LEND-LEASE COMES TO A SOVIET CAMP: A SAMIZDAT STORY
Shalamov, Varlam
The poet Varlam Shalamov learned about Soviet concentration camps through his own experience. In 1929, at the age of 22, he was sentenced to three years of hard labor for "counterrevolutionary...
...The expression "secondhand" was mysteriously indefinite, as if something had been held in one's hand or kept home in a closet...
...His poems have appeared in Moskva, Younost', and Znamya...
...After his 1957 rehabilitation, Shalamov returned to creative writing...
...The cheerfulsounding phrase "to trel" meant dragging and stacking logs by hand, in Kolyma a back-breaking and unbearable task...
...It was Vinokurov, director of the hospital, who did his best to change and prolong the Life of Engineer Kipreyev, but was told by the general in charge at Kolyma that "talent or not" this prisoner belonged where his "article" indicated he belonged, in the gold mine...
...In Kolyma, however, the bulldozer's first assignment on Russian soil would be completely different...
...Lend-Lease pork stew in fatbellied jars, this we knew very well...
...On the very first night the watchman ladled out a pailful of liquid glycerine and sold it to the inmates as "American honey...
...Corpses that had not decayed, naked skeletons covered with filthy skin, scratched raw and bitten all over by lice...
...But they had not vanished...
...In his story The Tartar Mullah and Fresh Air, the author notes that the famous Russian revolutionaries Nicholas Morozov and Vera Figner, who spent 25 years in the strictest Csarist jails, came out sane and relatively healthy...
...A stream, a scoop, a prospecting pan, temporary quarters, a violent destructive push during which the lumberer denudes river and countryside of timber for three centuries to come while the prospector empties them of gold forever...
...Shalamov recalls several of his fellow inmates in his touching Epitaph—intellectuals and peasants, former Party dignitaries, Red Army officers, Navy captains and scholars, scientists, philosophers, the French Communist Derfell, the Dutch Communist Fritz David who hardly could understand Russian and lost his sanity...
...There was a time until 1938 when horses were used here, but horses bear up in the North less successfully than humans...
...But perhaps American "Solidol" could...
...Finally it began to puff and to howl, then it boldly dashed ahead, crushing the mounds in its path and easily rolling over the tree stumps...
...He is one of the few survivors, one of the few to survive and bear witness...
...The snow hid any number of heavy logs that had fallen when prisoners could not lift them onto their lean and fragile shoulders...
...it followed the beds of the streams...
...The mountain slope was stripped bare...
...Two stove pipes, installed near the motor, were heated by "churka," wood cut into small pieces and dried in a special stove...
...The same ironic note sounds in his description of the high aristocracy of Soviet prisons, the common criminals...
...As to what was left over, a guard was posted there since Solidol happened to be food for machines, machines being much more important to the state than people...
...In Kolyma 2 A camp prisoner, exhausted, desperate, unable to work and doomed to die soon...
...The sighs and groans of the new American beast resounded for a long time in the frosty air...
...His prose has not been accepted by the Soviet publishing houses...
...How could such an enormous grave exist in this area...
...Even we concentration camp inmates had heard about these overseas gifts, so confusing to the mind of the camp authorities...
...2 Its bottom was knocked out on the spot...
...Because they could not stand the "trelling" they died...
...A being, not a substance...
...They would simply increase the daily quota of timber we had to cut...
...So completely did the prisoners' stomachs and bowels absorb this splendid white bread with its mixture of corn, bonemeal, and other doubtful ingredients, which were perhaps, in reality, mere human hope leaving no residue...
...While reforestation was feasible elsewhere, in Kolyma, where larch trees take three hundred years to mature, it was impractical in the wartime rush sparked by intensive Lend-Lease activity...
...The lucky ones gulped down the "Lend-Lease butter," refusing to believe it was simply a truck lubricant...
...Another "acquaintance" of Shalamov, the sadistic civilian employee Engineer Kiselev, assaulted and mutilated his defenseless slave workers until he fell victim to his own cunning...
...Rearrested in 1937, he was sent to the far northeast of Siberia and spent the next 17 years in Kolyma, most dreadful of Soviet labor camps...
...different types of such activities are labeled by letters (litera...
...9 Concentration camp terms denoting political prisoners...
...The Studebakers and Diamond-T's used un a lot of gas...
...It was easier digging graves than standing in the ice-cold water of the gold mine wearing only rubber "chums" on one's feet, working at the camp's major enterprise, removing the primary metal...
...The snow, still not deep enough, was blown away by the wind...
...Even the armed guard approached this overseas wonder and said that he could shave in front of the iron mirror...
...The bulldozer had pushed a mass of rocks and pebbles over the new grave under which the corpses were once again concealed beneath Stone...
...Lend-Lease sausage was not at all "secondhand," but we saw the legendary cans only from afar...
...In any case, we would have to do something else, equally humiliating and despicable, as is all labor in the concentration camp...
...Whole teams of prisoners in the gold fields in 1938 were put to work digging such graves, incessantly drilling, blowing up, deepening the huge, grey, cold stone pits...
...The time had not yet come to count all the people saved by this overseas wheat...
...Via Lend-Lease there also came huge, black ten-ton Diamond-T trucks and trailers with iron sides, and five-ton Studebakers that could easily climb any hill...
...They prepared the "churka" using a circular saw...
...Some of it has reached the West...
...This was overseas help...
...Most of Shalamov's short stories are autobiographic and have the ring of truth...
...Like prospecting, lumbering sticks to gold-bearing streams...
...miles...
...No one had been sent from the barracks to do it...
...g Grinya Lebedev happened to be a common criminal, a patricide to be exact...
...Nothing happened to those who had gotten their hands into the barrel...
...In 1929, at the age of 22, he was sentenced to three years of hard labor for "counterrevolutionary activities...
...I was an old-timer in Kolyma...
...I realized that I knew only a very small, insignificant part of this world...
...Deep in the mountains much is hidden...
...In Kolyma dead bodies are not committed to earth but to Stone...
...Perhaps straining after resurrection, these human bodies had shifted down the slope...
...The grave had yawned and the corpses moved down the slope...
...Measured according to a complicated table, stolen by greedy supervisors, counted and recounted, measured out again before being put into the cauldrons, there to be boiled soft and transformed into some mysterious substance smelling of anything but meat—Lend-Lease pork stew excited our eyes but not our taste buds...
...made himself a nice profit, too...
...once every five days one's stomach exploded in what could scarcely be called a bowel movement...
...I thanked God for giving me the time and strength to see this...
...So all those who had succeeded in touching the Solidol licked their fingers for the next few hours, swallowing the tiniest pieces of the overseas delicacy with its rocklike taste...
...Neither the Stone nor the North would let the corpses into their womb...
...not a scratch, not a mark on its mirrorlike knife...
...They baked pudgy, tasteless "rations" with this flour...
...In these stories, the camp hospital plays a unique part...
...I do not recall how many "sloggers" were in each enterprise—two, more likely three, for each shift...
...It seemed to me there were no LEND-LEASE COMES TO A SOVIET CAMP 419 gold fields here...
...Everything in a state of preservation— crooked fingers, gangrenous toes discharging puss, stumps of frostbitten limbs, skin scratched raw and blood-stained, eyes inflamed with hunger...
...He served the full term...
...The work was over...
...Pride and satisfaction with a job well-done were clearly written on Grinya's stony face...
...By whom...
...Thus the mountain was stripped bare and converted into a gigantic stage for the performance of a concentration camp mystery play...
...Timber and wood lay scattered about the forest on the mountain slope...
...The word "churka" came into widespread usage, and several "churka" enterprises headed by party members were set up...
...After all, American bread was also medicinal and tasteless except for a strange iron flavor...
...MARK Liwszxc The fresh tractor trail in the mud looked like the footsteps of some prehistoric beast...
...Then I remembered putting out grass fires and, by contrast, the intense blooming of the taiga in summer whose foliage together with the grass may hide all human actions, good or bad...
...Katya Glovatsky fell dead while climbing into the truck that was to carry her back to the mine...
...I became aware that a mere 20 kilometers away might stand the hut of survey geologists, prospecting for uranium or gold that might one day employ thirty thousand additional prisoners...
...Day and night these Studebakers and Diamond-T's transported American Lend-Lease wheat, in beautiful white linen bags with the American eagle sewed on them, along the thousand-mile route...
...There were no gas ovens in Kolyma...
...I remembered that grass is more forgetful than man...
...Equipment that one could not eat—uncomfortable tomahawk hatchets, very comfortable short-handled spades, non-Russian handles that spared the loader's strength...
...The American bulldozer would not cure our frostbitten fingers...
...The easygoing Dr...
...Corpses lay waiting in the doubly hardened realm of Stone and Permafrost...
...Grinya Lebedev had carried out his official assignment...
...They envied Grinya Lebedev...
...Three hundred men passionately envied the prisoner sitting at the steering wheel of the American tractor...
...Lend-Lease oatmeal we approved of and ate...
...But Stone and Permafrost will not...
...The objective of the first was to destroy the prisoner's spirit, of the second 'to destroy him physically, by starvation, cold, and a 14- to 16-hour work day...
...But now the bulldozer would give us a helping hand...
...Moscow skyscrapers are watchtowers guarding Muscovite prisoners...
...two small collections appeared separately in 1961 and 1964...
...Only in the dark canyons of the mountain riverbeds do the trees gain in height and strength...
...There were no stiff assignments, no daily quotas designed to kill people and calculated on a fourteen-hour work day...
...This was an American bulldozer with a wide blade, the moldboard, a hanging metal shield that shone like a mirror...
...415 Political prisoners, those sentenced under Article 58 for "counterrevolutionary activity," were at the very bottom of concentration camp society...
...But while not in print in the U.S.S.R., Shalamov's work is known to Russian readers in handwritten and mimeographed form (Samizdat...
...These woolen treasures were marked "secondhand" in the inventories, this, of course, seeming far more expressive an adjective than "shabby" or "b/u"—having "been used"—terms only familiar to concentration camp ears...
...The inmates' stomachs preferred native food, such as old, rotten venison that could not be boiled soft in the seven camp cauldrons...
...Only in old age does a rock become substance...
...Shabby knitted suits, secondhand pullovers and jumpers, collected overseas for the inmates of Kolyma were snatched up by the wives of the Magadan generals,' during what would develop almost into a scuffle...
...And now the knife of the overseas bulldozer would come to our aid—or was it really there to help us...
...Now that the mountain lay stripped bare its secret was revealed...
...I should know...
...LendLease supplied technical equipment...
...Side by side with these criminal underworld representatives stood those who belonged to the camp administration...
...Here, secluded from the wind and reaching for the sun out of the darkness of deep ravines, trees grow high...
...This area's rich ores—gold, wolfram, uranium, coal—have been developed through slave labor...
...In Kolyma not only gold was hidden, not only lead, wolfram, and uranium, but also preserved human bodies...
...It was a very large grave...
...Feeble human hands, even dozens of such hands, could not raise a two-meter log to the shoulders of others, to be lugged tens of meters over mounds, ditches, and pits...
...The bulldozer roared past us...
...Soviet GAZ cars had been reequipped for wood fuel...
...None of us dared dream that he would be assigned an easy task instead of the unbearable "trelling," so hated by everyone...
...There were tractor operators among the prisoners more skilled than Lebedev, but all were "Article 58" cases, "literik," "lityorka...
...They were the best trucks in Kolyma...
...The last of the tree stumps was uprooted...
...The new route was twice as long as the old one and full of hills we had to climb up and down...
...Trelling" logs by hand over the mounds and along the twisting, narrow paths was beyond human strength...
...Stone is more reliable than earth, especially when fortified by Permafrost...
...Shalamov's stories show the essential difference between an investigation prison and a hardlabor camp...
...Each of our dear ones who had perished in Kolyma, each who had been shot or beaten to death, or wasted away from hunger, might have been identified decades later...
...Lend-Lease bread had a remarkable quality...
...Lend-Lease technical equipment arrived, too...
...Each one of the three hundred envied his luck: to sit at the wheel of the well-oiled tractor, to "chirr" and roar through the timber-cutting area...
...After all, a rock was also born not as a rock but something soft and buttery...
...Glycerine...
...We had been driven to work this way hundreds of times...
...But we received no more than two tablespoons of porridge per head...
...Venison did not disappear or evaporate like pork stew...
...But gas, a light aircraft gas, also came via Lend-Lease...
...Grinya Lebedev, patricide, operated a tractor skillfully...
...They were therefore considered to be more reliable than political prisoners...
...416 VARLAM SHALAMOV These spades were immediately attached to long handles in accord with the local style, and flattened so that they could pick up more soil...
...My exhausted mind tried to understand...
...it seemed to have little relation to the LendLease delivery of American technical equipment...
...To one of these camps was sent Andrei Amalrik in August 1971, dissenter and author of the pamphlet Will the Soviet Union Survive Till 1984...
...Plenty of wood had to be abandoned during the backbreaking toil of "trelling...
...Zaytsev became a real physician again the moment he diagnosed an extremely rare case of Aneurism of the Aorta in a beautiful female prisoner...
...In Two Encounters the author describes a mine manager, A nisimov, who ordered a foreman to be shot for not standing up in his presence and who slapped prisoners with his heavy leather gloves...
...The bulldozer was approaching us...
...If all my comrades and I should freeze to death, or however we were to die, there would be enough room for us in this new grave...
...Timber cutting went on and on...
...Here were doctors who really wanted to help their fellow prisoners...
...The starving prisoners said it was LendLease butter...
...Glycerine in barrels...
...Kolyma is a well-known colloquial term denoting the basin of the Kolyma River in Siberia, known administratively as Magadan Province [562,850 sq...
...In the camp hospital where the elderly Professor Umansky worked, he proudly proclaimed himself The Mendelist, a follower of Mendel's genetic theories despite their rejection by the Party...
...Finally, yielding to force, defeated and humiliated, the Stone had promised to keep its secret, but harsh winters, hot summers, the winds and the rain, at work for six years, had wiped away the secret by casting the corpses forth from the Stone...
...The welltrained stomachs and bowels of Kolyma were easily able to cope with Solidol...
...But later it occurred to me that I knew only a small part of this world, a scrap defined by the barbed-wire zone and watchtowers that reminded one of Moscow's tentlike period of architecture...
...Everyone who ate it stopped going to the toilet...
...This mirror reflected the sky, the trees and the stars, along with the dirty faces of the prisoners...
...It both preserves and exposes secrets...
...For the last few weeks it had not occurred to me why they had been leading us to work by another route instead of along the familiar path, well-trodden by the heels of the armed escorts and by the "chunis" or thin rubbers 418 VARLAM SHALAMOV which the prisoners wore on their bare feet...
...such was the order...
...No matter how grave their crimes, they were crimes against fellow citizens, not against the Party...
...The bodies had slid down the mountain slope, revealing the secret of Kolyma...
...The smaller stumps were uprooted with crowbars and still smaller ones were simply pulled out by hand...
...i Magadan, the capital city of Magadan Province, which includes the basin of the Kolyma River, is an administrative center for all Kolyma concentration camps...
...He checked his diagnosis, he fought, he warned the authorities, but he could not overcome their distrust...
...Grinya Lebedev, common criminal, patricide, did not deign to look at us, Article 58 prisoners...
...The bulldozer was shoveling the corpses together, thousands of skeletonlike corpses, frozen stiff...
...A stone pit, the common prison grave, full of preserved corpses, had been reopened by the disappearance of the topsoil...
...So here was one of those beings that came to us from beyond the ocean...
...When finally a watchman was posted, less than half the barrel remained and the authorities drove off the crowd of dokhodyaga with shots...
...Many logs as well as sawed and piled-up wood remained in the forest...
...Article 58 means "counterrevolutionary" activity...
...But we weren't thinking about shaving, such an idea never occurred to us...
...We crawled on all fours, clutching at the rocks and bloodying our fingers...
...Which guard house towers came first, the Kremlin's or those in the concentration camps...
...Pork stew from the camp cauldron had no taste at all...
...Quietly, without rhetoric or exaggeration, the author paints his picture of the isolated world of the camps...
...The story that follows, as most of the writer's prose, deals with life and death in Soviet concentration camps...
...The trees on the mountain slopes look fit for a museum of strange and freaklike phenomena of nature...
...It must be so...
...We were exhausted before we reached our place of work, but nobody asked why another route was being taken...
...It was an easy task to dig graves then...
...it brought us a tractor and, with it, a new word for the Russian language, "bulldozer...
...Oh, Solidol, Solidol...
...These huge, stonepit graves were filled to overflowing with dead bodies...
...The barrel in which this LEND-LEASE COMES TO A SOVIET CAMP 417 heavy truck lubricant had been brought was instantly attacked by a crowd of dokhodyaga...
...With confidence he drove the well-oiled American tractor...
...Seen through the sparse, hewn-out forest I had thought they were logs still to be piled up...
...Dynamite charges set under the biggest stumps sent them flying...
...The prehistoric beast was unchained and let loose on its caterpillar tracks...
...Grinya Lebedev performed his task thoroughly, pushing the corpses up to the edge of the grave, then the shiny knifeshield of the bulldozer shoved them into the pit and he withdrew to "trel...
...Near the tractor trail a new, huge, mass grave had been carved out...
...But now I saw and understood...
...No longer would it be necessary for us to "trel" the massive logs of Daurya larch...
...Those in the wind and full light of the muddy mountain slopes are broken and deformed as they lean toward the sun, exhausted in their perpetual struggle for a piece of thawed-out soil...
...We all watched as the bulldozer turned left and began to climb the terrace, the ledge of rock where the old road led to the camp cemetery...
...a legion of others, unknown and nameless, but sharing the same fate...
...The earth had opened its mouth to reveal its underground storerooms...
...Each such enterprise was staffed by a chief engineer, a regular engineer, a labor overseer, a planner, and accountants...
...Much earlier, from the other side of the stream, I had seen objects moving, some obstructed by branches and rocks...
...The bulldozer coughed in the frost, its anger growing...
...The authorities had decided that the first job of the tractor acquired by American Lend-Lease would not be a simple job in the woods, but a more important one...
...If I forget, surely the grass will...
Vol. 21 • July 1974 • No. 3
