Gulag

To solve this problem, the prisoners of Butyrka resurrected a phrase from the early days of the Revolution, and organized “Committees of the Poor.” Each prisoner donated 10 percent of his money to the committee. In turn, the committee purchased food items for prisoners who had none. This system went on for some years, until the authorities decided to eliminate the committees by promising some prisoners “rewards” of various kinds for refusing to participate. The cells fought back, however, and ostracized the refusers. And who, asks Shalamov, “would risk placing himself in opposition to the entire group, to people who are with you twenty-four hours a day, where only sleep can save you from the hostile glare of your fellow inmates?”

Curiously, this short story is one of the few in Shalamov’s extensive repertoire to end on a positive note: “Unlike the ‘free’ world ‘outside,’ or the camps, society in prison is always united. In the committees this society found a way to make a positive statement as to the right of every man to live his own life.”⁴⁹

This most pessimistic of writers had found, in this one organized form of prisoner solidarity, a shred of hope. The trauma of the transports, and the horror of the first bewildering days in the camps, soon shattered it.

Chapter 9

TRANSPORT, ARRIVAL, SELECTION

I remember Vanino port

And the clamor of the gloomy ship

As we walked along the gangway

Into the cold, murky hold.

The zeks suffered from the rolling of the surf

The deep sea howled all around them—

And in front of them lay Magadan

The capital of the land of Kolyma.

Not cries, but pitiful moans

Emerged from every breast

As they said goodbye to the mainland.

The ship rolled, strained, groaned . . .

—Soviet prisoners’ song

IN 1827, Princess Maria Volkonskaya, the wife of the Decembrist rebel Sergei Volkonsky, left her family, her child, and her safe life in St. Petersburg to join her husband in his Siberian exile. Her biographer described her journey, which was thought, at the time, to have been one of almost unendurable hardship:

Day after day, the sledge raced onwards into the endless horizon. Enclosed as if in a time capsule, Maria was in a state of feverish elation. There was a sense of unreality to the journey: lack of sleep and little food. She stopped only at an occasional relay for a glass of hot lemon tea from the ever-present brass samovar. The intoxicating speed of the sleigh, pulled by three plunging horses, devoured the empty distances at a gallop. “Onward . . . forward!” shouted the drivers, dashing on as great plumes of snow rose from under the horses’ hooves, and harness bells jingled relentlessly, warning of the approach of the vehicle . . .¹

More than a century later Evgeniya Ginzburg’s cell mate read a similar description of an aristocrat’s journey across the Urals—and sighed with envy: “And I always thought that the wives of the Decembrists endured the most frightful sufferings . . .”²

No horses and no sleighs drove twentieth-century prisoners with “intoxicating speed” across the Siberian snow, and there were no glasses of hot lemon tea to be had from brass samovars at the relay stations. Princess Volkonskaya may have wept during her journey, but the prisoners who came after her could not even hear the word étap—prison jargon for “transport”—without feeling a jolt of mouth-drying fear, even terror. Every journey was a wrenching leap into the unknown, a move away from familiar cell mates and familiar arrangements, however poor those might be. Worse, the process of moving prisoners from prison to transit prison, from transit prison to camp, and between camps within the system, was physically grueling and openly cruel. In some senses, it was the most inexplicable aspect of life in the Gulag.