But a solution presents itself in the end. And, of course, it is the familiar solution. Of course — the management shows up. Several directors enter the hall, on whose walls the strikers have managed to put up two slogans: “Down with the bureaucracy!” and “Down with the Partocracy!” (exactly like that — a small b, but a large P). Consternation among the strikers, but not among the directors. The directors are smiling ironically, as if to say, Exactly, down, down with us, but without us you would be unable to take a single step!
And what more is there to say — the directors are right. Nowhere can you see so clearly the division of this society into the ruling class and the ruled as you can here. This division, moreover, goes back at least to the time of Peter the Great. Only the names of the classes have changed, but the ratios of dependence, asymmetry, and bondage between them remain the same. How could it be that such an apparently simple thing as the knowledge about how to organize and conduct a meeting has already been monopolized by the ruling class. And indeed, after entering the hall, the director general stands behind the table with the same physical ease and imperious assurance with which Richard Strauss or Arturo Toscanini stood behind the conductor’s lectern.
The hall grows quiet.
“Who wants to speak?” the director asks calmly. Several raise their hands. The director establishes the order in which they will do so and castigates and forces back into his seat with one glance someone who tries to jump ahead of the others. But first of all, he himself takes the floor.
“The meeting has been going on for five hours already,” he says. “What have you resolved?”
Voices from the halclass="underline" “Well, nothing.”
“Ah, you see,” the director says, as if distressed, “you see — nothing. I, on the other hand, have taken care of the matter of the mine. Yes, I have taken care of it! I came back from Moscow yesterday.” (Here, saying that one was in Moscow immediately raises one several notches in the hierarchy.)
He pauses, stares at the hall, grown suddenly still, and, after a moment, continues with pathos: “We, we alone, without any mediation from Moscow, will be exporting our coal to England and America! We, straight from Vargashovska!”
Animation in the hall, excitement, joy. What does this mean — to America? It means — dollars! And what does that mean — dollars? It means everything, literally everything!
I can see that these poor, frozen people, people who often do not see the light of day for weeks at a time, are being fooled by this man who yesterday returned from Moscow, are being fooled and hoaxed. I can see it, but there is nothing I can do about it; I cannot stand up and cry: People, don’t believe him! I cannot, if only so as not to deprive them of that shred of comfort that they derive from the thought that Vargashovska will be exporting coal to England and America.
AFTER THE VOTE to end the strike, Mikhail drove me in a dilapidated but swift Moskvich to town, to the hotel. It is thirty kilometers along a road covered with thick, smooth ice. Mikhail was tearing along at one hundred kilometers per hour. We were driving and living at the mercy of that first stone that at any moment could jut out in front of us. On this road, at this speed, a stone would have meant death. Staring straight ahead, I thought: Aha, so this is what your last image of the world is like — this darkness, these headlights, and, rising before you, this shining blade of icy road, which in a moment will cut you up into pieces.
I CAME to Vorkuta to see the strike, but I also came on a pilgrimage. For Vorkuta is a place of martyrdom; it is a holy place. In the camps of Vorkuta hundreds of thousands of people died. How many exactly? This no one can measure. The first inmates were brought here in 1932, the last released in 1959. The greatest number of people died during the construction of the railroad line, along which today coal is shipped to Arkhangel’sk, Murmansk, and Petersburg. It was during its construction that one of the officers of the NKVD said: “There aren’t enough railroad ties? No matter! You will serve as the railroad ties!”
And that is really how it was. It is a railroad line along which, for hundreds of kilometers, stretches a cemetery, today invisible to the naked eye. Only those who walk over the tundra that abuts the embankment (this is possible only two or three months of the year, when there is no snow) will discover in it, here and there, rotten pickets with little wooden boards nailed to them. If on a board they make out, for example, the inscription A 81, it means that in this place a thousand people are buried. This code was used by the camp bookkeepers, who kept careful accounts of the number of killed and deceased in order to reduce proportionately the number of bread rations distributed.
A man did not die here from one particular weapon, but was the victim of an entire edifice of cruelty, constructed and overseen by the NKVD.
Here, in the north, the greatest enemy of the condemned man was (besides the NKVD) the cold:
Terrible, inhuman, penalizing labor. In the glare of blazing fires, amid the polar night, glinted hundreds, thousands of shovels, tossing the snow that was to be swept up by a bulldozer further away from the tracks. So long as one had enough good sense and strength to remain in motion the entire time, there was a chance of surviving, enduring. But each day, around the fires, a dozen or so huddled human beings gathered, wrapped in every rag they owned. They sat motionless, in a circle around the warmth flowing from the merrily crackling wood chips. They were already living corpses. Nothing could save the health or lives of these people. Warmed from one side by the heat of the fire, grilled by the biting smoke of the burning branches, they were exposed on the other side to the effects of a cold measuring tens of degrees below freezing. No organism could endure such a gradient of temperature occurring within it. Blood warmed in the veins of the face, hands, chest, and stomach was pumped by a weakened heart into a body reduced nearly to a state of hibernation. Something was happening inside the man which he himself could not explain, he was overwhelmed with drowsiness and nausea, overcome by an ever greater chill. He therefore moved still closer to the fire, crawled practically inside it. After several hours of sitting this way, there were only corpses by the fire, or men in final agony. Nothing could budge these people from the fire. Neither threats of force, beatings, nor attempts to stir the stiffening muscles and cooling blood — nothing helped. After they were pulled away forcibly, they fell like logs into the snow and lay motionless. Not a day passed without a dozen or so stiffened corpses being carried into the camp on stretchers. (Marian Mark Bilewicz, I Escaped the Dark, 1989)
I walk around dark, cold, and snow-covered Vorkuta. At the end of the main street one can see oblong, flat buildings on the horizon — those are the barracks of the old camps. And these two aged women at the bus stop? Which one of them was a camp inmate, and which one was her overseer? Age and poverty equalize them for now; soon the frozen earth will reconcile them finally and forever. I wade through snowdrifts, passing identical-looking streets and houses, no longer knowing very well where I am. The whole time I have before my eyes the vision of Nikolai Fiodorov.
Fiodorov was a philosopher, a visionary; many Russians consider him a saint. He owned nothing his whole life. Not even a coat in the cold Russian climate. He was a librarian in Moscow. He lived in a little room, slept on a hard chest, placed books for pillows under his head. He lived from 1828 until 1903. He walked everywhere. He died because there was a great frost and someone convinced him that perhaps he should after all put on a sheepskin coat and go in a sleigh. The next day he developed pneumonia and died. Fiodorov believed that fame and popularity are signs of shamelessness and published his texts under a pseudonym, but most frequently he didn’t publish them at all. After the master’s death, his two students collected Fiodorov’s works and published them in a volume entitled The Philosophy of the Common Cause, in a printing of 480 copies, which they distributed free of charge.