‘Listen,’ said the gray-haired official as he stepped out into the center of the ward and gestured at the double row of cots standing along the walls. ‘Listen to me. I’m the new chief of political control at Far North Construction Headquarters. Anyone who has broken bones as a result of injuries he received either in the mines or in the barracks from foremen or brigade leaders, sing out. We’re here to investigate traumatism. The rate of injuries is terrible. But we’re going to put an end to it. Anybody who has received such injuries, tell my aide. Major, write it all down!’ The major unfolded his notebook and got out a fountain pen.
‘Well?’
‘How about frostbite, sir?’
‘No frostbite, only beatings.’
I was the paramedic for the ward. Of the eighty patients, seventy were there with that kind of trauma. It was all written down in their case histories. But not one patient responded to the appeal of the higher-ups. Later on you’d pay for it while you were still lying on your cot. If you shut up, they’d keep you in the hospital for an extra day as payment for your quiet nature and good sense. It was much more advantageous to remain silent.
‘A soldier broke my arm.’
‘A soldier? Can it be that our soldiers beat the prisoners? You can’t mean a guard, but some convict work gang leader.’
‘Yeah, I guess it was a work gang leader.’
‘See what a bad memory you have? My arrival here is not a run-of-the-mill kind of thing. I’m the boss. And we will not permit beatings! In general, rudeness, hooliganism, and swearing has to come to an end. I already gave a talk at a meeting of the Planning Board. I told them that if the director of Far North Construction is impolite in his conversations with the headquarters chief, and the headquarters chief permits himself to use obscene, abusive language with the director of mines, then how does the mine chief talk to the area heads? It’s nothing but a stream of obscenities. But those are still mainland obscenities. The area head chews out his superintendents, work gang leaders, and foremen for using the obscenities of the Kolyma underground world. And what’s left then to the foreman or work gang leader? All they can do is take a stick and beat on the workers. Isn’t that the way it is?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the major.
‘Nikishov gave a talk at that same conference. He said: “You’re new people. You don’t know Kolyma. The conditions here are special. Morality is different here.” But I told him we came here to work and we will work, not the way Nikishov says, but the way Comrade Stalin says.’
‘That’s right, sir,’ said the major.
When they heard that the matter had reached Stalin, the patients fell silent.
Behind the door was a crowd of area supervisors; they had been summoned from their apartments and were waiting, along with the hospital director, for the speech to end.
‘They’re removing Nikishov?’ Baikov, director of the Second Therapeutic Ward asked quietly, but he was hushed up.
The chief of political control came out of the ward and shook hands with the doctors.
‘How about some dinner?’ asked the hospital director. ‘It’s on the table.’
‘No, no,’ the chief of political control looked at his watch. ‘I have to make it to the west area, to Susuman by tonight. We have a meeting tomorrow. But maybe… I don’t want to eat, but here’s what we can do. Give me the briefcase.’ The gray-haired chief took the heavy briefcase from the major’s hands.
‘Can you give me a glucose injection?’
‘Glucose?’ asked the hospital director, not understanding.
‘Yes, glucose. An intravenous injection. I haven’t drunk anything alcoholic since I was a kid… I don’t smoke. But every other day I have a glucose injection. Twenty cubic centimeters of glucose intravenously. A doctor in Moscow advised me to do it. Keeps me in great shape. Better than ginseng or testosterone. I always carry the glucose with me, but I don’t carry a needle; I can get a needle in any hospital. You can give me the shot.’
‘I don’t know how,’ said the hospital director. ‘Let me hold the tourniquet. Here’s the surgeon on duty; that’s right up his alley.’
‘No,’ said the surgeon on duty. ‘I don’t know how to do that either. That can’t be done by just any doctor, sir.’
‘Well, how about an orderly?’
‘We don’t have any non-convict orderlies.’
‘How about this one?’
‘He’s a convict.’
‘Funny. But what’s the difference? Can you do it?’
‘I can,’ I said.
‘Sterilize a syringe…’
I boiled a syringe and cooled it. The gray-haired chief took a box with ‘glucose’ from his briefcase, and the hospital director poured some alcohol on his arm. With the assistance of the party organizer, he broke the glass seal and drew the solution into the syringe. The hospital director attached a needle to the syringe, handed it to me, and tightened the rubber tourniquet on the man’s arm; I gave him the shot and pressed the place with a cotton wad.
‘I have veins like a truck-driver,’ the chief joked graciously with me.
I said nothing.
‘Well, I’ve rested; it’s time to get on the road.’ The gray-haired chief got up.
‘How about the therapeutic wards?’ asked the hospital director, afraid that if the guests had to return to examine the therapeutic patients, he would get chewed out for not having reminded them in time.
‘There’s no reason for us to visit the therapeutic wards,’ said the chief of political control. ‘We’re pursuing a specific goal on this trip.’
‘How about dinner?’
‘No dinners. Business comes first.’
The car of the chief of political control roared to life and disappeared into the frozen dark.
The Life of Engineer Kipreev
For many years I thought that death was a form of life. Comforted by the vagueness of this notion, I attempted to work out a positive formula to preserve my own existence in this vale of tears.
I believed a person could consider himself a human being as long as he felt totally prepared to kill himself, to interfere in his own biography. It was this awareness that gave me the will to live. I checked myself – frequently – and felt I had the strength to die, and thus remained alive.
Much later I realized that I had simply built myself a refuge, avoided the problem, for when at the critical moment the decision between life and death became an exercise of the will, I would not be the same man as before. I would inevitably weaken, become a traitor, betray myself. Instead of thinking of death, I simply felt that my former decision needed some other answer, that my promises to myself, the oaths of youth, were naïve and very artificial. It was Engineer Kipreev’s story that convinced me.
I never in my life betrayed or sold anyone down the river. But I don’t know how I would have held out if they had beaten me. I passed through all stages of the investigation, by the greatest good luck, without beatings – ‘method number three’. My investigators never laid a finger on me. This was chance, nothing more. It was simply that I was interrogated early – in the first half of 1937, before they resorted to torture.
Engineer Kipreev, however, was arrested in 1938, and he could vividly imagine the beatings. He survived the blows and even attacked his investigator. Beaten still more, he was thrown into a punishment cell. Nevertheless, the investigators obtained his signature easily: they threatened to arrest his wife, and Kipreev ‘signed’.
Throughout his life Kipreev carried with him this terrible weight on his conscience. There are more than a few humiliations and degradations in the life of a prisoner. The diaries of members of Russia’s liberation movement are marked by one traumatic act – the request for a pardon. Before the revolution this was considered a mark of eternal shame. Even after the revolution former political prisoners and exiles refused to receive anyone who had ever asked the czar for freedom or for a reduction of sentence.