The economist Semyon Alekseevich Sheinin died. He was my partner and a good person. For a long time he could not grasp what they were doing to us, but he finally came to understand the situation and quietly began to wait for death. He did not lack courage. Once I received a package. The fact that the package had arrived was a rare event. There was nothing in it but an aviator’s felt boots. That was it. How little our families knew of the conditions in which we lived! I was perfectly aware that the boots would be stolen on the very first night. So, without leaving the commandant’s office, I sold them for a hundred rubles to Andrei Boiko. The boots were worth 700, but it was a profitable sale anyway. After all, I could buy more than 200 pounds of bread for that amount, or maybe some butter and sugar. I had not eaten butter and sugar since I had arrived in prison. I bought more than two pounds of butter at the commissary. I remember how nutritious it was. That butter cost me forty-one rubles. I bought it during the day (I worked at night) and ran for Sheinin, who lived in a different barracks, to celebrate the arrival of the package. I bought bread too…
Semyon Alekseevich was flustered and happy.
‘But why me? What right do I have?’ he kept repeating in a state of nervous excitement. ‘No, no, I can’t…’ But I persuaded him, and he ran joyfully for boiling water.
And I was immediately knocked to the ground by a terrible blow on the head.
When I regained consciousness, the bag with the bread and butter was gone. The larch log that had been used to strike me lay next to the cot, and everyone was laughing. Sheinin came running with the boiling water. For many years after that I could not remember the theft without getting terribly upset. As for Semyon Alekseevich, he died.
Ivan Yakovlevich Fediaxin died. He and I had arrived in Kolyma by the same train and boat. We ended up in the same mine, in the same work gang. A peasant from Volokolamsk and a philosopher, he had organized the first collective farm in Russia. The collective farms, as is well known, were first organized by the Socialist Revolutionaries in the twenties. The Chayanov-Kondratiev group represented their interests in the government. Ivan Yakovlevich was a Socialist Revolutionary – one of the million who voted for the party of 1917. He was sentenced to five years for organizing the first kolkhoz.
Once in the early Kolyma fall of 1937 he and I were filling a cart on the famous mine conveyor. There were two carts which could be unhitched alternately while the horse-driver was hauling the other to the washer. Two men could barely manage to keep up with the job. There was no time to smoke, and anyway it wasn’t permitted by the overseers. But our horse-driver smoked – an enormous cigar rolled from almost a half-package of home-grown tobacco (there was still tobacco back then), and he would leave it on the edge of the mine for us to smoke as well.
The horse-driver was Mishka Vavilov, former vice-president of the ‘Industrial Imports Trust’.
We talked to each other as we tossed earth casually into the cart. I told Fediaxin about the amount of earth demanded from exiled Decembrists in Nerchinsk as told in The Notes of Maria Volkonskaya. They used an old Russian unit of measure back then, the pood, which was thirty-six pounds. Each man had to produce three pood per day. ‘So how much does our quota come to?’ Fediaxin asked.
I calculated – approximately eight hundred poods.
‘So that’s how much quotas have increased…’
Later, in the winter, when we were constantly hungry, I would get tobacco, begging, saving, and buying it, and trade it for bread. Fediaxin disapproved of my ‘business’.
‘That’s not worthy of you; you shouldn’t do that.’
I saw him for the last time in the cafeteria. It was winter. I gave him six dinner coupons that I had earned that night for copying some office documents out by hand. Good handwriting helped me out sometimes. The coupons would have been worthless the next day, since dates were stamped on them. Fediaxin picked up the dinners, sat down at the table, and poured the watery soup (which contained not a single grease spot) from one bowl into another. All six portions of the pearl-barley kasha weren’t enough to fill one bowl. Fediaxin had no spoon, so he licked up the kasha with his tongue. And he cried.
Derfelle died. He was a French communist who had served time in the stone quarries of Cayenne. Aside from hunger and cold, he was morally exhausted. He could not believe that he, a member of the Comintern, could end up at hard labor here in the Soviet Union. His horror would have been lessened if he could have seen that there were others here like him. Everyone with whom he had arrived, with whom he lived, with whom he died was like that. He was a small, weak person, and beatings were just becoming popular… Once the work-gang leader struck him, simply struck him with his fist – to keep him in line, so to speak – but Derfelle collapsed and did not get up. He was one of the first, the lucky ones to die. In Moscow he had worked as an editor at Tass. He had a good command of Russian. ‘Back in Cayenne it was bad, too,’ he told me once, ‘but here it’s very bad.’
Frits David died. He was a Dutch communist, an employee of the Comintern who was accused of espionage. He had beautiful wavy hair, deep-set blue eyes, and a childish line to his mouth. He knew almost no Russian. I met him in the barracks, which were so crowded that one could fall asleep standing up. We stood side by side. Frits smiled at me and closed his eyes.
The space beneath the bunks was so packed with people that we had to wait to sit down, to simply crouch and lean against another body, a post – and – fall asleep. I waited, covering my eyes. Suddenly something next to me collapsed. My neighbor, Frits David, had fallen. Embarrassed, he got up.
‘I fell asleep,’ he said in a frightened voice.
This Frits David was the first in our contingent to receive a package. His wife sent it to him from Moscow. In the package was a velvet suit, a nightshirt, and a large photograph of a beautiful woman. He was wearing this velvet suit as he crouched next to me on the floor.
‘I want to eat,’ he said, smiling and blushing. ‘I really want to eat. Bring me something to eat.’
Frits David went mad and was taken away.
The nightshirt and the photograph were stolen on the very first night. When I told people about him later, I always experienced a feeling of indignation and could not understand why anyone would want a photograph of a stranger.
‘You don’t know everything,’ a certain clever acquaintance once explained to me. ‘It’s not hard to figure out. The photograph was stolen by the camp thugs for what they call a “showing”. For masturbation, my naïve friend…’
Seryozha Klivansky died. He and I had been freshmen together at the university, and we met twenty years later in a cell for transit prisoners in Butyr Prison. He had been expelled from the Young Communist League in 1927 for a report on the Chinese revolution that he gave to the Current Politics Club. He managed to graduate from the university, and he worked as an economist in Government Planning until the situation changed and he had to leave. He won a competition to join the orchestra of the Stanislavsky Theater, where he played second violin until his arrest in 1937. He was a sanguine type, sharp of wit and full of irony. He never lost his interest in life and its events.
It was so hot in the transit cell that everyone walked around nearly naked, pouring water on themselves and sleeping on the floor. Only heroes could bear to sleep on the bunks.
Klivansky maintained his sense of humor: ‘This is torture by steaming. Next they’ll torture by northern frost.’ This was a realistic prediction, not the whining of a coward.
At the mine, Seryozha was cheerful and talkative. Enthusiastically, he studied the camp thugs’ vocabulary and took a childlike delight in pronouncing phrases from the criminal world with the proper intonation.