Gulag Voices (13 page)

It was then that the formerly clear and precise distinction between what was permissible and what was not began to blur for Zaliva. In order to retain the goodwill of his superiors he needed clever planners and accountants, experienced engineers, capable organizers, and honest warehousemen. He could only find them among the “politicals.” Zaliva’s sense of self-preservation was so developed and strong, it turned out, that he began to send the “socially acceptable” on gang labor out into the forest and appoint to all the decisive posts those recommended by the head of planning, the chief accountant, and the doctor. The foreman and the planner blatantly exploited Zaliva’s stupidity. They concealed almost half of the already very modest output, and after the daily report, Zaliva, pale with fright, would not summon the planner but himself run into the planning office and, stuttering, beg him almost obsequiously to “throw in” a few more dozens or hundreds of cubic meters … By nighttime the formerly fearsome and self-confident boss became a pitiful wretch, sweating from terrible fear. For now, every night, the administration called up each camp in turn for a report.

At about midnight the most important figures in the camp would gather in Zaliva’s office. The director sat behind the lavish desk made for him by his own personal cabinetmaker, surrounded by jailers of various rank—the head of the guard, the “godfather,” or security officer, and the heads of the medical and culture units. A little way off sat the prisoner heads of sections—the planner, accountant, norm-setter, works inspector, and the foremen. It was at the latter that Zaliva now gazed, with fear, suffering, and hope in his eyes. How he was probably cursing that damned radio and the prisoner, a radio operator, who had so skillfully and quickly set up the equipment and, if need arose, was sitting here to correct any defects in transmission.

All sat, talking in a whisper, as if they might be overheard by their yet more powerful bosses, at this very moment assembled in Vozhael at Ustvymlag headquarters, and sitting in the awesome director’s office. Zaliva could not take his mournful, doglike eyes off the little box sitting on his desk. Finally, it began to crackle, gasp, and clear its throat. The voice of the head of production could suddenly be heard, calling all the camps participating in this roll-call report. Then the calmly insolent voice of the director himself rang out of the box. Since poor Zaliva was in charge of Camp No. 1, they began with him, and he was the butt of most of his superior’s anger and zeal.

“Zaliva! Report on output!”

Zaliva’s shaking voice was interrupted by a roar, “How much? How much? What are you up to there, you lazy good-for-nothings? What about the state plan? I sent you a contingent, and chucked in a few extra horses, now where’s the output? I’ll have you pile the logs on your prick, you idiot, and carry them here yourself!”

When Zaliva tried to interject a timid word of self-justification or a promise to do better in this stream of abuse he was shut up in such a way that even our experienced jailers began to look firmly at the floor. At last, this torment drew temporarily to a close: “If you don’t raise output by 150 cubic meters [about 5,000 cubic feet] tomorrow I’ll send you bare-assed into the forest to fetch the wood yourself! What else is left if you can’t force your zeks to work!?”

Then the director turned to the other camps, more fortunate and, often, less fortunate. From time to time, he would remember Zaliva, “Are you there, Zaliva? You hear how they’re working at No. 14? And they’ve less men, and fewer horses! They know how to make people work there. They know what the state plan means. They’ve probably organized a health resort at No. 1, since they can see what a fool their boss is!”

Yet Zaliva believed that he also knew how to make people work. He had often forced the doctors and all the camp “trusties” to go out and fell timber. But those cubic meters, where was he to make up those damned cubic meters?! Only by appealing to the “Trotskyists” could he get them. Zaliva pleaded an extra hundred cubic meters from the planner “for his own personal needs”; he agreed to let the foreman’s mistress live in his cubicle with him; he was agreeable to anything, in fact, that could help him keep his difficult but still desirably superior position. Apart from the nightly radio reports there was also the daytime. Then he sat in his office, punishing and, where necessary, pardoning; he rode around the “work sites” on superb light sledges pulled by a pure-blooded (“anemic”) trotter; and, having survived another twenty-four hours, he would sit down and calculate the day’s profits and losses. For, apart from everything else, Zaliva was also unbelievably stingy. He was afraid to steal because he was almost as great a coward as he was a miser. He tried to spend as little as possible on himself and his wife. His dinner came from the prisoners’ kitchen, to be “tried first” by him. Since the meal he received was always filling and delicious he took away the unconsumed part for his wife to eat. Even his bread was brought from the bakery “for testing.” When his wife, nevertheless, had to pay for his food ration—it couldn’t be allowed to go to waste!—she wrote down the quantity and price of each item. Zaliva would then come to the accountant’s office with this slip of paper and check for himself that she hadn’t cheated him. Sometimes he would weigh out the food again. Everything in his house was under lock and key, and Zaliva took the keys with him. In the morning he handed his wife the food she needed to survive the day.

As the value of those working in the camps rose, comparatively, and the demands for output continually increased, Zaliva was steadily demoted. He was made deputy director, then sent to a small camp producing skis, and then somewhere else. Toward the end of the war I came across him in charge of a small outpost of another camp. After the war ended he discharged himself and sold off all his belongings. The prisoners were able to buy a few worn-out greatcoats and his large ginger cat. Zaliva bargained long and passionately with the zeks, listing all his pet’s exceptional qualities …

He returned to the Ukraine, taking with him his tormented wife, vast trunks packed with goodness knows what, and a fat pile of banknotes earned over years of zealous and loyal service to the state. He did not leave any friends behind him at Camp No. 1, but he bore no one any malice. Several months later, the chief of the escort guards received a contented and self-satisfied letter. They had appreciated him, after all, wrote Zaliva: he had been put in charge of a district MGB section in his own Poltava Region, and not sent back to the ferocious and tedious North.

…

COLONEL TARASIUK

“Only the first ten years are terrible. After that, you get used to it.” Apart from gallows humor there is a good deal of truth in this common camp saying. Under more-or-less routine conditions a zek who survived two to three years had a chance of serving out his whole sentence. By the summer of 1941 we were already calm and settled camp regulars. Those who couldn’t stand it became part of the night’s “C figures.” The survivors adapted and grew accustomed to the work; they established contact with their relatives outside and regularly received letters and parcels. By then we had made firm contact with other prisoners: we were friendly with some, and others were already almost family. We received many books from Moscow, and some of us were allowed to move about without an escorting guard. Zaliva was demoted, and the new bosses proved more reasonable. In their attempts to get more out of the prisoners they realized that it made sense to feed them better. It didn’t require particular intelligence or humanitarian enlightenment to grasp this truth: most of the bosses were former peasants and they knew how to look after livestock.

This went on until June 22, 1941, the day Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. The shock affected all without exception and among the bosses led to an idiotically pointless burst of warning and preventative measures. During the very first day of war all radio amplifiers were taken down, correspondence and newspapers were forbidden, and no more parcels were allowed. The working day was extended to ten and, by some enthusiasts, to twelve hours. All days off work were also canceled. And of course they immediately introduced very severe cuts in the food given to the zeks.

By autumn people were beginning to be struck down by pellagra. It was the first time we had heard this awful word. With horror we began to observe in ourselves the primary and then progressive symptoms of the “disease of despair,” as even the medical textbooks call it. The skin on our elbows became dry and rough and it peeled; dark spots appeared on our knuckles and rapidly turned black; around our throats a dark ring of patches blending with one another became ever clearer. Then followed a rapid loss of weight and uncontrollable diarrhea. That was almost the end. The diarrhea removed the mucous lining of the intestine, and it could not be restored. Nothing could bring someone back to life after that.

Within two to three months the camp was full of living skeletons. Only in the photographs presented by the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials have I seen such a degree of emaciation. Indifferent and without any will to live, corpselike figures covered by a taut gray skin sat on the board beds and calmly waited for death. Carts and then sledges carried the almost weightless bodies to the cemetery each morning. By spring of 1942 the camp had ceased to work altogether. It was difficult to find people still able to cut firewood and bury the dead.

And here the military enthusiasm of the camp administration was exposed as being quite inappropriate. The war could not be fought, they discovered, without timber. It was needed for building airplanes, for making skis and pit-props. Most important of all, it was essential for explosives. Cellulose is the basis of all modern gunpowders and it is obtained, as everyone knows, from wood pulp. No matter how great their need for more soldiers at the front, timber-industry workers were almost all exempted from service. Our bosses were also exempted—but they couldn’t supply the timber required of them: there was no one to cut it … Only then did their NKVD superiors start to do the minimum that reason required. Timber-felling zeks began to be fed as much as free workers. Correspondence was restored, the amplifiers were put back, and newspapers started to arrive. Prisoners were the only people in the country who were allowed to receive food parcels. The old bosses were quickly removed and others sent in to replace them.

It was then that we first heard the name of the new boss of Ustvymlag, Colonel Tarasiuk.

At this time the remaining prisoners from the evacuated Berezlag
4
joined our camp. When they described the man who had been their boss and was now to head all of Ustvymlag, they would give a very significant shake of the head and explain that Tarasiuk was the worst bastard of all. (The word they actually used, following the peculiar jargon of the camps, was
pederast,
but it meant misanthrope rather than sexual deviant.) The former Berezlag prisoners also recounted at length the colonel’s staggering administrative abilities. Yet they could not keep silent about this other, still more vividly pronounced, side to his character.

In fact, Tarasiuk represented the most extreme and fully developed type of slave owner. Before working in the camps, it was said, he had been in charge of Internal Affairs in Dagestan, in the north Caucasus, and was later removed from that prestigious post for “excesses.” If he was really in Dagestan in 1937, then it becomes understandable why a column of centenarian Caucasians could appear at Kotlas while we were in transit there. I do not exaggerate. An entire trainload of old men aged eighty and more suddenly arrived in the Russian North from Dagestan. They did not know any Russian and expressed no desire to mix with anyone else or say how they came to be there. They sat silently on their heels with their eyes closed, in their homespun clothes and distinctive tall shaggy fur hats. Only when it was time to pray to Mecca did they rouse themselves from this immobility. They had been “withdrawn” from Dagestan, explained the zeks who hung around Distribution, as part of the elimination of feudal survivals. Many Dagestanis did not recognize the Soviet courts and preferred to go to the elders, who would judge them according to
adat,
their own customs and traditions. In order to reorient the republic’s inhabitants toward more progressive forms of justice, all the old men were rounded up and given ten years apiece. Then they were sent to the North to die. This certainly bore the hallmark of Colonel Tarasiuk.

Now Tarasiuk was in charge of our camp, and we soon felt his purposeful and iron will. He traveled around all of Ustvymlag and drove the criminals out of any work linked with food, replacing them only with “politicals.” The ledger clerks in Supplies, the quartermasters, and the cooks grew pale with fear when Tarasiuk appeared. Those who could work in the forest were even better fed than their escorting guards and the free workers. Medicines appeared and nonprisoner doctors arrived. Special anti-pellagra rations were introduced. Tarasiuk restored the capacity of the camp to work with all the energy of a gifted and determined administrator. But the methods he used!

I first saw him at close range when he visited us in spring 1942. Accompanied by a vast entourage of bosses of all ranks, he examined everything in the camp, including the latrines. If he came across someone working in the office or doing another job inside, and it seemed to him that person was fit enough to cut timber and not idle about in the compound, he beckoned the unfortunate with a flexing of his finger (rather like the mythical giant Viy in Gogol’s tale).
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The name of the unlucky zek was immediately written down on the work distributor’s plywood slate. In the evening Tarasiuk summoned the section heads. I was then standing in for the senior norm-setter, and so, with all the prisoner-administrators (head of planning, chief accountant, works inspector, foremen, vets, and doctors), I found myself next to Tarasiuk.

He had the face of a Roman patrician, and a coldly calm and indifferent look. The way he sat down in the camp director’s armchair, lifted the telephone receiver, and ordered the switchboard operator to connect him with headquarters—and the way he then spoke with them—all conveyed that he had been accustomed to giving orders for many years. He was used to having the power of life and death over those around him. The last phrase should be understood in the most literal sense. Moreover, it applied to the free workers just as much as the prisoners. The free workers were all exempted from fighting. Tarasiuk merely had to say, “Remove their exemption,” and any of the bosses could be sent straight into battle. Telegrams “regretting to inform …” came for them with astonishing rapidity, as Tarasiuk was well aware.