He loved poetry and recited verse by heart while in prison. He stopped doing that in camp.
He would have shared his last morsel, or, rather, he was still at that stage… That is, he never reached the point where no one had a last morsel and no one shared anything with anyone.
The work-gang leader, Diukov, died. I don’t know and never knew his first name. He had been convicted of a petty crime that had nothing to do with Article 58, under which the political prisoners had been sentenced. In camps back on the mainland he had played the part of ‘club president’, and if his attitude toward life in the camps was not romanticized, he at least intended to ‘play the role’. He had arrived in the winter and had made an amazing speech at the very first meeting. The petty criminals and thieves with repeated offenses were considered friends of the people and were to be re-educated and not punished (in contrast to enemies of the people convicted under Article 58). Later, when repeating offenders were tried under Point 14 of Article 58 for ‘sabotage’ (refusing to work), all of Paragraph 14 was removed from Article 58, and such offenders were saved from a variety of punitive measures that could last for years. Repeating offenders were always considered ‘friends of the people’ right up to Beria’s famous amnesty of 1953. Hundreds of thousands of unhappy people were sacrificed to theory, the infamous concept of re-education, and Krylenko’s* sentences, which could be stretched out to any number of years.
At that first meeting Diukov offered to lead a work gang consisting exclusively of men convicted under Article 58. Usually the work-gang leader of the ‘politicals’ was one of them. Diukov was not a bad sort. He knew that peasants worked hard in the camps and remembered that there were a lot of peasants among those convicted under Article 58. This last circumstance was due to a certain wisdom in Yezhov and Beria, who understood that the intelligentsia’s value in terms of physical labor was not very high and that they might not be able to cope with camp production goals, as opposed to camp political goals. But Diukov did not concern himself with such lofty deliberations. Indeed, he never thought of anything other than his men’s capacity to work. He selected a work gang exclusively of peasants and started to work. That was in the spring of 1938. Diukov’s peasants survived the hungry winter of 1937–8. If he had ever seen his men naked in the bathhouse, he would immediately have realized what the problem was.
They worked badly and needed to be fed. But the camp authorities turned Diukov down flat on this point. The starving work gang exhausted itself heroically to fulfill its quotas. At that point everyone started to cheat Diukov: the men who measured production levels, the bookkeepers, the overseers, the foremen. He complained, protested more and more harshly, but the production of the work gang continued to fall, and the food ration got smaller and smaller. Diukov attempted to take his case to higher authorities, but these higher authorities simply advised the proper persons to include Diukov’s gang together with their leader in certain lists. This was done, and they were all shot at the famous Serpentine Mine.
Pavel Mixailovich Xvostov died. It was the conduct of these hungry people that was most terrible. Although they might seem normal, they were half mad. Hungry men will always defend justice furiously (if they are not too hungry or too exhausted). They argue incessantly and fight desperately. Under normal circumstances only one quarrel in a thousand will end in a fight. Hungry people fight constantly. Quarrels flare up over the most trivial and unexpected matters: ‘What are you doing with my pick? Why did you take my place?’ The shorter of two men tries to trip his opponent to bring him down. The taller man attempts to knock his enemy down by using his own weight advantage – and then scratch, beat, bite… All this occurs in a helpless fashion; it is neither painful nor fatal. Too often it’s just to catch the attention of others. No one interferes with a fight.
Xvostov was precisely that sort of person. He fought with someone every day – either in the barracks or in the deep side trench that our work gang was digging. He was my winter acquaintance; I never saw his hair. He had a cap with torn earflaps of white fur. As for his eyes, they were dark, gleaming, hungry. Sometimes I would recite poetry, and he would look at me as if I were half mad.
Once, all of a sudden, he furiously began to attack the stone in the trench with his pick. The pick was heavy, but Xvostov kept swinging it hard and without interruption. This show of strength amazed me. We had been together for a long time and had been hungry for a long time. Then the pick fell to the earth with a ringing sound. I looked around. Xvostov stood with his legs apart, swaying. His knees began to crumple. He lurched and fell face down, his outstretched hands covered in those same mittens he mended every evening. His forearms were bared; both were tattooed. Pavel Mixailovich had been a sea captain.
Roman Romanovich died before my very eyes. At one time he had been a sort of ‘regimental commander’. He distributed packages, was responsible for keeping the camp clean, and – in a word – enjoyed privileges that none of us ‘fifty-eighters’ could even dream of. The highest post we could hope to attain was work in the bathhouse laundry or patching clothes on the night shift. ‘Special instructions’ from Moscow permitted us to come into contact only with stone. That little piece of paper was in each of our folders. But Roman Romanovich had been allotted this unattainable post. And he quickly learned all its secrets: how to open a crate containing a package for a prisoner and do it in such a way as to dump the sugar on the floor, how to break a jar of preserves, how to kick toasted bread and dried fruits under the counter. Roman Romanovich learned all this quickly and did not seek our company. He was primly official and behaved as the polite representative of those higher camp authorities, with whom we could have no personal contact. He never gave us any advice on any matter. He only explained: one letter could be sent per month, packages were distributed between eight and ten p.m. in the commandant’s office, etc.
Evidently some accidental acquaintanceship had played a role in his getting the job. But then he didn’t last long as regimental commander – only about two months. Either it was one of the usual personnel checks that took place from time to time and were obligatory at the end of the year, or someone turned him in – ‘blew’ on him, in the camp’s eloquent phrase. In any case, Roman Romanovich disappeared. He had been gathering dwarf-cedar needles, which were used as a source of vitamin C for convicts. Only real ‘goners’ were used for needle-picking. These starving semi-invalids were the by-products of the gold-mines, which transformed healthy people into invalids in three weeks by hunger, lack of sleep, long hours of heavy work, beatings. New people were ‘transferred’ to the work gang, and Moloch chewed on…
By the end of the season there was no one left in the work gang except its leader, Ivanov. The rest had been sent to the hospital to die or were used for needle-picking, where they were fed once a day and could not receive more than 600 grams of bread – a little more than a pound. Romanov and I worked together that fall picking needles. The needles were not only useless as a source of vitamin C but were even declared much later, in 1952, to be harmful to the kidneys.
We were also building a home for ourselves for the winter. In the summer we lived in ragged tents. We paced off the area, staked out the corners, and drove sticks into the ground at rather wide intervals to form a double-row fence. We packed the gaps with icy pieces of moss and peat. Inside were single-layer bunks made from poles. In the middle was a cast-iron stove. Each evening we received an empirically calculated portion of firewood. Nevertheless, we had neither saw nor axe, since these objects were guarded by the soldiers who lived in a separate plywood shack. The reason for this was that some of the criminals in the neighboring work gang had attacked the gang leader. The criminal element has an extraordinary attraction to drama and introduces it into its own life in a way that would be the envy even of Evreinov.* The criminals decided to kill the work-gang leader, and the proposal to saw off his head was received ecstatically. They beheaded him with an ordinary cross-cut saw. That was why convicts were not allowed axes or saws at night. Why at night? No one made any attempt to find logic in camp orders.