The Day Will Pass Away Read online

  Solzhenitsyn’s words about those who failed in their struggle to avoid working in the camps, who felt they couldn’t go on living that way, who just wanted to get away from it all, are wholly applicable to Ivan Chistyakov. The diary he left gives us a unique insight into the thoughts and feelings of someone who found himself in that role.

  ‘They just called me in and sent me off . . . ’

  It was through no choice of his that Chistyakov was sent to the ends of the earth to command a unit of VOKhR## marksmen, whose job was to guard the prisoners on their way to work, to patrol the camp perimeter, to accompany echelons, and to catch anyone who tried to escape.

  From that moment, every day he spent at BAM was filled with just one wish: to get himself out of that nightmare world by whatever means he could. He describes it endlessly: the severe climate, the disgusting accommodation in which your hair would freeze to your forehead at night; the lack of a bathhouse, of decent food, the constant colds he suffered, the stomach pains:

  It would be bearable if we could at least relax in a warm building, but we don’t have even that. The stove heats you on one side of your body while the other freezes. You become lackadaisical: why care about anything? Yet every day that passes is part of my life, a day I could have lived instead of wasted.

  Chistyakov was in command of a platoon of guards. He was the very lowest link in the chain of command and was under pressure from two directions. On the one hand there were the coarse, illiterate, drunken guards, many of whom were themselves prisoners serving short sentences, or had been prisoners in the past. He writes: ‘There is no one to talk to here. I can’t talk to the zeks,*** obviously, and if I talked to the guards they’d become overfamiliar and I’d lose my authority. We are just a prop for the system, and when the project is finished we will leave the stage unnoticed.’

  On the other hand, he was also being pressured by his more bloody-minded Chekist superiors in the secret police, who had been transferred to BAM from the dreaded Solovki complex where they had been trained in the ways of Solovki power, which had replaced Soviet power.††† It was a school whose approach was now extended to the entire Gulag system. The brutal methods used against the prisoners (which Chistyakov was to encounter at BAM) are described by Varlam Shalamov on the basis of his own experience of the camp in the early 1930s:

  Somebody must have shot those three escapees. It was during the winter, and their frozen corpses were stood by the guardhouse for a full three days to demonstrate to the camp inmates the futility of attempting to escape. Somebody must have given the order to parade those corpses to teach us a lesson. There in the North, which I knew like the back of my hand, someone must have issued instructions for convicts to be given ‘the mosquito treatment’, to be tied naked to a stake for refusing to work or failing to achieve the output quotas.‡‡‡

  It is obvious from this kind of testimony that Chistyakov’s role in BAMLag must have been deeply repugnant to him, and indeed he writes about that quite openly in his diary:

  Nightfall brings disturbances, escapes, killings. For once, though, may the gentle autumn night extend its protective mantle over the captive. Two runaways this time. There are interrogations, pursuits, memoranda, reports to HQ. The Third Section§§§ takes an interest, and in place of rest night brings unrest and nightmares.

  This man is no Chekist. He is an outsider, here under duress, and from time to time he is given to reflection. He remembers ‘for some reason, the number of people I have burdened with a longer sentence. I try to stay calm but sometimes lose my temper. Some I send to the punishment cells.’¶¶¶ He was stunned by the appalling conditions in which prisoners, engaged in the heavy labour of building a railway, were kept.

  We check out the huts . . . bare bunks, gaps everywhere in the walls, snow on the sleeping prisoners, no firewood. A mass of shivering people, intelligent, educated people. Dressed in rags filthy from the trackbed ballast . . . They can’t sleep at night, then they spend the day labouring, often in worn-out shoes or woven sandals, without mitts, eating their cold meals at the quarry. In the evening their barracks are cold again and people rave through the night. How can they not recall their warm homes? How can they not blame everyone and everything, and probably rightly so?

  In his jottings shortly after arriving at BAM, we still find clear expressions of sympathy for those he is obliged to guard. He understands why people refuse to go out to work, and why, given the least chance, they try to escape.

  We have been sent juveniles: louse-ridden, dirty, without warm clothing. There is no bathhouse because we cannot go sixty rubles over budget, which would work out at one kopek a head. There is talk of the need to prevent escapes. They look for causes, use guns, but fail to see that they themselves are the cause, that escapes are a result of their slothfulness, or their red tape, or just plain sabotage. People are barefoot and inadequately dressed even though there is enough of everything in the stores.

  Chistyakov is incensed by the methods in use on this project, a combination of muddle-headedness and profound indifference and heartlessness towards people deprived of the barest necessities. His diary is one of the few reliable sources exposing the perversity of Stalin’s forced labour system. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that the author is describing what happened day after day from inside the system.

  At every step he encounters evidence of the inanity and inefficiency of organizing labour in this manner. For example, the administration fails to provide firewood for a contingent of new prisoners, and at –50°C people simply must find a way to keep warm. As Chistyakov admits, they have no option but to steal and burn precious railway sleepers intended for the project.

  The zeks are burning railway sleepers by the cartload. They poach a few from here, a few from there, and in total they destroy thousands. So many that it’s terrifying to think about. The top brass either can’t or won’t recognize that it is because these people must be given firewood, and that their burning of sleepers is the expensive alternative . . . The brass, the Party members, the old Chekists, all work in a slapdash way, not giving a damn about anything . . . Discipline is maintained solely by fear of the Revtribunal.###

  On almost every page of the diary Chistyakov expresses irritation and dissatisfaction with the Chekist leaders, who are constantly in hysterics, ‘the company commander kicks me out of his office, shrieking’, because their superiors are demanding that they should at all costs fulfil the Plan and complete the project in an absurdly short time. He also expresses his lack of faith in their coercive work methods, although it would have been dangerous for him to say anything about that openly: ‘If you try talking out loud about the real state of affairs you’ll be in big trouble.’

  From what Chistyakov describes, he appears to have behaved in substantially the same way as the prisoners. In other words, he tried his best to avoid carrying out inane orders. He understands something the camp bosses do not, when:

  they imagine that a subordinate who has been given an order is duty bound and willing to carry it out promptly and punctiliously. In actual fact not all are slaves. A whole category of sloggers among the prisoners strain every fibre not to carry out any order they are given. This is the natural reaction of a slave, but the camp bosses in Moscow and those below them for some reason suppose that every order they give will be carried out. In fact, however, every order from above offends against a prisoner’s dignity, irrespective of whether the instruction itself is constructive or destructive. The prisoner’s brain has been deadened by every conceivable order, and his free will is impugned.****

  The real tragedy of Chistyakov’s situation is that, whether he likes it or not, and as he himself occasionally realizes to his horror, he is growing into BAM. Gradually the sympathy he felt towards the prisoners atrophies until it all but disappears. Fights and murders among the criminals, endless escape attempts for which he is answerable, blunt his empathy. This is more pronounced in BAMLag because few of the prisoners are educated. That time, o
f educated prisoners, had not yet come; the mass terror of 1937 was still ahead.††† The main contingent were criminals, jailed for ordinary crimes, dispossessed ‘wealthy’ peasants, and street children who had been rounded up. These were prisoners who were particularly likely to attempt escape, and circumstances were in their favour: the constant moving of the phalanxes as the railway track advanced and the lack of a fixed camp infrastructure. Chistyakov writes that every day he covers many kilometres on foot or horseback. These conditions made it almost impossible to prevent escapes.

  For the women prisoners (mainly criminals or prostitutes) he felt horror and revulsion, mixed, at times, with pity:

  . . . there is a fight in the phalanx, a fight between women. They are beating the former top shock worker to death and we are powerless to intervene. We are not allowed to use firearms inside the phalanx. We do not have the right even to carry a weapon. They are all 35-ers,‡‡‡ but you feel sorry for the woman all the same. If we wade in there will be a riot; if they later recognize we were right, they will regret what they have done. You just get these riots. The devil knows but the Third Section doesn’t. They’ll come down on us and bang us up whether or not the use of firearms was justified. Meanwhile, the zeks get away with murder.

  The sound of trams

  Did echoes of events in the rest of Russia in 1935–6 reach the Far East? In his diary Chistyakov several times mentions Communist Party officials like Klim Voroshilov and Lazar Kaganovich, and current political events. This is mainly in connection with his obligation to conduct political indoctrination sessions, based on the newspapers, with his guards. He reads them Mikhail Kalinin’s§§§ speech about the draft of a new Soviet constitution.¶¶¶ He tells them about the building of the Moscow Metro and the world situation, mentioning Hitler. He does not, however, give the impression of having thought overmuch about the significance of these events, or even about how hollow the word ‘constitution’ sounds in the context of the situation he himself describes in BAMLag. Chistyakov writes derisively about a meeting which took place in the canteen in support of the trial, which was just beginning, of the ‘Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc’.### What he mocks, however, is not the show trial of the political opposition as such, but the absurd and illiterate speeches by Chekists, none of whom ‘can carry the masses with them, inspire them, know how to guide the listener’s mind’.

  Neither, however, does Chistyakov have any fanatical belief in communism, or any particular enthusiasm for the ‘great construction projects’. He knows that he and others like him are mere rubble for Stalin’s ‘foundation pit’: ‘The Armed Guards Unit is part of a great construction project. We’re devoting our lives to building a socialist society, and what recognition do we get? None. Unless we get hauled before the Revtribunal.’

  Chistyakov is a fairly typical bit player of the early Soviet era. He only wants to be a loyal citizen. His aspirations are modest. He wants to live a life full of ordinary human joys:

  I want to play sport, to learn about radio, I want to work at my real profession, study, keep up with metals technology and try it out in practice. Live among educated people, go to the theatre and cinema, to lectures and museums and exhibitions. I want to sketch. Ride a motorbike, and then perhaps sell it and buy one of those catapault-launched gliders and fly . . .

  He was to enjoy none of these things. It was the way of the times he lived in. Soviet power was to give him no opportunity of acquiring even a minimum of personal freedom, and the hopelessness of his situation is something he felt from his very first day at BAM. He sensed that even the modest life he had lived as a Muscovite was over. In the first half of the 1930s Moscow was a grey city, with communal flats, crowded trams, queues, food ration cards and badly dressed people, but now it seemed to Chistyakov the most beautiful place on earth. He outdoes even Chekhov’s three sisters in his yearning to return there: ‘I pictured Karetno-Sadovaya Square, the noise of the trams, the streets, the pedestrians, the thawing snow, and the yard sweepers clearing the pavements with their scrapers. I thought about it till my head ached . . . and even some remembered ramshackle fence in the Moscow suburbs seems near and dear to me.’

  From today’s viewpoint, this sense of nostalgia and fatalism seems strange, almost neurotic. Chistyakov had probably been conscripted for only one year, and soon that ill-starred year would end and he should return home. He knew only too well, however, the country he was living in. He knew he was powerless when faced with the authorities, who could deal with him as they pleased. Most importantly, he was aware of the fragility of the partition that separated him from those he was compelled to guard. A recurring motif in the diary is the constant expectation of his own arrest. He is undoubtedly aware that the whole tenor of his life at BAM is going to lead inevitably to his exchanging the status of commander of an armed guard platoon for that of a prisoner.

  The threat of arrest dogs him. He is in genuine danger of facing the tribunal his superiors keep threatening him with, either for failing to prevent escapes, or for any of the other actions and inactions which could provide grounds for accusing him of negligence. He might be consigned to the Gulag for many years. In the climate of denunciation which reigned among the Chekists in BAMLag, with everybody spying on everybody else, Chistyakov was vulnerable from virtually every angle. He was an outsider in terms of social class, he had been purged from the Party, he criticized his bosses, and he didn’t take orders seriously. The fact that he kept his distance from the others, didn’t get drunk along with everybody else, and was constantly writing and drawing alerted the Chekists and made them suspicious of him.

  Chistyakov gradually grew reconciled to the idea of his impending arrest. He told himself he might only get a short sentence and, having served his time, at last be able to return to his old life.

  I really will have no option but to earn myself a prison sentence and get out. It won’t be that bad. I certainly won’t be the only person in the USSR with a criminal record. People just get on with it now, and will in the future. That’s how BAM has re-educated me, how it has refined my thinking. By making me a criminal. In theory I already am. I’m quietly sitting here among the ‘soldiers of the track’, preparing and resigning myself to that future. Or perhaps I will top myself.

  ‘I am going out of my mind . . . ’

  It may be that the nostalgia and despair Chistyakov increasingly felt during his year at BAM were intensified by a sense that any other way of life was now a mirage. The whole world seemed to be one big BAMLag.

  ‘There was something else I realized: the camps were not a hell in comparison with a paradise elsewhere but a mask copied from that other life,’ Varlam Shalamov was to write, formulating what Chistyakov, the armed guard platoon commander, is attempting to say in his diary. Shalamov goes on:

  Why is the camp’s mask copied from the outside world? The camp mirrors that world. There is nothing in the camp that you would not find in the world beyond the barbed wire, in terms of the social and moral arrangements. The ideas in the camp only replicate ideas from outside, transmitted downwards in the form of orders from superiors. Any social movement, campaign, twist or turn in the world outside is promptly reflected in the camp. It reflects not only the struggle of political cliques succeeding each other in power, but the culture of these people, their secret urges, tastes, customs, their suppressed desires. The camp is a mask of society also because everything there is the same as in the world outside. Blood is just as bloody, and the secret policemen and stool pigeons are working flat out, initiating new cases, compiling profiles, conducting interrogations, carrying out arrests, releasing some and arresting others. It is even easier to control other people’s destinies in the camp than outside. Everybody works every day, just as in the outside world, and working outstandingly well is supposedly the only way to be released. Just as in the outside world, however, these promises prove false and do not lead to release. The motto on the gates of the camp is constantly repeated: ‘Labour is a matter of honour, gl
ory, valour, and heroism’. Lectures are given about current affairs, national loans are signed up for, meetings attended. People succumb to the same diseases as in the world outside, are hospitalized, get better or die. Nowhere are blood and death illusory. It is the blood that makes this mask a reality.*****

  Gradually, indeed, the sense of isolation, doom and fear take hold of Chistyakov so powerfully that the possibility of death nearly becomes a reality. He contemplates suicide ever more frequently. After the terrible cataclysms of the Revolution and Civil War, suicide became almost a fad. That choice struck many of Chistyakov’s contemporaries as virtually the easy way out. Reporting a suicide in the camp, he writes about it as a possible escape for him too.

  One of the zek armed guards has shot himself.†††† The report claims he was afraid of being sentenced to a new term, but the reality is probably different. They write these reports to keep up morale. What will they write if I top myself? I am going out of my mind. Life is so precious, and wasted here so cheaply, so uselessly, so worthlessly.

  As time goes by the idea of killing himself becomes increasingly real, and seems simple, almost commonplace:

  I took out my pistol and put it against my throat. It would be so easy to press the trigger and then . . . feel nothing. How easily it could be done, as if you were only joking. It’s nothing to be scared of, nothing supernatural. Just like supping a spoonful of soup. I don’t know what held me back. It was all so real, so natural, my hand didn’t even tremble.