The ship Dzurma, carrying condemned women, had reached Magadan. Many of these women were already dying from cold and exhaustion. Such people, in a state of slow agony, are called dohodiags, “coming to the end,” in the language of the camps.
The dohodiags were carried out one by one on stretchers. They were carried out and arranged in rows on the shore, clearly for the purpose of facilitating accounting, to avoid confusion during the making out of death certificates. We were lying on the rocks and looking around for our group, which was dragging itself to town for the torture of communal sauna and disinfection. (Evgeniya Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind)
The people who boarded the transports were already exhausted by months of imprisonment, interrogation, hunger, and beatings. Now they faced weeks of torment in crowded cattle cars, in filth, the delirium of thirst (for they weren’t given anything to drink). They did not know where they were going or what awaited them at the end of the journey. Those who survived this Gehenna were driven in Magadan to the enormous staging camp. Here a slave market operated. The commanders of the camps set up near the mines would come and select for themselves the most physically able prisoners. The higher the commander stood in the hierarchy of power, the stronger the convicts he was able to choose for himself.
There were 160 camps — or, as they are also called, Arctic death camps — in Magadan and Kolyma. The convicts changed over the years, but at any given moment there were around half a million residents. Of these, one-third died in the camps, and the rest, after serving years of hard labor, left as physical cripples or with permanent psychic injuries. Whoever survived Magadan and Kolyma was never again the person he or she once was.
The camp was a sadistically and precisely thought-out structure, having as its goal the destruction of the individual in such a way that before death he would experience the greatest humiliations, sufferings, and torments. It was a barbed net of destruction from which a man, once having fallen into it, could not extricate himself. It consisted of the following elements:
(cold)
clothed in wretched and thin rags, the convict continuously suffered from the cold, froze
(hunger)
he experienced this cold all the more keenly because he was always bestially, obsessively hungry, having for nourishment only a piece of bread and water
(hard labor)
hungry and frozen, he had to work hard, punishingly, past the point of endurance, digging the earth and carting it off in a wheelbarrow, crushing rocks, chopping down the forest
(lack of sleep)
frozen, hungry, exhausted by work, and most often sick, he was purposefully deprived of sleep. He could sleep for only a short time, in an icy barracks, on hard boards, clothed in the rags in which he worked
(filth)
he was not allowed to wash himself, and besides
there wasn’t the time or the place for it, so he was covered in a crust of sticky dirt and sweat, he smelled, stunk unbearably
(vermin)
he was consumed the whole time by vermin. Lice nested in his rags, bedbugs caked the plank beds in the barracks, in the summer swarms of mosquitoes tormented him, and terrible Siberian flies, attacking in swarms
(NKVD sadism)
the escorts and guards — the NKVD overseers — incessantly inflicted their rage upon him. They shouted, beat him about the face with their fists, kicked him, baited him with dogs, and for trivial reasons — shot him
(terror of the criminals)
political prisoners were terrorized, robbed, and tormented by the criminal ones. To them belonged the effective control of the lower rungs of power
(the feeling of injustice)
it was psychological torture to endure the feeling of having been done the gravest injustice. All these political prisoners were utterly innocent, they had done nothing wrong
(homesickness and fear)
all were tormented by the longing for their dearest, for home (sentences ran to twenty-five years), by being completely cut off from the world, by an unknown, increasingly horrifying tomorrow, by fear that death would arrive any day
“It is a terrible thing to see a camp,” wrote Varlam Shalamov of Kolyma. “No one on earth should know camps. In the camp experience everything is negative — every single minute of it. A human being can only become the worse for it. And it cannot be any other way. There is a great deal in the camps about which a man should not know. But seeing the very bottom of life is not the most dreadful part of it. What is most dreadful is when a man appropriates this bottom as his own, when the measure of his morality is borrowed from the camp experience, when the morality of criminals finds application in life. When man’s intellect attempts not only to justify those camp sentiments, but also to serve them.”
And later: “The camp was a great test of character for a man, a test of ordinary human morality, and 99 percent did not pass this test. Together with those who did not pass it, died those who did manage to, by trying to be better than the rest, harder on themselves …” (Kolyma Tales).
ON DECEMBER 1, 1937, Berzin is recalled to Moscow. Stalin has decided that this executioner has acted too gently and orders him arrested and shot. That same December 1, the ship Nicolai Yezov reaches Magadan, bringing, as Berzin’s replacements, the two new rulers of Kolyma — the director of Dal’stroy, Col. Karp Pavlov (he will shoot himself in 1956), and his deputy, the chief of Kolyma’s death camps, Col. Stiepan Garanin. Garanin is thirty-nine years old. He will live one more year.
Garanin is Kolyma’s dark legend.
“Ivan Kuzmich, do you remember Garanin?”
Do I remember? You must be kidding. I saw him from close up, after all, just like I’m seeing you now. He was reviewing a column of prisoners. And he wasn’t alone, but with an entourage. Before he appeared, they were relaying messages over the telephone: he might pull up here, so as to personally conduct an inspection of the camp. He was still in Magadan when we were already standing at attention. Everything cleaned, painted, the ground strewn with yellow sand. The command frets and fumes; it cannot control its nerves. Suddenly, whispers: They’re coming, they’re coming. The gate of the camp opens wide. And he drives through it with his escort — several passenger cars, several trucks carrying his personal guards. He steps out of the first car, and his entourage arranges itself quick as lightning on both sides. All of them with Mausers [a type of gun], in short sheepskin jackets. He himself in a coat of bear fur. A fierce expression on his face. Drunken eyes, heavy as lead. The commander of our camp, a major, runs up to him and reports in a trembling voice: “Comrade commander of USVITL-NKVD. The independent subcamp of the camp system ready for inspection.” “Are there prisoners here who shirk their work?” “There are,” the major answers fearfully. And around twelve people step forward from the ranks. “So, you don’t want to work, sons of bitches?” And he already has a pistol in his hand. Bang! Bang! Bang! He gets them all. Any that still move are finished off by the entourage. “And are there record setters here, those that exceed the quota? Super-quota workers?” “There are, comrade chief of USVITL-NKVD.” A joyful, cheerful line of super-quota workers steps forward. They don’t have anything to fear. Garanin walks up to them with his entourage, still holding the Mauser with the empty magazine. Without turning around, he hands it backward to his people. He gets from them a new loaded pistol, which he puts into a wooden holster, but he doesn’t take his hand off the butt. “So, super-quota workers? You exceed the quota?” “Yes,” they answer. And he asks them again: “Enemies of the people who exceed the quotas? Hmm … you, cursed enemies of the people! One must liquidate the likes of you.…” And again: Bang! Bang! Bang! And again around ten people are lying in a pool of blood. Then he appears cheered up, his eyes have grown calmer. He has sated himself with blood. The camp commander leads his dear, honorable guests to the mess hall for a prepared feast. And he is happy that he has himself dodged the bullet. When Garanin felt like it, he shot at the commanders of the camps as well. It was a terrible lawlessness, when Garanin was chief. People fell like flies. (Anatoly Zygulin, Black Stones)