During the short journey to KGB headquarters at Lubyanka her bag was searched and her internal passport quickly examined. One of the men sitting next to her in the back gave a quick nod to his colleague on the other side of her.
In the Lubyanka courtyard she was pulled from the car and pushed toward a small green door.
Once inside she was led through endless corridors brightly lit with overhead lights, the walls pale green, the many doors painted cream.
They descended a stone stairway to a line of cells. Outside one she was dragged to a stop. The door was unlocked. In the corner of the brightly lit room a bloodied mess of rags stirred.
“Yes or no?” a plainclothesman said.
The rags stirred again and a face lifted. From it came a croak of confirmation. She knew it had to be, but could not recognize, the face of Andrei.
Chapter Fourteen
Seven hundred miles northeast of Moscow Anton Ovsenko looked back at the line of men on the rope and gave the signal to haul the great log up the incline. Like them he leaned forward into his leather harness, his feet sliding and slipping on the churned frozen snow, his breath snorting from his nostrils, his back aching from the effort in the bitter cold.
The log, a heavy center post for the new camp’s administrative building, inched forward up the slope and stopped. Three or four of the older men were leaning forward into their harness, too exhausted to contribute more than their weight to the task.
“Heave…” Anton tore the words from his throat. “Heave…”
The log began to move again, slowly at first, then faster as the slope evened off and the men scrambled forward in their harness scenting victory and the promise of rest.
As the log slid and bumped forward to the half-completed administrative building, the guard put his whistle to his mouth and blew three short blasts. It was the end of another workday at Panaka Five.
All over the new campsite men were stamping the circulation back into their feet, clapping their hands together to generate some warmth or easing themselves out of the logging harness in which they had spent the daylight hours.
In response to the guards’ shouts they formed up in a long column, four abreast, dark bent figures against the deep drifts of snow. Hands behind their backs, the new zeks of the 1980s trudged off behind the swaying lanterns held on poles by the men at the head of the column.
By the mid-decade Western specialists were calculating the Soviet prison population at something in the region of four million, or closing fast on the estimated figure at the end of Stalin’s reign. The vast number of Soviet prisoners, almost one in 50 of the population, was KGB General Kuba’s response to industrial and agricultural unrest in the early eighties. Fifteen years earlier, Solzhenitzyn had made the term Gulag for the camp administration and zek for the unhappy prisoner known throughout the Western world. Attempts by groups such as Amnesty International to monitor the Soviet treatment of prisoners were contemptuously rejected by the Soviets. Their claim was that prisoners in the Gulag system had been rightfully convicted under the Soviet Constitution and both the tradition of Soviet penology and the practice over the years showed the treatment of all categories to be firm but just. It was a blank wall against which Western complaints shattered harmlessly.
Behind the wall the picture was grimly different. The camps spread throughout the Soviet Union with a marked concentration in the north and mid-Siberia. Prisoners’ reports show clearly that treatment varied greatly with the personality of the commandant and the remoteness of the location as the determinants. From the women’s camps accounts of rape, forced concubinage and sexual abuse were common. Probably the easiest camps were mixed. Some of the men’s camps on the dreaded Kolyma peninsula were as harsh, even bestial, as the Stalinist Gulag had produced.
In their new millions they passed into the camps. Many of course were sentenced for crimes which would have attracted imprisonment in any civilized society. But from 1984 onward an increasing proportion of zeks were again there for political crimes — they were the leaders of, or participants in, large or small strike actions from Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan to Minsk in White Russia or Odessa in the southern Ukraine.
Among these politicals there is no doubt that a large proportion were nationalists. In these years people in Kiev began to talk of the Ukrainian camps at Kolyma or the Caucasian camps in the dreaded lead mining complex on Cape Deschnev, the farthest northeasterly point of Soviet Siberia.
Careless of the brutalized creatures they were breeding in these arctic wastes, the Soviet penal system continued to believe that they were safer caged together, in Siberian lumber camps, or living a troglodyte life in the deadly lead mines of the East Cape. It is clear from KGB reports, that it occurred to no one in the government that they were sitting on a powder keg.
Panaka Five was the latest of a group of new camps being built by the zeks of Panaka One. Deep in the limitless birch-woods the Panaka complex had grown rapidly since its founding in 1982. From a small free logging camp it had acquired first annexes of long wooden huts and then full-sized sister camps with their own medical and administration buildings, their own high barbed-wire fences, dirt roads and mess halls. The rumor was, and strangely these rumors were seldom totally wrong, that Panaka Five was to be reserved for a full penal brigade of Asiatics.
At Panaka Anton Ovsenko had lived through his first northern summer, had survived the backbreaking work in the drenching autumn rains and was beginning now on the first of seven long winters to which he had been sentenced. He was twenty-four years old, strongly built. He counted it good fortune that he had been assigned to the only mixed camp in the Panaka complex.
In the light of later events [Anton wrote], it is important to try to describe the feelings of many of my fellow zeks. First for the newly arrived prisoner there was the most frightening sense of lonely desolation. This had of course begun back at the railhead at Krasibirsk where the prisoners left the cattle trucks which had brought them from what passes in the Soviet Union for civilization. From the railhead to Panaka was a hundred-kilometer march. Some marched in summer, some in winter snows. All, in their trudging columns, were attended by the whip-guards of the prison service. And here that sense of desolation, of abandonment, gripped a man, as he marched day after day, further from the railhead, as the very road turned first to a track through the birch forests and then seemed barely to exist at all. Russia can swallow a man, can swallow his soul. Perhaps our national character is more based on the dread of isolation than on anything else, the fear of the limitless snowfields or the unwalked summer forest.
Once at Panaka all but the strongest are lost. Tremblingly they question the older zeks. There are no published rules. It is the prisoner’s responsibility to discover his duties and perform them. As a new arrival he is cheated of his bread ration, assigned to the duties of other zeks, forced to struggle for a position in the pecking order even of us, the lowest of the low. For we are not kind to each other.
Later there are friendships, it is true, slender relationships that moderate the desolation. But for most prisoners the sentence is not to the hard labor of this hard land, but to suffer its awful emptiness, to endure this cosmic sense of abandonment.