isn’t responsible for feeding you out of its own rations. So they swing you back and forth six times (it has actually happened!): Irkutsk to Krasnoyarsk, Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk, Irkutsk to Krasnoyarsk, etc., etc., etc., and when you do see a blue visor on the Tulun platform, you are ready to throw your arms around him: Thank you, beloved, for saving me.

You get so worn down, so choked, so shattered in a Stolypin, even in two days’ time, that before you get to a big city you yourself don’t know whether you would rather keep going in torment just to get there sooner, or whether you’d rather be put in a transit prison to recover a little.

But the convoy guards begin to hustle and bustle. They come out with their overcoats on and knock their gunstocks on the floor. That means they are going to unload the whole car.

First the convoy forms up in a circle at the car steps, and no sooner have you dropped, fallen, tumbled down them, than the guards shout at you deafeningly in unison from all sides (as they have been taught): “Sit down, sit down, sit down!” This is very effective when several voices are shouting it at once and they don’t let you raise your eyes. It’s like being under shellfire, and involuntarily you squirm, hurry (and where is there for you to hurry to?), crouch close to the ground, and sit down, having caught up with those who disembarked earlier.

“Sit down!” is a very clear command, but if you are a new prisoner, you don’t yet understand it. When I heard this command on the switching tracks in Ivanovo, I ran, clutching my suitcase in my arms (if a suitcase has been manufactured out in freedom and not in camp, its handle always breaks off and always at a difficult moment), and set it down on end on the ground and without looking around to see how the first prisoners were sitting, sat down on the suitcase. After all, to sit down right on the ties, on the dark oily sand, in my officer’s coat, which was not yet so very dirty and which still had uncut flaps! The chief of the convoy—a ruddy mug, a good Russian face—broke into a run, and I hadn’t managed to grasp what he wanted and why until I saw that he meant, clearly, to plant his sacred boot in my cursed back but something restrained him. However, he didn’t spare his polished toe and kicked the suitcase and smashed in the top. “Sit down!” he gritted by way of explanation. Only at that point did it dawn on me that I towered over the surrounding zeks, and without even having the chance to ask: “How am I supposed to sit down?” I already understood how, and sat down in my precious coat, like everybody else, just as dogs sit at gates and cats at doors.

(I still have that suitcase, and even now when I chance to come upon it, I run my fingers around the hole torn in it. It is a wound which cannot heal as wounds heal on bodies or on hearts. Things have longer memories than people.)

And forcing prisoners to sit down was also a calculated maneuver. If you are sitting on your rear end on the ground, so that your knees tower in front of you, then your center of gravity is well back of your legs, and it is difficult to get up and impossible to jump up. And more than that, they would make us sit as tightly massed together as possible so that we’d be in each other’s way. And if all of us wanted to attack the convoy together, they would have mowed us down before we got moving.

They had us sitting there to wait for the Black Maria (it transports the prisoners in batches, you couldn’t get them all in at once), or else to be herded off on foot. They would try to sit us down someplace hidden so that fewer free people would see us, but at times they did make the prisoners sit right there awkwardly on the platform or in an open square. (That is how it was in Kuibyshev.) And it is a difficult experience for the free people: we stare at them quite freely and openly with a totally sincere gaze, but how are they supposed to look at us? With hatred? Their consciences don’t permit it. (After all, only the Yermilovs believe that people were imprisoned “for cause.”) With sympathy? With pity? Be careful, someone will take down your name and they’ll set you up for a prison term too; it’s that simple. And our proud free citizens (as in Mayakovsky: “Read it, envy me, I am a citizen”) drop their guilty heads and try not to see us at all, as if the place were empty. The old women are bolder than the rest. You couldn’t turn them bad. They believe in God. And they would break off a piece of bread from their meager loaf and throw it to us. And old camp hands—nonpolitical offenders, of course—weren’t afraid either. All camp veterans knew the saying: “Whoever hasn’t been there yet will get there, and whoever was there won’t forget it.” And look, they’d toss over a pack of cigarettes, hoping that someone might do the same for them during their next term. And the old woman’s bread wouldn’t quite carry far enough, what with her weak arm, and it would fall short, whereas the pack of cigarettes would arch through the air right into our midst, and the convoy guards would immediately work the bolts of their rifles—pointing them at the old woman, at kindness, at the bread: “Come on, old woman, run along,”

And the holy bread, broken in two, was left to lie in the dust while we were driven off.

In general, those minutes of sitting on the ground there at the station were among our very best. I remember that in Omsk we were made to sit down on the railroad ties between two long freight trains. No one from outside entered this alleyway. (In all probability, they had stationed a soldier at either end: “You can’t go in there.” And even in freedom our people are taught to take orders from anyone in a uniform.) It began to grow dark. It was August. The oily station gravel hadn’t yet completely cooled off from the sun and warmed us where we sat. We couldn’t see the station, but it was very close by, somewhere behind the trains. A phonograph blared dance music, and the crowd buzzed in unison. And for some reason it didn’t seem humiliating to sit on the ground in a crowded dirty mass in some kind of pen; and it wasn’t a mockery to hear the dances of young strangers, dances we would never dance; to picture someone on the station platform meeting someone or seeing someone off—maybe even with flowers. It was twenty minutes of near-freedom: the twilight deepened, the first stars began to shine, there were red and green lights along the tracks, and the music kept playing. Life was going on without us—and we didn’t even mind any more.

Cherish such moments, and prison will become easier to bear. Otherwise you will explode from rage.

And if it was dangerous to herd the zeks along to the Black Maria because there were streets and people right next to them, then the convoy statutes provided another good command: “Link arms!” There was nothing humiliating in this—link arms! Old men and boys, girls and old women, healthy people and cripples. If one of your hands is hanging onto your belongings, your neighbor puts his arm under that arm and you in turn link your other arm with your other neighbor’s. So you have now been compressed twice as tightly as in ordinary formation, and you have immediately become heavier and are hampered by being thrown out of balance by your belongings and by your awkwardness with them, and you sway steadily as you limp. Dirty, gray, clumsy creatures, you move ahead like blind men with an ostensible tenderness for one another—a caricature of humanity.

It may well be that no Black Maria at all is there to fetch you. And the chief of convoy is perhaps a coward. He is afraid he will fail to deliver you safely—and in this state, weighed down, jouncing as you go, knocking into things, you trudge all the way through the city to the prison itself.

There is one more command which is a caricature of geese: “Take hold of your heels!” This meant that anyone whose hands were free had to grab both his legs at about ankle height. And now: “Forward march.” (Well, now, reader, put this book aside, try going around the room that way! How does it work? And at what speed? How much looking around could you do? And what about escaping?) Picture the way three or four dozen such geese look from the side. (Kiev, 1940.)

And it is not necessarily August out; it might be December, 1946, and, there being no Black Maria, you are being herded at 40 degrees below zero to the Petropavlovsk Transit Prison. And it is easy to guess that during the last hours before arriving the Stolypin convoy refused to go to the trouble of taking you to the toilet, so as to avoid getting it dirty. Weakened from interrogation, gripped by the cold, you have a very hard time holding it—women especially. Well, and so what! It’s for horses to stand stock-still and loose the floodgates! It’s for dogs to go lift a leg against a fence. But as for people, you can do it right there, while you keep moving. No need to be shy in your own fatherland. It will dry at the transit prison…. Vera Korneyeva stooped down to adjust her shoe and fell one step behind, and the convoy immediately set the police dog on her and the dog bit her in the buttocks through all her winter clothing. Don’t fall behind! And an Uzbek fell down, and they beat him with their gunstocks and jackboots.

Well, that’s no tragedy: it won’t be photographed for the Daily Express. And the chief of convoy will live to a ripe old age and never be tried by anyone.

And the Black Marias, too, came down to us from history. In what respect does the prison carriage described by Balzac differ from a Black Maria? Only that the prison carriage was drawn along more slowly, and prisoners weren’t packed so tightly.

True, in the twenties columns of prisoners were still being driven afoot through our cities, even Leningrad. They brought traffic to a halt at intersections. (“So you got caught stealing?” came the reproaches from the sidewalks. No one had yet grasped the great plan for sewage disposal.)

But, always alert to technological trends, the Archipelago lost no time in adopting the black ravens, more familiarly known simply as ravens—Black Marias. These first Black Marias appeared at the same time as the very first trucks on our still cob-blestoned streets. Their suspension was poor, and it was very rough riding in them, but then the prisoners weren’t made of crystal either. On the other hand, they were very tightly corked even at that time, in 1927: there wasn’t one little crack; and there wasn’t one little electric light bulb, and there wasn’t any air to breathe, and it was impossible to see out. And even in those days they stood so tightly packed inside that there wasn’t any room left at all. And it wasn’t that all this was intentionally planned; there simply weren’t enough wheels to go around.

For many years the Black Marias were steel-gray and had, so to speak, prison written all over them. But in the biggest cities after the war they had second thoughts and decided to paint them bright colors and to write on the outside, “Bread” (the prisoners were the bread of construction), or “Meat” (it would have been more accurate to write “bones”), or even, simply, “Drink Soviet Champagne!”

Inside, the Black Marias might consist of a simple armored body or shell, an empty enclosure. Or perhaps there were benches against the walls all the way around. This was in no sense a convenience, but the reverse: they would push in just as many prisoners as could be inserted standing up, but in this case they would be piled on top of each other like baggage, one bale on another. The Black Maria might also have a box in the rear—a narrow steel closet for one prisoner. Or it might be boxed throughout: single closets that locked like cells along the right-and left-hand walls, with a corridor in the middle for the turnkey.

One was hardly likely to imagine that interior like a honeycomb when looking at that laughing maiden on the outside: “Drink Soviet Champagne!”

They drive you into the Black Marias to the tune of the same shouts coming from the convoy from all sides at once: “Come on there, get a move on, quick!” And so that you shouldn’t have time to look around and figure out how to escape, you are shoved and pushed so that you and your bag get stuck in the narrow little door and you knock your head against the lintel. The steel rear door slams shut with a bang—and off you go.

It was rare, of course, to spend hours in a Black Maria; twenty to thirty minutes were more likely. But you got flung around, it was a bone-breaker, it crushed all your insides during those half-hours, your head stooped if you were tall, and you remembered the cozy Stolypin with longing.

And the Black Maria means one thing further—it is a reshuffling of the deck, new encounters, and among them those which stand out most clearly are, of course, your encounters with the thieves. You may never happen to be in the same compartment with them, and maybe they won’t put you in the same cell with them even at the transit prison, but here in the Black Maria you are in their hands.

Sometimes it is so crowded that even the thieves, the urki, find it awkward to filch. Your legs and your arms are clamped between your neighbors’ bodies and bags as tightly as if they were in stocks. Only when all of you are tossed up and down and all your insides are shaken up by ruts and bumps can you change the position of your legs and arms.

Sometimes, in less crowded circumstances, the thieves can check out the contents of all the bags in just half an hour and appropriate all the “bacilli”—the fats and goodies—and the best of the “trash”—the clothing. Cowardly and sensible considerations most likely restrain you from putting up a fight against them. (And crumb by crumb you are already beginning to lose your immortal soul, still supposing that the main enemies and the main issues lie somewhere ahead and that you must save yourself for them.) And you might just throw a punch at them once and get a knife in the ribs then and there. (There would be no investigation, and even if there should be one, it wouldn’t threaten the thieves in any way: they would only be delayed at the transit prison instead of going to the far-off camp. You must concede that in a fight between a socially friendly prisoner and a socially hostile prisoner the state simply could not be on the side of the latter.)

In 1946, retired Colonel Lunin, a high-ranking official in Osoaviakhim—the Society for Assistance to Defense and to Aviation-Chemical Construction of the U.S.S.R.—recounted in a Butyrki cell how the thieves in a Moscow Black Maria, on March 8, International Women’s Day, during their transit from the City Court to Taganka Prison, gang-raped a young bride in his presence (and amid the silent passivity of everyone else in the van). That very morning the girl had come to her trial a free person, as attractively dressed as she could manage (she was on trial for leaving her work without official permission—which in itself was a repulsive fabrication worked up by her chief in revenge for her refusal to live with him). A half-hour before the Black Maria, the girl had been sentenced to five years under the decree and had then been shoved into this Black Maria, and right there in broad daylight, somewhere on the Park Ring (“Drink Soviet Champagne!”), had been turned into a camp prostitute. And are we really to say that it was the thieves who did this to her and not the jailers? And not her chief?

And thief tenderness too! Having raped her, they robbed her. They took the fashionable shoes with which she had hoped to charm the judges, and her blouse—which they shoved through to the convoy guards, who stopped the van and went off to get some vodka and handed it in so the thieves could drink at her expense too.

And when they got to the Taganka Prison, the girl sobbed out her complaint. And the officer listened to her, yawned, and said: “The government can’t provide each of you with individual transportation. We don’t have such facilities.”

Yes, the Black Marias are a “bottleneck” of the Archipelago. If there is no possibility of separating the politicals from the criminals in the Stolypins, then it isn’t possible to keep women separate from men in the Black Marias. And just how could one expect the thieves not to live it up en route from one jail to another?

Well, and if it weren’t for the thieves, we would have to be grateful to the Black Marias for our brief encounters with women! Where, if not here, is one to see them, hear them, and touch them in a prison existence?

Once in 1950 they were transporting us from the Butyrki to the station in a not at all crowded van—fourteen people in a Black Maria with benches. Everyone sat down, and suddenly they pushed in one more—a woman, alone. She sat down beside the rear door, fearfully at first. After all, she was totally defenseless against fourteen men in a dark cell. But it became clear after a few words that all those present were comrades. Fifty-eights.

She gave us her name—Repina, a colonel’s wife, and she had been arrested right after he had. And suddenly a silent military man, so young and thin that it seemed he had to be a lieutenant, said to her: “Tell me, weren’t you arrested with Antonina I.?” “What? Are you her husband? Oleg?” “Yes!” “Lieutenant Colonel I.? From the Frunze Academy?” “Yes!”

What a yes that was! It emerged from a trembling throat, and in it there was more fear of finding out something bad than there was happiness. He sat down next to her. Twilight shafts of summer daylight, diffused through two microscopic gratings in the two rear doors, flickered around the interior as the van moved along and across the faces of the woman and the lieutenant colonel. “She and I were imprisoned in the same cell for four months while she was undergoing interrogation.” “Where is she now?” “All that time she lived only for you! Her fears weren’t for herself but were all for you. First that they shouldn’t arrest you. And then later that you should get a lighter sentence.” “But what has happened to her now?” “She blamed herself for your arrest. Things were so hard for her!” “Where is she now?” “Just don’t be frightened”—and Repina put her hands on his chest as if he were her own kin. “She simply couldn’t endure the strain. They took her away from us. She, you know, became—well, a little confused. You understand?”

And that tiny storm boxed in sheets of steel rolled along so peacefully in the six-lane automobile traffic, stopped at traffic lights, and signaled for a turn.

I had met Oleg I. in the Butyrki just a few moments before—and here is how it happened. They had herded us into the station “box” and had brought us our things from the storage room. They called him and me to the door at the same moment. Through the opened door into the corridor we could see a woman jailer rifling the contents of his suitcase, and she flung out of it and onto the floor a golden shoulder board with the stars of a lieutenant colonel that had survived until then all by itself, heaven only knows how; she herself hadn’t noticed it, and she had accidentally stepped on its big stars with her foot.

She had trampled it with her shoe—exactly as in a film shot.

I said to him: “Direct your attention to that, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel!”

And he glowered. After all, he still had his ideas about the spotlessness of the service.

And now here was the next thing—about his wife.

And he had had only one hour to fit all this in.

Chapter 2 The Ports of the Archipelago

Spread out on a large table the enormous map of our Motherland. Indicate with fat black dots all provincial capitals, all railroad junctions, all transfer points where the railroad line ends in a river route, and where rivers bend and trails begin. What is this? Has the entire map been speckled by infectious flies? What it is, in fact, is precisely the majestic map of the ports of the Archipelago. These are not, to be sure, the enchanted ports to which Aleksandr Grin enticed us, where rum is drunk in taverns and men pay court to beautiful women.

It is a rare zek who has not known from three to five transit prisons and camps; many remember a dozen or so, and the sons of Gulag can count up to fifty of them without the slightest difficulty. However, in memory they get all mixed up together because they are so similar: in the illiteracy of their convoys, in their inept roll calls based on case files; the long waiting under the beating sun or autumn drizzle; the still longer body searches that involve undressing completely; their haircuts with unsanitary clippers; their cold, slippery baths; their foul-smelling toilets; their damp and moldy corridors; their perpetually crowded, nearly always dark, wet cells; the warmth of human flesh flanking you on the floor or on the board bunks; the bumpy ridges of bunk heads knocked together from boards; the wet, almost liquid, bread; the gruel cooked from what seems to be silage.

And whoever has a good sharp memory and can recollect precisely what distinguishes one from another has no need to travel about the country because he knows its geography full well on the basis of transit prisons. Novosibirsk? I know it. I was there. Very strong barracks there, made from thick beams. Irkutsk? That was where the windows had been bricked over in several stages, you could see how they had been in Tsarist times, and each course had been laid separately, and only small slits had been left between them. Vologda? Yes, an ancient building with towers. The toilets right on top of one another, the wooden partitions rotten, and the ones above leaking down into the ones underneath. Usman? Of course. A lice-ridden stinking hole of a jail, an ancient vaulted structure. And they used to pack it so full that whenever they took prisoners out for a transport you couldn’t imagine where they’d put them all—a line strung out halfway through the city.

You had better not tell such a connoisseur that you know some city without a transit prison. He will prove to you conclusively that there are no such cities, and he will be right. Salsk? Well, there they keep transit prisoners in the KPZ—cells for preliminary detention—along with prisoners under interrogation. And what do you mean, no transit prison in every district center too? In Sol-Iletsk? Of course there’s one. In Rybinsk? What about Prison No. 2, a former monastery? It’s a quiet one, too, with empty courtyards paved with old, mossy flagstones and clean wooden tubs in the bath. In Chita? Prison No. 1. In Naushki? Not a prison but a transit camp, which is the same thing. In Torzhok? Up the hill, also in a monastery.

You must realize, dear sir, that every town has to have its own transit prison. After all, the courts operate everywhere. And how are prisoners to be delivered to camp? By air?

Of course, no transit prison is the equal of another. But which is better and which worse is something that can’t be settled in an argument. If three or four zeks get together, each of them feels bound to praise his “own.” Let us listen for a while to such a discussion:

“Well, even if the Ivanovo Transit Prison isn’t one of the more famous, my friends, just ask anybody imprisoned there in the winter of 1937-1938. The prison was unheated—and the prisoners not only didn’t freeze to death, but on the upper bunks they lay there undressed. And they knocked out all the windowpanes so as not to suffocate. Instead of the twenty men Cell 21 was supposed to contain, there were three hundred and twenty-three! There was water underneath the bunks, and boards were laid in the water and people lay on those boards. That was right where the frost poured in from the broken windows. It was like Arctic night down under the bunks. There was no light down there either because it was cut off by the people lying on the bunks above and standing in the aisle. It was impossible to walk through the aisle to the latrine tank, and people crawled along the edges of the bunks. They didn’t distribute rations to individuals but to units of ten. If one of the ten died, the others shoved his corpse under the bunks and kept it there until it started to stink. They got the corpse’s ration. And all that could have been endured, but the turnkeys seemed to have been oiled with turpentine—and they kept driving the prisoners endlessly from cell to cell, on and on. You’d just get yourself settled when ‘Come on, get a move on! You’re being moved!’ And you’d have to start in again trying to find a place! And the reason for such overcrowding was that they hadn’t taken anyone to the bath for three months, the lice had multiplied, and people had abscesses from the lice on their feet and legs—and typhus too. And because of the typhus the prison was quarantined and no prisoner transports could leave it for four months.”

“Well, fellows, the problem there wasn’t Ivanovo, but the year. In 1937-1938, of course, not just the zeks but the very stones of the transit prisons were screaming in agony. Irkutsk was no special transit prison either, but in 1938 the doctors didn’t even dare look into the cells but would walk down the corridor while the turnkey shouted through the door: ‘Anyone unconscious, come out.’”

“In 1937, fellows, it was that way all across Siberia to the Kolyma, and the big bottleneck was in the Sea of Okhotsk, and in Vladivostok. The steamships could transport only thirty thousand a month, and they kept driving them on and on from Moscow without taking that into account. Well, and so a hundred thousand of them piled up. Understand?”

“Who counted them?”

“Whoever was supposed to, counted.”

“If you’re talking about the Vladivostok Transit Prison, then in February, 1937, there weren’t more than forty thousand there.”

“People were stuck there for several months at a time. The bedbugs infested the board bunks like locusts. Half a mug of water a day; there wasn’t any more!—no one to haul it. There was one whole compound of Koreans, and they all died from dysentery, every last one of them. They took a hundred corpses out of our own compound every morning. They were building a morgue, so they hitched the zeks to the carts and hauled the stone that way. Today you do the hauling, and tomorrow they haul you there yourself. And in autumn the typhus arrived. And we did the same thing: we didn’t hand over the corpses till they stank—and took the extra rations. No medication whatever. We crawled to the fence and begged: ‘Give us medicine.’ And the guards fired a volley from the watchtowers. Then they assembled those with typhus in a separate barracks. Some didn’t make it there, and only a few came back. The bunks there had two stories. And anyone on an upper who was sick and running a fever wasn’t able to clamber down to go to the toilet—and so it would all pour down on the people underneath. There were fifteen hundred sick there. And all the orderlies were thieves. They’d pull out the gold teeth from the corpses. And not only from the corpses.”

“Why do you keep going on and on about 1937? What about 1949 on Vanino Bay, in the fifth compound? What about that? There were 35,000! And for several months too! There was another bottleneck in transport to the Kolyma. And every night for some reason they kept driving people from one barracks to another and from one compound to another. Just as it was with the Fascists: Whistles! Screams! ‘Come on out there without the last one![294] And everyone went on the run! Always on the run! They’d drive a hundred to get bread—on the run! For gruel—on the run! No bowls to eat from. Take the gruel in whatever you could—the flap of your coat, your hands! They brought water in big tanks and there was nothing to distribute it in, so they shot it out in sprays. And whoever could get his mouth in front of one got some. Prisoners began to fight in front of the tanks—and the guards fired on them from the towers. Exactly like under the Fascists! Major General Derevyanko, the Chief of Administration of the Northeast [i.e., Kolyma] Corrective Labor Camps, came, and while he was there an air force aviator stepped out in front of the crowd and ripped his field shirt down the front: ‘I have seven battle decorations! Who gave you the right to shoot into the compound?’ And Derevyanko replied: ‘We shot and we will go on shooting until you learn how to behave.’”[295]

“No, boys, none of those are real transit prisons. Now take Kirov! That was a real one! Let’s not take any special year, but, say, 1947. Even then in Kirov two turnkeys had to work together with their boots to jam people into a cell, that being the only way they could get the door shut. In September (and Kirov—formerly Vyatka—isn’t on the Black Sea either) everyone was sitting naked on the three-story bunks because of the heat. They were sitting because there was no place to lie down: one row sat at the heads of the bunks and one row at the feet. And two rows sat on the floor in the aisle, and others stood between them, and they took turns. They kept their knapsacks in their hands or on their knees because there was nowhere to put them down. Only the thieves were in their lawful places, the second-story bunks next to the windows, and they spread out as they pleased. There were so many bedbugs that they went right on biting in the daytime, and they dive-bombed straight from the ceiling. And people had to suffer through that for a week or even a month.”

I myself would like to interrupt in order to tell about Krasnaya Presnya[296] in August, 1945, in the Victory summer, but I am shy: after all, in Krasnaya Presnya we could somehow stretch out our legs at night, and the bedbugs were moderate, and flies bit us all night long as we lay naked and sweaty under the bright lights, but of course that’s nothing at all, and I would be ashamed to boast about it. We streamed with sweat every time we moved, and it simply poured out of us after we ate. There were a hundred of us in a cell a little larger than the average room in an apartment, and we were packed in, and you couldn’t find a place on the floor for your feet. And two little windows on the south side were blocked with “muzzles” made of steel sheets. They not only kept the air from circulating, but they got very hot from the sun and radiated heat into the cell.

Just as all transit prisons are pointless, talk about transit prisons is pointless, and, in all probability, this chapter, too, will turn out to be the same: one doesn’t know what to take hold of first, what particular thing to talk about, what to lead off with. And the more people that are crowded into transit prisons, the more pointless it all becomes. It is unbearable for a human being, and it is inexpedient for Gulag—but people sit there month after month. And the transit prison becomes a straight factory: bread rations are lugged in, stacked up in hand barrows like those in which bricks are hauled. And the steaming gruel is brought in six-bucket wooden casks that have holes knocked in them with a crowbar.

The transit prison at Kotlas was tenser and more aboveboard than many. Tenser because it opened the way to the whole Northeast of European Russia, and more aboveboard because it was already deep in the Archipelago, and there was no need to pretend to anybody. It was simply a piece of land divided into cages by fencing and the cages were all kept locked. Although it had been thickly settled by peasants when they were exiled in 1930 (one must realize that they had no roofs over their heads, but nobody is left to tell about it), even in 1938 there simply wasn’t room for everyone in the frail one-story wooden barracks made of discarded end-pieces of lumber and covered with… tarpaulin. Under the wet autumn snow and in freezing temperatures people simply lived there on the ground, beneath the heavens. True, they weren’t allowed to grow numb from inactivity. They were being counted endlessly; they were invigorated by check-ups (twenty thousand people were there at a time) or by sudden night searches. Later on tents were pitched in these cages, and log houses two stories high were built in some of them, but to reduce the construction costs sensibly, no floor was laid between the stories—six-story bunks with stepladders were simply built into the sides, up and down which prisoners on their last legs, on the verge of dying, had to clamber like sailors (a structure which would have adorned a ship more appropriately than a port). In the winter of 1944-1945, when everyone had a roof over his head, there was room for only 7,500 prisoners, and fifty of them died every day, and the stretchers on which they were carried to the morgue were never idle. (People will object that this was quite acceptable—the death rate of less than one percent per day—and that, given that sort of turnover, a person might manage to last five months. Yes, but the main killer was camp labor, and that hadn’t even begun yet for transit prisoners. This loss of two-thirds of one percent per day represents sheer shrinkage, and it would be intolerably high even in some vegetable warehouses.)

The deeper into the Archipelago one got, the more obviously did the concrete docks of the Archipelago become transformed into wharves made of wooden pilings.

In the course of several years, half a million people passed through Karabas, the transit camp near Karaganda, whose name became a byword in the language. (Yuri Karbe was there in 1942 and was already registered in the 433rd thousand.) The transit prison consisted of low rammed-earth barracks with earthen floors. Daily recreation there consisted in driving all the prisoners out with their things and putting artists to work whitewashing the floor and even painting carpets on it, and then in the evening the zeks would lie down on it, and their bodies would rub out both the whitewash and the carpets.[297]

The Knyazh-Pogost transit point (latitude 63 degrees north) consisted of shacks built on a swamp. Their pole frames were covered with torn tarpaulin tenting that didn’t quite reach the ground. The double bunks inside them were also made of poles (from which, incidentally, the branches had been only partially removed), and the aisle was floored with poles also. During the day, the wet mud squelched through the flooring, and at night it froze. In various parts of the area, the walkways were laid on frail and shaky poles and here and there people whom weakness had made clumsy fell into the water and ooze. In 1938 they fed the prisoners in Knyazh-Pogost the same thing every day: a mash made of crushed grits and fish bones. This was convenient because there were no bowls, spoons, or forks at the transit prison and the prisoners had none of their own either. They were herded to the boiler by the dozens and the mash was ladled into their caps or the flaps of their jackets.

And in the transit prison of Vogvozdino (several miles from Ust-Vym), where five thousand prisoners were kept at a time (now who ever heard of Vogvozdino before this sentence? how many such unknown transit prisons were there? and then multiply that by 5,000), the food was liquid, but they had no bowls either. However, they managed without them (what is there that our Russian ingenuity cannot overcome?) by distributing the gruel in washbasins for ten people at a time, leaving them to race each other gulping it down.[298]

True, no one was imprisoned in Vogvozdino longer than a year. (The kind of prisoner who would have been imprisoned there that long was a prisoner on his last legs whom all the camps had refused to accept.)

The imagination of writers is poverty-stricken in regard to the native life and customs of the Archipelago. When they want to write about the most reprehensible and disgraceful aspect of prison, they always accuse the latrine bucket. In literature the latrine bucket has become the symbol of prison, a symbol of humiliation, of stink. Oh, how frivolous can you be? Now was the latrine bucket really an evil for the prisoner? On the contrary, it was the most merciful device of the prison administration. The actual horror began the moment there was no latrine bucket in the cell.

In 1937 there were no latrine buckets in certain Siberian prisons, or there weren’t enough. Not enough of them had been made ahead of time—Siberian industry hadn’t caught up with the full scope of arrests. There were no latrine barrels in the warehouses for the newly created cells. There were old latrine buckets in the cells, but they were antiquated and small, and the only reasonable thing to do at that point was to remove them, since they amounted to nothing at all for the new reinforcements of prisoners. So if long ago the Minusinsk Prison had been built for five hundred people (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was never inside it; he moved about freely), and there were now ten thousand in it, it meant that each latrine bucket ought to have become twenty times bigger. But it had not.

Our Russian pens write only in large letters. We have lived through so very much, and almost none of it has been described and called by its right name. But, for Western authors, peering through a microscope at the living cells of everyday life, shaking a test tube in the beam of a strong light, this is after all a whole epic, another ten volumes of Remembrance of Things Past: to describe the perturbation of a human soul placed in a cell filled to twenty times its capacity and with no latrine bucket, where prisoners are taken out to the toilet only once a day! Of course, much of the texture of this life is bound to be quite unknown to Western writers; they wouldn’t realize that in this situation one solution was to urinate in your canvas hood, nor would they at all understand one prisoner’s advice to another to urinate in his boot! And yet that advice was the fruit of wisdom derived from vast experience, and it didn’t involve spoiling the boot and it didn’t reduce the boot to the status of a pail. It meant that the boot had to be taken off, turned upside down, the boot tops turned inside out and up—and thus a cylindrical vessel was formed that constituted the much-needed container. But, at the same time, with what psychological twists and turns Western writers could enrich their literature (without in the least risking any banal repetition of the famous masters) if they only knew about the scheme of things in that same Minusinsk Prison: there was only one food bowl for every four prisoners; and one mug of drinking water per day was issued to each (there were enough mugs to go around). And it could happen that one of the four contrived to use the bowl allotted to him and three others to relieve his internal pressure and then refuse to hand over his daily water ration to wash it out before lunch. What a conflict! What a clash of four personalities! What nuances! (And I am not joking. That is when the rock bottom of a human being is revealed. It is only that Russian pens are too busy to write about it, and Russian eyes don’t have time to read about it. I am not joking—because only doctors can tell us how months in such a cell will ruin a human being’s health for his entire life, even if he wasn’t shot under Yezhov and was rehabilitated under Khrushchev.)

And just to think that we had dreamed of resting and loosening up a bit in port! After being squashed and doubled up for several days in the Stolypin, how we had dreamed of the transit prison! That we could stretch out a bit there and straighten up. That we would be able to go to the toilet there without hurrying! That we would drink as much water there as we wanted, and get as much hot water for tea. That there we wouldn’t be forced to ransom our own bread rations from the convoy with our own belongings. That we would be fed hot food there. And that at last we would be taken to the bath, that we could drench ourselves in hot water and stop itching. We had had elbows stuck into our sides and been tossed from side to side in the Black Maria; and they had shouted at us: “Link arms!” “Take hold of your heels!” But we were in good spirits anyway: it was all right, all right, soon we would be at the transit prison! And now we were there.

And even if some part of our dreams came true in the transit prison, something else would foul it all up anyway.

What awaits us in the bath? You can never be sure. They begin suddenly to shave all the women’s hair off. (In Krasnaya Presnya, in November, 1950.) Or a line of us naked men is clipped by women barbers only. In the Vologda steam room, portly Aunt Motya used to shout: “Stand up, men!” And she’d let the whole line have it from the steam pipe. And the Irkutsk Transit Prison argued differently: it’s more natural for the entire service staff in the bath to be male and for a man to smear on the medicinal tar ointment between the women’s legs. Or during the winter, in the cold soaping-up room of the Novosibirsk Transit Prison only cold water comes from the faucets; the prisoners make up their minds to ask higher-ups, and a captain comes, puts his own hand unfastidiously under a faucet: “I say this water is hot, get it?” I have already wearied of reporting that there are baths which have no water at all, that they scorch clothes in the roaster, that after the bath they compel people to run naked and barefoot through the snow to get their things (the counterintelligence of the Second Byelorussian Front in Brodnica in 1945).

From your very first steps in the transit prison you realize that here you are not in the hands of the jailers or the officers of the prison administration, who at least adhere some of the time to some kind of written law. Here you are in the hands of the trusties. That surly bath attendant who comes to meet your prisoner transport: “Well, go wash, gentlemen Fascists!” And that work-assignment clerk with a plywood writing board who looks over your formation searchingly and hurries you up. And that instructor, cleanshaven except for a prominent forelock, who slaps his leg with that rolled-up newspaper and at the same time gives your bags a once-over. And then other transit-prison trusties, whom you don’t recognize, penetrate your suitcases with X-ray eyes—oh, how alike they all are! And where in your brief prisoner-transport journey have you seen them all before? Not so clean-looking, not so well washed, but the same kind of ugly-mug swine with pitiless, bare-toothed grins?

Baaaah! These are the same blatnye, the thieves, again. Those same urki crooks, whom Leonid Utyosov glorifies in his songs. Here again are Zhenka Zhogol, Seryoga-Zver, and Dimka Kish-kenya, but not behind bars this time; they have been cleaned up, dressed up as representatives of the state. And putting on airs of great importance, they see to it that discipline is observed—by us. And if one peers into those snouts, one can even, with imagination, picture that they sprang from the same Russian roots as the rest of us—that once upon a time they were village boys whose fathers bore such names as Klim, Prokhor, Guri, and that their general structure is even similar to our own: two nostrils, two irises in the eyes, a rosy tongue with which to swallow food and utter certain Russian sounds, which, however, shape totally new words.

Every chief of a transit prison has enough presence of mind to realize that he can send his relatives back home the wages for all staff positions or else he can divvy them up with the other prison officers. And all you have to do is whistle to get as many volunteers as you want from among the socially friendly prison elements to carry out all that work just in return for being allowed to cast anchor at the transit prison and not have to go on to a mine or to the taiga. All these work-assignment clerks, office clerks, bookkeepers, instructors, bath attendants, barbers, stockroom clerks, cooks, dishwashers, laundresses, tailors who repair underwear and linens—are permanent transit-prison residents. They receive prison rations and are registered in cells, and they swipe the rest of their soup and chow on their own out of the common food pot or out of the bundles of the transit zeks. All these transit-prison trusties regard it as certain that they will never be better off in any camp. We arrive in their hands still not completely plucked, and they bamboozle us to their hearts’ content. It is they and not the jailers who search us and our belongings here, and before the search they suggest we turn in our money for safekeeping, and they seriously write down a list—we never see the list or the money again. “We turned in our money.” “Who to?” the officer who has arrived on the scene asks in surprise. “Well, it was one of them.” “Who exactly?” The trusties hadn’t noticed which one. “Why did you turn it over to him?” “We thought…” “That’s what the turkey thought! Think less and you’ll be better off.” And that’s that. They suggest we leave our things in the vestibule to the bath: “No one’s going to take them. Who needs them?” We leave them, for after all we can’t take them into the bath with us anyway. We return and there are no sweaters left and no fur-lined mittens. “What kind of a sweater was it?” “Grayish.” “Well, that means it went to the laundry.” They also take things from us honestly: in return for taking a suitcase into the storage room for safekeeping; for putting us in a cell without the thieves; for sending us off on prisoner transports as soon as possible; for not sending us off as long as possible. The only thing they don’t do is rob us by main force out in the open.

“But those aren’t thieves!” the connoisseurs among us explain. “These are the bitches—the ones who work for the prison. They are enemies of the honest thieves. And the honest thieves are the ones imprisoned in cells.” But somehow this is hard for our rabbity brains to grasp. Their ways are the same; they have the same kind of tattoos. Maybe they really are enemies of those others, but after all they are not our friends either, that’s how it is….

And by this time they have forced us to sit down in the yard right underneath the cell windows. The windows all have “muzzles” on them and you can’t look in, but from inside, hoarse, friendly voices advise: “Hey, fellows! You know what they do here? When they search you, they take away everything loose like tea and tobacco. If you have any, toss it in here, through our window. We’ll give it back later.” So what do you know? We are suckers and rabbits. Maybe they do take tea and tobacco away. We have read about universal prisoner solidarity in all our great literature, that one prisoner won’t deceive another. The way they spoke to us was friendly. “Hey, fellows!” And so we toss them our tobacco pouches. And the genuine pure-bred thieves on the other side catch them and guffaw: “You Fascist stupes.”

And here are the slogans with which the whole transit prison welcomes us even though they don’t actually hang them on the walls: “Don’t look for justice here!” “You’re going to have to hand over everything you’ve got to us.” “You’ll have to give it all up.” This is repeated to you by the jailers, the convoy, and the thieves. You are overwhelmed by your unbearable prison term, and you are trying to figure out how to catch your breath, while everyone around you is figuring out how to plunder you. Everything works out so as to oppress the political prisoner, who is already depressed and abandoned without all that. “You will have to give it all up.” The jailer at the Gorky Transit Prison shakes his head hopelessly; and with a sense of relief, Ans Bern-shtein gives him his officer’s greatcoat—not free, but in exchange for two onions. And why should you complain about the thieves if you see all the jailers at Krasnaya Presnya wearing chrome-leather boots they were never issued? They were all lifted by the thieves in the cells and then pushed to the jailers. Why complain about the thieves if the instructor of the Cultural and Educational Department of the camp administration is a blatnoi, a thief, himself and writes reports on the politicals? (The Kem Transit Prison.) And how are you ever going to get justice against the thieves in the Rostov Transit Prison when this is their ancient native tribal den?

They say that in 1942 at the Gorky Transit Prison some officer prisoners (including Gavrilov, the military engineer Shchebetin, and others) nonetheless rebelled, beat up the thieves, and forced them to stay in line. But this is always regarded as a legend; did the thieves capitulate in just one of the cells? For long? And how was it that the bluecaps allowed the socially hostile elements to beat up the socially friendly ones? And when they say that at the Kotlas Transit Prison in 1940 the thieves started to grab money right out of the hands of the politicals lined up at the commissary, and the politicals began to beat them up so badly that they couldn’t be stopped, and the perimeter guards entered the compound with machine guns to defend the thieves—now there’s something that rings true. That’s the way it really was.

Foolish relatives! They dash about in freedom, borrow money (because they never have that kind of money at home), and send you foodstuffs and things—the widow’s last mite, but also a poisoned gift, because it transforms you from a free though hungry person into one who is anxious and cowardly, and it deprives you of that newly dawning enlightenment, that toughening resolve, which are all you need for your descent into the abyss. Oh, wise Gospel saying about the camel and the eye of the needle! These material things will keep you from entering the heavenly kingdom of the liberated spirit. And you see that others in the police van have the same kind of bags as you. “Ragbag bastards!” the thieves have already snarled at you in the Black Maria—but there were only two of them and there were fifty of you and so far they haven’t touched you. And now they were holding us for the second day at the Krasnaya Presnya station with our legs tucked beneath us on the dirty floor because we were so crowded. However, none of us was observing the life going on around us, because we were all too concerned with how to turn in our suitcases for safekeeping. Even though we were supposed to have the right to turn in our things for safekeeping, nonetheless the only reason the work-assignment clerks permitted us to do it was because the prison was a Moscow prison and we ourselves hadn’t yet lost our Moscow look.

What a relief—our things had been checked. (And that meant we would have to give them up not at this transit prison but later on.) The only things left dangling from our hands were our bundles with our ill-fated foodstuffs. Too many of us beavers had been assembled in one place. They began to distribute us among different cells. I was shoved into a cell with that same Valentin whom I had been with the day I signed for my OSO sentence, and who had proposed with touching sentiment that we begin a new life in camp. It was not yet packed full. The aisle was free. There was plenty of space under the bunks. According to the traditional arrangement, the thieves occupied the second tier of bunks: their senior members were beside the windows, their juniors farther back. A neutral gray mass was on the lower bunks. No one attacked us. Without looking around and without thinking ahead, inexperienced as we were, we sat down on the asphalt floor and crawled under the bunks. We would even be cozy there. The bunks were low for big men to get under, and we had to slide in on our bellies, inching along the asphalt floor. We did. And we were going to lie there quietly and talk quietly. Not a chance! In the semidarkness, with a wordless rustling, from all sides juveniles crept up on us on all fours, like big rats. They were still boys, some twelve-year-olds even, but the Criminal Code accepted them too. They had already been processed through a thieves’ trial, and they were continuing their apprenticeship with the thieves here. They had been unleashed on us. They jumped us from all sides and six pairs of hands stripped from us and wrenched from under us all our wealth. And all this took place in total silence, with only the sound of sinister sniffing. And we were trapped: we couldn’t get up, we couldn’t move. It took no more than a minute for them to seize the bundles with the fat bacon, sugar, and bread. They were gone. We lay there feeling stupid. We had given up our food without a fight. And we could go on lying there now, but that was utterly impossible. Creeping out awkwardly, rear ends first, we got up from under the bunks.

Am I a coward? I had thought I wasn’t one. I had pushed my way into the heat of a bombing in the open steppe, I hadn’t been afraid to drive over a trail obviously mined with antitank mines. I had remained coolheaded when I led my battery out of encirclement and went back in for a damaged command car. Why, then, at that moment didn’t I grab one of those human rats and grate his rosy face on the black asphalt? Was he too small? Well then, go for their leaders. But no. At the front we are strengthened by some kind of supplementary awareness (and quite false, too, perhaps): is it a sense of our military unity? The sense of being in the right place at the right time? Of duty? But in this new situation nothing is clear, there are no rules, and everything has to be learned by feel.

Getting to my feet, I turned to their senior, the pakhan, the ringleader of the thieves. All the stolen victuals were there in front of him beside the window on the second tier of bunks: the juvenile rats hadn’t eaten a thing themselves. They were disciplined. Nature had sculpted the front part of the ringleader’s head, in bipeds usually called a face, with nausea and hate. Or perhaps it had come to be what it was from living the life of a beast of prey. It sagged crookedly and loosely, with a low forehead, a savage scar, and modern steel crowns on the front teeth. His little eyes were exactly large enough to see all familiar objects and yet not take delight in the beauties of the world. He looked at me as a boar looks at a deer, knowing he could always knock me off my feet.

He was waiting. And what did I do? Leap forward to smash my fist in that ugly mug at least once and then go down in the aisle? Alas, I did not.

Am I a scoundrel? Until that moment I had always thought that I wasn’t. But now, plundered and humiliated, I found it offensive to get down flat on my stomach again and crawl back beneath the bunks. And so I addressed the ringleader of the thieves indignantly and told him that since he had taken our food away from us he might at least give us a place on the bunks. (Now just tell me, wasn’t that a natural complaint for a city dweller and an officer?)

And what happened then? The ringleader of the thieves agreed. After all, I was thereby surrendering any claim to the fat bacon; and I was thereby recognizing his superior authority; and I was revealing a point of view in common with his—he, too, would have driven off the weakest. And he gave orders for two of the gray neutrals to get off the lower bunks beside the window and free a space for us. They obeyed submissively. And we lay down in the best places. For a while we still grieved over our loss. (The thieves paid no attention to my military breeches. They weren’t their kind of uniform. But one of the thieves was already fingering Valentin’s woolen trousers. He liked them.) And it was only at night that the reproachful whisper of our neighbors reached us: how could we ask the thieves to help us by driving two of our own people under the bunks in our place? And only then did awareness of my own meanness prick my conscience and make me blush. (And for many years thereafter I blushed every time I remembered it.) The gray prisoners on the lower bunks were my own brothers, 58-lb, the POW’s. Had I not just a short while ago sworn to assume the burden of their fate? And then I had shunted them off under the bunks. True, they hadn’t done anything to defend us against the thieves. But why should they have fought for our fat bacon if we ourselves didn’t? They had had enough cruel fights back in POW camps to destroy their faith in decency. But they hadn’t done me any harm, and I had them.

And thus it is that we have to keep getting banged on flank and snout again and again so as to become, in time at least, human beings, yes, human beings….

But even for the newcomer whom the transit prison cracks open and shucks, it is very, very necessary. It gives him some gradual preparation for camp life. Such a change all in one step would be more than the heart could bear. His consciousness would be unable to orient itself in that murk all at once. It has to happen gradually.

Then, too, the transit prison gave the prisoner the semblance of communicating with home. It was there he wrote the first letter he was permitted to: reporting that he hadn’t been shot and, sometimes, the direction of his prisoner transport, and these were always the first unfamiliar words home of a man who had been plowed over by interrogation. At home they continued to remember him as he had been, but he would never be that person again. And that could suddenly, like a stroke of lightning, become apparent in one or another clumsily written line. Clumsily written because, even though letters could be sent from transit prisons, and there was a mailbox in the yard, it was impossible to get either paper or pencils—or anything to sharpen a pencil with. However, a makhorka wrapper or one from a sugar packet could turn up and be smoothed out, and someone in the cell would have a pencil—and so lines would be written in an undecipherable scrawl which would determine the family’s future peace or discord.

Women driven out of their minds by receiving such a letter would sometimes precipitately rush off and try to get to their husbands at the transit prison—even though visits were never allowed and they would have succeeded only in burdening him with things. One such woman provided, in my opinion, the theme for a monument to all wives—and even indicated the place for it.

This was in the Kuibyshev Transit Prison in 1950. The prison was situated in a low-lying area (from which, however, the Zhiguli Gates of the Volga River could be seen). And right above the prison, bordering it on the east, rose a high, long, grassy hill. It was outside the camp compound and above it; and from the inside and down below we couldn’t see the approach to it. Very rarely did anyone ever appear up there, although sometimes goats were pastured there or children played. And one cloudy summer day a city woman appeared on its ridge. Shading her eyes with her hand and barely moving, she began to scan our compound from above. At the time, three heavily populated cells were taking their outdoor walk in three separate exercise yards—and there in the abyss among those three hundred depersonalized ants she hoped to catch sight of her man! Did she hope that her heart would tell her which one he was? In all probability they had refused to allow her a visit with him and so she had climbed that hill. Everyone noticed her from the courtyards and everyone stared at her. Down below in the hollow there was no wind, but it was blowing hard up above. It made her long dress, her jacket, and her long hair stream out and billow, expressing all that love and anxiety which possessed her.

I think that a statue of such a woman, right there on that spot, on the hill overlooking the transit prison, with her face to the Zhiguli Gates, just as she actually stood, might explain at least a little something to our grandchildren.[299]

She was there for a long time and they didn’t drive her off, probably because the guards were too lazy to climb the hill. But finally a soldier climbed up and began to shout and wave his hands at her—and chased her away.

The transit prison also gives the prisoner some kind of over-all view, some breadth of outlook. As they say: even though there’s nothing to eat, still it’s a gay life. In the incessant traffic here, in the comings and goings of dozens and hundreds of people, in the frankness of the stories and conversations (in camp they don’t talk so freely because they are always afraid there of stepping into the trap of the Oper, the Security officer), you are refreshed, you are aired out, you become more lucid, and you begin to understand better what is happening to you, to your people, even to the world. Even one single eccentric who turns up in your cell can tell you things you’ll never in your life read about.

All of a sudden they introduce into the cell some kind of miracle: a tall young military man with a Roman profile, curly and undipped flaxen locks, in a British uniform—just as if he had come straight from the Normandy landing, an officer of the invading army. He enters as proudly as if he expected everyone to rise to their feet in his presence. And it turns out that he had simply not expected to be among friends at this point: he had already been imprisoned for two years, but he had never yet been in a cell and he had been brought secretly, right to the transit prison itself, in an individual Stolypin compartment. And then, unexpectedly, either by mistake or else with special intent, he had been admitted to our common stable. He looked around the cell, saw a Wehrmacht officer there in German uniform, and started to argue with him in German; and there they were arguing heatedly, ready, it seemed, to resort to weapons if they’d had any. Five years had passed since the war, and it had been drummed into us that in the West the war had been waged only for the sake of appearances, and to us it was strange to observe their mutual outrage: the German had been with us for a long time, and we Russians hadn’t argued with him; for the most part we had laughed with him.

No one would have believed the story of Erik Arvid Andersen had it not been for his unshorn locks—a miracle unique in all Gulag. And that foreign bearing of his. And his fluent English, German, and Swedish speech. According to him he was the son of a rich Swede—not merely a millionaire but a billionaire. (Well, let’s assume he embellished a little.) On his mother’s side he was a nephew of the British General Robertson, who commanded the British Zone in occupied Germany. A Swedish subject, he had served as a volunteer in the British Army and had actually landed in Normandy, and after the war he had become a Swedish career officer. However, the investigation of social systems remained one of his principal interests. His thirst for socialism was stronger than his attachment to his father’s capital. He looked upon Soviet socialism with feelings of profound sympathy, and he had even had the chance to become convinced of its flourishing state with his own eyes when he had come to Moscow as a member of a Swedish military delegation. They had been given banquets and taken to country homes and there they had encountered no obstacles at all to establishing contact with ordinary Soviet citizens—with pretty actresses who for some reason never had to rush off to work and who willingly spent time with them, even tete-a-tete. And thus convinced once and for all of the triumph of our social system, Erik on his return to the West wrote articles in the press defending and praising Soviet socialism. And this proved to be his undoing. In those very years, in 1947 and 1948, they were roping in from all sorts of nooks and crannies progressive young Westerners prepared to renounce the West publicly (and it appeared that if they could only have collected another dozen or so the West would shudder and collapse). Erik’s newspaper articles caused him to be regarded as suitable for this category. At the time he was serving in West Berlin, and he had left his wife in Sweden. And out of pardonable male weakness he used to visit an unmarried German girl in East Berlin. And it was there that he was bound and gagged one night (and is not this the significance of the proverb which says: “He went to see his cousin, and he ended up in prison”? This had probably been going on for a long time, and he wasn’t the first). They took him to Moscow, where Gromyko, who had once dined at his father’s home in Stockholm and who knew the son also, not only returned the hospitality but proposed to the young man that he renounce publicly both capitalism and his own father. And in return he was promised full and complete capitalist maintenance to the end of his days here in our country. But to Gromyko’s surprise, although Erik would not have suffered any material loss, he became indignant and uttered some very insulting words. Since they didn’t believe in his strength of mind, they locked him up in a dacha outside Moscow, fed him like a prince in a fairy tale (sometimes they used “awful methods of repression” on him: they refused to accept his orders for the following day’s menu and instead of the spring chicken he ordered they simply brought him a steak, just like that), surrounded him with the works of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, and waited a year for him to be re-educated. To their surprise it didn’t happen. At that point they quartered with him a former lieutenant general who had already served two years in Norilsk. They probably calculated that by relating the horrors of camp the lieutenant general would persuade Erik to surrender. But either he carried out that assignment badly or else he didn’t want to carry it out. After ten months of their being imprisoned together, the only thing he had taught Erik was broken Russian, and he had bolstered Erik’s growing repugnance for the bluecaps. In the summer of 1950 they once more summoned Erik to Vyshin-sky and he once more refused (in so doing, he made existence contingent on consciousness, thereby violating all the Marxist-Leninist rules!). And then Abakumov himself read Erik the decree: twenty years in prison (what for???). They themselves already regretted having gotten mixed up with this ignoramus, but at the same time they couldn’t release him and let him go back to the West. And so they transported him in a separate compartment, and it was there that he had heard the story of the Moscow girl through the partition and seen through the train window in the dawn light the rotting straw-thatched roofs of the age-old Russia of Ryazan.

Those two years had very strongly confirmed him in his loyalty to the West. He believed blindly in the West. He did not want to recognize its weaknesses. He considered Western armies unbeatable and Western political leaders faultless. He refused to believe us when we told him that during the period of his imprisonment Stalin had begun a blockade of Berlin and had gotten away with it perfectly well. Erik’s milky neck and creamy cheeks blushed with indignation whenever we ridiculed Churchill and Roosevelt. And he was also certain that the West would not countenance his, Erik’s, imprisonment; that on the basis of information from the Kuibyshev Transit Prison the Western intelligence services would immediately learn that Erik had not drowned in the Spree River but had been imprisoned in the Soviet Union—and either he would be ransomed or someone would be exchanged for him. (This faith of his in the individual importance of his own fate among other prisoners’ fates was reminiscent of our own well-intentioned orthodox Soviet Communists.) Notwithstanding our heated arguments, he invited my friend and me to Stockholm whenever we could come. (“Everyone knows us there,” he said with a tired smile. “My father virtually maintains the Swedish King’s whole court.”) For the time being, however, the son of the billionaire had nothing to dry himself with, and I presented him with an extra tattered towel as a gift. And soon they took him away on a prisoner transport.[300]

And the movement of people was endless. Prisoners were brought in and taken away, singly and in groups, and driven off in prisoner transports. Appearing so businesslike on the surface, so planned, this movement was marked by such stupidity that one can hardly believe it.

In 1949 the Special Camps were created. And then and there, on the basis of some summit decision, masses of women were driven from camps in the European North and the Trans-Volga area, through the Sverdlovsk Transit Prison, to Siberia, to Taishet, to Ozerlag. But in 1950 someone found it convenient to assemble all the women not in Ozerlag, but in Dubrovlag—in Temnikov, in Mordvinia. And so all those same women, enjoying all the conveniences of Gulag travel, were dragged through this same Sverdlovsk Transit Prison—to the west. In 1951 new Special Camps were set up in Kemerovo Province (Kamyshlag)—and that turned out to be where the women’s labor was required. And those ill-fated women were again put to the torment of being sent to the Kemerovo camps through that same accursed Sverdlovsk Transit Prison. The time came for liberation—but not for all of them. All those women who were left to drag out their terms in the midst of the general Khrushchev relaxation were once again swung out of Siberia through the Sverdlovsk Transit Prison—into Mordvinia: it was thought better to have them all together.

Well, after all, we have our own self-contained economy. The isles are all our own. And the distances aren’t so very great for a Russian.

And the same sort of thing happened to individual zeks, the more unfortunate ones. Shendrik was a big, merry, open-faced fellow, and he labored honestly, as they say, in one of the Kuibyshev camps and had no intimation of the evil fate overtaking him. But this evil fate struck nonetheless. An urgent order arrived at the camp—not just from anybody but from the Minister of Internal Affairs himself! (And how could the Minister know of Shendrik’s existence?) The order was to deliver this Shendrik to Prison No. 18 in Moscow immediately. They grabbed him, dragged him off to the Kuibyshev Transit Prison, and from there to Moscow with no delay. But not to some Prison No. 18; instead, with all the rest, he went to the widely known Krasnaya Presnya Prison. (Shendrik didn’t know about any Prison No. 18. No one had told him.) But his misfortune did not drowse. No more than two days had passed before they jerked him onto a prisoner transport again and this time took him all the way to Pechora. The landscape outside the train window grew ever sparser and grimmer. Shendrik was alarmed: he knew there was an order from the Minister, and here they were rapidly hauling him off to the North, and that meant that the Minister had some awful evidence against him. In addition to all the other torments of the trip, they stole three days of bread rations from him while he was en route. And by the time he got to Pechora he was staggering. Pechora greeted him inhospitably. They drove him out to work in the wet snow, hungry and unsettled. In two days he never had a chance to dry out his shirts nor even a chance to stuff his mattress with pine needles. And right then they ordered him to turn in everything he had that was government issue and once again they scooped him up and whisked him still farther—to Vorkuta. It seemed quite evident from everything that had happened that the Minister was determined to destroy Shendrik, and not him alone but the entire group in his prisoner transport. At Vorkuta they didn’t touch Shendrik for a whole month. He went out to general-assignment work, even though he had not yet recovered from his travels, but he had begun to reconcile himself to his Arctic fate. And then suddenly one day they called him out of the mine, and chased him off breathless to the camp to turn in everything he had that was government issue, and in one hour’s time he was being carried off to the south. Now by this time it had already begun to smell of personal vengeance! They took him to Moscow Prison No. 18. They held him in the cell there for one month. And then he was summoned to some lieutenant colonel who asked him: “Where the hell have you been? Are you really a mechanical engineer?” And Shendrik confessed that he was. And then they took him off to none other than, yes, the Paradise Islands! (Yes, there are such islands in the Archipelago!)

This coming and going of people, these destinies, and these stories greatly enliven the transit prisons. And the old camp veterans advise newcomers: Lie down and take it easy. They feed you the guaranteed minimum here,[301] and you don’t have to tire your back. And when it’s not crowded you can sleep as much as you want to. So just stretch out and lie there from one handout of gruel to the next. The food is sparse, but the sleeping is good. Only those who know what general-assignment work is in the camps will understand that a transit prison is a rest home, a happiness on our path. And one more advantage too: when you sleep in the daytime the hours pass more quickly. If you can just kill off the day, the night will go away on its own.

True, recalling that labor created the human being and that only labor can reform the criminal, and sometimes having auxiliary projects, and sometimes acting as subcontractors in order to keep up their financial end, the bosses of transit prisons might sometimes even drive their loafing transit manpower out to labor.

The work at that same Kotlas Transit Prison before the war was not the least bit easier than in a regular camp. In the course of a winter day six or seven weakened prisoners were harnessed to a tractor (!) sledge and had to drag it seven miles along the Dvina River to the mouth of the Vychegda. They got stuck in snow and fell down, and the sledges got stuck. And it would seem that any work more wearing and debilitating could hardly have been thought up! But it turned out that this wasn’t the actual work, but merely the warm-up. There at the mouth of the Vychegda, they had to load thirteen cubic yards of firewood on the sledges—and the same people harnessed in the same way (Repin is no longer with us, and this is no subject for our new artists; it is merely a crude reproduction from nature) had to haul the sledges back to their transit-prison home. Now what does a camp have to offer after that! You wouldn’t even survive to get there. (The work-brigade leader for that task was Kolupayev, and the work horses were electrical engineer Dmitriyev, quartermaster corps Lieutenant Colonel Belyayev, and Vasily Vlasov, who is already familiar to us; but not all the other names can be collected at this date.)

During the war the Arzamas Transit Prison fed its prisoners beet tops and at the same time put them to work on a permanent basis. There were garment shops, a footgear-felting shop (where woolen fibers were fulled in hot water and acids).

In the summer of 1945 we went out of the stiflingly stagnant cells of Krasnaya Presnya to work as volunteers: for the right to breathe air the whole day long; for the right to sit unhurried and unhindered in a quiet plank latrine (an incentive that is often overlooked!) heated by the August sun (and these were the days of Potsdam and Hiroshima), listening to the peaceful buzzing of a lonely bee; and, last, for the right to get an extra quarter-pound of bread at night. They took us to the wharves of the Moscow River, where timber was being unloaded. It was our job to roll the logs off some of the piles, carry them over and stack them in other piles. We spent a good deal more strength than we received extra food in compensation. Nonetheless we enjoyed going out to work there.

I often have to blush at my recollections of my younger years (and that’s where my younger years were spent!). But whatever casts you down also teaches you a lot. And it turned out that as a residue of the officer’s shoulder boards, which had trembled and fluttered on my shoulders for two years in all, some kind of poisonous golden dust had settled in the empty space between my ribs. On that river wharf, which was a camplet too, there was also a compound with watchtowers surrounding it. We were merely transient, temporary work sloggers, and there had been no talk at all, no rumor, that we might be allowed to stay and serve out our terms there. But when they formed us up for the first time, and the work-assignment foreman looked down the line to pick out temporary work-brigade leaders, my worthless heart was bursting under my woolen field shirt: Me, me, pick me!

I was not chosen. But why did I want it? I would only have made further shameful mistakes.

Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to understand.

There was a time when Krasnaya Presnya became the virtual capital of Gulag—in the sense that no matter where you went, you couldn’t bypass it, just like Moscow. Just as when one travels in the Soviet Union it is more convenient to proceed from Tashkent to Sochi and from Chernigov to Minsk via Moscow, they dragged the prisoners there from all over and sent them off all over via Presnya. And that was the way it was when I was there. Presnya was at the point of breakdown from overcrowding. They built a supplementary building. Only the through trains of cattle cars carrying those who had been sentenced right at counterintelligence bypassed Moscow on the circle line around it, which, as it happened, went right past Presnya, perhaps even saluting it with a whistle on the way.

But we do have a ticket when we come to Moscow as free passengers in transit, and we hope sooner or later to proceed in the desired direction. At Presnya at the end of the war and just after, not only the prisoners who arrived there but even the very highest-ranking officials and even the heads of Gulag itself were unable to predict who would proceed where. At that time the prison system had not yet crystallized as it had by the fifties, and there were no routes and no destinations were indicated for anybody—except perhaps for service instructions: “Keep under strict guard”; “To be employed only on general-assignment work.” The convoy sergeants carried the bundles of prison cases, torn folders tied somehow with twine or ersatz cotton string made of paper, into a separate wooden building that housed the prison offices, and tossed them onto shelves, on tables, under tables, under chairs, and simply on the floor in the aisle (just as their subject prisoners lay in the cells). They became untied and got scattered and mixed up. One room, a second, and a third got filled with those mixed-up cases. Secretaries from the prison office, well-fed, lazy, free women in bright-colored dresses, sweated in the heat, fanned themselves and flirted with prison and convoy officers. None of them wanted to or had the strength to pick a way through that chaos. And yet the trainloads had to be dispatched in the red trains—several times a week. And every day a hundred people had to be sent out on trucks to nearby camps. The case of every zek had to be sent with him. So just who was going to work on all that long-drawn-out mess? Who was there to sort out the cases and select the prisoners for the transports?

It was entrusted to several work-assignment supervisors from among the transit-prison trusties—who were either “bitches” or “half-breeds”.[302] They moved freely through the prison corridors, entered the prison office, and were the ones who decided whether your case would be put in a bad prisoner transport or whether they would really exert themselves, search long and hard, and put it in a good one. (The newcomers were not mistaken in thinking that there were whole camps which were death camps, and they were right about that, but their idea that there were some that were “good” was simply a delusion. There were no good camps, but only certain easier duties within them—and they could only be sorted out on the spot.) The fact that the prisoner’s whole future depended on such another prisoner, with whom one ought perhaps to find the chance to talk (even if via the bath attendant), and whose hand one ought perhaps to grease (even if via the storage room keeper), was worse than if his fortunes had simply been determined blindly by a roll of the dice. This invisible and unrealized opportunity—to go south to Nalchik instead of north to Norilsk in return for a leather jacket, to go to Serebryanny Bor outside Moscow instead of Taishet in Siberia for a couple of pounds of fat bacon (and perhaps to lose both the leather jacket and the fat bacon for nothing at all)—only aggravated and fatigued tired souls. Maybe someone did manage to arrange it, maybe someone got himself fixed up that way, but most blessed of all were those who had nothing to give or who spared themselves all that anxiety.

Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for—all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him.

And thus it was that the prisoners lay in rows in the cells, and their fates lay in undisturbed piles in the rooms of the prison office.” And the assignment supervisors took the files from the particular corner where it was easiest to get at them. And some zeks had to spend two or three months gasping in this accursed Presnya while others would whiz through it with the speed of a shooting star. As a result of all that congestion, haste, and disorder with the cases, sometimes sentences got switched at Presnya (and at other transit prisons as well). This didn’t affect the 58’s, because their prison terms, in Maxim Gorky’s phrase, were “Terms” with a capital letter, were intended to be long, and even when they seemed to be nearing their end they just never got there anyway. But it made sense for big thieves and murderers to switch with some stupid nonpolitical offender. And so they or their accomplices would inch up to such an individual and question him with interest and concern. And he, not knowing that a short-termer at a transit prison isn’t supposed to disclose anything about himself, would innocently tell them that his name was, for example, Vasily Parfenych Yevrashkin, that he was born in 1913, that he lived in Semidubye and had been born there. And his term was one year, Article 109, “Negligence.” And then Yevrashkin was asleep or maybe not even asleep, but there was such a racket in the cell and there was such a crowd at the swill trough in the door that he couldn’t make his way there and listen, while on the other side of it in the corridor they were rapidly muttering a list of names for a prisoner transport. Some of the names were shouted from the door into the cell, but not Yevrashkin’s because hardly had the name been read out in the corridor than an urka, a thief, had obsequiously (and they can be obsequious when it’s necessary) shoved up his snout and answered quickly and quietly: “Vasily Parfenych, born 1913, village of Semidubye, 109, one year,” and ran off to get his things. The real Yevrashkin yawned, lay back on his bunk, and patiently waited to be called the next day, and the next week, and the next month, and then he made so bold as to bother the prison superintendent: why hadn’t he been taken in a prisoner transport? (And every day in all the cells they kept calling out the name of some Zvyaga.) And when a month later or a half-year later they got around to combing through all the cases by calling the roll, what they had left was just one file—belonging to Zvyaga, a multiple offender, sentenced for a double murder and robbing a store, ten years—and one shy prisoner who was trying to tell everybody that he was Yevrashkin, although you couldn’t make anything out from the photo, and so he damn well was Zvyaga and he had to be tucked away in a penalty camp, Ivdellag—because otherwise it would have been necessary to confess that the transit prison had made a mistake. (And as for that other Yevrashkin who had been sent off on a prisoner transport, you wouldn’t even be able to find where he had gone—because none of the lists were left. And anyway he had only had a one-year term and had been sent to do farm work without being under guard and got three days off his sentence for every day he worked, or else he had simply run away, and was long since home or, more likely, was already imprisoned again on a new sentence.) There were also eccentrics who sold their short terms for a kilo or two of fat bacon. They figured that in any case the authorities would check up and establish their correct identities. And sometimes they did.[303]

During the years when the prisoners’ cases didn’t carry any indication of their final destination, the transit prisons turned into slave markets. The most desired guests at the transit prisons were the buyers. This word was heard more and more often in the corridors and cells and was used without any shadow of irony. Just as it became intolerable everywhere in industry simply to sit and wait until things were sent from the center on the basis of allocations, and it was more satisfactory to send one’s own “pushers” and “pullers” to get things done—the same thing happened in Gulag: the natives on the islands kept dying off; and even though they cost not one ruble, a count was kept of them, and one had to worry about getting more of them for oneself so there wouldn’t be any failure in fulfilling the plan. The buyers had to be sharp, have good eyes, and look carefully to see what they were taking so that last-leggers and invalids didn’t get shoved off on them. The buyers who picked a transport on the basis of case files were poor buyers. The conscientious merchants demanded that the merchandise be displayed alive and bare-skinned for them to inspect. And that was just what they used to say—without smiling—merchandise. “Well, what merchandise have you brought?” asked a buyer at the Butyrki station, observing and inspecting the female attributes of seventeen-year-old Ira Kalina.

Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth. And the very same sensations of curiosity, relish, and sizing up which slave-traders felt at the slave-girl markets twenty-five centuries ago of course possessed the Gulag bigwigs in the Usman Prison in 1947, when they, a couple of dozen men in MVD uniform, sat at several desks covered with sheets (this was for their self-importance, since it would have seemed awkward otherwise), and all the women prisoners were made to undress in the box next door and to walk in front of them bare-footed and bare-skinned, turn around, stop, and answer questions. “Drop your hands,” they ordered those who had adopted the defensive pose of classic sculpture. (After all, these officers were very seriously selecting bedmates for themselves and their colleagues.)

And so it was that for the new prisoner various manifestations foreshadowed the camp battle of the morrow and cast their pall over the innocent spiritual joys of the transit prison.

For just two nights they put a special-assignment prisoner in our cell in Krasnaya Presnya. And he was next to me in the bunk. He traveled about with special-assignment orders, which meant that an invoice had been filled, out in Central Administration indicating that he was a construction technician and could be used only in that capacity in his new location, and this went with him from camp to camp. The special-assignment prisoner was traveling in the common Stolypin cars and was kept in the common cells of the transit prisons, but he wasn’t nervous; he was protected by his personal document, and he wouldn’t be driven out to fell timber. A cruel and determined expression was the principal trait of this camp veteran’s face. He had already served out the greater part of his term. (And I did not yet realize that this exact expression would in time etch itself on all our faces, because a cruel and determined expression is the national hallmark of the Gulag islanders. People with soft, conciliatory expressions die out quickly on the islands.) He observed our naive floundering with an ironic smile, just as people look at two-week-old puppies.

What should we expect in camp? Taking pity on us, he taught us:

“From your very first step in camp everyone will try to deceive and plunder you. Trust no one but yourself. Look around quickly: someone may be sneaking up on you to bite you. Eight years ago I arrived at Kargopollag just as innocent and just as naive as you are now. They unloaded us from two trains, and the convoy prepared to lead us the six miles to the camp through the deep, crumbly snow. Three sleds came up beside us. Some hefty chap whom the convoy didn’t interfere with came over to us and said: ‘Brothers, put your things on the sleds and we will carry them there for you.’ We remembered reading in books that prisoners’ belongings were carried on carts. And we thought: It isn’t going to be all that inhuman in camp; they are concerned about us. And we loaded our things on the sleds. They left. And we never saw them again, not even an empty wrapper.”

“But how can that happen? Isn’t there any law there?”

“Don’t ask idiotic questions. There is a law there. The law of the taiga, of the jungle. But as for justice—there never has been any in Gulag and there never will be. That Kargopol incident was simply a symbol of Gulag. And you have to get used to something else too: in camp no one ever does anything for nothing, no one ever does anything out of the generosity of his heart. You have to pay for everything. If someone proposes something to you that is unselfish, disinterested, you can be sure it’s a dirty trick, a provocation. The main thing is: avoid general-assignment work. Avoid it from the day you arrive. If you land in general-assignment work that first day, then you are lost, and this time for keeps.”

“General-assignment work?”

“General-assignment work—that is the main and basic work performed in any given camp. Eighty percent of the prisoners work at it, and they all die off. All. And then they bring new ones in to take their places and they again are sent to general-assignment work. Doing this work, you expend the last of your strength. And you are always hungry. And always wet. And shoeless. And you are given short rations and short everything else. And put in the worst barracks. And they won’t give you any treatment when you’re ill. The only ones who survive in camps are those who try at any price not to be put on general-assignment work. From the first day.”

“At any price?”

“At any price!”

At Krasnaya Presnya I assimilated and accepted this altogether unexaggerated advice of the cruel special-assignment prisoner, forgetting only to ask him one thing: How do you measure that price? How high do you go?

Chapter 3 The Slave Caravans

It was painful to travel in a Stolypin, unbearable in a Black Maria, and the transit prison would soon wear you down—and it might just be better to skip the whole lot and go straight to camp in the red cattle cars.

As always, the interests of the state and the interests of the individual coincided here. It was also to the state’s advantage to dispatch sentenced prisoners straight to the camps by direct routing and thus avoid overloading the city trunk-line railroads, automotive transport, and transit-camp personnel. They had long since grasped this fact in Gulag, and it had been taken to heart: witness the caravans of red cows (red cattle cars), the caravans of barges, and, where there were no rails and no water, the caravans on foot (after all, prisoners could not be allowed to exploit the labor of horses and camels).

The red trains were always a help when the courts in some particular place were working swiftly or the transit facilities were overcrowded. It was possible in this way to dispatch a large number of prisoners in one batch. That is how the millions of peasants were transported in 1929-1931. That is how they exiled Leningrad from Leningrad. That is how they populated the Kolyma in the thirties: every day Moscow, the capital of our country, belched out one such train to Sovetskaya Gavan, to Vanino Port. And each provincial capital also sent off red train-loads, but not on a daily schedule. That is how they removed the Volga German Republic to Kazakhstan in 1941, and later all the rest of the exiled nations were sent off in the same way. In 1945 Russia’s prodigal sons and daughters were sent from Germany, from Czechoslovakia, from Austria, and simply from western border areas—whoever had gotten there on his own—in such trains as these. In 1949 that is how they collected the 58’s in Special Camps.

The Stolypins follow routine railroad schedules. And the red trains travel on imposing waybills, signed by important Gulag generals. The Stolypins cannot go to an empty site, to “nowhere”; their destination must always be a station, even if it’s in some nasty little two-bit town with some preliminary detention cells in an attic. But the red trains can go into emptiness: and wherever one does go, there immediately rises right next to it, out of the sea of the steppe or the sea of the taiga, a new island of the Archipelago.

Not every red cattle car is ready as is to transport prisoners. First it has to be prepared. But not in the sense some of our readers might expect: that the coal or lime it carried before it was assigned to carry people has to be swept out and the car cleaned—that isn’t always done. Nor in the sense that it needs to be calked and have a stove installed if it is winter. (When the section of the railroad from Knyazh-Pogost to Ropcha was being built and wasn’t yet part of the general railroad network, they immediately began to transport prisoners on it—in freight cars without either stoves or bunks. In winter the zeks lay on the icy, snowy floor and weren’t even given any hot food, because the train could make it all the way through this section in less than a day. Whoever can in imagination lie there like them and survive those eighteen to twenty hours shall indeed survive! Here is what was involved in preparing a red cattle car for prisoners: The floors, walls, and ceilings had to be tested for strength and checked for holes or faults. Their small windows had to be barred. A hole had to be cut in the floor to serve as a drain, and specially protected by sheet iron firmly nailed down all around it. The necessary number of platforms on which convoy guards would stand with machine guns had to be evenly distributed throughout the train, and if there were too few, more had to be built. Access to the roofs of the cars had to be provided. Sites for searchlights had to be selected and supplied with uninterrupted electric power.

Long-handled wooden mallets had to be procured. A passenger car had to be hooked on for the staff, and if there wasn’t one, then instead heated freight cars had to be prepared for the chief of convoy, the Security officer, and the convoy. Kitchens had to be built—for the convoy and for the prisoners. And only after all this had been done was it all right to walk along the cattle cars and chalk on the sides: “Special Equipment” or “Perishable Goods.” (In her chapter, “The Seventh Car,” Yevgeniya Ginz-burg described a transport of red cars very vividly, and her description largely obviates the necessity of presenting details here.) The preparation of the train has been completed—and ahead lies the complicated combat operation of loading the prisoners into the cars. At this point there are two important and obligatory objectives:

• to conceal the loading from ordinary citizens

• to terrorize the prisoners

To conceal the loading from the local population was necessary because approximately a thousand people were being loaded on the train simultaneously (at least twenty-five cars), and this wasn’t your little group from a Stolypin that could be led right past the townspeople. Everyone knew, of course, that arrests were being made every day and every hour, but no one was to be horrified by the sight of large numbers of them together. In Orel in 1938 you could hardly hide the fact that there was no home in the city where there hadn’t been arrests, and weeping women in their peasant carts blocked the square in front of the Orel Prison just as in Surikov’s painting The Execution of the Streltsy. (Oh, who one day will paint this latter-day tragedy for us? But no one will. It’s not fashionable, not fashionable….) But you don’t need to show our Soviet people an entire trainload of them collected in one day. (And in Orel that year there were.) And young people mustn’t see it either—for young people are our future. Therefore it was done only at night—and every night, too, each and every night, and that was the way it went for several months. The black line of prisoners to be transported was driven from the prison to the station on foot. (Meanwhile the Black Marias were busy making new arrests.) True, the women realized, the women somehow found out, and at night they came to the station from all over the city and kept watch over the trains on the siding. They ran along the cars, tripping over the ties and rails, and shouting at every car: “Is So-and-so in there?” “Is So-and-so in there?” And they ran on to the next one, and others ran up to this one: “Is So-and-so in there?” And suddenly an answer would come from the sealed car: “I’m in here. I’m here!” Or else: “Keep looking for him. He’s in another car.” Or else: “Women! Listen! My wife is somewhere out there, near the station. Run and tell her.”

These scenes, unworthy of our contemporary world, testify only to the then inept organization of train embarkations. The mistakes were noted, and after a certain night the trains were surrounded in depth by cordons of snarling and barking police dogs.

And in Moscow, the loading into red cattle cars from the old Sretenka Transit Prison (which prisoners no longer remember) or from Krasnaya Presnya took place only at night; that was the rule.

However, although the convoy had no use for the superfluous light of the sun by day, on the other hand they made use of suns by night—the searchlights. They were more efficient since they could be concentrated on the necessary area, where the prisoners were seated on the earth in a frightened pack awaiting the command: “Next unit of five—stand up! To the car—on the run!” (Only on the run, so as not to have time to look around, to think things over, to run as though chased by the dogs, afraid of nothing so much as falling down.) On that uneven path. Up the loading ramp, scrambling. And clear, hostile searchlight beams not only provided light but were an important theatrical element in terrorizing the prisoners, along with yells, threats, gunstock blows on those who fell behind, and the order: “Sit down.” (And sometimes, as in the station square of that same Orel: “Down on your knees.” And like some new breed of believers at prayer, the whole thousand would get down on their knees.) Along with that running to the car, quite unnecessary except for intimidation—for which it was very important. Along with the enraged barking of the dogs. Along with the leveled gun barrels (rifles or automatic pistols, depending on the decade). And the main thing was to undermine, to crush the prisoner’s will power so he wouldn’t think of trying to escape, so that for a long time he wouldn’t notice his new advantage: the fact that he had exchanged a stonewalled prison for a railroad car with thin plank walls.

But in order to load one thousand prisoners into railroad cars at night so precisely, the prison had to start jerking them out of their cells and processing them for transport the morning before, and the convoy had to spend the entire day on a long-drawn-out and strict procedure of checking them in while still in prison and then holding those who’d been checked in for long hours, not, of course, in the cells by now, but in the courtyard, on the ground, so as not to mix them up with the prisoners still belonging in the prison. Thus for the prisoner the loading at night was only a relief after a whole day of torment.

Besides the ordinary counts, verifications, hair clipping, clothing roasting, and baths, the core of the preparation for the prisoner transport was general frisking. This search was carried out not by the prison but by the convoy receiving the prisoners. The convoy was expected, in accordance with the directives regarding the red transports and in accordance with their own operational requirements, to carry out this search so that the prisoners would not be left in possession of anything that might help them to escape; to take away: everything that could saw or cut; all powders (tooth powder, sugar, salt, tobacco, tea) so they could not be used to blind the convoy; all string, cord, twine, belts, and straps because they could all be used in escaping (and that meant all kinds of straps! and so they cut off the straps which held up the artificial limb of a one-legged man—and the cripple had to carry his artificial leg on his shoulder and hop with the help of those on either side of him). The rest of the things—all “valuables” and suitcases too—were, according to instructions, supposed to be checked and carried in a special baggage car and returned to their owners at the end of the journey.

Yet the power of the Moscow directive was weak and might be ignored by the Vologda or the Kuibyshev convoy, while the power of the convoy over the prisoners was very corporeal, very real. And this fact was crucial to the third objective of the loading operation:

• in simple justice to take all the good things they possess from enemies of the people for the use of its sons

“Sit down.” “On your knees!” “Strip!” In these statutory orders of the convoy lay the basic power one could not argue with. After all, a naked person loses his self-assurance. He cannot straighten up proudly and speak as an equal to people who are still clothed. A search begins. (Kuibyshev, summer of 1949.) Naked prisoners approach, carrying their possessions and the clothes they’ve taken off. A mass of armed soldiers surrounds them. It doesn’t look as though they are going to be led to a prisoner transport but as though they are going to be shot immediately or put to death in a gas chamber—and in that mood a human being ceases to concern himself with his possessions. The convoy does everything with intentional brusqueness, rudely, sharply, not speaking one word in an ordinary human voice. After all, the purpose is to terrify and dishearten. Suitcases are shaken apart, and tilings fall all over the floor and are then stacked up in separate piles. Cigarette cases, billfolds, and other pitiful “valuables” are all taken away and thrown without any identifying marks into a barrel that is standing nearby. (And, for some reason, the fact that this particular receptacle isn’t a safe, or a trunk, or a box, but a barrel particularly depresses the naked prisoners there, and it seems so terribly futile to protest.) The naked prisoner has all he can do simply to snatch up his well-searched rags from the floor and knot them together or tie them up in a blanket. Felt boots? You can check them, throw them over there, sign for them on the list! (You aren’t the one who gets the receipt, but you are the one who signs for having surrendered them, certifying that you threw them onto the pile!) And when at dusk the last truck leaves the prison yard with the prisoners, they see the convoy guards rushing to grab the best leather suitcases from the pile and select the best cigarette cases from the barrel. And after them, the jailers scurry for their booty, too, and last of all the transit prison trusties.

That is what it cost to spend one day to get to the cattle car. And now the prisoners have clambered with relief up onto the splintered planks of the bunks. But what kind of relief is this, what kind of heated cattle car is this? Once again they are squeezed in a nutcracker between cold and starvation, between the thieves and the convoy.

If there are thieves in a cattle car (and they are, of course, not kept separate in the red trains either) they take the best places, as is traditional—on the upper bunks by the window. That’s in summer. So we can guess where their places are in winter. Next to the stove, of course, in a tight ring around the stove. As the former thief Minayev recalls: in 1949, during a severe cold wave, they were issued only three pails of coal for their car for the entire journey from Voronezh to Kotlas, lasting several days.[304] And in this crisis, the thieves not only occupied the places around the stove, and not only took all the suckers’ warm things away from them and put them on, but didn’t even hesitate to take their footcloths out of their shoes and wind them around their own feet. You today, me tomorrow. It was somewhat worse with food—the thieves took charge of the whole ration for the car and then kept the best for themselves along with whatever else they needed. Loshchilin recalls a three-day prisoner transport from Moscow to Perebory in 1937. They didn’t cook anything hot on the train for such a short journey and handed out only dry rations. The thieves took the best for themselves but gave the others permission to divide up the bread and the herring; and that meant they weren’t hungry. When the ration was hot and the thieves were in charge of distributing it, they divided up the gruel among themselves. (A three-week transport from Kishinev to Pechora in 1945.) With all this, the thieves didn’t scruple to engage also in plain and simple robbery en route: they noticed an Estonian’s gold teeth and they pushed him down and knocked out the teeth with a poker.

The zeks considered the hot food the real advantage of the red trains: at remote stations (again where people couldn’t see them) the trains stopped and gruel and porridge were doled out to the cars. But they even managed to give out the hot food in such a way that things went wrong. They might (as on that same Kishinev train) pour out the gruel in the same pails in which they issued coal—there being nothing to wash them out with. Because drinking water was also rationed on the train and was in even shorter supply than gruel. And so you gulped down the gruel, your teeth gritting on pieces of coal. Or they brought the gruel and the hot cereal to the car and didn’t issue enough bowls—twenty-five instead of forty—and promptly ordered: “Come on, come on, faster, faster. We have other cars to feed too, not just you.” How then could you eat, how could you divide it up? You couldn’t dish it out equitably on the basis of bowls, and that meant you had to estimate each portion so as not to give out too much. And those to be served first would shout: “Stir it! Stir it!” And the last kept silent: there would be more on the bottom. The first were eating and the last waiting. They would have liked the others to eat faster, because they were hungry, and meanwhile the gruel would be getting cold in the barrel and they were also being hurried from outside: “Well, have you finished? Come on now, get a move on!” And then they served the second contingent—not more and not less and not thicker and not thinner than the first. And then came estimating the leftovers correctly and pouring them out two portions to a bowl. And all this time forty people don’t so much eat as watch the sharing out and suffer.

They don’t heat the car, they don’t protect the other prisoners from the thieves, they don’t give you enough to drink, and they don’t give you enough to eat—but on the other hand they don’t let you sleep either. During the day the convoy can see the whole train very clearly and the tracks behind them, and can be sure that no one has jumped out the side or slipped down on the rails. But at night vigilance possesses them. With long-handled wooden mallets (the standard Gulag equipment) they knock resoundingly on every board of the car at every stop: maybe someone has sawed through it. And at certain stops the door of the car is thrown open. The light of the lantern or the beam of the searchlight: “Checkup!” And this means: Get on your feet and be ready to go where they tell you—everyone run to the left or to the right. The convoy guards jump inside with their mallets (others have ranged themselves in a semicircle outside with automatic pistols), and they point: to the left! That means that those on the left are in place and those on the right must get over there on the jump like fleas hopping over each other and landing where they can. And whoever isn’t nimble, whoever gets caught daydreaming, gets whacked on the ribs and back with the mallets to give him more energy. And by this time the convoy jackboots are already trampling your pauper’s pallet and all your lousy duds are being thrown in every direction and everywhere there are lights and hammering: Have you sawed through any place? No. Then the convoy guards stand in the middle and begin to shift you from left to right, counting: “First… second… third.” It would be quite enough to count simply with a wave of the finger, but if that were done, it wouldn’t be terrifying, and so it is more vivid, less subject to error, more energetic and faster, to beat out that count with the same mallet on your ribs, shoulders, heads, wherever it happens to land. They have counted up to forty. So now they will go about their tossing, lighting up, and hammering at the other end of the car. It’s all over finally and the car is locked up. You can go back to sleep till the next stop. (And one can’t really say that the anxiety of the convoy guard is entirely unfounded—because those who know how can escape from the red cattle cars. For instance, they knock on a board to test it and find it has been partially sawed through. Or suddenly in the morning, when the gruel is being distributed, they see that there are several shaved faces among the unshaven ones. And they surround the car with their automatic pistols: “Hand over your knives!” And this is really just petty bravado on the part of the thieves and their allies: they got tired of being unshaven, and now they are going to have to turn in their razor.)

The red train differs from other long-distance trains in that those who have embarked on it do not know whether or not they will disembark. When they unloaded a trainload from the Leningrad prisons (1942) in Solikamsk, the entire embankment was covered with corpses, and only a few got there alive. In the winters of 1944-1945 and 1945-1946 in the village of Zhelez-nodorozhny (Knyazh-Pogost), as in all the main rail junctions in the North, the prisoner trains from liberated territories (the Baltic states, Poland, Germany) arrived with one or two carloads of corpses tacked on behind. That meant that en route they had carefully taken the corpses out of the cars that contained the living passengers and put them in the dead cars. But not always. There were many occasions when they found out who was still alive and who was dead only when they opened up the car after arriving at the Sukhobezvodnaya (Unzhlag) Station. Those who didn’t come out were dead.

It was terrifying and deadly to travel this way in winter because the convoy, with all its bother about security, wasn’t able to haul coal for twenty-five stoves. But it wasn’t so cushy to travel this way in hot weather either. Two of the four tiny windows were tightly sealed and the car roof would overheat and the convoy wasn’t about to exert itself in hauling water for a thousand prisoners—after all, they couldn’t even manage to give just one Stolypin car enough to drink. The prisoners considered April and September the best months for transports. But even the best of seasons was too short if the train was en route for three months. (Leningrad to Vladivostok in 1935.) And if such a long trip is in prospect, then arrangements have been made for both political indoctrination of the convoy soldiers and spiritual care of the imprisoned souls: in a separate railroad car attached to such a train travels a “godfather”—a Security officer. He has made his preparations for the prisoner-transport train back in prison, and prisoners are assigned to cars not simply at random but according to lists he has validated. He is the one who appoints the monitor in each car and who has instructed and assigned a stool pigeon to each. At long stops he finds some pretext for summoning both from the car and asks what the people are talking about in there. And any such Security chief would be ashamed to finish the journey without signed and sealed results. And so right there en route he puts someone under interrogation, and lo and behold! by the time they reach their destination, the prisoner has been handed a new prison term.

No, damn that red cattle car train too, even though it did carry the prisoners straight to their destination without changing trains. Anyone who has ever been in one will never forget it. Just as well get to camp sooner! Just as well arrive sooner.

A human being is all hope and impatience. As if the Security officer in camp will be any more humane or the stoolies any less unscrupulous. It’s just the other way around. As if they won’t force us to the ground with those same threats and those same police dogs when we arrive: “Sit down!” As if there will be less snow on the ground in camp than what has sifted through into the cattle cars. As if it means that we’ve already gotten to where we’re going when they begin to unload us and won’t be carried farther in open flatcars on a narrow-gauge track. (And how can they carry us in open flatcars? How can we be kept under guard? That’s a problem for the convoy. And here is how they do it: They order us to lie down all huddled together and they cover us with one big tarpaulin, like the sailors in the motion picture Potemkin before they’re to be executed. And say thank you for the tarpaulin too. In the North, in October, Olenyev and his comrades had the luck to have to sit in open flatcars all day long. They had already embarked, but no locomotive had come. First it rained. Then it froze. And the zeks’ rags froze on them.) The tiny train will jerk and toss as it moves, and the sides of the flatcar will begin to crack and break, and the bouncing will hurl someone off the car and under the wheels. And here is a riddle: If one is traveling sixty miles from Dudinka through Arctic frost in open flatcars on the narrow-gauge track, then where are the thieves going to be? Answer: In the middle of each flatcar, so the livestock around them will keep them warm and keep them from falling under the train themselves. Right answer! Question: What will the zeks see at the end of this narrow-gauge track (1939)? Will there be any buildings there? No, not a one. Any dugouts? Yes, but already occupied, not for them. And does that mean that the first thing they do will be to dig themselves dugouts? No, because how can they dig in the Arctic winter? Instead, they will be sent out to mine metal. And where will they live? What—live? Oh, yes, live… They will live in tents.

But will there always be a narrow-gauge track? No, of course not. The train arrived: Yertsovo Station, February, 1938. The railroad cars were opened up at night. Bonfires were lit alongside the train and disembarkation took place by their light; then a count-off, forming up, and a count-off again. The temperature was 32 degrees below zero Centigrade. The prisoners’ transport train had come from the Donbas, and all the prisoners had been arrested back in the summer and were wearing low shoes, oxfords, even sandals. They tried to warm themselves at the fires, but the guards chased them away: that’s not what the fires were there for; they were there to give light. Fingers grew numb almost instantly. The snow filled the thin shoes and didn’t even melt. There was no mercy and the order was given: “Fall in! Form up! One step to the right or left and we’ll fire without warning. Forward march!” The dogs on their chains howled at their favorite command, at the excitement of the moment. The convoy guards marched ahead in their sheepskin coats—and the doomed prisoners in their summer clothes marched through deep snow on a totally untraveled road somewhere into the dark taiga, nary a light ahead. The northern lights gleamed—for them it was their first and probably their last view of them. The fir trees crackled in the frost. The ill-shod prisoners paced and trod down the snow, their feet and legs growing numb from the cold.

Or, as another example, here is a January, 1945, arrival at Pechora. (“Our armies have captured Warsaw! Our armies have cut off East Prussia!”) An empty snowy field. The prisoners were tossed out of the cars, made to sit down in the snow by sixes, painstakingly counted off, miscounted, and counted again. They were ordered to stand up and then were harried through a snowy virgin waste for four miles. This prisoner transport was also from the south—from Moldavia. And everyone was wearing leather shoes. The police dogs were right on their heels, and the dogs pushed the zeks in the last row with their paws on their backs, breathing on the backs of their heads. (Two priests were in that row—old gray-haired Father Fyodor Florya and young Father Viktor Shipovalnikov, who was helping to hold him up.) What a use for police dogs? No, what self-restraint it showed on the dogs’ part! After all, they wanted to bite so badly!

Finally they arrived. There was a camp reception bath; they had to undress in one cabin, run across the yard naked, and wash in another. But all this was bearable now: the worst was over. They had arrived. Twilight fell. And all of a sudden it was learned there was no room for them; the camp wasn’t ready to receive the prisoner transport. And after the bath, the prisoners were again formed up, counted, surrounded by dogs, and were marched back to their prisoner-transport train all those four miles, but this time in the dark. And the car doors had been left open all those hours, and had lost even their earlier, pitiful measure of warmth, and then all the coal had been burned up by the end of the journey and there was nowhere to get any more now. And in these circumstances, they froze all night and in the morning were given dried carp (and anyone who wanted to drink could chew snow), and then marched back along the same road again.

And this, after all, was an episode with a happy ending. In this case, the camp at least existed. If it couldn’t accept them today, it would tomorrow. But it was not at all unusual for the red trains to arrive nowhere, and the end of the journey often marked the opening day of a new camp. They might simply stop somewhere in the taiga under the northern lights and nail to a fir tree a sign reading: “first olp.”[305] And there they would chew on dried fish for a week and try to mix their flour with snow.

But if a camp had been set up there even two weeks earlier, that already spelled comfort; hot food would have been cooked; and even if there were no bowls, the first and second courses would nonetheless be mixed together in washbasins for six prisoners to eat from at the same time; and this group of six would form a circle (there were no tables or chairs yet), and two of them would hold onto the handles of the washbasin with their left hands and would eat with their right hands, taking turns. Am I repeating myself? No, this was Perebory in 1937, as reported by Loshchilin. It is not I who am repeating myself, but Gulag.

Next they would assign the newcomers brigade leaders from among the camp veterans, who would quickly teach them to live, to make do, to submit to discipline, and to cheat. And from their very first morning, they would march off to work because the chimes of the clock of the great Epoch were striking and could not wait. The Soviet Union is not, after all, some Tsarist hard-labor Akatui for you, where prisoners got three days’ rest after they arrived.³

Gradually the economy of the Archipelago prospered. New railroad branch lines were built. And soon they were transporting prisoners by train to many places that had been reached only by water not long before. But there are natives of the Archipelago still alive who can tell you how they went down the Izhma River in genuine ancient Russian river galleys, one hundred to a boat, and the prisoners themselves did the rowing. They can tell you how they traveled in fishing smacks down the northern rivers of Ukhta, Usa, and Pechora to their native camp. Zeks were shipped to Vorkuta in barges: on large barges to Adzvavom, where there was a transshipping point for Vorkutlag, and from there only a stone’s throw, let’s say, to Ust-Usa, on a flat-bottomed barge for ten days. The whole barge was alive with lice, and the convoy allowed the prisoners to go up on deck one by one and brush the parasites off into the water. The river transports did not proceed directly to their destination either, but were sometimes interrupted to transfer for transshipment, or for portage, or for stretches covered on foot.

And they had their own transit prisons in this area—built out of poles or tents—Ust-Usa, Pomozdino, Shchelya-Yur, where they had their own special system of regulations. They had their own convoy rules, and of course, their own special commands, and their own special convoy tricks, and their own special methods of tormenting the zeks. But it’s already clear that it is not our task to describe those particular exotica, so we won’t even begin.

The Northern Dvina, the Ob, and the Yenisei know when they began to haul prisoners in barges—during the liquidation of the “kulaks.” These rivers flowed straight north, and their barges were potbellied and capacious—and it was the only way they could cope with the task of carting all this gray mass from living Russia to the dead North. People were thrown into the troughlike holds and lay there in piles or crawled around like crabs in a basket. And high up on the deck, as though atop a cliff, stood guards. Sometimes they transported this mass out in the open without any cover, and sometimes they covered it with a big tarpaulin—in order not to look at it, or to guard it better, but certainly not to keep off the rain. The journey in such a barge was no longer prisoner transport, but simply death on the installment plan. Anyway, they gave them hardly anything to eat. Then they tossed them out in the tundra—and there they didn’t give them anything at all to eat. They just left them there to die, alone with nature.

Prisoner transport by barge on the Northern Dvina (and on the Vychegda) had not died out even by 1940. That was how A. Y. Olenyev was transported. Prisoners in the hold stood tightly jammed against each other, and not just for a day either. They urinated in glass jars which were passed from hand to hand and emptied through the porthole. And anything more substantial went right in their pants.

Barge transport on the Yenisei came to be a regular and permanent feature for whole decades. In Krasnoyarsk in the thirties, open-sided sheds were built on the bank, and in the cold Siberian winters the prisoners would shiver there for a day or two while they waited for transportation.[306] The Yenisei prisoner-transport barges were permanently equipped with dark holds three decks deep. The only light was what filtered in through the companionway for the ship’s ladder. The convoy lived in a little cabin on deck. Sentries kept watch over the exits from the hold and over the river to make sure that no one escaped by swimming. They didn’t go down into the hold, no matter what groans and howls for help might come from there. And the prisoners were never taken up on deck for fresh air. In the prisoner transports of 1937 and 1938, and 1944 and 1945 (and we can guess it must have been the same in the interval), no medical assistance whatever was provided in the hold. The prisoners lay there lined up in two rows, one with their heads toward the side of the barge and the heads of the other row at their feet. The only way to get to the latrine barrels was to walk over them. The latrine barrels were not always emptied in time (imagine lugging that barrel full of sewage up the steep ship’s ladder to the deck). They overflowed, and the contents spilled along the deck and seeped down on those below. And people lay there. They were fed gruel from casks hauled along the deck. The servers were prisoners too, and there, in the eternal darkness (today, perhaps, there is electricity), by the light of a portable “Bat” kerosene lamp, they ladled out the food. Such a prisoner transport to Dudinka sometimes took a month. (Nowadays, of course, they can do it in a week.) It sometimes happened that the trip dragged out much longer because of sand bars and other hazards of river travel, and they wouldn’t have enough food with them, in which case they just stopped giving out the food for several days at a time. (And later on, of course, they never made up for the days they missed.)

At this point the alert reader can without the author’s help add that the thieves were on the upper level inside the hold and closer to the ship’s ladder—in other words, to light and air. They had what access they required to the distribution of the bread ration, and if the trip in question was a hard one, they didn’t hesitate to whip away the holy crutch (in other words, they took the gray cattle’s rations from them). The thieves whiled away the long journey playing cards, and they made their own decks.[307] They got the stakes for their card games by frisking the suckers, searching everyone lying in a particular section of the barge. For a certain length of time they won and lost and rewon and relost their loot, and then it floated up to the convoy. Yes, the reader has now guessed everything: the thieves had the convoy on the hook; the convoy either kept the stolen things for themselves or sold them at the wharves and brought the thieves something to eat in exchange.

And what about resistance? It happened—but only rarely. One case has been preserved. In 1950 on such a barge as I have described, except that it was larger—a seagoing barge en route from Vladivostok to Sakhalin—seven unarmed 58’s resisted the thieves (in this case bitches), who numbered about eighty in all (some with knives, as usual). These bitches had searched the whole transport back at Vladivostok transit point three-ten, and they had searched it very thoroughly, in no way less efficiently than the jailers; they knew all the hiding places, but no search can ever turn up everything. Aware of this, when they were already in the hold they treacherously announced: “Whoever has money can buy makhorka.” And Misha Grachev got out three rubles he had hidden in his quilted jacket. And the bitch Volodka Tatarin shouted at him: “You crowbait, why don’t you pay your taxes?” And he rushed in to take it away. But Master Sergeant Pavel (whose last name has not been recorded) pushed him away. Volodka Tatarin aimed a slingshot—a “V” fork—at Pavel’s eyes, and Pavel knocked him off his feet. Immediately twenty to thirty bitches moved in on him. And around Grachev and Pavel gathered Volodya Shpakov, a former army captain, Seryezha Potapov, Volodya Reunov, a former army sergeant, Volodya Tretyukin, another former sergeant, and Vasa Krav-tsov. And what happened? The whole thing ended after only a few blows had been exchanged. This may have been a matter of the age-old and very real cowardice of the thieves (always concealed behind feigned toughness and devil-may-care insolence); or else the proximity of the guard held them back (this being right beneath the hatchway). Or it may have been that on this trip they were saving themselves for a more important social task—to seize control of the Aleksandrovsk Transit Prison (the one Chekhov described) and a Sakhalin construction project (seizing control of it, of course, not in order to construct) before the honest thieves could; at any rate they pulled back, restricting themselves to the threat: “On dry land we’ll make garbage out of you!” (The battle never took place, and no one made “garbage” out of the boys. And at the Aleksandrovsk transit point the bitches met with misfortune: it was already firmly held by the honest thieves.)

In steamships to the Kolyma everything was the same as on the barges except that everything was on a larger scale. Strange as it seems, some of the prisoners sent to the Kolyma in several overage old tubs on the famous expedition led by the ice-breaker Krasin in the spring of 1938 are still alive today. On the steamers Dzhurma, Kulu, Nevostroi, Dneprostroi, for which the Krasin was breaking the way through the spring ice, there were also three decks in the cold, dirty holds, and on these decks, in addition, there were two-story bunks made out of poles. It was not completely dark: there were some kerosene lanterns and lamps. The prisoners were allowed up on deck in batches for fresh air and walks. Three to four thousand prisoners were in each steamer. The voyage took more than a week, and before it was over all the bread brought aboard in Vladivostok got moldy and the ration was reduced from twenty-one to fourteen ounces a day. They also gave out fish, and as for drinking water… Well, there’s no reason to gloat here, because there were temporary difficulties with the water. Here, in contrast to the river transports, there were heavy seas, storms, seasickness. The exhausted, enfeebled people vomited, and didn’t have the strength to get up out of their vomit, and all the floors were covered with the nauseating mess.

There was one political incident on the voyage. The steamers had to pass through La Perouse Strait, very close to the Japanese islands. And at that point the machine guns disappeared from the watchtowers and the convoy guards changed to civilian clothes, the hatches were battened down, and access to the decks was forbidden. According to the ships’ papers, foresightedly prepared back in Vladivostok, they were transporting, God save us, not prisoners but volunteers for work in the Kolyma. A multitude of Japanese small craft and boats hovered about the ships without suspecting. (And on another occasion, in 1938, there was an incident involving the Dzhurma: The thieves aboard got out of the hold and into the storage room, plundered it, and set it afire. The ship was very close to Japan when this occurred. Smoke was pouring from it, and the Japanese offered help, but the captain refused to accept it and even refused to open the hatches. When Japan had been left behind, the corpses of those suffocated by smoke were thrown overboard, and the half-burned, half-spoiled food aboard was sent on to camp as rations for the prisoners.)[308]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In camp it will be… worse.

Chapter 4 From Island to Island

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

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

And the special convoy is precisely that sort of miracle from beginning to end. You won’t see the common prisoner transports this time. You don’t have to keep your hands behind your back. You don’t have to undress down to your skin, nor sit on the earth on your rear end, and there won’t be any search at all. Your convoy guards approach you in a friendly way and even address you politely. They warn you, as a general precaution, that in case of any attempt to escape—We do, as usual, shoot. Our pistols are loaded and we have them in our pockets. However, let’s go simply. Act natural. Don’t let everyone see that you’re a prisoner. (And I urge you to note how here, too, as always, the interests of the individual and the interests of the state coincide completely.)

My camp life was totally transformed the day I went out to line up forlornly in the carpenters’ brigade, my fingers cramped (they had gotten stiff holding onto tools and wouldn’t straighten out), and the work-assignment supervisor took me aside and with unexpected respect said to me: “Do you know that on orders of the Minister of Internal Affairs… ?”

I was stupefied. The line-up dispersed and the trusties in the camp compound surrounded me. Some of them said: “They are going to hang a new stretch on you.” And others said: “To be released.” But everyone agreed on one thing—that there was no escaping Minister of Internal Affairs Kruglov. And I, too, swayed between a new term and being released. I had quite forgotten that half a year before, some character had come to our camp and distributed Gulag registration cards. (After the war they had begun this registration in all the nearby camps, but it seems unlikely that it was ever completed.) The most important question on it was: “Trade or Profession.” And the zeks would fill in the most precious Gulag trades to enhance their own value: “barber,” “tailor,” “storekeeper,” “baker.” As for me, I had frowned and filled in “nuclear physicist.” I had never been a nuclear physicist in my life, and what I knew of the field I had heard in the university before the war—just a little bit, the names of the atomic particles and their parameters. And I had decided to write down “nuclear physicist.” This was in 1946. The atom bomb was desperately needed. But I didn’t assign any importance to that Gulag registration card and, in fact, forgot about it.

There was a vague, unverified legend, unconfirmed by anybody, that you might nevertheless hear in camp: that somewhere in this Archipelago were tiny paradise islands. No one had seen them. No one had been there. Whoever had, kept silent about them and never let on. On those islands, they said, flowed rivers of milk and honey, and eggs and sour cream were the least of what they fed you; tilings were neat and clean, they said, and it was always warm, and the only work was mental work—and all of it super-supersecret.

And so it was that I got to those paradise islands myself (in convict lingo they are called “sharashkas”) and spent half my sentence on them. It’s to them I owe my survival, for I would never have lived out my whole term in the camps. And it’s to them I owe the fact that I am writing this investigation, even though I have not allowed them any place in this book. (I have already written a novel about them.) And it was from one to another of those islands, from the first to the second, and from the second to the third, that I was transported on a special-convoy basis: two jailers and I.

If the souls of those who have died sometimes hover among us, see us, easily read in us our trivial concerns, and we fail to see them or guess at their incorporeal presence, then that is what a special-convoy trip is like.

You are submerged in the mass of freedom, and you push and shove with the others in the station waiting room. You absent-mindedly examine announcements posted there, even though they can hardly have any relevance for you. You sit on the ancient passenger benches, and you hear strange and insignificant conversations: about some husband who beats up his wife or has left her; and some mother-in-law who, for some reason, does not get along with her daughter-in-law; how neighbors in communal apartments make personal use of the electric outlets in the corridor and don’t wipe their feet; and how someone is in someone else’s way at the office; and how someone has been offered a good job but can’t make up his mind to move—how can he move bag and baggage, is that so easy? You listen to all this, and the goose pimples of rejection run up and down your spine: to you the true measure of things in the Universe is so clear! The measure of all weaknesses and all passions! And these sinners aren’t fated to perceive it. The only one there who is alive, truly alive, is incorporeal you, and all these others are simply mistaken in thinking themselves alive.

And an unbridgeable chasm divides you! You cannot cry out to them, nor weep over them, nor shake them by the shoulder: after all, you are a disembodied spirit, you are a ghost, and they are material bodies.

And how can you bring it home to them? By an inspiration? By a vision? A dream? Brothers! People! Why has life been given you? In the deep, deaf stillness of midnight, the doors of the death cells are being swung open—and great-souled people are being dragged out to be shot. On all the railroads of the country this very minute, right now, people who have just been fed salt herring are licking their dry lips with bitter tongues. They dream of the happiness of stretching out one’s legs and of the relief one feels after going to the toilet. In Orotukan the earth thaws only in summer and only to the depth of three feet—and only then can they bury the bones of those who died during the winter. And you have the right to arrange your own life under the blue sky and the hot sun, to get a drink of water, to stretch, to travel wherever you like without a convoy. So what’s this about unwiped feet? And what’s this about a mother-in-law? What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I’ll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusory—property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life—don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides. If your back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart—and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory!

But the convoy guards stroke the black handles of the pistols in their pockets. And we sit there, three in a row, sober fellows, quiet friends.

I wipe my brow. I shut my eyes, and then I open them. And once again I see this dream: a crowd of people unaccompanied by guards. I remember clearly that I spent last night in a cell and will be in a cell again tomorrow. But here comes some kind of conductor to punch my ticket: “Your ticket!” “My friend there has it!”

The cars are full. (Well, “full” in free people’s terms—no one is lying under the benches, and no one is sitting on the floor in the aisles.) I was told to behave naturally, and I have been behaving very naturally indeed: I noticed a seat beside a window in the next compartment, and got up and took it. And there were no empty seats for my guards in that compartment. They sat where they were and kept their loving eyes on me from there. In Perebory, the seat across the table from me was vacated, but before my guard could get to it and sit down, a moon-faced fellow in a sheepskin coat and a fur cap, with a plain but strong wooden suitcase, sat down there. I recognized his suitcase: it was camp work, “made in the Archipelago.”

“Whew!” he puffs. There was very little light, but I could see he was red in the face and that he had had a hassle to get on the train. And he got out a bottle: “How about a beer, comrade?” I knew that my guards were close to a nervous breakdown in the next compartment: I was not allowed anything alcoholic. But still… I was supposed to conduct myself as naturally as possible. And so I said carelessly: “All right, why not?” (Beer! It’s a whole poem! For three years I hadn’t had even one swallow. And tomorrow in my cell I would brag: “I got beer!”) The fellow poured it, and I drank it down with a shiver of pleasure. It was already dark. There was no electricity in the car. This was post-war dislocation. One tiny candle end was burning in an ancient lantern at the door, one for four compartments: two in front and two behind. I talked amiably with the fellow even though we could hardly see each other. No matter how far forward my guard leaned, he couldn’t hear a thing because of the clickety-clack of the wheels. In my pocket I had a postcard addressed to my home. And I was about to explain who I was to my simple friend across the table and ask him to drop the card in a mailbox. Judging by his suitcase he had been in stir himself. But he beat me to it: “You know, I just barely managed to get some leave. They haven’t given me any time off for two years; it’s a dog’s branch of the service.” “What kind?” “Don’t you know? I’m an MVD man, an asmodeus, blue shoulder boards, haven’t you ever seen them?” Hell! Why hadn’t I guessed right off? Perebory was the center for Volgolag, and he had gotten his suitcase out of the zeks, they had made it for him for free. How all this had permeated our life! Two MVD men, two asmodei, weren’t enough in two compartments. There had to be a third. And perhaps there was also a fourth concealed somewhere? And maybe they were in every compartment? And maybe someone else there was traveling by special convoy like me.

My fellow kept on whining and complaining of his fate. And at that point, I decided to enter a somewhat mystifying demurrer. “And what about the ones you’re guarding, the ones who got ten years for nothing—is it any easier for them?” He immediately subsided and remained silent until morning: earlier, in the semi-darkness, he had noticed that I was wearing some kind of semi-military overcoat and field shirt. And he had thought I was simply a soldier boy, but now the devil only knew what I might be: Maybe I was a police agent? Maybe I was out to catch escapees? Why was I in this particular car? And he had criticized the camps there in my presence.

By this time the candle end in the lantern was floating but still burning. On the third baggage shelf some youth was talking in a pleasant voice about the war—the real war, the kind you don’t read about in books: he had been with a unit of field engineers and was describing incidents that were true to life. And it was so pleasant to realize that unvarnished truth was, despite everything, pouring into someone’s ears.

I could have told tales too. I would even have liked to. But no, I didn’t really want to any more. Like a cow, the war had licked away four of my years. I no longer believed that it had all actually happened and I didn’t want to remember it. Two years here, two years in the Archipelago, had dimmed in my mind all the roads of the front, all the comradeship of the front line, had totally darkened them.

One wedge knocks out another.

And after spending a few hours among free people, here is what I feel: My lips are mute; there is no place for me among them; my hands are tied here. I want free speech! I want to go back to my native land! I want to go home to the Archipelago!

In the morning I deliberately forgot my postcard on an upper shelf: after all, the conductor will get around to cleaning up the car; she will carry it to a mailbox—if she is a human being.

We emerge onto the square in front of the Northern Station in Moscow. Again my jailers are newcomers to Moscow, and don’t know the city. We travel on streetcar “B,” and I make the decisions for them. There is a mob at the streetcar stop in the middle of the square; everyone is on the way to work at this hour. One jailer climbs up to the streetcar motorman and shows him his MVD identity card. We are allowed to stand imposingly on the front platform for the whole trip, as if we were deputies of the Moscow Soviet, and we don’t bother to get tickets. An old man isn’t allowed to board there—he isn’t an invalid and he has to board in the rear like the others.

We approach Novoslobodskaya and disembark—and for the first time I see Butyrki Prison from the outside, even though it’s the fourth time I’ve been brought there and I can draw its interior plan without difficulty. Oof, what a grim, high wall stretches for two blocks there! The hearts of the Muscovites shiver when they see the steel maw of its gates slide open. But I leave the sidewalks of Moscow behind me without regret, and as I enter that tower of the gatehouse I feel I am returning home. I smile at the first courtyard and recognize the familiar main doors of carved wood. And it’s nothing at all to me that they are now going to make me face the wall—and they already have—and ask me: “Last name? Given name and patronymic? Year of birth?”

My name? I am the Interstellar Wanderer! They have tightly bound my body, but my soul is beyond their power.

I know: after several hours of inevitable processing of my body—confinement in a box, search, issuing receipts, filling out the admissions card, after the roaster and the bath—I shall be taken to a cell with two domes, with a hanging arch in the middle (all the cells are like that), with two large windows and a long combination table and cupboard. And I shall be greeted by strangers who are certain to be intelligent, interesting, friendly people, and they will begin to tell me their stories, and I will begin to tell them mine, and by night we will not even feel like going off to sleep right away.

And on the bowls will be stamped (so we shouldn’t make off with them on the prisoner transport) the mark “Bu-Tyur”—for flwtyrskaya Tywrma, Butyrki Prison. The “BuTyur” Health Resort, as we mocked it last time. A health resort, incidentally, very little known to the paunchy bigwigs who want so badly to lose weight. They drag their stomachs to Kislovodsk, and go out for long hikes on prescribed trails, do push-ups, and sweat for a whole month just to lose four to six pounds. And there in the “BuTyur” Health Resort, right near them, anyone of them could lose seventeen or eighteen pounds just like that, in one week, without doing any exercises at all.

This is a tried and true method. It has never failed.

One of the truths you learn in prison is that the world is small, very small indeed. True, the Gulag Archipelago, although it extended across the entire Soviet Union, had many fewer inhabitants than the Soviet Union as a whole. How many there actually were in the Archipelago one cannot know for certain. We can assume that at any one time there were not more than twelve million in the camps[309] (as some departed beneath the sod, the Machine kept bringing in replacements). And not more than half of them were politicals. Six million? Well, that’s a small country, Sweden or Greece, and in such countries many people know one another. And quite naturally when you landed in any cell of any transit prison and listened and chatted, you’d be certain to discover you had acquaintances in common with some of your cellmates. (And so D., after having spent more than a year in solitary confinement, after Sukhanovka, after Ryumin’s beatings and the hospital, could land in a Lubyanka cell and give his name, and then and there a bright chap named F. could greet him: “Aha, so now I know who you are!” “Where from?” D. shied away from him. “You are mistaken.” “Certainly not. You are that very same American, Alexander D., whom the bourgeois press lied about, saying you had been kidnaped—and TASS denied it. I was free at the time and read about it.”)

I love that moment when a newcomer is admitted to the cell for the first time (not a novice who has only recently been arrested and will inevitably be depressed and confused, but a veteran zek). And I myself love to enter a new cell (nonetheless, God grant I never have to do it again) with an unworried smile and an expansive gesture: “Hi, brothers!” I throw my bag on the bunks. “Well, so what’s new this past year in Butyrki?”

We begin to get acquainted. Some fellow named Suvorov, a 58. At first glance there’s nothing remarkable about him, but you probe and pry: at the Krasnoyarsk Transit Prison a certain Makhotkin was in his cell.

“Just a moment, wasn’t he an Arctic aviator?”

“Yes. They named…”

“…an island after him in the Taimyr Gulf. And he’s in prison for 58-10. So does that mean they let him go to Dudinka?”

“How do you know? Yes.”

Wonderful! One more link in the biography of a man I don’t know. I have never met him, and perhaps I never shall. But my efficient memory has filed away everything I know about him: Makhotkin got a whole “quarter”—twenty-five years—but the island named after him couldn’t be renamed because it was on all the maps of the world (it wasn’t a Gulag island). They had taken him on at the aviation sharashka in Bolshino and he was unhappy there: an aviator among engineers, and not allowed to fly. They split that sharashka in two, and Makhotkin got assigned to the Taganrog half, and it seemed as though all connection with him had been severed. In the other half of it, however, in Rybinsk,

I was told that he had asked to be allowed to fly in the Far North. And now I had just learned he had been given that permission. This was not information I needed, but I had remembered it all. And ten days later I turned up in the same Butyrki bath box (there are such lovely boxes in the Butyrki, with faucets and small washtubs so as not to tie up the big bath chambers) as a certain R. I didn’t know this R. either, but it turned out he had been a patient in the Butyrki hospital for half a year and was about to leave for the Rybinsk sharashka. In another three days the prisoners in Rybinsk, too, a closed box where zeks are cut off from all ties with the outside world, would nevertheless learn that Makhotkin was in Dudinka, and they would also find out where I had been sent.

Now this is the prisoners’ telegraph system: attentiveness, memory, chance meetings.

And this attractive man in horn-rimmed spectacles? He walked around the cell humming Schubert in a pleasant baritone.

And youth again oppresses me, And the way to the grave is long.

“Tsarapkin, Sergei Romanovich.”

“But look here, I know you very well indeed. You’re a biologist? A nonreturnee? From Berlin?”

“How do you know?”

“But after all, it’s a small world! In 1946 with Nikolai Vladi-mirovich Timofeyev-Ressovsky…”

Oh, what a cell that had been in 1946: The memories of it returned. It was perhaps the most brilliant cell in all my prison life. It was July. They had taken me from the camp to the Butyrki on those mysterious “instructions of the Minister of Internal Affairs.” We arrived after lunch, but the prison was so overloaded that the reception processing took eleven hours, and it was not until 3 a.m. that, tired from the boxes, I was admitted to Cell 75. Lit by two bright electric bulbs below the two domes, the whole cell slept side by side, restless because of the stuffiness: the hot July air couldn’t circulate through the windows blocked by the “muzzles.” Sleepless flies kept buzzing, and the sleepers twitched when the flies lit on them. Some of the prisoners had put handkerchiefs over their faces to keep the light out of their eyes.

The latrine barrel smelled acrid—everything decayed more quickly in such heat. Eighty people were stuffed into a cell for twenty-five—and this was not the limit either. Prisoners lay tightly packed together on the bunks to left and right and also on the supplementary planks laid across the aisle, and everywhere feet were sticking out from under the bunks, and the traditional Butyrki table-cupboard was pushed back to the latrine barrel. That was where there was still a piece of unoccupied floor, and that was where I lay down. And thus it was that whoever got up to use the latrine barrel before morning had to step across me.

When the order “Get up!” was given, shouted through the swill trough in the door, everything started to stir: They began to take up the planks from across the aisles and push the table to the window. Prisoners came up to interview me—to find out whether I was a novice or a camp veteran. It turned out that two different waves had met in the cell: the ordinary wave of freshly sentenced prisoners being sent off to camp and a reverse wave of camp inmates who were all technical specialists—physicists, chemists, mathematicians, design engineers—all being sent to unknown destinations, to some sort of thriving scientific research institutes. (At this point I relaxed: the Minister was not going to hang a new stretch on me.) I was approached by a man who was middle-aged, broad-shouldered yet very skinny, with a slightly aquiline nose:

“Professor Timofeyev-Ressovsky, President of the Scientific and Technical Society of Cell 75. Our society assembles every day after the morning bread ration, next to the left window. Perhaps you could deliver a scientific report to us? What precisely might it be?”

Caught unaware, I stood before him in my long bedraggled overcoat and winter cap (those arrested in winter are foredoomed to go about in winter clothing during the summer too). My fingers had not yet straightened out that morning and were all scratched. What kind of scientific report could I give? And right then I remembered that in camp I had recently held in my hands for two nights the Smyth Report, the official report of the United States Defense Department on the first atom bomb, which had been brought in from outside. The book had been published that spring. Had anyone in the cell seen it? It was a useless question.

Of course no one had. And thus it was that fate played its joke, compelling me, in spite of everything, to stray into nuclear physics, the same field in which I had registered on the Gulag card.

After the rations were issued, the Scientific and Technical Society of Cell 75, consisting of ten or so people, assembled at the left window and I made my report and was accepted into the society. I had forgotten some things, and I could not fully comprehend others, and Timofeyev-Ressovsky, even though he had been in prison for a year and knew nothing of the atom bomb, was able on occasion to fill in the missing parts of my account. An empty cigarette pack was my blackboard, and I held an illegal fragment of pencil lead. Nikolai Vladimirovich took them away from me and sketched and interrupted, commenting with as much self-assurance as if he had been a physicist from the Los Alamos group itself.

He actually had worked with one of the first European cyclotrons, but for the purpose of irradiating fruit flies. He was a biologist, one of the most important geneticists of our time. He had already been in prison back when Zhebrak, not knowing that (or, perhaps, knowing it), had the courage to write in a Canadian magazine: “Russian biology is not responsible for Lysenko; Russian biology is Timofeyev-Ressovsky.” (And during the destruction of Soviet biology in 1948 Zhebrak paid for this.) Schrodinger, in his small book What Is Life?, twice cited Timofeyev-Ressovsky, who had long since been imprisoned.

And there he was in front of us, and he was simply bursting with information concerning all possible sciences. He had that breadth of scope which scientists of later generations don’t even want to have. (Or is it that the possibilities of encompassing knowledge have changed?) And even though at the moment he was so worn down by the starvation of the interrogation period that these exercises were very difficult for him. On his mother’s side he was descended from impoverished Kaluga gentlefolk who had lived on the Ressa River, and on his father’s side he was a collateral descendant of Stepan Razin, and that Cossack energy was very obvious in him—in his broad frame, in his basic soundness, in his determined struggle with his interrogator, and also in the fact that he suffered from hunger more than we did.

And his story was this: In 1922 the German scientist Vogt, who had founded the Brain Institute in Moscow, had asked to have two talented graduate students sent abroad to work with him permanently. And that was how Timofeyev-Ressovsky and his friend Tsarapkin had been sent off on a foreign assignment with no time limit. And even though they did not have any ideological guidance there, they nonetheless achieved great things in science, and when in 1937 (!) they were instructed to return to their homeland, this seemed to them, since it meant interrupting their work, impossible. They could not abandon either the logical continuation of their own researches or their apparatus or their students. And, no doubt, they also couldn’t do it because back in the Motherland they would have been compelled to pour shit publicly all over their fifteen years of work in Germany. And only that would have earned them the right to go on existing (and would it have earned it for them?). And so they became non-returnees, remaining patriots nevertheless.

In 1945 the Soviet armies entered Buch (a northeast suburb of Berlin), and Timofeyev-Ressovsky and his entire institute joyously welcomed them: everything had worked out in the best possible way, and now he would not have to be separated from his institute! Soviet representatives came to inspect it and said: “Hmm! hmm! Put everything in packing cases, and we’ll take it all to Moscow.” “That’s impossible,” Timofeyev objected. “Everything will die on the way. The installations have taken years to set up.” “Hmm!” The bigwigs acted astonished. And very shortly after that Timofeyev and Tsarapkin were arrested and taken off to Moscow. They were naive. They had thought that the institute would not be able to operate without them. Well, even if it didn’t operate, the general line of the Party must triumph! In the Big Lubyanka it was very easily proven to the arrested individuals that they were traitors of the Motherland (or to it?), and they were sentenced to ten years, and now the President of the Scientific and Technical Society of Cell 75 took heart from the thought that he hadn’t made any errors.

In the Butyrki cells, the arched metal frames supporting the bunks were very, very low. Even the prison administration had never thought of having prisoners sleep under them. Therefore, you first tossed your neighbor your coat so that he could spread it out for you under there, and then you lay face down in the aisle and crawled your way in. Prisoners walked through the aisle, the floor underneath the bunks was swept maybe once a month, and you could wash your hands only during the evening trip to the toilet, and even then without soap—and it was thus impossible to say that you could perceive your body as a Divine vessel. But I was happy! There, on the asphalt floor, under the bunks, in a dog’s den, with dust and crumbs from the bunks falling in our eyes, I was absolutely happy, without any qualifications. Epicurus spoke truly: Even the absence of variety can be sensed as satisfaction when a variety of dissatisfactions has preceded it. After camp, which had already seemed endless, and after a ten-hour workday, after cold, rain, and aching back, oh, what happiness it was to lie there for whole days on end, to sleep, and nevertheless receive a pound and a half of bread and two hot meals a day—made from cattle feed, or from dolphin’s flesh. In a word, the “BuTyur” Health Resort.

To sleep was so important! To lie there on one’s belly, to cover one’s back and just to sleep. When you were asleep, you didn’t spend your strength nor torment your heart—and meanwhile your sentence was passing, passing. When our life crackles and sparks like a torch, we curse the necessity of spending eight hours uselessly in sleep. When we have been deprived of everything, when we have been deprived of hope, then bless you, fourteen hours of sleep!

But they kept me in that cell two months, and I slept enough to make up for the past year and the year ahead, and during that time I moved forward under the bunks to the window and then all the way back to the latrine barrel, but on the bunks this time, and then on the bunks I moved to the archway. I was sleeping very little by this time—I was gulping down the elixir of life and enjoying myself. In the morning the Scientific and Technical Society, then chess, books (oh, those itinerant books, there were only three or four for eight or ten people, and there was always a waiting list for them), then a twenty-minute walk outdoors—a major chord! We never refused our walk even when it was raining heavily. And the main thing was people, people, people! Nikolai Andreyevich Semyonov, one of the creators of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Dam and Power Station. His POW friend, the engineer F. F. Karpov. Witty, caustic Viktor Kagan, a physicist. The musician and conservatory student Volodya Klempner, a composer. A woodcutter and hunter from the Vyatka forests, as profound as a forest lake. An Orthodox preacher from Europe, Yevgeny Ivanovich Divnich. He did not confine himself to theology, but condemned Marxism, declaring that no one in Europe had taken it seriously for a long while—and I defended it, because after all I was a Marxist. And even a year ago I would have confidently demolished him with quotations; how disparagingly I would have mocked him! But my first year as a prisoner had left its mark inside me—and just when had that happened? I hadn’t noticed: there had been so many new events, sights, meanings, that I could no longer say: “They don’t exist! That’s a bourgeois lie!” And now I had to admit: “Yes, they do exist.” And right at that point my whole line of reasoning began to weaken, and so they could beat me in our arguments without half-trying.

And again the POW’s kept coming and coming and coming—this was the second year of the wave of them that kept unceasingly coming from Europe. And once more there were Russian émigrés—from Europe, from Manchuria. One went about among the émigrés seeking news of acquaintances by first asking what country they had come from, and did they know so and so? Yes, of course, they did. (And that is how I learned of the execution of Colonel Yasevich.)

And the old German, that portly German, now emaciated and ill, whom I had once upon a time back in East Prussia (was it two hundred years ago?) forced to carry my suitcase. Oh, how small the world really is! Strange fate that brought us together again! The old man smiled at me. He recognized me too, and even seemed pleased by our meeting. He had forgiven me. He had been sentenced to ten years, but he certainly didn’t have anywhere near that long to live. And there was another German there too—lanky and young, but unresponsive—perhaps because he didn’t know one word of Russian. You wouldn’t even take him for a German right off the bat: the thieves had torn off everything German he had on and given him a faded old Soviet field shirt in exchange. He was a famous German air ace. His first campaign had been in the war between Bolivia and Paraguay, his second in Spain, his third Poland, his fourth over England, his fifth Cyprus, his sixth the Soviet Union. Since he was an ace he could certainly not have avoided shooting down women and children from the air! That made him a war criminal and he got a prison sentence and a “muzzle” of five additional years. And, of course, there had to be one right-thinking person (like Prosecutor Kretov) in the cell: “They were right to imprison all you counterrevolutionary bastards! History will grind up your bones for fertilizer!” “You’re going to be fertilizer yourself, you dog!” they shouted back. “No, they will reconsider my case. I am innocent!” And the whole cell howled and seethed. And a gray-haired Russian-language teacher stood up on the bunks, barefoot, and wrung his hands like a latter-day Jesus Christ: “Children of mine, make peace with one another! My children!” And they howled at him too: “Your children are in the Bryansk forests! We are nobody’s children! All we are is the sons of Gulag.”

After dinner and the evening trip to the toilet, night cloaked the window “muzzles” and the nagging electric lights below the ceiling lit up. Day divided the prisoners and night drew them closer together. There were no quarrels in the evening: lectures and concerts were given. And in this, too, Timofeyev-Ressovsky shone: he spent entire evenings on Italy, Denmark, Norway, Sweden. The émigrés spoke about the Balkans, about France. Someone delivered a lecture on Le Corbusier. Someone else delivered one on the habits of bees. Someone else on Gogol. This was when we smoked our lungs full. Smoke filled up the cell and hovered in the air like a fog, and there was no draft to pull it out the window because of the “muzzles.” Kostya Kiula, twin to me in age, round-faced, blue-eyed, amusingly awkward, stepped up to the table and recited to us the verses he had composed in prison.[310] His voice broke with emotion. His verses were entitled, “My First Food Parcel,” “To My Wife,” “To My Son.” When in prison you strain to get by ear verses written in prison, you don’t waste a single thought on whether the author’s use of syllabic stress is faulty and whether his lines end in assonances or full rhymes. These verses are the blood of your own hearty the tears of your own wife. The cell wept.

In that cell I myself set out to write verses about prison. And it was there that I recited the verses of Yesenin, who had almost but not quite been on the forbidden list before the war. And young Bubnov, a POW, and before that, apparently, a student who had not completed his studies, worshipfully gazed at those reciting, his face aglow. He was not a technical specialist and he hadn’t come from camp, but was on his way there, and because of the purity and forthrightness of his character he would in all likelihood die there. People like him don’t survive there. And for him and for others—their fatal descent braked for the moment—the evenings in Cell 75 were a sudden revelation of that beautiful world which exists and will continue to exist but which their own hard fate hadn’t given them one little year of, not even one little year of their young lives.

The swill trough dropped down and the turnkey’s mug barked at us: “Bed.” No, even before the war, when I was studying at two higher educational institutions at the same time and earning my way by tutoring, and striving to write too, even then I had not experienced such full, such heart-rending, such completely filled days, as I did in Cell 75 that summer.

“But listen,” I said to Tsarapkin, “I’ve heard since then from someone called Deul, a sixteen-year-old boy who got a fiver (not on a school report card) for ‘anti-Soviet’ propaganda….”

“What, do you know him too? He was on our prisoner transport to Karaganda….”

“…I heard,” I continued, “that you were given work as a laboratory assistant doing medical analyses and that Timofeyev-Ressovsky was constantly being sent out on general-assignment work….”

“Yes, and he grew very weak. He was half-dead when they brought him from the Stolypin car here to the Butyrki. And he is in a hospital bed here right now, and the Fourth Special Department[311] is issuing him cream and even wine, but it’s hard to say whether he will ever get back on his feet again.”

“Did the Fourth Special Department summon you?”

“Yes. They asked us whether we considered it might still be possible after six months of Karaganda to start setting up our institute here, in the Fatherland.”

“And you, of course, agreed enthusiastically.”

“Most certainly! After all, we have come to understand our mistakes. And besides, all the equipment wrenched from its original place and put into packing cases got here even without us.”

“What dedication to science on the part of the MVD! May I ask for a little more Schubert?”

And Tsarapkin sang softly, staring sadly at the window (his spectacles reflecting both their dark “muzzles” and their light upper sections):

Tolstoi’s dream has come true: Prisoners are no longer compelled to attend pernicious religious services. The prison churches have been shut down. True, their buildings remain, but they have been successfully adapted to enlarge the prisons themselves. Two thousand additional prisoners have thereby been housed in the Butyrki church—and in the course of a year, estimating an average turnover of two weeks, another fifty thousand will pass through the cells in what was once the church.

On arriving at the Butyrki for the fourth or fifth time, hurrying confidently to my assigned cell, through the courtyard surrounded by prison buildings, and even outstripping the jailer by a shoulder (like a horse that hurries, without the urging of whip or reins, home to where the oats are waiting), I sometimes even forgot to glance at the square church rising into an octagon. It stood apart in the middle of the courtyard quadrangle. Its “muzzles” were not machine-made of glass reinforced with iron rods as they were in the main section of the prison. They were rotten, un-planed gray boards, pure and simple—and they indicated the building’s second-rank priority. What they maintained there was a kind of intra-Butyrki transit prison, so to speak, for recently sentenced prisoners.

And at one time, in 1945, I had experienced it as a big, important step when they led us into the church after our OSO sentencing (and that was the right time to do it too!—it was a good time for prayer!), took us up to the second floor (and the third floor was also partitioned off), and from the octagonal vestibule distributed us among different cells. Mine was the southeast cell.

This was a large square cell in which, at the time, two hundred prisoners were confined. They were sleeping, as they did everywhere else there, on the bunks (and they were one-story bunks), under the bunks, and just simply on the tile floor, out in the aisles. Not only were the “muzzles” on the windows second-rate; everything else, too, was in a style appropriate not to true sons of Butyrki but to its stepsons. No books, no chess sets, no checkers were distributed to this swarming mass, and the dented aluminum bowls and beat-up wooden spoons were collected and removed from one mealtime to another for fear that in the rush they might get carried off on prisoner transports. They were even stingy with mugs for the stepsons. They washed the bowls after the gruel, and then the prisoners had to lap up their tea slops out of them. The absence of one’s own dishes was particularly acute for those who experienced the mixed blessing of receiving a parcel from their families (despite their meager means, relatives made a special effort to provide parcels in those last days before the prisoner transports left). The families had had no prison education themselves, and they never got any good advice in the prison reception office either. And therefore they didn’t send plastic dishes, the one and only kind prisoners were allowed to have, but glass or metal ones instead. All these honeys, jams, condensed milks were pitilessly poured and scraped out of their cans through the swill trough in the cell door into whatever the prisoner had, and in the church cells he had nothing at all, which meant that he simply got it in the palms of his hands, in his mouth, in his handkerchief, in the flaps of his coat—which was quite normal in Gulag terms, but not in the center of Moscow! And at the same time the jailer kept hurrying him as if he were late for his train. (The jailer hurried him because he was counting on licking out whatever was left in the jars.) Everything was temporary in the church cells, without that illusion of permanency which existed in the interrogation cells and in the cells where prisoners awaited sentencing. Ground meat, a semiprocessed product partially prepared for Gulag, the prisoners were unavoidably here those few days until a bit of space had been cleared for them at Krasnaya Presnya. They had just one special privilege here: three times a day they were allowed to go for their gruel themselves (no grits were given out here, but the gruel was served three times a day, and this was a merciful thing because it was more frequent, hotter, and stuck to the ribs better). This special privilege was allowed because there were no elevators in the church—as there were in the rest of the prison. And the jailers had no wish to exert themselves. The big heavy kettles had to be carried from a long way off, across the yard, and then up a steep flight of stairs. It was hard work, and the prisoners had very little strength for it, but they went willingly—just to get out into the green yard one more time and hear the birds singing.

The church cells had their own air: it held a fluttering presentiment of the drafts of future transit prisons, of the winds of the Arctic camps. In the church cells you celebrated the ritual of getting adjusted—to the fact that your sentence had been handed down and that it wasn’t in the least a joke; to the fact that no matter how cruel the new era of your life might be, your mind must nevertheless digest and accept it. And you arrived at that with great difficulty.

And you had no permanent cellmates here as you did in the interrogation cells—which made the latter something like a family. Day and night, people were brought in and taken away singly and by tens, and as a result the prisoners kept moving ahead along the floor and along the bunks, and it was rare to lie next to any one neighbor for more than two nights. Once you met an interesting person there you had to question him immediately, because otherwise you would miss out for good and all.

And that is how I missed out on the automobile mechanic Medvedev. When I began to talk to him, I remembered that his name had been mentioned by the Emperor Mikhail. Yes, he had indeed been implicated in the same case as Mikhail, because he had been one of the first to read the “Manifesto to the Russian People”—and had failed to write a denunciation. Medvedev had been given an unforgivably, shamefully light sentence—three years. And under Article 58, too, for which even five years was considered a juvenile sentence. They had evidently decided the Emperor was really insane, and had been easy on the rest of them because of class considerations. But I had hardly pulled myself together to ask how Medvedev regarded all this than they took him off “with his things.” Certain circumstances led us to conclude that he had been taken off to be released. And this confirmed those first rumors of the Stalinist amnesty which reached our ears that summer, the amnesty for no one, an amnesty after which everything was just as crowded as before—even under the bunks.

They took my neighbor, an elderly Schutzbiindler, off to a prisoner transport. (Here in the land of the world proletariat, all those Schutzbiindlers who had been suffocating in conservative Austria had been roasted with “tenners,” and on the islands of the Archipelago they met their end.) And there was a swarthy little fellow with coal-black hair and feminine-looking eyes like dark cherries, but with a broad, larger than usual nose that spoiled his whole face, turning it into a caricature. For a day he and I lay next to each other in silence, and on the second day he found occasion to ask me: “What do you think I am?” He spoke Russian correctly and fluently, but with an accent. I hesitated: there seemed to be something of Transcaucasia in him, Armenian presumably. He smiled: “I used to pass myself off very easily as a Georgian. My name was Yasha. Everyone laughed at me. I collected trade-union dues.” I looked him over. His was truly a comical figure: a half-pint, his face out of proportion, asymmetrical, his smile amiable. And then suddenly he tensed up, his features sharpened, his eyes narrowed and cut me like the stroke of a black saber.

“I am an intelligence officer of the Rumanian General Staff! Lieutenant Vladimirescu!”

I started—this was real dynamite. I had met a couple of hundred fabricated spies, and I had never thought I might meet up with a real one. I thought they didn’t exist.

According to his story, he was of an aristocratic family. From the age of three he had been destined to serve on the General Staff. At six he had entered the intelligence service school. Growing up, he had picked his own field of future activity—the Soviet Union, taking into account that here in Russia the most relentless counterintelligence service in the world existed and that it was particularly difficult to work here because everyone suspected everyone else. And, he now concluded, he had worked here not at all badly. He had spent several prewar years in Nikolayev and, it appears, had arranged for the Rumanian armies to capture a shipyard intact. Subsequently he had been at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, and after that at the Urals Heavy Machinery Factory. In the course of collecting trade-union dues he had entered the office of the chief of a major division of the plant, had shut the door behind him, and his idiotic smile had promptly left his face, and that saber-sharp cutting expression had appeared: “Ponomaryev! [And Ponomaryev was using an altogether different name at the Urals Heavy Machinery Factory.] We have been keeping track of you from Stalingrad on. You left your job there. [He had been some kind of bigwig at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory.] And you have set yourself up here under an assumed name. You can choose—to be shot by your own people or to work with us.” Ponomaryev chose to work with them, and that indeed was very much in the style of those supersuccessful pigs. The lieutenant supervised his work until he himself was transferred to the jurisdiction of the German intelligence officer resident in Moscow, who sent him to Podolsk to work at his specialty. As Vladimirescu explained to me, intelligence officers and saboteurs are given an all-round training, but each of them has his own narrow area of specialization. And Vladimirescu’s special field was cutting the main cord of a parachute on the inside. In Podolsk he was met at the parachute warehouse by the chief of the warehouse guard (who was it? what kind of person was he?), who at night let Vladimirescu into the warehouse for eight hours. Climbing up to the piles of parachutes on his ladder and managing not to disturb the piles, Vladimirescu pulled out the braided main support-cord and, with special scissors, cut four-fifths of the way through it, leaving one-fifth intact, so that it would break in the air. Vladimirescu had studied many long years in preparation for this one night. And now, working feverishly, in the course of eight hours he ruined, according to his account, upwards of two thousand parachutes (fifteen seconds per parachute?). “I destroyed a whole Soviet parachute division!” His cherrylike eyes sparkled with malice.

When he was arrested, he refused to give any testimony for eight whole months—imprisoned in the Butyrki, he uttered not one word. “And didn’t they torture you?” “No!” His lips twitched as though to indicate he didn’t even consider such a thing possible in the case of a non-Soviet citizen. (Beat your own people so foreigners will be more afraid of you! But a real spy’s a gold mine! After all, we may have to use him for an exchange.) The day came when they showed him the newspapers: Rumania had capitulated; come on, now, testify. He continued to keep silent: the newspapers could have been forgeries. They showed him an order of the Rumanian General Staff: under the conditions of the armistice the General Staff ordered all its intelligence agents to cease operations and surrender. He continued to keep silent. (The order could have been a forgery.) Finally he was confronted with his immediate superior on the General Staff, who ordered him to disclose his information and surrender. At this point Vladimirescu coldbloodedly gave his testimony, and now, in the slow passing of the cell day, it was no longer of any importance and he told me some of it too. They had not even tried him! They had not even given him a sentence! (After all, he wasn’t one of our own! “I am a career man—and will remain one until I die. And they won’t waste me.”)

“But you are revealing yourself to me,” I pointed out. “I might very well remember your face. Just imagine our meeting someday in public.”

“If I am convinced that you haven’t recognized me, you will remain alive. If you recognize me, I will kill you, or else force you to work for us.”

He had not the slightest desire to spoil his relationship with his cell neighbor. He said this very simply, with total conviction. I was really convinced that he wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to gun someone down or cut their throat.

In this whole long prisoners’ chronicle, we will not again meet such a hero. It was the only encounter of the sort I ever had in my eleven years of prison, camp, and exile, and others didn’t even have one. And our mass-circulation comics try to dupe young people into believing that these are the only people the Organs catch.

It was enough to look around that church cell to grasp that it was youth itself the Organs were catching in the first place. The war had ended, and we could allow ourselves the luxury of arresting everyone who had been singled out: they were no longer needed as soldiers. They said that in 1944 and 1945 a so-called “Democratic Party” had passed through the cells of the Small (Moscow Province) Lubyanka. According to rumor, it had consisted of half a hundred boys, had its own statutes and its membership cards. The eldest of them was a pupil in the tenth grade of a Moscow school, and he was its “general secretary.” Students were also glimpsed fleetingly in the prisons during the last year of the war. I met some here and there. I was presumably not old myself, but they at any rate were younger.

How imperceptibly all that crept up on us! While we—I, my codefendant, and others of our age—had been fighting for four years at the front, a whole new generation had grown up here in the rear. And had it been very long since we ourselves had tramped the parquet floors of the university corridors, considering ourselves the youngest and most intelligent in the whole country and, for that matter, on earth? And then suddenly pale youths crossed the tile floors of the prison cells to approach us haughtily, and we learned with astonishment that we were no longer the youngest and most intelligent—they were. But I didn’t take offense at this; at that point I was already happy to move over a bit to make room. I knew so very well their passion for arguing with everyone, for finding out everything, I understood their pride in having chosen a worthy lot and in not regretting it. It gave me gooseflesh to hear the rustle of the prison halos hovering over those self-enamored and intelligent little faces.

One month earlier, in another Butyrki cell, a semihospital cell, I had just stepped into the aisle and had still not seen any empty place for myself—when, approaching in a way that hinted at a verbal dispute, even at an entreaty to enter into one, came a pale, yellowish youth, with a Jewish tenderness of face, wrapped, despite the summer, in a threadbare soldier’s overcoat shot full of holes: he was chilled. His name was Boris Gammerov. He began to question me; the conversation rolled along: on one hand, our biographies, on the other, politics. I don’t remember why, but I recalled one of the prayers of the late President Roosevelt, which had been published in our newspapers, and I expressed what seemed to me a self-evident evaluation of it:

“Well, that’s hypocrisy, of course.”

And suddenly the young man’s yellowish brows trembled, his pale lips pursed, he seemed to draw himself up, and he asked me: “Why? Why do you not admit the possibility that a political leader might sincerely believe in God?”

And that is all that was said! But what a direction the attack had come from! To hear such words from someone born in 1923? I could have replied to him very firmly, but prison had already undermined my certainty, and the principal thing was that some kind of clean, pure feeling does live within us, existing apart from all our convictions, and right then it dawned upon me that I had not spoken out of conviction but because the idea had been implanted in me from outside. And because of this I was unable to reply to him, and I merely asked him: “Do you believe in God?”

“Of course,” he answered tranquilly.

Of course? Of course… Yes, yes. The Komsomols were flying ahead of the flock—everywhere, but so far only the NKGB had noticed.

Notwithstanding his youth, Borya Gammerov had not only fought as a sergeant in an antitank unit with those antitank 45’s the soldiers had christened “Farewell, Motherland!” He had also been wounded in the lungs and the wound had not yet healed, and because of this TB had set in. Gammerov was given a medical discharge from the army and enrolled in the biology department of Moscow University. And thus two strands intertwined in him: one from his life as a soldier and the other from the by no means foolish and by no means dead students’ life at war’s end. A circle formed of those who thought and reasoned about the future (even though no one had given them any instructions to do so), and the experienced eye of the Organs singled out three of them and pulled them in. (In 1937, Gammerov’s father had been killed in prison or shot, and his son was hurrying along the same path. During the interrogation he had read several of his own verses to the interrogator with feeling. And I deeply regret that I have not managed to remember even one of them, and there is nowhere to seek them out today. Otherwise I would have cited them here.)

For a number of months after that my path crossed those of all three codefendants: right there in a Butyrki cell I met Vyacheslav D.—and there is always someone like him when young people are arrested: he had taken an iron stand within the group, but he quickly broke down under interrogation. He got less than any of the others—five years—and it looked as though he were secretly counting a good deal on his influential papa to get him out.

And then in the Butyrki church I encountered Georgi Ingal, the eldest of the three. Despite his youth, he was already a candidate-member of the Union of Soviet Writers. He had a very bold pen. His style was one of strong contrasts. If he had been willing to make his peace politically, vivid and untrodden literary paths would have opened up before him. He had already nearly finished a novel about Debussy. But his early success had not emasculated him, and at the funeral of his teacher, Yuri Tynyanov, he had made a speech declaring that Tynyanov had been persecuted—and by this means had assured himself of an eight-year term.

And right then Gammerov caught up with us, and, while waiting to go to Krasnaya Presnya, I had to face up to their united point of view. This confrontation was not easy for me. At the time I was committed to that world outlook which is incapable of admitting any new fact or evaluating any new opinion before a label has been found for it from the already available stock: be it the “hesitant duplicity of the petty bourgoisie,” or the “militant nihilism of the declasse intelligentsia.” I don’t recall that Ingal and Gammerov attacked Marx in my presence, but I do remember how they attacked Lev Tolstoi, and from what direction the attack was launched! Tolstoi rejected the church? But he failed to take into account its mystical and its organizing role. He rejected the teachings of the Bible? But for the most part modern science was not in conflict with the Bible, not even with its opening lines about the creation of the world. He rejected the state? But without the state there would be chaos. He preached the combining of mental and physical work in one individual’s life? But that was a senseless leveling of capabilities and talents. And, finally, as we see from Stalin’s violence, an historical personage can be omnipotent, yet Tolstoi scoffed at the very idea.[312]

The boys read me their own verses and demanded mine in exchange, and I as yet had none. They read Pasternak particularly, whom they praised to the skies. I had once read “My Sister Life” and hadn’t liked it, considering it precious, abstruse, and very, very far from ordinary human paths. But they recited to me Lieutenant Shmidt’s last speech at his trial, and it touched me deeply because it applied so to us:

Gammerov and Ingal were just as shiningly attuned as that: We do not need your leniency! We are not languishing from imprison-ment; we are proud of it. (But who is really capable of not languishing? After a few months Ingal’s young wife renounced and abandoned him. Gammerov, because of his revolutionary inclinations, did not even have a sweetheart yet.) Was it not here, in these prison cells, that the great truth dawned? The cell was constricted, but wasn’t freedom even more constricted? Was it not our own people, tormented and deceived, that lay beside us there under the bunks and in the aisles?

The young people imprisoned in these cells under the political articles of the Code were never the average young people of the nation, but were always separated from them by a wide gap. In those years most of our young people still faced a future of “disintegrating,” of becoming disillusioned, indifferent, falling in love with an easy life—and then, perhaps, beginning all over again the bitter climb from that cozy little valley up to a new peak—possibly after another twenty years? But the young prisoners of 1945, sentenced under 58-10, had leaped that whole future chasm of indifference in one jump—and bore their heads boldly erect under the ax.

In the Butyrki church, the Moscow students, already sentenced, cut off and estranged from everything, wrote a song, and before twilight sang it in their uncertain voices:

Good Lord, how could we have missed the main point of the whole thing? While we had been plowing through the mud out there on the bridgeheads, while we had been cowering in shell holes and pushing binocular periscopes above the bushes, back home a new generation had grown up and gotten moving. But hadn’t it started moving in another direction? In a direction we wouldn’t have been able and wouldn’t have dared to move in? They weren’t brought up the way we were.

Our generation would return—having turned in its weapons, jingling its heroes’ medals, proudly telling its combat stories. And our younger brothers would only look at us contemptuously: Oh, you stupid dolts!