Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes (9 page)

“A year! You could sit that out on the shit-bucket!”

My cell-mates in Syzran jail think I’ve got off lightly for menacing society with malicious hooliganism of a particularly vicious form.

Olga visits me after the trial. “Vanya,” she pleads, “I never expected them to send you to prison. I tried to withdraw my statement but they threatened to give me two years for laying false charges. And you heard the judge…”

At the trial she wept and asked them not to punish me, but the judge told her to be quiet.

“Perhaps he was right,” I admonish her. “If every wife was allowed to change her mind trials all over the country would collapse and there would be chaos.”

We have nothing left to say to each other. If I tell Olga what I think of her she’ll walk away believing I deserve to be in prison. “Don’t worry about me,” I say. “It makes a change to be living here. The company is delightful.”

I babble on about prison life until it is time for her to go. She throws me a look of despair as she leaves.

Waiting for the trial was the worst part; now I know how long my sentence will be I settle down to await my transfer to a labour
camp. I can’t say I am depressed; in fact I’m curious about my
fellow
inmates and interested to find out what camp life will be like.

In the jail we are housed in long barrack huts that we call cowsheds. As new prisoners come in they talk about what they have done. One or two swear they will never again pick up a knife or a glass of vodka, but most see their arrival in prison as pure bad luck. They don’t see any justice in their sentence and are sure it will be their last.

The boy in the bunk next to mine is an exception. Vovik is a country lad of 18 who has been sentenced for robbing village stores. “A thief’s life is the best of all,” he claims, “I want no other. Robbing those stores is like shooting fish in a barrel: they don’t have alarms. We find out beforehand where they keep the money. The assistants leave the takings in the shop overnight because they don’t trust their husbands. We helped ourselves a few times and then we went to the Black Sea for a holiday.”

“What did you do there?”

“We ate ice cream until we burst and went to the cinema as often as we liked. The trouble was, as we changed the notes we’d stolen our pockets became so weighted down with coins that our trousers hung off our arses. One night in the park we poured all our loose change into a flowerbed. Unfortunately a policeman noticed. He got suspicious and pulled us in. They kicked us round a bit and one of my mates squealed. We each got three years.”

“What’s the point of stealing a few roubles just to get caught and end up inside like this?” I want to know.

“I never saw ice cream on the collective farm. In Sochi I ate it day and night! Stealing is easy – I’m going to take it up again as soon as they let me out.”

Vovik spends his time drawing elaborate ballpoint churches
on handkerchiefs. Prisoners soak these and press them to their backs, leaving delicate tracings which are then tattooed into the skin. Vovik’s churches are very popular and he has orders from other cells besides ours. He is a good-natured boy, willing to share out country foodstuffs sent in by grateful village
shop-assistants
, along with knitted gloves, socks and scarves.

“I’m carrying the can for them,” he explains. “They all have their hands in the till too.”

I am glad of the odd scrap from Vovik’s parcels. I refuse the food my wife sends in but it’s hard to exist on prison rations. In the morning we are issued half a loaf of clay-like bread which has to last the whole day. Taking a tip from the old lags, I try not to gobble up my bread at once but keep some to chew in the evening. This is important. Those who eat theirs all at once spend the whole day looking at the others’ bread with hungry eyes. Some men develop an insatiable desire for food, begging it from the other zeks. This is the road to losing your human dignity.

I have hardly got used to prison routine in Syzran when the shout comes to pack up our things and assemble outside. We are marched through town to the station. I follow on behind in a cart with four women prisoners. My leg prevents me from keeping up with the men.

At the station we’re penned in by snarling Alsatians straining at their chains. With kicks and cuffs the guards make us sit on the floor. Townspeople and travellers mill about but no one stands and gawps. Men casually reach into their pockets as they pass and throw us cigarettes. An old lady pushes past the guards and silently places a bundle of pies on a prisoner’s lap.

From the outside, our ‘Stolypin’ carriages look no different to a normal passenger car except that there are no windows
on one side. Each compartment holds about twenty men, and is sectioned off from the corridor by steel bars. Experienced prisoners make straight for the top bunk and kick away anyone who tries to follow them. We have no idea where we’re going. Finally, when the train starts to move we learn our destination is to be a camp near Tashkent.

Our bread and herring rations make us crazy with thirst. The guards give out scarcely any water since they can’t be bothered to escort us to the toilet. “Have patience lads,” says an elderly zek, “salt absorbs water, so if you eat the herring you won’t sweat so much. You’ll hold water in your bodies and the craving will pass.”

As the train pulls into Saratov news comes through that an earthquake has destroyed most of Tashkent. We are diverted to Astrakhan. When we reach that city I am squeezed into a Black Maria with 32 others. A prisoner loses consciousness in the stifling van. No one takes any notice of our cries for help.

The old zek raises his voice: “Okay lads, start rocking.”

We lean first to one side of the van and then the other. The vehicle begins to tilt dangerously and the driver stops. The guards unload the sick man and send him to hospital. Then they punish us by taking away our tobacco.

“We once derailed a train this way,” says the old man. “When you’re looking at 25 years’ hard labour you don’t care what you do.”

Corrective Labour Camp No. 4 holds people who have committed crimes against the person. The camp is so near the town that at night we can hear trolleybuses rattling past. While we’re waiting to be processed the elderly zek from the Black Maria explains the nature of the camp.

“It’s a bitches zone,
17
although there haven’t been any here for a long while. However there are a lot of goats.
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Most of them are SVPs.”
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Almost half the inmates wear SVP armbands. They help to keep internal order. If for example, an SVP sees someone smoking in an unauthorised place, and the guards are taking no notice, he’ll run to the watch and point it out.

Recruitment for the SVP is carried out by the ‘Godfather,’ the head of the camp. He interviews everyone, explaining that only members of the SVP get remission and other concessions. When my turn comes I decide it best not to tell him what I think of SVPs. Instead I try to convince him of my unsuitability for the role.

“A condition of my sentence is that I am treated for alcoholism.”

“We have no such facilities in this camp.”

“And I am to serve my full sentence, so what’s the point of joining the SVP?”

The Godfather lets me go.

I didn’t become a Pioneer leader in my youth and I’m not about to start telling tales now. Our school teachers wanted to create a nation of stool-pigeons, but fortunately not everyone listened to them. It is the same in camp; the rest of us despise SVPs as the lowest form of human life.

Two SVPs in my cell agree to share all the extra food they receive from parcels and bonuses. When their locker is full one of them hides a razor blade in the other’s bed and informs the guard. A search party finds the blade, the culprit gets ten days in the isolator and his friend eats all the food. That incident teaches me a lot about the SVPs’ mentality.

Those who work and meet their quotas receive a small amount of money with which to buy goods in the camp shop. Anything unfit for sale in Astrakhan’s stores comes to us: piles of
stuck-together
sweets, dirty sugar, stinking herring and gritty rusks. The shop also sells rough shag tobacco for 6 kopecks a packet. Vodka and tea comes in via civilian workers in the industrial zone. They bribe the guards to look the other way.

On my arrival I go straight to the camp trader and offer my change of underwear for a very low price. Now I can buy enough tobacco to last until my first pay. I won’t have to humble myself by begging for it from other prisoners. Another prisoner tells me I’m an idiot, for I could have sold my new pair of pants and a vest for two roubles.

“The idiot was the one who bought them. He paid for rags and I bought independence!”

The next morning new arrivals are assembled for work detail. We are to be sent to an industrial zone to make prefab homes for the virgin lands of Siberia. As we line up one of the camp officers asks: “Is there anyone here who has completed their secondary education?”

I step forward.

“You will help in the library.”

I am lucky to get such a cushy job. In the morning I hand out letters and in the evening prisoners come for books and newspapers. ‘Soviet Woman’ is especially popular. Pictures of pretty women adorn walls and lockers. The prisoners replace them as soon as the guards tear them down. Convinced that the KGB checks which books they borrow, some zeks take out all 40 volumes of Lenin’s collected works.

My days pass easily enough; the only problem is the camp storekeeper, a former colonel, who keeps dropping into the library. This man destroys any lingering respect I might have for epaulettes: only in Russia could such an utterly stupid man have risen to such a high rank. His self-regard is so absolute it shocks me. He shows me the book he is writing.
Life is not a Bed of Roses
describes his life from birth to prison camp. In his childhood he was the top student, he ran the fastest and jumped the highest. In his youth he was more handsome and intelligent than his peers, in the army braver than his comrades-in-arms. His wife was the regimental beauty; he killed her from jealousy.

Our literary journals have already rejected the first volume of the colonel’s work; he assumes this is because it contains grammatical errors. Now he wants my help with corrections. I try to excuse myself, saying I’m not very literate, but he persists. In the end I give in. The task oppresses me but I haven’t got the courage to tell the colonel the truth.

A fellow prisoner named Oleg comes to my rescue. He is an intelligent lad who dropped out of university. We become friends
and spend all our free time together. He helps me proofread the colonel’s book and we laugh over it together.

The library is stocked with classics and Dostoevsky’s works are constantly borrowed, especially
Crime and Punishment
. But the zeks are only attracted by the title. and return the book disillusioned, having failed to understand its archaic language. I try to warn them in advance: I don’t believe that someone of forty can suddenly become converted to Dostoevsky.

I can’t work out why the correspondence of our greatest authors should be in such constant demand. I’ve read Blok’s letters and was disappointed – and I’m more educated than most. One prisoner after another borrows Turgenev’s letters to Pauline Viardot. Old editions of local papers are also in heavy demand. Finally Oleg explains the mystery.

“Until last year petitioners for divorce had to make an announcement in their local papers. For example:
Citizeness Ivanovna, Anna Semyonova, born 1942, living at 5, Sadovaya Street, has initiated divorce proceedings…

“Prisoners note down the names and addresses of divorced women and then they copy out Turgenev’s letters. Imagine how citizeness Ivanovna feels. She is alone after kicking out the husband who sold all her furniture for drink. Suddenly she receives a letter from an unknown admirer! And written in such effusive language that it makes her head spin. She replies and thus she becomes what we call an external student. Yura and Fedka each have three external students. They sometimes get parcels. There’s a woman in our street at home who married a prisoner after she became his external student.”

“But can’t they see from our address that this is a camp?”

“The zeks say they are working in a secret military plant, which
is why the address is just a number. I am sure many women guess the truth but all the same they continue to write. It’s better to receive a letter than nothing at all. Remember the joke about two women friends who meet each other in the street? One says:

‘How’s the old man, drinking?’

‘Yes, the parasite.’

‘Knocking you around?’

‘Yes, the bastard.’

‘Well, you can’t complain, at least he’s in good health.’”

I laugh. Being a married woman in the happiest country in the world is better than being divorced, widowed or single. “Don’t you have an external student?” I ask Oleg.

“I don’t need one. My own wife’s enough. She had me arrested for beating her up. At my trial she pleaded with the judge to let me off but that only annoyed him.