Red Ice

I must have paled. No wonder he had looked familiar; Kurganov was the Iron Curtain exile whose novels had rocked the West to its long-ignored or forgotten foundations. Perhaps no man in this century had endured the fathomless pain or had seen the unquantifiable suffering he had—and still maintained the resilience to skewer the most powerful and oppressive political system in the world with his pen. He dwarfed the other great men of the decade. I could not help feeling humble.

Sato, sensing my unabashed awe, started in, “Mr. Kurganov, as you probably know, does not speak English. I do not know the reasons why he has arranged for this meeting. He has asked me to translate for him and, as a lawyer, keep these communications in the strictest confidence.”

Sato began, at first haltingly, to interpret Kurganov’s famous sardonic style:

“The creative thinking of the Soviet penal system established a rehabilitative marvel, the Corrective Labor Camp, to attend to its class enemies. Class enemies leave such camps vertically or feet-first. There is, of course, always some doubt about those who leave the camps vertically. It is, therefore, a credit to the camps that the majority of the inmates leave feet-first and unquestionably rehabilitated to the requirements of Soviet society.”

Kurganov swayed slightly as he stood up, holding his hands tightly behind him as if still manacled.

“A statistically predeterminable percentage die in the railroad cars and on the trek to the camps. This cannot be helped. Those weak in ideology will be weak in body. In the frozen cemeteries that pass as Corrective Labor Camps, these class enemies—a good many of which haven’t the remotest idea what they have done, and whose persecutors often have little better idea—may expect a degrading end in utter despair. Slow death by interminable beatings, exposure, or starvation are the prevalent options; the stronger, however, can add scurvy and pellagra to their choices.

“Families are divided among the camps. Daughters and wives are used by the camp officers, guards, trustees….”

And this stooped, frail man had withstood it all. He had endured fifteen years in an icy hell that, by sheer number of deaths, made Hitler’s a five-and-dime operation. It was beyond imagining how anyone could survive the sixty-below-zero winters of Siberia in what we would consider spring street clothing.

But where and how did I enter into all this?

“…in calling the world’s attention to this continuing atrocity, I incurred the wrath of the Soviet Republic (which had been so good as to return to me the freedom with which I had been born). I expected and was prepared to accept whatever treachery lay in store for me personally. By this time my wife was dead, my daughter, as if by a gift, insane. But the benevolent and all-knowing republic has found a way to bring revenge upon me, though it knows nothing short of death will stop my writing.”

Yes, I thought, there was little that could or should stop his writing, yet what cost must a man pay—and keep paying? would he ever have any peace, whether he continued or not?

“As a university student before the war, I studied to be a physicist. At the university an older student from my hometown, Yuri Vyshinsky, took me under his tutelage. We were very close. It was he who introduced me to my wife. Those were happy times, vibrant with laughter in the student drinking halls. I was blissfully ignorant of politics and strove to remain that way.

“Yuri often asked me, in a veiled way, what good was harnessing the universe when at the same time men’s souls were being tethered. ‘Couldn’t I think of any higher calling than physics?’ I couldn’t understand him. Wasn’t he a physics student himself? I sensed he questioned my particular vocational choice. Despite these mystifying exchanges, we remained firm and loyal friends.

“Not until several years later, after capture with my artillery unit and my subsequent escape from a German POW camp, did I begin to understand Yuri. To our Soviet masters, the story of my escape and naïve return to the Red Army had to be the flimsy cover story of a spy. (In retrospect, I now fully appreciate how incredible such an act must have appeared to one who understood the Soviet system—which I did not, then.)

“The first weeks, those weeks before you’re sent to a camp, are the hardest. I was thrown into an ancient prison east of Moscow. Despair is simply a word until you have survived long periods of torture and lack of sleep.