ROBERT CONQUEST KOUfMA= THE ARCTIC DEATH CAMPS

.r

r^]

KOLYMA

KOLYMA
The
Arctic

Death Camps

ROBERT CONQUEST

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford

New York

Toronto

Melbourne

1979

For

KINGSLEY and JANE AMIS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Acknowledgements are due to the sources quoted in the text, mainly ex-prisoners, and in particular to Vladimir Petrov, Elinor Lipper, Michael Solomon and the late Varlam Shalamov; and also to Lloyd's of London who helped me with their records; to Anna Bourguina of the Hoover Institution, Stanford; and to Marie Collett, for her
invaluable assistance in preparing the material.

CONTENTS
Introduction
i

'3
*9

The Middle Passage Into Kolyma

1938

Baptism of Horror
Social

36

4
5

The

Order of Kolyma
Ice: the

49 67
104
125

Gold under

Kolyma

Economy
6
7

Living and Dying Conditions

Women

8
9

Clownish Interlude
Roll

176 200

The Death

214
Kolyma Run
232 234
243

Appendix Appendix

Ships on the

Camps and Camp Groups

Bibliography and References

Index

246

Maps
showing the Kolyma Region 8-9 and sea routes The Kolyma Region 10-

USSR

USSR

showing the Kolyma Region and sea routes

Kolyma Region

INTRODUCTION
The
present work
is

a documentation from a number of

and Western, in which I seek to establish beyond cavil the history and the conditions of the huge labour camp complex of Kolyma.*
sources, both Soviet

Kolyma

constitutes,

it is

true, only

one section of the

'Archipelago' (as Solzhenitsyn has so aptly

named it) of the

NKVD's
territories

penal empire, scattered throughout the vast

of the Soviet North and East. But, just as Auschwitz has come to stand for the Nazi extermination camps as a whole, so Kolyma remains fixed in the
imagination of the Soviet peoples as the great archetype of
the sinister system under which Stalin ended,

by hunger,

many of his subjects. (It was natural, during a celebrated debate among Soviet historians in the early sixties, that when Dr A. V. Snegov
cold

and exhaustion, the

lives

of so

was denouncing the Stalin heritage and was pressed by the Stalinist historian Deborin to say did he belong to the Soviet or the anti-Soviet camp, he should have retorted, 'I belong to the Kolyma Camp.') The sinister reputation of the Kolyma camps is, of course, primarily due to the fact that, of the mass-imprisonment areas at least, it was the deadliest. There seem, indeed, to have been camps on the Arctic islands of Novaya Zemlya from which no one returned at all: but of these practically
*The
accent
falls

on the

last syllable.

1.3

KOLYMA
nothing
scale.
is

In Kolyma, millions died: and

known, and they were certainly on a smaller it is possible, owing to

the special circumstances of the area, to obtain reasonable

The point here is that Kolyma was supplied by sea; and we have some knowledge of the number of ships in service, their capacity, and the number of trips they made a year.
estimates of the numbers.

This isolation from the 'mainland', as the prisoners

always referred to it, coupled with the fact that the area
the
furthest
is

in

corner of the enormous Soviet territory,

contributed greatly to the prisoners' feeling of having been

removed irrevocably from the normal world

also

an

effect

especially powerful for inhabitants of the great land mass. It

of the Archipelago

be found in the rest example that precautions against escape were less thorough, since escape in any real sense was
characteristics hardly to
(for
It

produced

virtually impossible)

thus seems not only comparatively simple to treat this

separate area in isolation, but also peculiarly appropriate to

do so:

particularly as Solzhenitsyn himself, though he gives

(

us a few illuminating pages

Archipelago,
I

on the area, says in The Gulag have almost excluded Kolyma from the

compass of this book.' As he notes, there are several accounts of Kolyma by Soviet writersas well as others, which he did not know of at the time, by former inmates in the West. What I have
done, in
effect, is to

bring these accounts together on a

full

reasonably systematic basis, to give as

and

irrefutable a
to
in-

picture as possible of this dreadful

monument

humanity.

on seventeen main first-hand accounts sixteen from ex-prisoners, and one from a free employee. In addition, I have used a few major reports and analyses published in the West or in the Soviet press, together with some hitherto unpublished information.
I

have

relied basically

*4

INTRODUCTION
major first-hand accounts, twelve were provided by witnesses who had reached the West, and five by witnesses remaining in the Soviet Union. Of the latter, two were actually published in Moscow, and the two others, though originally intended for Soviet publication, were finally refused this and were later published in the West; but none of the writers were prosecuted for their revelations. Ten of these testimonies are from present or former Soviet citizens; four from Poles; one from a Romanian, one from a Swiss, and one from a German. Thirteen are from men and two of the latter among the most four from women

Of the

valuable.

And, in addition to these, I have relied to a lesser extent on half a dozen unpublished witnesses, former victims, whose testimony is summarised by Roy Medvedev in Let History Judge, by Dallin and Nicolaevsky in Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, and elsewhere; as well as by the evidence, based on the affidavits of 63 Polish prisoners, summarised in Silvester Mora's
booklet Kolyma.

The

experience of these

men and women

extends from

the earliest beginnings of

rehabilitations
their

Kolyma,

in 1932 to 1933, to the

which

started to take place in 1954.

And'

broad range of background and experience seems more than adequate to provide a clear, full and irrefutable
picture of
It

Kolyma.

has often been pointed out that while Auschwitz and

Maidanek are known the world over, the Soviet equivalents

are not. Since the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, the
existence

and nature of the Soviet camp system

in

general has penetrated the world's consciousness. But,

except in the Soviet Union

and

far

Russians
for the

-and

less

as

itself, this has been as a system a local habitation and a name. For

it is

surely right that this should

world as a whole

Kolyma
15

is

become true a word of horror

KOLYMA
wholly comparable to Auschwitz.
point to

And

the

first

remember

is

that

it

did indeed

kill

and easiest some three

million people, a figure well in the range of that of the

victims of the Final Solution.

It is

not

my

purpose to argue whether Stalin's mass

murders were worse than Hitler's or vice versa. Both were on a horrible scale and both were conducted with such inhumanity that such comparisons seem otiose. We may, indeed, note certain differences. Hitler's atrocities were carried out against those he had himself declared to be his enemies. Stalin's were a random operation against his own subjects and supporters. Stalin, simply because he had a
longer period to operate in and a larger pool of potential
victims, killed a

good many more than Hitler did.

A final
among

difference

is,

of course* that Stalin found defenders

sensitive-minded liberals in the West and Hitler did not.

Moreover Stalin's terror was one of the foundation stones of a system which, far from being part of history, flourishes to this day. The resources of Kolyma, so long developed at the expense of prisoners' lives, are now largely exploited by free labour backed by adequate machinery. But its name remains in the Russian mind as epitomising more than any other the horrors of the Stalin era. Nor has the change been complete. There are still labour camps in Kolyma, as elsewhere in Russia: in 1971 Andrei Amalrik was sent to serve out a sentence in a strict-regime camp in the area, fpr
the crime of spreading 'falsehoods against the Soviet state

and the system'. These were, of course, nothing of the kind,

but merely expressions of opinions or statements of fact

unwelcome to the KGB. For the Secret Police still exists and still administers even if on a smaller scale the Gulag Archipelago of which Kolyma, beyond the icy waters of the Okhotsk Sea, was the most dreadful and distant island. The way in which the memory of Kolyma still haunts the Soviet present may be seen in a case which came particu-

l6

INTRODUCTION
larly vividly to public notice in 1976,

with the publication

West of the autobiography of Georgi Vins, the Soviet Reform Baptist leader, under the significant title Three Generations ofSuffering. Pastor Vins, who had himself already been imprisoned for his religious activities (and was to be
in the

again after publication of the book) deals with the earlier

,

sufferings of his father in the

same cause, which ended with death in Kolyma in December 1943. Basically, the frightfulness of Kolyma was due not to
geographical or climatic reasons, but to conscious decisions
taken in Moscow. For a few years before 1937, in fact ** was well administered and the death rate was low. The climate,
>

though exceedingly cold,

is

a remarkably healthy one for

the administration

men who

are properly fed, clothed and sheltered. In this

was to produce gold efficiendy. In the later period (as one commandant put it quite openly) though the gold remained important, the central aim was to kill off the prisoners. In
earlier phase, the

main aim of

the earliest period of the labour

camp

system, the Solovki

White Sea were the symbol of the whole system, the worst killers. These were followed, in the mid- thirties, by the camps of the Baltic- White Sea Canal. Kolyma took their place just when the system was reaching its maximum expansion, and remained central to
islands of the
it

camps on the

for the

next fifteen years, as (in Solzhenitsyn's words) 'the

pole of cold and cruelty' of the labour

camp

system.

17

CHAPTER ONE

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

Death-ships of the Okhotsk Sea
.
.

ANDREI SAKHAROV

We take up the story of the endless stream of victims as they

on the seas beyond which Kolyma's port of Nagalay their eventual destination yevo, its central staging area at Magadan, and behind them the camps and mines of the interior. For readers will be familiar with the earlier stages in the
arrive
Pacific shore,

on the Soviet

sufferings of the victim of the

Great Purge. From

his night-

time arrest; his

life

in the incredibly overcrowded cells of the

Butyrka or the Lefortovo, or the Lubyanka, or Leningrad's

Kresty or Shlaperny prisons, or in one of the hundreds of
prisons of the lesser cities; the interrogation, at

confession to

an

entirely false charge

which was obtained by the

continuous questioning without sleep of the 'conveyor' or

by physical torture; then the days or weeks in the crowded and lightless cattle truck of the prison train conveying him to his camp.

We

will begin, then,

with the prisoners arriving at the

huge transit camps on the Pacific coast, outside Vladivostok and later at Nakhodka, and at Vanino, in each of which a hundred thousand prisoners would be crowded into the endless array of barracks which stretched as far as the eye
19

KOLYMA
could see. There they awaited the prison ships of the

Kolyma

run.

Those who arrived were already crushed and humiliated, starved and ill-clad remnants of human beings. They would normally have spent around three months in prison under conditions and treatment thought adequate to such as they. And the train journey always one of the worst of the

various experiences of the victims, with

its

fetid

wagons,

its

inadequate water supply,

guards

its

lack of food

and

light, its brutal

was, of course, the longest undergone by any of

and were
at

Gulag's victims: 28 days, 33 days, 35 days, 47 days are

typical times reported.

On

arrival they piled out of the train

once

surrounded by guards with dogs. They would be told to

squat and the guards would shout the routine warning, *If

anyone stands up we shall take it as an attempt to escape and shoot instantly.' All quite normal. After a checking of documents by the train guards and the camp guards, the consignment of prisoners would be marched off to the transit camps. These huge camps do not need to be described in great detail. Life in them resembled in most aspects the general camp life of the Archipelago. The differences were mainly in the absence of physical labour, and the knowledge of impermanence. At the Vladivostok transit camp, in the thirties, there were two zones, one for common criminals and one for counter-revolutionaries. The former, had heated barracks, blankets, mattresses and other luxuries not available at the latter. In the counter-revolutionary section, there was always a grave shortage of water, which produced fights. Still, this was better than the company of the criminals. When the Vladivostok camp was moved to Nakhodka at the beginning of the war, and the Vanino camp much further north later opened up, such segregation was no

20

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

longer practised.

The tough General Gorbatov was both

by

cheated and violently robbed at Nakhodka. There was the

usual despoilment of all possessions, including overcoats,
thieves at
It is

Vanino.

not certain

when

it

was that Vanino, just north of

Sovietskaya Gavan, became fully operational.

Though
it

nearer both to Central Russia and (by sea) to Nagayevo,

at
first

had no rail connection

to the Trans-Siberian.

There

was a large camp in the area as early as 1940, though it is not clear whether this was already a main transit camp for Kolyma. (One of several reported strikes by Polish prisoners
to secure delivery of their rations
is

reported there in that

year, involving finally several thousand

men, including

Russians and others.

It resulted in

mass machine-gunning.)

At whichever camp, once

Everyone hoped
but with a
to find

settled in, prisoners tried to

take advantage of the vast crowds to meet acquaintances.

husbands or other close

relatives,

woman serving a sentence which took her to Kolyma, the husband had almost invariably been shot. One girl of Evgenia Ginzburg's group did meet her brother, who gave her a small pillow and blamed himself for her arrest. She later gave him the pillow back, as the only thing she had, before boarding the Dzhurma: he was shot in 1944 for * anti-Soviet talk in camp, to be rehabilitated in the 1950s. 4

Many

prisoners, of course, died in the transit

camps.

Those we know of include the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and the Polish poet Bruno Jasienski. General Gorbatov tells of an old colleague:
I

met Ushakov, former commander of the Ninth

Division.

We flung our arms around each other and, of course, wept.

Ushakov had once been thought a man of culture, the best of the divisional commanders. Here he was a foreman in charge of nine camp kitchens, and still considered himself
* Superior figures refer to the Bibliography and References at p. 243.

21

KOLYMA
fortunate to have such 'privileged' work. Ushakov never reached Kolyma, because of his health. An old soldier, he had been wounded eighteen times fighting the Basmachi in Central Asia. He had received four medals for his military service. While we were at Nakhodka Bay Ushakov's fate, for no apparent reason, took a turn for the worse; he was demoted from foreman and put on heavy physical labour. 5

And

so died.

Mrs Ginzberg
fleshless,

describes the death of a friend, almost

blind and disfigured with scurvy,

whom

not even

the bugs of the transit

were so legendary,
reported in almost

camp would approach. The bugs even by camp standards, that they are
the prisoners' accounts as provoking
last
till

all

every night a struggle which would

it

dawn. As soon as

got barely warm enough, prisoners would

'procession of the virulent

move out of the

Lice too

barracks and sleep on the ground, only to be followed by a

veritable
-

insects'.

abounded.
inefficiently.

The

disinfestation

chambers

worked

A typhus epidemic, as a result, swept the camp

Over
the

in 1938 causing tens of thousands of deaths.

following year a

improved the de-lousing system and brought the epidemic under

finally

new camp commandant

control.

The survivors of this, and of mere starvation, would, when the time came, be checked for working capacity. At the Vanino camp in 1949, a regular slave market was in
operation. Officials from various mining areas, accom-

panied by doctors, would examine the wares.

for 120,000 labourers a year.

One group is

reported to have had a standing contract with the

NKVD

*They

felt

men's muscles,

opened their mouths to check their teeth and looked at eyes, head and shoulders.' 31 As elsewhere, the method of testing for dystrophy was to pinch the buttocks. If the muscle was still elastic the prisoner was judged as not in so advanced a condition as to be unfitted for hard labour.
22

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

Embarkation day would
arrive.

At Vanino:

When we came
camp
I

out on to the immense field outside the witnessed a spectacle that would have done justice to a Cecil B. DeMille production/As far as the eye could see there were columns of prisoners marching in one direction huge detachment or another like armies on a battlefield. of security officers, soldiers, and signal corpsmen with field telephones and motor-cycles kept in touch with headquarters, arranging the smooth flow of these human rivers. I asked what this giant operation was meant to be. The reply was that each time a transport was sent off the administration reshuffled the occupants of every cage in camp so that everyone had to be removed with his bundle of rags on his shoulder to the big field and from there directed to his

new

destination. Only 5000 were supposed to leave, but 100,000 were part of the scene before us. One could see endless columns of women, of cripples, of old men and even teenagers, all in military formation, five in a row, going through the huge field, and directed by whistles or flags. It was more than three hours before the operation was completed and the batch I belonged to was allowed to leave
for the

embarkation point. 31

In these camps, depending on the time of year, a prisoner

might be held for only a few days or if he arrived after the end of the navigation season from early December until

camp, at any ratein summer had afforded somewhat of a relief. It had been possible, if not to eat much, at least to breathe and to rest a little. Those who missed this break in the journey were at their worst. Soviet writer tells of one such party of men. Before they had had time to recover from their train journey they were marched a distance of several miles towards the port. There was a hitch over the supply of bread, so the men went off on empty stomachs. After an hour or two in the broiling sun they began to collapse; some of them died on the spot. The
late April. After the trains the

and

in the absence of epidemics,

23

KOLYMA
survivors sat

down and

declared that they would go no

protest

Such an organised was a rare occurrence among 'politicals', who had all been Party members and were used to discipline. The frightened guards went berserk, kicked the dead bodies about after the manner of the Good Soldier Schweik's doctors ('Take this malingerer to the morgue') and shot
further until they were given bread.
several stragglers

who

'attempted to escape'. 4

There were

lesser

inconveniences too. After hours of

to the piers,
all sick,

shunting on the

way

As the people
asked

had under supervision were

they

me for permission to leave their place long enough to

relieve themselves. Being 'protected' personnel I addressed

myself in turn to a soldier watching us^ and asked him to grant permission for the sick to do so. I did it in the official Russian form: 'Is it allowed by you that some sick people should attend to their urgent necessities?' 'Those who are bored with life,' the officer replied, 'should just make one step out of the column and they will be through with it!' 31

And so, finally, the columns wound down to the boats. It was for the great majority of the prisoners their first sight of the open sea, for almost all of them their first sea voyage. On
the Russians, in particular, the effect of the long cruise

northward over the open ocean greatly enhanced the feeling already common to prisoners that they had been removed from the ordinary world. It seemed not merely a transportation from the 'mainland' (as the prisoners always referred to the rest of the country) merely to some distant penal island, but even to another 'planet', as Kolyma was always called in its songs and sayings. One of the many more recent unofficial ballads about the camps (the widespread singing of which by Soviet students in private groups so strikingly illustrates the -way in which
Stalin's terror
still

haunts the Russian consciousness)

It begins:

is

Galich's 'Magadan'. 3

24

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

1 remember Vanino port Where the grim-looking steamer rode, How we climbed the gangplank aboard

To

the cold

and gloomy hold.

The ships of Kolyma's Middle Passage were mainly tramp steamers built at Flensburg and Newcastle, Schiedam and Tacoma, which had previously had such names
as (ironically enough) Commerical Quaker or Puget Sound.

They were mostly in the range of 5000 to 7000 gross tons, though some were as small as not much more than 2000 tons. The biggest, the Nikolai Yezhov (changed when he became an unperson to Felix Dzerzhinsky) was just over 9000 tons. She had originally been a cable ship, and it had caused considerable surprise when the Soviet government bought her in the mid-thirties, since it was not known to be conducting or planning any laying of cables. Such, however, was not the intention. The huge cable holds made splendid floating dungeons. However, there seem to have been disadvantages. At any rate many years later she was turned into a fisheries vessel. At the other end of the scale was the Indigirka built at Greenock in 1886, and grossing only 2336 tons, which finally proved unable to ride the Okhotsk storms, and sank in December 1939. The shipwreck of another prison vessel with the loss of 5000 prisoners and an escort of 200 is noted in July 1949. And there were other losses, such as the reported blowing up of the ship Dalstroy in Nakhodka harbour in 1946, apparently by Latvian and Lithuanian nationalists among the prisoners. The convicts had not yet gone aboard but
,

supplies of ammonal, the explosive used in the gold mines,

had already been loaded. Great destruction was caused in the town. There was no proof of responsibility, but many Latvians and Lithuanians seem to have been shot.

The core of the slave fleet were theDzhurma,

25

the Dalstroy

KOLYMA
and (from 1940) the
which operated on the route throughout most of the period. The Dzhurma, ofjust under 7000 tons, was built in Holland in 1 92 1 The Dalstroy, also of Dutch origin, had the same tonnage. The Sovlatvia, of just" over 4000 tons, was built in Sweden for the independent Latvian government in 1926, and taken over after the
Sovlatvia,
.

Soviet annexation of that republic.

These ships were actually part of Dalstroy's (the Far Northern Construction Trust's) own fleet, as were
Kulu;

NKVD
for

long periods vessels such as the Felix Dzerzhinsky and the

and

their port of registry

was Nagayevo

itself.

Each
its

bore a broad white band with a blue stripe on

smokestack, and the
letters

DS

for Dalstroy (the

blue and

white

officially signifying

hope). Other ships, registered in'

served

Vladivostok or Nakhodka,
trations

and were made available

for the

mainland adminisNagayevo run by

arrangement.
ship
describes the Dzhurma in 1939, when the had many years ahead of her on the Nagayevo run: 'She was an old ship that had seen better days. Her railings, stairways and even the captain's megaphone were dull and covered with verdigris. Now she was used solely for moving

Mrs Ginzburg

convicts.' 4

She
sailed,

is first reported in these waters in 1933 when she laden with an above-capacity load of prisoners said

to

have numbered

as

many

as 12,000,

from Vladivostok
late in the season,

through the Bering Straits to Ambarchik at the mouth of the

Kolyma. Reaching the Arctic Ocean too

she was caught in the pack ice near Wrangel Island for the

whole winter, arriving the following spring with no

vivors

sur-

among
the

the prisoners.

Aboard

Dzhurma or another of the convict

fleet,

the

prisoners were herded into the holds. Iron grilles cut these
into isolated sections,

and there were machine-gun

nests

on

the decks. But the main recourse against riot or rebellion

26

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

was the fire pumps, by which the icy ocean water could be and was directed at the prisoners. The prisoners were tept under hatches (with brief and occasional exceptions) for the whole trip. One reason was that the ships went through the Straits of La Perouse. They were thus, until 1945, running between Japanese territories, well in sight of land, and among Japanese shipping and fishing boats. At least one early (1932) case of a prisoner managing nevertheless to jump ofT and get picked up is recorded. But normally there was no trouble. The guards put on civilian clothes. The machine-guns disappeared from the bridge. The ships even had false papers made out in case of any incident.

typical hold

is

described as having three decks, each

containing two-level bunks

made

of poles. 32

The

extent to

which the prisoners were packed in, and the squalor, may be judged from Evgenia Ginzburg's remark that aboard the Dzhurma, 'How we longed for the comfort of Van 7' the goods truck in which she had spent a month on the way to Vladivostok from Yaroslavl prison, 'so many pushed in that there scarcely seemed room to stand'; into which, though they could hardly stir, and could not even turn on their sides unless they all did it together, fifteen more women were pushed en route; in which 'it was so stuffy that the air felt .'; in which the roof of the wagon was thick and greasy red-hot and the nights were not long enough to cool it; in which the only ventilation was a three-inch gap closed while in stations; in which the water ration had been one mugful a day for all purposes; in which their inadequate bread ration had been cut to half as a penal measure ... It was still better than the Dzhurmal* A male prisoner working in the sick bay of the Sovlatvia in

1949

tells

of conditions aboard:

When we

reached the women's hold, the entrance was

27

KOLYMA
barred by two armed soldiers, but on seeing our red cross armbands, they let us pass. We climbed down a very steep,
slippery

wooden stairway with

It

great difficulty

and

finally

took us some time to accustom our eyes to the dim light of the dingy lower deck. As I began to see where we were, my eyes beheld a scene which neither Goya nor Gustave Dore could ever have imagined. In that immense, cavernous, murky hold were crammed more than 2000 women. From the floor to the ceiling, as in a gigantic poultry farm, they were cooped up in open cages, five of them in each nine-foot-square space. The floor was covered with more women. Because of the heat and humidity, most of them were only scantily dressed; some had even stripped down to nothing. The lack of washing facilities and the relentless heat had covered their bodies with ugly red spots, boils, and blisters. The majority were suffering from some form of skin disease or other, apart from stomach ailments and dysentery. At the bottom of the stairway we had just climbed down stood a giant cask, on the edges of which, in full view of the soldiers standing on guard above, women were perched like birds, and in the most incredible positions. There was no shame, no prudery, as they crouched there to urinate or to empty their bowels. One had the impression that they were some half-human, half-bird creatures which belonged to a different world and a different age. Yet seeing a man coming down the stairs, although a mere prisoner like themselves, many of them began to smile and some even

reached the bottom.

tried to comb their hair. Who were these women? And where had they come from? I asked myself. I soon learned that they had been arrested all over Russia and those countries of Europe overrun by Soviet armies. The main accusation against them was collaboration with the enemy. 31

Battened

down in the murky holds

is,

there

was nothing

to see

or do. Nothing, that

except to survive the activities of the

tells

common
little else.

criminals. Every report of these voyages

of

*8

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

Though some of the prisoners had previously come across
this

great criminal element, the urkas, and been terrorised

in

and robbed
for

camps, on trains or in the transit

camp itself,
encounter

many
this

the ships were the scene of their

first

with

dreadful underground culture which

its

had

sur-

vived, with

own

traditions

and

laws, since the

Time

of

Troubles at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and

had greatly increased in numbers by recruiting orphans and broken men of the revolutionary and collectivisation
periods.

One woman

tells us:

During the entire voyage, which lasted a week, no member of the guard on the ship's crew ever entered the prisoners' hold. They were afraid to, especially when a large number of murderers and bandits were being transported, since they were an insignificant, though heavily armed, minority compared to the number of prisoners. They stood with raised guns, ready to fire, when the prisoners were let out on deck in small groups to use the toilet. None of them took any account of what went on below decks. As a result, during all such voyages the criminals put across a reign of terror. If they want the clothing of any of the counterrevolutionaries, they take it from him. If the counterrevolutionary offers any resistance, he is beaten up. The old and weak are robbed of their bread. On every transport ship a number of prisoners die as a f esult of such treatment. 13
General Gorbatov was robbed again:
in the Sea of Okhotsk misfortune befell Early in the morning, when I was lying half-awake as many of us did, two 'trusties' came up to me and dragged away my boots which I was using as a pillow. One of them hit me hard on the chest and then on the head and said with a leer: 'Look at him sells me his boots days ago, pockets the cash, and then refuses to hand them over!' Offthey went with their loot, laughing for all they were worth and only stopping to beat me up again when, out of

While we were

mc

29

KOLYMA
sheer despair, I followed them and asked for the boots back. The other 'trusties' watched, roaring with laughter. 'Let him have it! Quit yelling they're not your boots now.' Only one of the political prisoners spoke up: 'Look, what

are you
I

thieves took off his

up to? How can he manage in bare feet?' One of the pumps and threw them at me. had often heard, since I had been in prison, stories

about the bestial behaviour of the common convicts but to be honest I never thought they would rob with such impunity in the presence of other prisoners. Anyhow, I lost my boots. Our guards, including their chief, got on well with the 'trusties', encouraged them to violence and used

them

to

mock

the 'enemies of the people'. 3

Some

of the most lurid accounts are of the

women

criminals. Evgenia

Ginzburg

recalls, in 1939:

But the worst was yet to come: our first meeting with the real hardened criminals among whom we were to live at Kolyma. When it seemed as though there were no room left for even a kitten, down through the hatchway poured another few hundred human beings. They were the cream
of the criminal world: murderers, sadists, adepts at every kind of sexual perversion. To this day I remain convinced that the proper place for such people is a psychiatric hospital, not a prison or a camp. When I saw this halfnaked, tattooed, ape-like horde invade the hold, I thought that it had been decided that we were to be killed off by mad

women. The fetid

air reverberated to their shrieks, their ferocious

obscenities, their wild laughter

They capered

and their caterwaulings. about, incessantly stamping their feet even

^though there appeared to be no room to put a foot down. Without wasting any time they set about terrorising and
bullying the 'ladies' the politicalsdelighted to find that the 'enemies of the people' were creatures even more despised and outcast than themselves. Within five minutes we had a thorough introduction to the law of the jungle. They seized our bits of bread, snatched the last of our rags

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

out of our bundles, pushed us out of the places we had managed to find. Some of us wept, some panicked, some tried to reason with the whores, some spoke very politely to them hoping to restore their self-respect. Others called for the warders; they might have saved their breath, for throughout the whole voyage we never saw a single representative of authority other than the sailor who brought a cartload of bread to the mouth of the hold and threw our 'rations' down to us as though we were a cageful of wild
beasts. 4

half-blind Polish

woman,

in 1944, tells:

One hundred and thirty women were also taken, of whom I was one. In all there were taken five of us Polish women, a few Soviet politicals, and all the rest of that type of criminal which can be most nearly described by the European
expression apache.

When at last we went aboard it was dark and I was quite

Heavy rain began to fall. Nobody helped me. I was in danger of being left completely alone on the desolate shore. Another blind woman (Soviet) at last came to my aid and finally a soldier. The idea that I might have been left behind amused everybody immensely. In the darkness hands reached out towards me from all sides. One tore ofT the shawl, the Polish shawl I wore on my head. Others tried to drag ofT my sweater and seize my sack. We fought in the
blind.

out at could just make out the lamp swinging; I could taste blood, and I knew that somehow I must get my back against a wall. I meant to fight to the last. If I once gave in I knew they would murder me. As I reached out and a blow went wide I fell against a door opening, and the commandant appeared. For the time being I was saved. All the way to Kolyma my battle with the apache women went on. One befriended me for a while and then herself completely robbed me. She simply could not keep it up. Her name was Lola and she looked like the old female wolf who leads the pack. Somewhere she had some Polish blood too.
blindness.
I

darkness of the night and of

my
to

hit

random; wherever there seemed

be anything soft.

31

KOLYMA
For the few days that she was bread with me.

my

friend she shared her

Xhe retching,
feet,

the brawling, fornicating

the wild cries, the dancing and stamping of and wild-cat fighting went on

night and day. Even the

men were

afraid of these

women.
he

The commandant was

helped

afraid of them too. Nevertheless,

some things back. I said to one woman, 'You are so young, you are even beautiful, and yet you are as evil as the fiend himself. Why?' She looked at me with an expression of which I can give no idea. 'Why should I be otherwise? Hell is where I live and the fiend is my
to get

me

brother.' 2

Elinor Lipper describes a particular danger that threat-

ened the

political

women, from

the

men

criminals:

We

lay squeezed together on the tarred floor of the hold because the criminals had taken possession of the plank platform. If one of us dared to raise her head, she was greeted by a rain of fishheads and entrails from above. When any of the seasick criminals threw up, the vomit came down upon us. At night, the men criminals bribed the guard, who was posted on the stairs to the hold, to send over a few women for them. They paid the guard in bread that they had stolen from their fellow prisoners. 13

Not only criminals worked

this trade,

indeed:

Some

of the

girls

had

better luck

and were entertained by

the captain, the chief mate, the battalion commander, and other officers who treated themselves to the charms of these unfortunate women on their way tp the wastes of Kolyma. Girls were invited to cabins where they were offered a

decent meal, good liquor, and the luxury of a shower, clean towel, and clean bed sheets. They realised, of course, that this might be the last chance they would have for such
luxuries. 31

But sex was not always so peaceable a transaction:

In 1944 several hundred young girls came to Kolyma. They were the so-called ukazniki, sent out here for unauthorised

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

absences from a war factory, or for some similar minor . . . The criminals, who formed the greater part of the human freight aboard this ship, had an absolutely free hand in the hold. They broke through the wall into the room where the female prisoners were kept and raped all the women who took their fancy. A few male prisoners who tried to protect the women were stabbed to death. Several old men had their bread snatched from them day after day, and died of starvation. One of the criminals, who appropriated a woman whom the leader of the band had marked for his own, had his eyes put out with a needle. 13

offence.

This, in accord with their

Polish
ship:

own

'Law'. Another prisoner, a

woman,

reports a similar sanction aboard another

'From the men's quarters came cries which surpassed had heard before. The apache men settling a score with their knives. A brigade leader had gambled and lost the brigade's bread ration at cards. For this he had been tried by the men apaches and found guilty. They literally cut him up with their knives. His brains lay scattered on the
any
I

decks.' 2

As to the needle-wielding gang, 'When the ship arrived in the prisoners were driven out of the hold, fifteen were missing; they had been murdered by the criminals during the voyage and the guards had not lifted a finger. The upshot of this particularly glaring scandal was that after the facts became known in Magadan, the commander of the ship's guard was called on the carpet and

Magadan and

arrested.' 13

On another occasion, in 1949, a bunch of ruffians had pushed through the rust-weakened bulkhead into the women's hold, and had tried to rape them. Soldiers had intervened and some of the rampaging prisoners had been killed. 'As we filed towards the ship's gangway I observed a few prisoners in chains. They were the ringleaders of the assault on the women's quarters who had not been shot.
33

KOLYMA

Two of them, teenagers, were charged with having hanged

a woman who tried to resist their attack. Both looked quite calm and asked for a smoke.' 31 An incident which is described as taking place on the Dzhurma in the latter half of 1939 is given by three prisoners, two Soviet and one Western, none of whom was present, but

who

learnt of

it

from witnesses. The accounts are

is

slightly

different,

but the value of authentication through such

obvious:

evidently independent corroboration

we

shall

come across it Mrs Lipper

again.
says:

'The criminals succeeded in breaking

through the wall of the hold and getting at the provisions.

They robbed
prisoners

the stores

and

then, to

wipe out the

traces, set

the storeroom on fire. There was a frightful panic among the

who were

locked in the hold of the burning ship.

The
still

fire

was held

in check, but the

Dzhurma entered port

burning.' 13
'

As Mrs Ginzburg describes it, a fire broke out. The male criminals seized the opportunity to try to break out and were battened down into a corner of the hold. When they went on rioting, the crew hosed them down to keep them quiet. Then they forgot about them. As the fire was still burning the water boiled and the wretched men died in it. For a long time afterwards the Dzhurma stank intolerably.' 4

The
is

third account,
similar. 22

from a

woman
as

Social-

Revolutionary,

This may well also be the same occasion happening the previous year in The Gulag

one given as

Archipelago:

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
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

accept

34:

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

food aboard was sent on to
prisoners. 32

camp

as rations for the

A particularly unpleasant trip. There were other arrivals

at

Nagayevo harbour
was unable

in specially nasty circumstances, as

when a convoy of four ships on

in 1938

the

first

voyage of the season

to penetrate the late-lasting ice,

and

disembarked the prisoners so that they had to finish the voyage on foot over the ice-pack, 'tormented half-dead
people in that grey line
other half-dead people
. . .

carrying on their shoulders

sufferers

from

arthritis or prisoners

without

legs'. 32

Or again, on
with the
last

5 December 1947 the steamer Kim arrived cargo of the year. On it were 3000 prisoners

who had been drenched with fire hoses during the trip, in the course of putting down some sort of riot. The temperature was 40C. There were many dead, who were carried by lorries to the common grave without post-mortem or certificate; and many more needed amputations or other
treatment.

But even the normal arrival at that coast is always moment of gloom. Even in August, a sea the colour of lead washed a rockbound shore, under cliffs up to a thousand feet high. Nagayevo, though a splendid external harbour, is outstanding for its harshness even on the notoriously inhospitable shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, and
described as a
for nearly three

hundred years of Russian settlement

it

had

been

left

deserted.

The prisoners disembarked. The dead and the very sick were laid out on the stony beach and checked. The remainder were formed up for the march to the Magadan transit camp, a few miles away from the coast. They found themselves in a strange land.

3&

CHAPTER TWO

INTO KOLYMA
The Kolyma Region
consists,

mainly, of the basin of the

source in
the East

Kolyma River, which winds northward from its the Gydan or Kolyma Range till it reaches
the Ukraine.

Siberian Sea near Ambarchik: a vast area about the size of

To

this

has been annexed a strip of coastal

territory to the south of the watershed, including

Magadan,

the capital.

The

climate of this southern strip, where the

is less

prisoners arrive,

extreme than most of the river basin,

though cold enough by most standards. The sea, for is frozen for scores of miles out from shore for five months of the year. Nevertheless the mildness of Magadan, Nagayevo and their surroundings, where the temperature has never fallen below 50C, is often remarked on by prisoners coming from northerly areas. General Gorbatov says, 'When I had first reached Magadan from Vladivostok it had seemed a wild place to me. Now, after Maldyak, Magadan seemed cosy and the air quite different, as if I had gone in November from the north of Russia to Sochi on the Black Sea Coast.' 5 The climate of the interior, where it may go down to - 7oC., is indeed the coldest in the Northern Hemisphere: the actual Pole of Cold is at Oymyakon, just over the
example,

Gydan.
36

INTO KOLYMA

A camp

rhyme

ran:

Kolyma, Kolyma

Chudnaya planeta
Dvenadsat mesyatsov zima Ostalnoye leto.

(Kolyma, Kolyma Wonderful planet: Twelve months winter* The rest summer.)

an exaggeration. The brief Arctic summer melts the snow, and the soil, to a depth of about six feet. In fact the hundred days of the mining season proper take place when the topsoil is at least warm enough to melt fairly easily when a fire is built on it, together with the two-month period when it is actually melted. At the same time the rivers
This
is

unfreeze.

But the Kolyma summer is almost as treacherous as the The ground becomes warm, especially on the southern slopes. But in some areas the swamps may go no deeper than a few feet, so that a road worker would be
winter.

standing in ice while being baked.

In addition, the insects are truly abominable, in particular in the coastal region.

One

specially large type of

gadfly can sting through deer hide,

and drives horses crazy.

to the insects,

The

local tribesmen,

however accustomed

always dress heavily and wear mittens and netting over their heads clothing which was not issued to prisoners

after the first years.

The freezing swamps of the upper valleys of the Kolyma

basin were variegated by small
settlements were often built.
hills,

or

sopki,

on which

The main
reaches of the
the

gold deposits are in and around the upper

Kolyma and

its

tributaries: that

is

to say, in

more southerly

section of the river basin,

though the

37

KOLYMA
history of the area since

1932

is

one of the continual

discovery and exploitation -of

new deposits. The area had been roughly known to the Russians for centuries. The first effective Russian crossing of the Urals came in the 1580s, when Yermak led his famous expedition.
But within an incredibly short span they had reached the Pacific. The Kolyma basin itself had been explored by 1650 Nizhne-Kolymsk, near the mouth of the river, had been founded as a trading post as early as 1644. In fact, paradoxical though it may seem, the far north of Siberia was penetrated and exploited before the more southerly areas. In those days, the north was swarming with

every type of fur-producing animal, and in particular the

unrivalled sable. Just as the

Hudson Bay Company,

in

parallel circumstances, held a fur-trading

empire in the far

north of western

Canada
it

as early as the late eighteenth

to the arctic

century, so in Siberia

was

and sub-arctic
first

lands that the adventurer or merchant were

attracted.

The

area was held by a handful of widely-scattered

which bands of hunters sought out their prey. From 1700, silver and tin mines were operating elsewhere in Siberia, and in 1 745 at Nerchinsk, near the Mongolian border, some gold was obtained as a
settlements or forts, between

by-product. Early in the nineteenth century gold deposits

proper were discovered at Nerchinsk and later in the Yenisey and Lena valleys. It was at first a state monopoly but private prospecting was allowed in 1826 and ten years

was also allowed, though the gold had to be delivered to the State. With the comparative exhaustion of the furs, gold became an important Siberian resource, but it was still on nothing like the scale that eventually developed in the
later private operation of gold finds

Kolyma basin. The first gold in Kolyma seems to have been found in 19 10 when a fugitive convict sold some to a trader. His
<

3&

INTO KOLYMA
name, or diminutive, survives Boriska and the first gold mine was called Boriskin. However, nothing was done until in 1925 a White officer called Nikolayev, who had been hiding out since the end of the anti-Bolshevik operations in 1922, took advantage of the 1925 amnesty and brought in some platinum. Prospecting parties were now sent into Kolyma. By the end of the twenties private traders were
bringing interesting quantities

down a

track over the

Gydan
like the

to the

clear that the

mouth of the Ola River. It was becoming Kolyma fields were exceptional, something
in 1927, at
first

equivalent of a Soviet Alaska.

Mining began
less

with free labour, though

than 200

men were

involved.

The government

per-

mitted them free enterprise and only maintained the old

monopoly of gold purchasing. In this it was outbidden by legal or semi-legal private traders. These were the first to cut a direct route through the taiga to the Sea
of Okhotsk.

The government was

face of it,
it

faced with great difficulty.

On the

could either give concessions to free enterprise or

amount of capital in the development of the area. But the first was ruled out for political reasons and there was no capital available. The solution was to make use
invest a great

of the one reserve material the government could dispose of

human

beings.

By

1930,

when

the position

became
starting,

clear, the first

great forced-labour projects

were

December 1931 Dalstroy, the Far Northern Construction Trust, was set up, in charge of all
'kulaks'. In

manned by

forced-labour projects in the north-east of Siberia. Reingold

Communist, was appointed its head. Dalstroy seems at first to have covered the new Kolyma region only. Eventually gold was also found on the Indigirka to the west, and this and various other areas of development such as the Chukhotsk peninsula gradually came under Dalstroy control. At the height of its operations,
Berzin, a Latvian

3$

KOLYMA
Dalstroy, which

was an

NKVD

agency, coming directly

under the Police Ministry in Moscow, controlled an enormous area, though its headquarters remained at Magadan. This area has never been precisely defined but it seems to have included all the territory beyond the Lena north of the Aldan as far as the Bering Straits: a territory four times the size of France. (And if it is true that in 1953 Dalstroy's then chief, Derevenko, was held responsible for the labour camp rebellion at Norilsk, it must then have stretched as far west as the Yenisey and controlled a region
as large as non-Soviet Europe.)

normal Soviet administration did not operate, and Dalstroy itself was in charge of all the activities of government. Thus, in Dalstroy's early days its Head simultaneously controlled the Kolyma camps. As its operations spread, its Head had a deputy responsible specifically for the Kolyma camps, whose post was Head of
In
all this

vast area, the

USVITL
rective

(the Administration of the North-Eastern Cor-

Labour Camps).
fell

was replaced as Head of Dalstroy by Pavlov, while the ill- famed Major Garanin became Head of USVITL and responsible for the Kolyma operations proper. Garanin was shot in 1939. His successors fell rapidly, Vyshnevetsky coming to grief with a disastrous first attempt to open up the Pestraya
After Berzin
in 1937, if

we may

anticipate, he

Dresva area in 1940. Meanwhile Pavlov had

fallen,

apparently owing to a

quarrel with Beria about production plans, and he was

replaced by the dreadful Ivan Nikishov

who seems

to

have

held the post until the end of the war. His successor Major-

General Derevenko lasted until 1953, about the end of the

era.

Known

successive heads of the

two organisations

are,

with approximate dates:

40

INTO KOLYMA
Dalstroy
E. P. Berzin 1932-7

USVITL
I. G. Filipov 1937 Maj. Garanin 1938-9 Maj. Yegorov 1939-40 Col. Vyshnevetsky 1940

K. A. Pavlov 1937-40 I. F. Nikishov 1940-6 P. P. Derevenko 1946-53

Col.

Gakayev 1941 Col. Drabkin 1942-

In

to exploit

93 1 -2, the decision was taken to base the campaign Kolyma on the splendid harbour of Nagayevo,
in spite of

and well protected from the wind by its its other disadvantages. It was impossible to build a real settlement at Nagayevo, so the operational base was set up beyond the cliffs some miles inland in a swampy area on the edge of the polar taiga. Here, in the early thirties, the settlement of Magadan was
several miles long

high

clifTs,

begun.
In the

summer of 1932,

collectivisation assault

the operation was launched. The on the peasantry had produced a

vast expansion in the

number of arrests. Of the

certainly

10 million

'kulaks' disposed of, half

probably died in famine and by

execution,

and of the remainder

no fewer than 3^

million poured into the prison camps.

share.

Kolyma

got

its

Throughout the navigational season scores of thousands of prisoners were put ashore at Nagayevo. It was a typical operation of the time, in that it was insufficiently prepared, the conditions had not been adequately investigated, and the programme was impossibly ambitious. This had to be made up for by simple human-wave tactics. Though the prisoners were treated ruthlessly, it Was not with the mean and vicious ruthlessness of later years. They were not deprived of food and clothing simply to procure their destruction. It was rather that, since everything else took priority over the prisoners' well-being, they were (for example) made to live in tents while hewing and placing the

KOLYMA
pier stones, cutting roads through the rocks,
to set

and beginning

up

the buildings of

Magadan.

This was, of course, the period in which the Soviet Union

dustrialisation,

and inand famine ravaged the rural areas. Supplies were naturally short for everybody, and prisoners were the first to suffer. The ration at this time was two pounds of
was engaged
in the struggle for collectivisation

bread; hot soup in the morning;

fatless

gruel at noon; hot

water at night.

The

winter of 1932-3 was exceptionally severe, with

blinding snowstorms. It was impossible at times even to

walk from one house to another in the middle of Magadan itself. The camps set up in the taiga were often completely cut off. Supplies failed, and in some camps, when communications were restored, it was found that no one was left, not even the dogs. According to one story a convoy lost its way in the Shaidinsky valley and died, several thousand prisoners with their guards, to a man. Survivors of the first year said that only one out of 50 or 1 00 of those 'thrown' into the first mass assault on the Kolyma gold came back.

One

prisoner records:

In March 1933, 600 prisoners were sent to Gold Mine No. 1 there were of the Mining Administration of the North two other administrations of the same kind, those of the West and the South. We set off on foot on this long journey.
.

We had to travel 370 miles in deep snow and during terribty

cold weather to the

Khatenakh

sopka.

16 miles a day, after which we spent the night in tents set up on the snow. After our scanty rations in

We had to make
we

out again. Those who were unable to march and died on the way were left with the snow for their only tomb. Our guards forbade us to give them a proper burial. Those who lagged behind were shot by the guards, without stopping the column. For thirty long days we trudged along over the immense expanses of snow, arriving at last exhausted at the sopka of
the morning,
set

survive this long gruelling

42

INTO KOLYMA
Khatenakh, where we were quartered
awaiting us. 10
in tents already

When
the

the navigation season opened again in 1933 the

the winter route, to build

new prisoners were sent up along

highway
to

Srednikan and thence to Seimchan, where

navigable. This

had the usual difficulties of road construction in a land of rivers and mountains. But in addition the thaw which now melted the upper levels of the permafrost made the whole ground intractably difficult. One section of the highway hardly a mile long is said to have swallowed over 80,000 beams and even years later was far from being firmly established, requiring repairs every year. These problems had not been properly allowed for. And, moreover, the route chosen from a too sketchy survey proved impractical, and a considerably longer one had to be followed. As a result the road was two years behind schedule, and was only properly finished in
the
1937-

Kolyma becomes

The heavy work on the roads and in the newly opened mining areas took its toll among the exhausted prisoners.
The summer of 933 is said to have cost more in human lives
1

than even the previous winter.

In 1934, the situation improved somewhat, and in 1935 Berzin was able to start the exploitation of Kolyma on a
rational basis.

1937 Kolyma

And now,

for

a couple of years

until late
calls
its

went through what Shalamov

'golden age'. All prisoners' accounts agree that Berzin instituted a

system by which the labour of the prisoners was efficiently

and

(as far as conditions

permitted) humanely used. It

is

said that

he sought and obtained special permission from

Stalin for this exceptionally careful handling of

human

resources to the

maximum

advantage. For he saw that a

prisoner
likely to

who was warm,

well-fed

and not overworked was

Stalin, at the time,

be more productive.

And

43

KOLYMA
needed gold from Kolyma more than he needed its punitive capacity. Under this regime gold production naturally
soared.

We have spoken of the harshness of the Kolyma climate.

But
it is

not unhealthy to

men

kept well fed and properly

clothed.

One prisoner

sent there in 1935

tubercular in jail and transit

who had become camp says that his tuberculosis

was actually cured by the climate, and that a doctor at Vladivostok had predicted this. Shalamov tells us of 'Excellent nourishment, good clothing, 4 to 6 hours work in winter, 10 hours in summer'.
Lipper speaks of the food as 'adequate when arrival of
supplies
difficulties

was

not

hampered

by

transportation
entitled to

and prisoners who worked well were

camp

additional food bought at the

commissary'.

Vodka

was even provided in the ration, during the cold weather, as both Lipper and Petrov tell us. Even more important, Lipper confirms that 'in winter the prisoners were given fur coats, fur caps and warm felt boots'. At the same time, 'the prisoners received good pay' c were well paid' (Petrov). (Shalamov); the prisoners. They were able to send money to their families.
.
.

Berzin even provided a non-material incentive. Shala-

mov tells us that 'The count of labour-days was managed in

such a way that prisoners condemned for ten years were let out after two or three.' At this point, indeed, this Soviet witness who (like Lipper but unlike Petrov) was not there
before 1937, oversimplifies the degree of 'liberalization' possible even in the most liberal of Stalinist periods and
places. Lipper has to qualify all her

comments with the

however, the

remark that

in general, *Even in those days,

treatment of criminals was considerably better than that of

counter-revolutionaries.

And for

the most part only crimi-

nals were given time off their sentences for satisfactory

work, which was a great incentive to their working welL'*3

INTO KOLYMA
Petrov
is

more

specific:

credit for

In those days in the Kolyma there was also a very high working days a shortening of the sentence for those who worked. Men sentenced for criminal acts received credit for ioo- 150 days per year, and sometimes for 200. Those sentenced for counter-revolution only on 58- 10 (agitation) received 50 days credit per year. Only the remaining others who had been sentenced on the more serious articles of the code received no credit at all. 23

Even

so,

the better physical treatment

went with, and

implied, a fairly
the prisoners.

humane
this

psychological relationship with

And

this in

element was not at

turn meant that the criminal time used by the administration as

an instrument

for terrorising the politicals,

but was held in

reasonable check.
It is also true that in this earlier

period the prisoners had

not experienced conditions in jail and in transit as crowded,

as ill-fed

and

as

unhealthy as became normal under

Yezhov.

And

these earlier prisoners

had a much lower

proportion of intellectuals and a higher one of peasants, not

only stronger and more adjusted to and experienced in

outdoor physical labour, but also

less

amenable
idyllic.

to bullying

by

urkas.

In retrospect, then, the period was

casualties of the
first

The

frightful

years were almost forgotten.

The

fact
all,

that the political prisoners should not have been there at

being innocent of anything except a

Stalin

and more often not even thatwas not the

And

critical attitude to

fault of

the local authorities.

elsewhere in Russia things were

already far worse.

June 1937 Plenum of

But the end of the Berzin era was approaching. At the the Central Committee, Stalin

personally attacked the practice which, he said,

into force, of 'coddling' prisoners.

had come Throughout the USSR

the response was a vast increase in brutality.

A decision

to

KOLYMA
extend
this to

Kolyma

came"shortly.

NKVD chief Yezhov,

denounced
on 11-12

certainly with Stalin's approval, specifically

conditions in the area 'with indignation' at a meeting of the

Central

Committeeevidently

the one held

October 1937.

The

fall

of Berzin and his associates naturally followed.

Berzin had been put up as a candidate in the election then

being held for the Supreme Soviet, but a week before the
voting prisoners noted that his portraits disappeared and his

name was withdrawn.

basis of his powerful

There seems to have been some apprehension that, on the and quasi-independent fief, Berzin might offer resistance. An NKVD delegation arrived with promises of awards and promotion, feted him in Magadan, and only arrested him on the airfield, of which their members had by then taken control. He was taken to Moscow, to be shot, apparently as a Japanese spy, on 1 November 1939* His wife was also jailed, as was then customary. The last ship of the season (as it happened the Nikolai Yezhov) meanwhile brought in hundreds of replacements for the lesser posts held by the Berzin gang. His close collaborators underwent the same fate; his deputy Filipov died or committed suicide in Magadan prison, Alexei Yezorov, called 'Red Liochka', head of the Southern Administration, Tsyrko, head of the Northern Administration, Mayzuradze, Vaskov But the Berzin affair also involved (as Shalamov tells us) 'the arrest and execution of several thousand people and the infliction of severe penalties on several thousand others, prisoners or otherwise: commandants of mines, of camps, of
. . .

sectors; instructors; secretaries of

Party committees; heads

.

of gangs; senior prisoners; brigade leaders.

.\ 28

At first this wave of arrests, though causing apprehension, did not appear to the ordinary prisoners to signify any basic
change. In the Northern Administration a prisoner noted

46

INTO KOLYMA
the arrest of
its

Chief Engineer, Eidlin, of the Heads and

Chief Engineers of a number of mines and of many other and the renaming of the Berzin mine as free employees *At-Urakh\ He and his mates were aware of 'endless secret

conferences of Party members' with the

Region's Political Section.

new Head of the They saw barbed wire being set

machine-gun
told
posts.

up everywhere,
worked
in the

searchlights,

More definite rumours began

Planning Section
one.

to percolate:
.

'A friend
that

me

who Moscow

revoked the earlier plan for gold production and sent in a

new and much higher

receive

Our

Administration was to
. .

an additional 30,000 prisoners

.'

And

then:

Late at night, while Khudiakov, Stepanov and I were asleep in our room near the carpentry shop, someone knocked violently on the door. I opened it. Sukhanov entered, looking very upset. 'What has happened?' I asked. 'Be prepared for very unpleasant things. There has just been a meeting of the leading personnel of the Administration. We were informed of new instructions from Pavlov, the chief of Dais troy. We are ordered to remove im* mediately from administrative posts all prisoners sentenced for counter-revolution and send them to general work at the mines. All the other prisoners can remain temporarily only at the most common, non-responsible work.' 23
This was the
prisoners which
first

blow

in the

mass terror against the

now ensued. The year that followed was the

most
seen,

frightful the

camps had known. Previous years had on occasion, massive casualties. But these had been

due

to inefficiencies in supply,

assignments in impossible conditions, and in fact

exaggerated form
of Soviet
life.

the normal incompetence and brutality

if in

attempts to carry out

When

the difficulties could be overcome,

seen,

conditions, as

we have

prisoners were not subjected to lethal conditions

pose.

were tolerable. But above all, on pur-

KOLYMA

Now came a regime under which the prisoners'

of survival, even
the ration system
if

chances

they escaped the

which ensued, were reduced to

wave of executions a minimum. Not only was

that survival, except
as clerk or nurse,

made so inadequate

by the holders of 'functions', such

became

impossible over any long period, but even such disgusting

harassments took place as the banning of adequate clothing.

Under newly

enforced regulations, fur clothing was

trousers

banned and replaced by wadding jackets and

prisoners'. 13 Felt boots

'which soon hung like torn rags upon the bodies of the gaunt

were similarly replaced by canvas

shoes.

The

result,

the only result, was, as

was

clearly

intended, a great increase in suffering and in death. This

more clearly than anything else the animus of the new authorities. Everywhere those in charge of the camps were given higher and higher production targets. At the same time their human raw material became increasingly weaker and less effective. Those who arrived from the 'mainland', mostly townsmen, had experienced the intensely debilitating effects of the Yezhov prison regime and of the cattle trucks and rations and of Vladivostok transit camp. In Kolyma they were driven directly to hard physical labour for which they were quite unfitted. The newly introduced ration scales were barely sufficient even for those who fulfilled their full norms and impossible for others. As output dropped the local NKVD commandants had no option but to increase working hours so that a vicious circle was
single point illustrates

established. The only way the system could be kept going at

all

was that as the 'goners' died out, they were replaced by a

continual stream of

new

prisoners.

One

estimate

is

that
life.

henceforward every kilogram of gold cost one

human

48

CHAPTER THREE

1938 BAPTISM OF
And
so

HORROR

Kolyma

entered

its

long period as the worst and

areas.

There were 'good' years and bad years in the epoch which followed. None was to be quite as bad as 1938 itself; but none was to be more than a comparative relief. Meanwhile, as the winter of 1937 -8 set in, the 'tempest', as prisoners described it, began to rage more and more violently. The first major policy decision was to insist on winter work in the mines though, as Petrov points out, this was highly uneconomic especially as regards labour. The prisoners did find that 'work in the mine held one vast advantage it was relatively warm. There was no snow, no icy piercing wind. The steam which thawed out the sand also lent some warmth to the air. The water in the draining
deadliest of all

the labour

camp

ditches froze only at the very exit of the mine.'

But there were also disadvantages. The boots were always wet, never quite drying out rheumatism was guaranteed. Then, the air in the pit, where there was no ventilation whatsoever, was filled twice daily with the poisonous fumes of blasted ammonal. Only thirty minutes were allowed for the clearing of the fumes through the entrance of the mine, after which the workers were driven back into the pits to continue their work. Many of them succumbed to the

49

KOLYMA
poisoned atmosphere and coughed violently, spitting blood and often particles of lung. After a short time, these were usually sent either to the weak squads for lumbering, or to their graves. Mortality was especially high among the men who carted the wet sand from the barrack after the washing. From the steamy, damp atmosphere of the heater the perspiring wheelbarrow-pushers slipped through the opening, which was covered by an old blanket, rolling out their wheelbarrows into the piercing 50 -below-zero frost. The time limit in this work was, at the most, one month, after which either pneumonia or meningitis dispatched the worker into the next world. 23

The new
politicians,

prisoners, moreover,

were mainly people who

'Scientists,
artists,

had never done any physical work:

educators,
leaders

of industry,

trade,

and

government.' 13

A veteran

prisoner describes them:

Their faces all showed signs of frostbite, although the winter was only three months old and the most severe frosts were yet to come. The majority of them were so dirty looking I

wager that some of them had not washed Their clothes were like nothing I had ever seen at the Kolyma everything from the torn boots to the incredibly dirty rags wrapped around their necks instead of scarves, their burned and tattered winter coats. The men had starved, worn-out faces, quiet voices, were completely absorbed in themselves and uncommunicative. Their range of interest was limited to work and food, and more food, and food again. Besides work and food the other questions discussed among them were tobacco the eternal Kolyma shag and the cold.

was willing

to

their faces for weeks.

They came to the tent after having supper in the dining room. They had rushed there as soon as they had returned to the camp from work and immediately crowded around the stoves, coming so close that one feared they would catch fire. Indeed, now and again one heard voices: 'Look out Your coat's burning !' The repulsive smell of burning rags would come up and bite into your nostrils.

50

I93 8

BAPTISM OF HORROR

The sight of these creatures who had almost lost the image of man made me feel distinctly uncomfortable. The possibility of becoming one of them seemed anything but
attractive. 23

Conditions killed them off quickly. But 'conditions' were

assisted

by a massive employment of execution

as a reprisal

against failure to produce adequate gold, and, in effect, on

any pretext whatever. The visible villain was Major,

the

later Colonel,

Garanin,

of USVITL. His rule gave his name to a whole epoch of terror the Garaninshchina^ as with the

new Head

Yezhovshchina

which was sweeping the

USSR

as a whole.

arrests began in the camp. As a rule the charge was systematic underfulfilment of quotas. Since no man in the gold field could possibly fulfil them, the failure was ascribed as criminal when the worker completed less than

Wholesale

50 per cent of the quota.

It was absolutely impossible to measure accurately the exact performance of a worker, and the estimate made depended entirely upon the attitude of the foremen. The foremen made daily measurements in a rough and ready fashion with the help of a tape line, and made their reports to the office where the volume of excavated sand was translated into percentages of the daily quota fulfilled by each brigade. In doing this a practice was systematically resorted to whereby a certain amount of work performed by the less efficient brigades was stolen from them and credited to the better brigades as a means of encouraging them. But the foremen were not altogether free in recording their measurements. Once a month a measurement of the mine's entire output was made by surveyors with instruments of great accuracy. The engineers measured the depth the mine increased during the month, and compared this with the added-up measurements of the foremen. When the figures disagreed and they always did, and to a great extent the foremen were merely reprimanded. Now, by Pavlov's new order, foremen guilty of excessive measurements were to be

Si

KOLYMA
put on trial. The same order stated the fact that six foremen had been executed for deceiving the State. It was natural that the foremen often went to the other extremecharity begins at home and deliberately gave lower figures. The official figures for labour productivity immediately

dropped heavily.

Then

the firing squad set to work.

three-man court the Troika appeared at the gold field. He held conferences with the section heads and demanded lists from them of
representative of the

NKVD

malicious saboteurs who systematically failed to make their quotas. The section heads had no alternative but to prepare

such lists and to include in them the least able workers who lowered the average labour productivity for that section. 23

Another veteran convict

recalls:

In our mine the Third Section . . was particularly active during the 1937-8 period. Some nights when we came back from work, the guards read out thirty to fifty names. The persons called had to step out of the ranks and were marched off immediately to the prison. The next morning they were driven in trucks to the Khatenakh sopka, where they were shot. In the evening, in addition to the list of new victims, the guards would read us the announcement: 'By judgement of (then would follow the names of the camp command' 'shot for sabotage, ill-will, those who had been executed)
.

and agitation against the Soviet power.' 10

r,

as Solzhenitsyn categorises the crimes (the

announceto the

ment of which was followed by the pinning of the lists

camp

notice boards): 'for counter-revolutionary agitation',

'for insulting

the guard', 'for failure to

fulfil

Shalamov well develops what

to:

these

work norm'. offences amounted

the

'For counter-revolutionary agitation*. This was the way one of the paragraphs in Garanin's sentences began. For the man in the street in 1937 it hardly needed explaining what

52

1938

BAPTISM OF HORROR

counter-revolutionary agitation was: Praising a Russian novel published abroad ten years; declaring that one queued too long to buy soap five years. ... But in the camps there was none of this gradation: five, ten, twenty years. Say aloud that the work was harsh, mutter the most innocent remark about Stalin, keep silent while the crowd of prisoners yelled 'Long live Stalin', and you're No trial, no investigation. shot -silence is agitation! The proceedings of the Troika, that famous institution, always meant death.

guard'.
gesture

shot also for 'outrage against a member of the Any insult, any insufficiently respectful reply, any 'discussion' when hit, or beaten up, any too disrespectful a

They

by a prisoner towards a guard was called 'an attempt at violence against the guard'. They shot for 'refusal to work'. Thousands of prisoners died before understanding the mortal danger of their attitude. Old men at the end of their strength, exhausted and famished skeletons, incapable of walking a step to reach
the

camp

gate in the morning

when

the columns

wound

towards the mine, stayed on their mattresses. They wrote their refusal on forms roneoed in advance: 'Although shod and clothed in conformity with the exigencies of the .' The richer mines ran to properly printed forms season where it was enough to write the name and a few points: 'date of birth, article of the law, duration of sentence'. Three refusals meant the execution platoon 'according to the law'. ... Even at the end of one's strength, one had to go to the mine; the gang chief signed every morning for this 'unit of production' and the administration counter-signed. This done the prisoner was saved, for this day he escaped death. Once out he could not work since he was incapable of it. He had to endure his day of torture to the end, but he was not classed as refractory. The administration could not then shoot the sick man; it hadn't, they said, 'the right'. I will not judge the extent of these rights, but for long years I struggled against myself to not refuse to go to the mine and to drag myself to the gates of the 'zone'.
. .

53

KOLYMA
The
last

prisoners

heading the richest under which they shot by waves was 'non-fulfilment of norms'. This

crime took entire brigades to the common graves. The authorities provided a theoretical basis for this rigour: all over the country the Five Year Plan was broken down into precise figures in each factory for each establishment. At Kolyma they were broken down for each gang. 'The Five Year Plan is the law Not to carry out the Plan is a crime!' 28
!

And

so, in

a camp, 'For more than a month, day and

night, at each

morning and evening roll call, an officer would read out the flowing lists of the condemned to death. At 50C, musicians chosen from the common criminals would sound a fanfare before and after the reading of each Each list invariably ended with the words: document. "The judgement has been executed. Chief of USVITL,
. .

Colonel Garanin."

'

28

According

to various accounts,

accepted by

Roy Med-

vedev and others, Garanin himself used to walk down the line of prisoners on parade, shooting them when he felt like it: two soldiers followed him taking turns at loading his

on occasion. But, according at least to Shalamov, who saw him some fifteen times on his visits to camps of the Northern Administration, this particular story is a legend: as 'chairman of the liquidation Troika', he was
revolver. Perhaps,

'content to sign the decrees'. If Garanin personally did not

shoot prisoners, at least in public, the story nevertheless

seems to have a foundation in fact, as with lesser officials such as Nikolai Aglamov, Head of the Southern Camp
Administration,
guilty of something
'liked to select a brigade which was from those paraded before him. He would order it to be led to one side and himself shot the terrified people with his pistol as they huddled together, accompanying the operation with merry cries. The bodies were not buried; when May came they decomposed and then prisoners who had survived were summoned to bury

who

54

1938 BAPTISM OF HORROR

and even alcohol.' 32 This attitude to human life became common among the NKVD 21s a whole. A typical account is of a drunken NKVD officer appearing at a work site, accusing prisoners of stealing drinking bowls from the State (it was then quite common for them to carry their gruel to the work site to eat it) and shooting wildly at the group, killing one and wounding two others. 23 In the women's camps, too, random killing was the norm. That year, 1 May and 7 November were celebrated by

them

in return for increased rations

sending batches of prisoners, without other pretext, to the

where many died. Then, on the usual parades, would be given for every tenth woman to be taken out and shot. 22 On one occasion thirty Polish women were shot in a batch at the Elgen camp. 32 Meanwhile starvation and epidemics took their toll, as in the men's camps. Many camps became famous for their executions and
penalty
cells,

the order

mass graves: Orotukan, Polyarny Spring, Svistoplyas,

Annushka and even the agricultural camp Dukcha.* 32 The Zolotisti mine had a particularly murderous reputation.
There, Solzhenitsyn
face during the
as usual.)' 32
tells us,

brigades 'were taken from the

after the other

day and shot one

on the spot.

(This was not instead of executions at night

those went on
KRTD

On

his

formal rounds Garanin

took special note of those who were convicted of (counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activity) 'Which of these have not met their quota?' he would ask. Most had not, could not. At evening roll call, when they returned from the mines, he would call out these unfortunates, revile them as saboteurs who were trying to continue their criminal counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities even in camp, and he would have them driven in a herd out of the gate. At a short distance from the camp they would be shot en masse under his personal supervision.

55

KOLYMA
This was still not enough. At night he would have thousands of enemies of the people taken out of all the Kolyma camps, loaded on to trucks and driven off to a prison. This prison, called Serpantinka, is about 375 miles west of Magadan, in the midst of the forest, and it is probably one of the most ghastly institutions in the Soviet

Union. 13

The Serpantinka

(or Serpantinnaya)

death

camp was

indeed the scene of mass executions continually through

1938, as the liquidation centre of the Northern Administration.
It

recalls that

had been carefully prepared. One prisoner on a long journey,

the way up, a little off from the road, we passed a few long and unpleasant-looking barracks. At one time those barracks had housed a road-building unit, and were called Serpantinnaya, but since the completion of the road to Khatenakh they had been empty for over a year. I recalled that a few days before, by orders from Magadan, Serpantinnaya had been transferred to the district section of the which sent two brigades of men there to carry out some secret work. The little camp was to be fenced with three rows of barbed wire, watch towers for sentries were to be erected every 25 yards, and a commodious house for officials and guards would be built as well as a garage. What puzzled me was the garage. It was not usual to build a garage in a small camp like this, especially since only three miles away were the big garages in the Khatenakh camp and in the Vodopyanov gold mines. Later I learned it was used to house two tractors, the engines of which produced enough noise to deaden the sounds of shooting and cries of the men. However, after a short stay, the tractors were moved to some gold field, and the automobile drivers who passed the camp at night sometimes heard the proceedings there with the utmost clarity. 23

On

NKVD

Another account
thirty to fifty people

tells

us that, 'At Serpantinka each

day

were shot in a shed near the cooler. The

5fc

1938

BAPTISM OF HORROR
mound on
motorised

corpses were then dragged behind a

sledges.
.

led with eyes

.There was also another method: prisoners were bound to a deep trench and were shot in the

ear or the back of the neck.' 32

Serpantinka victims sometimes waited several days to be

shot, standing in

given a drink

them

they could not move

it

a shed packed so tight that when they were in the form of pieces of ice being thrown in to
their hands for
it

and had

to try

to catch

in their mouths. 32

Another prisoner describes a particular case of an

acquaintance:
Skeletons, they worked badly. Dyukov (the brigade leader) asked for better rations. The director refused. The famished gang tried heroically to fulfil the norms and faded away. Everyone turned against Dyukov. . Dyukov made more and more vigorous complaints and protests. His gang's output went on falling, and so its rations went down. Dyukov tried to intercede with the administration. This in turn asked the competent services to inscribe Dyukov and
.
.

his

men on the 'lists'. They shot Dyukov and morning by the Serpantinka. 28
Only a few fortunate
prisoners,

all his

gang one

who were

sentenced

merely to a ten-year addition to their term, came back from

Serpantinka to the camps. 'Years later they were so gripped

by the horror of it that they did not dare to tell their fellow prisoners of the inhumanity they had seen and experienced. When they at last brought themselves to speak of it, they looked anxiously around to make sure that no informer was
near by.' 13

When,

in the natural course of events,

himself executed

the

following year

Berzin, as a 'Japanese spy'

apparently,

Garanin was
like

his

Serpantinka subordinates

down

diggers were shot too

and graveand the camp was razed. His victims, however, were not rehabilitated and none of his sentences
to rank-and-file executioners, drivers

3%.

KOLYMA
was quashed. Later gold was found on the site, and had to be dug up through a veritable stratum of bones. Serpantinka-type operations are estimated to have seen
about 26,000 executions in 1938. The remainder of the 40,000 or more who (according to Roy Medvedev) were
shot over the whole region during that year, perished near
their

own camps

or at other regional centres.

five

Many
Since the

more, probably between

and ten times

as

many, simply died of hunger, cold and overwork:

summer

of 1938, that

summer of unhallowed

memory, there were three degrees of punishment in the camps of the Northern Administration. The highest was almost equivalent was exile to the shooting; the second Shturmovoy mine, to the separate camp at Panning'Unit No. 8; the third and mildest, imprisonment in the local

punishment cell at the camp where the culprit lived. It was rumoured about the Eighth Unit at Shturmovoy that no one could survive the regime there for more than a month, and that even more people passed through this camp than through the butcher shop at Serpantinnaya. 23

A
The
filth

lorry driver
tents

tells

that at

Shturmovoy,

were

full

of gaping holes through which blew the

cold winter air.

The broken iron stoves were not lit. The was unbelievable. The beds had neither mattresses,

blankets, nor pillows. Only here and there dirty rags lay strewn about. Seeing that there was nothing to choose from, since all tents were the same, I went into one of them and began to pace from corner to corner, to warm myself a little. I paced for a long time. ... It had been long dark when the men returned from work. They brought some firewood and the stoves belched forth smoke from all their holes, creating an illusion of warmth. The tents were lighted only by the fire in the stove there were no lamps. Only the yard was lit by the dazzling searchlights set up in the watchtowers.

58

1938

BAPTISM OF HORROR
variety of

had seen a great

men

during

my

stay at

Tumanny, among them many like those who sat around the
stove in the smoke-filled tent, but I had never seen such a complete collection of typical dokhodyagas ['goners']. 23
But. even in the ordinary camps,

Even

in the early

weeks of the brief Kolyma summer, the

men revealed a tendency to die at a rate never before known

in the region. Frequently this happened all of a sudden, sometimes even while the man was at work. A man pushing a wheelbarrow up the high runway to the panning apparatus would suddenly halt, sway for a moment, and fall down from a height of 24 to 30 feet. And that was the end. Or a man loading a barrow, prodded by the shouts of a foreman or a guard, unexpectedly would sink to the ground, blood would gush from his mouth and everything was over. The death rate was particularly high among men brought to the Kolyma during the last six months. Their body resistance had been undermined in jail before they were shipped to the gold fields, and they simply succumbed under the violent pace of work. 23

Shalamov

describes

how

in his

camp,

similarly,

In the whole of 1937 on ^y two men out f two or three thousand, one prisoner and one free man, had died in the Partisan mine. They buried them side by side under a hill. Two rough monuments, a rather smaller one for the prisoner, marked their two tombs. But in 1938 an entire brigade worked permanently digging graves. The rock and the eternally frozen earth of the permafrost refused the corpses. The rock had to be dynamited, broken open, prised apart. Digging graves involved the same procedure, the same instruments, the same material and the same workers as digging for gold. The whole brigade filled its days making these graves, or rather, ditches into which the anonymous corpses were fraternally piled not totally
.


KOLYMA,
anonymous perhaps,

since following instructions the subboss representing the administration attached a tag carry-

ing the number of his personal case to the left leg of the naked corpse before burial. ... The doctors did not dare in their reports to give the real cause of death. There burgeoned 'polyvitaminoses', 'pellagra', 'EPE': the enigmatic EPE was 'extreme physiologi-

which represented a step towards the truth. But only the boldest doctors, not themselves prisoners, gave such diagnoses. The formula 'alimentary dystrophy' slipped later into the reports of the Kolyma doctors, after the blockade of Leningrad during the war when it became possible to name, even though only in Latin, the true cause of death. 28
cal debilitation', a diagnosis

a new category of imprisonment was introduced katorga. The word, referring to the old Tsarist system of forced labour, was in fact far worse. The katorzhniki worked in special camps, in chains, and without

Not long

after,

blankets or mattresses at nights. None survived. The 'tempest' of 1938 was the worst time of

all

in

Kolyma. Though

things

improved a

little

the following
in force.

year, the principles established in 1938

remained

The

appalling ration scales, the ban on

warm

clothes

and
still

shoes, a death rate lower than that of 1938 but

murderously high, marked the whole period.

As

in the rest of the country, 1938 represented a violent

It

breaking with old standards.

sense

was-followed by, and

a
less

it

constituted the foundation stone

of,

ravaging but in a

systematisation of permanent terror. There

lessening in indiscriminate shooting:

an even more dehumanising consolidation and was a marked

but that sanction

remained, and was enforced frequently enough

prisoners'
life

when it was
forfeit

thought suitable. The basic attitude of the authorities to the

that

it

was

in

effect

already

remained

firm.

60

1938

BAPTISM OF HORROR
tells us:

In the winter of 1938-9^ a prisoner

Things became somewhat calmer. There were scarcely any shootings now, but the mortality rate did not diminish since the physical resistance of the prisoners, undermined by the difficult spring and summer, now disappeared entirely under the hard winter conditions. It must also be added that the diet of the workers deteriorated dreadfully with the end of the large-scale washing. 'There is no gold, so they give us no food,' I was told by an acquaintance, an employee of the local Supply Section. 23

One of the new orders was that work, which had hitherto stopped when the temperature went down to 50 would
,

was 6o. However, no thermometer was visible to the prisoners and instructions were simply phoned down by the administration. Only three working days were
go on
until
it

cancelled for reasons of low temperature in the winter of

the woodcutting workers

1938-9 as against fifteen the previous winter, but even then had to go out.

The continuity of the official attitude to the prisoners can

documented at this point by a brief selection of incidents and developments spanning the whole period. Mrs Ginzburg recalls the fate of a friend in the winter of
best be

1939-4-

One of us found a fairly recent number ofPravda, and when we read it after lights-out, its contents caused a sensation,
for
it

gave the

respectful

full text of Hitler's latest speech followed by a commentary and a two-page photograph of

Molotov receiving Von Ribbentrop. *A charming family group!' remarked Katya Rotmistrovskaya, as she climbed on to her upper bunk. She was rash. I had warned her repeatedly that there were people among us who listened carefully to what was said at night.
In the end, Katya's lack of prudence cost her her life. Six months later she was shot for 'anti-Soviet propaganda in the
huts'. 4

61

KOLYMA
Iq 1940, a Pole
tells us,

The orchestra very often played while the prisoners were at

work. To the accompaniment of this music, the guards would fall out prisoners whose work was especially feeble and shoot them, there and then. The shots rang out one after another. The bodies of the murdered men were also buried under the brushwood on the surface of the mines. A Jew from Lwow working alongside me was so exhausted that he repeatedly fainted at work.

The guard ordered

him

to fall out, took

I

shot.

him to a near-by shed, and there he was heard the shot and saw his body a few minutes later. 2

In the

summer

of 1940, Shalamov

tells

us of the local
It

'mobile detachment' designed to catch escapers.

was

commanded by
passion.

the

young Corporal Postnikov.

fulfilled his task

Drunk with murder he

with zeal and

He had personally captured five men. As always in

the living. It

such cases he had been decorated and received a premium.

The reward was the same for the dead and

was

not necessary to deliver the prisoners complete. One August morning a man who was going to drink at a stream fell into an ambush set by Postnikov and his soldiers. Postnikov shot him down with a revolver. They decided not to drag the body to the camp but to leave it in the taiga. The signs of bears and wolves were numerous. For identification, Postnikov cut off the fugitive's hands with an axe. He put the hands in his knapsack and went to make his report on the hunt. The report went out the same day. One soldier carried the packet. Postnikov gave leave to die others in honour of the occasion. ... In the night the corpse got up. Pressing his bleeding wrists against his chest, he left the taiga following the trail and reached the prisoners' tent. With pale face, mad blue eyes, he looked inside, holding himself at the opening, leaning against the

door posts and muttering something. Fever devoured him. His padded coat, his trousers, his rubber boots were stained with black blood. They gave him warm soup, wrapped his chopped-off

1938 BAPTISM OF HORROR

wrists in rags

and took him to the infirmary. But already Postnikov and his men came running out of their little hut. The soldiers took the prisoner. He was not heard of 28 again.
. . .

shall

recounts, in the same year, a refrain we meet again: 'We stood about for some time by the camp gates while our guards argued with Kucherenko, a big copper-faced man in charge of the infirmary and

Mrs Ginzburg

politely called "doctor", but in fact only a medical orderly.

We

heard him say: "What

y

if some of them die on the

way?

They

re politicals.

You can

see

how

they are dressed." As

were the worst of any.' 4 In 1940 or early 1941, a free sailor at Nagayevo saw the following incident. Boxes of tinned and bottled food were being unloaded from a steamer. One fell and broke open. A bottle of preserved fruit was smashed. The stevedore bent down, picked up a piece of pear or some other fruit and put it in his mouth. The NKVD man on guard went up to him without a word and with a shot from his revolver laid him out on the spot. 'That is the rule', the sailor comments, 'for theft while loading murder on the spot even if the theft
usual, our clothes

is

of the kind described in

.

this case.
. .

Nevertheless there

is

great deal of stealing.

Life

in

any case

is

worth

nothing.

33
.
.

In 1 94 1, on the outbreak of war, prisoners sentenced under Article 58 were sent from Magadan to camps in the interior; the official ten-hour working day was raised to twelve and less officially was often sixteen; and no holidays of any sort permitted. The bread ration was fatally reduced from a kilo to half a kilo. Non-fulfilment of norms

was treated

as ruthlessly as in 1938, as sabotage, involving

the death penalty. Sentences (signed at the time by Colonel Drabkin) were hung in the eating rooms.
All

accounts of

this

period show

it

to

have been

63

KOLYMA
particularly lethal. But

when

the

war ended, and more

normal conditions were mained.

In 1949, a

restored, the basic attitude re-

camp doctor

called

prisoner, 'Before being a doctor, I

Major Vostokov told one am a chekist and as such I

y

you that you are not brought here to live but to suffer and die. If you live it means that you are guilty of one of two things: either you worked less than was assigned you or you ate more than your proper due.' 31 In 1950, after the first Communist defeats in Korea, a new wave of terror swept Kolyma: officials, or some of them, seemed genuinely to fear a general war and the arrival of the Americans. One prisoner reports being harangued to the effect that if the Allies did indeed land 'we shall blow up the mine entrances and you will die like rats, 200 yards below without seeing a single American or British unitell
.

must

form.' 31

Orders came to carry out mass shootings for the slightest slowdown. Camp commandants had a free hand. Some shot
prisoners at

random, simply

to spread terror. Prisoners

who

after fourteen hours in the

mines could not do further work,

were shot and their bodies left on the ground for a day as a warning. Food became worse and scarcer, the output went down, and execution for sabotage became common. And

we

are told, for example, that at Debin, in 1951, three

prisoners of a group

which had been allowed out to gather berries got lost. When they were found their heads were bashed in with rifle butts, and the camp chief, Senior Lieutenant Lomaga, had their bodies hauled past the
assembled inmates in that condition. 32

When this particular wave of terror passed, normal terror

was resumed. And the continuing attitude reported by Mrs Ginzburg in 1939 was still expressed openly: 'More than once, one of the officers told us contemptuously: "If you think that we are so anxious to get more metal that we will

I93 8

BAPTISM OF HORROR
alive, you're

do
is

all in

our power to keep you

mistaken
All

We

don't give a damn for your output or your

to punish

lives.

we want

you

for

your crimes!"

'

31

Even accounts of Kolyma in 1953 show no real improvement in conditions. But the prisoners' morale naturally rose with Stalin's death and the fall of Beria, while the administration was shaken and became a trifle uncertain for the same reasons.

The immediate
oners doing
less

post-Stalin

amnesty only affected

pris-

than five years, so applied almost entirely to

common criminals. In one camp, only 2 out of 250 prisoners

by the amnesty. Symbolic changes in the camp included a cancellation of the rule requiring prisoners to wear numbers on their clothing, and from then on they were called by their names. In one camp, the commandant, a Colonel Vasiliev,
benefited

commonly known
routine if he

as 'the Rat',

who a month

previously

'would have beaten a prisoner to death as a matter of

had caught him without a number', delivered a strange harangue to his charges, lasting more than an hour, beginning with the revolt of Spartacus and ending by threatening severe punishment to anyone caught wearing a number. He concluded, 'Woe to those who misunderstand our deeds and mistake our humanitarian feelings for weakness They will be summarily wiped out.' 31 It was only in 1955-6 that we can really speak of the system coming to an end, or at least becoming far smaller, less arbitrary, and with a much lower death rate. The days when Kolyma was one end of the spectrum typifying Stalinism, with the Lubyanka at the other, had ended, and
!

only the labour

camp

system as

it

persists

today remained.

When we

deal, in the chapters that follow, with every

aspect of Kolyma,

we shall see

that the accounts vary

little,

even as concerns quite minor detail, whether they are dated

from 1939 or 1943 or 1948 or 1952.

65

KOLYMA

We have
actions
1938, the

in this chapter dealt briefly with the frightful

habits of mind on which, from Kolyma system proper was built, and sketched the persistence of that tradition. As we said, there were to be ups and downs, 'good' years and bad. The differences are

and the inhumane

worth recording. But they were no more than minor

variations in a consistent pattern, in the established order of

Kolyma which we shall be describing. Over the whole period, the ruling principle of Kolyma was that expressed in the brief and well-remembered
things in the

address which the post-war

Head

of Dalstroy, General

Derevenko, used to greet the newly arrived drafts as they

The law

is Kolyma! and the public prosecutor is the bear Never expect to eat soup and bread together. What comes first, eat first What's gone from your hands is lost for ever. You are here to work, and to work hard You must repay with your sweat and tears the crimes perpetrated against the Soviet State and the Soviet people No tricks, no

fell

in in fives at
is

Nagayevo: 'Convicts! This

the taiga,

monkey
pitiless

business.

We

are fair with those

who

co-operate,

who don't. We need metal, and you must produce this metal according to The Plan. The fulfilment of The Plan is our sacred duty. Those who do not fulfil The Plan are saboteurs and traitors, and we show them no
with those

mercy

!'

31

66

CHAPTER FOUR

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

In

Kolyma a whole new

social order in

microcosm arose,
but also a

with not only a formal and

together with

official structure,

network of economic and other relationships and customs,

the growth of deep-set habits of

mind

appropriate to the society which gave them birth.

Kolyma social system reflected, in exaggerated form, the new nexus of privilege, power, exploitation and subordination which had come into being throughout the USSR. At the pinnacle of the Kolyma 'new class' came, of course, the Head of Dalstroy a potentate whose word was
This

law throughout the vast territories of the North-East.* We can easily set out the handful of other families who constituted the crime de la crime: they were those who had the privilege of shopping in the special store already one of the perquisites of the Stalinist elite throughout the Soviet Union, which remains to this day one of the great economic benefits awarded to the privilegentsia. At Magadan this was

* The area was once visited at a time in 1 952 when a nuclear plant was planned to use the recently discovered uranium deposits by a man even more powerful than the Head of Dalstroy This was Beria's close associate General Goglidze, who terrified everybody, both official and prisoner. He was at this time Head of the Secret Police for ther whole of the Far East. His execution the following year was welcomed by all.

67

KOLYMA
known
as the Devyatka, or 'Miner'.

Only nine

families held

the special pass which procured them, even in wartime,

every luxury from oranges to chocolate to fine shoes and

American
i
.

cigarettes.

These were:

The Head

of Dalstroy

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.
7.

8.
~

9.

Head of USVITL The Head of the Political Administration The Head of Procurement The Head of the NKVD Troops in Kolyma The Head of the Guard Troops in Kolyma The Head of the Regular Troops in Kolyma The Head of the Economic Department The Head of the Health Department for ail Dalstroy 13
His deputy, the
these, in

Below

an intricate pecking order beset with endless

petty struggles for advantage,

came

first

their official

subordinates, according to rank; then the free specialists;

then the urkas; and finally the

'political' prisoners.

The

successive heads of Dalstroy were, particularly in

their position of comparative isolation

from the

rest

of the

USSR, men
distant

of power

responsible

satraps of the most

Stalin empire.

and detached province of the

They

normally ranked high. Nikishov was not merely a

of the Supreme Soviet, but actually a (candidate)

member member

of the Central Committee

Suslov and the others.
so
It
is

itself,

a colleague of Kosygin,

true that they were subject to the

usual precariousness of high position under despotism; but

were members of the Politburo

fruits.

itself.

Meanwhile, they

enjoyed the

Nikishov in 1942, at the age of fifty, divorced his first wife and iharried a Young Communist of twenty-nine named
"Gridassova, a primitive, crude, avaricious creature,

Mrs Upper tells us, 'who was only too well known to myself and
to other female prisoners, for she functioned as the harsh

commander of

the

Magadan women's camp.' Thanks

to

her husband's position she rose in the military hierarchy

68

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

and was decorated. She became the Head of Maglag, the camp district of Magadan and the surrounding region, and
ruled the lives of tens of thousands of prisoners.

The couple's country house forty-five miles north-west of Magadan was furnished and equipped in the greatest
comfort and was surrounded by Nikishov's private hunting
preserve. 'Nearby the prisoners of the invalid

camp

called

"Seventy-second Kilometre" worked in a glass factory

which was under the

record.

special protection of Gridassova

and

consequently always registered a marvellous production

repaired there, since

During the war burnt-out electric bulbs were new bulbs were almost unobtainable and even tiny bulbs were sold at 150 roubles.' 13

The Derevenkos, who succeeded the Nikishovs, also lived

like princes.

Derevenko

organised his

own

theatre,

had

his

own

court

artists,

wrestlers, clowns,

and

so on.

When

sea traffic opened he

would fly from Magadan

to Vanino in his own plane, along with his artistic advisers, and select from the tens of thousands of unfortunates a handful of prisoners considered good enough by Captain Ziger, his first counsellor, to join his personal theatre company. Ostensibly this theatrical to distract his overworked mind from his heavy state responsibilities. For those few actors and artists, life was different from that of the other prisoners. They lived in town, had a few amenities, performed on the stage, and went around in two big American Diamond-T trucks to play before camp inmates. Derevenko's prisoner troupe

company was

toured the labour camps in the entire north-eastern tip of camp about once a month. This was no amateur group. It included numerous professionals who had not only performed at the Bolshoi, but on the main stages of Europe. They travelled with reasonably good costumes and sets. Derevenko . . charged each prisoner 15 roubles admission per performance. Obviously none of the prisoners had that kind of money. But the regime provided an allowance for each prisoner, the allowance to
Siberia, visiting each
.

69

KOLYMA
retained by camp authorities until the day of release-when regulations stipulated that the prisoner was to receive 300 roubles 'liberation money'. The 15 roubles we paid for these shows were deducted from this special fund and pocketed by Derevenko. Derevenko and his advisers watched the arrival of our etap with keen interest. From it they selected some outstanding performers a former dancer of the; Tbilisi Opera, a violinist from Shanghai, an actress from Moscow and another from Berlin, a famous trumpet-player, Eddy Rosner, and his four-piece band. They were all given a bath, fresh clothes, and promptly sent by special plane to Magadan where they were to start performing for the enjoymenjt of Derevenko and his wife.

be

Dqrevenko's wife, Galina EfimoVna,

had acquired the airs and graces of a person of stature and not only wanted to be recognised as such, but to be unanimously accepted as the 'First Lady' of the region. She was a huge woman, weighing about 250 pounds, and resembled her husband in many ways. Though rude and arrogant, she still had her femininity. She liked to dress according to the latest Paris fashions, which meant that she kept the camp seamstresses and dressmakers working day and night 'par amour pour le Roi de Prusse\

A Romanian shoemaker once showed me the white brocade ball shoes he was making for her, carefully covering the delicate material with a white cloth so as not to get the slightest spot on it. 31
And so it was, in varying degrees of self-indulgence, in the
lower leadership.

Any

lady who had the slightest connection with the camp administration would have her coats made free in the prisoners' tailor shops. For their private benefit camp commanders freely made use of prisoners as cobblers, tailors, painters, artisans, fishermen, doctors, and so on. With the co-operation of prisoners in charge of food supplies

70

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

and prisoners in charge of book-keeping all sorts of manipulations were carried on. The prisoners had every incentive to co-operate. It ensured their hold on the comfortable jobs, and they made a little profit besides; the mass of the prisoners in the camp suffered. 13
In the Berelyakh
exploited anyone

camp group its chief, Colonel

Vasiliev,

who came within his range. Every day, a party of no less than 25 girls had to go to work at his house milking the cows, feeding the hens, and polishing the furniture. Everything had to be done, of course, without All services and supplies came to him entirely free pay. of charge. ... One day he ordered the camp's carpentry shop to produce a complete classroom [for his son] blackboards, desks and all. The cabinet-makers were told to use the best materials and the best of workmanship. They did an excellent job with some first-class carving, and they were very proud of their product. The problem now was the price. They knew full well what a stingy, miserable man Vasiliev was. But they had to account for the costly materials used. After much scratching of heads, they decided to quote him a price that barely covered the cost of the raw materials involved. They sent the bill to the camp's head office where it eventually reached the Colonel's desk. Next morning 'the Rat' burst into the workshop and began to curse the squad leader and his cabinet-makers,

calling

them

thieves

and robbers.

'Don't you believe in God?' he ranted. 'How can you try to rob me? I am a poor working man, striving hard for my daily bread! How can you charge me eight hundred
roubles!'

The frightened squad leader, anxious to soothe the Colonel's anger, told him: 'Citizen Colonel, there has been a gross mistake. That bill was not for you, but meant for someone else. We'll send your bill along tomorrow.' The following day, Colonel Vasiliev found on his desk a new bill for only 300 roubles. It didn't cover a third of the cost of the raw materials, but he was quite satisfied because
7i

KOLYMA
no one would accuse him of damaging the
State.* 1
interests of the

A woman hospital chief, who owed her position to having

married a prominent
Lipper:

NKVD

officer, is

described by

Mrs

She had the manner of a lazy, well-fed cat. She never raised her somewhat nasal, eternally bored voice, not even when she sent an orderly to the gold mines for some minor ofFence. She came fully awake only when she talked about needlework, which she had her nurses make for her in large quantities. Patterns, yarn, colour-combinations were the
things that passionately interested her. Nurses

who did

not

know embroidery, no matter how

conscientious they were

about attending their patients, were treated by her with contemptuous tolerance; those who could do needlework could neglect their patients as much as they wished and still be sure of the favour and protection of this so-called doctor. In the women's ward there were always a few patients who looked and were remarkably healthy. These were kept in busy embroidering tablecloths and tapestry hangings the style of our grandmothers. All the ladies of Magadan society were wild about this hobby and competed with one another to the great joy of those prisoners who could do such work, for they could thereby earn additional food. It was amusing to see the officers outbid one another in sending wives of

NKVD

secret presents to the 'counter-revolutionaries'; officially

gifts were strictly forbidden, of course. But the ladies were so excited at the chance to enrich themselves cheaply for in their eyes this superfluous and generally that they forgot tasteless needlework represented wealth their ostentatious hatred and contempt for the contriki. lz

such

Such

a handful of

stories

among dozens

was the

life

of the privileged caste. Even at a local level, Shalamov

tells

of the fortunes

made by

officials.
is

Time and

again, one

struck

by the extraordinary gap

72

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

between the ruling privilegentsia and the prisoners. Even in when the camp administration were

Berzin's time,

pretty decent

men or, at any rate, not vicious ones, one thing was characteristic of them all: they did not regard the prisoners who were in their charge and dependent on them as quite human, although some of them had been in the very same shoes in the past. Their attitude towards persons who had lost their freedom was very similar to that of the whites toward the Negroes in the United States during the period described in Uncle Tonts Cabin. This attitude had entered into the very blood of these men, for almost unlimited power over living beings, deprived of nearly every right, inevitably awakens the specific instincts of arbitrary tyranny, absolute intolerance of any opposition from these *lower creatures', and complete irresponsibility in dealing with them. True, the illiterate fool Brukhnov was proud of having at his command and working as common miners eighteen professors. But his pride grew out of his awareness that all these people, better and more intelligent and more honest than he the flower of the nation were in his hands, while he, a fool who could not write his own name, could exercise his power

over them at

will, in

any form and with

total

impunity. 23

Or again, we are told that Sukhanov, then Head of the Northern Administration, had a servant who had formerly
been a professor of psychiatry. He treated him well, but with a certain con temp tuousness which even the best of free employees seemed unable to escape in their relations with
prisoners.

In the 1940s

this attitude

was

to

be found everywhere:

At twenty-eight Nina Vladimirovna was the head of a hospital for 500 patients, which she always spoke of as 'my* hospital. She behaved like a pomeshchitsa, a great lady and landowner of Tsarist times, and considered the entire stafTof
the hospital her personal serfs. ... She felt neither hatred nor contempt for the prisoners, no

73

KOLYMA
more than a landowner of earlier times would have hated, his serfs. She looked upon them as tools supplied by nature
to increase her wealth, as the prerequisites for her position of power. But she was able to pity them. 13

In a father different context,

we

again find even

women

and doctors sharing the slave-owner mentality already noted at Vanino and Nakhodka at the Magadan transit

camp

(in 1949):

We

were paraded naked in front of a medical board of young girl internes just out from the Moscow University Medical School. Then we were carefully examined by
broad-shouldered unfriendly-looking civilians dressed in sheepskin coats and wearing high felt boots. These were the mine managers, the representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the owner and sole supplier of detainee manpower. They pinched our muscles, opened our jaws, and felt our teeth. If satisfied, they addressed the board with the words, 'I take him.' There was seldom any protest from the medical beauties who examined us with regard to the health of the man thus chosen. They merely nodded, an entry was ticked ofT, and the man's fate was sealed. He was headed for one of the mines. 31

At a lower level, the free specialists and others often lived more squalidly, while yet finding themselves in economic and other connection with the prisoners who lived incomparably more squalidly still. The atmosphere of social distinction was so pervasive that it affected even the very
young.
In
themselves by throwing stones at

One Russian victim describes free children enjoying women prisoners. 34 1940 the hotel in Magadan was a large grey barrack,
officials

containing middle
built, alcoholic

waiting for their houses to be

mining

clerks, 'pickpockets plying their

trade between two sentences; and even a few forgers who, in

spite of lack of tools,

managed

to

make

passable identity
prostitutes

cards'. In the hotel,

where 'mining engineers,

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

Kolyma got drunk on pure alcohol, and cursed', 4 scrubbing the floors was nevertheless a joy and a privilege for the women prisoners, who even met kindness from some of the inhabitants, though also having to foil rape attempts and prostitution
and the
bosse$ of
offers.

forriicated, stole

free

There were other forms of connection between the lesser population and the convicts. In the easier camps the

prisoners traded not only

free citizenry also.

among

themselves, but with the

all

In Kolyma

goods were rationed

because of transportation

difficulties.

The inhabitants had

ration cards long before the war. Free citizens bought

and food at state prices and sold them at blackmarket prices to the prisoners. These transactions had to be
textiles

managed behind
then In
passed

the backs of the guards; but there were

least

always opportunities for at

prisoners

a few prisoners, and they

the
,

genuine freedmen the handful of released

addition
to
free

on the goods to adding their own profit

less

privileged

to the purchase price.

citizens,

there

were

prisoners, the lowest of

the non-prisoner population. These two groups regarded

themselves as of quite different social status and rarely

mingled. (Except, that

women
in

prisoners.)

is, that no stigma attached to former But most of the old free specialists were

any case re-arrested in 1937-8 even though some especially geologists were to be released in 1939. Prisoners who were released were, if under fifty and not declared invalids, forbidden to leave Kolyma. So were those over fifty if their skills were urgently needed in the region that is everyone from engineers to cooks. After the war, there was a special regulation for prisoners of German origin, including Volga Germans, German exiles and even German Jews. They had to sign an application to stay, and almost all were sent to a special community barracks in the remote area of Tyenki.

KOLYMA
There
is

even one extraordinary borderline case quoted,

of a prisoner
discharge

given another one,

who had completed his sentence and not been who was yet not issued with his papers and went on working for many months

with the remarkable status of Tree prisoner'. 9

We may suitably recount here the fate of an anomalous one of the most extraordinary set of inmates which group even Kolyma had seen. In its earlier days the Road-Building Administration, and the settlement of Yagodnoye at which it was located, were the best-managed enterprises in Kolyma. This was

due
It

to the efficiency of the Administration's chiefs.

was common practice under Berzin

to

employ

skilled

and was the case even with quite ordinary prisoners. But the Yagodnoye men sent him in 1 935-6 were a very special category. They were none other than the Leningrad NKVD officers Medved, Zaporozhets, Fomin, Yanishevsky, Mosevich, members of that group of twelve which had, on 23 January 1935, been sentenced to short terms of imprisonment for failing to observe the basic
and experienced
prisoners in important administrative

technical posts. This

requirements of state security, in that 'having received information about the preparations for the attempt on
S.

M. Kirov

they failed to take the necessary measures

. . .

to prevent the assassination

although they had every

means of arresting it'. As Khrushchev was to remark twenty years later, 'After the murder of Kirov, top functionaries of the Leningrad
possible

NKVD were given very light sentences,

were
shot.

We

but in 1937 they can assume that they were shot in order to

killing.' But even at the time, the sentences struck leading circles in the as disproportionately light. Stalin would, in the

cover the traces of the organisers of Kirov's

NKVD

natural course of events, have ordered the exemplary

execution of anyone involved in a criminal failure to guard

76

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

against a genuine assassination attempt. Moreover,
it

became known

Yagoda had ordered. specially good treatment for them, sent them to their destinations not in a
that
to look after their families; while their

prison van but by special coach, and ordered his secretary

former colleagues

sent

them

presents, contrary to the strict Stalin rule of

instantly breaking with friend or relations once arrested.

This is not the place to give a full account of the evidence on

the

murder of Kirov.*

It

is

enough

to say that

it

seems clear

that Stalin procured

it

through Yagoda

who worked

through Zaporozhets, then Deputy Head of the Leningrad

NKVD. Some
is

recent books, even reputable ones, have

taken the line that the case against Stalin is not proven. This
true in the

narrow and formal sense that complete

is

juridical 'proof

naturally lacking. But, as

Roy Medall,

vedev, the Leninist dissident writer, has said, there can no

longer be any real doubt about
it.

And, above

the

information available
conclusion.

is

incompatible with any other

their wives, treated in all but
it

name as powerful and prominent officials-until

most extraordinary part of the
concerned,
is

So here they were, with

became
But the
is

suitable for Stalin to disembarrass himself of them.

story, as far as

Kolyma

that after the other Leningrad policemen

to

been re-arrested and taken

had Moscow, Zaporozhets himself

remained
tration

for

some time

at his post, a lone exception.

He is

reported as

still

in charge of the

Road-Building Adminis-

and resisting the transfer of his headquarters from Yagodnoye months after his colleagues had disappeared. Presumably the announcement on 2 March 1938 in connection with the Bukharin trial, that he had organised Kirov's death on Yagoda's orders and that he was being made 'the subject of separate proceedings', marks his
* See The Great Terror by Robert Conquest chapter New York: Macmillan, 1968, 1973).

(London and

97

KOLYMA
final

disappearance. (Yagoda's instructions, passed on to

Zaporozhets, were

now
has,

alleged to have been given

Yenukidze
habilitated

who

however,

long since

by Abel been re-

and who, even

at the time,

was

clearly not in a

position to give instructions to the

Head of the Secret Police,

only.)

who

took his orders from one

man

Thus, in spite of the sharp polarisation of Kolyma society

between the privilegentsia and the prisoners, there was as indeed not uncommon in such societies an intermediate stratum. There were free men who were scarcely better than prisoners, even occasional prisoners who ranked higher than some free citizens. The social order was a complex one. Still, the basic division remained clear and the moral and social corruption of the system is evident. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that, as we have said, instances of actual humanity to prisoners were occasionally to be found, even after J 937. These usually led to trouble. We are told (Literaturnqya Gazeta, 4 April 1 964) of a geologist who intervened on humanitarian grounds. He once complained to an official: 'These people might die!'
is

'What people?' The representative of the

istration smiled. 'These are

Camp Admin-

enemies of the people.'

As a

result the geologist himself lost his life.

The only solidarity of this sort which really helped, and of which there are many examples, is when free specialists
such as doctors and engineers tried and sometimes suc-

ceeded in getting prisoners with qualifications suitable

posts:

almost

all

the witnesses

we quote only survived, as we

and

shall see, as the result of getting office or nursing jobs,

not seldom by these means.

The

hierarchical structure of

only as between free

Kolyma society applied not men and prisoners, but also among the

prisoners themselves.

78

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

First

came
far

the urkas

who

ranked, in the social scale of

above the lowest of the low, the 'politicals'. Hitherto, the politicals had been terrorised by the urkas, on the ship or earlier, in spontaneous acts of robbery and violence. They were now to find this oppression consciously taken advantage of by the authorities, and built into the system. Officialdom made it clear to the urkas that they were a privileged stratum. A former criminal is quoted by Roy Medvedev: 'they tried to let us know that we thieves were still not lost to the homeland; prodigal, so to speak, but nevertheless sons. But for "fascists" and "counters" (i.e. politicals) there was no place on this mortal earth and never And if we were thieves, would be in all ages to come. then our place was beside the stove, while "phrasemongers" and all that sort had their place by the doors and
. . .

Kolyma,

in the corners.' 16

They

exploited this support ruthlessly.

Roy Medvedev

holds that the Stalin technique of putting criminals and

politicals together 'was

no

better or worse than the idea of

Whatever we may think of that particular comparison, it is certainly true that it was a conscious decision, under which the already starving and
creating gas ovens in Auschwitz'.
terrorised politicals

found their inadequate rations, their

their lives constantly at the

meagre
little,

clothing,

capricious

mercy of and conscienceless thugs to whom murder meant

and
the strange

theft less.

We have described

subhuman

culture of the

urka world. Their speech

was a strange jargon, with an

amazingly continuous obscenity (found, indeed, also among the administration, even at the highest level) Their bodies, too, were usually distinguishable from those of
.

politicals

by thick

tattooing.

Even

their

sometimes indelibly disfigured in

this

women were way, often in a

in

manner described as incredibly obscene. Urkas had one weakness, reported time and again
79

our

KOLYMA
sources.

They loved
and

to listen to stories.

That

is

to say, not

anecdotes, but, for example, the whole length of The Count of

Monte

Cristo,

as far as possible in the original words.

This was true even of those who knew the story well already:
they preferred to hear it told in an 'educated' voice and manner. Time and again politicals were not only saved from beating or murder, but actually fed and helped for this one talent. 'The only privileged political prisoner' (as Mrs Ginzburg puts it) 'was the one who could tell stories or who could give a verbal rendition of some adventurous novel.' 4 But the normal relationship of the urkas to the politicals was different. First of all, they got all the easier posts and a
disproportionate share of the food, with the result, as

Shalamov

notes, that 'At the mine,

we

only got half the

rations, the rest

having

fallen off en route into the plates of

the bosses, the staff

and the common

criminals.' 28

General Gorbatov, writing of a Maldyak camp where

there were 400 politicals
theft

and 50

urkas, describes

how

the

was formalised:
rule,

'The enemies of the people', as a

were detailed

for the

heaviest jobs, the lighter work being given to the 'trusties' or

common
foremen,

criminals. ...

It

cooks,

orderlies

was they who were appointed and tent seniors. Naturally

for the pot chiefly

enough the small amounts of fat released

found their way into the bellies of the 'trusties'. There were three types of rations: one for those who had not fulfilled their quota, another for those who had, and a third for those who had exceeded their quota. The latter automatically included the 'trusties'. They did little enough work, but the tally clerks were of their persuasion and so they swindled,

we had

putting to their own and their mates' credit the work that done. As a result the criminals fed well and the

politicals

went hungry. 5

It

is

even the case that the authorities went out of their

way

to select

men with particularly bad records for overseer

80

JHE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

jobs.

Gorbatov mentions a curious

"the Careerist".

case: 'Boris

was nick-

one of the named He got northern camps because he made himself out to be a big criminal, with six murders and five major robberies to his credit. He was believed, and was appointed a senior prisoner. Then it turned out that he was simply an independant, small-time thief. There was a great fuss and he was demoted and given his nickname.' 5 Criminals were favoured in other \yays. Out of the mass criminals in Kolyma, a few hundred would be picked out of and released shortly before their term was up.
this

name

in

The

list of the names of these people, who were called 200-per-centers (dvukhsotniki) , was posted in the dining rooms of all the camps, so that the rest would learn from the

example of these super-producers. On closer examination you discovered to your surprise that a prisoner who had worked as a chambermaid for some NKVD chief was listed as a 200-per-center in woodcutting, for which meritorious accomplishment she was being released before completion of her sentence. Most of these people were criminals who had distinguished themselves in the service of the camp authorities by special cruelty towards their fellow prisoners, and who were falsely listed as miners; or else they were brigadiers who had made a name for themselves by denunciations and ruthless driving of their workers. 13
In addition to the regular and legalised theft of food,
ordinary robbery, often with violence, went on unchecked.

Shalamov

tells

a typical

story:

since they arrived very got a parcel: airman's boots made of felt. Our relatives did not understand our conditions of life. . They would have been stolen the first night. So, even before leaving the office with the commandant I sold them for ioo roubles to the team boss, Andrei Boyko. The boots were worth 700 roubles but it was a good sale. I had the means to buy 100 kilograms of bread or perhaps butter and sugar. I

One day
rarely

an exceptional event

KOLYMA
hadn't eaten any butter or sugar since my stay in prison. At the shop I bought a kilo of butter^41 roubles. As soon as this purchase was made in the middle of the day, as we were working at night I ran to Sheinin, who lived in another barracks, to celebrate. I had also bought some bread. Emotion and joy made Sheinin stutter: 'But I haven't the right! Why me?' he murmured, overwhelmed. 'No, I can't.' I Anally convinced him and he went off running to get some hot water. Immediately a terrible blow on the neck sent me rolling to the ground. When I got up the bag of bread and butter had disappeared. The great chunk of wood with which I'd been knocked out lay by a mattress. Around me everyone was laughing. Sheinin arrived with a pot of hot 28 water.

Sometimes the motives were different: 'On his first night in camp they stole a Dutch Communist's shirt and the photograph of his wife. Every time I remembered this I felt worried and embarrassed. Who could need the photo of a foreign woman and why? "You don't see?" a grinning colleague said to me one day. "It's not difficult to guess, some toughs pinched the photo, to organise, as they say,
seances of masturbation.' 28

Robbery extended
possible:

to

the products of work,

where

Sometimes it happened that we and the criminals were sent

off for

wood

together.

We,

the 'enemies of the people',

would go

would lie in wait for camp. As we came back they would grab our load and, if they were feeling generous, say: 'We'll help you carry that.' We were forbidden to return to camp without any wood and so back we had to go for more, a couple of miles into the forest. Sometimes things went even worse, depending on who happened to come your way. You might be attacked and have your load snatched from you, and you might be badly beaten up, for good measure, and
into the forest; the criminals

us not far from the

8*

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF HOLYMA

told: 'You're a Communist, aren't you? You defended Soviet power, didn't you? Well, here's your thanks . . .' 5

But more basically, this regime of violence was, as we have said, harnessed to the official machine, with the urkas
acting as supervisors of the 'political'
serfs.

'The urkas did not work. With their clubs

mometers"
strode

as

"therhand, they they laughingly called them

their
in

Plan.

among the diggings to ensure the execution of The They threw themselves on the defenceless politicals,
them
to

and

often beat

death.

"Politicals"

untitle

bridled repression against millions had put under this

innocent

men

of

all politics.

They were martyrs but

not heroes.' 28

Romanian

prisoner gives a fairly typical specific

instance:

After twelve hours work that first day, we began to climb down the slippery path to our camp quarters. heart was pounding, my limbs were stiff and aching. whole body

My My

was in such a state of exhaustion that I felt certain that a few more days of such hard labour would finish me. As we slid down the slope like a bunch of drunks, the brigade leader stopped us in front of a barn-like building from which a weak beam of light shone out into the pitch-dark night. 'Halt!' he said. 'I want everybody to go in and bring out two cement bags to load the truck.' Inside, in a dusty, choking atmosphere, people began to load the bags on their shoulders and haul them out to be loaded on a waiting truck. With some help I lifted up the two bags on my back and, bending under their weight, directed my feet towards the door. Whether it was my state of exhaustion after the exhausting day's work, or whether I slipped on the threshold, I still don't know, but I fell on my back and the cement bags flew from me. One of the bags burst open and the contents spilled all over. I heard shouts and curses, but I couldn't stand up. At that moment the brigade leader arrived on the scene

fcl

-..--

KOLYMA
to beat me with a thick iron rod, calling me all of names. The blows were falling indiscriminately all over me, and I felt certain that the next one would finish me. But I still could not make it to my feet. Finally, his thirst for blood satisfied, he allowed some of my fellow inmates to help me back on my feet. I tried to move, convinced that death was round the corner. I don't know how I eventually reached the camp. I needed immediate medical attention, but there was no doctor in the male barracks. The nearest medical officer was in the women's camp, and one could only go there with the permission of the camp officials. I had to face the danger that the brigade leader would find out that I had sought a doctor and would kill me on the spot in his fury. After all, justice was on his side. I took the

and began
sorts

risk

and went
this

to the

woman

doctor. 31
case, since the

Even

was a comparatively mild

prisoner survived. All accounts have reports in which,

'Innocent people were savagely beheaded with axes in broad daylight or stabbed to death with picks and
shovels.
. .

.'

31

victim, lifting

was to break the bones of the him by his hands and legs and throwing his body violently on the ground. 'The victim would groan and plead for mercy, but nobody would listen. When, after
typical urka atrocity

One

twenty or thirty such vicious throws, the victim finally remained silent, the criminals would simply leave him there and proceed to report their deed to the authorities. And so the cycle went: a mock trial, an added sentence, and then back for more violence, brutality, and murder.' 31 As we saw on the ships, the urkas also submitted their own kind to a savage discipline, if their code was seen to be broken. An urka at the Ola camp, Alexei, nicknamed
'Stumpy',

had three fingers missing from his left hand. He was generally morose and taciturn but once, not without great difficulty, he managed to get out: 'I've done two big jobs
84

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

myself.
I

One was

with one murder.

The second one

did

three people in.'

asked him How he had lost his fingers. . . . was playing cards and I lost. I had no cash so I staked a good suit, not mine of course, one that a political had on. I lost. I meant to take the suit during the night when the new prisoner had stripped for bed. I had to hand it over before eight in the morning, only they took the political away to another camp that very day. Our council of seniors met to hand out my punishment. The plaintiff wanted all my lefthand fingers off. The seniors offered two. They bargained a bit and agreed on three. So I put my hand on the table and the man I'd lost to took a stick and with five strokes knocked
'I

off

my

three fingers.'

quite cool about his story. He added: 'We have our laws too, only tougher than yours. If you do your comrades down you've got to answer for it.' 5

Stumpy was

is

said to

One particular urka execution, carried out while at work, have been the origin of a camp regulation:
distributed our scythes

They only

and axes

in the. morning

before going to work. In the neighbouring brigade, a group of common criminals had recently settled accounts with
their brigade leader.
cal,

Always inclined towards the

kill

theatri-

the toughs, having decided to

the brigadier,

enthusiastically greeted the proposal to cut off his head.

They decapitated him with an ordinary

the night. Why only during the night? logic of a regulation. 28

scythe. Hence the ban on leaving scythes and axes with the prisoners during

No one questions the

samosud

One

'political'

describes

criminal

urka

which he witnessed. A young criminal called court Sashka was charged with betraying his fellow thieves to the camp administration. Found guilty he was asked how he wanted to die, 'by cutting or by hanging'. The barrack had already seen inmates strangled to death with a sock or a sleeve, stabbed, or having their skulls split with an axe, but
85

KOLYMA
previously in

scene which

moments of criminal rage. The cold-blooded now ensued was something new to them.

Sashka chose cutting.

wash-basin was produced, he

was made to kneel over

and his throat was cut on the spot. The executioner cleaned his hands with drinking water from the barrel, kicked the body and then banged on the door to call the sentry and report the deed. 31 For during the Stalin period, while people could be executed for anti-Soviet agitation in camp, there was no death penalty for murder. As a result, the urkas killed with what was, in effect, complete immunity. After even the most public and brutal murders, they would only be taken off and sentenced to a further five or ten years. And since the length of sentence meant nothing (many of them would be serving accumulated sentences of fifty or even a hundred years), this did not act as a deterrent. But in any case, even apart from legal sanctions, such murders (and particularly of politicals) hardly even brought them moral censure from the camp administration. When the death penalty was introduced for murder in 1950, there was a great falling-ofF
it,

of crimes of
in a

this sort.

became less powerful number of the camps. Instead of the meek 'Trotskyites* of the earlier period, the new intake consisted of hard-bitten
After the war, for a time, the urkas
soldiers, fully

prepared to stick together and fight back, and

equally tough and united Ukrainian and other nationalists.

The

soldiers (though not of course the nationalists) were even able to exploit the system on occasion to the extent of taking over the leading prisoner positions, traditionally

reserved for the criminals.

In I 95 I > when a hundred thousand prisoners were packed into the Magadan transit camp, several thousand urkas were held in one of the fourteen separate enclosures.

They broke

into a katorzhnik section, to steal food

and

clothing, but the

new

prisoners fought back so effectively

86L

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

that the urkas decided instead to break out

and

loot

N.C.O.S they were repelled from the gates by machine-gun fire. In the end the death roll on all sides amounted to around 300. The survivors were sent to the Kholodnaya lead mines, a notoriously deadly site. 31 In fact, the symbiosis of urka and officialdom, though effective in its main purpose of repressing the 'politicals', was never complete. The urkas regarded themselves as an independent society; and they were always liable to
killing several

Magadan. After

extravagant outbursts, individual or in groups, against the

authorities.

Yet another stratum, officially political prisoners too, yet remained slightly better off than the rank and file. These were the informers, who were slipped extra rations, and the
promise of earlier release, in exchange for denunciation.

Such denunciation was a necessary part of NKVD as witnesses were conventionally required to establish a crime and enable further sentences to be imposed. Sometimes, indeed, the NKVD would launch
legalism,

provocations directly.

The

Secret Police also resorts to provocation whenever it has to 'formalize the liquidation' of counter-revolutionary elements who have otherwise given no ground for execution and whom it considers dangerous and deserving of such

punishment. It should be observed that although the Secret Police is not bound by any rules or laws during an investigation, it is careful, once the investigation has been finished, to formalize the juridical aspects of a case with regard to procedures and appearances, so that the case will give the impression of having been conducted in conformity with the laws of the U.S.S.R. 38

Shalamov

tells

us that

an automatic persecution was

arranged for any prisoner

who had reached

a?-

the last year of

KOLYMA
his sentence,

reports,
release,

on Moscow's order, with provocations, narks9 interrogations. He instances one prisoner due for

who 'so that things should be in order', is denounced, on the instructions of the authorities, by another
prisoner for 'chanting the praises of Hitler'.

Elinor Lipper describes a typical attempt to

mount a

provocation' against an honest doctor prisoner.

alcohol

A bottle of

and some poison were found in the doctor's bunk in the barracks while he and the other prisoners were away at work. It was put about that a terrorist Trotskyite organisation had been discovered. Witnesses were produced by threats and beatings. Unfortunately, the chief witness was a tough young Ukrainian who was the doctor's medical
orderly. ("Ukrainians can be extremely stubborn, especially

when

they are serving a ten-year sentence anyway.') He proved that the doctor did not drink and could have taken all the alcohol he wanted when at work. It was then alleged
that the alcohol

was used to bribe accomplices. However, things had now been held up so long that an

NKVD investigative officer hostile to the commandant took

from his point of view, 'no political made' of the case. This would have done no good, but he turned up a fact that destroyed the whole story that the bottle in which the poison was found was of a type used in the provocateur's office only. The accomplices confessed. Those concerned in the frame-up disappeared, including the camp commandant. As Mrs Lipper said, 'The incident was one of the very rare triumphs of justice in the Soviet Union, and deserves to be remembered for that
over.
that,

He saw

capital could be

reason.' 13

In November 1937, Filimonov, Head of the Militarized Guard, organised a remarkable provocation at the Kresty
fisheries

camp, near Sredne-Kolymsk. He had the local guard chief tell a prisoner that orders had been given to
shoot all the prisoners.

A hastily organised revolt took place.

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

But after holding the camp for some weeks the prisoners had little choice but to surrender. Most of them seem to have
been shot. 38

The
reports,

role of the

regular informer

illustrated

by a figure of whom from Elinor Lipper

most strikingly we chance to have separate

is

and Varlam Shalamov

for
is

respectively

the former Deputy People's Commissar

Krivitsky (who
also mentioned,
as

Heavy Industry

though

in friendlier tones,

by Mrs Ginzburg
.

a helpful fellow

passenger on the Dzhurma)

A distinguished surgeon, a prisoner called Dr Koch, was

the best in

Magadan, and was always resorted

to the

to

administration. However, the free chief physician

by the top had him

denounced and he was sent

after the

Berelyakh mines. Here,

outbreak of war, he became particularly vulner-

able, as a

Volga German.

In 1943 he was accused of having made pro-Hitler, prospeeches to a group of prisoners. The shameful witness at this trial was the despicable Krivitsky, former
fascist

Deputy People's Commissar himself had been sentenced

for

Heavy
1937
to

Industry,
fifteen

who

in

years'

imprisonment as a counter-revolutionary. A slimy, fawning, cunning creature, he hoped to buy his freedom by acting as a provocateur. Old Koch, whose sole fault was that he had saved the lives of thousands of people, was shot. In 1945, when I was working in the prisoners' hospital in the northern gold-mine region, Krivitsky was in the hospital from a stroke of paralysis. I noticed how some of the patients from Berelyakh watched him with mingled hatred and fear, and refused to have anything to do with him. I did not understand until they told me of the numerous victims
.
.

of Krivitsky's informing

activities. 13

Krivitsky also features in the

camp

trial

at

which
first.

Shalamov received

his

second sentence, to provide the

formal basis for keeping him in after he had served his

89

KOLYMA
Shalamov speaks of the leading camp denouncers who set him up for it Krivitsky, the former Deputy Commissar for Industry and Zaslavsky, a journalist on Izvestia* [Two witnesses were, in fact, required by regulations.) After a month on penal rations '300 grams of bread and a bowl of water' to which the jailer twice added a spoonful of soup, Shalamov was ready for his interrogation. As he says, in the conflict of wills which constitutes such an

interrogation, a

man

in his state

is

at a disadvantage.

He

adds: 'If the interrogators of Kolyma

had prepared Georgy Dimitrov, the universe would never have heard of the
Leipzig
trials.'

The

witnesses produced

an accusation of sympathy

towards the German offensive. Shalamov replied that, as he

hadn't read a paper for six years, he knew nothing whatever

about

it.

Worse still, he had said that the 'Stakhanovite' movement in the camp was a cheat. And, besides, he had asserted that Bunin was a great Russian writer. 'And so he is a great Russian writer. And can I be condemned for saying that?' 'Yes, you can. He's an emigre and an enemy.' Finally, he went before the tribunal. They had actually assembled four witnesses, one of whom however he had

The only question he asked was, 'Why is it you have the same witnesses for all the accused?' After deliberation, on 26 June 1942, he was given ten years extra. As to his delators, he says, 'Krivitsky is dead, it seems. Zaslavsky got back to Moscow, and joined the Union of Writers, even though he'd never written anything except
never even met.
that

nark's reports.' 28 * Shalamov also describes a 'game' played by prisoners at the Dzhelgala camp and invented by the two informers, Krivitsky and Zaslavsky. They left a piece of bread on a table and hid in the corner. When a starving prisoner came in and tried to seize it, they jumped out and beat him half
to death.

90

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

And,
finally,

we reach

the masses of ordinary 'political*

prisoners, the corpus vile

on which the other grades of

society exercised their extreme oppressions.

Of them it can
become a

be said that in principle they represented

prisoner for an indiscreet word, or
less.
is

every section of the Soviet population. Anyone could

'political'

From

the beginning of the

Kolyma epoch proper,

that

in

definite

1937, the area does indeed seem to have been selected by a decision, as a suitable dumping place for an

unusually high proportion of lives regarded as particularly

expendable

starting with the Trotskyites

and

so forth of

the Yezhovshchina.

abounded. In the ordinary samizdat it is A. A. Mikheev, a botanist, was beaten to death by a guard at Kolyma; that a prominent surgeon was shot for failing to fulfil his norm in the gold mines; that a Polish professor was killed by a blow
Intellectuals

common

to read in passing that Professor

in the kidneys with

a rifle butt; that V. V. Knyazev, a poet admired by Lenin, perished at Magadan (but whose precise date of death, even though he has now been rehabilitated, has not been discoverable even by the Soviet authorities,

who

give

it

as '10

information,

November 1937 or, according to other March 1938'). n All camp reminiscences
officials,

proper teem with descriptions of former academics, administrators,

Party

miliation, death

scientists, facing pain and huby violence and death by exhaustion.

typical account runs:

My brigade was made up exclusively of former members of

the intelligentsia.
in plastic surgery.

One

professor at the Military Medical

of them was Isaac Brevda, a former Academy and an expert

He was a little, weak and hounded man accused of terrorism, although he started with fright at the very mention of the word. Another man, Vladimir Steklov, was the son of the well-known Bolshevik Yiiry Steklov-Nakhamkes, one of the veterans of the
who had been
9i

KOLYMA
revolution
in

and former

editor of Izvestia,

who

too was jailed

Syzran or Yaroslavl, for joining the forces of the anti-Stalin opposition. Still another, Nekrasov, a professor of meteorology and an old man, had been sentenced for espionage, although he could not understand what it was he had done to make him a spy. Then there was a former member of the Communist Party and director of some trust, by the name of Ginzburg. There were also
isolator, either in

an

engineers, teachers, doctors,

and

artists.

All of

them had

been seized during the wave of political reprisals launched by the head of the NKVD, Yezhov, and all reached the Kolyma in a condition unfit not only for work, but for
living. 23

One
ing.

intellectual effort in

Kolyma

itself is

worth record-

In the hospital at Kilometre 23, a group of nurses and a unique effort, made an attempt to collect systematic factual evidence of events in Kolyma. They hoped that they might be able to pass it on to posterity, not expecting ever to publish it in their own lifetimes. They were all former members of the Communist Party, and they kept their writing rigorously factual with no commentary at all. They were betrayed by a woman doctor. The alleged ringleader, an old man who had been an agronomist, was shot, and the others got ten years more, for treason, although they had done nothing but draw up a chronicle of the things that happened every day with the knowledge and consent of the government. 13
intellectual prisoners, in

Communists who had not adapted themselves

Stalinist style of falsification were, of course,

to the new common. A

typical tale:
I belonged to a political study circle. One day our theme was the October Uprising in Moscow. I had been a soldier under Muralov, one of his artillerymen, and I was wounded twice in the October fighting. I commanded my battery

personally against the Junkers at the Nikitsky Gate. In the

ft*.

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

middle of the lecture the professor asks me:

'Who commanded

the Soviet troops in

Moscow

at the

time of the insurrection?' I answer: 'Muralov, Nikolay Ivanovich Muralov.' I knew him well personally. What else could I say? Eh? 'But that's a provocational answer, Gavril Alexeyevich! You know well that Muralov has been declared an enemy of
the people.' 'Well yes, but

what do you want me

that
I

to say? It wasn't in

political study circle

learnt about the night. 28

October

Revolution.' They arrested

me

the

same

There were representatives of older political

bers of the party

trends.

Both

Lipper and Ginzburg report Social-Revolutionaries,

memin the

which had won the majority

mostly old
these,

Constituent Assembly, now have a very full account by one of

Olitskaya,

women, and we
Ekaterina

the area

who survived her sentence to die in 'free exile' in in 1947. 22 Even those who had adjusted to the
as

Soviet regime were of course arrested,

were

their

children, even if totally non-political. These

women, who

had often served in Tsarist prisons, were notably educated and intelligent, particularly as compared with the young Communist intake that is until crushed by the Kolyma system and news of the death of their husbands and sons. Then there were the Christians. These religious prisoners were the firmest and most unbreakable. They included sects which had been persecuted under Tsardom. Among the women there were nuns. Their convents had, indeed, been

destroyed thirty years previously, but they

themselves as bound by their vows.
Elinor Lipper describes

still

regarded

how

On all Sundays and church holy days they would go to the

punishment could force them
lockup. Neither persuasion, threats, mockery nor physical to work on the Lord's Days.

93

KOLYMA
They
songs.
ate their slender

punishment rations and sang their

beaten. Their skirts were tied over their heads, and sometimes they were tied together by the hair. It did not help. On the following Sunday they allowed

They were

themselves to be pushed into the lockup as patiently,

submissively,

and unflinchingly

as ever. 13

The

rigour of the sects' beliefs

had already involved them

in persecution

some, their

from Tsardom, which now continued. With religion forbade them even to give their names

to Anti-Christ.

One woman would

call

never answer

roll call
if

with her name. Others used to

out for her, but

there

was no

friend present she

was simply

sent to the lockup

without food for the night.

Other

sects

had

rules against official

documents. In

fact,

absence of papers had often been the cause of their arrest

and conviction. For

five years.

this fairly

Unfortunately

charge, they refused to

minor offence they got only they were taken for disaccept their discharge papers and

when

were tried and sentenced again. During the war a number of church dignitaries who had survived were released and restored to office under Stalin's then policy of broadening his support. This did not apply to the rank and file of those sentenced for religious reasons,

who

remained.
prisoners from Central Asia

Muslim

and the Caucasus

presented a different picture:

Brought from the subtropical climate of their homelands to

vital forces

the coldest regions in the world, they died were numbed as soon as they terrible cold. They did not try to defend let themselves be driven out to the gold

like fliep. All their

went out into the

themselves. mines. . .
.

They They

stood motionless, their arms' crossed, their bowed heads hunched between their shoulders, waiting for the end. They made no response at all to orders and curses. Blows were

9*

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

useless

it

was

as hopeless as asking tin soldiers to bestir

themselves.

The decent guards, who realized that these people could not be made to work because in this cold they simply stopped functioning, used their rifle butts to drive the prisoners around and around in a circle, not out of cruelty, but out of pity, because they simply could not look on while the men stood numbed until they fell over like so many dolls. 'Another frozen to death,' the prisoners would note. 'Thermo-shock,' the doctor would record. When one of them entered the hospital, it was certain
that he would leave it comrades fought for life
feet
first.

While

their

to the last breath, they

Russian waited

submissively for death. This fatalism, this utter capitulation to the thought of death, made saving them impossible, although Russians with similar cases would overcome the disease. While the Russians patients swallowed their pills with a childlike faith in their curative powers, the Central Asians took the medicine with sceptical indifference, convinced that it would not help at all.

Their traditions forbade them to undress in the presence woman, even a nurse. It was a battle every time to give them an injection or an enema. On the other hand, while we had to insist on the Russian patients' washing, these Asiatics were extremely careful about personal cleanliness to the last minute of their lives.
of a

died of tuberculosis, many of intestinal diseases, of pellagra. But the real sickness was the cold, the sunlessness, and the actual imprisonment. These people, many of whom had been nomads, could not endure confinement. 13

Many

many

In addition to the more or

intellectuals,

permanent intake of and people of non-Communist convictions,

less

the

camp

population received a variety of additions

is even the case that whole category, though a small one, was released from Kolyma altogether. As a result of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the last voyage of that year saw the shipping out of

reflecting the political circumstances. It

in 1939 a

95

KOLYMA
German Communists due Gestapo among the 570
to

be handed over to the

transferred

from

NKVD

to

Gestapo custody at the

winter.

frontier bridge at Brest-Litovsk that

The same
1940.

year saw the arrival of the

Poles, in fact,

first

Poles from
to

Soviet-occupied territory.

Many more were

seem
to

come

in

Remarkably few

have survived

to recount their experiences though, unlike their fellow

prisoners, those

who

did survive were released under the

Polish-Soviet Treaty of 1941:

and various accounts from

them are

available.

The

Poles suffered the disadvantage that they were

it

heavily discriminated against when

jobs of the camps

surviving.

which alone gave reasonable chances of

came to the 'function'

them put it, 'The tremendous difference between us and our fellow convicts was very clear to me here. In spite of everything the Poles
the other hand, as one of
in something,

On

waited with hope in their hearts; hope of something, belief

and

this

something was the survival and

final

liberation, if not of themselves, of the nation

Our
-

fellow prisoners
2

hoped

for

and of Poland. nothing and had faith in

nothing.'

and Western Ukrainians were mainly kept in camps of poor reputation in the Western Mining Administration. In 1941, at first the Treaty was kept from them: 'While at this forest work, I learned, entirely by chance, about the Polish-Soviet Pact and the "amnesty" affecting all Polish prisoners. I saw the commandant to ask him about this. By way of reply, I was severely punished,
Poles

separate

having to stand for twenty-four hours in the open, without

food.' 2

However,
released.

in late

September 1941 the Poles began

to

be

arrival of

The outbreak many

of war led in the other direction to the

Soviet Germans, against

whom

special

96

THE SOCIAL

O'fttBBR-OF

KOLYMA

discrimination was, practised^

At Elgen a

special 'German- barrack'

was

set

up.

[Link] concentrated

Germans fromGermany and from

the Volga Republic, from -Siberian and Caucasian, villager,

Jews from Germany, Austrians, Russians, Hungarians* Einns. and. Latvians all 'enemy aliens? in other words,

although almost every one of them was. a Soviet, citizen..

They
the

employed for heavy 'general' tasks and were be routed out of their beds for nocturnal shocktroop work: otherwise their fate was the same as that of the other prisoners. Ohly occasionally were they isolated' completely in specially remote camps under reinforced guard. Although the idea of this barrack was that Russians, even though, prisoners, should not be forced to live with Germans (for all that they were mainly long*-since-Russified Volga Germans), the Russian prisoners had a disconcerting habit of wanting to move into this barrack because it was relatively clean, quiet and disciplined, and there was less stealing and swearing in it. 13
too were
to
first
4

German prisoners of war were comparatively rare in Kolyma, but a few eventually returned to West Germanyj where accounts by them, or based on their evidence, were published in the press in the early 1950s..1*' 20 There werea certain number of Japanese P.O;W.s. They were kept in separate camps and only had to work eight hours a day. They usually were employed on road maintenance, but are also noted working in Nagayevo harbour. The 1943-4 deportation of whole tribes from, the
Caucasus accused of collaborating with, the Germans led to hundreds of them being sent to Kolyma. An account in the Khrushchevite press tells that some of these were sent to a new site, and ordered to clear the ground, to eut timber and construct barracks and watehtowers, an inevitable and integral part of the camp. The Caucasians, not the first to be ordered to perform this work, were certainly the first to
97

KOLYMA
refuse to

do

it.

Autumn was

fast

approaching and the

for

Caucasians, already suffering from the cold, would certainly die if

no

shelter

were provided

them.

team of

veteran convicts was despatched to impress upon the

recalcitrant Caucasians that their ill-considered gesture of

protest

would

certainly be their death warrant, and, as

an

additional persuasion, proceeded to set the example of working at the necessary buildings. The example proved fruitless: the unhappy tribe persisted in crouching about the only tent where their chief lay dying. They wept and they prayed, but they would not budge an inch. The camp commandant was in despair: he had no mandate to cause the death of these men, who were, in any case, in sufficiently large numbers to cause official enquiries into their fate. He therefore asked another team leader to approach their chief, whom he supposed to be

some kind of religious leader, to try to persuade him to order his people to work at their own salvation. But when he
approached the
lost,

chief's tent, the despairing cries of the

Caucasians told him that the old

man had died. All was not

which was
observance,

however,

for,

after the chief's funeral

strict religious

performed in accordance with

tasks required of them.

the Caucasians signified their willingness to perform the

They were asked if their chief,

left

in his

capacity of religious leader, had

some dying message that they should begin work. The Caucasians replied: 'He was no religious leader, he was the secretary of our District
Party Committee.' 29
liberated areas.

In 1944 and 1945 there was an influx from the newly The Baltic states in particular provided

thousands of

woman, all Germans in

Lithuanian Jewish of whose family had been murdered by the

prisoners.

new

One

1941,

was sentenced

to ten years in 1946 for

attempting to leave the country.

In 1946 came a new

influx, the

'homecomers'

former

98

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

Germany, virtually ail of whom on return, supplemented by large numbers of women and girls whom the Nazis had deported to work in German munitions plants and who
Soviet prisoners of war in

were sentenced

as deserters

were now sentenced for collaboration. Other foreigners included numbers of Spaniards. When young children, they had been embarked at Bilbao and elsewhere during the Spanish Civil War, as a humanitarian gesture by the Soviet Union, which had undertaken to look after them. Some 5000 are said to have been shipped thus. In the camps, in the late forties and early fifties, they were young men and women, who had been sentenced usually
for theft or prostitution.

They had been brought up

(like

in

orphanages and on leaving had

same circumstances)

drifted into the

little

many Russians in the criminal world. They

could remember very

areas.

Spanish. Adult Spanish Re-

publicans are of course also reported, just as in other

unarrested until 1948,

camp One former Republican Air Force captain remained

when he
unfortunately put in an

application to emigrate to Mexico to join his family

and

so

got a 25-year sentence for espionage.

Prisoners

who had been working on

and had
to

secret

atomic

projects in Central Russia,

finished their terms,

now began
ous',

be sent

in thousands to

Kolyma

instead of

being released. Here they were treated as 'specially dangersimply because of the knowledge they might have picked up. 32

There were also Koreans, described as liable to stab losers pay up even more promptly than other criminals. One Western prisoner took against them when he saw them slaughtering the camp commandant's St Bernard and boiling up its head in the laundry tub. 31 In 1953, a very special group of prisoners arrived in Magadan. These were the survivors of the great labour camp rebellion which took place at NoriPsk in May of that
at cards unable to

99

KOLYMA
year.

camps of the They struck

had managed to spread it to all the involved some 55,000 prisoners. for comparatively mild demands contact with their families, letters and parcels, regularisation of the ration system and so on. Many attempts were made to trick them, but the strike was eventually put down by force, with over 1000 dead. Executions followed on a mass scale of 'ringleaders'. The rebellion's rank and file were sent for special punishment to Kolyma. On their arrival the women's camp at Magadan was evacuated for them as a transit area and equipped with fresh searchlights, six small watchtowers and an immense thickness of fresh barbed
organisers
area,
till it

The

wire. Everything that could be used as a

stones to nails,

up by soldiers armoured cars. They had already shown resistance, refusing to disembark till the procurator had arrived and guaranteed fair
treatment.
After a

weapon, from was removed. The prisoners were marched in full battle equipment, accompanied by

month

in

Magadan

they were sent on to the

notorious mines of Kholodnaya.

An

old inmate describes

them marching to their trucks, shouting boasts and sneering at the meeker prisoners who had preceded them and some of them even singing Ukrainian nationalist songs. 31

We may

conclude

this brief

conspectus with a Soviet

as flourishing as ever.

account (of the Khrushchev period) which shows the

traditional 'political' pretexts
still

Three youths of about seventeen years of age arrived in one of the gold camps. They looked younger than their age, perhaps because they were so thin as to be almost emaciated. They announced their names respectively as Yura, Nikita and Vladlen (short for Vladmir Lenin) It was the latter boy who was the cause of the downfall of his two companions. His father, an old Bolshevik, had been killed in the war, and when going through his possessions afterwards,
.

100

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

Vladlen had found a collection of V.
-the

I.

Lenin's works. In

volume he had found an envelope containing a *copy*of 'Lenin's Testament'. Vladlen was overcome by :a -boyish temptation to show thisoffto his comrades although an old frfend of his late father's advised him to keep it hidden. Vladlen, although he knew that the advice was good, could not help showing his find to his friends, .the matter was reported to the authorities, and he and his closest associates were arrested on the accusation of terrorism and xounter-revolution, and sentenced to fifteen years. So there they all -were three boys, two girls and others of the youthful group dispersed in other prison camps. The prisoners were sorry for their youth and weakness and hunted for something to givcf them to eat, and pressed them to take the places nearest the stove. The remark of an old Ukrainian appeared a fitting comment: 'They have not enough men to send us now, so they have to send
very
last

-children.' 29

We

shall

be dealing with the living

and

dying

conditions facing this wide variety of prisoners in a later

chapter. Meanwhile, though, it will be appropriate to note a certain hierarchy of suffering. It was often a matter of chance if a prisoner was sent to a 'bad' camp or not; and

chance almost always played a part in survival. But there were also institutionalised differences in the prisoners' Jot. Among politicals there was a small proportion in Kolyma who had been sentenced under Article 58(x), for antiSoviet agitation merely and not terrorism or espionage. Unlike all other politicals, these were not absolutely excluded from the possibility of privileges otherwise only granted to urkas, and they were not, or not automatically, given the worst and most back-breaking jobs. At the other extreme came -the lowest and most oppressed category of all those sentenced not merely for CounterRevolutionary Activity (KRB), but for Counter-

10

KOLYMA
Revolutionary
not,
Trotskyite Activity
in--

(KRTD). These were

sense:
all

of course, Trotskyites

any

Trotskyitesand there were very few of these

shot by 1937.

had been

genuine

Thp

expression

now meant only

that the

victim had for

special hatred of one or other official involved,

by chance, incurred the and was thus subject to the worst accusation available. Anyone who had the fatal letter T (Trotskyite) on his dossier was the subject of 'special instructions' which ran: 'During detention forbid all use of post and telegraph. Use only for the hardest labour, report on the conduct of the accused once every three months.' This was a 'passport to death'. Shalamov describes a prisoner who managed to save his life by getting a typist to drop the T from KRTD when rereason, or

some

copying

his dossier for the

camp

file.

When, and

especially after

about 1943,

it

came

to

katorzhniki, serving katorga

or hard penal servitude (usually

with a 20 to 25 year sentence), these were the worst treated of all. It was commoner in Kolyma than in the other main

any circumstances be used They were transported in chains. 'They lived in barracks on bare boards in three tiers,
areas.
in

camp

They could not

except for hard physical labour.

without straw mattresses or blankets, so that they never

dared to take ofTany of their wet work clothes. They were granted a blanket only after three years of good conduct. Their camps were totally isolated from all other prison camps. All contact with the outside world, all correspondence was forbidden to them.' 13 They did not
survive.

In katorga, and even in ordinary camps, the prisoners

group of living beings to whom The referred the animals. have not yet dogs wolfhounds were a constant presence in Kolyma. They accompanied all marches and were trained on command to attack people in prison clothes. There are
lived far worse than a final

we

102

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF KOLYMA

many
guards
tales

of prisoners savaged, and sometimes killed.

Their rations were extremely good, better than that of the

let

alone the prisoners.

also the horses enjoyed better

Not only the dogs but

conditions than the prisoners.

spoken of in the camps, of a

Upper tells a story, much man who in 1944 at the

Burkhala camp asked to be regraded as a horse. When he explained to the commandant that he would then get one

day ofTin every ten, and be assigned work according to his strength and have his own stable and blanket, the commandant first gave him ten days in the cells, but after thinking it over, issued him with a new jacket and a month's
highest ration. 13

worth telling even this single example of good humour. The extreme rarity of the faintest sign of humanity in the system is, however, its most striking characteristic. Speaking specifically from experience of Kolyma, a prisoner sums up the effects of the whole system, on all its inmates good or bad,
It
is

Soviet

camp

is

an incubator

for all the vilest

human

name, 'corrective labour camp', is a mockery. The only things that are corrected in such camps are the methods of petty occasional criminals^ who leave the camp
instincts. Its

trained professional thugs.

Not only does the camp provide

gives the criminals, the finest

no educational work;

it

opportunities to practise their profession.

The

thief steals^

the speculator speculates, the prostitute

sells herself^

Not

person is perverted,, the honest man* becomes a hypocrite, the brave man a coward, and all have their spirits and bodies broken. M

only that.

The normal

103

CHAPTER FIVE

GOLD UNDER ICE: THE KOLYMA ECONOMY

Geographically and organisationally, the exploitation of Kolyma was centred on Magadan (and nearby Nagayevo) We have seen how the original buildings and roads were constructed from scratch by the first wave of prisoners. In 1936 the town of Magadan was still unimpressive. The only
brick buildings were the post office, the automobile-repair

plant and the power station. Everything else was of wood,

and mostly mere logs at that. The main road, which went on to become the Kolyma Highway leading out for 400 miles to Seimchan, was paved; but other streets were not, and were impassable after rain. There were few street lights. But though three-quarters of the population were prisoners, robberies were rare, since the administration had kept in
the town, apart from politicals, only the less violent of the
privileged criminal class
ers,

'embezzlers,

speculators, chisel-

bigamists, the most flagrant violators of the alimony

laws and others composing the cream of Kolyma society'. 23

Moreover, since the penalty

for a prisoner

mitting some ofTence like theft or

making love was

shipped at once to the goldfields,

transgressions.

found comto be there were not many

By

the mid-forties

Magadan had become a handsome

little city,

of 70,000 inhabitants, with electrical workshops, 104

GOLD UNDER

ICE:

THE KOLYMA ECONOMY

a small shipbuilding works (at Nagayevo), a 'House of Culture' containing a cinema, a stage, a ballroom and a
library
(cultural standards

were higher, owing

to

the

presence of talented prisoners, than in Vladivostok).

The
of

key points in the town, however, were the vast

Dalstroy and the

offices

NKVD and the huge transit camp which

provided the labour for the mines up-country as replace-

ment became necessary that is, continually. The main gold deposits were to be found in the upper, hilly stretch of the Kolyma, south and west of Seimchan. The first great expeditions of 1932 -3 worked the old mines centred on the one hand on the area where the Magadan - Seimchan road reaches the river, which included the original site of Boriskin, together with Srednikan

and others; and on the other the area further up the river around Yagodnoye, including such sites as Khatenakh and At-Uryakh. These became the Southern and Northern Administrations respectively. By 1938, the Northern Administration was running eight main mines, employing between them over 50,000 prisoners. The total in all the Kolyma mines was now about 150,000. Expansion was continual. By 1938 a new Western Administration had come into existence, and by 1940 South-Western, North- Western, Chai-Urya and TyenkinoDetrinsk Administrations were operating. (The Western
seems to have covered the area over the passes from
Berelyakh, and the North-Western the further extension
into the Indigirka valley around Oymyakon. The SouthWestern was in fact situated in the easterly direction. The Chai-Urya lay in the more inaccessible areas east of the Kulu, while the Tyenkino-Detrinsk was in even more difficult country south-west of the most southerly bend of the Kolyma.) In 1940, these 7 administrations ran no less than 66 mines. The extension by opening up new areas had been

105

KOLYMA
matched by further
in 1940.
finds in the old areas

so

that the

Northern Administration, for example, had 12 main mines

The numbers

of prisoners in the gold

camps had

risen to over 400,000.

Expansion continued.

first

attempt to open up the

in the

1940* Several thousand prisoners and about 800 free citizens were

Pestraya Dresva area was

made

summer of

embarked. The winter clothes were inaccessible at the bottom of the hold when the cold weather set in, and there was much frostbite en route. They were landed, in conditions somewhat resembling the first 'assault' on Magadan in 1932, but weather and sea conditions made it
impossible to build the base harbour. After thousands of
deaths, the survivors

had

to

be re-embarked and the project

was abandoned.
In the spring of 194 1 the remnant of the expedition was unloaded in the port of Magadan: two hundred free men and a hundred and fifty prisoners. In the prison hospital at Magadan, where I was working as a nurse at this time, these hundred and fifty were laid side by side on cots in three barracks. They were hollow-eyed relics of humanity, but they kept silent about the horrors they had endured; only those in the delirium of pneumonia screamed out their memories. The frightful stench of rotting human flesh filled
the barracks.
assistants

The morning after their arrival the surgeon came with his and his instruments and went down the line. With

the aid of the nurses the sick were sat up and their arms stretched out at right angles to their chests, palms down. Then the surgeon cut off the frozen, suppurating fingers.

Twenty-five cots along one wall, twenty-five cots along the opposite wall. The bits of flesh in the kidney-shaped bowl piled up. After the fingers came the toes. Those were the light cases. Others were left with stumps of arms and legs. A good many survived the pneumonia, and when they awoke for the first time after long days of fever and coma they looked for their limbs, but the limbs
106

GOLD UNDER

ICE:

THE KOLYMA ECONOMY

were gone. For many, medical care came too late and they died of blood poisoning. Unknown Soviet heroes. No newspapers mention them. There is only a number on their nameless graves. 13

A later and better-prepared attempt finally opened up the

area,

and by 1949 20,000 prisoners were working in four Omsuchkan. There was continuous prospecting and an extension of mining in all likely areas. The fields on the lower Yana, on the Arctic Ocean, were developed. In addition to the gold camps whose existence we know of, there must have been a fair number of others, on the Yana and elsewhere, which have not been registered in records reaching the West. It seems probable that eventually some half a million prisoners were in the mines and this, of course, is not to include prisoners working at other projects, of which we
mines, based in

shall treat later in this chapter.

The

gold of

Kolyma

is,

in

one way, specially suited

to

manual labour. That is, much of it lies in surface deposits not more than a few metres down into the soil, even though usually within the permafrost, meaning work that was both hard and cold. Veins were of course also discovered, and proper mines opened to develop them; and these became increasingly important as the more accessible deposits became exhausted. But the expression 'mine' used of the gold camps covered every sort of excavation. For the surface mining preliminary work was often done
before the 100-day official season the deep layers of peat which
the upper surface.

mainly the removal of

the top level in most of
to
sift

make

Kolyma. In some areas detachments then went out

An

account in the Soviet press

a bonfire. This
to fetch

tells

of

had to be done without matches, by the ancient method of striking sparks

to start

how two men had

with flints. Another

man had

water from the frozen

107

KOLYMA
river

softened, then excavated

in search for gold. 29

and melt it. The deeply frozen ground next had to be and the sand passed through sieves

Elsewhere the surface gold was more concentrated, and whole teams worked a site intensively. A Pole describes the

methods: 'The work on the surface consisted of digging

mixed with gravel. We dug with crowbars, and in winter when the ground was frozen, with gouges. The daily norm was 125 barrows of earth dug, which had then to be pushed to a distance of from 300 to 400 metres.' 2 These excavations merged insensibly into true surfaceearth, often

picks

and

shovels,

mining:

We were set to work to open up the mine, which was later

named for the famous aviator, Vodopyanov. The work was
back-breaking. We had to dig holes in the frozen earth with picks in order to plant dynamite for blasting. Often, before getting to solid soil, there was peat to be removed sometimes as deep as five feet. For this work we only had the and in winter, sleds simplest toolsshovels and pickaxes to which we harnessed ourselves. Later, when the work of development had progressed further, machines began to be

brought

in.

10
.

Finally, and increasingly, there were genuine underground mines. One prisoner describes how 'Below the surface these mines were 120-150 feet deep, and acwere frequent, as many as five or six a day. The cidents underground corridors were narrow and the ceilings not propped. The unfortunate victims of accidents were hauled to the surface, their hands cut off in proof of death (to be shown to the authorities) and the bodies then thrust below
.

the brushwood.' 5

Another tells us that, 'In the underground mines machine drills and explosive drills and explosive cartridges filled with ammonal are used. The pace of work is so furious
108

GOLD UNDER

ICE:

THE KOLYMA ECONOMY

and
of

that the use of explosives occasions frequent accidents

prisoners are crippled or killed.

There are also many

themselves up.' 13

tales

despairing workers

who blow

In winter,
Technically, the work proceeded as follows: in the mine drifts the workers bored and blasted the sands, which were then raked away and heaped into a single pile. The ends of steamhoses connected to boilers standing outside the barrack were then driven into the pile. The steam was released and the sands were thawed out somewhat. Then they were carried in wheelbarrows to the panning unit. Carloads of
ice were also thawed out by steamhoses, and the sands were washed with the water thus obtained. After the washing, the water flowed offinto a deep pool where it was allowed to settle and later used again. From the technical point of view, winter panning under such conditions bordered on insanity, since, in the first place, the sands were never thawed out properly, and, second, the apparatus was extremely inadequate. Geologi-

cal analysis established that close to three-fourths of the gold

was carried off instead of being retained in the apparatus. However, the plan for gold production fixed for Dalstroy remained unfulfilled, and Moscow demanded gold. According to computations by economists, each gram of gold obtained during winter washing cost approximately four times the number of working hours it required in summer. Despite these facts, panning continued. 23

A free citizen was told that 'Each worker must work eight
cubic metres of rock per day If he does not do
.

this, his

bread
is

ration

is

reduced. If he exceeds the norm, his ration

As only a few are capable of achieving the output required in the time, the majority work considerably more than the officially laid down working day/ 33 A prisoner was able to recall the labour imposed by Tsardom, under Nicholas I, on the Decembrist rebels forced to work in the Nerchinsk goldfield: 'I told himr from
increased.

109

KOLYMA
the "Tales of Maria Volkonskaya", the rigorous treatment
that they

had

inflicted

on the Decembrists: each of them

Petrovich?" Fedyakhin

had

hew 50 kilograms. ... '"And what's our norm, Vasily

to
*I
'

asked.
calculated:
see,

"You

Vasily Petrovich,

"About a ton and a half!" the norms have pro-

gressed."' 28

The

gold was put into leather bags containing 20

wooden crates and sent under heavy guard to Magadan. In the midthirties, it was flown directly to Moscow to a special NK VD gold refinery. Later, when production increased, we are
kilograms of dust and screwed into special
told

that the gold

was sent

in

a special destroyer to

Vladivostok, on the

first leg of its journey to Moscow. Gold production in the late thirties seems to have reached about 300 tons a year, and after the war to have gone up to from 400 to 500 tons a year (getting on for a third of world production) As we have seen, one estimate is that every ton
.

of

Kolyma gold cost about a thousand human lives. Though gold remained the staple product of the whole Dalstroy- Kolyma enterprise, there were other products

for example, the lead mines on the Chukhotsk peninsula. These were operated without safety measures (at least in - 1 ) and all prisoners eventually died of lead poisoning. 1 940

This applied, for example, to 3000 Poles sent there in August 1940, about whom no action had to be taken when
at the end of them was left alive. 2 With the American entry into the war later in 1941 gold became less immediately necessary to the Soviet rulers on

the amnesty for Polish citizens

came into force

the following year, since none of

account of the Lend-Lease system.

The plan
tin

for gold

mining on the other hand was intensified (and a new effort went into road-building) . Other mining included the great coal mines
production was slightly curtailed. Lead and

no

GOLD UNDER

ICE:

THE KOLYMA ECONOMY

of Arkagala, to the north-west. These eventually supplied

the entire region. In the same area, uranium was eventually
discovered.

And at the beginning of 1952, it was decided to

known
Magadan)

build a vast nuclear plant at a spot

distance in kilometres from
It

as 754 (its otherwise as D-2.

was to be operated by free workers, but built by prisoners. Some ten thousand were assembled. There was the usual trouble with inefficient planning, resulting in the warping of floors and inefficient and unsafe use of labour. Security was intense, and we only have one brief account from a foreigner who was accidentally posted there for a few
days. 31

construction and maintenance remained a conand heavy burden on resources and on labour, with its own Administration (originally sited at Yagodnoye), ranking with and evidently employing as many labourers as a mining administration. And the roads were also regular customers for a supply of logs from the lumber teams. These
tinual

Road

were of course needed

construction.

for other purposes too,

such as

camp

And

logging remained, as elsewhere in the

Soviet North, a major employment.

transferred

In 1941 ten thousand of the strongest prisoners were from the Northern Administration alone to the

Road-Building Administration, to build the road to the

Indigirka River and beyond. This road,
Trassa

known
It

as
is

Kolyma
in

-the

Kolyma Trace
used
it

still

exists.

part

roughly metalled and in part merely a

taiga.
still

mud track across the

A Russian who
in

many camps now extended to

were operation across the whole stretch, by

in 1965 says that there

Irkutsk.

As with the coal of Arkagala, and the wood of the forests, it was Dalstroy's policy to be self-sufficient in every respect.

One essential product alone could not be raised in Kolyma wheat. ('Of course', a free visitor noted, 'other

foodstuffs are

imported into the territory for

officials,

and

in

RQLYMA
receptions at r for example, Nikishov's
'

~ ~ were

notable for

tlieir lavishness-')

2Br
:

Butr except as regards bread, the staple: foodstuffs were produced locally^ There were large 'State Farms', entirely/ staffed by women prisoners, at Dukcha, Susuman and elsewhere. Their main; product was cabbage. The coarse outer leaves: were used for prisoners in a brew called 'khaki soup' because of its greenishrbrown colour. The cabbage heads were sent! to fcee citizens. Some potatoes were alsoplanted,, although mt much smaller quanti ties,, and solely for

the free population* In addition, turnips were growny

together with oats which did not ripen but were used
cattle fodder. 13
as*

A
The

Polish
site

woman: describes one of the farming camps:

of the

camp

in Talon
forests,

is

very beautiful.

Meadow-

land, ringpd in

by vast

one side bounded by a chain

of mountains, the other by a wide, slow-flowing; river. The air fresh and keen. Beyond the forest, swamp. The tilled fand producer potatoes* turnips, cabbage, low-growing
oats.

Here order was kept

incredibly,

in

the barracks: and

the

were better thought of than the apaches and other criminals. This is the only time I experienced this. The barracks are roomy and light, with pallet-beds. Between the beds are empty packing-cases for
'politicals',

lockers
saekfuls

and some

chairs.

We worked long shifts in the fields, cutting and loading

of cabbage. With my terrible discharging sores, it was very difficult for me to pack, sew up and* load the enormous sacks. Hands and arms were covered with blood; the cold entered all my open wounds. The apache women lit great fires in the fields, but they would not let us other

women

near. ...

My legs and hands now became so fill! of pus that I was

put to work with old Jaga, plaiting straw slippers. Four ofus worked in a tiny log hut, with a stove in the middle, minute windows, a wooden wheel, and straw stuffed between the tegs in an at tempt Cakeep-out the bitter wind .Jaga^ was very
112

GOLD UNDER

ICE*

THE ROLYMA ECONOMY

olHl Altday long^she sang and told tales; old tales of the time of the Tsars, full of inagteians, bishops, enchanted wolves; subsets and moonrise, sleigh rides and Easter joy. . Qnfy he very infirm were allowed to- ch>- this work.* Among us were a former colonel (Tsarist)) whose spine had been permanently injured during interrogation^ a former nobfe who: had- been* educated in Warsaw^ a former engineer (Soviet);, Minded in a gold mine, old- Jaga, and'- myself, a former human* being and a Pole.*
..

..

and constituting an export as-well was fishing. On the Okhotsk Sea*, there were five large fishing camps, with both men and women prisoners: at Nagayevo, Ola, Balagannoye, Yana and Arman. And similar camps existed on the Arctic Ocean at Ambarchik and on the Bear Islands. Herring and various types of salmon. were the main product,.salt herring being a normal part of the prisoners' diet. Working- conditions in the fishery camps were different frorar daoseof the gold and other camps, in the nature of the jo.b Balagannoye is described as one of the most tolerable camps' of Kolyma. It was 'divided into two parts by a high wooden palisade and by barbed wire; one part is for
stilly

More important
a

as

useful: local foodstuff,

women,

the other for the

ill

men

prisoners

who

are crippled,

too weak, or too

therefore,

to

work
as.

in the gold mines,

are em played

porters and. drivers,,

and who woodsmen,

and craftsmen2 1 3

At Arman r the women, fist-packers noted that

Our clothes, our blankets, even the planks we slept on, were always streaming and full of salt. Our boots, if we took them
and sticky like gloves washed on when we came to put them on again next morning- Qur clothes came off only once a week, when- we
off at night, .were shapeless

the hands

went
salt

to the bath-house.

...

Two women, working together are supposed to pack, and

reaching

away 6600 salmon in one day. In itself the effort of down tor the bottom* of the great kegs is enough* to

"3

KOLYMA
exhaust the strength of a healthy woman properly fed. The pain in our arms and shoulders was excruciating. We felt as if we were being flayed by the salt, the water and the movements we had to make. We worked a shift of twelve hours inside refrigerators. Scales lay about our feet in drifts. . . . Among the barrels, a few couples were always lying in hurried, sodden and animal embrace. After some days I was moved from the kegs to the gutting-alleys. I forget exacdy how many I was expected to gut a day. I think it was 1700. The doctor was a kind woman, herself serving a sentence of twenty-five years. She spoke French, but in secret only. It was to her that I owed the change of work. 2

This prisoner adds

that nevertheless.

(like

her fellow convict at Balagannoye)

Apart from the actual nature of the work (which was the most exhausting I experienced anywhere) this was not the worst camp one could find. ... The food, too, was good by comparison. Soup made of fish heads in the morning, kasha with pieces offish at noon and salmon fried in seal fat for our dinner. The star workers got a kilo of bread, but few of us ever passed 50 per cent of the norm and got only 500 grams of bread and small portions of the other foods. Those lower than 50 per cent got only 300 grams of bread, with soup. 2
In addition to the mining of non-precious metals and of
coal, the production of logs and of food, there was a whole range of subsidiary enterprises, such as sewing shops, a glass

factory,

power stations, brick-works, an electro-engineering

plant at Atka, which manufactured electric motors; a

metallurgical plant at Orotukan, where there were iron
deposits;

and

so forth.

Gold, however, remained the great central focus of the

economy of Kolyma, with most of its other operations ancillary to that main thrust. This remained true in spite of
the fact that the road-builders and fish-packers, the menial

114

GOLD UNDER
workers of

ICE:

THE KOLYMA ECONOMY

the turnip growers of Ola,

Magadan and

constituted a fair proportion of the total labour force

even

though, as far as possible (and

prisoners at

it

was not always

in

possible),

women and 'goners' were used. Perhaps a third of Kolyma's

any given time were,
one capacity or
nevertheless, in

another, not at the gold face.

their

The miners
real

hundreds of thousands, were the

cannon fodder of

the enterprise.

Of course, it is plain

that (as even works published in the

USSR, such as that of General Gorbatov, have stressed) the way the prisoners were used, the total disregard of human
was insanely wasteful. That is, indeed, to assume, and to assume wrongly, that the economic motive predominated, and that the aim of destroying the prisoners was
resources,

not in

itself at least

equally compelling for the Stalinist

administration.

But even in

its

purely economic attitudes, the regime had

a built-in tendency to enormous errors and inefficiencies.

For example,

much

winter work was done in prospecting,

with prisoners being sent to drive shafts deep into the

permafrost, particularly harsh and dangerous work. Five

Jiundred prisoners were sent out for

Zarosshy Spring. Half of them died.

unproductive and the shafts

March 1938, at The area proved were abandoned. In March

this in

1940, prisoners were sent to exactly the same area for the same work, with the same results. 32 The mere utilisation of machinery was impossible to organise effectively under the pressures of the time. There

are

many stories of machines wrecked

because the foremen

could not provide proper maintenance and the prisoners

were forced to use them beyond

their capacity.

Even more extraordinary

stories are told

of losses due to

organizational inefficiency. In 1939 one prisoner

had a

talk with the norm-setter of the mine's

Planning

"5

KOLYMA
Section a free employee. He told me that the productivity of labour in the pits was approximately three-fourths of that of the preceding year, and only one-fourth of that of 1937. The situation was partly corrected by the presence of three excavators which managed to do some of the work despite the difficulties of operating in perpetually frozen soil. I asked how the large 'Marion* excavator of American origin, imported a year earlier, was functioning. He thought for a
while.

'Marion, Marion ... I remember we had one by that name. But where is it? Last year I heard that it was working poorly and very little: some mistakes had been made in assembling it, then there was some breakage, and it stopped working altogether. I have no idea where it is now, though I

know all our sections 'I remember it was

remarked. Two days
.
.
.

sections

.'

said last year that

it

was paid

for in
I

gold, something like $20,000, apart from transport costs,'

later I

saw him again. He came to where I the embankment. 'YouVe started something now. There is quite a mess. I ran through every mine looking for the excavator, and then reported to the director that it had disappeared. He raised everyone to their feet and how we are all running about worked and
sat

down on

searching for it ... I burst out laughing. The supposition that a huge excavator could disappear without a trace from a relatively small gold field seemed extremely amusing. The fact that
picks

'

and

shovels,

wheelbarrows and wagons were

lost

by

the hundreds in the blasting operations, to the complete indifference of everyone, that the rails of the mechanical tracks rusted through and vanished under piles of rock and

timber was burned in the ovens and was perfectly normal and taken for granted in every Soviet enterprise. But an excavator! A huge, expensive imported machine! This was too much even for the camp administration. No one could have stolen it, especially since, when it was last seen, it was inactive, broken by unskilled mechanics. Besides, who would steal an
ore, that building

boilers

all this

116

GOLD UNDER

ICE:

THE KOLYMA ECONOMY

excavator at the gold fields! Looking at me with chagrin, the norm-setter said: 'Well, what are you laughing at? Do you know what trouble this might mean for me? I was one of three persons who signed tfife Inventory of October the first, certifying the 4 presence of a "Marion* excavator at the mine. And now it is not here. It is true that formally the warehouse-keeper df the 3rd Section is responsible for it, but the trouble is that he was transferred six months ago to the new Western Mining Administration, and the transfer was so hurried that he had no time to explain all his affairs to the new man. And now no one can say who wiH be answerable.' I understood all that,Tuiowing the system of complicated hook-keeping controls in Soviet institutions, a system which, however, was quite powerless to eliminate the crying inefficiency everywhere. The puzzle of the excavator's disappearance was cleared up in the fall, and then quite by accident. The geologists found that one of the previous year's dumps was lyipg on ground with a high gold content, and it was necessary to carry it to a new place, which had already heen mined. One of the new excavators was assigned to this work since the earth to be moved was not frozen hard and therefore the excavator could be of use. One day the scoop or the excavator caught against something in the dump and broke; the men began to dig, and found, under a solid layer of earth, the vanished 'Marion', thoroughly rusty and battered. How this huge machine could have been buried under the reRise without anyone seeing it or taking note remained a mystery. In the field records the excavator was
.

written ofT as iron scrap. 23

mismanagement was the Stalinist planning principle under which the slogan 'There are no fortresses a Bolshevik cannot storm' was interpreted in such away that it became impossible to criticise planning far beyond the capacity of an enterprise without running
Even more basic
to disastrous

the risk of arrest for 'counter-revolutionary norm-setting*.

AH over the USSR crazed or ambitious officials ruined their

J17

KOLYMA
saner rivals, and imposed in
resources, or even plans
all fields

the over-utilization of
basis

which had no more

effect,

than their

very grandiosity. Moreover the planning process proper,

within which these attitudes took

was heavily over-

bureaucratized and (especially in Kolyma) lacking in real

connection with the problems on the spot. In minor

building, for example, as early as 1937:

Under

activities as ours

Soviet procedure even such petty construction had to be approved in Moscow, by the

Ministry, and the latter, lacking any knowledge of the actual local needs, often included in the plan completely unnecessary units and omitted the essential ones. As a result, a mine might be in need of a bakery, but would be required by plan to build a bath-house. Or it might need a

bath-house, but the plan would provide money for building breeding kennels for bloodhounds; or else money would be allotted for the construction of a communal dwelling, while the mine director wanted to build a new house for himself, with but a single apartment. Then a series of complicated combinations would begin. In its reports, the mine would show the building of a dining-hall for prisoners, when in fact a dbrmitory for the guards had been erected. Naturally, the bank knew nothing and issued money for a dining-hall. The bank was not concerned with whether the kennels were needed by the mine: if kennels were ordered, they had to be

was

But under Kolyma conditions, when all local power hands of Dalstroy, and the bank's sole representative was the ever-hungry inspectress Sveshnikova, the bank's actual powers of control were reduced to zero. However, within the mining administration, the construction activities were also controlled by the Building Section, which in effect said to the mine: 'You may break 9 the law, but only with our permission. And the mine director knew that if our section should report his illegal building work to the bank, the money would be stopped at once, and, if things took a bad turn, he might even end up on the defendant's bench. If, luckily, his mine fulfilled the gold production norm, he could reasonably expect lenibuilt!

in the

118

GOLD UNDER

ICE;

THE KOLYMA ECONOMY

ency* ... But if, in addition to everything else* the mine produced less gold than was required of it,, then no power art earth could save the mine administration: from serious
difficulties.
23

The
trouble

station at

power Taskan ran into the other and equally common of arbitrary and ill-informed orders.
construction of a 3000-kilowatt electric

Despite the constant pushing by Pavlov himself, the survey of that area prolonged itself. Pavlov lost patience and made a personal appearance on the spot in the middle of winter,, mercilessly berated all the geologists* cast his ruler's eye over the region, pointed out a site for the erection of the powerhouse, and ordered immediate excavations. Within a week about a thousand workers were herded to the spot* and all winter they dug the ground for the foundations of the powerhouse. However, when the snow melted, it turned out that the spot chosen was in the middle of a swamp and there could be no question of building anything there. Everything had to be started anew. Fortunately for the geologists, the head of the prospecting party had succeeded in obtaining from Pavlov a written order for the starting of operations on the spot determined by the eccentric's whim, and therefore no reprisals followed the initial fiasco. 2 *

Another construction job of the same period, also in the Taskan area,

was the Taying of a single-track suspension railway. By that time the problem of supplying the mines with construction lumber and firewood had become extremely complicated, since all more or less suitable timber had been ruthlessly
destroyed within a radius of 30-40 miles. The nearest forests of suitable size were . . . separated from the gold fields by a wide stretch of impassable swamps. The lack of transportation facilities and the general acuteness of the problem made it necessary to find some way out of the difficulty; as a result, it was decided to build a suspension railway on piles dug deeply into the earth. Along this

**9

KOLYMA
railway, suspended cars were to ply back and forth, carrying lumber to the fields. . . .Its total mileage, to begin with, was to be 25 miles. ... Since the Industrial Bank refused to grant any funds for so risky a venture, some simple book-keeping manipulations were indulged in, and the financing was started at the expense of basic production the expense of costs per gram of gold.

The whole story ended ingloriously. Work went on for about eight months, but when spring arrived it became clear that the implacable swamp would brook no intrusion: all the piles that had been driven into the earth in winter
began to settle down and sag in various directions as the ground thawed out. The road laid over them, with here and there the rails already in place, turned into such a bent and twisted line that there could be no question of moving cars with lumber along it. Work was stopped. A part of the construction timber that went into the road was salvaged for fuel, and the rest was abandoned without use. The administration wrote off a loss of about a million and a half
rubles. 23

Similar stories

come from
later, the

all

periods

and areas of

Kolyma. Ten years

of the chief

building of a factory in the

Pestraya Dresva region was 'speeded up' by the simple act

NKVD official (evidently General Derevenko) who, on being told that it could not be ready until November, wrote on the file 'the factory must be ready unconditionally not later than May 1 .' 31 As a result of the pace, and the lack of equipment, it then took a year longer -than the original plan and cost double. In the same area and period a Czechoslovak engineer prisoner, Venyamin Piscun, reports a vast error almost precisely parallelling the Taskan railway fiasco:
At the Galimyy mines they were working on four levels and drilling new sections, so that the ore output would be trebled. They found that their huge Diamond-T trucks
120

GOLD UNDER

ICE:

THE KOLYMA ECONOMY

could not cope with the increase. Apart from that they considered it unpatriotic to shell out dollars, or even gold, for tires and spare parts. So they decided that the cheapest way to solve the truck and fuel problem would be to build a funicular transportation system from the top of the mountain and string it four miles down to the factory below. They had the poles, they had the cable-cars. The missing link was the cable. Funicular cables are specially made, and their production requires great skill and experience. At that time the only such plant was in Leningrad. They wrote to Leningrad and were told that, due to the large number of orders on hand, the request could not be filled for five years! A Party meeting was immediately convened to solve the problem. The hotheads shouted, There are no fortresses that we cannot conquer! We shall build the cable with our own hands! 9 He meant our hands, of course. Some older members tried to talk them out of it, but the hotheads had it
their own way. I was called in for technical advice, and gave them a categorical no. But who was I, a convict, a traitor to his motherland. They knew better. So they went ahead, twisting the wires around a wooden device invented by some cabinet-maker. One day it was ready, and thousands of prisoners were marched up the icy slopes of the mountain, lugging the homemade cable on their shoulders. The day came when the first empty cable-car left the top and reached the plant below. Then another, half loaded.

Everything looked wonderful. They put flags on each pole, they brought a brass band, and then decided that some top officials should go down the mountain by cable to show how safe it was. The officials piled in, the band played, and loud hurrahs went up as the cable-car took off. It had hardly gone a hundred yards when suddenly the cable began to sStretch, and as a result the cable-car sagged to the ground. No one was injured, but neither did anybody have the courage to propose another homemade cable. As for the poles, they remained as a reminder of this costly bungle, but because they were not buried in deep enough they now look like sagging crosses in an old cemetery! 31
fully loaded.

Then a third, They decided

to celebrate.

121

KOLYMA
In
fact,

the

economy was beset by inhuman pressures and

functioned with a
as a result.

maximum of friction, as well as of terror,

A typical story, in which these pressures are seen

spirit

not on the grand scale but as they affected the ordinary

mining gang, well conveys the

of the times:

A dark hole in the rib ofa desolate mountain was the usual
entrance to a mine. Digging was made at various levels with some of the prisoners working at the surface and others 2500 or 3000 yards below. The tunnels inside the mines were so narrow that two people could hardly walk side by side, and the height hardly permitted a medium-sized fellow to walk unless bent from the middle. In some places the gallery was so badly excavated that we had to advance on our knees and hands. Until the end of the 1950s when Humphrey's safety lamps were distributed, every prisoner-miner had to provide his own light which was a rusted tin with a wick dipped in some grease. This gave a very poor light; under the drafts it was often snuffed out. The worst situation was when the naked light came in contact with gases emanating from crevasses and other cracks in the mine's walls and caused an explosion. Trunks of trees,, which should have been used as pillars of support for the galleries, were sometimes sawed and taken away in the dark by prisoners who used them in
the barracks as firewood. Until late in the 1950s prisoners
still working with picks and axes as their only tools, while their legs could hardly move from the heavy chains. The loading of excavated material was done in threequarter-ton cars pushed with bare hands to the pit's mouth where other prisoners took over, sorting the rich ore from the waste rock. For the prisoners who used the primitive lifts for descending into the mines there was a terrible risk, as the cables holding the lifts were old and rusty, and more than once they snapped under the load of the humans they were taking below. The work in the mines was a nightmare. No precautions were taken to protect the workers against accidents* Eventually the miners got carbide lamps, and a privileged

were

122

GOLD UNDER

ICE:

THE KOLYMA ECONOMY

electric batteries.

few were given lamps with

also

The

officials

but due to the administrative panic to reach the projected production levels, the air was always filled with heavy dust. As a result, many developed silicosis. Not a single day would go by without an accident being reported. Either the power supply fail, prisoners would get stuck halfway, or a cable would snap and the lift would crash. The maimed and badly injured were constantly being hauled off to the camp hospital. Lack of headgear caused more accidents. Miners wore their Russian fur hats instead of helmets, and when large stones and rocks poured down, a man was done for. The terror of failing to meet the daily quota kept the brigade leaders and the men in a constant state of frenzy. They knew how many three-quarter-ton cable-cars they had to send down daily, and they knew that each cable-car was carefully checked when it arrived. I witnessed a scene when, at the end of our shift, the brigade leader, a man named Gregoryev, questioned the prisoner assigned by the administration to check the output. The man was covered in dirt from head to foot, and his eyes were red from dust. 'How many cable-cars did we send down today?' asked Gregoryev in a hoarse voice.
to

began

pump fresh air into the mines,

'Fourteen!'

roared Gregoryev. 'Not one less.' 'I'm sorry,' said the checker, 'there were only fourteen.' 'What do you want?' screamed Gregoryev at the top of his voice. 'That my men should go hungry because of a few stones! Put down fifteen on your tally sheet. If you don't I'll
'Fifteen,'
kill
'I

you
.

right here.'
'I

cannot, brother,' cried the other.

.

swear

can-

not.

.'

He never finished his sentence. Gregoryev pulled out a thin-bladed knife and plunged it several times into the
man's
chest.

The man

lay dead,

and Gregoryev ran away

after spitting

on the body and

hissing:

'For a dog, a dog's death.' 31

123

the minds of

Aese conditions srefleeted ne main iruth. .fa; its creators and organisers the conscious purpose of Kdlyma, Which had originally been the production of gold, with death as an unplanned by-product, had become the production, with at least equal priority, of gold and death.
.All

in

afll,

i*4

CHAPTER

SIX

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

At Cayenne too
it

was

nasty, but here

is

it

really

very nasty.

A FRENCH PRISONER,
PREVIOUSLY ON DEVIL'S ISLAND. 28

The

basic principle of

Kolyma,

that of underfeeding

and
last

overworking the prisoner, has already emerged clearly

enough
State

in a general

way

that system by which the

consider precisely

energies squeezed out of his failing

body were used to get the

more

gold.

We may now

how

the

machine worked. The method by which the Stalin regime extracted further effort from its exhausted victims was, of course, the 'norm system*. The ration was made dependent upon output, so
that the urge to survive pressed the prisoner to try to
his set task,
fulfil

and thus achieve the maximum food. At the was so low as barely to ensure a temporary respite; the work was so hard and long that the struggle was always a losing one; and the norm itself was anyhow set so high that it was very difficult to achieve it

same

time, that best ration

125


KOLYMA
regularly.

usually

ensured a
the other

So a precarious balance was reached which

fair level

of gold production while also

fulfilling

main

object of Kolyma, the killing off of

the prisoners.

The norms
which
also

varied to ^ some extent through the years

the war, as well as after 1947.

(being raised in 1941-2 for example). So did the ration,

came down during

famine, or near-famine, years like

The

general

which should put it beyond much dispute, in a Soviet publication of the Khrushchev era: 'The convicts worked a twelve-hour day, and only completion of the norm gave the right to the full 800 grams of bread per day. Non-fulfilment of norms, through whatever cause, automatically entailed a reduction of the bread ration to 500 grams. This was just above the starvation level: any further reduction to 300 grams (as a punitive measure) meant death within a couple of days.' 29 The slight variations on this to be found in other reports are of no great significance. But we may note that in certain circumstances 'overfulfilment' of the plan might be rewarded with a ration of a full 1000 grams; 18 that an intermediate ration of 700-750 grams is sometimes reported; that women (and men not in the mines) got a lower basic scale of 600 grams for 100 per cent norm, 500 for 70-99 per cent, and 400 for 50-69 per cent; that the penal ration in the lockup was sometimes as low as 200 grams. And, more important, that the 1 2-hour day was a minimum and in practice it was extended, often to as much as 16 scheme
is

given,

hours. 13

In addition to the basic bread, other food was provided.

One reported supplementv rather better than most, is given

as; *3-5

ounces of salted

fish; 2*1

ounces of cereals

barley,

barley groats, millet, or oats; 0.17 ounce of meal or starch;

0.5 ounce of vegetable
.

oil; 0.34 ounce of sugar; 0.106 ounce of herb tea; 10.5 ounces of brined cabbage leaves.' 13

126

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

It
is

worth nothing that these rations can readily be

to Westerners for
its

compared with a camp system known

horrors

that of the Japanese prisoner-of-war

camps on the

River Kwai. There the daily ration norm was 700 grams of rice, 600 of vegetables, 100 of meat, 20 of sugar, 20 of salt
spite of the latter area's

and 5 of oil. This, notably superior to the Kolyma ration in added disadvantage of extreme cold, was also the ration actually delivered and not merely the official figure. Like the Soviet ration, it was, however, greatly deficient in vitamins. It gave a calorie total of about 3400. The Soviet diet in strict-regime camps is, even in 1977, only 2600 calories; punishment diet is still 2100 calories, and prisoners in the strict-punishment cells get 1300. The international standard for a man working Very actively' for 8 hours a day is 3100 to 3900 calories. The calories deficit alone, to say nothing of vitamins and fats, is thus something like 1000 calories a day at a minimum. Moreover, as a prisoner notes, 'In evaluating the prison rations it must be kept in mind that these rations are for

people

who perform

the heaviest kind of physical labour

and sixteen hours a day in a country which during the eight months of winter has the lowest tempera13 tures of any inhabited country on the face of the earth.' And it was indeed the heaviest labour. Kolyma is the only area of the whole labour camp system where lumbering is not taken as the hardest and most killing task. For the
twelve, fourteen,

hack not wood but stone, or earth I. S. Karpunich-Braven typically describes taking part in 'the removal of "turves" (earth with rock fragments arid boulders in it) when the temperature was 50C. below freezing, transporting them on sledges to

Kolyma prisoners had

as

to

hard as stone. General

which were harnessed four

hauled.' 8

prisoners,

beaten as they

The prisoners' day

typical

thus centred round food and work. A one ran on the following lines: Reveille 4 a.m.

127

KOLYMA
Breakfastof gruel plus one- third' of the bread ration, or half
herring and bread, 5 a,nu, march off to work. Noon^ cabbage leaf soup, one-third; of the bread ration, groats, or merely gruel and peas. 8 p.m., back to camp, except for those not achieving their norm, who did two hours more. Supper: one-tjjird, of the bread, ration and soup* after various* camp chores like firewood-collfecting had beerra-

performed. l8

2r

The
more

fulfilment of the

norm was of

course

made even

difficult-

to criminals'

who had done no

by the assignment of part of the outputs real work. In- any case

even if the worLperformed is listed honestly, it is impossible a person unaccustomed to physical labour to ftilfil the quota. He quickly fells into a vicious circle. Since he cannot do his full quota of work, he does not receive the full bread ration; his undernourished body is still less able to meet the demands, and so he gets less and less bread,, and in the end is so weakened that only clubbings can force him to drag himself from camp to gold mine. Once he reaches the shaft he istoo weak to hold the wheelbarrow, let alone to run the drill; he is too weak to defend himself when a criminal punches him in the face and takes away his day's ration of
for

bread. 1 *

The margin was

watched.

so

narrow that every Grumb, was

A woman

prisoner gives the atmosphere:

The bread

is distributed by a grey^haired old invalid with sharp eyes, a sharp tongue, a thin sharp nose, and thin sharp fingers. In front of her lies a^ book, like the commander of the guard's book,, listing the names of all the prisoners by brigades. You give her your name and she begins thumbing through the pages while seventy women wait. She pushes back her glasseis* stares at you to. make sure you really are the person you claim to be, sets her glasses back on her nose, and hands you the ready-cut seven ounces of bread. It is a middle section, of course; not everybody can have an end of bread. Ends are for her special friends; she cannot befriend

128

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

everyone* It is impossible to explain to someone who has not been in camp or prison what the end of a loaf of bread means. The end is crisper, it looks more attractive and it seems to be heavier. But more than that, an end mysteriously fills you more than the middle section of the bread,

although it too weighs only seven ounces (200 grams). middle section is a stab wound to the heart; it is a confirmation from Providence that you are abandoned for good and all. It is the beginning of a day in which everything will surely go wrong. And you almost always get a middle section. Not only on account of the ends is the distributor of bread one of the most hated women in camp. She also has the right to allow for 3 grams of crumbs and moisture for each 200 grams of bread, so that in reality she need give out only 197 grams. What happens to all the crumbs and to the moisture,

which

is

not

lost at all, since it is

well

known

that she covers

the loaves at night with

damp

cloths in order to replace

whatever moisture may have evaporated? Those extra 3 grams go into her own stomach, or she makes gifts of bread m her bosom friends. It's easy to see how she has filled out
since; she

are the well-fed. w

has held

this post.

The worst-hated people in camp

Naturally
naturally,

this

system

left

no allowance for error. Equally

error

in

Soviet conditions,

seen

came

or

the unfore-

often.
basis,

This might happen on an individual

as

when

General Gorbatov

tells

of inedible bread.

Unfortunately the bread he had brought turned out to be sodden and inedible. We were indignant and pressed him to take it back and show it to someone in authority. The man
took
said:

me
. .

aside, explained the situation at the

camp, and

.'You're an Article 58 man. If you protest they might take it as insubordination and incitement. That
I

would cost you another five years or ten.

can see for myself

the bread's unusable, but that's all you'll get this time so you'll just have to wait a week anyhow whether you like it or

129

KOLYMA

Why don't you keep it that would be better- instead of making me take -it back. It would be dangerous for me- I'm in the same boat as you.' 6
not.

Any large-scale dislocation brought disaster. Even in summer, as General Karpunich describes, Trisoners were so hungry that at Zarosshy Spring they ate, in July, the carcass of a horse which had been lying for more than a week and which stank and was crawling with flies and worms. At the Utinyi prisoners ate half a barrel of grease which had been brought to oil the wheelbarrows. At Mylga they fed on moss, like reindeer.' 8 The spring thaws might cut a camp off, as with the Spokoiny mine in the Northern Administration in May 1944, where mass death ensued. In winter, as General Karpunich tells us,
the passes were snowbound, at the outlying mines each prisoner received 100 grams of bread a day, and the shortfall in rations was never made up later. Numerous utterly exhausted prisoners who could not walk were dragged to work on sledges pulled by other equally exhausted prisoners whose legs were not so swollen. Any who lagged behind were beaten with sticks and bitten by dogs. When work had to be carried out at temperatures of 45C. below zero the prisoners were forbidden to start a fire 8 to warm themselves. (Criminals were allowed to.)

When

Another account of the results of heavy snow describes how short a time a few days was necessary to ruin the already weakened miners:

Shortly before Christmas heavy snowfalls began, cutting off our mine completely from the rest of the Kolyma. There was so much snow that some mine workers were transferred to the work of clearing a road. In the meantime, the last food reserves for the prisoners were exhausted. First of all, as usual, the salt disappeared, and in all the dishes we were served in the dining hall it was replaced by

130

LIVING AND
herring.

mWG. CONDITIONS

cereal gave out,

Soup with herring, gruel witfc herring. Then the and there wa& no more gruel. There

remained only soup with, breads the soup consisting of nothing, but water with asmall mixture of flour. Then,, for three days, all workers received only a half-pound of bread per person, and on the morning of the fourth day everyone received a double portion of the same soup instead of bread. On the following day again there was no bread. Real famine set in at the mine. Five* thousand men did not have a piece of bread. But everyone worked as: twelve hours a day. The prudent administration usual put all guards on duty r fearing a hunger rebellion- These fears were groundless the browbeaten and worn-out men were incapable of any energetic action. Exhausted by long years of half-starved existence and inhuman labour, people spent their last remnants of strength in working. And died. During those days- thenameless; graves, under the hilt swallowed fifteen or twenty

meet every day. In the evening of the

day, barely dragging: our feet,, my team-mate and I went directly to the dining hall on returning from work. Alexeev's eyes were burning feverishly. We had just come intothe mess hall when- our nostrils were struck by the smell of meat. From the kitehem window we were giveir a- pl&te of soup each-, and what soup!' Large chunks of meat floated in- it. Alfexeev began to gulp it down at once, but I was. seized by a sudden' suspicion*, knowing that the roadfe had not yet been eteared. Since there were few/ people m* the dining hall, t went to the windbw and* called the cook, whom I knew, to ask what kind of meat if was. The cook laughed, immediately guessing my thought. HS&fotface shone. 'So, you* are afraid it m human* meat? Ncr, not yetv Calm- down and eat it. Today they slaughtered three horses at the stable. They say that one died MraselF, but what's the difference?'
fifth
r
1

agreed that

table to eat

my

it made no difference and returned to the portion with great relish. After supper we

went

to

our tent to

sleep. 23

13*

KOLYMA
Even apart from
these special disasters, the system easily

got out of hand, with a resulting shortfall in production.

Roy Medvedev tells us that in Kolyma, The exhaustion of

prisoners

was so great that in the first post-war years there were frequent cases of two thousand to three thousand enrolled men turning out about one hundred to work in the mines '16 But even when the system was grinding on in fairly
orderly fashion, the cycle sooner or later set in.

The

exhaustion of the prisoners brings about a slowing

the output.
to beat

down in

When

the output goes

their

them with

down, the guards begin rifle-butts, put them into solitary

confinement and

finally shoot them.' 2

In any case, a prisoner who had been reduced to a virtual wreck in three or four weeks, and had then managed to keep going somehow from day to day, finally became incapable of further effort and found himself on starvation rations as a
dokhodyaga

'goner'.
. .
.

applied in the camps to the men a low level mentally and physically that even as workers they are of very limited value. The name dokhodyaga is derived from the verb dokhodit which means to arrive or to reach. At first I could not understand the connection, but it was explained to me: the dokhodyagas were 'arrivistes*, those who had arrived at socialism, were the finished type of citizen in the socialist

The word dokhodyaga who have been reduced

to such

society.
Little consideration

was shown

in the treatment of these

constantly, and received frequent cuffs on the head from the camp officials and guards. . The dokhodyagas always gobbled up the entire day's bread ration at breakfast time. 23
dokhodyagas.

They were being reprimanded

The

physical

and mental deterioration

is

reported with

horror by

all survivors.

Hunger produces strange behaviour. Half-mad, the hungry

132

LIVING AND [Link]

look like normal people. If famine hasn't entirely consumed them they defend their rights with fury. Eternal quarrellers, desperate skirmishers, they fight continuously. Discussions arise on the most petty pretext. . . . The small ones try to trip their adversaries up, the big ones to knock them over by sheer weight. The bodies hit and bite each other . . . often only trying to show off to an audience which never separates the combatants. 28

And again, who stood on

filthy

'In those days

all fours,

one often saw people in camp growling and rooting about in the

garbage near the tents and> especially near the kitchen^ looking for anything even remotely edible and devouring it on the spot. They had become semi-idiots

whom no amount
heaps.' 23

of beating could drive from the refuse

situations, stimulants

As

in all

extreme

were

as

much

desired as food. Tea, rarely obtainable,

would be stewed to

a palpitating concentration. 'Tobacco', a Soviet journalist

scrupulously shared out amongst the team.

was Taken in minute "pinches" it acted as a stimulant and was given by the team leader when one or other of the team was
tells

us,

'was even more precious than breads and

completely exhausted.' 29

The authorities, as frantic as the prisoners to complete their own norms, used this and other incentives. On turning
a nugget of i\ kilograms to the authorities a group of two ounces of tobacco each, half a day off, and a dinner at the canteen which catered for the freely employed. (The foreman was [Link]* as he explained with much vituperation, he could have made it more worth their while if the team had applied to him.) 2* In another camp, in the rare event of anyone exceeding the norm, the reward was a small bottle of cheap eau de cologne to drink. There were always a certain number of
in

prisoners were given

alcoholics, astonishing as

it

may
*3S

seem.

Some would

drink

KOLYMA
anything from turpentine to anti-freeze. Even
blindness. Others
filtered

through bread or cotton wool, these often caused death or

managed

to establish relations

with the

medical orderlies, and obtain medicines supposedly containing alcohol.

exhaustion which led to the total and the occasional stimulant was much increased by an almost total lack of rest days. 'One autumn day in the Great North, they gave us our first day's rest after six months of uninterrupted toil. Everyone wanted simply when, in the morning, the to lie down doing nothing administration of the camp sent us out on a wood-collecting
obsession with food
.
. .

The continuous

fatigue.* 28

Nor were

the barracks or huts in which prisoners spent

their spare hours

much

of a refuge. Desperately over-

crowded, with bunks three or four deep, they were often quite uninsulated (guards' huts had sawdust between two
layers of boarding) .

And,

ill-constructed as they were, the

cracks

and

holes were usually stuffed with moss, rags or

all

straw. Moreover, almost

the miners were afflicted by

try,

incontinence of urine.

They would
all

when

sent to other

camps, to get the lower bunks, in order to spare their

colleagues.
possible. 28

Where

they were

together this was not

The stoves, too, were quite inadequate. It was a constant complaint that 'The barracks were not given enough heat,
clothing

would not dry

out. In the fall they kept people,

soaked to the skin, out in the rain and the cold to fulfil norms
that such hopeless wrecks could never
fulfil.
. .

Prisoners

were not dressed for the climate in the Kolyma region. They were given third-hand clothing, mere rags, and often had only cloth wrapping on their feet. Their torn jackets did not protect them from the bitter frost, and people froze in
droves.' 36

We have noted the revealingly vicious regulations which,

*34

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

from 1937, practically forbade clothing adequate to the climate. Boots were the most troublesome, after Yezhov's
order banning
felt in

favour of sacking and canvas.

One

type of these burki

were made of lightly padded and quilted sacking with high, wide tops that reach to the knee, the shoe itself being strengthened by oilcloth or artificial leather at the toe and heel. The sole is made of three cross-sections of rubber from worn-out automobile tires. The whole thing is fastened to the foot with strings and tied with string below the knee so that the snow does not get in. These burki are so roomy that you can wrap three footrags around each foot. After a day's
use they

become all twisted, and the flabby soles turn every which way. They absorb moisture with incredible speed, especially when the sacks of which they are made were used for bagging salt, and hold the moisture obstinately. During the eight months of winter, drying the burki is the prisoner's principal problem. They are so heavy that after a march of several miles from the camp to the place of work you can scarcely lift your feet, although your day's work is just

beginning. Heavy nailed mountaineering shoes are like elegant dancing pumps compared to these Che-te-se, as the prisoners call them; it is the abbreviation for Chelyabinsk

Tractor Factory. 13

The

later burki

were

a sort of boot, an economic product dating from the war. They cut them in hundreds of thousands from canvas trousers. The sole was made with the same material sewn
flannel. This
. . . They also gave us strips of the way we went to work at the mines at 50 below and 6o below. After a few hours' work in the forest these burki, torn by the branches, came completely to pieces. In the mines the burki resisted for several days. Repairs were made rapidly by cobblers who worked through the night. In the morning the 'repairs' were done. They added successive layers of material for the sole, and the burki ended by being completely shapeless, like the churned-up bank of

into several thicknesses.

is

135

KOLYMA
a mountain torrent after an avalanche. 28

wadding jackets and a cloth cap with ear shawl women), cotton underwear, wadded mittens usually A Polish prisoner
As for clothes
trousers,
flaps (or
for
all

in rags.

says:

Tn winter, one has to work even in 65C. of frost. Clothes get

worn out very quickly in the mines. We went about wrapped in rags which we almost never took off; only very rarely in the bath-house. The ice-bound rags on our feet would thaw out in the vapour. After the bath, we had to wrap our feet again in these sodden rags.' 2 The men did indeed need baths, and the clothes needed
the disinfestation, which theoretically took place at the same time. Lice abounded. There were camps 'where they bathe every six months'. A doctor complaining of vermin would be told 'Were you ever at the Fifty-sixth Kilometre? That's where you would see lice, my

13

friend

'

But the bath and disinfestation procedure, which one might think so welcome to the prisoner, was on the contrary
regarded as
'unjust'.
it's

'When they

[i.e.

the politicals]

moan

about

injustice,

because the chief is sending them to the

the point.

baths.'

Shalamov develops

The rejection

of the bath always astonishes the doctors and the administration, who see in this absenteeism an opposition to rules and a defiance of discipline. . . . Special

gangs are formed: all the bosses participate personally in the hunt for abstainers. And the doctors too. The baths and the disinfestation of clothing are a direct part of their professional duties. ... Special measures ^re enforced for such days (there are three a month). ... Why? Is it possible for a man, however miserable he may be, to refuse to wash, to get rid of the sweat and the filth which cover a body devoured by skin diseases; refuse to Russian proverb smell clean even if only for an hour?

136

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

actually says

with

lice

or without?

'Happy as ifjust out of the bath*. Is one better And lice pullulate. Only disinfestation

can get

rid

of them.

Of course, lice are a relative matter. A dozen lice in one's

underclothes don't count. Lice begin to attract the attention of the prisoners and doctors when one can shake them out with a movement of the hand, when a crawling pullover

move on its own. Is it possible that a man, of whatever type, might not wish to escape this torture when he does not sleep and scratches his filthy body, gnawed by vermin, till the blood runs? No, of course not. But there is a 'but'. On bath days there's no spare time allotted. You go before or after work. After long hours in the cold (and the summer is no better) one wants only to plod to the barrack, swallow something
starts to

and

sleep.

The

baths delay

this

And

the baths are always far from the

moment: it's unbearable. camp, for they are

used both by prisoners and by free employees. ...

The bath and

disinfestation don't take

more than an

hour. But there's the waiting.

The

prisoners arrive in large

numbers, gang by gang. The late-comers wait outside, in the cold (they are taken direct from the place of work without going to the camp for fear that they would disperse and escape from control). When the cold is particularly intense, to save the prisoners too long a wait, they are allowed to go into the changing room designed for ten or fifteen people, where a hundred or so fully clothed men now cram themselves. ... A fantastic hubbub, naked bodies and clothed bodies are mixed pell-mell, howling, shouting and stamping. Profiting from the noise and the confusion, the thieves steal their comrades' property, and as there are several brigades there, the stolen objects are never recovered. ... The second, or rather the third, 'but' is that on bath days a special gang, in the absence of the prisoners, carries out the cleaning of the barracks. They scrub, they wash, they mercilessly throw away everything superfluous. Now the least rag is precious when one thinks of the energy needed to acquire it: a pair of gloves or spare slippers, to say nothing of
'37

KOLYMA
food or other objects, all disappear without trace and almost by regulation while the prisoners are at the baths.

work and then to the and experienced eyes of the common criminals are quick to notice this ruse. They can
take one's personal objects to
useless.

To

bath,

is

The

vigilant

always exchange stolen gloves or slippers for a

tobacco. 28

little

And

then the bath

itself:

cup of lukewarm water and ice ad lib. (In the summer they give cold water instead of ice. All the same that's better.) Of course, a prisoner must know how to wash himself whatever the volume of water, a spoonful or a cistern. If he only has a spoonful he confines himself to his puss-caked eyes. ... There's a lack not only of water, of heat too. The stoves are not warm enough. There are cracks in the walls, draughts. . . . The bath-house is built directly on the moss. This dries out quickly and creates holes through which the cold comes in. Every bath brings the risk of frostbite.
Everyone knows
the
list
it,

especially the doctors.

Next morning

of those off work for non-simulated illness is longer. And besides, it is the prisoners themselves who have had

to collect the

wood

the previous

day and carry

it

on

their

shoulders, again holding

several hours.

up

their return to barracks

by

But still, that's nothing. The worst thing is the compulsory disinfestation. In camp, the underclothes can be 'individual' or 'collective'. These are official terms. . . . The individual underclothing, newer and stronger, is reserved for the administrative personnel, prisoner-bosses and other privileged ones. . . . The 'collective' underclothing is distributed on the spot, immediately after the bath, in exchange for the dirty underclothes which have been collected. The question of sizes does not arise. The clean underclothes are strictly a lottery. I've seen adults crying with rage when, in exchange for dirty,,good underclothes, they've had clean, rotted underclothes. Nothing can take a man away from the contradictions which are the frame of
138

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

Neither the fact that he won't have this underclothing longer than the next bath time nor that the good stuff was no more than a lucky chance, nor that the bad stuff isn't anything, after all, compared with a lost life. But they argue and cry. A sign of the psychological anomaly of the 'dementia' which characterises almost all the actions They argue, they of the prisoner. A universal malady speak of the underclothes they got last time and of those which. were distributed five years ago at Bamgala.
his existence.
.

time to dry

The new underclothing is often damp. There hasn't been it for want of wood. They have to put it on
. . .

Clad in sodden after the bath. underclothing, completely frozen, the prisoners have to wait further* till their main clothing is disinfested. Success in this depends on luck and on the goodwill of the man in charge. At best, only the clothes hung near the stove get the heat. Those behind get the damp, and those in the furthest corners remain cold. This disinfestation which doesn't eliminate the vermin, exists only for the form and constitutes an additional torment to the prisoner. Doctors
immediately

know this well. But you can't decently leave a camp without
a disinfestation room. Finally, after an hour's wait in the changing room, the prisoners conclude their business with a pile of indistinguishable clothes thrown pell-mell on to the ground. Everyone, cursing, pulls out his coat, his undercoat, his cotton trousers, damp and smoky. Now you have to stay up the rest of the night to dry them out by the barrack
stove. 28

A womah
tation; 'the

prisoner confirms the inefficiency of disinfestemperature was never brought up to the iooC.
kill

which

is

necessary to

the

lice.

Usually the heat in

disinfestation

chambers was just right to make the lice feel comfortable and stimulated.' She adds that, when it had

become clearly impossible to delouse themselves, women would give up trying, and only when the itching became intolerable would reach under their blouses, 'fish out a handful of the vermin, and throw them away'. 13
139

KOLYMA
The whole question ofhealth and hygiene was crucial to The lice, as we have seen, produced outbreaks of typhus. And when such sicknesses were added
Hfe in Kolyma.
to the deficiency diseases

which were universal in the

camps, the prisoner

even passable health for any length of time became almost a forgotten memory. On arrival each prisoner had, of course, been given a medical check and been put into one of three categories Heavy Physical Labour, Medium Physical Labour, and Light Physical Labour. But, in the first place y na one was rejected as unfit and the check consisted of three

who enjoyed

applications

of

the

stethoscope

to

the

lungs

and

heart

plus an examination of the buttock muscles. All

'Trotskyites*

were

in

any case sent

to

Heavy Labour.

Moreover,, commandants rarely paid attention to the

had no light labour available,, what was being pre-empted by urkas. Since the health of even genuinely strong and fit men could not stand work at the mines, the true dist mction soon became simply between those whose bodies were irreversibly ruined and those who might yet recover if saved in time. The existence of sickness,, even of the deficiency diseases caused directly by the system itself, was more or less recognised. Partly hypocrisy, partly formalism, partly mere
categories because they

there

double-think kept a retinue of doctors, infirmaries, hospitals

going.

To go sick, anyway,, required a temperature of at least 4PC, and was then only possible if the quota for sick that day had not been filled..2 This quota (for 'P' provisionally off work) was strictly limited at every level 'for each medical centre and for each ambulance service. No medical orderly or doctor dared exceed this norm, and risk being sent back

to the mines.*28

There were the usual administrative Khatenakh

140

difficulties^

At

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

Even in cases of patent sickness, it was not always possible to
get release from work. Patients were admitted to the dispensary only after 8 p.m. when men were beginning to return to the camp, and examinations took place for only

two hours although sometimes there were over a hundred

waiting. In addition, the

camp commander limited

release

and if this number had been reached, a man was driven to work even if he had pneumonia and a temperature of 105 23
notes to from twenty to twenty-five a day,
.

Criminals had various methods of getting

salt

ill

drinking

water, stealing a syringe from the infirmary

under their skins, hands to get frostbite, cutting ofF their middle fingers, rubbing substances into the eye to produce symptoms like those of trachoma. They had a recipe, still believed to be secret, for producing the symptoms of
injecting kerosene

and putting a wet rag on

one of their

feet or

syphilis. It

was murmurs from

also possible to

produce fevers and heart

particularly strong infusions of tea

and

were insanity and paralysis though not often successfully. Prisoners with particularly large boils due to scurvy were 'particularly
tobacco. Sciatica
also faked, as of course

was

envied'. 13

One form
him than
this that

of self-mutilation was most remarkable.

'If

criminal has an idea that the

new camp

will

be worse for

his present one, he will at the last moment cut open the surface of his abdomen. Criminals are so skilful at

they never injure their internal organs. In fact,

is not even sent sewed up in the camp infirmary, and if the criminal has bad luck he will at most gain half an hour by his self-mutilation. Then he will be

such cases are so frequent that the prisoner

to the hospital.

The gaping wound

is

tossed into the truck.

.'

13

Proved cases of malingering and self-mutilation were

punishable, but doctors rarely

made such a

report if there

was any way

to avoid

it.

There was the regulation that self141

KOLYMA
more than thirteen days in was generally evaded hospital, hut this too In genuine illness it was in general 'only when the doctors themselves were prisoners' 36 that some real help might be available. Even so, they risked their own appointments, and
mutilators were allowed no

hence their

lives,

by

their attitudes.

One

actually slipped

some vitamin G syrup, a packet of butter and a 25 rouble

note into the pocket of a sick prisoner
otherwise help. 81

whom

he could not

But there were also a number of 'free' doctors not NKVD, who maintained their humanity. Shalamov, describing the horror of such a doctorJust come back from the front, when faced with the state of die prisoners,, says he was reminded of General Ridgway's
belonging to the

remarks

after the

war,

when

the

American troops entered

the Nazi camps: 'The experience of a soldier at the front cannot prepare one for the spectacle, of death in the

camps.' 28
Normally,, the treatment available in camp was

anyhow

of

little

use.

One

prisoner writes that at his

camp, the

dispensary only had iodine and soda. 23 Another describes

when he was in an extremely sick condition, that every time he went to the doctor 'the doctor threw into my mouth a gpeat spoonful of permanganate, and shouted* turning:
away, "Next"'. Permanganate was the all-purpose medithe only one in use at the camp. 'They gave it to yon to drink for dysentery, poured it over frostbite, wounds and. burns.' 21 (Frostbite, usually contracted not at work but when standing outside to be mustered and counted, was common. It is reported that through the winter 10 to 15 per cent of the prisoners got serious frostbite needing treatcine,,

ment.) 13

As

for getting into the infirmary attached to

it,

most large
all

camps, as Mrs Ginzburg puts

took in only those

'As a rule the infirmary

who were

plainly dying

and not

of

142

LIVING ANEf DYING CONDITIONS

them.' 4

There were enough exceptions

Hospital,

to support the hospital

system. This was based on the thousand-bed Central

which was in Magadan until the war, when it was moved twice, each time further north; and in addition there
were small local hospitals in the Administrations.

Apart from physical

have been treated
barracks near

cases, there

was a high incidence of

least after the

madness. Psychiatric cases seemed, at

as well as

war, to

was

feasible,

both in special

Magadan and

at a four-storey building at

Kilometre 500 on the Kolyma.

The normal sick who made good progress in hospital were sent to 'invalid camps': 'In the Kolyma region there
were so-called slabosilki, where they kept convalescents after discharge from the hospital. Here they were confined for three weeks. The ration was indeed better: 700 grams of bread. But three weeks for a wreck were the same as a bone for a hungry dog. I regarded those infirmaries as a way of covering up. ... As if to say, "we took suitable measures, but they did not want to work and live.'" 36 From these 'invalid camps' one of which was at Kilometre 23 until moved out to Kilometre 72 'every morning several corpses are taken out.' 13 And the hospitals and infirmaries remained under pressure to supply labour. For example at the beginning of the digging season in the spring, the chief of the Northern Administration would

arrive at the local hospital with guards to take ofT all

prisoners

who

could stand. 13

Those prisoners who did not get re-categorised as suitable for physical labour were now divided into two 9 groups 'Working Invalids' and 'Non-Working Invalids * There were sometimes posts for the former, on low rations. For example, at Elgen:

In every barrack an elderly woman, medically certified as

143

KOLYMA
an invalid, was on barrack duty. She swept and washed the and carried drinking water and water for washing, carried out used water and refuse, kept the stoves burning and, with the aid of inmates who took turns helping her, sawed and split the firewood. She brought food to the sick who were temporarily excused from work, collected dirty wash once a month and took it to the prison laundry outside the camp, brought back the laundry and distributed it. Her bread ration was 17^ ounces when the top ration for prisoners was 2 1 ounces: when the top ration was reduced to 17J ounces, in 1941 -3, she received 14 ounces, and no pay at all from the camp. But it was customary for the other
floor, fetched

inmates of the barrack to make a voluntary collection every month, so that she usually received more money than any of the other prisoners. All knew that what few decencies of life they had in the camp depended upon this old woman.

Everyone was grateful to her. When we came back to the barrack, soaking wet, frozen, and exhausted, she was there to welcome us with a friendly, maternal smile. She contrived to steal a little extra firewood somewhere in the camp the official ration of wood was always ridiculously small; she saw to it that the 'tea' was hot and in adequate quantity; and she did not fuss overmuch about the snow that everyone tracked into the barrack. And it was she who awoke us in the morning when we stubbornly refused to heaar the bell for rising. 13

Many
describes

'Working Invalids' had

less

luck.

A Soviet writer

how

One morning a party arrived at the camp made up of men who had been worked to exhaustion in the mines and were
no longer any good for underground operations. On their march back they had died I was going to say like flies but at Kolyma it was truer to say that the flies died

like people.

The survivors were sorted out at Magadan, where a few remained. The rest were sent on, for allegedly light work, to such places as the Taskan food plant where, before being
144

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

released to a better world, they performed the noble task of developing the food supplies by spending 12 hours a day in

which the factory depended

6o of frost in the forest, cutting the branches o{ stlannik for its raw material. 4

on

'Non-Working Invalids', on minimum rations, they pottered around the camps doing odd jobs till they died. In their cases, dystrophy had become irreversible and they were dokhodyagas. Going sick, in any case, usually led in one way or another to the vicious circle of cut rations, which ended in death. General Gorbatov gives the general attitude: 'What were we to do? We couldn't say that we were ill: they would just cut our bread ration. What medicine would they give us, anyway? There was only one medicine to be had an infusion of pine needles. Beyond that there was only one six feet under. So pull, comrade, pull while alternative 5 still can.' you The pine infusion Gorbatov speaks of was that supplied by the 'light work' prisoners at Taskan. It was compulsory to drink the concentrate before meals. 1 * It was supposed to combat scurvy, a result of vitamin C deficiency (just as a prisoner actually suffering from pellagra had to give up 1 .75

As

for the

ounces of his bread ration in favour of a yeast concoction) . If

pure

it

caused severe pain and was rejected by

many

prisoners, being eventually (1954)

abandoned.

31

Meanwhile an attempt had been made to find a superior substitute in the leaves of the dwarf willow, which were also processed at the Vitamin Combine. One prisoner involved
in collecting there remarks:

went on an expedition with a 'vitamin' gang, ordered to dwarf willows, the only plant that is always green in these regions. The leaves were carried hundreds of versts to the Vitamin Combine where they were cooked into a thick brown broth of nauseating taste
I

collect the leaves of

*45

KOLYMA
and odour.

The doctors used it as one of the main compulsory treatments for the scurvy that then ravaged the camps, and at the same time pellagra and the other vitamin deficiencies. Anyone who swallowed even a drop of this diabolical drug agreed that death was better. But an order is an order. In the camp the authorities didn't distribute the rations until the patients had swallowed this potion. Dinner, to which the prisoner attached so much value, was irretrievably spoilt by this obligatory aperitif. This went on for more than ten years. Doctors, who had received some instruction, were astounded that this willow broth could still contain vitamin C, which is extremely sensitive to changes of temperature. In fact, they knew that the broth had no virtue at all, but the distribution continued. ... It wasn't till after the war that the medical authorities of the region sent the administration of the camp an order categorically forbidding the use of the dwarf willow leaves extract. It appeared that it had catastrophic effects on the kidneys. They shut the Combine. 28
.
. . .
.

This curious attempt to prevent one of the plagues which

were the natural and normal

system of feeding,
is

result of the

whole Kolyma

reported by prisoner after prisoner.

The

struggle to avoid the

able sickness was, as

that one could miss a

minimum ration and irrevocwe have seen, complicated by the fact

maximum ration not only by the mere

a norm, but also by incurring
is,

failure of one's effort to fulfil

or merely offending some

by infringing some rule, There were, of course, offences punishable by death and there were times when an
the 'disciplinary*

ration that

official.

offence previously incurring a smaller sentence

capital.

became

For example:

Refusal to work is punished by a sentence in the lockup. A notation of the case is made and signed by the camp commander, the commander of the guard, and the doctor. From three to five such notations are sufficient to bring a work-shirker to trial. In peacetime he was given additional

146

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

sentences of from five to ten years on the basis of Paragraph 58, Article 14: counter-revolutionary sabotage. During; wartime counter-revolutionaries who refused to work were shot; criminals usually got ofT with an additional sentence of
ten years. 13

Concealing gold was almost always a capital offence.

Previous ta igjff there had been a

money premium
in nuggets over

for

nuggets over 50 grams. This was changed to an ofTer of a

gram of alcohol
grams
prisoners

an inadequate

for every

gram of gold

return,

which led

to cases

10a 'where

who found big nuggets threw them away into the

They

bushes rather than hand them over to the authorities.

were put ta death, but it did not make the prisoners any more keen on looking for nuggets.'*3 Mere suspicion, on the other hand, was one of those considerations which might involve not a death sentence as such* but a session in the camp lockup. A Soviet-published account tells of an episode when a team had been accused of concealing gold which they had found. Their quarters were thoroughly searched but nothing was found. However, in
order to 'teach the

men a lesson'*

the

whole team had been

sentenced to solitary confinement in a section

'Stalin's
villa'.

known

as

Only a few of
to

the

team survived the

experience

and returned

work. 29

Again,

Nothing was easier than to get in to the punitive cell because of the zachistka, i.e. the clearing up of the soil after a goldbearing stratum had been exploited. This work consisted of sweeping a strip of land of 36 square metres and brushing it with smalt brushes so that no traces of gold could be found. . . . It often happened that the ore with: tiny grains of gold was deeply embedded in the earth and had to be dug out and carried on wheelbarrows to a designated place. Is other instances there were holes filled with water and gravel. After many cubic metres of sludge had been
147

KOLYMA
excavated from the hole, examination would still reveal the presence of gold: the soil had not been properly dealt with, and the prisoner usually landed in the cells. 18

Sometimes,
a brigade which had not fulfilled the norm had to work throughout the night and then continue the following day, without rest or food, so as to deliver the required amount of gold. Prisoners who did not reach the prescribed norm were put, right after work, into a punitive cell. Before entering it, the prisoner had to take off all his clothes except his underwear. He had to spend the night in a wooden barrack, with rain, snow, or frost penetrating throbgh the cracks in the walls. I personally was able to take it because I had wrapped a towel around my chest, underneath my shirt, with which I covered myself and a companion. Towards morning, we would hear cries emanating from the cell: 'Open the door, chief, I am dying.' After emerging the prisoner had to resume his habitual place and work the whole day, along with the others. 18

For these lockups, the

every camp.

'Stalin villas',

were an

essential in

A woman prisoner lists the misdemeanours for

which lockup was the usual punishment:

Lateness in leaving camp for work; talking while going out to work; impertinence to the guards, camp administrators or other free citizens; smoking in the barracks; smoking while going out to work; wearing unauthorised clothing (say, private coats or shoes); leaving the place of work without permission; being found with a man, even though it is in a harmless conversation, which it usually is not; entering a house or store in a free settlement; drunkenness; bringing food back into camp; disorder in the barracks; disorderly cot; refusal to work; theft in camp; theft at the place of work; failure to meet labour quota; use of unauthorised places as a latrine; fighting among prisoners (guards who beat prisoners receive no punishment); refusal to take part in extra duty or shock-troop work (udarniki) for

148

LIVING AND DVING CONDITIONS

the camp, that is, work which must be done after the end of the official twelve-hour working day; leaving the barracks, except to go to the latrine r after the evening roll call*, washing laundry in the barracks, washing hair in the

and so forth. hundred inmates, not a day passes without some sentences to the lockup. At one time or
barracks; burning holes in clothing,
'In a

camp with

several

another every prisoner receives a lockup sentence.

.'
.

The lockup

itself

was

usually without windows, without illumination, and unhealed or very inadequately heated. Frozen toes among the prisoners are frequently due to a stay in the lockup. It contains a biggish common celt and a few tiny solitary cells, the usual planks and the usual bedbugs and' lice. . . . The camp commanders hand out lockup sentences of from one to ten days for a great variety of infractions of camp discipline; only in very severe cases is the sentence for twenty days. You can be sentenced to the lockup with or without permission to work. The latter type is the harsher sentence. If the prisoner is let out to work he can usually manage to get a little more food than he is allotted, and above all, by moving around at work he can warm, up more easily than he can in the lockup.*3

There were other, irregular, punishments

highly correct and institutional ones.

as well as these

A Soviet general tells

that his

camp chief

punished those who did not fulfil their norms in the following ways; in winter the prisoner was stripped naked at the mine face, cold water was poured over him and he was left to run back to the camp. In summer the prisoner would again be stripped naked, his hands tied behind him to a common pole and all those so fixed would be put out into a cloud of mosquitoes. (The guard wore a mosquito net over his head.) Finally, the prisoners were also simply beaten with rifle butts and flung into the cooler. 8

149

KOLYMA

Pole recounts

how

'one of

my

Fellow workers,

Unnot

tenberg, a -German from the Volga district,

fulfilled his

who had

undress
clear,
.

norm of output, was ordered by the guard to and to stay naked without budging. The night was
.

and swarms of mosquitoes covered his body. In morning he was all swollen, he screamed from pain and rolled on the ground despite the order not to move.' 18
.

the

In addition to these disciplinary sanctions, the guards

carried out investigative checks.

Above

all,

there were

constant searches,

much
lot

loathed by the prisoners. of odd objects.

As one

points out, 'Rich or poor, prisoners or otherwise, every

man

quickly accumulates a
for

It's

the

same

a prisoner: he's a worker, he must have a needle, a bit of

.
.

mend his clothes. Everything's thrown away and every time those who haven't managed to hide their stuff in the snow for 24 hours have to start all over again.' 28
cloth to
.

A woman

says that these searches

are an important part of

life both in prisons and camps. Female prisoners may be searched only by women. Since there are usually not enough women supervisors in the

camps, the camp administration also uses prisoners who are in turn checked upon by soldiers of the guard. There is a shake-down every time the prisoners re-enter the camp, that is, once or twice a day. In addition at least every two months there is a thorough search of the barrack and of all the prisoners' belongings. This operation is always carried out in the middle of the night and usually lasts several hours. Suddenly the entire barrack will be full of guards who chase the frightened women ofTthe planks and begin rummaging through bundles and mattresses in all corners of the barrack at once, so that the prisoners cannot pass things around to conceal them. Nevertheless, almost all the prisoners own a home-made knife fashioned out of a piece of sharpened iron. At night this is carefully stuck into a crack between the planks. The reason for this is that you can make your bread ration go farther by cutting it into slices than by breaking off
150

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

pieces.
state holidays

Shake-downs are particularly rigid before and during the on i May and 7 November; apparently the administration then fears some demonstration on the part of the prisoners, although the idea of a demonstration on these or any other days never even enters the prisoners' heads. The two cases of genuine counter-revolutionary demonstrations which took place in two women's camps were carried out, significantly enough, by criminals. They hung up a placard reading, 'Long live fascism!' They were shot, and their names and the announcements of the executions were read to us at the evening roll call. Ordinarily the guards turn up scarcely anything in the

home-made sewing

course of these searches: writing paper, pencils, cotton bags, needles, contraband food which may have been bought with endless trouble and excitement from the earnings of two or three months, and money in excess of fifty roubles. For there is a regulation that no prisoner may

have in his possession more than fifty roubles even though he may have been paid more than that in wages. What we hated worse than the coarseness of the guards, worse than the confiscation of the little things we needed, worse than the humiliation of the whole procedure, was the fact that we were robbed of our all-too-brief night's sleep. For all through the years in camp we suffered from chronic
fatigue. 13

In cases where some stoolpigeon had definitely reported

an

illegal object,

which the guards nevertheless could not

in

find, traditional

NKVD methods were used. At the Novaya

1938,

Zyryanka prison
straitj acket in

a prisoner was held in a

icy conditions for a day, to locate a real

knife. 38

But the main application of 'interrogation' procedures in the work of the Third Section of the NKVD, which to produce new charges and sentences for those whose term was theoretically approaching its close. Very complex frame-ups, with days of standing and sleeplessness are

was had

IS*

KOLYMA
reported especially in 1938

for

example,

when

at the

Lobuya camp a
treated,

geologist,

an airman and others were so

and

also beaten, at various periods over several

months, to confess to a local counter-revolutionary plot. 38

Later an easier routine was followed,
'it

was a thoroughly

everyday matter: those in charge of the work force went

through the filing cards looking for prisoners who were approaching the end of wastefully short sentences, sum-

moned them in bundles of 80- 100 men at a time and added a new 10-year sentence to each of them.' 26

One peculiarity marked the relation ofjailer and prisoner in

Kolyma compared with
sorts

the

camps of the 'mainland': the

precautions against escape were small; and escape

took

of
was

place.

Though

security at the

camp
their

sites

laxer,

and prisoners were allowed out on

and
isolation constituted

own on

'woodcutting' parties, for example.

distances

Kolyma

itself in its

one vast prison. Almost without exception 'they are caught, a few days or a few weeks later. ... 'The innumerable camp guards, the operational units
aided by thousands of German shepherd dogs, the detach-

ments of frontier guards and the troops called the "Kolyma Regiment" are enough to catch the prisoners without exception. The upkeep of a corps of "headhunters" is less expensive to the country than the upkeep of jailers.' 28
Urkas seldom escaped;

The police and the guards, rich in long experience, had a sixth sense in recognising them. The police claimed that men of that class are marked with an indelible seal. This sixth sense showed criminal, sentenced for theft and murder, itself one day. had escaped. He was armed. He was searched for for more than a month all over Kolyma. The soldier Sevastianov stopped an unknown in a
'they didn't believe escape possible.

camp

152

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

sheepskin coat near a petrol station at the edge of the road. turned and Sevastianov shot him in the forehead. He hadn't seen the thief's face for this happened in winter and the fugitive was muffled up. The description Sevastianov had was vague (it isn't possible to verify everyone's tattoo). The photo he had of the bandit was dark and blurred. But his instincts had not deceived him. revolver was From the dead man's coat, a rifle fell. found in his pocket. He had adequately convincing papers. What should one think of the energetic conclusion dictated

The man

by this sixth sense? One moment more and it would have been Sevastianov who would have been shot down. 28
For
politicals too, the

motivation to escape back to the

USSR
the

was low.

Escape where?
first

To

their families, to their friends? In 1938

passer-by they looked at on the road would himself have fallen under repression. It wasn't a question of their own fifteen or twenty years, it was the life of their relatives

which was threatened. Someone would have had to have helped the fugitive and hidden him. In 1938, for the political prisoners, no one would have taken the risk. If a prisoner ever went back having served his sentence, which was very rare, his wife checked if his papers were in order and ran as quickly as the concierge did to report to the police. ... Nothing remained for them but to die and they died without thinking of escaping. They died, showing once again this national quality which Tyutchev has glorified, and which all politicians have abused patience. 28

would start. The number of guards and dogs, and trained and drilled them. The escapers few but determinedhad food and made plans. If they were caught in the immediate search by their own camp guards, they
All the same, in spring the escapes
authorities increased the

were not often captured alive. The taste for human blood sharpened the hatred of the guard for the prisoner.
153

KOLYMA
Prisoners feared for their lives above all during trans-

One imprudent word could send you into the fers. . other world This is why prisoners asked to have their hands tied behind their back. There was then less risk of having written into your file the . phrase 'Killed while attempting to escape'. The enquiry was quick. If the killer had had the intelligence to fire a second shot into the air, he risked nothing. The regulation was that the first shot should be
. . . . .

fired into the air.

28
. .

Once away, a new world opened. Most of them hardly even planned on more than a few days' liberty. They hid in
caves and abandoned bears' dens, having taken what they
could, sometimes

managing

to break into the

camp

stores

on the night of their departure.

able to take

much planned
hills.

to

Even those who were not live on the country not on

roots and berries, but on stealing from passing food lorries as

they laboured up

When

this practice started, lorries

-were often convoyed, but not always.

The cold of the following winter invariably forced them

back, unless they preferred dying of cold to long days in
the punishment
death.'
28

cells,

long beatings, hunger, sometimes

escaped

One man, atOlchan,

on two
logs,

reaching the Arctic

down the Indigirka River Ocean where he was, of

course, recaptured.

On

another occasion, near Elgen^ in

1947, an ex-officer being marched in a column of prisoners disarmed and shot both the guards and escaped with their
rifles

and ammunition,

killing

and wounding

several pur-

suers before shooting himself. 32

.

reference*

Of a number of recorded One was a mass

war.

cases of escapes,

two deserve

escape

by imprisoned army

officers after the

Lieutenant-Colonel Yanovsky was now Prisoner Yanovsky, the 'cultural organiser' of an important camp section. This section had been formed immediately after the war from the

154

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

soldiers of Vlasov, Russians

who had gone over to the enemy, and the inhabitants of occupied villages suspected
of collaboration.

These men had seen death face to face. They had the habit of war. The animal struggle for life, risks and death. They had already escaped from the Germans, the Russians, the English. . . .They'd often bet their lives on a coin. They were soldiers, men used to killing. Taught in a rough school, they continued to struggle for survival, this time against the
State.

The authorities who had hitherto only known peaceful Trotskyites could not suspect that these were
of action.

the

men

One day an important personage visited the camp. Having looked into the life of the new ones and their work he remarked that their cultural and artistic activities
something to be desired. The former LieutenantColonel Yanovsky, camp cultural organiser, replied respectfully: 'Don't worry, we will prepare a concert of which
left

all

Kolyma

will talk.'

During the winter the

prisoners,

who were

waiting for

spring for their escape, took over, little by little, all the administrative posts. . . . All the civil personnel of the camp

were chosen by Yanovsky in person. Airmen, drivers, electricians, they were all capable of assisting with the risks of an escape. The climatic and geological conditions were carefully studied. No one was blind to the difficulties of the enterprise. They had one aim: to live free, or die with arms and hands. They did not want to die of hunger on a camp bunk. Yanovsky knew that his comrades had to preserve their strength and keep up their morale. The prisoners he had put into these jobs ate well and did not weaken too
quickly. ...

At five o'clock in the morning exactly, someone knocked on the window. The sentry looked through the pane. It was the camp cook, Soldatov, who had come to get the key of the provision shed. Hung on a nail, this was inside the guard post. The cook had come to get this key every morning at five o'clock for months. The sentry unbarred the door and let Soldatov in. The other sentry had just gone out by the

155

KOLYMA
outside door.

He lived with his family a few hundred metres

window
he had

from the

post.

Everything had been calculated and the producer was

looking through a
little

at the first act

planned for so long. The cook went to the wall where the key hung. There was another knock on the pane. The sentry knew well the man who knocked. It was Shetvtsov, the camp mechanic and armourer: he often repaired the machine carbines, the rifles and the pistols of the section. At this moment Soldatov threw himself on the sentry from behind and strangled Mm, with the help of Shetvtsov who had now entered. They hid the body under some logs. Soldatov put on the man's
. .

uniform, took the revolver and sat at the sentry's table. The other sentry came in. Before he could gather what had happened he had been strangled like the first. Shetvtsov put

on

his clothes.

The wife of the second sentry, the one who'd gone home, entered the post unexpectedly. They did not kill her. They tied her hands and feet and hid her with the bodies. The night shift came back to camp. The guard in charge of them came into the post. He too was killed. . Outside, life
.

followed

its

usual course. It

was the time of departure for

work. The Lieutenant-Colonel took

command

of his

men.

guards gave orders, the team formed up. It was men. They marched off* They left the road and turned into a pathway. That didn't worry the sentries. Teams which were late often followed this route, which passed in front of the guards' barrack. . . . The sentry, half asleep, saw them from the opening of the door and had just time to ask why they were in Indian file and not in rank. He was surrounded and disarmed. The leader threw himself towards the pyramid of rifles piled near the sentry. Armed with a machine pistol, Yanovsky opened the door of the barrack room where forty soldiers of the guard were sleeping. ... A burst of fire through the ceiling made everyone lie on their bellies under the beds. He passed the gun to Shetvtsov and went out to the courtyard where his
quite small: ten

Two

156

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

comrades were already collecting provisions and arms. Up on the guard posts the sentries had decided not to open fire. Later they [Link] was impossible to try and make^ out what was going on. Their word was not acce'pted and they were punished. The fugitives did not hurry. Yanovsky organised the arms and ammunition. For food he recommended they should only take biscuits and chocolates. The medical
. . .

orderly, Nikolsky, put individual packets in a sack marked with a red cross. The telephone wires had been cut. By the time news reached the next camp, the fugitives had already got to the main road. They stopped the first empty lorry. The driver came out, covered by a revolver, and the war pilot, Kidalidze, took the wheel. The lorry headed towards Seimchan, the nearest airfield, to seize an aeroplane and fly off! ...
. . .

After driving

some way, they were

fired on:

Yanovsky had foreseen

this eventuality.

further on, Kidalidze stopped.

Ten kilometres The fugitives abandoned the

. .

lorry, jumped over the ditch and disappeared into the taiga. They wpre still 50 kilometres from the airfield. Next morning they came across soldiers who were
.

searching the taiga. Four soldiers were killed at once. set fire to the forest: the wind was blowing towards the enemy. The fugitives went on. But already lorries crammed with soldiers were pouring along the roads of Kolyma. Large numbers of regular troops came to reinforce the local garrisons and the special detachments. The Seimchan road was blocked every 10 kilometres. The highest authorities in Kolyma were personally conducting this exceptional operation. . . The evening of the second day, Yanovsky's group once again fell in with a patrol and had to fight. Ten soldiers were left dead. . . . The third night, . they were en-

Yanovsky

circled.

The commander ... waved a handkerchief

.

and

impossible.

him

'Surrender, you are surrounded. Flight is .' . He collapsed. . . . Shetvtsov had killed with a bullet in the forehead ... new attack, a new
cried,

-1.-57

ROMA
repulse
up* two machine-guns. Yet one survivor, the cook Soldatov, shot in both knees,, the shoulder and the upper
. . .

They brought
.

another attack

.. They* found, only

arm. Yartovsky and Kuznetsov had disappeared.

The same evening 20 kilometres away by river, they stopped an unknown soldier in uniform. Surrounded, he shot himself. It was Kuznetsov. There remained only the organiser, Lieutenant-Colonel Yanavsky. His fete remained mysterious. . .They searched for months- . -Alt the exits were guarded. He probably committed suicide in a cave or bear's den and his body was eaten by savage beasts.* ... After the fight ... 'What's happening here? Is there a waar?' the surgeon asked the commander'It's not a war, but it's rather Kke it. I've had twentyeight killed. And how many wounded you'll find out for yourself. As for me I'll lose my post. I'll have to make an 1 unexpected retirement. He was right. He lost his post and was transferred to another sector. Soldatov was condemned to 25 years. The camp commandant got 10 years; the sentries 5 years. In the mine more than 60 people were sentenced. Those wlwy knew and had said nothing, those who had helped, those who thought of helping but hadn't had the time to do so. The garrison commandant would have been ruined for life if Shetvtsov's bullet hadn't saved him. Potapova, the chief doctor^ was declared blameworthy. The escaped medical orderly* Nikolsky, had worked under her. But she managed to get transferred very quickly and that saved her. 28
. .

AH

other

escapes

into

the

taiga

were

similarly

unsuccessful

25 prisoners overpowering their guards on a

autumn, and
all

lorry in early

caught and being amputated

for frostbite within four days;

two army

officers;

two men

who had

taken a third to eat

an indictable offence. The

Kolyma was conceived on
away from
the sea, towards

only successful escape from

different lines:

Krivoshey

fled in the direction

158

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

Yakutsk.
geologist's

He was

lightly

laden.

thick

raincoat,

hammer, a bag containing a few specimens, matches and money. Nothing else.

geological

He didn't hide,

he didn't rush.

He followed

horse tracks

and deer paths. He passed in front of the rural police posts, went through villages, never wandered into the taiga, and slept every night under the roof of a cabin, tent or hut. In the first big settlement in Yakutia, he got workers, whom he paid, to dig little trenches just what they'd already done for real geologists. He had the necessary technical knowledge: he had lived for nearly a year at Arkagala, an important geological base, and he had observed the

behaviour of geologists.

The weighty

shell glasses, the daily shave, the

gestures, the tortoisewell-tended finger-nails,

inspired limitless confidence.

Krivoshey did not hurry. He inscribed mysterious signs in road book, as he'd seen geologists do. Slowly but surely he went on towards Yakutsk. Sometimes, even, he went back on his tracks, made a detour, slowed up. To confuse his tracks, he went through the semblance of exploring the basin of the Ryabaya. Krivoshey had nerves of steel. . After a month he crossed the crest of the Yablonov. Two Yakuts sent by a collective farm to accompany this important state mission carried the bag of 'specimens'. ... At Yakutsk, Krivoshey went to the geological centre and asked for their help in sending some very important packages to the Academy of Sciences in
his
. .

Moscow. He went

to the baths, to the hairdresser.

He

bought an expensive suit, several coloured shirts, underwear, dyed his hair and presented himself with a debonair
smile to the Director of Scientific Research. He was very well received. His knowledge of foreign languages produced the desired effect. Seeing in the newcomer a man of high culture, not so common in the streets of Yakutsk at that time, they begged him to prolong his stay. Pavel Mikhailovich replied with

confusion that he had to get back rapidly to Moscow. The Director promised to pay his trip as far as Vladivostok. He added, 'You will not refuse, my dear colleague, to give
.
.

159

KO&YMA
one or two lectures to our prospectors on any subject you .' 'Oh, certainly, with great pleasure. Within the like. limits of what is permitted to be divulged. You yourself will understand that information . . without Moscow's per.' The lecture took place, before a good number mission The guest from Moscow got as far as of listeners. Irkutsk on the fees from the scientific bodies of Yakutsk. 'The strangest thing', Krivoshey used to tell us, 'is that during the three months my trip took, no one anywhere
.
.

asked

bought a house and got a job documents. Krivoshey 's wife had left Kharkov to join him. ... Of course, she did not find work at Arkagala. She left it for Magadan, capital of the territory, where she found a When Krivoshey escaped they thought he job. would hide with his wife. She was arrested but nothing could be got out of her. They did not let her go back to the mainland. Authorisations to leave were given by the very organs which were searching for her husband. Such cases had been foreseen. She settled down to wait. The months went by. She still received refusals without explanation. She was shut in an immense stony prison covering one eighth of the Soviet Union which she could not
thanks to his
false
.
.

me for my papers.'. He ended up at Mariupol,

.

leave.

Her husband had earlier often repeated to her the phrase of a German general: 'War is won by the man with the
She whispered these words during the white polar nights when she felt that her nerves were giving way. She was troubled for her husband. . . ; Perhaps he had died of hunger on the way or been killed by other fugitives or by soldiers. The only thing that reassured her was the constant surveillance of which she was the object. She deduced from it that her husband had not been caught, that they were still searching for him, and she was happy not to be suffering for nothing. She wanted to confide in someone. . . .But in whom? She felt in everyone a spy ready to denounce her and she was right. All her acquaintances had heen called in and warned.
firmest nerves.'

l6o

HIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

They waited

for her confidences with impatience. During her second year of surveillance, she tried to get in touch through friends in Kharkov. Her letters were intercepted. Reduced to misery, half-mad, only knowing that her husband was alive and that she should join him, she sent letters Poste Restante to all the big towns in the name of Pavel Mikhailovich Krivoshey. In reply she got a postal order, then other small sums 500 or 800 roubles a month. The place of despatch and the despatchers varied. Krivoshey was too intelligent to send the money from Mariupol, and the administration was too experienced not to understand this. They marked out an area of manoeuvre on a staff map. The pins indicating the places from which the money had been sent followed the line of the railway from Mariupol to the north. . They checked the names of the people who had arrived in Mariupol during the last two years, compared photographs. Pavel Krivoshey was arrested. What was his mistake? This escape had used all human qualities: talent, tenacity, subtlety, physical endurance. It was an escape without precedent in the care taken in its preparation, in the psychological depths and finesse that it showed. An astonishing escape because it only required a very small number of lies, the test of its success. An extraordinary escape: for the first time, one man had entered into a struggle with the State and its thousands of armed men in a territory where, since the time of the Tsars, fugitives had been given up for white flour at a rate of eight kilograms a head after the Revolution this tarifT was actually the subject of a legislative measure. Rightly seeing in every individual an informer and a coward, he had fought alone and he had won. His wife had been a faithful and courageous companion. more It was she who had brought the papers and money than 50,000 roubles to Arkagala. With her husband arrested they let her leave at once. Morally and physically exhausted, she left Kolyma by the first boat. 28

An

exploit

worth recounting,
161

unique,

and

finally

KOLYMA
abortive. Escape, even temporarily,

was the rare adventure

still

of a

fewalmost

always newly arrived convicts

not

physically broken.

Death was the most usual

relief from the

camps. But, of course, the fact of our having evidence of all this is a sign that there was another possibilitysurvival.
Survivors

make

it

clear, first of all, that

it

was

essential to

avoid being kept in the mines.

uninterrupted
stint

No
'it

survivors did

an

of more than a few months in those

is

conditions. Shalamov's view

that

took twenty to thirty

days to turn a healthy

man

into

a wreck.' General

Gorbatov, a
it is

man
all

of great strength and vigour, barely

survived such a

stint.

a rule that

survivors are

Though mines varied to some extent, men who managed to obtain

other jobs.

The same is true of the women survivors, none of

In
fact,
it

whom worked continually at the manual jobs of Elgen and

the hard-labour camps.

appears to be an

invariable rule that whenever we. come across

anyone who
1

has survived a really long period as a prisoner in Kolyma,

is

because he or she has been able to obtain a 'function

office, as

it

in

an

a nurse, and so on, not only escaping the

excessive labour of the

main body of the work force but also,

generally speaking, having better access to food.

A shorter stay, of course, increased the chance of survival.

Gorbatov was only
about a year. Several witnesses are Poles, released after the outbreak of the Soviet -German war in 1941. And a further thing which
in
for

Kolyma

greatly improved the chances of survival

sent to

was

to

have been

Kolyma

before the end of 1937. Prisoners

who had

arrived in the earlier period

had

the advantage of getting

acclimatised, learning the conditions

nections.

When the terror wave broke in

it

and making con1937-8, they were

were in any and quite

better equipped to resist

than the disorientated masses of

at this period,

the

new intake

most of whom,
1.6.2

case from Party, administrative

and

similar jobs

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

unused to hard manual labour. Moreover they were, of fresh from intensive months of physical and psychological debilitation. Above all, over the few weeks of back-breaking labour which reduced them to wrecks, the new intake never had time to learn how to cope with the
system and the climate.

course,

One

notes of the old-timers,

These were men that had already spent one or more winters there. They were incomparably cleaner. Even in the extremely harsh conditions of their life in camp they had managed to wash their faces every day, and when they could not get water, they had used snow. They were better dressed, too, thanks to the better clothes they had been able to preserve somehow from the old pre- Pavlov days. These old-timers were more self-possessed. They did not crowd about the stoves, but sat on their bunks either doing something or talking about their affairs. Even from the
outside their tent looked different. You realised that the men who lived there tried by themselves, as far as they
could, to

make

the tent

warmer by covering

it

with moss

and snow. 23
In a sense, they were better adjusted; but
being simply more vigilant. For to save one's
this
life

included

be alert and decisive in a dozen incidents

after day.

meant to and contexts day

crucial.

The

right reaction to

an urka might be

boss, a lively and energetic type, looked young but he went round the ranks of his new workers with an experienced eye. My scarf interested him immediately. It was cotton of course, not wool, but it was a scarf, a free man's scarf. A hospital orderly had given it me as a present the previous year and ever since I'd worn it round my neck summer and winter. I washed it as I could when we went to the 'baths'. I didn't give it in for disinfestation even though it was full of lice, because one can't have everything and they would have stolen it from me immediately. My colleagues in the barracks; the boys with whom I lived and worked, hunted

The

163

KOLYMA
the scarf within the rules. The others did it outside these doesn't want to get something with which he can

rules.

Who

buy tobacco and bread? Any

this scarf. It's

free

man would have bought

steam.

wound
it

it through a prisoner. But I heroically my scarf around my neck before going to sleep. I tied

easy to get rid of lice by putting

difficult for

It's

only

at the throat in spite of the intolerable lice.

One

doesn't

get

any more accustomed

it?'

to lice

than to cold.

'You'll sell
'No.'

the fellow said.

'As you wish you've no need of a scarf.'. Without looking at anyone he read out names in a monotonous tone and quoted for each the amount of work done as compared with the norm. Then he folded his paper carefully and went out. The barrack was silent. One could only hear the breathing of several dozen men in the gloom. 'The last name', my neighbour explained, 'won't have
.

bread tomorrow.' 'No bread at all?'

'None.'
I'd never seen that

anywhere. In the mines, the ration

depended on the work of the brigade taken as a whole. At worst one got the penal ration, that is 300 grams. But they
never suppressed bread entirely. ... I understood why there was this list of percentages. he had not forgotten .my scarf.
. . . . . .

'Sell
'I

me

your

scarf.'

had it as a present, citizen boss.' 'You make me laugh.' I refused categorically. That evening I was on the list of those who hadn't reached the norm. I didn't try to prove the contrary. Next morning I examined my scarf and took it
to the boss.

through steam.' born yesterday.' Happy at this unexpected acquisition, he gave gram loaf in exchange. 28
'Put
it

'Sure.

We weren't

me a 500

Or again, one might see at once

164

that a given job, even in

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

was the one in which one could survive just that some other opportunity arose. One might, for example, become a 'pointist\ 'The "point" is an iron tube which directs a jet of burning vapour to warm the
the mine,
longer, until

little

frozen moraine.

From time

to time the "pointist" extracts

the pieces of warmed-up stone with the aid of a pole ten feet
long, with a flat metal spoon the size of a

hand

at

its

extremity.
tinually, as

Volodya no longer needed

all did,

to think con-

we

of how to find such a warmth.

The

piercing cold no longer penetrated his being and paralysed

the cells of his brain.

The jet of vapour saved him. Everyone

envied him.' 28

Another prisoner tells of saving himself when in a very by his rusty ability to play the violin, by which he ensured recruitment to the camp orchestra. (These bands, found also in the German concentration camps, were a well-established custom. Solzhenitsyn, it will be remembered, remarks on the farce of the Dalstroy Orchestra playing marches and waltzes to the convoy of 'tormented, half-dead* prisoners who, the ships having been
difficult situation

unable

to penetrate

completely the late ice in early

May,

had

to

be disembarked on the ice and drag themselves over

basically,

the last miles to the shore.) 32

More

one

relied

on

'blat'

and

'tufta\

The

former indicates influence, protection, the network of

gaining favours
urkas

normally open only

known), though used

to the blatniye (as the as far as possible

were

also
else

by

everyone

who

could, particularly by experienced

veterans. In spite of the principle of maximum persecution

for counter-revolutionaries,

there were always cases of

commandants who were tugged the other way by the necessity of getting results and keeping things reasonably efficient. If they could do so without attracting attention, commandants under heavy pressure wouldin practice if
not in form

sometimes use qualified

165

political prisoners.

KOLYMA
'Tufta'
is

the system of faking results of all types.

all

One

woman remembers, There is tufta in man who understands the art of tufta

kinds of work.

can always turn out

work should not pass. In the evening, for example, two wood choppers show their pile of wood to the free brigadier. He checks it and notes down: twelve cubic yards. That is a respectable performance. Nevertheless, the two wood choppers are not noticeably tired. In actuality they have felled just enough wood to camouflage artfully a pile of brush. That is tufta.* 13 Another woman (Mrs Ginzburg) learnt a practically
satisfactory work, although in reality his

identical trick:

'You need

to

keep your heads. Kolyma

foundations: threats, intrigue,

and

graft.

rests on three Choose the one

you want to star in.' This was theory. It was Polina Melnikova who showed us how to apply it. She was one of the few to fulfil her norm, yet she worked alone on a one-handed saw. One afternoon we found ourselves working beside her, that is to say we were working, but she, huddled in her rags, had been resting for an hour on a frozen log, her axe and saw thrown aside.
'Look!' said Galya. 'She's like a statue of Gogol.' *
'It's true.'

her norm sitting about like that?' that she had already reached it. Amazed, we pressed her to tell the secret. Looking around furtively, she explained: 'The forest is full of piles of timber cut by our predecessors. No one has ever counted them/ 'But anyone can see that they were cut long ago. By the fact that the cross-sections have grown dark in colour. 'If you saw off the slices at the end of each log it looks as though it had just been cut. Then you re-lay the logs in a different place and there's your norm.'
she
fulfil

'How can

We asked her. She said

This dodge, which we called freshening up the sandwich, gave us a respite. We made some variations in Polina's technique. We used as a nucleus of our pile some trees which we had in fact felled. We left two trees cut down but not yet
166

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

sawn up as a sign of our assiduous activity. Then we dragged along some old logs and after slicing off their ends, added them to our pile. Of the three foundations of Kolyma, we had opted for the third, and I may say we felt no compunction. I don't know whether Kostik realised why our output had increased; anyway, he never said anything about it. Our respite was a short one. We had not yet recovered on our full rations from the punishment-cell, when tractors arrived at Kilometre Seven to cart away the timber. In three days all the reserves which helped us to fulfil the norm
had vanished.
'Cousin' got into a rage

when our output

fell

to 18 or 20

per cent.

We

were

hoist with our

own

petard. Again
for sabotage. 4

we

were condemned to the punishment-cell

More generally, to give the appearance of working, while

not actually expending calories, was
vital:

During this period of my stay at the Tumanny gold field, the practice of 'conserving one's strength' became a mass characteristic of the prisoners. When there was no official nearby the man at work moved slowly with minimum exertion, halted as frequently as he could to have a smoke, took time to roll his thin cigarette, walked around to look for a match, and so forth. But with an increased number of supervisors, the method of 'conserving strength' underwent a change. Men pretended they were working with great energy, whereas in crushing rocks they put no force in their pickaxes, and in loading wheelbarrows lifted with their spades only half or less of what they were supposed to lift. They moved the wheelbarrows slowly, and often upset them. As you looked from the side, you saw a man pushing a wheelbarrow and apparently straining every effort so that even the veins on his forehead looked swollen. But one glance at the barrow and you saw it less than half filled, light enough for a boy to push. During the time it took the man to wheel his barrow to the panning structure, with a couple of upsets on the way, his two team-mates, who were filling the next barrow, were able to snatch a good rest. This practice
167

KOLYMA
had a
Just
special name: dimming. You asked a worker. 'Well, how goes it?' He would wink at you and answer, 'All right.

dimming a little.' However, the authorities soon began to see through all this, and woe to him who was caught with a half-empty barrow. A resounding cuff on the head sent him, along with his wheelbarrow, flying for several yards off the runway. But this didn't improve matters much. The men realised too clearly that any over-exertion at their exhausting work would soon land them in the brigade for the unfit, with its reduced ration of bread from which it was a straight road to
the

common

grave. 23
lives

There are various reports of

particulars.
difficult

Several prisoners claim

depending on small to have survived

periods by adding cranberries to their diet.

broken limb might sometimes be better than the

native: 'Every prisoner

alter-

welcomes a broken arm or leg

if they

and

the bones of sufferers from scurvy break easily. Here, too,

the prisoners will assist chance

have the opportunity.

For example they

will

hold their leg between moving hand-

trucks in the mines.' 13

And we need not neglect the spiritual solaces, which we have already seen so powerfully shown by the persecuted
nuns. Shalamov describes an imprisoned priest in his

barracks
gives a

whom

he finds at prayer and

to

who

explains, 'That

and then I feel hunger less.' Shalamov adds that everyone had some secret which helped him to live: 'for Zamyatin, it was the liturgy of St John .' 28 Chrysostom. My secret saviour was poetry. All the same, nothing could work in the long run except withdrawal from the irrevocably debilitating toil of the masses of miners and other workers. At the Maldyak mining camp, General Gorbatov recalls,
little
. .

balm

my heart,

swell

Soon things started to go badly with me. My legs began to and my teeth grew loose in my gums. To lie down sick
1

68

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

on the job. was bad there was only ever one result so I went to see the doctor. He was in fact only a doctor's assistant, sentenced to ten years for some trifle. He was a decent man. He certified me sick, pronounced me fit for light duties only and fixed me up as watchman of the summer water tank. This was considered a privilege; you did not have to push around heavy barrows and trolleys. All you had to do was make sure that no one stole the dry wood for the stoves. I held my rank as watchman for two weeks. I sat in a shelter which I had made out of snow, and kept a small fire going in there. I had a pick and an axe and I used them to hack pieces off tree stumps and drag them into my snow house to keep the fire going. The work was not hard and inwardly I often thanked the kindly doctor. But my legs went on swelling until they looked like logs and my knees would no longer bend. I had to go back to the doctor. He certified me as completely unfit and wrote a recommendation for my removal from Maidyak to a camp some twelve miles from Magadan. Everything now depended on the camp commander. Fortunately he initialled the document and at the end of March 1940, 1 found myself near Magadan. This and only this saved me from certain death. I wish I could remember the name of the doctor at Maldyak. I shall be grateful to him for ever. 5
Then, when he had been
transferred:

There were many criminals in our new camp and, as at Maldyak, they worked little and lived well. For a long time one of these individuals had been pestering me to sell him my woollen tunic. He was the senior in one of the tents and drew the bread ration to distribute to the other prisoners, so that he always had surpluses. One day I received a letter from my wife in which she told me that she had sent a parcel containing a new tunic, trousers, underwear, boots and a dry sausage. I showed this letter to the 'trusty'. 'I can't sell you the tunic I'm wearing, but I will let you have the other one when I get it, provided you supply me with extra
bread.'

169

KOLYMA
'All ---right,' he answered, Til let you have a ration of six hundred grams a day/ And, to do him justice, he kept his

promise.

From long

experience, however,

things never got as far as

received what my parcels simply failed to arrive. So, not being very hopeful of ever seeing the latest parcel, I felt sure that the extra bread, which was keeping me on my feet, would only be available for a limited time. It was a question of planning a lighter job well ahead. With the help of another prisoner, Gorev, who enjoyed a certain amount of authority, being in charge of part of the workshops, I managed to obtain a job splitting firewood and heating water in the boilers. I was up to this
it was warm there. Next to the boilers stood the camp administration sector where a man called Egorov worked as an accountant. He had once been a finance clerk in Yaroslavl. I got to know him and offered to tidy and sweep his office regularly, in the hope that this might bring the extra crust of bread my way. Egorov agreed he stood to lose nothing and I congratulated myself as I swept crusts and crumbs and

I knew that the good me. Up to now I had never wife had told me she had sent. Some

work, and

sometimes even
bag.

little

chunks of bread off the tables into

my

was able to still my hunger to some extent. Not far from the place where I worked there were a number of clamps which Egorov looked after, in which were kept potatoes, carrots and onions. I also worked that hunger is no genteel old lady picking over the vegetables. I could not chew raw potatoes or carrots whole as my teeth were loose, so I made myself a grater by punching holes with a nail in a piece of tin. Now I was eating raw vegetables my teeth began to strengthen and the swelling of my legs went down. I could even help some of my comrades in misfortune, including my friend Loginov. 5
I

Now

In his piece in the Soviet press, Grigory Shelest relates one of the rare occasions when an inspection by the commandant-generar did not end in a general distribution of punishments. He describes the amazement of a
170

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

commandant-general, at an inspection ofthcdokhodyagy, at finding his former army general among them. When he had recovered from his astonishment, the commandant-general ordered the prisoner to be taken to his office, and when he duly appeared, commanded everyone else to leave the room. When the two men were alone, the commandant

begged

his ex-general to

be seated, pressed him to accept

and offered his sincere apologies. He explained that he could do little to help him (except possibly to make his life a little more bearable), since he, too, was under the sword of Damocles. At the same time he enquired what he
cigarettes

could do, within the

his lot.

strict limits

of the possible, to lighten

'You can do nothing', replied the ex-general, 'except perhaps get me the job of store-manager.' This was a
privileged position, carrying with
it

the acquisition of

.decent clothing

and good quality boots. In addition, it assured employment indoors which would enormously
increase the old matfs chances of survival.

The news of this incident, naturally, spread about the camp and gave rise to a spate of rumours. It was reported,
on excellent authority, that the general was a personal friend of Lenin's who had fallen out with Stalin, and that the commandant, as a kind of insurance for the future, had found a means of placing a man so influential (although temporarily under a cloud) under an obligation to him.
Shelest does not hide the other side of the coin, telling

how,

in the

atmosphere created by the event, a Jew named

in the flesh of the

Dodya Shmuller, who was a thorn

authorities

on account of his constant complaints and determination to have his 'rights', thought he saw a chance
to justify himself.
'Stalin's villa',

He was, at that time, undergoing a spell in

and existing on the statutory 300 grams of bread per day, and clearly he would not long survive this regime. When the news of the commandant's inspection and its attendant rumours got about, Shmuller lodged one
*7*


KOLYMA
more formal complaint

desperate one, this time

seeking to prove that the nourishment content of the food he

was receiving would not support life. But Shmuller was no ex-general and he received another spell in 'Stalin's villa'
for his pains. 29

Mrs Ginzburg, who was also eventually saved by a doctor

after only

a few months at Elgen, notes that any claim to

medical knowledge was an enormous help.

'When they
training.'

start filling

began studying the

arts

up your forms, say you did four

that before
years'

you

medical

'Why?' I asked, surprised. 'They need nurses here. They will take your medical training into account, and you'll be a nurse, under a roof, instead of having to hoe the ground and fell trees.' 'But it's not true. I'm not competent to be a nurse.' 'Of course you are. Training has no significance here, all the camp women need is a decent humane person. You will be sorry for those who have reached their end and you won't take bribes from them.' 'What about treatment?' 'That's a joke. Here the only treatment consists in one or two days off work!'
'Well,
I

can't

tell Jies.'

'Then you had better

This paid
witnesses.
off,

learn, hadn't you?' 4

as

it

did in several other cases

among our

'"But

am

not a doctor,"

answered in bewilderment.
friend,

'"Never mind that," said

my

"you know how

to

write a prescription in Latin, don't you?"

'"What have I to do with prescriptions?" '"You will write something in Latin in front of the chief doctor. This will make a good impression on him."' 31 By some such method, and given a great deal of luck into the bargain, a small proportion of Kolyma's inmates
172

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

survived. But
it is

well to record

what a small number they

were, what fate faced the majority.

For them the only escape was death. One prisoner reports
a great wave of suicide, in September 1938, started by that of a professor of meteorology. But it was always easy to

provoke the shot of a guard, and

fun:

many

did.

Many,

as

we

saw, were executed or beaten to death or merely killed for

one post-war prisoner

says,

I was convinced that soldiers of the must have been picked for their sadistic qualities. They had a completely free hand over us and would do anything, particularly when drunk, to make prisoners suffer. For instance, when going to or coming back from work in the usual columns of five, they would sometimes stop us in the middle of the road, unleash their dogs, and laugh uproariously as the dogs sank their fangs into the prisoners'legs. It was a time when they were absolutely free to do anything, even kill us and get a

MVD

reward for it. I have known them to call a man over to make a fire for them, or to bring them a mug of water when on sentry duty, and then kill the unfortunate under the pretext
that the prisoner
Still,

had crossed the 'no

trespass' line. 31

the

majority died

of mere

freezing,

hunger,

polyavitaminosis and exhaustion, or in the routine of camp

brutality,

by that colder and more calculated violence of the mature Stalinist order. In 1939, one prisoner was
graveyard
detail.

allotted to the

We started

out, past the mine, past the

punishment shack,

mound. Our tools were stored in a small booth. A wide square was cleared of snow, and in it two pits were dug, about ten by thirty feet. One of them was shallow, apparently it had been just begun, but the other was finished and already nearly full. Standing at the edge, I saw
uphill to the

clearly the outlines of the corpses

under the layer of lime. A

barrel with lime stood near by, ready for use. began to work, drilling vertical holes arranged in

We

chessboard order, in the unfinished

pit.

When

the holes

173

KOLYMA
were about three feet deep, they were charged with ammonal and blasted, after which we had to clear away the earth and rock, and drill again. The work proceeded quietly, and slowly. There were no guards about, and the workers were all fine fellows. The blasting was done once every two days. A huge bonfire was always burning near by, and we spent a good half of the working day sitting by it. I fell to talking with the senior grave-digger, a cheerful young

man.
he told me. 'Even before I at the Berzin mine. The mine was a large one at that time it employed six or seven thousand prisoners. The camp had to have one gravedigger, and I used my connections to get the job. What a life that was! No worries, no troubles, no control of any kind. The work was easy enough. In 1936 I buried only three men, in 1937, four. What a job! In the summer I picked berries and toasted myself in the sun. The output was always one hundred per cent, the food was fine And though I was not socially preferred, I was considered something of a camp official. The criminals hate to dig
'I

am a veteran grave-digger,
to

came

Tumanny,

buried

men

graves.

'And how was it last year? And now?' I asked. The veteran grave-digger only shrugged his shoulders. 'Now there is almost no difference between working here

and slaving in the mine, except that you are not being pushed around. The work is the same as
at grave-digging,

everywhere else they drive you to death. Last year there were four of us, then six, and by winter we had fifteen men.
Last year

we dug more than ten pits. 'And how many corpses go into one pit? I asked. 'That depends. As many asit will take. Sometimes thirty,
1

sometimes more.' 23

The
asked.

prisoner went on to ask the chief grave-digger,

notify the relatives

"'Do they

when someone
the

dies?" I

"What do you think?" "T know that they don't. In

camp

they

make a

record that prisoner so-and-so died of such-and-such an

174

LIVING AND DYING CONDITIONS

and send the information to Magadan where his If it was a political prisoner, his death is reported to the NKVD in Moscow. And that is the end of it."' 23 And, in fact, it was often years before the fact of death could be established by relatives. Over the gates of the camps in Kolyma there was an inscription required, we are told, by camp statutes: 'Labour is a matter of honour, courage and heroism.' As the Leninist
illness

name is struck from the lists.

dissident

Roy Medvedev comments,

camps
its

this

cannot but recall

the parallel hypocrisy by which the gates of Nazi concentration

carried the inscription, 'Arbeit machtfret.
is

The remark which

chapter, as

epigraph, was

quoted at the beginning of this made by a French Communist

is

named

Derfel.

His end, typical enough of many,

described: 'Blows

had already come into fashion. One day a

and didn't
get up.' 28

brigadier gave Derfel a simple clout in passing, a matter of

routine. Derfel
fell

175

CHAPTER SEVEN

WOMEN
One day Lara went out and did
not

come back.

She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which later was mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women's
concentration camps in the north.

PASTERNAK, Doctor

Z^agO

The women
differences

of

Kolyma shared

the general fate.

The

male prisoners nevertheless warrant a separate treatment even though we have already, of course, seen something of women's life in the ships, and in various mixed camps. The number of women involved is hard to determine. The best estimate is probably around 5 -6 per cent giving
between
their condition

and

that of the

about 25,000 when Kolyma held half a million prisoners in all. They served in the farming and fishery camps of the
southern coastal area

Talon,

Duchka, Yana, Balagan-

noye, Ola and so forth; in the women's

camp

at

Magadan,

which provided much of the menial labour of the capital; at the Elgen camp and its satellites, in the northern area, of which we shall treat later; in various penal camps such as
176

WOMEN
distant Tyenki,

scattered

which held women katorzhinki; and in more camps at Omsuchkan and elsewhere throughout
administrations.

the

Kolyma
have

We

disproportionate

number

of

witnesses

women

in particular, Elinor Lipper.

A former Western
who wrote
itself,

Communist who long

since renounced the system, she

published her account in Switzerland in 1950. Another,

Evgenia Ginzburg, was a Soviet Party

official

with the intention of publication in the Soviet Union

in

taking the view that 'the great Leninist truth has prevailed

our country and party

following Khrushchev's re-

velations

and attacks on

Stalinism;

and that now

it

would
first

be

'possible to tell everyone'

about what had happened.

Her book was not

appeared
It
is

in fact published in Russia,

and

(in

Russian) in Italy in 1967, without however

getting her into trouble in Russia.

truly

remarkable how closely these two agree about

that

everything

they

report

the

rations, the brutality

and

prostitution. It

moral climate, the is even the case

that they both served in, and report in virtually the same way, the women's camp at Elgen (though Mrs Ginzburg was there in 1940 and Mrs Lipper in 1943). They are, moreover, confirmed in every essential about this camp by a
third account, that of Miss Olitskaya,

who was

there in

1938.

The

reason for the comparatively high survival rate

which gave us the testimony of these and other women, is argued by both these as being due to the greater strength and endurance of their sex. Elinor Lipper remarks: 'Women and women are also are far more enduring than men more adaptable to unaccustomed physical labour.' Mrs Ginzburg agrees:
.

Men are supposed to be stronger than women, yet somehow they seemed more defenceless and we felt a strong urge of
177

KOLYMA
maternal pity towards them. They were so bad at enduring pain all the women were agreed on this they didn't know how to wash anything or how to mend their rags in secret as we did our underclothes. They were the image of our husbands and our brothers, deprived, in circumstances in which they so greatly needed it, of our care. Someone said, quoting Ehrenburg: 'Poor chap, he has no one to sew a button on.' Each face reminded me of my husband; my head almost burst from the tension. All of us women were straining, trying to identify our loved ones. 4

This comes in one of many touching stories of meetings between groups of men and women prisoners, when these have been segregated for long periods. 'Then the men notice the women for the first time. Both sexes flock to the
wire.

The men and women shouted and stretched out their hands to each other; almost all were weeping openly. "You !" poor loves, you darlings Cheer up Be brave Be strong arose from both sides of the wire. They then threw each other presents across the wire torn towels, saucepans made out of stolen prison mugs, even bread.' 4 On the other side of the picture a male prisoner tells of
! ! !

being locked with another group in a barrack,

realised

when they

from voices that there were women the other side of They knock out a few knot-holes and talk; attempts to kiss cannot quite reach through; finally they induce a girl to take her clothes off. In return they push some tobacco through the hole. One prisoner foreigner was shocked but another told him: 'You're a child, Mike. You expect all women prisoners to behave like Katyusha Maslova, if she ever existed. They are not whores. None of them. They are human, and they suffer as much as
the wall.

these boys
caress.

do

for the

want of a word of love and a tender

The boys understand them better than you do. They

i

78

WOMEN
are their

own blood, their womenfolk.' 31 The superior capacity of women to survive was of course
stock, their

own

helped by the fact that they were not used in the gold mines.
Yet, as

Mrs Lipper

points out, 'Strictly speaking,

in the gold mines,

wood

chopping is lighter than the work which women are exempt. But the
is

transition

as a stenographer, housewife, or teacher to

from from working wood chopping

no joke.' 13 Moreover, to survive better than the men was no high criterion in Kolyma. The death rate among women who remained at manual labour with Kolyma rations remained high. Mrs Ginzburg recounts several deaths of friends. One 'first went blind, then died in a camp infirmary of a kidney disease brought on by overwork'. Another 'died a month later, three days before a telegram came from her son, emboldened by the fact that he was now an Izvestia war
correspondent, asking the

camp commandant

to give her

the assistance "necessary to save her life" .'Another,

'Nadya

Korolyova, returning with her team from the day's work,

collapsed on the frozen ground, thereby holding

of the column.

The

four

women who marched

in the

up the rest same

!

rank were angry with her and the guard prodded her lifeless body with his rifle butt, saying: "Stop playing the fool Get up, I tell you " He repeated this several times until finally one of the prisoners said: "But she's Can't you see?" Another, after serving for nearly ten years, was made the scapegoat for a fire that had broken out on the farm, and 'she was threatened with a new trial and a new sentence for arson and sabotage. So, on one of the white nights of the short Kolyma summer, brown-eyed, black-browed Tanya was found dangling from a noose in a hothouse where cucumbers and tomatoes were grown for the camp and farm officials, a swarm of disgusting, fat Kolyma mosquitoes, like tiny bats, swarming and buzzing round her
!

head.' 4

179

KOLYMA
And in general, as with men,
(as

the survivors are those

who
get

with

Lipper

'functions'

and

Ginzburg)

managed

to

in their case as nurses.

women

always had a

final resource

At a

different level,

their bodies.

Mrs

Ginzburg sardonically recounts her naive first reaction to the atmosphere of prostitution, when she heard 'a hoarse,
alcoholic voice say:

hundred roubles." 'Up till then the question of prostitution had come my way only as a social problem (in connection with unemployment in the U.S A.) or as an ingredient of drama (Alisa Koonen on the stage; a street lamp in the background and .' 4 And the she waiting at one side in the shadow) literature abounds with bread, clothes or cash being obtained by this means. Mrs Ginzburg's eventual team boss was a criminal who would give a pair of warm quilted breeches in payment for sexual interludes. Even to go sick could be made easier by this method. 'In order to be let off work one had to have a temperature of at least 100.4 Anything less was scrimshanking. As a rule he used up his quota of exemptions on the common criminals, who repaid him in food acquired from the soldiers or in a more natural fashion, for he, though approaching his fifties, was a lusty
*

"Well, what about

it? I'll

give you a

male.' 4

Not

that

more innocent love-making could be

easily

arranged without some quid pro quo. At

Omsuchkan

Once a week a party of sick men would be sent for X-rays to

women's hospital. Duly bribed, the convict doctor used send brigade leaders who had sweethearts there instead of those who were really sitk. Once in, the men could easily lose themselves among the thousand-odd women and make love at their own peril. Finally, however, the authorities got wind of what went on, punished the doctors, and stopped
the
to

the

illicit visits.

But they were not always so interested in the mainten180

WOMEN
ance of proper moral standards.

On

one occasion

was

present when the camp commandant, Colonel Ponomarenko, asked a brigade leader to paint his office, as well as that of his second in command. The brigade leader said he

would quite
to

willingly

do the job, provided he were allowed

go over to the women.

The commandant smiled, and said: 'Do the painting first

and then we shall see.' 'But I have no paint,'
'That's your business.'
said the brigade leader.

'Do I have to steal the stuff from the enterprise I am working for?' 'Did I tell you to steal? But if you want to go to your girl, you paint my office first. I'm not asking you where you get
the paint!' 31

Some women
revenge.

used their bodies more dramatically, for

amazement at all those human up the rugged mountain, I couldn't help thinking what an extraordinary picture of

One

day, looking in mute

ants carrying their heavy loads

human life an intelligent film producer could have made of it. Among the women assigned to^ this heavy task I
had admired very she had given a performance in our camp at Magadan. I spoke to her the next day. She was Nadiya Milionushkina, winner of the allSoviet Union contest for drama in 1948. Tall and slender, with thick auburn hair down to her shoulders, beautiful green eyes, and a milky complexion, Nadiya looked like a queen even in the shoddy camp clothes she had to wear. She was arrested in 1949 after being accused of having been the mistress of the German general commanding the Minsk area during the occupation. Her sentence: 25 years hard
I

recognised a famous young actress

much when,

several

months

earlier,

labour.

Nadia had been such a distinguished creature in her last camp, her manners so exquisite and her talent so genuine, that not only did zek prisoners fall in love with her but even
181

KOLYMA
camp
officials and not a few politruks. She pretended to accept the courtship of the politruks until these unsuspecting men invited her to their offices. Then when they tried to make love to her, she would begin to scream, smash

windows, bang on doors, and create such a scandalous din that all sorts of curious people immediately arrived on the scene to hear Nadiya cursing the politruk for assaulting her. The result was that the politruks had to be transferred

somewhere
prisoners.

else

because they had

lost face in front

of the

I asked Milionushkina why she had continued to play such a dangerous game. Her answer was that she wanted to see them disgraced or, more hopefully, shot for misbehaviour. After she did this several times they revenged themselves by depriving her of her actress status and sent her to this desolate place where she had to carry the daily food rations over the mountain on her frail back. Yet she kept her good looks and remained in high spirits and full of pep. Lifting the heavy bag of food on her shoulders, she smiled at me before taking off and said: 'Believe me, there is nothing more pleasant than to see chekists dying to make love to you and then being shot as traitors to their motherland.' 31

Rape

was, of course, regularly practised by urkas.

twenty-one-year-old girl about to become a school teacher,

but arrested for being of Polish descent and given ten years,

was on cleaning duty at the Magadan men's camps. One day, the guard to take her back to the women's camp had not arrived when a brigade of men returned from work. They were, as it happened, urkas, and invited her into their barrack where twenty of them raped her. She caught both syphilis and gonorrhea. A prisoner who worked with her comments, 'Her experience was not unique in Kolyma. There was even a common expression for it: "She fell under the trolley".' 13 One of a score of similar stories on a theme

we

shall not labour.

As

to the female urkas,

we have already seen them on

182

the

WOMEN
Dzhurma. In Kolyma, they mainly stole. A Polish
the

woman in

Magadan women's camp

women commandants here to help me women and to get me back what they had stolen. Both women were young, in their early twenties,
appealed to the
against the apache
intelligent, energetic, hellishly

hard and bad, handsome and extremely well dressed when out of uniform. Their
these

clothes looked as if they

might have come from Paris. One of women got my things back for me but I had better sell

them at once, she said. So long as I had them she would not answer for my neck. I sold her a pair of shoes very cheaply (they were worth 500 roubles and I got 180), but it was worth it. By doing so, I got permission from her to buy jam,
sugar and gingerbread, and was given work
I

wished. 2

One

urka

woman team

leader

is

noted as being par-

ticularly praiseworthy since, after in effect

commandeering

someone's woollen jacket, 'she sometimes puts people on

light

work

for as long as
is,

Rozochki, that

'little

two weeks.' roses', was the contemptuous

jiyalochki,
'violets'.

name

that the urkas gave female 'counter-revolutionaries';

female urkas called themselves

One
the

woman political noted

lies

that 'behind the poetic

for those

word "rose"

a rich complex of hatreds

13

who differ from

masses.'

The extreme

crazedness of the

'violets'

marked them out

even from their male counterparts. 'One,

Shura, attacked even the

whom they called

commandant with her knife, refusing to go to work. Nothing would make her change her mind. The commandant sentenced her to be shot. Still she did not care. I believe she really did not. Her companions
said:
I

"With a character like that, better sooner than later!" cannot imagine what she thought about, if she ever

thought.

When

saw her she was

2

sitting

on a

barrel, her

knife in her hand, doing her hair, as sullen

and

self-

engrossed as

sin.'

183

KOLYMA

Women

humiliation.

were particularly susceptible One was taken aback when,

to brutality

and

for the first time,

she found in the transit

camp

that the

couple of soldiers were present at the baths,

commander and a among

hundreds of naked women. Her companions pointed out that they no longer thought of them as human. (This appeared to be true, except for one guard who showed himself keen on a magnificent redhead.) 4 A similar humiliation is recounted by a male prisoner at

Omsuchkan.
Because Guralnik was one of the few privileged people allowed in and out of the camp, he invited me along, on his own responsibility, to the bath-house on 'women's day'. 'I'll show you a scene you'll never see again in your lifetime,' he told me temptingly. I refused to go at first but later succumbed to my morbid curiosity. Dressed in a white gown, and carrying some iodine in a bottle, I followed him into the dressing room which also doubled as a barber shop. Hundreds of naked women in Indian file, heads bowed, silent, had to submit to the indignity of having their hairy parts shaven by a man. It was done once a month. The administration explained that it was for hygienic reasons. Looking at those women, some almost children, some who could be their grandmothers, lifting one leg up on the bench to ease the barber's job while others waited silently for their turn, I could not help reflecting that even in such barbarous conditions women did not lose their innate shyness. I spoke later to an intellectual Russian woman who spoke fluent English and French and had graduated from Shanghai University. When I expressed my distaste for this debasing practice she told me her own story. 'I was so shocked about it at first that I refused, so they took me by force. Two soldiers kept my hands behind my back, while another two forced my legs apart. The razor cut into my flesh and they had to give it up for the moment, but later they forced me again. Afterwards I had a nervous breakdown and was in the hospital for a while. I thought
184

WOMEN
they had forgotten about me, but they discovered that I was not complying with the mandatory monthly regulation and physical dragged me out to the bath-house once more. strength was at an end, so I resigned myself to be handled by one man instead of five.' 'Why didn't you ask for a razor to do it yourself?' She smiled sadly, and said, 'You don't know them. They think that you might use the razor as a weapon. Kill yourself or slash somebody.' 31

My

Women
brutality:

were

also subject to

both arbitrary and

'legal'

Hala was in terrible pain, and kept begging to be taken to hospital. 'Hospital! We'll give you hospital!' In desperation we invoked the regulations and the 'amnesty' that had been, or was going to be, signed. They laughed again. We had 36 kilometres to cover on foot, with three guards and a dog and apaches. Our way was through the with its clear, sharp, northern smell; cones, forest berries and mushroom-damp, and carpet of soft white moss. ... Once or twice we halted to pick berries, for we had been given no food all day. After 10 kilometres like this we could go no further. Hala was writhing with pain. My legs were inflamed, hard, shining, in my hard prison boots; the skin was coming away in strips; blood was running into my boots. Hala was unable to get to her feet. For this they struck her repeatedly in the back with their fists. An insanity of anger swept over me. I began to fight both the guards and their dogs. The rest of the journey was made on a lorry lying among sacks of salt. Hala was taken away from me. Later, in the new camp, called to answer for what I had done, I said: 'The English government and the Polish government will hold you responsible for what you are doing.' For this I was struck in the back with the flat of a bayonet, twice. 'Here,' I was told, 'here is one for your Poland and here is another for your England.' This was on the 27th of August
All this time
. .

941.2

On

another occasion, at night,

185

KOLYMA
officer and a few soldiers in their long sheepskin coats, their faces red from the frost and alcohol. They spoke so loudly that everybody awoke. . . .A certain woman patient was to be immediately discharged, given her clothes, and sent back in the dead of night to the camp she belonged to. The orderly, as politely as he could, replied that he had express orders from the chief surgeon to effect no discharges during the night. He pointed out that in the case involved, the woman ran a high fever and was very ill after a postbirth infection. Removal was certain death. The drunken officer began cursing him at the top of his voice and called for the poor woman's bundle of clothes. To everyone's horror, the half-dead patieftt was dressed and, supported by two soldiers, taken from the ward in a dreadful state. Next morning, we heard that she had died during the night in the women's camp. Dr Goldberg was so furious he refused to take over his duties. He left by car for the district headquarters where he handed in his resignation. As there were very few specialists of his calibre, his defiant attitude paid off. The public attorney came back with the doctor, an enquiry was held, and the officer disappeared from the camp. It was alleged that he was put on trial, but nobody knew what punishment, if any, he received. 31

In marched an

typical

punishment

for religious believers

is

reported:

During that mortally dangerous spring, the strength of character displayed by the semi-illiterate 'believers' from Voronezh did much to keep up our morale. Easter fell that year at the end of April and these women who fulfilled their norm by honest work and on whose output the production of Kilometre Seven was based, asked to be dispensed from work on Easter Day. 'Cousin' refused even to listen to them, though they promised to work three times as hard to make up for the day
of
rest.

recognise any religious holidays here, and don't try to convert me. Get out into the forest with the rest

'We don't

186

WOMEN
and don't be up to any of your tricks. I've wasted too much time as it is making reports about you and bothering the high-ups. I'm capable of handling you myself. If you try any subversion you'll get a punishment you won't forget in
a hurry.'
brute then gave his orders to his underlings. The refused to leave their quarters, saying that it was a sin to work on Easter Sunday. The guards drove them out with rifle-butts but when they reached the forest the 'believers' made a neat pile of their axes and saws, and sitting down composedly on the frozen logs started to chant

The

women

their prayers.

The guards, acting no doubt on 'Cousin's' instructions, ordered them to stand barefooted on one of the ice-bound pools, the surface of which was covered with a thin film of water. 4
This took place at Elgen, the archetypal women's
of Kolyma. Outside
it

camp

with the inscription

was a green-painted wooden arch, 'Long live the great Stalin'. Then came

a wooden gate with 'Elgen Main Gamp. Women's

Camp

USVITL, NKVD.' From descriptions

worth registering
for

of the interior

clearest pictures available of

its

we have one of the any camp layout and one typicality. There were two barbed-

wire fences outside the

corners was a

camp wall proper which, itself made

of wood, was also topped with barbed wire. At each of its

main gate

wooden watchtower manned by guards. The was wide enough for prisoners to be marched in

in their usual fives.

When

it

was locked, entrance was

through a narrow door which led into the guardroom.

Within the walls was a large parade ground, on which and marched off to work. Beyond it, a broad path led between two rows of barracks, five on each side. The first barrack on the left was the dining
prisoners assembled to be checked

room

(with its connected water-boiling section), then three

prisoners' barracks, then the 'club'.

On the right-hand side

i8 7

'

KOLYMA

was first a prisoners' barrack, then a barrack half infirmary and half used by prisoners working inside the camp, then two more prisoners' barracks and then the disciplinary barrack. Beyond the left-hand barracks were two latrines, beyond the right hand barracks a closed closet marked Tor
free citizens only'.

The

next row of buildings on the right consisted of the

administration offices with the

camp commandant and

for

the

labour assignment

chief;

a barrack

sewing and cobbling

work; a shed for the issue of clothing; and the shed with the

camp

food supplies. Near by was a woodshed and a stable

for the

oxen needed

to haul the

water barrows from the

stream some

way

out of camp.

On

the right side of the

entrance to the camp, beyond the guardroom, was the

economic

office

and a

rest

room

for guards.

barrack proper was outside the camp.

The guards' The prisoners'

barracks, each holding about a hundred inmates, were

about 65 -70 X 25 feet. Each had a small entrance hall and a washroom with an iron stove and arrangements for drying wet mittens and foot rags though, as Mrs Lipper tells us,

this

was only allowed

at night, so that night shifts

were not

able to dry their stuff out in the daytime.

Mrs Ginzburg

describes her arrival:

'I

thought Elgen was only for women, but don't some of

'Yes, I think so, but
it's
.
.

you like men? .' hard to tell At first we made a joke of it. But that's where we had got to. We could no longer tell a man from a woman. As we continued to watch the files of workers passing by, any inclination to joke left us. They were indeed sexless, these creatures in patched breeches, their feet wrapped in torn puttees, their caps pulled low over their eyes, rags covering the lower part of their brick-red frostbitten faces. This sight appalled us and took away the last remains of our courage. For the first time in many months some
these people over there look to

188

WOMEN
women's eyes filled with tears. So, this was what Elgen had in store for us. We had already lost our professional and party status, our citizenship,

our families; were we now to lose our sex as well? From tomorrow onwards we too would belong to this species of strange, unreal beings who were now tramping through the snow towards us. 'Elgen is the Yakut word for "dead" a woman
,

'

explained. ...
greedily opening their jaws to swallow us up.

Barbed wire, symmetrical watchtowers, creaking gates Rows of low

huts covered with ragged tar-board, a single long lavatory made of planks surrounded by lumps of frozen excrement. 4

The
In
at

routine was regular:

in winter beaten several times in succession against a dangling length of iron rail, the kind of rail the carts in the gold mines run on everywhere it gives out the same wailing, hateful sound that so tears at one's insides that probably no prisoner ever forgets it for the rest of his life. At the sound the uniformed women guards are at the side of our cots, pulling the blankets away from us. 'Come on,
five- thirty.

summer the day in Elgen begins at five o'clock,

An

iron rod

is

Then you rush into the come on, get up, faster, faster' washroom where the battle for the foot rags is already in full swing and where you can swear as hard as you like. You find
. .
.

that your footgear, which you carefully tied together in the evening, is now scattered into two different corners and is cold and wet. 13

Then came
the

the breakfast. First the bread ration then

same

line

line has

other our drinking cups are

now grown longer by barracks. Our breakfast

filled

forms at the next counter except that the the addition of squads from
ration ticket
is

torn off

and

with a slightly sweetened, faintly tinted, lukewarm liquid, which is supposed to contain the third of an ounce of sugar we are entitled to
189

KOLYMA
every day. Then half a herring is slapped down on the counter. Good Lord, are these herrings all head? What has happened to the tail ends? Of course you really know. The cooks have their favourites too, and they can't have everyone for a favourite. The tail end of a herring is almost all edible, except for a tiny portion, while the head amounts to the same in weight, even though so little of it can be eaten. There are quite a few prisoners who save their herring heads, boil them in water and then eat this 'soup*. It cannot be said that they are any the fatter for it, or any the
healthier. 13

The women then form up

and
after

to

go

to

work;

Once again we line up in rows of five in front of the barrack,

a suitable wait the guard leads us to the square in There are six or seven hundred women waiting to go out. Every brigade is guarded by at least two male soldiers. The soldiers are not here yet, so the prisoners wait. As yet only the naryaditsya, who is responsible for the distribution of work, is on the spot. She is one of the most influential, prisoners in the camp, for she makes up the lists of the various labour brigades, although of course she is subordinate to her free superior, the chief of labour allotment. Unlike her superior, she knows every prisoner in the camp, and a casual remark of hers at the right time very frequently determines where a prisoner will be sent to work. She can make proposals for transfer of workers, and since
front of the gate.

most

free

camp

administrators are notoriously lazy

and

a rule adopted without question. This applies also to proposed transfers to other and more rejnote camps. Naturally the naryaditsya ofTers her suggestions on the basis of her personal impressions. To make sure that these personal impressions are good, and in the hope of getting or keeping a better job, the prisoners shamelessly shower presents and flattery upon her. This is the more necessary because she usually is called upon to assist in the daily 'shake-down* or search of the prisoner's person, and she only pretends to search those prisoners who have kept on her good side. 13
careless, these proposals are as

190

WOMEN
The work
potato
fields,

consisted of digging, mainly ditches or

on the

and

tree-felling.

One prisoner asked if, being a

trained midwife, she might get suitable work. 'The overseer gave a nasty smile and replied: "There are two tasks for people with your sentence: breaking the soil and felling." 4 But the digging quota for the ditches was particularly

hard.

was nine cubic yards a day impossible even for the strongest women.' 13 However, even this was preferable to tree-felling. When Mrs Ginzburg was shown her first tree
It

she asked,

'Do you really think that Galya and

4

can

fell

a tree that

size?

From Keyzin, who had

curt reply:
for the

not yet

left

the

camp, came the

'Not just one. Eight cubic metres a day. That's the norm two of you.' And Kostik, who until then couldn't have. cared less about the trees or about us, chimed in, in a revolting bootlicking tone:
'Yes,

and you have three days

to get

your hand
it

in.

You'll

get

full

rations for that long. Afterwards

how much timber you can

parasites here.'

produce.
I

We

depend on can't have any

will

For three days Galya and

impossible. Poor trees,

struggled to achieve the

how they must have suffered at being

mangled by our inexpert hands. Half-dead ourselves, and completely unskilled, we were in no condition to tackle them. The axe would slip and send showers of chips in our faces. We sawed feverishly, jerkily, mentally accusing each
other of clumsiness but we knew we couldn't afford the luxury of a quarrel. The most terrifying moment was when the battered tree began to sway and we had no idea which way it would fall. Once Galya got a hard blow on the head, but the medical orderly refused to put iodine on the wound, remarking: 'That's an old trick. You'd like to be put off work from the
start.' 4

*9i

KOLYMA
Mrs Lipper
recalls,
in,

We

load the logs on our shoulders, and to make a woodpile. Sometimes the weight on my shoulders forced me to my knees two or three times, and each time I remembered a movie I had seen many years before in another life. It had shown Indian elephants at work, kneeling on their forelegs and winding their trunks around a tree, then slowly swaying to their feet. Would I not have been better off if I had been born an elephant? Then we sat silently side by side at the fire, poking peripheral pieces of wood into the flames and listening to the stillness of the frozen forest crowd tangibly around us. At last the brigadier would appear silently beside us on his snowshoes and call out a loud, genial, 'Home, girls,' as he measured our pile of wood. 'Home', we would repeat bitterly as, accompanied by a single guard, we marched back to camp with the others. 13

would come

struggle out with

them

In fact the work was, in

considerable tufta.

effect,

impossible without

And

even then, as

we have

said,

both

women

only survived by getting other functions.

failure, or

any other crime like pocketing a cells, and almost inevitably to use of the disciplinary camps of the Elgen complex. For Elgen was surrounded by small subsidiary camps: Forty women, mainly foreigners, at the Kilometre Seven isolation camp near Elgen were guarded by four men and one wolfhound. When the Seventh Kilometre burnt down in 1944, new ones arose at the Tenth and Twelfth. There was another at Kilometre Fourteen, another at Zmeika. But the largest and worst were two described in almost identical terms by Lipper and Ginzburg, in a way well worth reproducing to show the extent of confirmatory detail as between Western accounts of the 1940s and Soviet ones of the 1960s. Mrs Ginzburg asks, 'Was there really a worse place to which one could be
Continual
potato, led to the punishment

192

WOMEN
sent from here? It seemed so, for there was Mylga to which one might be sent from Elgen, and Izvestkovoye to which one might be sent on from Mylga.' 4

And Mrs

Lipper

says,

The outlook for the inmates of the disciplinary barrack was

Camp Mylga, which is about 18 miles from Elgen. The conditions at Mylga are so ghastly that Elgen seems a paradise by comparison. But even Mylga is
usually shipment to
disciplinary

camp Mylga has its own Izvyestkovoye, where women work in gypsum quarries. A woman who swings the pickaxe there does not have to reckon out how many more years of imprisonment she faces. She can be quite certain that within a year she will be released from all earthly sorrows. 13
not the
last stage, for disciplinary

camp

called

Another Soviet woman writer, O. L. Sliozberg, is cited by Solzhenitsyn with a passing remark on Mylga: 'At Mylga, when Gavrik was in charge, the punishments for women who did not fulfil the work norms were somewhat milder; just an unheated tent in winter (but one could run out and run round it); and at hay time when the mosquitoes were around an unprotected twig hut.' 30 Into Elgen and Mylga and the other camps, there poured a constant stream of women prisoners. For the most part they were counterparts of their male equivalents - 'counter-

revolutionaries', urkas

categories

There were some special the nuns, for example. Then, a new category of

and

so on.

non-politicals

came

in 1941

the ukazniki. An ukase was issued which provided that any worker who left his job in a war plant, no matter for what reasons, was subject to from six to eight years of imprisonment. Hundreds of young girls between the ages of eighteen and twenty were sent to Kolyma for running away to their villages because they could no longer endure the starvation in the cities where they had been forced to work. Some had only gone back home for a few days to visit a sick mother,

193

KOLYMA
but the factory manager would not give them any days off and when they returned they were arrested* They came as adolescents and were instantly transformed by Kolyma into full-fledged prostitutes. Thousands of workers were sent
into the Kolyma camps as ukazniki, for some petty misdemeanour. These prisoners were given amnesties when the war ended in 1945, but those who had not been physically wrecked were morally shattered. 13

In 1944 -5 came Ukrainian nationalist girls aged from seventeen to twenty-two. One prisoner, though accepting

committed by the Ukrainians, commented: 'But why had Soviet officers, interrogating seventeen-year-old girls, broken the girls' collar-bones and kicked in their ribs with heavy military
Polish accounts of atrocities

nevertheless

boots, so that they lay spitting blood in the prison hospitals

Kolyma? Certainly such treatment had not convinced any of them that what they had done was evil. They died
of

with

tin

medallions of the Virgin on their shattered chests,

their eyes.' 13
1

and with hatred in

On

the Sovlatvia, in

949, were a new-style group:

Many of the foreign girls living in Moscow, as well as some Russian girls who had graduated from the Foreign Lanwere often recruited by the secret service. and a certain knowledge of English or French were basic requirements. They would be given the fullest details on young bachelor diplomats newly arrived in Russia and instructed to frequent the Metropol and the

guage

Institute,

Good

looks

National hotels in order to get acquainted with them. Once contact was established, the girls were supposed to use all their wiles and sexual charms to ferret out all possible information pertaining to the affairs of the foreign embassies. All too often, however, the girls fell in love with their diplomats and after confessing their true mission, would implore them to save them and smuggle them out of y the country. Because the 'information' they brought back to their

194

WOMEN
who
masters invariably turned out to be inaccurate, those girls permitted love to interfere with their spying were punished with a io-year sentence. Their crime came under Article 37, Paragraph 6 of the Soviet Penal Code and they were designated as 'dangerous social elements'. In simpler language, they were considered guilty of 'illegal prostitution'. Now, as the ship plowed on, these unhappy girls were crying their hearts out and cursing the day they had accepted their assignments. Some of them managed to keep in their bosoms the tear-stained photos of their former

boyfriends. 31

This concourse of women of all types inevitably produced

occasional children

though when a katorzhanka

USSR) was

at

Tyenki

became pregnant,
an abortion (then

soldiers being the only

illegal in the

males available,
carried out by

administrative decision. Pregnancy was automatically a

disciplinary offence,

'mothers'
'So that's

and apart from politicals and urkas was the other recognised category at Elgen.
'

Mother and Child Welfare! exclaimed Nina when she saw the first platoon of 'mothers' surrounded by soldiers with rifles at the ready. But it was
Gvinyashvili

only later that

section

we

learned

all

the details of the children's

. . .

and the joys of motherhood at Elgen. For some reason, the authorities had decided that Elgen was an excellent place for prisoners' children of all ages, who, if they survived, would grow up so tough that even a bullet wouldn't kill them. As for the 'mothers', this was a collective term for all female prisoners who had been caught having an illicit love affair and found to be pregnant. The regulations concerning them were severe but occasionally tempered by humanity. Several times a day the command 'Feeding-time' came from the watchtowers, and the muffled, sexless figures, guarded by warders in sheepskin jackets, would stumble in ranks of five towards the children's home. Each woman was given her baby and faced with the problem of extracting a few drops of milk from her breast, not an easy task since she was living on
195

KOLYMA
Elgen rations and working on land-improvement. Usually, after a few weeks the doctor reported that lactation had ceased, the woman would be sent back to fell trees or to haymake, and the baby would have to fight for its life on patent foods. As a result of this system the turnover of 'mothers' was very rapid, their ranks were constantly refilled by the arrival of 'fallen women' from all over Kolyma. 4

A mother could stay with her child for a week, and was off work for a month. She was not admitted into the children's room, but nursed her baby at intervals in a special visiting room. After nine months the mother had the right to see the baby for two hours a month if she remained at Elgen. However, this permission was withdrawn from May to September on the grounds that prisoners could not be
spared from
field

work.

The

children's settlement at Elgen held from 250 to

300

children.

Those who survived stayed

till

they were seven

and were then

near the coast.

transferred to a state institution at Talon,

During
control
of,

their time at Elgen, the children

were under the

usually, well-disposed but

incompetent

women

criminals,

who in any case had no time to do more than the

They learn to talk late and The smaller children
which always upset the

bare essentials of cleaning and feeding them. Toys were

hardly seen. 'They rarely smile.
forgot their mothers between

they never experience affection.'

visits,

mothers. 'The larger children put their noses to the

window

and watch knowingly

off in

rows of five

mothers are marched behind them the soldier with the fixed
as their convict
it

bayonet.' 13

When

the children were sent to Talon,

regulation that the mother should never see

was a strict them again.

in the area,

Care was taken that they would never be held

but Elinor Lipper mentions a case of a mother

who

after

various shifts found herself at Talon and was able to get a

196

WOMEN
job as a cleaning
did not say

woman

at the

home where

her boy lived.

She saw him every day but he no longer recognised her. She who she was, for fear of the secret coming out,

and was happy enough with the circumstances. Other special barracks are reported in other women's camps for girls with illegitimate children. The motives many gave for becoming pregnant were that it improved their living conditions a little for a few weeks. At first they were often reluctant to keep their babies, but they were allowed to feed them in the morning and play with them in the evening, and they became attached to them until, at the age of two, the children were dragged away to infant homes. Even among the lower class of free settlers,
the life expectancy of newborn babies was practically zero. There was absolutely nothing available in those years to feed the infants except mother's milk. But because of the poor food and hard work, most of the mothers were unable to produce enough milk, and the babies died.

The older children didn't fare much better. When we came to Kolyma they were giving hospitalised children one
bread and butter daily. No vegetables, no no vitamins. On rare occasions, such as the ist of May or s0me other Soviet holiday, children were given half an apple green and small. 31
glass of milk with
fruit,

In general, free

women, except of the higher

castes,

had

an unpleasant existence. A few wives, in the early days, followed

husbands.

their sentenced

Some women brought from Moscow permission to see their husbands every month if he had exemplary conduct and had executed his norm. But these visits were always in the presence of a camp chief, and the woman never got permission to spend the night with her husband. The women who came to join their husbands had to cope with the cold and the perpetual changes of residence. The
197

KOLYMA
prisoner was constantly being transferred from one place to the other and the wife had to give up her job, found with

great difficulty, to follow him to dangerous areas, where she could be raped, robbed, insulted. . On arrival she would be exposed to the gross advances of the chiefs and the guards who had taken up the morals of Kolyma. With the female prisoners, there was no subtle courtesy. Undress, lie down and one passed on one's syphilis to her. But to rape a woman prisoner always meant a certain risk. friend, a subordinate or a superior could denounce you. With prisoners' wives this risk did not exist. Juridically they were independent persons and they were not protected by any law. 28
. .

But above
useless.

all, this

immensely long journey proved

to

be

The unhappy woman

propositions.

did not get permission to see

her husband. Promises for an interview were accompanied

by precise

The woman did

not find work near

the place of detention. If by chance she did

manage

to,

the

husband was immediately transferred. This was not a game on the part of the authorities, it was an order. Moscow had
foreseen everything:

The

him food forbidden by rehim the food? It's forbidden. He's afraid to. A chief? All right, but pay with your body. What about money? He has too much, he doesn't know what to do with it. The wife certainly hasn't got the amount
wife could not give
gulations.

Have a guard

give

necessary, to grease the palms, especially the Kolyma palms. Anyway, there's no way out. . . . Some got a three-year permit, but caught in this trap they took the first boat back. The strongest and you needed to have more strength than the prisoners themselves waited out their time and went back without having seen their husbands. The weakest, obsessed by the persecution of which they had been victims on the 'mainland' and fearing to return there, cashed in on their bodies. They remarjied, had children and forgot the prisoner in

forgetting themselves. 28

198

WOMEN

A woman prisoner, when freed, was in a difficult position.

It was impossible to live alone. She would be molested wherever she went, persecuted by employers unless she

submitted to them sexually, attacked and raped

dark, incessantly importuned.

if out after

On

the other hand, the

shortage of women was such that

wives, even

many free men sought out

among

prisoners twenty or so years older than

themselves.

'I'm ofTto get a wife,' one former prisoner said, with a light at the fiancee market at the Elgen State Farm. I want to marry.' He came back that same evening with a wife. Not far from the Elgen State Farm, at the exit of the village, there was a petrol station. . . . Former prisoners would come in the evening in cars and choose a companion. It was the assembly point for newly liberated women. The huts were all around in the bushes. Proposals of marriage were made quickly like everything in Kolyma except the sentences. The cars went off with the newly-weds. The bushes were high and leafy enough for, if necessary, closer
smile. 'A wife

acquaintance on the spot. 28

It

was common

for

woman

to settle

with a man, regain

her health and looks, and then to cash in on her rarity value

with a richer man.

The

shortage of

women

led,

soon after the war, to an

girls to

appeal to young Communist

go to Kolyma as

voluntary workers. Several hundred applied.

They were
a

made

the object of a great

propaganda

exercise. After

short time, however, reports of their heroic actions could

Kolyma since in the region much was known about what had happened to them. For Kolyma not only killed, it also corrupted. Those who came through whole needed luck, certainly. They also
only be used in papers outside
itself

too

needed extraordinary qualities of personality.

199

CHAPTER EIGHT

A CLOWNISH INTERLUDE
One
of the most extraordinary
is

and disgracefulthings

about Kolyma

that

its

mere existence was ignored or

denied in the West over a period of some twenty years. This

camp system. But added irony that Kolyma was the one such area actually visited by a prominent delegation of Westerners who managed to see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil
is,

of course, true of the whole labour

is

there

the

about

it.

This Western attitude to Stalin's

camp

system was not

due to lack of evidence. No impenetrable security curtain was required. Individual reports from survivors who had reached the West existed even before the war. Reports from the hundreds of Poles who had served in the Kolyma camps themselves, and been permitted to leave the Soviet Union in 1 941 -3 under the Soviet-Polish Treaty, were soon available. On the basis of these, in 1945, Mora and Zwiemak gave a comprehensive account of the whole
system throughout the
great

USSR with special attention to eight

under Dalstroy. In 1946, Polish eyewitness stories were collected, with a preface by T. S. Eliot, in The Dark Side of the Moon including a number of experiences from Kolyma. In 1948, the old Mensheviks
clusters
y

camp

200


A CLOWNISH INTERLUDE
D. J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky published their classic Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, which listed fifteen camps or

camp clusters in

the

Kolyma and gave a long and generally

accurate account of the history and conditions of the area.

In 1 95 1, Elinor Lipper's Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps appeared and, in the same, year, Vladimir Petrov's //

Happens

in Russia:

both of them

full

and

careful descriptions,

from the prisoner's point of view, of the Kolyma camps. By now, in fact, dozens of first-hand reports had appeared in
the West: and all of them consistent with each other, all of them true. Over the Stalin period a certain number of accounts of the area were published in the USSR. These were designed
to give not only a false,

but a totally imaginary picture of

Kolyma. Berzin himself provided an Arcadian view in the Moscow press as early as 1935. 25 'Kolyma Land of Marvels', by N. Zagorny, a series published in Izvestia in

1944,

has possibly

less relation to reality

even than other

material published in the Stalin epoch, though 'In

The Far
close.
(as

North

Kolyma, Indigirka',

21

by S. Boldayev, runs it

The accepted legend about the building of Kolyma

certain other areas)

of

was that the work had been done by

is

volunteer

Young Communists. This theme

strongly

pressed by none other than Nikishov in a radio address on

the occasion of the 1946 elections in the area; 27
it is

more

surprising to find the falsehood repeated in Izvestia twenty

years later, 7 at the height of the Khrushchev interlude

it, was even then becoming (temporarily) available in other Soviet publications, as we have seen. For it was at this time, of course, that it became absolutely clear that the accounts given by Dallin, Lipper and the others were completely accurate. Material actually published in the Soviet Union confirmed them in every detail. There were, in particular, the memoirs of General

especially as the true story, or part of

201


KQLYMA
A. V. Gorbatov, and Grigory
into print, there was^a
Shelest's

Kolyma Notes. And in

addition to what actually passed the Soviet censor and got

good deal of samizdat material which was published abroad without getting its writers into difficulties at home in particular Evgenia Ginzburg's Into the Whirlwind, and the passages on Kolyma in Roy Medvedev's Let History Judge. Readers will have seen how, in earlier chapters, the

Soviet

material

even

the

Soviet

official

material

confirms the earlier stories printed in the West.

scales, the locations,

The

ration

names and conditions in the individual

camps, the continuous threat of death, the conduct

of the authorities towards the

common

criminals

and the

conduct of the

latter

towards the

'politicals',

the conditions

aboard
cated.

steamers

like

the earlier accounts

in every way, the Dzhurma and analyses are thoroughly vindi-

In The Great Terror,

gave a number of examples of

credulity, stubbornly

distinguished Westerners nourishing extravagant delusions

about

Stalin's Russia.

The

defended

against overwhelming odds in the

way of evidence, marked

a whole generation of Western left-wingers. Nor, in that book, did I have space for more than a selection. I omitted,
for

example,

Sir

Julian

Huxley's

prize-winning

fantasy

that

Stalin used personally to

I

go down to the
to the effect that

yards to help unload railway trucks.

did not even mention

Dr Edith Summerskill's egregious remarks

Ivan the Terrible was to be remembered primarily for

bringing some Western doctors to Russia, as a fact far

outweighing any

atrocities

he

may have committed; and

were more than counter-

that, similarly, Soviet executions

balanced by some hospitals she had been shown. (Might it not have been tentatively suggested to her that, even on a
strictly

medical view, execution could also be held to have a

bad

effect

on the

health?)

202

A CLOWNISH INTERLUDE

Nor can we maintain

facts

that the final establishment of the

ended these delusions. Baroness Wootton, writing in the mid-sixties, recalled her shame when, in the thirties, she went to Russian schools only to be greeted with the cry 'You come from England where they beat children." The retorts, some of them available even at the time, seem fairly obvious: 'You live in Russia where they beat grownups'; 'You live in Russia where they shoot children'; and to complete the story, 'You live in Russia where they beat children and not only beat, but submit them (as was done
really

to Peter
like the

Yakir when he was fourteen or

fifteen) to tortures

strappado, which have not been employed even on

adults for several centuries in Britain.'

How

was

it

possible that the clear, cool

material available and published in the

believed?

and consistent West was not

What emerges

is

a sorry tale of self-deception.

Few went

as far as Jean- Paul Sartre

that accounts of the Soviet labour

who argued, in effect, camp system should be

French working

suppressed even
class

if true,

since otherwise the

might become anti-Soviet.

Kolyma itself was made a public issue an extraordinarily revealing way, in an exchange in court in the libel suit brought in 1950 by David Rousset, of the Commission contre la Regime Concentrationnaire, against the Communist Les Lettres Franqaises, which had accused him of falsifying a quotation from the Soviet penal
In France, indeed,
in

code.

leading
'If

Communist defendant, M. Jean

like those

Lafitte,

which have been described to us exist at Kolyma, would you agree to condemn them?' Lafitte replied, 'If you were to ask me, "If your mother is a murderer, would you condemn her?" I would reply: "Sir, my mother is my mother and will not be a murderer!'" Similar, if less explicit, processes seem to have taken place in many Western minds. Perhaps, by now, there are not many people who are
203

was asked,

labour camps

KOLYMA
\

unaware of what happened and what

Soviet Union. This
is

is

happening

in the

certainly a great gain. All the same,

the cast of mind which so long

truth has, all too often, merely turned to

totalitarianised countries to

and so stubbornly resisted the more recently project on them its visions of

Utopia.

Bertrand Russell wrote the preface to one labour

book, published in 1951,* which concluded with

camp
letters

from eminent Communists saying

exist'.

'that

no such camps

He commented:
letters

Those who write these

and those

fellow-travellers

allow themselves to believe them share responsibility for the almost unbelievable horrors which are being inflicted upon millions of wretched men and women, slowly done to death by hard labour and starvation in the Arctic cold. Fellow-travellers who refuse to believe the evidence . . . are necessarily people devoid of humanity, for if they had any humanity they would not merely dismiss the evidence, but would take some trouble to look into
it.

who

Such themes are well

illustrated

by one of the most

absurd, and from every point of view, horrifying events in

the whole history of the Soviet labour
short stay in
States,

camp system

the

Kolyma

of the Vice-President of the United

Henry A. Wallace, with a group of advisers headed

by Professor

Owen

Lattimore, representing the Office of

War

Information, in the

summer of

1944. It

is

not quite

unique, since in the early thirties there were odd visits by Western figures well disposed to the Soviet regime, like Bernard Shaw, to the timber-producing areas near Archangel. The idea was to refute allegations that the Soviet timber then being dumped in Western markets was produced by slave labour. The method of refutation was the dismantling of the barbed wire and sentries' towers, and the marching of

*A World

Apart by Gustav Herling

204

A CLOWNISH INTERLUDE
the prisoners into the depths of the forest for a few days, under conditions which can be imagined. This proved
effective.

The Wallace -Lattimore

visit to

Kolyma, though preto refute allegations

senting certain parallels, was

much more remarkable. For

clear

one thing, they were not concerned

about slave camps since
(as
is

from what they wrote

afterwards) no such allegations had ever reached them, or if

they had, had been repressed beyond conscious recall. Nor,

of course, was the Vice-President of the United States

selected

visitors, for its

by the Soviet government, like those earlier own purposes. For him and his companions, Kolyma was no more than a convenient staging post on their flight from the United States to China; though it was indeed one which, as they saw it, gave them the opportunity, over their three-day stay, to gather useful

im-

pressions of the

development of

this rarely visited

area of

Soviet Asia.

Both Wallace and Lattimore published enthusiastic

accounts. In his book, Soviet Asia Mission, Wallace
that the gold miners at
tells

us

Kolyma

are 'big husky

young men
.

who came
cities'.

out to the Far East from European Russia*

He

adds that they are "pioneers of the machine age, builders of

He was much impressed by the horrible Nikishov, who enchanted him when he 'gambolled about enjoying
the wonderful air immensely'.

One prisoner comments on this: 'It is too bad that Wallace never saw him "gambolling about" on one of his drunken rages around the prison camps, raining filthy, savage language upon the heads of the exhausted, starving prisoners, having them locked up in solitary confinement for no offense whatsoever, and sending them into the gold mines to work fourteen and sixteen hours a day, at no matter what human cost.' 13

Of

the frightful Goglidze,

whom

Wallace met later

205

KOLYMA
him as President of the Executive Committee of Khabarovsk Krai a nice 'civilian' post and, more accurately, as 'an intimate friend of Stalin'), he writes, 'Goglidze is a very fine man, very efficient, gentle and
(describing

the

understanding with people.'

Nikishov's wife, Gridassova (the

commandant of

the

said

Magadan, of whom the best that can be make lampshades out of human skin), also made a splendid impression on Wallace, with her efficiency, maternal solicitude and little unostentatious attentions. He was introduced to her at 'an extraordinary exhibit of paintings and embroidery, copies of famous Russian landscapes'. These had been made,
women's camp
is

at

that she did not actually

Wallace

tells us,

by a group of local women who gathered

during the severe winter to study needlework.

pictures were presented to Wallace

Two

of the

by Nikishov. He was unable to tell Wallace who had done them but Wallace later learned that this was typical modesty; for the director of the exhibit told him that they had in fact been done by
Gridassova, described as 'one of the art teachers'.

In

fact, 'the

group of local women' who had produced

all

the needlework were female prisoners, mainly former nuns,

who were able to supplement their meagre rations by doing such work for the Kolyma police elite. This was a very minor deception, of course. The
operation designed to conceal the facts from Wallace and
his

companions was conceived, however, on a vast

scale.

The wooden watchtowers which lined the road into Magadan were pulled down. During the three days of the visit no prisoners, who usually provided much of the city's
Moreover, in case the visitors no prisoners were allowed even in the camp yard. Instead, they were kept indoors, and films were played to them over the whole period. Wallace went to an evening performance at Magadan's
labour force, were
let out.

happened

to pass close by,

206


A CLOWNISH INTERLUDE
Gorky Theatre. The actors, who were prisoners, were loaded on their trucks and sent back to camp immediately after the performance. And while on this cultural theme, we may note Wallace reporting that 'Mr' Nikishov and his
friends also expressed themselves as very pleased with

film called North Star, which on a Soviet collective farm. The shops of Magadan had their windows full of Russian products, scraped up from all over the region. For the previous two years there had been very little in these windows, and that mostly of American Lend-Lease origin. One free citizen is reported as slipping into a shop at the same time as Wallace, and buying food which had long since vanished in the ordinary course of events. Another followed but by now Wallace had left and the citizen was told that the goods were not for sale. Of conditions in the area, Wallace comments,

phoney pro-Soviet Hollywood

idyllic picture of life

gave an

The

eight-hour day is the legal work day in Soviet Russia. Paid overtime was put in as a wartime necessity. Minors under eighteen worked an eight-hour day, and in the evening attended continuation school free of charge. These are the actual working conditions we found, and the wage differential of about three to one in favor of Dalstroy seemed real enough, since ration rates at Mag-

adan were the same

as in

laborers in old Russia, the

men

Moscow. Compared to-mine in overalls on the Kolyma

had many more rubles

to spend. 37

Wallace, whose background was of course agricultural, was taken out to the farm 23 kilometres from Magadan normally a penal camp. He asked the well-dressed girl swineherds a polite question about their work which caused some confusion as they were in fact NKVD office staff selected for their looks and smartness and had little knowledge of pigs. However, the interpreter saved the
situation.

207

KOLYMA
The
party flew from

Magadan

to

Seimchan and then

to

Berelyakh in the heart of the area of the penal mines.

(We

have already had occasion to recount prisoners* experiences in Berelyakh.) Wallace describes his visit there:

We were flown north along the Kolyma Road to Berelyakh,

where we saw two placer gold mines. The enterprise displayed here was impressive. Development was much more energetic than at Fairbanks, although conditions were more difficult at Berelyakh. Gold, coal, and lead mining are the explanation of nearly everything in the Kolyma region, where there are now about 300,000 persons in the community. More than 1,000 mines are in operation, it was
said. 37

He

noted the good clothing issued to the miners:

We were surprised to find the Kolyma gold miners wearing

United States rubber boots, because our lend-lease policy

had always denied anything requested for gold mining anywhere in the world, including Soviet Russia. 'They were
days of the war,' Nikishov asked me to take back a message of solidarity to the people of the United States. Their trade union leader, N. I. Adagin, sent his best regards to Sidney
for cash in the early

bought

explained.

The miners

Hillman and Philip Murray. 37

comment on camp food is also interesting in its way: 'The delicious fresh Kolyma River fish served us near
Wallace's

Berelyakh led

me

to inquire

about the presiding chef of this

mining camp.'
Professor Lattimore wrote about the visit in an article which appeared with photographs in the National Geographic

Magazine for December 1944. After noting the deplorable methods by which Siberia had been colonised in Tsarist
times, he went on to celebrate the enlightened system which had replaced them. The 'orderly' development of the Soviet North was controlled by 'a remarkable concern'. This was

208

A CLOWNISH INTERLUDE
Dalstroy which 'constructs and operates ports, roads and
railways,

and operates gold mines and

municipalities'

and

which, Lattimore maintained, 'can be roughly compared to

a combination of the Hudson Bay

Company and the TVA*.

This Soviet development was superior not only to the

Tsars' methods, but also to the American-style gold rushes

with their

'sin,

gin

and brawling'. Instead, greenhouses

provided tomatoes, cucumbers and even melons, to 'make

aure the hardy miners got enough vitamins*.

On

this

point, a prisoner

tells

of an energetic and

tenacious

woman head of a hospital: 'Once she set her mind

as, for

on something,

example, building a greenhouse to

if necessary

raise tomatoes, she

would

obtain the glass from

Magadan more than 300

in the

miles away. Naturally, a

good

part of the tomatoes were eaten by herself and her superiors

camp and

public health administrations of the gold-

mining region, and very few of the tomatoes reached the patients. But had it not been for her, no patients at all would have received so much as half a tomato.' 13 No prisoner not in hospital, that is to say no miner, ever did see a tomato or any such luxury. As for the other vitamins on which, according to Lattimore, the miners flourished, we have described the deadly fiasco with the pine-needle broth which represented the only attempt to
provide them.
context,

We

need only note once again, in

is

this

that polyavitaminosis

one of the regularly

reported causes of death.

Lattimore was equally impressed by the ballet 'highgrade entertainment' on which he approvingly quoted a
colleague's remark, that
gold,
latter
it

'just

naturally seems to go with

certainly been shown. The cover operation had been well conceived and efficiently executed, though one

and had

so does high-powered executive ability'. This

may

feel that the visitors failed to exhibit the

sharpest

critical acuity. Nikishov,

who had
209

reason to congratulate

KOLYMA
made as good an impression on Lattimore as he did on Wallace. He seems to have dropped his rank for the visit, civil status doubtless seeming more appropriate for the idyll Wallace and Lattimore thought they saw. At any rate, Lattimore too, calls him 'Mr Nikishov, the head of Dalstroy', and rejoices that 'he had just been decorated with the Order of Hero of the Soviet Union for his extraordinary achievements'. Even more remarkably, Lattimore felt able to add that 'both he and his wife have a trained and sensitive interest in art and music and also a deep sense of civic responsibility.' 12
himself,

The

illustrations to Lattimore's article fully

accord with
fit

what he

writes in

it.

He was

able, for example, to print a

photograph of a group of well-clad and physically

at the pig farm.

men,

taken at a gold mine visited under conditions similar to that

These men bear little physical resemblance normally to be found at the site. The caption is 'They have to be strong to resist winter's rigors'. It is, of course, true that one had to be strong to survive a Kolyma winter. But with the prisoners things worked out the other way. Since they were not expected to withstand its rigours, it was not found necessary to keep them strong. The present writer had occasion to refer in an earlier book to this absurd interlude in the dreadful tragedy of Kolyma. A reviewer in the New Statesman was among those who expressed distaste at the credulousness of Lattimore and the others. In reply, Lattimore found it appropriate to write a letter {New Statesman, 18 October 1968) in which he asked, 'Is it assumed that a visit of this kind affords an ideal 1 opportunity to snoop on one's hosts? This is, let us say, an odd way of putting it. Accounts were already available about the true situation from Poles who had been released from the area. And even the most polite observer might perhaps have kept his eyes open to see if the sights presented officially were truly inconsistent with those
to the prisoners
'

210

A CLOWNISH-INTERLUDE
reports.

More

strikingly,

it is

difficult to

fathom how even

the politest foreign visitor

felt

obliged, after such

meagre

contact, to insist on the 'deep sense of civic responsibility' of General Nikishov. Lattimore goes on to comment in his letter that Nikishov 'must have slipped up' since Elinor Lipper 'eventually got
out'.

The fact

that there were survivors

is

thus used to imply

were not so bad as they were painted: while if had been no survivors, no evidence contradicting Lattimore's idyllic picture would have been available. An interesting example of having it both ways. Lattimore, whose tone throughout is of a levity some might find inappropriate to the subject, adds that 'the cream of the jest was that the National Geographic Magazine, in its conservatism, did not wish him to give publicity to
that things

there

Vice-President Wallace. ...

conventional

diversion

constitutes

the

nub

of

Lattimore's self-exculpations.

In

the original

German

edition of her book, Elinor Lipper, not having seen them,

did not go into Lattimore's and Wallace's writings on the

matter.

In the English edition she added some

unnaturally rather critical

letter

remarks. In

not

his

New Statesman
was done
United

Lattimore explains

all this

quite simply. It

at the behest of

some sinister unknown, 'McCarthyism' which was then rampant

as part of the
in the

States.

In his old age Lattimore became a hero for the younger

sociologists

and others

in the

United

States,

being lionised

at their conventions. His qualifications

were twofold; he

had opposed American policy, and Senator Joseph McCarthy had falsely accused him of being a leading Soviet
s py-

The real evidence of Lattimore's record on Stalinism was

that,

seldom referred to by himself or

his apologists,

which

appears in the two- volume report of the

211

McCarran Com-

KOLYMA
mittee hearings on his Institute of Pacific Relations.

The
its

evidence was overwhelming that the Institute and

to Soviet, circles

journal were tightly linked to Communist, and specifically

and that its line was Stalinoid. The leftwing New Republic, which had generally defended him,
finally

concluded (14 July 1952),

The report will, we believe, substantiate these charges: that a Communist Party caucus infiltrated the staff and council of the American IPR before the last war; that IPR officials knew of this infiltration and tolerated it; and that the IPR
gave up its objective research function and adopted the role of advocate in China policy. The record will further indicate that Owen Lattimore knowingly accepted these trends and that he erred in professing naivete or ignorance before the Committee.
For, indeed, Lattimore's role as an apologist for the

Soviet regime went back a good way. In his journal Pacific

Affairs

Moscow
triumph
officials

(September 1938) he discussed, for example, the Trials. Asking himself if they represented 'a
for

democracy', he answered that the purge of top

citizen his

showed the ordinary

even them, and concluded, 'that sounds

me.' (Anyone

power to denounce like democracy to

who could think in this way might, indeed, have found Kolyma admirable even if he had seen it as it
was!)

Wallace, before he died, expressed his regret at having so

deeply misunderstood the Soviet Union. Lattimore has

never done

so. It

may

be that in these cases the more

innocent dupes are the ones

least in the short

run (which

who do the greatest damage, at may nevertheless be disas-

trous) . Still,

it is

nation for those

who

hard not to reserve one's harsher condemcould and should have known better,

and

for the adulators

who later excused them.

In any case,

even the harshest words are scarcely as painful as the

suffering of the victims of Kolyma, so unforgivably misrep-

212

A CLOWNISH INTERLUDE
resented in this episode.

even

pitiless

account of

More important it may serve

yet,

a clear and
instruct

to

the

publicand

to discourage potential future offenders.

And
chapter

there

inhabitants of our region. But

is

and temporary what has been said in this by no means a digression. Granted that this
leave these special

we must

particular case, with Western well-wishers of Stalinism

actually brought to the location of
horrors,
it
is

some of

its

largest

the most extreme example ever to have occurred,

nevertheless demonstrates a major side of Stalin's whole

system based
the
lie'.

(as Pasternak put it) on 'the inhuman power of For an important part of his whole scheme was precisely the deception of the West. It is particularly appropriate that in addition to the killers and torturers, and the innocent victims, we should be able to find on the very

soil

of Kolyma that other key

element the dupes and

the

apologists.

213

CHAPTER NINE

THE DEATH ROLL

Cold Auschwitzes of the North yuri galanskov, poet, (died 1972 in Forced Labour Camp Zh. Kh. 385/17)
. . .

As we
scale.

said in our introduction,

Kolyma

killed

on a

vast

No

official figures

have ever been released either

is

about the number transported, or about the numbers

dying.

usual broad estimate

that, as the editor

it,

of the

Paris edition of Shalamov's pieces puts

the area

em-

ployed 'depending on the period, from 300,000 to a million

"workers"

',

though the

latter figure, for

1950-3, seems on
it

the high side. In any case, as

difficult in the case

we

noted,

is

rather

less

of Kolyma than of any other part of the

to arrive at

an estimate above we have reasonably adequate information about the number of ships involved, their capacity and their frequency. First, nevertheless, let us consider the problem from the other end, and see what can be deduced in this line from our knowledge of the camps themselves. We have the names of about 106 camps of all types. We also know of the existence of many more (for example if to the 66 gold camps in operation in 1940, we add 4 more we know of, which later came into use in the Pestraya Dresva area, that gives us an authenticated minimum total of 70 gold camps, of which we have the names of only just over
Soviet labour
all,

camp system

because the area was supplied by sea and

214

THE DEATH ROLL

half, so that there

were

at least

some 30 more

besides our

106).

Thus, all in all we know^of the existence of some 140 camps, and if we omit a few which were small penal
settlements dependent
9

on labour camps proper, we are

left

with at any rate no fewer than 100 of substantial size (and a

'camp in this usage may include more than one for example, had in 1940 four sites, each Maldyak, site holding 2500 prisoners in 25 100-men huts). Camps, of course, differed in the numbers they employed, and these numbers also fluctuated for various obvious reasons. We can, however, fairly estimate the normal populations. In the Northern Administration in 1938, we are told that the Partisan mine employed only 3000 prisoners, while such mines as those at Upper At-Urakh and Shturmovoy were regular townships of 12,000 to 15,000 inhabitants; and
single

elsewhere, quite consistently with

the area

this,

that the average in

was 6000

to 8000. Similar figures are given

throughout the literature.

There is no reason to believe that our camps is anything like complete, even as
covers: for the

register of

140
it
is

to the areas

known

figure in

a given Administration

often
for

an early one, before

later expansion; while

we know,

example, that the figures increased in the two years

to the

1938-40 from about 25 mines with some 150,000 prisoners 66 mines we have noted with up to 400,000. In

addition

we know of several

areas

Chukhotsk in which we cannot specify the names or even the numbers of camps, but which at any rate must have contained not less than 20 more. At its full development, then, Kolyma must have contained at any rate 120 full-scale camps. Of these at least 80 must have been mining camps proper, with from 2000 to 10,000 inmates, with a probable average of around 5000. The remainder were fishing, agricultural and similar camps
215

Yanstroy, Chaun Gulf,

KOLYMA
of around iooo inmates each, plus the 80,000-capacity
transit

camp and

the other

camps of Magadan
four-fifths

itself.

Thus,

on

these rather conservative figures,

we reach a

total of

approximately half a million,

of them in the

mines, in the later period of Kolyma's history.

to fluctuation and new areas came into operation and new mines opened in the old, though it is also true that some

The

figure

was of course subject

especially to increase, as

mines were exhausted and closed

1942.

downfor

example, in

From

collation of the Polish evidence it appears that

(when the Poles were released) the Kolyma was usually in the range of .300,000-400,000. The figure of 300,000 in 1942 is given by a man who worked in the Magadan gold-mining office. Henry Wallace in 1944 was told that the population was 300,000 presumably with about 250,000 of them prisoners. This was certainly near the lowest point and thenceforward there was a continual increase. In general, if
in 1940 to 1942

prison

population

(from 1937) we take a figure of 150,000, increasing to 500,000 or more in the post-war expansion, we shall hardly
err

by exaggeration. Another very approximate

approach

is

to note that

the census result for the

Magadan

province gave a popurural),

lation in 1939 of 172,988 (30,657

as against

urban and 142,331

7580 in 1926. This figure, as always in the census,

represents the free population only. If we exclude

women,

children, free settlers, specialists (such as geologists), port

officials

and truck

to think that at any rate not

grand

total

would seem not unreasonable less than some 20,000 of the would have been commandants, guards, and
drivers,
it

others direcdy involved in the labour

camp

system. Es-

timates from other areas are that the proportion of guards to

prisoners

was around one

to twenty. If this applied to

Kolyma

(allowing for fewer actual

camp guards and more

mobile detachments), that would give us a very rough

216

THE DEATH ROLL

estimate of 400,000 prisoners.

To

these population figures

we must apply a death

rate.

There is, of course, no doubt at all that from 1937 the death rate was extremely high. We have noted Roy Medvedev*s statement that in the mines, after the war, it was not uncommon for a work force of 2060 or 3000 to be able to send only 100 to the gold-face: 16 the rest, not yet dead indeed, were in the longer or shorter interim condition which led to death just as we are told that of 3000 katorga prisoners sent to the Maxim Gorky mine in 1944 only 500 were healthy enough merely to be transferred to Laso the following year; 800 were incapable, and the rest dead. 13 Again, Shalamov tells us: 'Brigades that began the goldmining season designated by the names of their brigadiers, at the end of the season did not have a single man left of those who had started, except the brigadier himself, his orderly and some of his personal friends. The rest of the brigade had been replaced several times during the summer. The gold mine steadily cast its waste products into- the

hospitals, into the so-called convalescent crews, inta invalid

settlements,
'brigadiers'

and

into

reminds

common graves.' 28 The survival of the us> moreover, that those who did not
some
5.

die included the urkas, believed to be

total prisoners. If they are

per cent of the

deducted and counted as part of the persecutors rather than of the victims, the substantive
percentage of prisoner deaths
that 'During 1939 patients
rises

proportionately.

Qf particular intakes we have some detail. A nurse notes

and 1940 the
hospital

swarmed with

who had been

it

after 1941

sentenced in 1937 and 1938* while was rare for a prisoner sentenced during those

show up in the hospitals. It was certainly not of them had suddenly stopped getting sick, but because they had meanwhile died in the gold mines.' 13 Another woman prisoner sent to Kolyma in 1938 says flatly that the 'counter-revolutionary' intake of that period was
years to

because

all

217

KOLYMA
'practically liquidated' within

two

years.

We are told, for the labour camp system as a whole, that

at this period

about a third of the new intake

already

and quite unprepared for heavy manual labour on a minimal ration died in the first year. In Kolyma, notoriously one of the very worst areas, the proportion must have been higher still and such is the
physically exhausted,

evidence.

On
camp
figure

the other

hand a prisoner who worked

in

one of the

administrations in 1938 records that the highest

he heard there
only,

for deaths that year, evidently for

Kolyma proper

was 70,000.

He

takes the then

camp

population as 250,000, so that 70,000 would amount to 28 per cent which though low is within the probable range.

(Another prisoner who worked in the administration gives a

figure

camp population for 1938, but in any case the must have varied through each year, rising in summer, falling in winter.) Figures spoken of officially and even semi-officially may, or may not, be more or less accurate. At any rate, we cannot take them as gospel. The period 1940-2 can be more easily checked, through
300,000
the evidence of another category, the Poles, since the
survivors were released in

two

years,

and often

less,

in

1941-42 after Kolyma.

little

more than

After the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in October

1939, about 1,060,000 Poles were sent to prisoner-of-war camps, 'forced settlement', or about 440,000 of them to

labour camps. About 270,000 died in the period up to the

release of the survivors

two to two and a half years later. Leaving aside special operations against prisoners of war,
appear to have taken place among the 440,000 who were sent to labour camps. Which is to say, as a general
casualties

such as the Katyn massacre, the great majority of these

estimate, that about half of these died. This ratio

is,

of

course, for the

whole labour camp system throughout the

218

THE DEATH ROLL

Soviet Union, most of which did not equal the lethal effects

of Kolyma. In Kolyma, therefore,

we can

certainly

assume
in

a higher death
all
less

rate.

And we are in fact told

that

no Poles at

returned of 3000 sent to the Chukhotsk camps.

And

extreme area, one notes that at Maldyak, 'In the

.
.

first

two and a half months

out of the total of 20 Poles in

2

my
At

group, 16 died. Four, including myself, survived.'

Komsomolets, there were 46 survivors out of 436. By September 1941, 60 per cent of those held in the rather less rigorous camps on the Kolyma River had died. 2 In all, of 10,000-12,000 Poles sent to Kolyma in 1940 and 1 94 1, 583 survived to return under the amnesty, between October 1941 and July 1942. 17 Even on the best assumptions, this must give a figure of some 75-80 per cent dead per annum. Virtually all the Poles were at hard labour, and it is to that category that the figure must be
applied.

In the post-war period, to take a further special case, the

Ukrainian nationalists were 'liquidated very quickly'. These were normally under sentence of katorga. And here we face a problem. On the whole the katorga prisoners were held in distant areas from which, precisely because they all died, we have virtually no reports. We have mentioned the Poles in the Chaun Gulf: and our information on the camps there is virtually nil. Similarly with, for example, the Tyenkino-Detrinsk Administration, where prisoners condemned to special rigour were also concentrated. This means that direct reports of death rates are from camps which had at -any rate some survivors, so that estimates based on such reports are probably, extraordinary though it may appear, on the low side. Nor do we have any
clear idea of the proportion of katorga prisoners to others.

But at any

rate,

even in the non-katorga mining camps,

we

regularly hear of a death rate of not less than 20 per cent per

annum even in good

years (for example in Pestraya Dresva

219

KOLYMA
in

course, brought

The extreme death rate for miners was, of down when other employees in the mining camps were included, while we must also take into account the non-mining camps, many of them deadly enough, but at least not as bad as the gold areas. If we allow, as all
1

949) .

31

reports imply, an average Tate of some

30-35 per cent

for

we may accept a much-quoted figure of 25 per cent per annum for Kolyma as a rough average, though the total
miners,

must depend on each year's numbers and conditions. And now we may turn to the most detailed and substantial part of our evidence, that of the prison ships of
the

Nagayevo run.

We

shall not find, needless to say,

complete register of every run with an accompanying bill of

lading specifying the numbers of each convict cargo. But
shall find,

we

by detective work among the various items of

information available, a fairly clear pattern which will pin

down

within reasonable limits the numbers transported to Kolyma, mainly to their deaths, over our whole period. We list, in Appendix A, every ship of which we have a
report, together with the details obtained

from Lloyd's
Register
is

Register of Shipping. But, helpful

though Lloyd's
Soviet

in
is

providing information never previously collated,

defective in certain respects.

it

The

Union did not

make

on shipping matters, or at any rate not full or adequate ones. This can readily be seen from the fact that the Dalstroy is given as having been called Yagoda until 1939, whereas the name must have been changed no later than the time of Yagoda's arrest in April 1937. Similarly, the
reports

name

Nikolai Yezhov appears in the Register until the late

while his name must have been removed when he became a non-person early in 1939: and in fact, the ship is reported by prisoners under the later name Felix Dzerzhinsky
forties,

even before the war.

that

When we consider our list, the first point to be made is we may be erring on the side of underestimate. A
220

THE DEATH ROLL

number of
there
ships are

known only by a
is

single report,

and

may well be others which no one has named. The first

example,

Indigirka, for

mentioned by a single ex-prisoner

with its loss in December 1939, as reported by a survivor eventually sent back to Kolyma.

and

solely in connection

which became known because the survivors were picked up by Japanese ships. But the Indigirka had certainly made other voyages that season and possibly earlier, though it is not
Lloyd's Register also reports
its

wreck

at this date,

listed in

other accounts of the ships then plying in those

waters.

reason

one

in

(When it comes to the second Indigirka, the only we are able to list it at all is that on checking the first Lloyd's Register, we find the second one registered at
it

Nagayevo, which indicates that

vessel.)

was a

full-time Dalstroy

Again, the Kim

is

highly detailed, report.

register,

And

known only from a single, though the Kulu, another Nagayevo

only appears in the account of the arrival of the

1938 convoy of which Solzhenitsyn retails an eyewitness report. Our list is probably incomplete: in addition
to ships we only know of from the odd report, the Soviet merchant fleet included vessels with such names as Kolyma and the Sovietskaya Gavan of which nothing is known, but which (on the analogy of the Kulu, the Indigirka, etc.) presumably operated in the area. Still, it seems improbable that this deficiency will greatly affect our conclusions. The main and permanent ships of the operating fleet are well known and frequently reported. The ships based on Nagayevo constituted Dalstroy's permanent fleet. There were, as far as our knowledge goes, six of them: and if they were not all under Dalstro> at the same time, we can nevertheless always identify a squadron of four or five. These were supplemented during the Okhotsk navigation season by the ships registered at Nakhodka or Vladivostok, presumably depending on the mutual convenience of the authorities and the demand for cargo space.

May

221

KOLYMA
The
ships used in 1932 during the original
Svirstroy>

mass

settle-

ment, the

the Skaturstroy

and the

Volkhovstrcy y are

not reported at a later period. In 1 933 the Raboehy took a cargo offorced labour from Archangel toAmbarchik, at the

mouth of the Kolyma River on the

route,

Arctic Ocean. Another on which the notorious Dzhurma first appears in the literature, was the long haul from Vladivostok through the Bering Strait to the same area. Tens of thousands of prisoners were certainly transported thus in convoys led by
the icebreaker Sakhalin^ as also to intermediate

camp

areas

on the route

such
Gulf.

as the

on

the

Chaun

We

Chukhotsk peninsula and Pevek have no means of estimating this.

And in any case a few scores of thousands of prisoners do not

make much difference one way or another to the enormous figures which we can arrive at on the regular routes. The main route ran, as we have seen> from Vladivostok to the port of Nagayevo: after the outbreak of war in 1941,
Vladivostok became a military supply port, and the prison
ships

were switched

to

nearby Nakhodka.

The voyage

led

through the Straits of La Perouse between Hokkaido and what was until 1945, Japanese Sakhalin. Later an alternative and shorter route came into operation, running, when a railway was established from the main Trans-Siberian line
to

the sea at that point,, from Vanino, just north of

Sovietskaya Gavan, to Nagayevo.

We must of course allow for a certain flexibility, to cope

with variations both in the supply of prisoners and in the

demand from Kolyma. We have indeed seen

rate,

that the death

and the principles producing that death rate, did not vary much. Which means in turn that in the longer run the rate of replacement can never have very greatly diminished; that particularly bad and comparatively good years can be balanced against each other without any great
problem. Nevertheless, there were variations. For example,
1942 and 1943 showed a falling-off in the numbers of

222

THE DEATH ROLL

prisoners

while

at the

same

time, the death rate of those

who remained shot up, ration scales becoming tougher, and

executions on grounds of 'sabotage' for failure to
fulfil

the

norm being
this.

the usual procedure. It

20

is

difficult to

quantify

comes from a German ex-prisoner of war.) The area remained operational, even though the emphasis was to some degree transferred from gold (no longer necessary due to American Lend-Lease) to lead and other products. But the Dalstrqy,
in 1942
for

(An estimate of a 70,000 intake

example,

is

reported as being taken off the

Nagayevo

route in 1942 and used to bring military supplies from the

United States. By 1944 things returned to the old level. By this time arrests were proceeding on a vast scale in the
'liberated' regions,

and the prospect of victory implied that

gold would soon again become a major state interest in

dealing with the outside world.

numbers in the labour camp system greatly increased, and by 1950-2 reached their probable
After the

war

the

maximum,

generally believed to be in the region of 1 2

is

14

million. This

nearly twice as

many

as the total in 1940.

And

there

is

no reason

to think that

Kolyma was any

for

exception.

On

the contrary, following the end of Lend-

Lease, gold again

regime

in fact

became an urgent priority more than it had ever been.

the

Generally speaking, over the whole period, the

number

of ships on the route seems to have varied from four or five to

nine or ten. Solzhenitsyn describes a convoy of four ships
arriving at

Nagayevo

in the spring of 1938, 32

to

and

at least

two others are known

have operated that year. Over the

named as continually on the route, only one of which is named in Solzhenitsyn's convoy. In 1940- 1, five new ships (together
period 1937-40 four ships are elsewhere

with an additional icebreaker) were provided.

able to say precisely

We

are not

how many

of these ships operated

continuously on the passage.

223

KOLYMA
The numbers carried varied from ship to ship. And the numbers carried on a given ship might vary somewhat from voyage to voyage, partly because those ships might be
carrying other cargoes as well; partly because (as with
Soviet prison
cells) in

case of necessity there

was always

room for more. The Dzhurma is reported to have carried not more than 4000 in the spring of 1938, but over 6000 as its average load during the same period, going up to 7000 in
1939.

which came into operation in the latter years are quoted as each carrying about 7000 a figure which is also specified for one of the earlier four. The Kim carried only 3000 in 1947, on the last trip of the season;
five ships

The

while another ship

sailor

is

reported with only 5000 in 1949.

who served on ships of the Magadan run from 1 937 (and again, after being wounded in the war, for eight
in 1942) says that in

months

1937-40 four
to

ships

usually

the Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Dalstroy, the Sovlatvia (after 1940)

9000 prisoners per trip. 3 * It is, of course, not necessarily easy, especially for a prisoner, to estimate the numbers on board. This problem

and the Dzhurma

carried 6000

should not, perhaps, be exaggerated: a prisoner ought to

achieve a fairly reasonable accuracy in noting the numbers
in his

own

hold and multiplying them by the

.

number of

holds (three on the Dzhurma)

And in some cases, though we

have no means of knowing which, the figures were no doubt those being spoken of by crewmen or others. In any c&se^ the range is from about 3000 to about 9000, in ordinary conditions. The figure of 6000 to 9000 given for four of the ships in the immediate pre-war period deserves attention, as it was provided by the sailor who knew the route well. If we omit the 9000 as probably referring to the particularly large Felix Dzerzhinsky we might then take 6000 for the Dzhurma^ the Dais troy and so on. One prisoner suggests that some 4000 was the most these
224

THE DEATH ROLL

larger ships could carry, while the smaller held

no more

than a few hundred; 24 he was himself, however, transported in 1935 before really intensive shipment of prisoners set in:

and the Soviet

literature

is full

of accounts of prisoners

who

believed that a cell, or a cattle truck, could not possibly hold

more than were crammed in at a given moment, only to find

the authorities able to double those numbers.
Still, if

we

take 4000 as an average commitment,

to

we are most

unlikely

be exaggerating.

The

next question

is

the

number of trips per season. This

depended on the weather, to some degree. We are told that a convoy arriving on 2 May 1938 from Nagayevo was premature, in that the 50- 60-mile belt of ice by the coast had not yet quite melted sufficiently. Other accounts have ships arriving in April. The end of the season is given in several accounts as early December, though the end of November is sometimes mentioned. At any rate, a normal season of 7 months, 30 weeks, or 210 days, was the planned and average period. On the basis of evidence collated from 62 prisoners, Mora gives the length of the voyage as 'five to thirteen days depending on the type of vessel and the weather'. 17 It would normally be the larger vessels which would take the shorter time, so we should perhaps give an average of seven to eight days for the Dzhurma and similar ships, and ten to twelve for lesser members of the flotilla like the Indigirka, which seem in any case to have been largely concerned with the transport of supplies. The Dzhurma is noted by another source as doing the trip in five days on one occasion, 22 and elsewhere as making the round trip, including unloading at Nagayevo, in fourteen days. 4 On the voyage when the fire broke out (see page 34), which was also very stormy, the Nakhodka - Nagayevo run took it eight days. The Dalstroy
is

also reported
is

taking eight days in

May

1940.

One

estimate

that six days should normally be given for

225

KOLYMA
unloading and refuelling for every round voyage; though
this often

seems to have been

less,

especially

when

the

proportion of prisoners to other imports was high. Moreover, these figures are almost entirely

from the period up to

1942, while in the post-war period turn-around

was much

speeded up: the new port at Vanino gave extra capacity,

while Nagayevo, which
at
initially could handle only one ship a time, was continually expanded. (The Vanino Nagayevo run, additionally, was at least a day shorter.) At any rate, a round trip every twenty days for the main

prisoner-transports seems reasonably conservative, giving

a year per vessel. (Our sailor witness speaks of 12-15 voyages a year, employing an
approximately eleven
trips

average round-trip time of 16-17 days.) 33

One account gives an impression that, at least in 1940- 1

and July were allotted to the transport of prisoners would imply maximum loads, and, of course, minimum turn-about time, during these periods, with an estimate of 1 20,000 sent per year on these trips alone, to say nothing of the other five months of the season. We know of the occasional diversion of ships from their regular routes: for example, that the Dzhurma was once diverted for some days to transport a party further northeast, up the Kolyma coast. Again, there were occasions when the schedule was interrupted more drastically, as when the Indigirka was wrecked in 1939; and when the Dalstroy was lost when its supply of explosives for the mines blew up at Vanino in 1946. On the other hand the demands of Kolyma, involving both gold and politics, certainly took preference over the requirements of local day-to-day shipping, and the other ships in the Far East would be at the disposal of the Dalstroy route in an emergency. All the same, it will be in
alone. This

May

accordance with our cautious attitude in these matters if we

make

the conservative assumption that

on the average the

226

THE DEATH ROLL

number of ships was 5 and on
round
trips

the average the

number of

was 10- 1

a season.

We thus find ourselves with 5 main ships each carrying an average of 4000 prisoners, and each making 10- 1 1 trips a
year, with 200,000-220,000 prisoners being transported

an average only, for in 1938, for example, at least 6 ships, with at any rate no fewer than 5000 prisoners each, were in operation which would mean over 300,000 recruits consistent with the massive and maximum arrests of that year; and the years following cannot have produced many fewer.) If we now take these reasonably conservative figures, and omit for the moment the years 1932-6, and 1942-3 as cases to be considered separately, in the period from 1937 to 1941 and 1944 to
annually. (This
is

we reach a figure of 3, 50,000 prisoners. If we take the lower figure of 50,000 per annum for the years up to 937> an d *94 2 ~3> we must then add another 350,000, giving a grand total of 3,500,000. On all the figures we have for labour camp casualties, we can hardly allow more than
1

953,

much
I

500,000 to have survived, and

estimate. Similarly, if we go by
rate, take

this

indeed seems a high

for the years

camp population and death

a population of 150,000-400,000

1937-41, of 200,000-300,000 for 1942-3, and of 300,000-500,000 for 1944-53, an d aPPty to each case death rates ranging from 20 to 35 per cent according to the
reported rigours of particular years,

we arrive at a death toll

of about 3,000,000, after including the lesser casualties of 1933-6. Thus, and it should once again be stressed that this
is

based on conservative assumptions at every point, we

it

may

take

that

Kolyma

cost 3,000,000 lives.

These

figures,

though quite clearly within the probable

range, are sensitive to the assumptions. Five ships

12 journeys a year with

making

5000 prisoners would bring the figure up to 4,000,000. Our sailor witness estimates about 1 ,500,000 arrivals in 1 937 - 40, which would imply a total of
227

KOLYMA
around 5,500,000 for the longer period. (Six ships per annum, with an average of 6000 prisoners and 13 trips per season, would give about 6,000,000.) At any rate, the 3,000,000 figure must be regarded, on the information we
have, as unlikely to be exaggerated.

Kolyma killed 3 million or more, or even some absolute minimum of 2-2^ million, of the presumed minimum 12,000,000 dead
Yet, in principle,
it is

not a matter of whether

whether Auschwitz

whole (any more than it is crucial a third or a quarter of the victims of the Final Solution) Kolyma still remains the 'pole of cold and cruelty* of the whole phenomenon, the illustration of its essence, and of the moral basis of the system which produced it. Of the 3 million or more dead whose bones now lie in the Kolyma permafrost there is one final point to make.
in the labour

camps

as a

killed
.

They were,

virtually without exception, entirely innocent

of the charges brought against them. Indeed,

when

it

came

to the lesser sentences of a mere ten years or so, this was more or less recognised, in an oblique way, even at the time. The much-quoted story, recorded by Solzhenitsyn in The

Gulag Archipelago, of a

camp official retorting indignantly to

a man serving a 25-year sentence, who had said he had done nothing, that this was nonsense as 'for nothing you only get ten years' is sometimes disbelieved. It is interesting to find

an almost
in
it

identical incident printed in the Soviet press

during the Khrushchev era.

The

writer Boris

Dyakov
first

tells

of how his interrogator said to him Trove

that

you

are 100 per cent crystal pure

otherwise

a lump of

and

you'll get ten years;

lead' (Oktyabr y no. 7, 1964, p. 82).

Similarly a soldier said to Evgenia Ginzburg, 'Of course

you're not guilty.

Would they have given you ten years if you had been?' 4 But even those serving 25-year sentences (or those shot) were innocent. In these more serious cases, a few may
228

THE DEATH ROLL

indeed have committed real offences against the Stalinist
order, such as having relatives who

had been shot, or having

innocent

met

foreigners, or

having served in high positions, or

for persecuting other

showing lack of enthusiasm

suspicion
9
.

people, or the officially listed crime of having 'fallen under

But even these were at

least innocent, or

almost

invariably so, of the crimes with which they were actually

charged.

Nor should it be accepted for a moment that the frightful happenings of Kolyma were a traditional and typical
product of a backward Russia, merely reflecting or repeating the oppressions of Tsarism.

always more prisoners in

twice as many, as the

From 1938 there were Kolyma alone, and probably maximum number ever held in
more
prisoners were executed in

Tsarist prisons of all types throughout Russia (183,949 in

19 2). As to executions,
the Serpantinka

alone in the one year 1938, than the total executions throughout the Russian Empire for the

camp

whole of the

last

century of Tsarist rule.

Solzhenitsyn's figures in

The Gulag Archipelago about

executions under Tsarism and

communism respectively are

in general
is

from excellent sources. The case

that there are those

so astonishing

who

find

them hard

to credit.

But the a
39

fact that the figures are of the right type

may

readily be

confirmed

from

Soviet

sources

themselves.

While

confidential Tsarist

document

gives 48 executions, for

assassinations (including that of Tsar

Alexander

II) in the

period from the 1860s to 1902, the Small Soviet Encyclopaedia

(first

in

on the years 1866- 1900. Even

edition) in the article

'Capital Punishment\ gives

if

94
as

we accept
in

the Soviet figure

unreservedly

we

are

clearly

the
is

same range

Solzhenitsyn's estimates,

and there

nothing remotely

comparable with Leninism or Stalinism. The Small Soviet Encyclopaedia^ and similar articles in other
Soviet reference books, give larger figures for the period

229

KOLYMA
after the 1905 Revolution.

This was a time

when the Social-

Revolutionary Party and the Anarchists were conducting

on a large scale, causing about 1400 deaths in 1906 and 3000 in 1907. Large areas were put under special regulations, and courts-martial tried those accused of terrorism and rebellion. The Soviet sources give a total of 1 139 executions in 1907, and 1340 in 1908; while they speak of 6000 executions in the period 1908-12, alternatively of 1 1,000 in the period 'following the 1905-7 Revolution'. Accepting these Soviet statistics, and making every allowance for the years not covered before 1905 and after 19 12, we arrive at an estimate of about 14,000
political assassinations

executions for the entire period of Tsardom in

century.

its last

half-

were scored by the forces opposed to the Tsarist state at the height of these reprisals. During (he Stalin period one successful assassination is known to have been carried out that of Kirov though
assassinations

More than 4000

doubtless there were a few acts of desperation against

NKVD officers which have gone unrecorded. No one now

believes that
indirect,

Kirov was the victim, in any sense however

of the sufferers in Kolyma.

For let us insist again on a highly relevant fact in comparing these Tsarist and Stalinist statistics: the executions and imprisonments of the earlier period were all of people who had committed some offence in the case of the

executed, assassination or

armed

rebellion.

The

victims of

Stalinism were entirely innocent even from the Soviet point

of view.

The vast death factory of the Kolyma camps is, in fact, to

be attributed Eatly and directly to the political system

which created

it.

It

was, by

its

sheer scale, by the petty

murderousness of such regulations as the banning of felt boots, by its whole attitude and method, more than a mere
negative attribute of that system.

On

the contrary,

it

was

230

THE DEATH ROLL

that system, carried to
its

logical end.

Kolyma

the threat

and actuality of Kolymawas the way the Soviet government imposed itself on its subjects. Until this horrible piece of history is openly exposed and denounced by the successors of Stalin it remains a demonstration of the background against which they made their careers, and of the system as a whole. Until they publicly
purge themselves of
accomplices.
this guilt, until

they break with this

its

horror in their past, they remain not only

its

heirs,

but also

Some beginning was being made in

it

Khrushchev's time:

has yet to be followed up.

231

KOLYMA

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BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES

The superior figures in
the text refer to the sources given below.
I

have not provided page numbers for the books cited, since a number of them have appeared in several editions in various countries; in almost all the cases the material on Kolyma is fairly short, so that anyone wishing to do so will have no difficulty in
tracing the original.
1

Dallin,

David

J.,

and Nicolaevsky, Boris

I.,
.

Forced Labour in

Soviet Russia

general

(New York and London, 1 948) Contains a useful analysis of Kolyma from information then available,
its

including

administrative structure, together with

earliest

first-

phase of its establishment. 2 Dark Side of the Moon, The. Anonymous, with Introduction by T. S. Eliot (London, 1946}. Contains two first-hand accounts

hand material about the

by Polish women, pp. r 18-21 and 155-64 respectively. 3 Galich, Alexander, Magadan, samizdat poem. 4 Ginzburg, Evgenia Semyonovna, Krutqy Marshrut (Milan, 1967). English translation, Into the Whirlwind (London and New York, 1967}. First-hand account by a Soviet woman
writer.

5 Gorbatov, General A. V., Memoirs, Novy Mir (Moscow), March -May 1964. English translation, Tears Off My Life (London 1964, New York 1965). First-hand account by a
Soviet general, later rehabilitated.

September 1944. Contains a series, 'Kolyma Land of Marvels', by N. Zagorny. 7 Izvestia, 14 July 1964. 8 Karpunich-Braven, Brigade Commander I. S., unpublished manuscript. First-hand account by a Soviet general, quoted
6
Izvestia,

in Soizhenitsyn (q.v.).

9 Kravchenko, Victor, I Chose Justice (London, 195 1). Among evidence given at the Kravchenko trial for libel in Paris in

243

3 2

KOLYMA

'

1949, contains an account by a refugee from the USSR (pp. 265-72). 10 Krevsoun, Ivan. First-hand account of the Berzin period at Kolyma by an ex-prisoner, quoted in Kravchenko (q*v.). 11 Large Soviet Encyclopaedia (Bolshaya Sovietskaya Entsiklopediya), 3rd edn., Moscow 1970-. Lattimore, Owen, article in National Geographic Magazine no, 1 Ixxxvi, December 1944. Account of the visit of the U.S. VicePresidential party to
1

Kolyma.

Lipper, Elinor, Elfjahre in sowjetischen Gefdngnissen una* Lagern (Zurich, 1950) . English translation, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison

Camps (London and Chicago, 1951). First-hand account by a Swiss ex-Communist woman prisoner (the English is rather
fuller

than the original).

in

14 Literaturnqya Gazeta, 4 April 1964.

at

Kolyma, published

Some notes on inhumanity Moscow during the Khrushchev

period.
15 Lloyd's Register of Shipping, 1936 to 1956. 16 Medvedev, Roy, Let History Judge. English translation

(New

17

York 1 971; London 1972). Some general material on Kolyma, together with quotations from unpublished manuscripts by first-hand sources. Mora, Silvester (pseudonym of Kasimierz Zamorski),
Kolyma

Gold and Forced Labor

in the

USSR (Washington,

1949). General analysis, together with important organisational detail, based on the evidence of 62 Polish prisoners,

including one woman (copies of whose affidavits, from the files

of the former Polish Embassies in

are in the Library of the
California).

Moscow and Washington,

Institution,

Hoover

Stanford,

18

Mora, Silvester and Zwiernak, Peter, La Justice Sovietitique (Rome, 1945). Contains two first-hand accounts. 19 Munchner Illustrierte, 18 August - 1 September 1951 Evidence
.

taken from former German prisoners of war. 20 Neue Zntang* &**> 18 July -22 July 1950. Articles on by a former German prisoner.
21

Kolyma
Far

Ogonyok,

North

Kolyma,

No.

32,

1946.

An
by

article,

'In

the

Indigirka',

S. Boldayev.

22 Olitskaya, E.,
prisoner.

Moi Vospominaniya (Frankfurt, 1971). Memoirs, written in 1947, of a former Social-Revolutionary woman

244

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES

23 Petrov, Vladimir, // Happens in Russia (London, 1951). Memoirs of a former Soviet prisoner, now in the West. Soviet Gold, New York, 1949. The Kolyma material in the above, with further detail. 24 Petrov, Vladimir, manuscript in the Nicolaevsky Archive,

Hoover

Institution, Stanford, California.

25 Pravda, 8 January 1935. Article by E. Berzin. 26 Retts, R. V., unpublished manuscript by a former Soviet
prisoner.

Quoted

in Solzhenitsyn (q.v.).

27 Russki Gobs, 12 February 1946. Radio talk by Lieu tenantGeneral I. F. Nikishov on 'elections' in the Kolyma area. 28 Shalamov, Varlam, Kolymskii Napiski. Unpublished Russian manuscript. French translation, Ricits de Kolyma (Paris, 1 969) Account by a Soviet ex-prisoner. ^wyfl (Moscow) no. 9, 29 Shelest, Grigory, Kolymskii ZaP^i 1963. Account by a Soviet ex-prisoner, published in the USSR during the Khrushchev period. 30 Sliozberg, O. L., unpublished manuscript by a Soviet woman ex-prisoner, quoted in Solzhenitsyn (q.v.). 31 Solomon, Michael, Magadan (Toronto, 1971). First-hand account by a Romanian ex-prisoner of the post-war period. 32 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., Archipelag Gulag. English translation The Gulag Archipelago (London and New York, 1973-77). Though, as the author says, he has "almost excluded Kolyma' from the book, it contains a few pages on the area, including first-hand reports. 33 Sotsialisticheski Vestnik, 10 December 1945. Interview with a Soviet sailor with long experience on the Nagayevo run. Surovtseva, Nadezhda, unpublished reminiscences of a Soviet 34 woman ex-prisoner, quoted in Solzhenitsyn (q.v.). 35 Vechernaya Moskva, 27 December 1 949. One of several glowing Soviet accounts of the development of the area. 36 Volgin, V. I., unpublished manuscript by a Soviet exprisoner, quoted in Medvedev (q.v.). 37 Wallace, Henry A., Soviet Asia Mission (New York, 1945). Account by the then Vice-President of the United States of his visit to the area in 1944. Ghost-written and later apologised

for.

38 Wolin, Simon and Slusser, Robert M., The Soviet Secret Police (New York, 1957). Contains two first-hand accounts by exprisoners.

245

INDEX
accidents, 108-9, 122-3 Adagin, N. I., 208 Administration: Northern, 42, 46 54>5 6 > 105-6, in, 130, i43 215; Western, 42, 96, 105, 1 17; Southern, 42, 54, 105; Road-Building, 76-7, mi; South-Western, 105; North-Western, 105; ChaiUrya, Tyenkino105;
>

atrocities, 16, 84, 194, 202 At-Urakh, 46, 105, 215

Auschwitz,

13, 15

16, 79,

228

Austria, Austrians, 97

Balagannoye, 113Baltic Sea,

1

14,

176

7,

98

Bamgala, 139 Bear Islands, 113

Berelyakh, 71, 89, 105, 207 8 Beria, Lavrenti, 40, 65, 67n

Detrinsk, 105, 219 Aglamov, Nicolai, 54

Bering

Strait, 26, 40,

222
6,

Alaska, 39
alcohol, 133-^4, 147, 186

Berlin, 70

Aldan River, 40
Alexander II, Tsar, 229 Amalrik, Andrei, 16 Ambarchik, 26, 36, 113, 222

Berzin, E. P., 39-41* 43 57> 73> 76, 201

Berzin mine, 174

Bilbao, 99

ammonal, 25, 49, 108, 174 Anarchists, 230 animals, 102-3, 118, ! 5 2 i ! 73>
188, 207

Black Sea, 36 Boldayev, S., 201

Boriskin, 39, 105 Brest-Litovsk, 96

Annushka, 55
Archangel, 204, 222
Arctic Ocean, 13, 26, 107, 113,
154, 222 Arkagala, in, 159-61

Brevda, Isaac, 91 Bukharin, N. I., 77 Bunin, I. A., 90 Burkhala, 103 Butyrka prison, 19

Arman, 113
Asia, Central, 2 1 ,
assassination,

Canada, 38
94

229-30

Atka, 114

casualties, 47 Caucasus, 94, Cayenne, 125

97-8

247

INDEX
Chaun
Gulf, 215, 219, 222

children,

195-7

Derevenko, P. 69-70, 120

P.,

40-1, 66,

China, 205, 212 Christians, 93-4, 168, 186-7, 193, 206

Devil's Island, 125

Dimitrov, Georgy, 90

Chukhotsk peninsula,
215, 219, 222
coal,
1

39,

10,

10- 1 1,

114, 208
'

136-9, 163 Dore, Gustave, 28 Drabkin, Colonel, 41, 63 Dukcha, 55, 112, 176
disinfestation, 22,

cold, 13, 17, 36, 49-50> 54, 58, 61, 94-5* 9**> !27> '30,

Dyakov, Dzhurma

Boris,

228

(ship), 21,

*4& *54> i65i 17a Communist Party, 24* 46-7,

135^-6,

89, 183^ 2Q2, 222^

25-7, 34, 224 -fr

9* -2,9a, 121, t62> 177*21 Conquest^ Robert: The Great Terror, 202, 210 Count of Monte Cristar The, 80
counter-revolutionaries,,
'politicals'

East Siberian Sea, 36 Ehrenburg, I. D., 1781

Eliot,,

T. &, 200
199;

Elgenv 55* 97. *43> ^54* ^62,

172, 176-7, 195-6, described, i8j-g$

see

counter-revolutionary activity

England, 185, 203

epidemics, 22-3, 55 escape, 14, 20, 62, 152-62
execution, 41, 40V 48, 51-7, 62-4, 76, 85-6, 89, 100,

(KRD)y 52-3*
kyist activity

102
Trots-

counter-revolutionary

(KRTD)*

55^

86, 88, 102, 140, 155 criminals, common, see urkas

151,222, 229-30
exhaustion, 13,.91, i$i r 173.

Dallin,

D. J.: Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, 15, 201

famine, 41-2*126, 131^ 13$

Felix.

Dalstroy, 26, 39-40, 47, 66-8* 1D5, 109- 1 i> 1 rfc, 165, 200*
Dalstroy

D&rzhinsky (ship); 25-6,

207-8, 2iox 221, 226 (ship)* 25-6^ 220>

220, 224. Filipov, I. G., 41, 46 Finland, Finns,, 97

223-6
Damocles, 171 Dark Side of the Moan* They 200 Debin, 64 Deborin, A. M.,. 13
Decembrists, 109-10 DeMille, Cecil B., 2$ denunciation, 87-8

Flensburg, 25 Fomin, 76-7

food, 23 -4 r 27,, 51.-3, 42* 50, 55, 61, 63-4, 80.-1, 109,
1 12- 13; described, 114, 126-8, 189-90; linked imth norms, 125, 164; starvation radons, 131.;. Americans on,

Derevenko,
70

Galma Efimovna,

208-9
France, 40, 203

24ft

INDEX
frostbite, 50, 106, 138, 141

-2,

Gridassova (wife of Nikishov),

158, 188
furs,

68-9, 206, 210

38

Gydan Range,
gypsum, 193

36,

39

Gakayev, Colonel, 41
Galich, Alexander, 24 Galimyy, 120

Hillman, Sidney, 208

Hitler, Adolf, 16, 61,

88-9
38,

Garanin, Major, 40-

1,

51 -2,

Hokkaido, 222

54~5, 57

Hudson Bay Company,

75,

Germany, Germans, 15, 89-90,96-9, 150, 160,

209

165,

223 Gestapo, 96 Ginzburg, Evgenia, 21 -2, 89, quoted, 26-7, 177; 93,

Hungary, Hungarians, 97 hunger, 13, 22, 55, 58, 79, 130, 132-3, 155, 170, 173, 193 Huxley, Julian, 202
Indigirka (ship), 25, 221,

30-1,34,61,63-5,80,142, 166, 172, 179-80, 188-9,

191-3, 228;
wind, 202
Into the Whirl-

Indigirka River, 39, 105,

225-6 in,

154
informers,

87-9

Goglidze, S. A., 67n,

gold,

205-6

17, 25, 38-9, 42-4, 47-9, 5 1 -3,.56, 58-9, 61, 72,89,91,94, 100,104, "3, 1 16-21, 167, 189, 223; deaths, 219-20; 47, numbers employed, 106-7; methods described, 107-9,
1

insanity, 141, 143 Institute of Pacific Relations,

Irkutsk,

211-12 in, 160

Italy, 177

Ivan the Terrible, 202

Izvestia, 90, 92, 179,

201

Izvestkovoye, 193

28; production figures,

10;

focus of economy,

114- 15,

226;

linked

124-6; 147-8; compared to gravedigging, 174; exemption of women, 1 79; Americans on, 205, 208-10; numbers of
mines,

with death, and punishment,

Japan, Japanese, 27, 34, 97,

127, 221 Jasienski, Bruno, 21

Jews, 75,

97-8
I. S.,

Karpunich-Braven,
130

127,

214-15

Gorbatov, A. V., 115, 162, 202; quoted, 21, 29-30, 36, 80-1, 129-30, 145, 168-70 Goya, Francisco Jose de, 28 Greenock, 25

katorga, 60, 102, 177, 195, 217,

219

Katyn massacre, 218

KGB,

16

Kharkov, 160-1

249

INDEX
Khatenakh, 42, 52, 56,
140
105,

giene,

140-6;
its

one

vast

prison, 152;

three foun-

Kholodnaya, 87, 1 00 Khrushchev, Nikita, 76, 97, loo, 126, 177, 201, 228, 230 Kim (ship), 35, 221, 224 Kirov, S. M., 767, 230 Knyazev, V; V., 91

power to corand the West, 200-3, 213; visited by Americans, 204-10; numbers in camps, 214-15;
dations, 166;
rupt,

199;

prison population, 2j6; cost

in lives,

Kolyma: labour camp complex, 13, 16, 65-6; reputation,

* 7>

227-8; compared to

Tsarist prisons, 229

13;

deaths in

14,

Kolyma

(ship), 221

59-6o, 65, 91, 94-5,106,115,130,145-7, HS-S* 217-20, 222; begin35* 43, 50,

Kolyma Range, 36 Kolyma River, 26, 36

105, 143, 219, 222 Kolyma Trassa, in

8, 43,

nings,

15;

rehabilitations
21;
1

from,

15,

natural re-

sources,

16,

10- 1
to,
7;
1

1,

113;

Russian attitude
frightfulness of,
1

15- r6;
climate,

Komsomolets, 219 Korea, Koreans, 64, 99 Kosygin, Alexei, 68 Kresty, 88

Krivitsky,

of,

43 -4; prison ships 25-6, 214, 220-8; 'another planet', 24; Middle
7> 3*> ~ 7>

Deputy

People's 61

20,

Commissar, 89-90 Krivoshey, P. M., 159

kulaks, 39, 41

Passage

to,

25-35;

history,

38-41, 104; 'golden age', 43-5; brutality increased

in,

46-8;

conditions,
'tempest', 49,

Kulu (ship), 26, 221 Kulu River, 105 Kwai River, 127
labour camps, 13, 16
17, 19,

49-54; 1938

60, 162; 1950 terror, 64; purpose of, 64-6, 91, 124-6; social orders, 67-8, 74-5, 78-9; corruption of administration, 69-72;

29,42,46-9,54,63,65,69,
127, 203, 216, 218; rebellion

'slave-owner'

mentality,

4> 99; described, 58, 1B7 93; self-indulgences of administrations, 69 72; efin

of prisoners, 92 - 1 o 1 ; hierarchy of suffering, 1 01 -3; numbers in

73

45 variety

fects

of,

103;

numbers

of,

mines,

industries,

105-6, 215; other 114; economic

115;

214-15; numbers increased, 223; deaths in, 228 Lafitte, Jean, 203

La

Perouse, Straits

of, 27,

222

attitudes,

organi-

Laso, 217

sational
1 1

inefficiencies,

Lattimore,

Owen,

204

5,

6-21;

health

and

hy-

208 -

12; Pacific Affairs, 21

250

INDEX
Latvia, Latvians, 25-6, 39, 97 1 10, 208, 223

Mariupol, 160-1

lead, 87,

Mayzuradze, 46

Lefortovo prison, 19
Leipzig, 90 Lena River, 38, 40 Lenin, V. L.,91, 101, 171,229

Medved, Philip, 76-7 Medvedev, Roy, 54, 58,

1

77,

75; Let History Judge,

5, 79,

Leningrad,

60,

76-7,

121;

Kresty

and

Shlaperny

132, 202, 217 Mexico, 99 Mikheev, A. A., 91

prisons, 19
Lettres Franqaises, Les,
lice,

Milionushkina,
181 -2

Nadiya,
19,

203 22, 136-7, 139-4. *49>

.

mines,

mining,
*3*

22,

,6 3-4

46 -7> 73-4,
122-3,
144, 162,

105,

Lipper, Elinor, 103, 177, 188, 196; quoted, 32, 34, 44, 68,
72,

in, ! 35- 6
>

37, 114,
>4

88-9,

93-4,

179,
Soviet

164-5, 168, 207; death rates in, 219-20; see

also gold,

192-3; Eleven Tears in Prison Camps, 20 1 , 2 1

Literaturnqya Gazeta, 78

lead, silver, tin,

uranium
Minsk, 181 Molotov, V. M., 61

Lithuania, Lithuanians, 25, 98

Lloyd's
Register

of

Shipping,

Mora,

Silvester,

200,

225;
70,
10,

220 1 Lobuya, 152

logging,

Kolyma, 15

Moscow,
114,

15, 17, 40,

in,

119-20,

77, 88, 90,

46-7, 92-3, 109

127, 179, 191 -2, 196 Lubyanka prison, 19,65

lumber,

see

logging

Bolshoi 207; Theatre, 69; University, 74; Nikitsky Gate, 92; Academy
118,

175,

of Sciences,

159;

Foreign
194;

McCarthy, Joseph, 211 "Magadan, 19, 33, 35 -6, 40 -2, 46, 5 6 6 3> 7-70, 72, 74, 86-7,89,91,99-100, 106, 1 10- 1 1, 115, i43-4> l6o
>
>

Language
Metropol

Institute,

169, 175, 207, 209, 216; des-

cribed, 104-5; women's camp, 176, 181 -3, 206; Gorky Theatre, 206 Maglag, 69 Maidanek, 15 Maldyak, 36, 80, 168-9, 2I 5> 219 Mandelstam, Osip, 21

National Hotels, 194; Trials, 212 Mosevich, 76-7 Muralov, N. I., 92 Murray, Philip, 208 Muslims, 94-5 Mylga, 130, 193

and

Nagayevo,

19, 21, 26,

35

-6,

4*> 63, 66, 97, 104-5, 113,

220-6
Nakhodka, 19-22, 25-6,
221 -2y 225
74,

251

IN&EX
National Geographic Magazine*

208, 2 1

Omsuchkan,
Socialism
(Nazis) y

Otitskaya, Ekaterina, 93, i 77 107, 177, 1^0,

National

184

2 > 175; Final Sol*3-99> ution, 16, 228

Orotukan, 55, 114 Oymyakon, 36, 105

Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939), 95 Negroes, 73

Nerchinsk, 38, 109

Pacific

Ocean,

19,

38

New New

Republic, 2 12

Statesman, 210 -11 Newcastle upon Tyne, 25 Nicholas I, Tsar, 109 Nicolaevsky, B.I .: Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, 15, 201
I. F.,

214 Partisan, 59, 215

Paris, 70, 183,

Pasternak, Boris, 213; Doctor

Zhivago, 176

Pavlov,

K.
*

A.,

40-1, 47, 51,

H9

63

pellagra, 95,

145-6

Nikishov,

40 -1, 68-9,

Pestraya Dresva, 40, 106, 120,

112, 201, 205 -11

214,219
Petrov,

Nikolai Tezhov (ship), 25, 46,

Vladimir:

quoted,

220 Nizhne-Kolymsk, 38

44-547 49-50, 91-2 Piscun, Venyamin, 120

platinum, 39

NKVD

(secret police), 13, 22,

26, 40, 45-6, 48, 52, 55-6, 63, 6 7 n, 68, 72, 76-8, 81,

pneumonia, 106, 141

Poland, Poles, 15, 21, 31, 33, 55> 62 > 9 6 > Io8 > IIO "*
I3 6 >
l

87-8,92,96, 105,110,
142,

120,

175,

187,

207,

229;

5> 162, 182-3, '85?

Third Section, 151 NKVD Far Northern Construction

194, 200, 210, 216,

218-19
(-1941)9

Polish-Soviet Treaty
96,

Trust,

see

Dak-

200

troy

'politicals', 24,

NoriFsk, 40, 99 North Star (film), 207

68, 72, 79,

29-30, 32, 63, 85-7, 89, 91,

100- 1,

104, 136, 165; con-

Novaya Zemfya, 13-14 Novaya Zyryanka, 151

October Revolution
(1917)9

trasted with urkas, 20,

44-5,

80, 82 -3* 112, 147; ability to tell stories, 80; and es-

cape, 153; deaths

of,

175,

92-3
Okhotsk Sea,
16, 19, 25, 29, 35,

217 Polyarny Spring, 55

polyavitaminosis,
Pravda, 61
prisoners: feelings
1

39, 113, 221

73,

209

Ola, 113, 115, 176

Ola River,

39,

84

Olchan, 154

of removal from normal world, 14; de*

252

n
INDEX
aths
of, 1 6, 43, 217; detention, interrogation, tor-

Russell, Bertrand,

204

Ryabaya River, 159

Sakhalin, 222
Sakhalin (ship), 222 Sakharov, Andrei, 19 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 203 Schiedam, 25 Schweik, Good Soldier, 24
sciatica, 141

19-21, 23-4; on ships, 26-35, 224-5; early experiences of Kolyma, 41-5; increased brutality against, 47-8; deture, 19; in transit,

scribed,

50- 1;

in the mines,
I! 5;

51-4, 106-9,
rises,

random

morale monetary allowances, 69-70; work for camp administrations, 69-72; and free population, 75; varieties of, 92 - 10 1 ; and norm system, 125-6, 128, ! *33> 48 ; and hunger,
killing of, 55, 60, 64;

65;

scurvy, 22, 141, 145-6, 168

Second World War, 63-4, 68-9, 75, 86, 89, 94, 96, 100, no, 126, 135* 142-3* 146-7, 154, 194, 200, 208, 212, 216-17, 220, 222, 224 Seimchan, 43, 104-5, 157, 207
self-mutilation, 141-2*
serfs,

130-3; the dokhodyaga, 132,

145,
!

171;

and

stimulants,
conditions,

33""4;

living

73-4, 83 Serpantinka (Serpantinnaya),

134; clothing,

134-6; baths,

56-8, 229
Shaidinsky River, 42

'36 ~9> medicine, 142-6; punishment, 146-50; searches

vival,
of,

150- 1,

190; sur-

Shalamov, Varlam, 43, 54, 72, 87-90, 102, 214; quoted,

nocence,

162-73; thdr in228-9; see a^so

katorga,
'politi-

44,46,52-4,59-60,62

3,

Christians,

80-2, 136-8, 142-3, 162, 168, 217

Shaturstroy (ship),

cals', ukazniki, urkas,

women

punishment, 58, 93-4, 126-7,

146, 167, 170,

192-3

Rabochy (ship), 222 rape, 32 -3, 75, 182, 198-9 Revolution, 1905, 230

Shanghai, 70; University, 184 222 Shaw, George Bernard, 204 -1 Shelest, Grigory, 1 70 Kolyma Notes, 202 Shmuller, Dodya, 171 -2

Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 61 Ridgway, General, 142

road-building,

Shturmovoy, 58, 215 Siberia, 38-9, 69, 97, 208

silicosis,

123

no15, 70,

silver,

38

Romania, Romanians,
83
Rosner, Eddy, 70 Rousset, David, 203

Sliozberg, O. L., 193 Small Soviet Encyclopaedia, 229 Snegov, A. V., 13

Sochi, 36

253

INDE3C
Social-Revolutionaries,

93,

230
Solovki, 17

Taskan, 119-20, 144-5 Tibilisi Opera, 70

thieves, thieving, 21,

29-30,

Solzhenitsyn,

Aleksandr,

13,

52

193, 221, 223; quoted, 17, 55> 165; Gulag Archi,

79-82, 85, 198 Time of Troubles, 29

34,
tin, 38,
1

1.0

pelago,

The,

14-15, 34

5,

torture, 19,
trains,

228 -9

203 19-20, 23, 27, 29

railway,
2
1

Soviet-German War, see Second World War Sovietskaya Gavan, 21, 222
Sovietskaya
Sovlatvia

Trans-Siberian

222

Gavan (ship), 221 (ihip), 26-7, 224

camps, 19-23, 29, 35, 216 Troika, 52 -4

transit

44, 48, 86, 105, 184,

Spain, Spaniards, 99

Tsyrko, 46
tuberculosis, 44,

Spanish Civil War, 99 Spartacus, 65 Spokoiny, 130 Sredne-Kolymsk, 88 Srednikan, 43, 105
Stalin, Josef;
1 3, 1 6> 24, 43 -6, 53>65, 67-8, 76-7, 79,86,

95

Tumanny,

59, 167, 174

Tyenki, 75, 177, 195 typhus, 22, 140 Tyutchev, F. L, 153

ukazniki,

193-4

92, 94> 5r H7 i5 I7i i73> i77 i87 200-2, 205,

"

Ukraine, Ukrainians, 86, 88,

96, 100- 1, 194, 219 Uncle Tom's Cabin, 73 Union of Writers, 90

213,

229-31

147-9, I7 ! "" 2 Steklov, Vladimir, 91 Steklov-Nakhamkes, Yury, 91

'Stalin's villa',

Urals, 38

uranium, 6yn,
urkas,

1 1

suicide, 173

Summerskill, Edith, 202 Suslov, Mikhail, 68 Susuman, 112 Svirstrqy (ship), 222
Svistoplyas, 55

28-34, 54, 65, 68, 79, 84, 86-7, ioi, 104, 138, 163;
20,

contrasted with 'politicals',

44-5, 80-5, 112, 130,

147; used to terrorise 'politicals',

swamps, 37, 119 -20 Sweden, 26

Switzerland, Swiss, 15, 177 syphilis, 141, 182, 196 Syzran, 92

45, 79, 83, 87, 202; love of stories, 80; and malingering, 141;

and escape,

152-3; and sex, 180, 182; survival of, 217

[Link].,

73,

180,

205,

208;

Lend-Lease,

no,

207-8,

Tacoma, 25
Talon, 112, 176, 196

223; Office of War Information, 204; McCarthyism,

254

INDEX
211;

McCarran Committee,

211

Vodopyanov, 56, 108 Volga German Republic, 97

Volkovstrqy (ship),

U.S.S.R., 13, 21, 28, 56, 68, 87, 204; press, 14; labour

222

Voronezh, 186
Wallace, Henry A., 204-12,
216; Soviet Asia Mission, 205

camp

system, 15, 65-6; set-

tlement of Kolyma, 38-41;

collectivisation

and

in-

dustrialisation in, 42; Central

Warsaw, 113
West, the, 1315, 17, 107, 200;
liberals in, 16; delusions of,

Committee, 45-6, 68;

increased
in,

brutality

45 -7> Five Year Plan > 54> 66, 83; effect of 1938 in, 60;
seeks retribution, 66;
social order in, 67;

202-3,213
wheat,

in

new
68;

Supreme

Soviet,

68;

Politburo,

White Sea, 17 women: on Sovlatvia, 27-8, 194; and sex, 32 -3, 180 2,
194; random killing of, 55; stoned, 74; on farms, 1 12; in
fishing
lice,
1

Ministry of Internal Affairs,

triumph ofjustice' in, 88; and Spanish Civil War, 99; bureaucracy, 1 1 7 - 20;
74; 'a

camps,
139;

Penal Code: Article 58: 63,

10 1,
129; Article
14:

50

1 ;

1 13- 14; and and searches, numbers in Kolyma,

147;

176;
177,

reasons

for

survival,

Article 37: 195; accounts of

Kolyma
icans,

in,

201;

212;

and Amerand Poland,

of

179-80; contacts with male prisoners, 178; deaths

of,
1

79; urkas 9 182

3; 'politiof,

218-19; and creation Kolyma, 229-30

cals',

183;

humiliation

USVITL
the
rective

(Administration of North-Eastern Cor-

Labour Camps),

40,

184-5; brutality towards, become sexless, 185-7; 188-9; as spies, 194 5; and motherhood, 195-7; free
wives, 197-8; freed, 199; see also katorga, Christians,
'politicals', prisoners,

51,54,68, 187
Utinyi, 130

ukaz-

Vanino, 19-23, 25, 69, 222, 226

Vasiliev, Colonel, 65,

74,

niki, urkas

71-2

Wrangel

Wootton, Baroness, 203 Island, 26

Vaskov, 46
Vins, Georgi: Three Generations

of Suffering, 17 Vishnevetsky, Colonel,

40-1

Vladivostok, 19-20,26-7,36,

44,48, 105, 110,159,221-2

Yablonov, 159 Yagoda, Genrikh, 77-8 Yagoda (ship), 220 Yaroslavl, 27, 92, 170 Yagodnoye, 76-7, 105,

in

255

INDEX
Yakir, Peter, 203 Yakutia, 159

Yezhov, Nikolai, 45, 48, 92,

135 Yezorov, Alexer, 46

Yakutsk, 159-60

Yana, 113, 176

Yana

River, 107 Yanishevsky, 76-7

Zagorny, N., 201

Zaporozhets, Ivan, 76-8 Zarosshy Spring, 115, 130
Zaslavsky, 90 Zmeika, 192
Zolosti,

Yanovsky, Lieutenant-Colonel, 154-8

Yanstroy, 2.15 Yegorov, Major, 41 Yenisey River, 38, 40 Yenukidze, Abel, 78

55 Zwiernak, Peter, 200

256