In Siberia Read online

  My hotel was huge, half ruined and the only one left: a monument to Stalin which rang with my footsteps. Four policemen gazed stonily from an office across the hall, and concierges still slumped at their corridor desks. In the cavernous dining-room canned dance-music played for nobody.

  I walked in the streets without knowing where to go. I wondered vaguely if I were being followed. The sallow people wandering the pavements could be thinking whatever you ascribed to them. It was oddly quiet. A populace of old men sat remote in the arid squares, and spoke with me in dislocated phrases and half-smiles. They were Latvians and Ukrainians, exiled long ago, and were taking the air with reticent surprise.

  For it was warm, with a dense, midsummer stillness. By eight o’clock in the evening the sun was still high, and at eleven the sky held a limpid, refracted light, as if it were illuminating the town through black gauze. But not one in ten windows was lit. Lost in its suburbs, I had a fantasy that the past, like something viscous and unreconciled, was leaking back in, inhabiting abandoned rooms, reclaiming the factories. Those who had died here far outnumbered the living. They had built the city in chains, and lie beneath it. Yet at midnight people were still walking their mongrels in the roads, and reading newspapers.

  Next morning I found a cheery Ukrainian to drive the twenty-mile noose-road through the mines. Vorkuta was a wonderful town, Vasil said, because it was close to the Urals, and you could hunt. He’d lived here thirty years, and life had been splendid. ‘You should see the rivers and lakes there. Hundreds! And chock-full of fish! You can bribe geologists or soldiers to take you out in a jeep, and they drop you where you want. As for this’–he dismissed Vorkuta with a backhand–‘everything will get better! It’s the worst moment now. Soon…’

  But the town was slipping away, and before us unrolled a ghastly no man’s land. For miles its grasslands bunched and undulated with the scars of vanished buildings; and some forgotten war, it seemed, had littered its surface with scrap-iron and ruin. All colour had drained away. Even the sky hung in thundery black and white. Pylons and telegraph poles cross-hatched half the land, while enormous hot-water pipes wormed below, their lagging spilt out over the discoloured grass.

  Our car shuddered into pot-holes. We were quite alone. Vasil started telling me fishing and hunting tales, and drove more carelessly as he dreamt of salmon and Arctic fox. Ahead our horizon was bloated with slag-heaps and chimneystacks. Polluted tributaries of the Vorkuta river wandered about. Sometimes I could not tell if a mine were working or wrecked. We would pass a ruin with no man or truck in sight, its shutes snapped off and chimneys extinct; then its pit-wheel would start turning. Surely that was the wind! But no. Deep beneath those installations the earth was teeming with men.

  Yet above ground, we were driving among ghosts. Every mine was shadowed by the traces of a prison camp or cemetery. They ruffled the soil with terraces, crashed-in barracks, rotted watch-towers. Sometimes I would leave Vasil and tramp away alone. My imagination was failing me. I wanted to shock myself into pity; but instead I felt a distant recoil and bewilderment. The ground seemed sick underfoot. I was afraid of what I might kick there. I walked lightly over its corrugations. I tried to remember any individual who had died here–a Mandelstam, a Babel. He might have stirred some sharp, particular loss. But I knew of no one. Only a nameless nation of the dead, whom I could not quite separate from its persecutors.

  These camps were self-contained states. They evolved in a perverted reflection of the world outside. After Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939, the mass of Russian and Ukrainian convicts were joined by tens of thousands of Poles, and as early as 1943 Russian soldiers recaptured from the Germans were incarcerated here as traitors. With the annexation of the Baltic states, the Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians poured in–those who’d fought against Hitler and Stalin indifferently–and by the war’s end Vorkuta’s patchwork of nations embraced Germans, Japanese, Nationalist Chinese, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Persians, several French and Americans, even a Tibetan herdsman who had strayed over the Mongolian border.

  Inside the camps the swarm of guiltless politicals was tyrannised by the tight-knit criminal fraternity imprisoned with them. These blatnye lived by their own savage laws, conducted their own executions, seized whatever privileges were going. The camp administration ignored or used them. The guards could be as vulnerable as the prisoners. Any carelessness, any untoward mercy, and they might be shot. The pervasive feel was one less of sadism than of brute indifference. By overwork, half-starvation and piercing cold, the convicts were ground down into an animal mass. On a daily ration of porridge, three ounces of fish and a few drops of oil, they laboured under a quota system often impossible to fulfil. They perished of typhus, tuberculosis, pneumonia, or dropped dead of heart failure as they hauled the coal-trucks up the pit. Sometimes their comrades concealed their corpses so they could draw their rations; but within three days the bodies’ stench betrayed them.

  ‘…And in winter you just cut a hole in the ice, drop in a line, and up they come–graylings by the dozen!’ Vasil was anticipating his next expedition. ‘And later you get the big one, the salmon. In July last year I was on the Usa, not thinking of anything, and suddenly the rod’s torn out of my hands. The creature weighed fifty kilos, I could swear–that’s my wife’s weight!–and it flashed round and looked at me….’

  On either side of us they continued: mine–graveyard–camp–mine–graveyard–all in ruins. Sometimes a village enfolded the barracks where a few ex-prisoners or their descendants lingered, with nowhere else to go. But most places remained only in memory, like the brickyard where 1,300 politicals were executed in 1937 by the ruthless commandant Kashketin. (He was awarded the Order of Lenin, then shot.) But a grey obelisk commemorates them. The punishment camp of Cementny Zavod had shrivelled to a huddle of gaunt tenements and a vomiting smokestack. Pallid women waited outside shops or sat round a vacant netball-pitch. Even five years before, miners’ strikes could rock the Kremlin; but now their pay was six months in arrears, Vasil said, and still the depleted gangs were going to work.

  Then we reached the shell of Mine 17. Here, in 1943, was the first of Vorkuta’s katorga death-camps. Within a year these compounds numbered thirteen out of Vorkuta’s thirty: their purpose was to kill their inmates. Through winters in which the temperature plunged to -40°F, and the purga blizzards howled, the katorzhane lived in lightly boarded tents sprinkled with sawdust, on a floor of mossy permafrost. They worked twelve hours a day, without respite, hauling coal-trucks, and within three weeks they were broken. A rare survivor described them turned to robots, their grey-yellow faces rimmed with ice and bleeding cold tears. They ate in silence, standing packed together, seeing no one. Some work-brigades flailed themselves on in a bid for extra food, but the effort was too much, the extra too little. Within a year the first 28,000 of them were dead. A prisoner in milder times encountered a remnant of the hundreds of thousands who were sentenced between 1943 and 1947. They had survived, he said, because they were the toughest–a biological elite–but were now brutalised and half-insane.

  Under the mine’s disembowelled head-frame, the heaps of slag and rubbish were inhabited by vagrants scavenging for metal. A horde of vicious dogs was on the loose. I started along the pit railway through shrubs and swamps and an undergrowth of ruin. The rails along the track had been torn up yard by yard. I thrust past waste-tips snowed under flocks of gulls. Then I came to a solitary brick building enclosing a range of cramped rooms. The roof was gone, but the iron-sheathed timbers of their door-frames still stood, and their walls were windowless. They were isolation cells. Solzhenitsyn wrote that after ten days’ incarceration, during which a prisoner might be deprived even of clothing, his constitution was wrecked, and after fifteen he was dead. Now their concrete was splitting underfoot. Into each cell the skeleton of a door still swung. Outside, wild camomile lapped against the bricks.

  I stumbled into a quagmire curtained by shrubs, and waded out again. In
front of me the coal trains were wheezing and clanking over the tundra. I began to imagine myself here fifty years ago. What would I have done? But knowing how physical depletion saps the will, the answer returned: You would have been no different from anyone else.

  I came upon a message scratched on a stone: ‘I was exiled in 1949, and my father died here in 1942. Remember us.’

  ‘They come in thousands! Flying south in autumn, that’s when you get them. Geese, duck, teal! And there’s a red salmon that descends the Pechora river from the Arctic into the Vorkuta….’ Vasil swung the car past Mine 29, and we clambered out. The pit-wheels hung stark against the sky. A low hill, slushy with reeds and mosses, had sucked in its decayed camp. ‘Now this salmon carries a kind of caviar. One day last June…’ But he never finished. As we plunged into the dank shrubbery it poured out mosquitoes. They were huge. They were the rearguard of the festering trillions called gnus–a miasma of midges, gnats, horseflies, mosquitoes–which breed in the tundra pools in summer. They came at us like helicopters. In the tundra they can put reindeer and cattle to headlong flight, and have suffocated foals (and even, it is said, reindeer and men) by clogging their throats and nostrils. They live for only a few days, and feed on nothing. Some species have no developed digestive organs at all. Yet they flew in with oblivious fury–almost harmless by mid-August–and bit us out of habit or spite. That night I discovered wide, fiery welts over my wrists and ankles–a thousand Lilliputian mouthfuls–which had vanished by morning.

  But Vasil was having none of them. When hunting, he yelled, he wore protective netting, and he didn’t plan to get eaten alive in some dump of a mine. So I scrambled alone among foundations of disintegrating wood, charred posts, and a litter of rusted buckets and chains. A spider’s web of fences, trickling into the undergrowth, ended at the vestige of a gateway. An iron-bound window had been tossed into the bushes all of a piece. And in barracks still balanced delicately above the earth, the light was pouring through roofs on to those atrocious aisles where the plank beds of men stacked up like battery hens had dropped to the ground, and powder and coal-dust leaked out of the walls.

  Opposite the mine I reached the cemeteries. You stumble over these everywhere round Vorkuta, but they hold only a fraction of those fallen. In winter the corpses were piled in open-sided shacks until there were enough to be worth burying, then an NKVD officer smashed their skulls with a pick and they were tipped into a trench pre-dug in summer. But here, beyond memorials to the German and Latvian dead, hundreds of bleached crosses rose from the undergrowth. All were nameless. Their cross-pieces carried numbers–‘A-41…A-87’–and many had rotted off or vanished. (People stole them as souvenirs, Vasil said.) A sledge-hearse, a pick and a single rubber boot lay under a bush, abandoned by the last burial party forty years before.

  Mine 29 bears a peculiar tragedy. A few months after Stalin’s death in 1953, strikes broke out in labour camps all across Siberia, and this pit was in the vanguard. Its inmates made demands in the name of the whole Gulag: for the release of the very old and the too-young, and for the repatriation of foreigners. They asked for a ban on random shooting by watch-tower guards. They wanted a reduction of working hours. They wanted humanity. One by one the other Vorkuta camps succumbed to threats or lies from Moscow; but Mine 29 held out. Meanwhile, it was surrounded by two divisions of NKVD troops, with tanks. The main gate had vanished among indecipherable foundations under my feet. But as it was battered down, the troops saw the prisoners standing behind it in a solid phalanx, their arms linked, and singing. There were three or four volleys of small-arms, then the heavy machine-guns opened up. For a minute the miners remained massed and erect, the dead held up by the living, then they started to litter the ground.

  The fallen were thrown into a common grave–a ‘brothers’ grave’, as the Russians say. In Khrushchev’s day somebody raised a cross like a telegraph pole over the slag-heaps where they lay. It has gone; but in the studio of Vorkuta’s chief architect hang designs for other monuments. Nobody knows who will pay for them–the government offers nothing–but the architect’s dreams continue. Above the Vorkuta river an immense cross will be carved from the earth, he hopes, its marble sides engraved with the names of the dead. Another hill will open on a crowd of carved faces gazing from the ground, struggling to rise. And above the brothers’ grave in Mine 29 will stand a granite figure of Mother Russia, with chunks missing from her face, her shoulders, and her heart.

  She is an old woman now. In the street she paddles her bulk along with rhythmic scoops of her arms, and her cheeks flush with the labour. But inside her apartment, her eyes clear. She sits upright, distracted by the Mexican television drama which has been running every day for a year. She says it’s rubbish, but she watches. Her face is oddly delicate on its thick neck, and her eyes cornflower blue. Even now, at eighty-seven, she intermittently looks pretty, and in her youth her looks were a dangerous blessing.

  She worked in the Russian embassy in Berlin, she says, and joined some fragile movement accused of opposing Stalin. She was arrested early in 1938 and taken from Moscow to Vorkuta: a guileless Communist who seems to have believed in legal process. This belief has never been cancelled. She works now where I met her, at Memorial, an organisation devoted to the memory of the vanished millions, the dead she will not forget.

  ‘We lived half underground at first, then in tent-huts until we built barracks. It wasn’t the temperature which hurt, but the winds. The winds tore through you.’ Her arms wrap her body. ‘At first I worked in the mines, then we were thrown into road-building. Then when the road was finished, I was put back in the mines.’ Her talk is sometimes sabotaged by laughter, as if she is still incredulous; then her blue eyes seem detached from it all, born survivors.

  ‘Because I was considered–how to say this?–a dangerous criminal, I didn’t sleep in ordinary barracks. I was kept separate, in a hut with four others, and two guards. We slept on two shelves. But the worst thing was to receive no letters. My husband was an army doctor, but he repudiated me to protect our children. In any case, what could I have written to him? “I’m fine”! But he repudiated me, and I didn’t write. And of course the censor read everything….’

  I ask: ‘You were never ill?’

  ‘No, never.’ Then, almost in afterthought, she says: ‘Ah, yes, just once. In 1941 I caught typhus.’ I stare at her. A lice-borne typhus killed thousands in the Vorkuta camps. ‘I expected these eruptions all over my body, but they didn’t come. Instead my temperature soared. Then my hair fell out and they realised I had enteric fever. I was taken into isolation. I was there a long time, a long time.’ She seems to be trying to remember something. It flickers away. ‘That was all right. I was alone.’

  I feel like a voyeur, ashamed, but I ask: ‘What was it like, the work?’ I think: perhaps, day to day, it was not quite as people have written it, perhaps only the worst was recalled, the uncommon.

  She starts to rock a little on the sofa, backwards and forwards, heavily. Her head turns to the television, where the soap opera is proceeding among yachts and tuxedoes. ‘It was hardest when we built the roads. So many died! The trouble was exhaustion, especially for the men. Somehow women seemed immune, stronger. Those who came first–scientists and administrators–they weren’t used to physical work, and they died easily. But the worst time came in the war. Up to 1941 there was something to eat, if only dried potatoes. But in 1941 there was famine all over Russia, and the labour and hunger killed very many.’ Her voice has levelled into calm. ‘There were embankments along the road, and when a person died we used to dig a hole and cover his head with his pea-jacket, and heap the gravel over him.’ She leans forward, and smooths her hands above the carpet, tenderly. She is laughing, as if from a great distance. ‘And later we laid rails over them, and soon the trains were running over their graves. That’s where the trains still run, over their graves.’ She touches my hand, as if it is I who need comforting. ‘Often the ground was harder than stone, so we had
to wait until summer. Then a work-team dug a long trench and threw the bodies in, and that was it. After executions too, they’d dig a brothers’ grave.’ Her body starts to rock again. ‘We knew the war might be coming to an end when we got proper funerals, and coffins. And after 1945 whole echelons of Ukrainians, Belorussians and Germans poured in. Then we knew it must be over.’

  She is breathing faster on the sofa beside me, and I wonder if I have asked too much of her. I say: ‘I’m sorry for asking.’

  ‘Many suffered more than I did. Of course there were all sorts of people there, blatnye too, and different things happened….’

  It is impossible to guess what she is remembering. The women suffered peculiarly. The female politicals, the ‘roses’, were tormented by the criminal ‘violets’, some of whom were slightly insane; and faced by men they were all powerless. Once two brigades of convalescent women were mass-raped by blatnye.

  But she says: ‘I just worked hard, and I kept quiet and nobody was very cruel to me, not very.’ When she grows animated I glimpse the girl in her, and wonder if she received protection at a cost, as other young women did, from an official or a soldier. And were the guards cruel, I ask, or only callous?

  ‘They just did what they were told,’ she says. ‘After all, if we escaped, they would end up like us.’

  I don’t like this easy understanding. I want her to be angry. ‘Did they think you guilty?’

  ‘Yes, yes, they supposed us all guilty.’ She stares down at her hands. Her thinning hair silvers her neck in lank curls. ‘Well, maybe in their souls they doubted it. Or perhaps later they began to think that so many couldn’t be guilty. But they kept their distance from us.’