"'Go to Siberia,' the government inspector said.
"What? Until then he had never worried about the powers of government. He was so upset he just lay down and died of a heart attack.
"His two sons—my great-uncles—ran away to fight against this unfair government. My grandmother stayed in the village. But she was scared. She knew the police were looking for her two brothers. At the same time, she was giving bread to her brothers when they sneaked home. The special police wanted to kill them. This was around 1930 or '31. A few years later they were found and shot by the police.
"My grandmother—her name was Matryona—wanted to bury her brothers but couldn't find their bodies. And her grief didn't end there. After World War Two there was a big famine. As the daughter of a kulak, with primary school honors—ha!—she was made head of a farm. There were no strong men left. She was suffering from hunger.
"In 1946, her son—my seventeen-year-old uncle—went looking for food. They were so hungry they'd go to the fields to look for grains of wheat that had been left behind after the harvest. He found a few grains. And he was seen. He was arrested for theft.
"He screamed at the police, 'You are monsters! You have food and we have nothing!'
"For saying that, he was given a twenty-five-year sentence. He spent it in Magadan and Kolyma, washing gravel for gold. There was almost no communication with his mother. In 1954 when Stalin died, he was rehabilitated. He died three years ago and—you know?—he would never speak a word about his imprisonment.
"My grandmother was so afraid of the KGB that when the name was mentioned she made a face. The worst document she'd ever seen in her life was that of her son's sentence. Imagine, twenty-five years. He would have got ten years for theft, but he screamed 'You monsters,' so he got fifteen more."
Now we were in the deep countryside, no other cars at all, and the road was buried in snow. The landscape was like a charcoal drawing on white paper—the black woods and the smudged sky and the whiteness of the blizzard.
"There are thousands of such stories," Viktor said. "It's a story of terror. People were afraid of anyone in power. The system was cruel. The whole basis of it was that Stalin wanted slave labor."
All this time, Yelena was translating and I was writing in the notebook on my knee, which was easy because of the pauses between the men speaking and Yelena's translation.
"And you couldn't trust anyone," Sergei said. "I had a problem myself. I was on file, someone had betrayed me."
"What had you done?"
"Told political jokes," Sergei said. "But I found out about my file in a roundabout way. I was working for Komsomol"—the communist youth organization—"in the Political Education Department. It was the eighties. We were dealing with vets from Afghanistan. They had severe stress and trauma, and they found it hard to adjust to life.
"I was stressed too, from the work. I wanted to travel abroad. I put in my application. I was told I'd need a reason. I gave one. They said, 'No, Sergei. Sorry, Sergei.'
"What? I was very surprised that I was not allowed to go. Five years later, after the USSR broke up, I found out the reason. The KGB gave me the information. That's a funny story. In 1989 I was in Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Revolution, when Havel became president. I was there the whole time. I was running a travel agency.
"The KGB came to me—some guys. They said, 'What happened? What's this Velvet Revolution? We don't want the same thing here.'
"I decided to blackmail them. I said, 'I'll tell you about the Czechs if you show me my file.'
"They finally agreed. I looked through my file and I was amazed. It turned out the informant was a girl I knew, a colleague in the Komsomol. After office parties, she wrote reports about who was telling jokes. I had trusted her!"
Big-shouldered, bearish, funny Sergei was hunched over the wheel, squinting into the snowstorm and the road ahead, and reminiscing. I could imagine him with a glass of vodka in his hand, drunk and yakking, being the life and soul of a party.
"Here's the really funny part," he said. "At the time, I sincerely believed in communism! I was deputy secretary, responsible for the ideology of the young people. We were believers! I discovered that there were three other spies in my office. And it was an ideological organization!"
"Were you scared when you found out about your file?" I asked.
"Not scared. I was very disappointed. I was disgusted. Here I was, intelligent. I thought our system was the best. But the trouble was, our leaders were old. Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev. Old men!"
"Tell me a political joke," I said.
"I can only think of Putin jokes."
I said, "Surely the jokes are the same, and only the names of the men change."
"No. There are specific jokes. Brezhnev jokes were different altogether."
"Such as?"
Viktor chipped in. "Here's one. A man is talking to another. He says, 'Have you heard that Brezhnev had an operation for chest expansion? More room for medals!'"
"It sounds better in Russian," Yelena added after she'd translated.
Sergei then told a long and bewildering joke about Brezhnev overhearing his neighbors watching a hockey game on television. He said. They said. He said. I wrote it down but didn't understand it.
When I didn't laugh at the punch line, Sergei said, "Jokes about Brezhnev are kindhearted. For one thing, he wasn't well. For another, compared to Stalin and Khrushchev, he was good. But Andropov was a problem. He initiated more repression of dissidents."
"What about the woman who reported on your jokes?" I asked. "What happened to her?"
"I saw her a few years later," Sergei said, chuckling at the memory. "I gave her a few shots of vodka, then told her what I knew. I asked, 'Why did you do it?'
"She just looked at me. 'I was doing my duty,' she says."
"So she didn't apologize?"
"Not at all. She said, 'I wanted to report everyone who was two-faced.' Listen, Paul, I have a huge file. Ha!"
We had gone sixty or more miles into the snow-covered pine forest of Chusovskoy Oblast, the snow blowing across the road in some places, the wind creating sharply pleated drifts. It was another vast but oversimple black-and-white landscape, beautiful and terrifying in its starkness. Just the way the snow danced in the headlights, swirling and funneling in the gusts, took my attention away from the stories of betrayal. I tried to imagine being a prisoner in this storm, on foot or in the back of a locked truck. There had been millions. Everything that made this place lovely for me, for a prisoner meant only death.
"This is Kuchino," Yelena said, as Sergei slowed and took a sharp right into very deep snow, going slowly past a village of dark wooden cottages. The half-buried buildings had scalloped, gingerbreaded shutters and wooden ornaments—flowers and squiggles—and some were log cabins, which dated from czarist times.
Boys and men wandered in the road, dangerously close to our car, peering at us from under fur hats. Their faces were red with cold, snot glistening under their noses, their mouths open as though calling out to us.
"Everyone here is feeble-minded," Yelena said. "They were sent here, to the hospital."
But it wasn't really a hospital. It was an old-fashioned asylum where the patients had been rusticated, and during the day many of them were turned out to wander in the snow. Until they were sent here, they had been locked in a gold-domed cathedral—decommissioned to serve as a madhouse—near the city of Kungur, ninety miles down the Siberian road.
A few miles beyond Kuchino, we came to a steel wall surrounded by trees, and a big gate, and a sign beside it saying that we'd come to Perm 36. A former corrective labor colony, I read, and the rest was obscured by the falling snow.
One of the patients from the asylum had followed us to the big gate and began pleading in Russian as we drove through.
The compound was so simplified by the snowfall it could have been a Boy Scout camp, but that was a first and fleeting impression. The barbed wire at the top of the high walls and near every
entrance told a truer story. So did the small barred windows, the windowless truck in which prisoners were transported, and, when I went inside, the cells, the bunks, the barracks, the torture chambers.
Perm 36 is the only intact gulag prison remaining in Russia. In Gulag, Anne Applebaum writes of Perm 36 as "a Stalinist-era lagpunkt [camp division], later one of the harshest political camps of the 1970s and 1980s." All the other prisons have been destroyed or were converted to different uses. Perm 36 still exists because of the efforts of former prisoners, gulag historians such as Viktor Shmirov, and, as I learned later, money from the Ford Foundation.
"Not the Russian government?" I asked, though I suspected what the answer might be.
Sergei laughed and said, "Many of the people in this government were responsible for the prison"—for the fact was that Perm 36, which had operated for more than forty years, had been shut down only recently. Fifteen years ago, this had been a place of torture, forced labor, virtual slavery, and death.
"Who was sent here?" I asked as we walked from cell to cell.
"The same people as in other camps. Fifteen percent anti-Soviet, ten percent criminals, and all the others—three quarters—ordinary people accused of 'misbehavior.'"
"Petty crime?"
"No, no," Viktor said. "Missing workdays—say, if you missed three, they'd send you here for ten years. Or lateness. Or taking something from the government."
"Taking what, for example?"
"A peasant—a hungry peasant—who took three tassels of grain would be arrested and brought here. Like Sergei's uncles. But never mind these things. You have to keep in mind that people were needed. We had a bad economy. Stalin had started a program of economic modernization. You know what Churchill said: Stalin found Russia working with wooden plows and left it equipped with nuclear bombs."
"Let's keep moving," I said. Inside, even with the heat on, the barracks and cells were very cold. They had been repainted, but still they were primitive examples of inhumanity and terror.
"For twenty-four years under Stalin we became powerful," Viktor said, "but at the expense of freedom. We had no loans or credit from other countries. We had to do it all ourselves. The only source of labor was the people"—and he gestured to the workshop we were entering—"Russian people, prisoners, slaves."
Here at Perm 36 the "politicals," the criminals, the tardy workers, labored in the machine shop, making small metal Y-shaped connectors to attach wires to electrical terminals. I'd seen them on plugs, on carburetors, on batteries. Viktor said they had to be made by hand, and Perm 36 produced hundreds of thousands of them.
"Government needed labor," Viktor said, "so it enacted harsh legislation, creating fear and exploitation. This produced huge numbers of prisoners. And because they were slaves, they were an extremely mobile labor force."
As we tramped through the snowdrifts to the punishment cells, Viktor said that it was not only these slave laborers who suffered. He recalled that in his own family there was never enough food. "We were always hungry."
Perm 36 had gone through a number of phases. After 1953, some prisoners got their freedom, though they had been almost destroyed by their time in the labor camp. Then a power struggle between Khrushchev and his spy chief, Lavrenty Beria, resulted in Beria's being convicted as a spy and shot. Eight hundred of Beria's men were sent to Perm to suffer and work. Because they were canny—most of them had been spies or agents—security was increased, walls were heightened, and the camp was expanded. In 1973—and I reminded myself that I had rattled past Perm on the Trans-Siberian at that time, feeling sorry for myself—Perm was "only one of two political camps" in the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum wrote. Perm was restocked with political prisoners. In the 1980s, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, a former director of the KGB, had arrested many thousands. "The prisoners were educated and had been powerful. Some had lawyers!" More camps were built, including others around Perm.
"They built a toilet over there in 1972," Viktor said, pointing from an iced-up doorway to an outhouse in a distant part of the prison compound. "It had to serve five hundred and sixty prisoners. They lined up to use it. How did they do it? Yes, quickly."
Sergei said, "It was just another tool to humiliate prisoners."
"Exhaustion, frost, hunger, and endless humiliations," Shalamov had written of prison certainties.
I asked Viktor about the death rate at Perm 36.
"In general, prisoners were worked to death. Six percent or more died every year. But many were too sick to work. In 1984, only seven percent of the prisoners here were capable of hard work. The rest were sick or handicapped."
In the midday snowstorm, under a gunmetal sky, the snowdrifts piled to the windows, the damp rooms and dark corridors too cold to linger in, the outside temperature around 0° Fahrenheit, and crazies from the nearby asylum banging on the high iron gate, it seemed an appropriate day to visit a gulag. I did not want to see it in the summer, surrounded by high grass and picturesque log cabins and wildflowers and tweeting birds. It was most enlightening to see it at its worst, when the broken bunks and the exhibit of prisoners' artifacts—dented bowls and twisted spoons and ragged gloves—were given more meaning by the cold despair I could feel in my bones.
Viktor showed me an exhibit of photographs of well-known Soviet political prisoners: Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Babel, Varlam Shalamov; and they could have included Natan Sharansky, who had served six years in Perm 35, not far away. A leader of the struggle for Lithuanian independence, Balis Gayauskas, had been locked up for thirty-five years. One of his crimes was translating Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago into Lithuanian. He subsequently became head of state security in the Lithuanian government.
"He comes back from time to time," Viktor said.
In The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn had written: "A great writer is, so to speak, a second government. That's why no regime anywhere has ever loved its great writers, only its minor ones."
A Ukrainian dissident, Lenko Luk'ianenko, was sentenced to death; his sentence was reduced to fifteen years, which he served here, but before he was released he was given ten more years. A fellow Ukrainian, a poet named Vasyl Stus—"not a dissident," Viktor said, "but had the sort of spirit they didn't want"—spent fifteen years here, after being arrested and rearrested. A Nobel Prize candidate in 1980, Stus had lost out to Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish poet who had immigrated to California, where he wrote lyric poems in the Berkeley sunshine while Stus sat in an isolation or punishment cell translating Rilke from memory and made metal connectors in the machine shop. Stus died in the prison in 1985, "in mysterious circumstances," Viktor said. But what was the mystery? I saw Stus's horrible little cell and the narrow board of a shelf that was his bunk. I would not have lasted two days.
"I want to explain the slavery of this system," Viktor said. "I've been to the U.S. My friends there would say to me, 'We had slaves. It's like American slavery.' I said no. Here's the difference. You know Cato, the Roman? He said, To keep a slave you must give him meat, bread, and two bottles of not very good wine every week. Eh?" He let this sink in, and then he said, "On the Southern plantations, the slaves were fed because they were worth something. They were kept well. They had families and households. They had value." He smiled grimly and went on, "Gulag prisoners were slaves who were worth nothing!"
"The word the guards used for gulag prisoners," a middle-aged Russian woman who was also a historian later told me, "was dust—pwl" She also said, "Stalin introduced fear. We lived in fear." His announced intention in setting up the gulag was "to isolate those who might possibly doubt our resolution and achievements in the great revolution."
"And look what we lost," the historian said. "Forty million in the purges from 1918 to 1953. Twenty-six million in World War Two. The best people. It's a wonder we're still here."
"What little freedom an American slave had was more than that of any gulag slave," Viktor said.
I went back to the old photographs to look at Varlam Shalamov's tormented, ma
rtyred-looking face. I had read his books but never seen his face. Where Solzhenitsyn served up piety, and redemption through suffering, Shalamov was clear-sighted about how everyone involved with the camps—prisoners and guards and party hacks—was debased: the camps represented "the corruption of the human soul." "The camps are in every way schools of the negative," he writes in one story. "Every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute." The prisoner clings to life but without any illusions because "we understood that death was no worse than life, and we feared neither." In another story, a fellow prisoner says flatly, "I'm going to Magadan. To be shot." All this in temperatures of 60 below. The wonder was that this highly intelligent man had survived, and in Kolyma Tales he had created a masterpiece out of the experience. "A human being survives by his ability to forget," he writes early in the book, and near the end, in a line that no writer would disagree with, "It's easier to bear a thing if you write it down."
Our last visit was to the isolation, or punishment, cells, each a bare cement box with four wooden shelves. I stepped in, and Sergei, in an exuberant fit of macabre humor, slammed the door shut and yelled at me through the door slit. I stood in the semi-darkness shivering, though some warmth was palpable on the pipes bolted to the wall. Trying to conceal my alarm, I shouldered the door open.
Viktor said, "A former prisoner told me, 'I remember every night I spent in that cell. I woke up five times a night. I rubbed my body against the pipes. I did exercises to stop shivering. We had no blanket.'"
Many former prisoners told Viktor the same story of the isolation cell. It was a torture chamber, he said as we walked outside into the snow. The prisoners got a quarter of the food the others were given. A zek, Anne Applebaum wrote, could be punished for sitting on his bed in the daytime, for not wearing socks, or for walking too slowly. And a sick or injured man might end up being held (as in one well-documented case) for two months "before being taken to the hospital."