Kolyma Tales (47 page)

This last right was extremely important, although in many of the first-aid stations at the mines, dysentery was cured with a solution of potassium permanganate, while the same solution – just a little thicker – was smeared on abscessed wounds and frostbite cases.

A doctor could officially free a man from work by writing in a book: ‘Hospitalize’, ‘Send to health clinic’, or ‘Increase rations’. And in a ‘working’ camp the doctor’s most important job was to determine ‘labor categories’, the degree to which a prisoner was capable of working. The setting of the different labor categories also determined the work norm of each prisoner. A doctor could even free a man – by declaring him an invalid under the authority of the famous Article 458. Once a person was freed from work because of illness, no one could make him work. The doctor could not be controlled in these instances; only medical personnel higher up on the administrative ladder could do that. As far as treatment was concerned, the doctor was subordinate to no one.

It is important to remember that the doctor was also responsible for what went into the food – with regard both to quantity and quality.

The convict’s only defender in any real sense was the camp doctor. The latter’s power was considerable, since none of the camp authorities could control the actions of a specialist. An inaccurate, unconscientious diagnosis made by a doctor could only be determined by a medical worker of an equal or higher rank – that is, another doctor. Relations were almost inevitably hostile between camp authorities and their medical personnel. The very nature of their duties pulled them in different directions. The authorities always wanted group B (temporarily relieved from work because of illness) to be smaller so that the camp would have as many people as possible working. The doctor, on the other hand, saw that the bounds of good and evil had long since been passed, that people being sent to work were sick, tired and exhausted, and had a right to be freed from work in much greater numbers than the camp authorities desired.

If he had a strong enough will, the doctor could insist that people be relieved from work. Without a doctor’s sanction, no camp administrator could send people to work.

A doctor could save a convict from heavy labor. All convicts were divided, like horses, into categories of labor. There might be three, four or five such labor categories, although this term sounds as if it comes from a dictionary of philosophy. That is one of life’s witticisms or, rather, mockeries.

To give a man an ‘easy’ labor category often meant saving him from death. The saddest of all were those convicts who attempted to deceive the doctor and get into an easy labor category, and who were, in fact, more seriously ill than they themselves believed.

A doctor could release a man from work, send him to the hospital, and even classify him as an ‘invalid’, thus returning him to the mainland. True, the bed in the hospital and actually getting sent back didn’t depend on the doctor, but it was at least a start.

All this and many other things relating to everyday routine were understood perfectly and exploited by the criminal ment in the camp. The thieves’ code of morality prescribed a special attitude toward the doctor. Aside from legends about ‘prison rations’ and the supposed ‘gentleman thief’, the legend of the ‘Red Cross’ was prevalent in the criminal world. The Red Cross was a criminal term, and I tense up every time I hear it.

The camp criminals openly demonstrated their respect for medical personnel, promised them their support, and made a distinction between doctors and ‘politicals’.

A legend grew up, which is still told in the camps today, of how a doctor was robbed by petty thieves, and how other, more important criminals found the stolen goods and returned them with an apology.

But this went further than mere stories. The criminals genuinely did not steal from doctors, or at least tried not to. Doctors, if they were civilians, were given presents of objects or money. If the doctors were convicts, the method would be persistent requests for treatment and threats to kill. Doctors who rendered assistance to criminals were praised.

To have a doctor ‘on the hook’ was the dream of every band of criminals. A criminal could be crude and insolent with any supervisor (he was even obliged to make a show of this sort of spirit under certain circumstances), but he would fawn, even cringe before a doctor. No criminal would allow a harsh word to be said about a doctor unless he realized that his complaint was not believed and that the doctor did not intend to satisfy his insolent demands.

No medical worker, the criminals believe, should be concerned about his fate in the camp. They assist him both in a material and a moral sense. Material assistance consists of stolen clothing. The criminal renders moral support by bestowing his conversation on the doctor, visiting him, being pleasant.

It is easy for a doctor to send some robust murderer and extortionist to the hospital instead of a sick political prisoner exhausted by excessive work. It is easy to send him there and keep him there until the criminal himself is ready to check out.

It is easy to send criminals to other hospitals for treatment if they need to go there for their own criminal, ‘higher’ purposes.

It is easy to cover up for criminals who fake illness, and all the criminals are fakers and malingerers with their eternal trophic ulcers on shin and hip, with their trivial but impressive slashes on the stomach, and so on.

It is easy to hand over all the codeine and caffeine supplies together with the entire supply of drugs and alcoholic tinctures for use by one’s ‘benefactors’.

For many years I was responsible for admitting new patients to the camp hospital. One hundred percent of the fakers officially sent by doctors were thieves. They either bribed the local doctor or threatened him, and he would make out the false medical slips.

Sometimes the local doctor or the local camp head would try to get rid of an annoying or dangerous element in his ‘household’ by sending criminals to the hospital. They hoped at least to get a rest from them, if not to dispose of them altogether.

If a doctor was bribed, that was bad, very bad. But if he was frightened, that could be forgiven, for the criminals did not make empty threats. Once a doctor was sent from the hospital to the first-aid clinic of the Spokoiny Mine, where there was a large number of criminals. His name was Surovoy, and he had recently graduated from the Moscow Medical Institute. He was a young doctor, and – more important – he was a young convict doctor. Surovoy’s friend tried to persuade him not to go. He could have refused and been sent to a general work gang instead of taking on this patently dangerous work. Surovoy had come to the hospital from a general work gang; he was afraid to return to it and agreed to go to the mine and work at his profession. The camp authorities gave him instructions but no advice on how to conduct himself. He was categorically forbidden to send healthy thieves from the mine to the hospital. Within a month he was killed while admitting patients; on his body were fifty-two knife wounds.

In the women’s zone of another mine an elderly woman doctor, Spizel, was cut down with an axe by her own orderly, a female criminal named ‘Cooky’ who was carrying out the ‘sentence’ passed by the other criminals. That was what the expression ‘Red Cross’ meant in those instances when the doctors could not be frightened or bribed.

Naïve doctors sought an explanation for these contradictions from the ideologists of the criminal world. One of the chief ideological leaders was a patient at the time in the surgical ward. Two months earlier he had used the usual foolproof method of getting himself out of solitary confinement: he sprinkled powder from a styptic pencil in his eyes – both of them, just to be sure. It just so happened that medical aid was late in arriving, and he was blinded. He was a bedridden invalid in the hospital and was to be shipped back to the mainland. But like Sir Williams from
Rocambole
, he continued – even though blind – to take part in making plans for future crimes, and in criminal ‘courts of honor’ was considered an incontestable authority. In response to a doctor’s question about the Red Cross and the murder of medical personnel by thieves, Sir Williams answered with that peculiar accent characteristic of so many of the thieves: ‘In life there are a number of situations in which the law should not be applied.’ He was a real specialist on dialectics, this Sir Williams.

In his
Notes from the House of the Dead
, Dostoevsky never knew anyone from the true criminal world. He would never have allowed himself to express sympathy for that world.

The evil acts committed by criminals in camp are innumerable. The unfortunates are those from whom the thief steals their last rags, confiscates their last coin. The working man is afraid to complain, for he sees that the criminals are stronger than the camp authorities. The thief beats the working man and forces him to work. Tens of thousands of people have been beaten to death by thieves. Hundreds of thousands of people who have been in the camps are permanently seduced by the ideology of these criminals and have ceased to be people. Something criminal has entered into their souls for ever. Thieves and their morality have left an indelible mark on the soul of each.

The camp administrator is rude and cruel; the persons responsible for propaganda lie; the doctor has no conscience. But all this is trivial in comparison with the corrupting power of the criminal world. In spite of everything, the authorities are still human beings, and the human element in them does survive. The criminals are not human.

The influence of their morality on camp life is boundless and many-sided. The camps are in every way schools of the negative. No one will ever receive anything useful or necessary from them – neither the convict himself, nor his superiors, nor the guard, nor the inadvertent witnesses (engineers, geologists, doctors), nor the camp administrators, nor their subordinates.

Every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute.

There is much there that a man should not know, should not see, and if he does see it, it is better for him to die.

There a convict learns to hate work. He does not and cannot learn anything else. He learns flattery, lying, petty acts and major villainies. He becomes totally engrossed in himself.

When he returns to ‘freedom’, he sees that he has not only failed to grow during his years in camp but his interests have narrowed, become impoverished and crude. Moral barriers have somehow been pushed aside.

It is possible to commit base acts – and live.

It is possible to lie – and live.

It is possible to give a promise and not fulfill that promise – and live.

It is possible to drink up a friend’s money.

It is possible to beg for charity – and live! Yes, even this is possible!

A person who has committed a base act doesn’t die.

In camp a human being learns sloth, deception, and viciousness. In ‘mourning his fate’, he blames the entire world.

He rates his own suffering too highly, forgetting that everyone has his own grief. He has forgotten empathy for another’s sorrow; he simply does not understand it and does not desire to understand it.

Skepticism is by no means the worst aspect of the camp heritage. There a human being learns to hate. He is afraid; he is a coward. He fears repetitions of his own fate. He fears betrayal, he fears his neighbors, he fears everything that a human being should not fear. He is morally crushed. His concepts of morality have changed without his having noticed this change.

A camp supervisor learns to wield limitless power over the prisoners, he learns to view himself as a god, as the only authorized representative of power, as a man of a ‘superior race’.

What will the guard tell his fiancée about his work in the Far North – the guard who often held human lives in his hands and who often killed people who stepped outside the ‘forbidden zone’? Will he tell her how he used his rifle butt to beat hungry old men who could not walk?

The young peasant who has become a prisoner sees that in this hell only the criminals live comparatively well, that they are important, that the all-powerful camp administrators fear them. The criminals always have clothes and food, and they support each other.

The young peasant cannot but be struck by this. It begins to seem to him that the criminals possess the truth of camp life, that only by imitating them will he tread the path that will save his life. He sees, moreover, that there are people who can live even on the very bottom of existence. And the peasant begins to imitate the conduct of the criminals. He agrees with their every word, is ready to carry out all their errands, speaks of them with fear and reverence. He is anxious to adorn his speech with their slang; no member of either sex, convict or civilian, who has been to Kolyma has failed to carry away from Kolyma the peculiar slang of the criminals.

These words are a poison that seeps into the soul. It is this mastery of the criminal dialect itself that marks the beginning of the non-criminal’s intimacy with the criminal world.

The intellectual convict is crushed by the camp. Everything he valued is ground into the dust while civilization and culture drop from him within weeks. The method of persuasion in a quarrel is the fist or a stick. The way to induce someone to do something is by means of a rifle butt, a punch in the teeth.

The intellectual becomes a coward, and his own brain provides a ‘justification’ of his own actions. He can persuade himself of anything, attach himself to either side in a quarrel. The intellectual sees in the criminal world ‘teachers of life’, fighters for the ‘people’s rights’. A blow can transform an intellectual into the obedient servant of a petty crook. Physical force becomes moral force.

The intellectual is permanently terrified. His spirit is broken, and he takes this frightened and broken spirit with him back into civilian life.

Engineers, geologists, and doctors who have come to Kolyma to do contract work for Far Northern Construction are quickly corrupted. The sources of this corruption are many: a desire for money, rationalizations that the ‘taiga is the law’, cheap and convenient slave labor, a narrowing of cultural interests. No one who has worked in the camps ever returns to the mainland. He would be worthless there, for he has grown accustomed to a ‘rich’, carefree life. It is this very depravity that is described in works of literature as ‘the call of the North’.