Chapter Twenty-Five
In Moscow it was the beginning of a hard summer and, everybody could see, likely to prove an even harder winter. It was now known in government and Party circles that a combination of last year’s harsh winter and the drought of this spring had resulted in the dreaded double crop failure.
Soviet grain supply, since Brezhnev turned Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands policy into a qualified success, depended both on the traditional breadbasket in the Ukraine and on an entirely new source of supply which had been developed in the western Siberian lands of Kazakstan. If both crops were successful, the 200-million ton average for grain crops could be handsomely met. Partial failure, as in 1979, might lead to a crop as low as 179 million ton. For the current year 245 million tons had been optimistically forecast.
In fact the spring weather had already made it certain that even the 1979 figure would not be reached. Before the Politburo was the utterly menacing possibility of a total grain crop of less than 160 million tons.
American, Canadian and Australian grain imports might once have filled the gap. But that was in the days of 1979-80, when Soviet oil exports to the West, at the rate of over a million barrels per day, were earning substantial amounts of foreign currency. The other major source of foreign earnings, tourism, had suffered a massive reduction by the progressive restrictions on foreign visitors which Kuba had insisted upon from the time of the Leningrad riots. Today, with closely watched guided tours to Moscow as the foreign visitor’s only option, earnings from tourism had been reduced to a trickle.
The final source of income on which the embattled Soviet leadership might call was the country’s still not inconsiderable gold reserves. Already the Soviet Union had dipped deeply into its gold holdings to pay for vital Western technology, but the trap was already apparent: The more Soviet gold was sold on world markets the more the price of gold fell. In the past four years the Soviet economy had already found itself caught between spiraling costs of imported technology and falling gold prices on the international market.
What then was the solution to the immediate shortage? The slaughter of millions of cattle, pigs and sheep? The immediate increase in the availability of meat would be welcome — if it could be transported to Soviet tables. But the aftermath would be the virtual disappearance of meat from the Soviet diet during an extended re-stocking period.
Gathered under Kuba’s chairmanship for the July meeting, the aged and baffled members of the Politburo told each other that they never realized that the Soviet economy was on such a knife-edge.
Kuba argued for further gold sales and the purchase of foreign wheat, but the Central Bank adviser made clear that at current gold prices this was not even an option if the minimum grain shortfall to be made up was between 40 and 50 million tons.
On the night of July 19th, after the meeting had already continued for over five frustrating hours, the Politburo of the Soviet Union took the portentous decision to impose immediate bread rationing throughout the Russian dominions.
In the camps the changes began, as ever, with the issue of rations. Even under the harsh work conditions of Kolyma and East Cape the rations were lowered for each zek. The results were perceptible within a month. The thieves who ruled the huts throughout the whole archipelago of shame began to exert pressure on the politicals. Within each hut they attempted to establish two scales of rations: one for thieves, one for politicals. As the rations were cut again, the political majority in camps throughout the Gulag system rebelled against their oppressors. Men fought with knives and axes, killing silently in the darkness of their huts. Sometimes the politicals triumphed and operated a fair distribution system. Or they would triumph and steal the rations of the defeated thieves, as they had had their rations stolen. In some camps the two sides arranged an uneasy truce; in others they united. But in every camp the tension between guard and zek increased. The relative ease of the late seventies and early eighties was gone. Guards patrolled in pairs, machine pistols cocked. Incidents in which zeks were shot “trying to escape” became more and more numerous until the mandatory enquiry became more and more perfunctory. To the old zeks to whom the days of Stalin were a familiar horror, the times were changing back again in one of those fearsome, cyclical movements which so far have seemed to be the very history of Russia.
In the Kraslag area of responsibility, which included the Panaka complex of camps, the major general in charge favored only one solution. If the camp’s timber cutting and sorting norms were not met, rations should be reduced. If that caused disturbances, then mutiny should be treated in the approved manner. The enquiry, if any, would be conducted by the officers of the camp concerned.
In these months [Anton recorded] life became harder than ever. Our rations were cut. Our work norms remained the same. Perhaps for us in Panaka One it was easier than for some others. But I remember vividly the day we went to do repairs at Panaka Five, the camp for penal brigades we had built that winter. There the poor devils had the faces of ravening wolves. They were mostly, if not all, Asiatics and they begged us on their knees, begged us, for a crust of bread.
Our masters had created a pyramid of privilege. In it everybody had their boot on somebody else’s face. Slip once in our honored society and the weight of boots on your face would be doubled. So the slogan was: Conform! Enjoy your ration of privilege, however meager! Despise the man below you! Use your boot to secure your place!
Yet those faces of the penal brigade troops were unforgettable. Even the armed guards feared the naked hatred of these emaciated bundles of rags.
As we marched back behind the lanterns in that light summer night, our guards were less attentive than usual. Hands behind our backs, I walked next to the tailor from Bratsk. He was older than me, not an educated man, but somehow I felt in need of his experience.
“How can it be, Bubo?” I asked him. The guard, paces behind us, said nothing. “How can man do this to his fellow creatures?”
Bubo reclasped his hands behind his back, limping heavily. “Anton,” he said. “One thing is sure. There’s more ignorance and indifference in the world than there is naked, lunatic cruelty.”
“Is that all it is then? Ignorance and indifference?”
“No,” he said. “It’s systems of government that allow ignorance and indifference free play.”
“You’re not a Communist then, Bubo?”
He blew misty breath through his closed lips. “How can I tell? When Communism devises a system to prevent the rise of a Stalin, or one of our present monsters, I’ll look around and think about it. But until then it’s not the proletariat of Karl Marx, it’s the KGB in their camps that control the means of production. Isn’t that so?”
We trudged on. The lanterns swinging at the head of the column reminded me of a colorful old picture my mother used to take out and look at, of a group of robed men in Jerusalem with lanterns on poles gathered round the figure of Jesus Christ. With his long beard and emaciated body he looked just like any of us zeks.
It was late when we arrived at our Panaka. We had eaten at the penal brigades’ camp, a millet stew and a few grams of rotten bread, and we weren’t entitled to another meal. The hollow ache in the stomach was commonplace by now and some of the older men were suffering other symptoms. Their speech was slurring and their eyesight definitely failing. I was 26, had a few pounds of fat to burn off when I was arrested (thanks to being the son of a peasant mother), and now and again in the last few months the assistant medical orderly, Zoya, slipped me a handful of pills and a few pieces of mutton fat. Perhaps she did it for a few of the others as well.