Gulag

For those undergoing the ordeal for the first time, the event was pregnant with symbolism. Arrest and interrogation had been an initiation into the system, but the train journey across Russia represented a geographical break with the prisoners’ former life, and the start of a new one. Emotions always ran high in the trains that left Moscow and Leningrad, headed north and east. Thomas Sgovio, the American who had failed to retrieve his passport, remembered what had happened when his train left for Kolyma: “Our train left Moscow on the evening of June 24th. It was the beginning of an eastward journey which was to last a month. I can never forget the moment. Seventy men . . . began to cry.”³

Most of the time, long transports took place in stages. If they were being held in large city prisons, the zeks were first transported to the trains in trucks whose very design spoke of the NKVD’s obsession with secrecy. From the outside, the “Black Ravens,” as they were nicknamed, appeared to be regular heavy-goods trucks. In the 1930s, they often had the word “bread” painted on the sides, but later more elaborate ruses were used. One prisoner, arrested in 1948, remembered traveling in one truck marked “Moscow Cutlets” and another labeled “Vegetables/Fruits.”⁴

On the inside, the trucks were sometimes divided into “two rows of tiny, pitch-black, airless cages,” as one prisoner described them.⁵ According to a design of 1951, others simply had two long benches, upon which prisoners squeezed beside one another.⁶ Peasants, and those being transported at the start of the mass deportations from the Baltic States and eastern Poland, had a rougher time of it. They were often packed into ordinary-goods trucks, as an elderly Lithuanian once described to me, “like sardines”: the first prisoner spread his legs, the second sat between the first’s legs and spread his own legs—and so on, until the truck was full.⁷ Such arrangements were particularly uncomfortable when there were many people to be collected, and a trip to the station could last all day. During the deportations that took place in the former Polish territories in the winter of February 1940, children froze to death before even reaching the trains, and adults suffered from severe frostbite, from which their arms and legs never recovered.⁸

In provincial cities, the secrecy rules were laxer and prisoners sometimes marched through towns to the train station, an experience which often provided their last glimpse of civilian life—and one of the civilians’ few glimpses of prisoners. Janusz Bardach recalled his surprise at the reaction of townspeople in Petropavlovsk when they saw prisoners marching through the street:

Most in the entourage were women wrapped in shawls and long heavy coats made out of felt. To my amazement, they began shouting at the guards: “Fascists . . . Murderers . . . Why don’t you go and fight on the front . . .” They began throwing snowballs at the guards. Several shots were fired into the air, and the women backed off several paces but continued cursing and following us. They tossed parcels, bread loaves and potatoes and bacon wrapped in cloth into the column. One woman removed her shawl and winter coat and gave them to a man who had none. I caught a pair of woolen mittens. ⁹

Such reactions have a long tradition in Russia: Dostoevsky wrote of the housewives who sent “fancy loaves made of the finest flour” to the inmates of Czarist prisons at Christmastime.¹⁰ But by the 1940s, they were relatively rare. In many places—Magadan, famously, among them—the sight of prisoners in the street was so commonplace as to evoke no reaction at all.

Whether on foot or by truck, prisoners eventually reached the train stations. Sometimes these were ordinary stations, sometimes they were special stations—“a piece of land surrounded by barbed wire,” in the memory of Leonid Finkelstein. He also remembered that prisoners were subjected to a series of special rituals before they were allowed to board: