Authors: Anne Applebaum
Gulag Voices
1.
T
o describe Dmitry Likhachev as a former Gulag prisoner is a little bit like describing Albert Einstein as a talented amateur violinist: he was that, but also so much more. Likhachev was born in 1906 and belonged to the extraordinarily cultured world of prerevolutionary Saint Petersburg. Like many of his contemporaries, he was arrested in 1928 for taking part in an academic discussion circle and was thus one of the early victims of the Bolsheviks’ systematic destruction of Russian civil society. In the view of the Soviet secret police, any organized group, even one devoted to the discussion of literature—Likhachev’s fellow club members saluted one another in ancient Greek—was by definition an enemy of the state. Accordingly, they accused Likhachev of planning counter-revolutionary activity. He served out his sentence on the Solovetsky Islands, the Soviet Union’s first political prison.
In one sense Likhachev was lucky: he survived his experience and did not fall victim to the waves of mass execution that washed over Solovetsky from time to time. He was released in 1932. In the years that followed, he slowly rose to public prominence, becoming Russia’s best-known literary historian, critic, and scholar. He wrote hundreds of books and articles, touching on everything from medieval icons to the architecture of Saint Petersburg. By the time of his death, in 1999, he had become a national institution.
His description of the four years he spent in the Solovetsky camps also constitutes a significant contribution to Russian culture because of what it reveals about the earliest days of the Gulag. The Solovetsky camps, known by the acronym SLON (Solovetsky Camp of Special Significance), were located on an archipelago in the White Sea and were the first prisons to be entirely controlled by the Soviet secret police. Here a notorious group of policemen also began experimenting with the forced-labor system. Prisoners in the camps cultivated furs for export, cut trees, and canned fish. They were “paid” for their labor with rations: those who worked harder received more food, those who could not work received less and eventually starved to death. The commercial success of Solovetsky and the rationing first put into use there helped persuade Stalin to expand the entire camp system in 1929. Using Solovetsky as a model, he aimed to use slave labor to mine Russia’s natural resources, to boost the Soviet economy, and to terrorize the population as well.
As Likhachev’s writing make clear, these early camps had an experimental feel. Rules were unpredictable, guards were irrational, prisoners might be treated well or badly, and it was hard to say why. Although some prisoners were able to publish magazines and conduct scientific experiments—at one point the main island contained a botanical garden as well as a mink farm—prisoners unable to fulfill their work assignments died of starvation. Murder and torture were common.
Likhachev wrote several essays about his years on the islands, including a famous linguistic investigation of the slang used by the criminals incarcerated alongside him. These essays were all published in the late 1980s, after Gorbachev came to power. The essay reprinted here describes Likhachev’s arrest in February 1928 and illustrates the odd, slovenly atmosphere of the pre-Stalinist Soviet prison system.
It was early February 1928. The clock in our flat on Oraniyenbaumskaya Street struck eight. I was alone at home, and was suddenly seized by an icy dread. I had not the least idea why. I had just heard the sound of the clock for the very first time. My father didn’t like to hear the clock strike, and the chimes had been turned off even before I was born. Why had the clock decided to strike for me for the first time in twenty-one years with its measured solemnity?
They came for me on the eighth of February early in the morning; there was a uniformed investigator and Sabelnikov, commandant of our buildings at the Pechatny Dvor.
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The latter was terribly upset (the same fate befell him later), but the investigator was polite and even sympathetic toward my parents, especially when my father turned pale and collapsed into the leather armchair in his study. The investigator took him a glass of water, and it was a long time before I could shake off my feelings of acute pity for my father.
The search itself didn’t take long. The investigator checked a piece of paper that he had, confidently approached the bookshelf, and pulled down H. Ford’s
International Jewry
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in its red binding. It all became clear to me: one of my university acquaintances had called for no particular reason a week before my arrest, looked at my books, and asked, with a voluptuous smile, whether I had anything anti-Soviet. He assured me that he was terribly keen on such lack of taste and vulgarity.
My mother put some things together (soap, underwear, warm clothes), and we bid each other good-bye. As everyone does in these situations I said, “This is madness, it’ll soon be sorted out, and I’ll be back soon.” But at the time mass and irreversible arrests were in full swing.
In the black Ford, then quite a novelty in Leningrad, we drove past the Exchange. By that time it was getting light, and the deserted city was unusually lovely. The investigator said nothing. Anyway, why am I calling him that? My real investigator was Aleksandr (Albert) Robertovich Stromin, who was behind all the prosecutions of the intelligentsia of the late 1920s, served in Saratov as head of the NKVD,
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and was shot “as a Trotskyist” in 1938.
After being searched and relieved of my cross, my silver watch, and a few rubles, I was taken to a cell on the fifth floor of the DPZ building
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in Shpalernaya Street (on the outside this building has three floors, but for the purpose of preventing escapes the building stands in a sort of tank). The cell was no. 273—the same as absolute zero.
At university I had been a friend of Lev Karsavin,
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and when I got to the DPZ I found myself, as fate would have it, in the same cell as the brother of a woman friend of his. I remember that boy: he wore a velvet jacket and sang Gypsy ballads in a fine voice, quietly, so that the warders shouldn’t hear. Shortly before I had been reading Karsavin’s book
Noctes Petropolitanae
.
The good six months I spent in that cell was the hardest period of my life. It was hard psychologically. But it was a time when I met a huge number of people who lived by quite different principles.
I will mention a few of my cellmates. In cell 273, intended for one occupant, and into which I was thrown, there was an energetic
nepman
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by the name of Kotliar, a shop owner of some description. He’d been arrested the previous day (this was the period when NEP was being abolished). He immediately proposed that we clean up the cell. The air there was dreadfully foul, and the walls, which had once been painted, were black with fungus. The lavatory seat was filthy and had not been cleaned for a long time. Kotliar asked the warders for some rags, and a day or two later they threw us somebody’s woolen underpants. Kotliar suggested that they’d been stripped off someone who had been shot. Choking back the nausea in our throats we set about scraping the mildew off the walls and washing the floor, which was soft with filth, but the main objective was cleaning the lavatory. Two days’ hard labor did the trick, and the result was a cell filled with fresh air. The third person to be pushed into our “one-man” cell was a professional thief. When I was summoned at night for interrogation he advised me to put my coat on (I had with me my father’s warm winter coat lined with squirrel fur). “At interrogations you’ve got to keep warm—you’ll feel calmer.” The interrogation was my only one (if you don’t count the filling up of questionnaires beforehand). I sat there in my coat as if in armor. Stromin, the investigator (the organizer, as I’ve already said, of all the actions of the late ’20s and early ’30s against the intelligentsia, including the unsuccessful “academic” one), failed to extract from me any of the information that he wanted (my parents were told, “Your son’s behaving badly”). At the start of the interrogation he asked me, “Why are you wearing your coat?” I replied, “I’ve got a cold” (that was what the thief had told me to say). Stromin was evidently afraid of catching influenza, as it was then called, and the interrogation didn’t last long enough to be exhausting.
Later we had a Chinese boy in the cell (for some reason there were a lot of Chinese in DPZ in 1928), from whom I tried unsuccessfully to learn Chinese; Count Rochefort (such seems to have been his surname), a descendant of the man who set up the tsarist prison system; a peasant boy who’d come to town for the first time and had taken a “suspicious” interest in a seaplane, the like of which he’d never before seen. And numerous others. Interest in all these people kept me going.
For six months our cell was taken for exercise by “Granddad,” as we called him, who had done the same for many revolutionaries under the tsarist government. Once he got to know us he showed us the cells where various famous revolutionaries had been held. I regret that I made no attempt at remembering the numbers. “Granddad” was a stern veteran, but he took part in the warders’ favorite game—passing a live rat back- and forward among themselves with brooms. When a warder noticed a rat running across the yard he would start to sweep it with a broom until it died of exhaustion. If there were other warders present they would join in the hunt and pass the rat from one to another, shouting as they did so, sweeping it toward an imaginary goal. This sadistic sport roused the warders to a rare pitch of excitement. The rat would immediately try to get away, escape, but they would keep on sweeping it, screaming and yelling all the time. The prisoners could watch this through the “muzzles” in the cells and compare the fate of the rat with their own.
After six months the investigation was over, and I was transferred to the general library cell. There were many extremely interesting people there, including N. P. Antsiferov,
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although, as he points out in his memoirs, I had already left by the time he arrived. We slept on the floor, even right by the lavatory pedestal, and for amusement we took turns to present “papers” with following discussion. The habit of discussing questions of general interest, which members of the Russian intelligentsia never tired of, sustained them even in the prisons and the camps. The papers were all on every kind of extravagant subject, and their theses were in sharp contradiction to accepted views. This was a characteristic feature of all papers delivered in prison and camp. The most impossible theories were dreamed up. I too delivered a paper, my theme being that every man determines his own fate even when events seemed to occur at random. Thus it was that all the Romantic poets died young—Keats, Shelley, Lermontov,
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etc. They had, as it were, thrust themselves upon death and misfortune. Lermontov had even begun to limp on the same leg as Byron. I also expressed my views on the comparative longevity of Zhukovsky. Realists, by contrast, lived long. And we, following the traditions of the Russian intelligentsia, had brought about our own arrests. It was our “free-will fate.” …
The most interesting man in the library cell was the head of the Petrograd Boy Scouts, Count Vladimir Mikhailovich Shuvalov. I had met him now and then in the streets just after the Revolution in Scout uniform, with his long Scout pole and distinctive hat. Now, in the cell, he was gloomy but strong and smart. He was studying logic. As far as I recall these were notions continuing Husserl’s
Researches in Logic
. I don’t understand how he was able to shut himself off from the dreadful noise in his cell and concentrate on his studies. He must have had great willpower and enthusiasm. When he expounded the results of his thinking I had difficulty in understanding him, although I had studied logic under Vvedensky and, like Shuvalov himself, Povarin.
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Eventually he was exiled, and I never saw him again. I think that a relative of his, or perhaps his wife, worked on the icons in the Russian Museum.
When you consider, our jailers did some strange things. Having arrested us for meeting at the most once a week to spend a few hours in discussion of philosophical, artistic, and religious questions that aroused our interest, first of all they put us all together in a prison cell and then in camps and swelled our numbers with others from our city interested in the resolution of the same philosophical questions, while in the camps we were mixed with a wide and generous range of such people from Moscow, Rostov, the Caucasus, the Crimea, and Siberia. We passed through a gigantic school of mutual education before vanishing once more in the limitless expanses of our Motherland.
In the library cell, where people were sent on completion of investigation to await sentence, I saw Nonconformists, Baptists (one of these had crossed the frontier from somewhere in the West, was expecting to be shot and couldn’t sleep at night), Satanists (there really were such people), Theosophists, homespun Masons (they used to meet somewhere on the Bolshoi Prospekt in the Petrograd District and prayed to the sound of the cello; how vulgar, if I might say so!). The OGPU satirists, the “Tur brothers,” tried now and then to show us in a ridiculous and insulting light; they published a piece about us in
Leningradskaia Pravda
, thick with lies, entitled “Oaken Ashes” and one entitled “The Light Blue International” about some of the others, and so on. M. M. Bakhtin later wrote in his memoirs about “Oaken Ashes.”
Our relatives too gathered, meeting at transfer points and at various little windows where information about us was given out, or more often was not. They were advised what to hand over, what to give us for when we stopped, where and what to provide for their prisoners. Many made friends. By that time we could guess how much they were going to give and to whom.
One day we were all summoned “without belongings” to the governor of the prison. In a deliberately lugubrious tone, specially assumed for the occasion, he read out our sentences. We stood and listened. Igor Yevgenevich Anichkov was absolutely priceless. With a markedly uninterested air he looked at the paper on the office wall, the ceiling, anywhere but at the governor, and when the latter had finished reading and was expecting us to hurl ourselves upon him with the usual lamentations—“We’re innocent,” “We shall demand a proper trial and a proper defense,” and the like—Anichkov, who had received five years like myself, asked with exaggerated indifference, “Is that all? May we go?” and, without waiting for a reply, turned and walked toward the door, taking us with him to the complete bewilderment of the governor and the escorts, who took a while to recover. It was magnificent!