Life is drawing to a close. And finally came the time you had been dreaming
of after all those terrible years, in which one had suffered so much. We must
not hide the rememberances of our lives, of everything we have gone through, in
our hearts.
In my opinion this is so important, because the true and correct story about those times has not been written yet - this is yet to come. And everything that was written during the years of despotism and stagnation, the years which lead to the moral degeneration of our society, is nothing else but fraud and falsehood, intended distortion of reality and truth, and the praise of seemingly "brilliant" leaders, who had seized the power with their dirty hands that had changed into a purple red colour from the blood of millions of people. But this had been "unevitable" for the securing of their staggering careers and the receipt of unmerited honours.
Moreover the witnesses and participants of all those events become less and less, and soon there will be none left at all. History has merely been written on the basis of archival documents, and it cannot be complete, for by far not all places of events and facts were recorded by documents and in accordance with the truth. There is no doubt that many extremely important documents were removed with intent. Details and comprehensiveness can only be recalled by the memory of contemporaries.
I am one of these contemporaries and an involuntary participant in the events of those days. Unfortunately I did not keep every single detail in my mind, nor all the names of those cultured, higly educated, greatly progressive, veracious and proper people I met during that period of time.
Had I not been drawn into the whirlpool of the events of the 1930s and 1950s, I would not have assiociated with such a multitude of people, who were so completely different from eachother with regard to their fates, their traits of character, their opinions and the way they conducted themselves in view of the conditions they had to cope with. My relations to these people helped me a lot to understand, digest, recognize and think about the appearances and events, which earlier would have remained disregarded by me, which would not have touched me and not even have roused any particular interest.
I was born in Kiev on the 30th of August (according to the old calendar) 1910. My father was a railway official. I remember the policeman, the grocers, the houseowners and landlords and several " bourgeois" who later were "sunk into the Black Sea".
In the Kiev municipal district called Pechersk, where I was born and grew up, there were numerous churches and a few monasteries, among them the famous Kiev-Pechersk lavra. Mainly pilgrims from all corners of Mother Russia came here on foot in order to meet eachother. I recall various kinds of solemn and ceremonial divine services. And I remember having set out for the lavra with my parents on Sundays. In the refectory they distributed big slices of rye bread and bread kvass from a pitcher to the pilgrims and all those, who so desired. We did not go there, because we suffered want, but because this feeding was extraordinarily delicious. In our district there were many military barracks, military schools and cadet corpses. The house we lived in was situated close to the famous "Arsenal" works that went down in revolutionary history. The first shots I heard in my life were fired during the skirmishes between Arsenal workers and cadets. And then everything began to turn round, as in a caleidoscope, one power followed the other, fierce fights were fought. Kiev was occupied by the Germans twice, afterwards by the Poles; twice Denikin captured the town; Petlyura's troups, the Haydamaks with their hetman Skoropadskiy and many other "powers" yet seized and got hold of Kiev. During this time people became aware of the meaning of the word "cruelty".
We got accustomed to the volleys of rifle and machine-gun fire, to the canonades of the artillery and the dead bodies dragged out into the streets. People were not taken prisoners - they were executed, left behind and not cleared away for a long time, with the intention of scaring the people.
During the fights the inhabitants sat snug in the basements. As soon as a gun-fight had come to an end, they appeared in the streets again, without knowing which power had just gained the upper hand. It sometimes occured that the people creeping out of the shelters were unable to guess, who was in charge at this very moment; they sometimes made some disrespectful remarks and - were shot at once.
For that reason our grandmother was always the first to come upstairs from the basement - she was a brilliant "diplomat", and whenever she entered into conversation with the victors, she would neither call them gentlemen nor comrades, but simply used words like "little son" or "relatives", and a s soon as she had realized what kind of people they were, these "relatives", she came back into the basement and said: you may come out, they are Petlyura's adherents.
The Soviet power finally became firmly established in Kiev with a considerable delay.Thus, I started school with the preparatory class at the gymnasia No. 5 for boys and then immediately changed to the third class of the only seven-year-school for the working population.
I remember the devastation and hunger caused by the intervention and the civil war. Fortunately, only the town people were suffering from hunger. In the village they had enough food-stuffs available. The town people dragged out everything from their homes that could be used as an object of exchange against food. They lived on this. The currency was salt at that time; they got it from Odessa, wherby they had to overcome lots of impediments and difficulties. It often happened that anti-profiteer detachments took away from us all the salt which had been obtained with the greatest difficulties, and one had to start from the beginning once again.
Money was completely worthless. The salary consisted of millions and even billions of rubels, for which one could not buy more than a few matchboxes. At this time practically nothing was sold against money - people were just exchanging foodstuffs and payments were made in the form of personal manhours.
The people only started to heave a sigh of relief upon the introduction of the New Economic Policy and the appearance of the 10-rubel bill.
Until 1930 I lived at my parents' expense in Kiev. During this time I finished the 7-classes school, as well as the railway training school, and then entered the railway technical secondary school, which, like other institutes of technology in the Ukraine, produced engineers with limited specialties. As a result of the unification of educational establishment, we, the students of the Kiev railway technical secondary school, were transferred to Moscow.
Well - good-bye, Kiev! I became a student of the second semester at the Moscow Institute of Communication Engineers - and proceeded to live at my own expense.
Due to the lack of class-rooms and student hostels they established a two-group system. One group stayed in Moscow and studied, while the second one carried out practical training. After a defined term both groups changed their whereabouts. The practical studies were, in fact, many-sided - trips on a locomotive and work in a steam-engine repair workshop, in metal and machine-building factories, in timber enterprises and saw mills, in planning and construction organizations.
This practical training also considerably improved our financial situation, because we were paid for it.
In order to "improve the teaching methods" essential changes were carried through. The participation in lectures was enjoined on us; we got used to responsible work, whereby the students worked on given subjects on there own by using their textbooks and all kinds of handbooks, and had the possibility, in unevitable cases, to direct themselves to the bored lecturers and professors sitting in the lecture hall; they introduced the brigade method, under which the students were dicided into groups of 4-5 persons each, with a brigade leader at the head, who regularly had to give account of all carried out tasks. In accordance with his replies and the work done in the groups all members of the brigade received the same marks.
All this methodic experimenting had its effects on the depths and the quality of the knowledge imparted to us.
Although in the 1930s, on the whole, people did not show much comprehension for democracy, the students none the less raised a number of questions before the dean to achieve changes regarding the syllabus – about the partial or complete exclusion of one or a few disciplines and the introduction of new ones. These questions, as a rule, were decided favourably.
The students of our faculty even suggested to reduce the term of training to the 4th course, i.e. by 6 months altogether, and then already pass the finals, which would, of course, increase the daily amount of strain to learn. This proposal was accepted, too. Instead of passing our final exams in the June of 1933, we finished the institute already in December 1932.
Thus, the first stage of my life came to an end.
In 1933 the administration of the education of cadres of the Department of Communication assigned me to go to Alma-Ata, for the disposal of the head, who had just opened the Turkestan-Siberian railroad, one of the first of the first 5 years’ plans.
At the end of the first chapter in my life I was to clash with a phenomenon, which went beyond the scope of my powers of imagination, particularly with regard to how it was distorted in public propaganda. They made us believe that the kulaks, against who they fought a cruel battle, were the worst enemies of the Soviet power and would have to be exterminated relentlessly.
Of course, we, the town children, did not know, how a kulak looks in reality. And then, when felling trees and during the next period of practical instruction in a saw mill in the district of Arkhangelsk, I was to meet a man, who had been expropriated by the state, face to face.
The first impression, which enduringly sticks in my memory, was given to me when our group arrived at its final destination, in the place, where our practical training was to be carried through.
The station concourse was stuffed; everywhere old people of different nationalities, utterly exhausted and hungry persons were sitting or lying about.
Later it became evident that the tomber stations refused to accept any responsibility or take on any irksome commitments for them, because they were completely unsuited to do any work. They automatically applied the rule that “the one who does not work, does not need any food”.
As a rule they proceeded with a kind of selection when taking over expropriated families. Young people and men of medium age were sent away to do the hardest labor – to fell trees. Women were assigned for light or unskilled work, children formed the third group, old people the forth.
As a consequence of this selection process the families were split up into different timber stations, which were often situated several kilometers away from eachother. I was forced to become an eye-witness of how mothers or fathers ran there and back after work, in order to meet eachother or to visit their children and old relatives and handing over to them a part of their food ration. There were no guards and no medical aid either. You can fall seriously ill, but they won’t give you your food-ration. Nobody made an attempt to escape – they all new that they would not get very far, and they could not take their families with them either.
The heads of the forest districts, foremen, accounting clerks, were all free employees – they lived in separate barracks. And we, the students doing a period of practical training lived together with them. Immediately after our arrival we were given short fur jackets, felt boots, warm caps and mittens, so that we would not have to be afraid of temperatures of minus 40 degrees centigrade.
The expropriated people were not allowed anything at all. I became eye-witness of a fire. During the night the baracks of the expropriated camp inmates went up in flames and burnt down completely; everybody tried to save himself. The had of the forest district, an old Communist, confidentially told me that he did not have the right to intervene and hand hout any food from the store-room to the suffering people, although he would have liked to do this for human reasons.
Upon our arrival they impressed upon us that we should under no circumstances start to enter into a conversation with the expropriated people and not start to fulfill their requests. But we cautiously ignored this order in a carefully considered way.
During the conversations they did not complain about anything, probably for fear, but they always asked the question: when will they let us go home? They only continued to live with this hope.
Well, and we, the young people, who had just made their first step to live on our own, got used to understand that in most of the cases it was not reasonable to say the truth, that the terms of compassion and sympathy were not approved in real life, that one had better kept occuring problems of life to oneself, that it was dangerous to entrust them to somebody. In my opinion this was the initial phase of moral decomposition in our society.
At the beginning of my work as a young specialist and engineer and in order to fulfill my official commitments, I often had to go on business trips by the Turk-Sibirian railway. Here I
experienced with my own eyes what it meant for the Kazakhs, a deeply rooted section of the population, to be forced to give up their nomadic life and change to a settled way of life. Their cattle was confiscated and they themselves were loaded on freight cars. They were taken away to places defined for their permanent residence. On the way they escaped from the waggons and ran off in different directions, so that the trains were practically empty when reaching their final destination.
They were escaped, but had nothing to eat. Even if some of them disposed of some money – there was nothing to buy at the train stations. And apart from the train stations there was nothing else but immeasurable steppe. 1933 was the year, when hunger reigned everywhere, and this time also in the countryside. Those who had escaped from the prisoner transports starved to death. Their dead bodies were collected at the train stations by special detachments, but there were not enough of them, so that the mortal remains were often lying in the heat for a long time.
The unpleasant sight was completed in a very depressing way by “refugees” from the European parts of the country, mainly by Ukrainians. In connection with the complete plundering of the villages a mass famine had began there; all farmers, who had survived dekulakization gathered their family members, bundled up their belongings and set off for a place, where they could find a better life. They knew that staying in their villages would mean to die of starvation for sure. They had to find a suitable area for grain-growing; maybe they would then succeed to survive. They left without knowing where to. Somebody or other had told them that Kirgisia was such a place. And so they started out. On their way they lost their ill relatives as well as those who had lagged behind. Having reached their final destination, they quickly filled the station concourse and the adjoining territories. There was nowhere to stay and live, now work, no food. And there was no way to turn back
I think that even in the “most special” places for keeping documents there cannot be found any information about how many millions of people died during these hungry years starved to death. And where are their graves?
The city of Alma-Ata, the former Verniy, changed into a town of exiles in the 1930s. They were people who, attracted by party crooks, had come over from the China-East- or other railroad lines to the Turksib and were counted among Ukrainian nationalists, former social revolutionaries, mensheviks and other “harmful elements”. The term of “ememies of the people” had not yet been invented at that time.
There were only a few “cristal-clear” specialists like us, and we honestly believed that, in fact, the others who were working with us were to be blamed for something. They were first class experts and they trained us how to work.
Almost no native inhabitants, no Kazakhs, could be found in Alma-Ata at that time; they were still leading a normadic existence. Before they started with the construction of the Turksib railroad Kazakhs, Uigurs from the Seven River’s region and other small ethnic groups (non-nomads) lived in this place. The costs of living were low - as in a fairy story; fruits were particularly cheap, since it was not possible to transport them, and nobody would buy them anyway; the local inhabitants all had their own gardens.
The process of settling their capital Alma-Ata by the Kazakhs only made slow progress during the first years. The main concern and task of a kazakh who had got into the “intelligent world of work” was to get himself an imposing brief-case, a full-length coat and horn-rimmed glasses, reagrdless of wether his sight was good or bad.
I am not writing about all this in order to give a scornful speech, but to show what a titanic effort the Kazakh people had to undergo for its development.
The main task of those times was the education of qualified national cadres. In this connection they organized a polytechnic of transport which was attached to the Turkestan-Siberian railroad and produced technicians of all fields for the railroad transport system. I was offered the job of a teacher - besides my main occupation for the transport administration, to be precise. Later I was transferred to the polytechnic as a permanent employee for special disciplines. This was a living, interesting and very necessary work. I devoted my whole free bachelorhood for it.
Time passed by; the atmosphere in the country and the international situation were in a process of change. The enemies of the people became evident – traitors to the fatherland, spies, saboteurs, wreckers. The first trials against enemies of the people were prepared and carried through.
The wave of mass arrests also rolled up to Kazakhstan. It started on the upper floors of the authorities, Republican superiors were accused of conspiracy, with the intention to divide off Kazakhstan from Soviet Russia by violence and incorporate it to Japan (!). The question of how this could have been realized in practice was not resolved. Afterwards mass arrests were carried out in all departments of the corresponding organs.
All things were proceeding schematically - the superior hired his representatives and assistants for the organization and those recruited the people under them, and so on, up to the simple workers. And thus a counterrevolutionary organization was brought into being. Forcing the arrestees to admit their guilt for a crime they, in fact, had never committed was a mere question of time and of the methods with which the interrogations were carried through.
For the simple and low ranks of the executive staffs this ended up in their transformation into unpaid and humble workers, for the rest with their physical extermination.
Lots of simpliefied methods were invented to secure a quick transfer "into the other world", the Military Collegium, the tribunals, the Special Boards, troykas and simply name lists that had been approved by the supreme authorities. Again and again they physically destroyed employees of the investigating and penal organs, who knew too much about the events and had even been personally taken an active part in what was happening. In this way the Soviets removed the traces of a perfect crime.
After the first wave of confiscations, acts of violence and measures of destruction followed a second one, and so on, depending on the importance of the respective authority.
This was accompanied by all kinds of interrogations, whereby their execution was waked by rewards; among these procedures were interrogations with one’s own parents, friends and acquaintances. Children even broke with their parents hoping that they would then escape by the skin of their teeth. Interrogations were also carried through with the aim of occupying a special job or receiving an apartment, to assume the honour of having brought about some scientific labour or elaborations (which, in fact had done somebody else) and finally of having the possibility to square with someone.
The people got accustomed to take part in the arrests of their neighbours and not to sleep at night, in the humble expectation that they would come for them. During the meetings the people expressed their wrath with regard to the unmasked enemies of the people and required most severe punishment for them. This was the atmosphere towards the year 1936.
In 1937, early in March, I was appointed as assistant head of the polytechnic educational department , but without being exempted from the lessons, for due to the beginning arrests the problems occurring in connexion with the demand for teachers became more and more critical. My private life had also changed: in June 1936 I had married. During the summer vacation my wife and I succeeded in visiting the parents in Kiev. Afterwards there was no further opportunity to see my father again alive, and my mother I met again only in 1947.
At the polytechnic they now began with the arrest of teachers, who had come to the Soviet-Union at their own request after the Chinese-East railroad had been transmitted to the Chinese. They also arrested the relatives who had come with them. They were all spies “as had been proved”. A student was arrested from among us, the nephew of a teacher working for the polytechnic, whose surname I still remember – Yakushkin. Then they arrested exiled engineers, who pursued a secondary occupation at the polytechnic. They were “harmful ele-ments”. And then it was the turn of the exiled teachers, who were accused of nationalism and other similar “delicts”.
Each arrest of a teacher was followed by the necessity of the assumption of their lections by others. Disposing of five branches of study, four classes and about thirty groups this was not a problem easy to solve, the more since many teachers were only employed there in secondary jobs and made conditions, on which days and at what time they would be able to carry on their work. For that reason I also had to circle around without rest or repose.
Without curiosities things would not go. I turned to the teacher of chemistry: “ Varvara Semyonovna, yesterday they arrested Vassiliy Kuzmich (teacher of physics) and I have to discuss the reorganization of the schedule with you”. Varvara Semyonovna was petrified with fear, her eyes widely opened and finally she gasped out: “But they haven’t yet arrested me, after all!”
In the first half of the year 1937 the Communists arrested my direct superior, the old Bolshevik Nikolay Alexandrovich Aleyev, and I had to overtake his tasks. As later became evident, I was arrested after they had literally beaten the “confession” out of him that he had founded a counterrevolutionary espionage and sabitage organization at the polytechnic and had also dragged me into this matter. Thus, my five-years’ work for the Turkestan-Siberian railroad came to an end.
On the 13th of November 1937 I came home from work late and sat down for dinner. A car neared the house, steps and voices were heard, and after a few minutes – knocks at the door.
Two unkonown persons and neighbours came in. They assumed a polite attitude towards me: “Finish your meal first; we will wait”.
Everything was clear. Every single piece of food stuck in my throat. They showed me the warrant of arrest and started searching the house, which was finished after a few minutes.
My wife and I had not yet succeeded, after all, to buy ourselves things. They merely took away a group photo taken on the occasion of our school-leaving, which also showed me.
“Take along your underwear, soap, toothbrush and toothpaste. Leave your wrist-watch at home – you won’t need it”.
Thus, I took leave of my wife, with who I had not even lived together for one-and-a-half years. We were to see again only ten years later.
This is how my Stalinist school years began.
We set out for the GPU communications and transport department without delay, which was located centrally in a small one-storey building in Gorkiy street. At those times Ama-Ata was a small city, not at all resembling to its today’s face, and mainly consisted of one- or two-storey buildings with special devices for heating by stove and missing internal roughcast, as the region was often hit by seismic shocks.
My attendants delivered me at the guard on duty, who, without saying a word, immediately set to work as prescribed. He cut off the collar patches and metal buttons from my uniform shirt. Then he removed my belt and performed the same operation with the trouser buttons.
The shoelaces were takenout of my boots and the contents of the bundle I had brought with me was examined carefully. A brief “let’s go”, and we went to the staircase leading down to the basement – I ahead, clutching my slipping down trousers with one hand and holding my bundle with the other. In the basement – a dimly lit corridor stretching along the complete length of the building, with iron-mounted doors on both sides, heavy metal crossbars on each door and big padlocks.
The lock was opened, the metal crossbar pushed aside, the door opened, and then I suddenly found myself in a cell, just as dimly lit as the corridor. Outside the small window a bevelled board was nailed up. There were three men in the cell, which at once started to shower me with questions. First question – “Six”? When they noticed my lack of understanding about this question, they immediately stated – he is new, comes from outside, out of freedom.
Their interest in me became stronger; they wanted to now which news there were to be reported from the white world.
My cell mates proved to be locomotive mechanics, who had come over from the South-West railroad to the Turksib. They had all been accused of espionage in favour of Poland. There I got my first lesson. They explained to me all paragraphs of section 58 of the Penal Code.
Paragraph 6 meant espionage, and now I understood their question for the “six”. They told me about the methods applied during the interrogations and what was special about this standing upright for hours and the endless questionings. How one could slumber in a sitting position after a sleepness night without the ward noticing this. How one could communicate with one’s cell neighbours knocking at the wall without being caught. What happened when they put a special agent provocateur into the cell, who tried his best to bring about an open conversation.
We talked for a long time, which helped me to slightly weaken my state of shock.
Throughout the whole night we heard the clanking of the iron padlocks, the banging of doors. As a rule, the investigations were carried out at night.
The next day, in the daytime, the investigator sent for me – one of those, who had arrested me; his family name was Skripchenko. This time he wore a uniform. It was the first and onviously pure treatment investigation, and he carried it out with utmost correctness. – “Tell me who you are in touch with, who hired you into the counterrevolutionary organization, who were its members”.
The terms „in touch with“ and „hire“ sounded as new and uncomprehensible to me as the “six”. In the final report they wrote: „You deny having been a member of a counterrevo-lutionary organization, but we know everything. The only thing that will give your fate a favourable turn is an honest remorse. You are an enemy of the people, after all, and if we now release you and let you go into the streets, the people will tear you into pieces there. Think about it”.
Thus, the interrogation ended; a protocol was drawn up. And then they seemed to forget about me. This situation went on for about one month and obviously was one of the technical elements for the psychological treatment. They intended to torment me by leaving everything in complete uncertainty, so that I would fully mature for the whole situation. During this time I was removed twice from one cell to another. One of their “hosts” introduced himself as a staff member of the militarized guards; he was extraordinarily talkative. I recalled to my mind the lection which the “spying” machinists had given me and behaved very cautious towards him, listen to everything he said, but did not say a word about myself.
The next stage were endless investigations at night. In fact, one could not call this inter-rogations anymore, it was rather the nasty attempt to influence me – not psychologically, but by physical measures. It was carried out in the study room: “Well, are you finally ready to admit your guilt un counterrevolutionary activities? Get up, bastard! Get one step away from the wall and look straight into the light bulb!” Time passed by with an agonizing slowness and was interrupted by shouts: “Write, you son of a bitch!” – and similar exclamations.
I am only quoting terms that will not spoil the paper on which they are written.
The people who were involved in this treatment showed an extremely limited moral and intellectual level of development and that was the reason why they were able to successfully cope with their very easy tasks.
In one of the following nights a young investigating officer, who must have been approxi-mately my age, attended to my case,. It was already past midnight. Suddenly he turned to me:
“Come here, sit down over here”.
I could hardly believe my ears, however, I came close to him and sat down. “What kind of education do you have? I did not manage to finish the institute”. A peacefil conversation developed.
From the distant end of the corridor a squeaking door could be heard throughout the silence of the night – and steps. Someone said in a whisper: “ Get up”, and then followed the typical exclamations in a loud voice.
Another time they expressed their sympathy for me and said: “ No matter how you behave yourself, you won’t get out of here. Don’t let yourself get confused. You won’t be given more than seven years. You are still young, you will experience better days”.
In the further course of the development I was to convince myself once again of the fact that there were also decent people among the investigating officers. That happened later, in the inner prison of the municipal GPU. There they mainly detained arrestees, whose preliminary proceedings had already been finished, but there were a few remand prisoners, too. Among them, in our cell, there was a doctor of sciences named Bobkov, a former student of the Pavlov Academy. Nothing else interested him but sciences. The only subject one could talk to him about were laboratory dogs, with which he used to work.
Every now and then, after an investigation, his investigator handed over to him a few newspapers. As a precaution he took the pages apart and gave the recoomendation: “If they catch you reading them, just say that you took them with you from the little basket in the toilet”.
One can imagine what a great pleasure this was for the people who had been serving their sentence in prison for a long time already, and what a deadly risk the investigator ran himself.
Having finally realized that he could get nothing interesting out of me, my investigating officer put the holographic confession of my superior in front of me, in which that one admitted having hired me into the counterrevolutionary organization founded by him. And only then I was willing to confirm that he had hired me, because I did not see any other possibility to prove my guiltlessness, and since I did not want all these physical methods of influencing me to continue.
Thus, the preliminary proceedings were brought to an end and I was transferred to the inner prison of the municipal GPU, where I was held till the arrival of the itinerant session of the Supreme Court Military Collegium in Alma-Ata.
Of course, nobody told us about the expected arrival of the Military Collegium. There were about forty people in the cell – quite a motley crowd of people. Two Kazakhs – secretaries of the regional comitee, Kazakh militia men, an old man, surely 90 years old – an adherent to the Islam, who felt his death draw near an had started to say prayers, in order to be able to yet make a pilgrimage tekka and beg there for the remission of his sins. And he was forgiven his sins. He wheezed with exertion as if a whole blacksmith’s workshop was in operation, and when he had taken off his clothes in the bath-house, one could study the construction of a human skeleton shining through his skin. His bones visibly stoof out from his skin.
The others were of Russian or other European nationalities, starting from the heads of Republican organizations up to people of my rank. After all, there also were “have-beens” – representatives of the NEP, the New Economic Policy; and other parties, mainly Social Revolutionaries. The latter had already been through quite a long-yeard experience of prison detention, had been in prison and in exile for many years, with only short periods of release into freedom, as if they only had been on a short holiday. When, by accident, they were at large just before the Revolution holiday and by that time had not succeeded to obtain a secondary or consequential term of confinement, it was almost sure that they would be put into prison again on one of these holidays. They would usually arrive there with everything absolutely needed for a short stay and immediately feeling themselves “at home”. They did not entertain the slightest hopes that their fate would ever change and therefore did not break with their ways of thinking and their opinions.
Although it seems to be paradoxical, but nevertheless I believe that, from the moral point of view, they felt much easier in their minds then those people, who believed in the party, who had taken part in carrying out the revolution and were completely dazed by what was dictated to them and what was being done to them.
They thought that everything that occurred here, happened without the “father of the people’s” knowing, they believed in him hoping that everything would return to normal. Maybe, some did not believe in this, after all, or entertained doubts, but rumours about this were not spread in public, because everybody knew for sure that they would soon lead to physical extermination. They all wished to stay alive, particularly those who had been deprived of freedom. In the cells they often used to more strongly walk around (within the walls of the cell!), make physical exercises and unpatiently wait for the time when they would be allowed to take one of the extremely short walks.
During the interrogations they behaved in different ways. The most strong-willed endured all tortures (and there is no other name for it) with their minds, the most powerful with their bodies; they did not sign any confession. And why did they nonetheless finally see themselves forced to admit their guilt during the public trials? I thinkt this was because they were “guaranteed” the preservation of their lives and, yet more important: they were promised that their families would not be exposed to reprisals. If this is true, unscrupulous have they been cheated!
Others believed that the more people were exposed to reprisals, the quicker they would make things clear and then, exhausted from all the stress, would try their best to reveal in their confessions as many family names as possible, including not only friends, work mates and acquaintances, but also adding the surnames of persons they were not acquainted with at all. Such were called “writers”. And there were quite a lot of them.
A third group, on the other hand, made an effort to admit entirely absurd things, which were recorded by investigating officers, who did not have the faintest idea on certain matters, and who then drew up the protocol. It was expected that there would be more competent people at the law court, who were surely well versed in everything.
Thus, by way of example, an old railway engineer (at that time he was already over 60 years old) wrote down that he had tried to blast a power station by means of a theodolite. This nonsense was drawn up by the investigator and the preliminary proceedings were brought to a conclusion.
For those, whose preliminary proceedings had come to a close, the time in the cell went smooth: reveille, washing and dressing, breakfast, walk, lunch, dinner, the signal for bed-time.
They were feeded well to some extent, rationed out sugar, makhorka and paper to roll cigarettes. Makhorka was the currency there – against tobacco the passionate smokers were willing to give away sugar or a part of their food ration.
Under these conditions some of the prisoners began to lose their outer veil and their true nature came to light. People who had not believed in God before, started to say prayers, believe in Providence and fortune-telling. The yesterday’s secretary of the regional committee took out a clean handkerchief, on which he spread bread pellets. If I am not mistaken, there were 42 of them and they were called “kumalaki”. He then pushed them together into little heaps, performed various combinations by removing the bread pellets and finally “knew” from their position , what the future would bring him and those, who he told their fortune. Such fortune-telling took place several times a day, in the firm conviction that the “kumalaki” told the truth.
On the broad and light prison corridor there was dead silence, which was only broken when they came to distribute the food. They reached the bowls through the square opening in the doors, usually locked with a little metal flap. In this flap there was a round opening closed from outside – the spyhole for the ward. If one pressed on this little metal flap from inside the cell, a slit was produced, through which one would be able to see a very limited part of the corridor. Among us there were a few curious, who liked to watch what was going on on this corridor.
One day, in the second half of February 1938, at a rather unusual time of the day, we heard loud steps from the corridor marching past our cell. We took up our duty at the door, since we wanted to know, whose steps it were. After a certain time we heard steps again, this time walking into the opposite direction. Our observer said that a large group of high-ranked militia-men had passed by. Our observations of the following days showed that they lead several prisoners through the corridor, on the side where the offices were situated, accompanied by three guards with pistols in their hands. After 30-40 minutes they were lead back the same way they had come, but were now supported by the guards under the arms. In the evening they carried sumptuous evening meals past our cell. Every night a car engine was running noisily.
In the cell they started uttering all kinds of conjecture and suppositions.
Early in March they began to open our cell door evenings and each time took away a few people with their belongings.
It became obvious that their trial was running. We had come to the agreement that each of the called out comrades, when returning from the trial and walking past our cell, should show with his fist which punishment they had inflicted on him. None of those who came back gave such a sign; they did not even glance a quick look at the cell door.
We understood that they did not feel like it, at all.
On the 9th of March it was my turn to leave the cell with my belongings. At that time there were almost no remand prisoners inside anymore.
Having stepped out of the cell door, they did not lead me to the direction where the other prison cells were, but to the other side, where the offices were situated. They brought me into an empty room with two matresses lying on the floor in opposite corners. My guard comfortably sat down on the corridor in an armchair, from where he could very well watch through the open door what was going on inside the room. They directed me to sit down on one of the matresses and put my belongings in one of the empty corners. After a certain time, the second guard came in with a middle-aged Kazakh, who was ordered to sit down on the other matress. The poor guy was so frightened that he shuddered as if he was in febrile condition. Then they handed the bills of indictment over to us, in order to give us the possibility of becoming familiar with the contents. However, we were not allowed to speak with eachother. An unnecessary prohibition, as we did not feel to enter into a conversation at all.
The bill of indictment was a shock for us. I am not in a position to describe what a terrible neverending night we spent, what we thought and felt.
The Kazakh left with the first escorted transport. They came for me in the second half of the day. They took me to a large room with a pedestal, on which I noticed a kind of tribune with seats for the members of the court. In the middle of the room stood a single chair. They lead me to it an someone said: “Sit down”. Two guards kept standing on both sides of the chair, the third behind me. All three of them had pistols in their hands.
The door opens. A militia man comes in. Someone shouts: “Get up, the judges!” I get up. The members of the Collegium are walking on and take their seats. My indictment is read out quickly. Question of the presiding judge: “Do you admit your guilt?” And at once they announce: “The court retires for deliberation”. The guards take me away to a nearby room.
Several chairs stand there. The guards, young guys in modern uniforms, seem to be bored. They tell each other funny stories and burst into loud laughter.
Time passes by. One of them says: “There is nothing going on; I will have a look”.
When he comes back he says to me: “It looks as if they are going to apply the capital punishment on you”. He is very content with his “Joke”, his friends agree, they are also enthusiastic about it and continue to laugh for a long time. They do not think about how miserable I, a persopn of the same age, feel in this very moment. Sympathy and compassion are unknown to them.
Finally they are calling us. The same room, the same chair, the same shout. As quickly as they read out the indictment, they now pronounce the judgement. “In the name of” … and so on, “sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment and subsequent deprivation of civil rights for a period of 5 years and confiscation of property” – “The sentence is irrevocable. It is not possible to appeal against it”.
And thus jurisdiction had been put into effect.
They brought me to a room, in which there were numerous prisoners with their belongings. They had already been “served” by the collegium. Among them I noticed the man, who had hired me. Nikolay Alexandrovich, who had been sentenced to 15 years with the same con-sequential charges that had been imposed on me.
For today the collegium had finished its work; we were loaded on two vehicles and transported away to the city prison, where they quarted us in the so-called new building complex. A square cell, not big. In the middle stood two iron beds pushed together at their back sides. Near the door a latrine bucket with a cover. The newcomers got settled to both sides of the beds, from the window, which was shut by a louver, up to the cell door. The latrine bucket, which seemed to have never been cleaned, gave a disgusting smell filling the whole cell. And no ventilation at all!
The lucky ones having got hold of a place where to sleep during the night, lay with their feet at the head of their neighbour, always three people at a time. The others lay in the some order, however, on the floor, their heads towards the wall, their legs under the beds, since the cell is not big enough for placing two people longways. Each of the inmates spreads on the floor whatever he has – a coat, a jacket, a blanket. The remaining belongings are put under the heads. During the night a problem occurs – how is one supposed to turn around, how to reach the latrine bucket and afterwards get back to one’s sleeping place.
On the whole we were packed like sardins in a can. Here the food was so sickening that one remembered the meals they had distributed in the inner prison of the city NKVD as something fabulous. The best time of the day was in the morning, after the reveille. The walk to the toilet, two of us take out the brimful latrine bucket, a short walk in a circle on the prison site next to the toilets, which had been hurriedly put together from simple laths. The remaining time we would usually spend with endless conversations, which develop among the cell inmates by groups.
Here my “file comrades”, who had been accused together with me for having committed the same crime and under one and the same file reference number, and I had the possibility to discuss in detail about the preliminary proceedings had been carried out. We did not make any demands on eachother. Our opinions on what had happened were identical, although our dis-parity in age was considerable. And the experience of life, too, was by far not uniform.
Experts were able to communicate with the neighbouring cells by knock signals, thus learning who was detained there. We were informed that there were two death cells in the building, but we did not succeed to find out, who were the inmates. They either were not in the mood for knocks or they did not know the “alphabet”. We furthermore learned that there was another cell in this building, stuffed with the same kind of prisoners as we were, prisoners that had also been sentenced by the Military Collegium. It turned out that they had all been sentenced on the 10th and 11th of March and that only very few dropped on a different date. The inmates distributing the meals told us that, apart from us, none of the “counter-revolutionaries” sentenced in February or in March had been taken to the city prison.
It became evident that the death penalty had been inflicted on the others and that they had been executed on the same day yet, to be more precise, late in the evening of that very day, under the noise of running car engines, in the inner NKVD prison.
The emptied solitary cells were filled with a new lot of prisoners, who were brought to trial on the following day. In this way the well-working assembly line of extermination was kept running. It was figured out that, after the work of the Collegium had been finished, not less than six-hundred people passed through the court between the 25th of February and the 12th of March 1938, less than one tenth of which stayed alive.
During one of the mass walks one of us, who was just on the toilet, peeped through a gap between the boards and saw women walking in a circle in the neighbouring prison yard.
Split-second this discovery became the intellectual property of all. And on the next day there was a long queue at the gap. Many recognized their wives, and I disvovered mine, as well.
Ten years later, when I met my wife again, she told me that after my arrest she had been expelled from the medical institute as being a family member of an enemy of the people and imprisoned in the old part of the city priosn; and later she had been sent into exile to Kursk. The wives of those who had been shot dead were sent into camps. She told me how difficult the life in exile had been for her. Nobody wanted to employ her, they all feared of being exposed to reprisales themselves. With the greatest difficulty she found a job as a worker in a geodesy group, where she had to carry the measuring pole.
Life in the cell took its course. Disgusting food, dejected mood and an almost complete lack of physical exercise resulted in the outbreak of scurvy in our cell. It started with the appearance of dark-blue spots all over the body, which increased in size and number. Without much efforts one could tear one’s teeth out of the jaw bones. Then the legs began to clench and one lost the ability of moving. We were not rescued by solicitous measures of the prison administration; a prisoner transport brought us help.
It was a fact that other republics had established special prisons for the isolatory confinement of persons who had been sentenced to imprisonment, but in Kazakhstan such an isolator for political prisoners did not exist.
They decided to organize something of this kind in Kustanay, using an old building from the Tsar’s times, a prison.
We were loaded on “Stolypin” cars, rail cars for the transportation of prisoners, and brought to Tashkent – the first stage of our transfer. At the Tashkent passenger station, at the end of a platform, we had to get off the train. We had to sit down on our belongings and were surrounded by guards. After a long suspension we saw free people again, who endeavoured to pass our group as quickly as possible, but nevertheless stealed a glance at us out of sheer curiosity. They particularly gave their attention to an approximately ten-year-old boy among us – a little enemy, who was the only member of his family that had survived and who was later taken to a reception camp for children. Stalin had decided that children were only to be shot as from the age of twelve.
Soon a vehicle approached, we were loaded onto it and transported away to the Tashkent transit prison. Here we stayed for about one month. There was a stall, where one could be some food. We greedily pounced on the tomatos. And it was them which saved us from falling ill with scurvy. At the end of our stay in Tashkent we had even completely forgotten about what scurvey was actually like.
And this transit prison reminded me of something else. The large and high barracks were equipped with plank beds. We were put into one of these barracks. It was impossible to find oneself a place to sit or lie down, as swarms of bedbugs fell upon us. There was no way to keep them off. We took our belongings, ran out into the fresh air (the barracks were not locked, after all) and set up our night’s lodging.
The next morning we made a complaint to the prison administration. Two or three days later they asked the prisoners to leave the barracks, spread sulphur inside, set it to fire and stopped up all windows and doors. The sulphur kept burning for several days. Afterwards the barracks were well ventilated and they started to collect the dead bedbugs. There were so many of them that they were heaped up with shovels and then looked like anthills.
I have never seen such a spectacle again.
The next stop during our transport was the prison in Orenburg, which remained engraved on my mind in the most tormenting way. It gave the impression that among its service staff there were the most cruel sadists. We were forced to take off our clothes, until we stood there stark-naked, and then had to make knee bends. All clothes, even those which we had just removed, were taken away for searching – and this search seemed to be neverending. They screemed at us in a rude, churlish manner, which wounded our feelings and were inhumane and inconsistent with human dignity in any way. The disgusting food. Fortunately, our prisoner transport was not kept there for a long time.
We finally reached Kustanay, the terminal point of our last stage. The regional prison. Very gloomy brick buildings with yards for walking around, which were separated from eachother by thick brick walls with solid metal gates and wickets. The whole prison territory was also surrounded by a tall brick wall and watchtowers. One thing immediately caught our eyes – there were no “muzzles” in front of the windows, those opaque shields mounted outside the cell windows, in order to obstruct the prisoners’ view. We took this as a sign from heaven, which later proved to be perfectly true.
It was fortunate for us that in this old prison they had not yet introduced the new rules of discipline yet, progress seemed to be retarded. The wardens were mainly men at an advanced age, which – opposite to the young ones – disposed of certain human qualities. There was no striped standard clothing as in other prisons, no sewed on numbers, as they had in Kresty or Solovky. As it had been the custom at all times, the prison disposed of its own big kitchen gardens, were the inmates used to cultivate vegetables. There also was a spacious storeroom for vegetables and a cellar storeroom, in which all kinds of vegetables, fresh or salted, and even water melons, were preserved.
The local meat collective combine catered the prison in plenty for bones and other cheap meat products. This gave the administration the possibility to provide the prisoners with substantial and tasty meals at a minimal financial contribution. On the whole I can say that we were in luck.
In the cell we did not feel bored at all. In other prisons they would only allow criminals to deliver and distribute the meals and carry out various kinds of housekeeping tasks. Here, however, all volunteers could work for the processing and storage of vegetables. Provided that the inmates of our cell had no objections, they were taken downtown, were they swept away snow and ice from the sidewalks around the building of the NKVD regional admininstration.
In their canteens we received a “real lunch”. There was no strict classification into criminals and counterrevolutionaries within the cells. In our cell, for example, there were criminals, who behaved in a proper way. Sometimes they came into conflicts, but only with the administration.
Although the days in the camp were quite monotonous, every single day passed by rather quickly, but, altogteher, the complete term of confinement only reduced very slowly.
Bread crumbs were worked in a particular way, until a quite plastic-like substance had been obtained, from which a part was then blackened by means of stove soot. From this mass we modelled chessmen, and some of us succeeded to do this in a very skilful and artistic way. We arranged competitions in the cells and determined a chess champion. The criminals made playing cards from papirossi (cigarette) paper. They used a red brick, rubbed to powder, and soot for dying them. Adhesive was made from garlic, which they had found in received par-cels.
In our cell there was a remarkable man – a seaman and participant in the uprising on the battle cruiser “Potemkin”. His family name was Savgorodniy, and he was a convinced social-revolutionary. As a close accomplice of the seaman Matyushenko, who had been the ring-leader, they had sentenced him to death, but then amended the penalty into life forced labour.
The revolution rescued him. During the flaring up civil war he dropped in to the hands of the White Guards and was once again sentenced to death for having participated in the uprising on the battle cruiser “Potemkin”. When he was in the death-cell, he was freed by the Red Army. In the years of persecution he was arrested and sentenced to death again for having been a social-revolutionary, who had refused to lay down his arms; however, the penalty was amended into 10 years’ prison by taking into consideration his participation in the uprising on the “Potemkin”. He was a strong-bodied man, very modest, and he did not like to tell things about himself. For several days the cell comrades and I tried to persuade him to tell us about the revolt on the battle cruiser.
He started with his story after the signal to go to bed had sounded. Lying on the bed boards, the whole cell listened with bated breath to this living participant in the events of that time. He was now already more than sixty years old.
Regardless of the considerable disparity in age, he showed much sympathy for me and liked to converse with me. To come straight to the point I mention that later I was taken with him to Norilsk in one of the prisoner trains.
The second interesting person in the cell was a lawyer named Guryevich. Like Savgorodniy he was an imposing figure, who also enjoyed talking with me. He said: “Good thing that the Military Collegium condemned you. You have the chance to yet see better days, when they will rehabilitate you. We, the restless wanderers, do not have this opportunity. Nobody wants to die in prison, after all”.
As far as I am concerned, this prophecy came true, even though only after a long time. When they sent us to Norilsk, he was not comprised in the transport and nothing is known to me about his fate.
During my stay in the prison of Kustanay I received a letter from my mother, in which she wrote that father had died. About what had happened to my wife, nothing was known to me at that time.
Late in the second half of the year 1939 rumours spread that they were preparing an extensive prisoner transport, but nobody knew, where this transport was to be going to. These rumours bore out by beginning medical mass checks. We started to fear the uncertainty – where would they take us to and what would we be in for at the new place. Would there be the same good conditions as in Kustanay?
The day for the loading and transporting away of the prisoners was dawning. Those who were left behind, as they had been sorted out by the medical commission, and the guards wished us all the best. We went in freight cars equipped with plank beds, with open, but barred hatches. I succeeded in getting a place on one of the upper plank beds, with my head showing to the direction of the locomotive, so that during the trip I would not have to sit in the whiff of fresh air all the time. We moved forward, but with extended stops at the different stations. From the names of the stations we at least understood that we were going to the east.
We wrote letters on cigarette paper glued together with chewed up bread and sent them off in quite a strange way. Having finished the letter and marked it with the recipient’s address we waited, until the train would stop at the next station, then laid down near the hatch. As soon as the train started to move again and gained speed, we attracted the switchman’s or any other railway employee’s attention to ourselves, asked him with a gesture to mail our letter and threw it far out of the waggon.
Being afraid that some of the workers might not pick up your letter and would not forward it as desired, I altogether threw three letters out of the waggon during the trip, which were all destined for my mother. As later became apparent, she received all three of them and they had even been put into real envelopes. If this is not a proof of how sympathetic the people behaved towards us, the persecutees.
After a long and exhausting trip we arrived in Krasnoyarsk at the camp transshipment point of the Norilsk smelting works collective combine. Our prisoner transport consisted of about hundred persons.
When we stood in front of the doors, with our belongings in our hands, waiting there to be quartered in the barracks, several “contriks” (counterrevolutionaries) approached us. They had already arrived here at an earlier time and now warned us of the so-called “urki”, the hardened professional criminals, who, they knew for sure, would take away our belongings. We imme-diately placed everything on a common heap and sat down on it, closely pressed toward eachother. We organized alternate groups of defense. The criminals started circling around us. One of them came close and drew a sack with someone’s belongings nearer towards himself. The owner, a strong old man, wrenched the things from him and violently pushed him back. The criminal jumped aside, picked up a stone and threw it at the old man’s head. Blood was running from the wound. The other criminals, who surrounded us, now also picked up stones and threw them at us. A fight arose. The guards on the watch-towers began to scream and waved their arms. A crowd of old residents gathered around us, the brawl stopped. The counter-revolutionaries, who were just such a kind of prisoners as we were, compassionately said to us: “As soon as they have leead you in to the barracks, the “urki” will steal all your belongings, anyway. They treated us in the same way, and there is no escape”.
In our group there was a tall, young, physically healthy repressed person – Vassiliy Yegorov.
Later, after his rehabilitation, he became the vice-director of the Norilsk collective combine.
He said: “Comrades, do not go into the barracks, as long as none of the representatives of the camp authorities has arrived”. And at the guards, who were standing on their watch-towers, he shouted: “Immediately go and get someone from the camp authorities here, elsewise we will approach the fence, and then you may shoot at us”.
What they yet said afterwards had never been heard at the transshipment point before. The camp chief arrived, listened to what Yegorov had to say and gave the official order that a certain part in one of the barracks should be cleared, so that we could then all settle in there. In this section we organized a round-the-clock guard duty and elected Yegorov as our “elder”. We lived here quite well, until the day when we were loaded on barges. Our group was lucky: they did not put us into the cargo hold, but on a swimming gangplank, which was towed behind from Krasnoyarsk all the way up to Dudinka. It was a two-storeyed swimming device. In the hold of the barges there was darkness and stifling air. The only unpleasant place was where a big lot of wooden latrine buckets were kept standing, which were tipped overboard, as soon as they were filled to overflowing. As a result, the stinking contents often ran over and poured upon the deck.
On the way, apart from bread, we ate salted fish and drank water from the Yenissey. And soon spread diseases, such as diarrhoe. In some cases they had such an acute issue that the ill persons were not even able to run to the latrine buckets. Everybody was frightened and shrinked from them in fear of an infection. I cannot remember, how many days and nights we were on the way, but it was certainly more than a week.
Having reached the port of Dudinka, we were transshipped to open freight cars running on a narrow-gauge track, and taken to Norilsk. The distance on this narrow-gauge track, which had already been opened at that time, was about a hundred kilometers. Prisoner transports that had arrived here before us, had had to walk this distance on foot, throught the tundra, an absolutely difficult and strenuous venture. It meant that our prisoner transport had been lucky in this respect, too.
Norilsk welcomed us in a rather unfriendly way – with incessant rain, which had already set in during the trip. I do not exactly remember the date, but it was a day in September 1939. And thus, since our arrest in 1937, almost two years had passed. Life in prison had come to an end, life in the camp was to begin.
Where we find today the town of Norilsk, everything was plain tundra at that time. There were no smelting works. People were working underground in the first mines and coal pits. A big motor depot was built, objects for railway transportation, new camp departments for the reception of the continuously flowing streams of prisoners, and under foundations and footings they made excavations, in order to pursue metallurgy on trial. And all this under the condition of permfrost. They had no experience at all to carry out this kind of work under such conditions. In the industrial zone they had already built the first short road leading through the workers’ settlement, the Zavodskaya street. One side was occupied by the 3rd camp section, the opposite side by a couple of dwelling houses for free, voluntary workers, a central laboratory and other production buildings and sociocultural facilities.
At right angles to the Zavodskaya street an improved path was already leading from the industrial zone up to what would be the future town. Along this path there were: a hospital for free employees, the DITR (House of Engineers and Technicians), the combine administration, a big store, a hotel and a number of two-storeyed houses for the free workers. The militarized guards were quartered in the military camp, which also consisted of barracks.
The camp authorities had their offices in three two-storeyed residential buildings at the banks of Lake Dolgiy. Here there were also two three-storeyed dwelling houses for free specialists, as well as a building attached to the technical secondary school, which was still under construction. The area bordering on the opposite banks of the lake and covered with low-growing tundra woods, had already been surveyed for the future town of Norilsk.
Jokers told that in Norilsk there live three nationalities: mainly “zeki” (prisoners) and two smaller groups – VNs (free workers) and VOKhR (Militarized Guard at Places of Confine-ment). Apart from this, the zeki were subdivided into contriks (enemies of the people) and urki (criminals).
Our prisoner transport was quartered in the 3rd camp secction, containing of barracks built from rubblestones. The residential barracks were divided into two separate halves, between which there was a room for drying laundry. Within the section – two-storeyed plank beds, at the entrance the place for the barrack room duty officer and a table for the distribution of food, which he fetched from the camp kitchen.
One of the barracks was reserved for the outpatient’s department and a small infirmary with twenty beds. Apart from the kitchen and the hospital there was a bath-house, a little club, a warehouse, a little shop, administrative and various kinds of economic premises. Later they also built a three-storeyed hospital and a mortuary.
The URCh (Registration Distribution Unit) and the AkhCh (Administrative and Supply Unit) were representing units of a particular structure in the camp department. The most terrifying man was the security officer, who took advantage of the services of informers from among the prisoners – they were called “stoolies”, and everybody despised and feared them.
Those who had arrived with our transport were alloted to different barracks and assigned into different brigades. Our former elder, Yegorov, now had no task anymore.
We, as well as some other transports, had brought in dysentery, which quickly spread in all dwelling barracks. Only a few lucky ones were taken to the hospital, as there was not enough space for all ill persons. At the sudden onset of cold weather the people started dying like flies. The dead bodies could not be carried away, since there were not enough coffins. The corpses were piled up in heaps at the frontage of the infirmary barracks like logs. The daily sight of these dead bodies finally lead to the fact that this situation did not disturb or worry us anymore. The only wish was – not to drop into this society ourselves.
There were people, who, as a rationalization measure, proposed not to manufacture single coffins, but to carry the departed off in big wooden cases, from which they could simply be dumped out into large graves - to be sparing with deficitary wood. The next suggestion : why burying them in clothes in view of the fact that underwear was few and far between, anyway? They started to inter the dead bodies nakedly, just with a numbered wooden tag around the neck. It was not necessary to save human material; a new sufficient lot would be carried to the spot across the river in summer, at the expense of a high mortality rate, too.
During the transport I had also fallen ill with dysentery, but not so seriously. After the arrival in the camp section they assigned me to a brigade which was occupied with the construction of the motor depot and nearby workshops. Huge holes were dug out. Our main tool – a pickaxe. The ground was frozen. – “Even though one would gnaw at it with one’s teeth”. No shelter to warm oneself up. We were merely allowed to make a campfire. We melted snow, boiled the water and threw the leaves of cranberries intot he brooth, which we had pulled out from under the snow. The “sumptuous” drink made us succeed in warming our souls. The people who worked there from early morning until late in the night were unable to speak, as it was the time of the polar nights with neverending snowstorms. During such periods of fresh gale and heavy snowfall the frost would usually let up a little, leaving moist snow on the faces and creating a crust. The result – a frostbitten face.
Snowstorm with strong frost was called “the Black”. In this case the frostbites were even worse. We started to sew face musks from flanel, with cut-outs for eyes and mouth. It was not comfortable at all to work with these masks. The steam from breathing condensed on the mask, forming icicles and developing rime, which concentrated around the openings for eyes and mouth. Work under such extreme conditions was called gang labour and it was particularly heavy.
The accompanying guards fared little better. There only advantage was that they wore warm clothes, long furcoats, among others. For them time probably passed by much slower than for us – who were working. In my opinion this was also the reason, why they were so nasty and mean. Who else should they vent their anger on, if not on a servile prisoner. They were even allowed to shoot him down by getting off unpunished: they only had to settle the matter as an “attempt to escape”. And the remaining prisoners would, of course, keep silence, fearing that the same fate would happen to them.
The most agreeable thing was the order to return to the camp zone. We formed groups of five, the guards counted us over again and then – forward, march! The usual warning: “One step to the left or to the right side will be interpreted as an attempt to escape; we will shoot without early warning!” Sometimes we came across an oncoming gang. Then we had the order: “Stop! Sit down!” We had to sit down exactly where we were standing in that very moment, no matter, how dirty the place was. The oncoming passed by, and we could continue our way. Well, and there is the camp gate. The guards, who are supposed to receive us, come out from their guardroom and open the gate. The entrance into the camp zone is accompanied by numbering off – “one, two”, and so on. If anything in terms of figures does not correspond with what it should be like, they chase us back throughout the gate and the whole counting starts again.
Sometimes this procedure is being repeated several times. The accompanying militiamen and the guards are getting angry, start to abuse eachother. The prisoners, exhausted from the long workday, have no other choice but to execute all orders obediently. Finally we are in the zone. Everybody is hurrying into the barracks, in order to take off the moist clothes and to find a suitable place in the room for drying laundry. Afterwards we get our meal and then there remains a litlle free time, until we have to go to sleep.
Quite often they gave us a surprise. The order: “Everybody out to the corridor with his belongings!” A few watchmen are standing there. An unexpected search, all things are shakenn out or rummaged through; others go into the section and turn the bedclothes over.
From timt to time they had the obsession to have us removed from one barracks into another, less comfortably equipped one, or from one section into a different one. And all this only in order not to allow us leisure and rest. Shortly before holidays or festive occasions searches are the order of the day, and on those very days they would usually carry us off to clear the streets from snow, which the next snowstorm immediately blocks up again – futile efforts. Enemies of the people, you are to know that holidays are not made for you!
Anybody may insult you, whereby they make use of the rough and ready formula: the lower the grade, the more ingenious and cheerful is the pleasure of doing it. As for the rest, there were people who did not speak out insults, but who carried out the search formally and even showed their sincere sympathy, which, however, due to their fear, they did not dare to express in words.
Fortunately, I did not have to do gang work for a long time. According to the work schedule issued by the head of the collective combine construction project, Avraamiy Pavlovich Zavenyagin, they selected qualified specialists for the coming up work in the combine administration, in the project and planning office, which was later converted into the institute, and other sub-divisions. I was sent to the technical supply unit attached to the combine administration. The head of the department, as well as the group leaders, were free employees, all others – prisoners.
Having got this settled and having dropped under human conditions, we, of course, were tremendously pitched in to learn everything quickly and fulfil our tasks as conscientiously as possible. In fact, the prisoners were doing all the work for the free employees. Hence, they got used to this parasitic way of life and finally believed that it should be exactly this way.
The camp authorities yet went a step further. All their personal needs were satisfied by the prisoners. Different kinds of workshops were organized within the camp sections – a tailor’s shop, a shoemaker’s shop, a joiner’s workshop and others, in which were working prisoners, who were all masters of their line. Just as much as we did, they also tried their best to please the camp authorities and to avoid being sent back to gang work. All housework at the cjiefs was done by female prisoners.
They even had a special fishing brigade, which supplied them with the most delicious kinds of fish – sturgeons, broad whitefish, muksuns, graylings and others. At that time there were plenty of them in the surrounding rivers and lakes.
In those years there were no Soviet authorities in Norilsk yet, the chief of the collective combine functioned as “tsar and God”. He also had the public prosecutor and the 3rd camp department under him – to the dismay of all prisoners, who only mentioned his family name, Plemyannikov, trembling.
As fate willed, I worked with him for the Krasnoyarsk Soviet national economy from 1957 to 1965, after my rehabilitation; he worked there as the head of the administration board for housing and living conditions. He associated very obligingly with me. Could I ever have expected such a care, when I was a prisoner yet?
Everything I described above often makes clear, how – step by step – the most valuable human sentiments atrophied – sympathy and compassion for the fate of unknown people. It is a sad heritage that was left to today’s society, a heritage which now has to be mastered and corrected.
Unfortunately, a lot of time will be needed for this intention, a change of generations, so that new generations grow up, which will be educated according to completely different principles than those described above.
I have a horror of watching the new candidate for the USSR people’s deputees on TV, a leading staff member of the shipyard. Being asked about what his attitude towards Stalinism is, he answers with an air of superiority, that, actually, he is not able to express his opinion on this. And he explains that he himself did not suffer under Stalin, neither did his relatives and those closely connected with him. And he continuous that, for this reason, the subject would not be of any interest to him. This is the level of a young man’s thinking, who intends to become a deputy of the people, a defender of the people’s interests.
In one of the weekly supplements of the newspaper „Izvestiya” called “The Week” one can find numerous comments on this subject made by young peuople in the letters to the editor section, which correspond to those mentioned above, or such like: “I am not able to utter my opinion, since I do not know anything about it”. Isn’t that strange?
Let us get back to chronological reporting. The first winter in Norilsk was a hard one. The unplastered barracks walls, built from rubblestone, had many clefts. During snowstorms there was a terrible draft and the snow penetrated through the brickwork up to the plank beds. When one awoke in the morning, the pillow for the head was frozen to the wall.
In the course of time life conditions took a turn for the better, to be motre precise for the privileged part of the contriks, which were not assigned to gang labor. The barracks sections in which they lived were equipped more comfortably, kept in order in a better way and the inmates received grade 1 clothes (new), which were even custom-made from better materials in the camp dressmaker’s shop. It was even permitted to bury them dressed and in single coffins. Associating with the free workers every day additionally gave them the possibility to procure themselves through them urgently needed foodstuffs from the shops.
When the execution of urgent tasks became indispensible, they made us work at night, and we received plenty of groceries in addition to the camp ration.
This did not happen at all on instruction “from the top”, but with the permission of the local administration, which took all responsibility for it. At that time there always was the threat of becoming a prisoner again – and even worse than that.
For the time being, for reasons of compelling necessity, they allowed the contriks to run free without being constantly accompanied by guards, that is with a permanent permission, which was valid at defined periods of time. Of course, this concession had only been made to the interest of the matter itself.
The “enemies of the people” were also allowed to write petitions to anyone they pleased, even to Stalin personally – formal requests to examine their case again. They did not only send such letters through the camp mails, which were subject to censorship, but also by the aid of compassionate free workers, whenever those went on an official journey or on vacation. The result always was the same – a printed standard reply, merely mentioning the name of the person lodging complaint written by hand: “Your request has been examined. There is no reason why your file should be looked over again”. Nevertheless the people believed that justice would finally prevail, and they continued to write. In our camp section professor Sergey Mitrofanovich Dubrovskiy stood out from the rest with his particular persistence; every month he wrote a petition that covered several pages. But the majority, convinced of the uselessness of such attempts, stopped dealing with this occupation.
Measuredly, in accordance with the set order, went our life in the camp.
Everybody got upset when the war broke out. Although all radio stations in the camp sections were turned off from the very first days of the war, we immediately heard the news from the free workers. How miserable did it sound, when the “leader”, who had brought such a ruin upon millions of innocent persons, addressed the people by the words “brothers and sisters!”
The memoirs of general Shtemenko give evidence about how terrified and stunned he had been in the beginning about the invasion of the Germans. In my opinion these memoirs, as well as those written by marshal Rokossovskiy, differ from others by much more veracity and objectivity.
The reaction of the “enemies of the people” to the war consisted of a mass presentation of petitions for the despatch to the front. However, there principally came no replies – this implied that everything was clear, anyway. Petitions were only accepted from the criminals, and some were even decided positively.
At the beginning of the war the need of metals increased in Norilsk by far and required a maximum augmentation of efforts to come up to this necessity.
I have already mentioned that we had no experiences at all to carry out construction projects under permfrost conditions. Below the experimentary smelteries the frozen ground quickly melted away, aggregates and even buildings deformed and collapsed. They searched for deposits and erected buildings ar the same time. Due to the lack of experience they dropped the decision to erect industrial objects on stony subsoil only and residential buildings on piles, with basements permeable to air. The started with the search for suitable places, as well as the territorial removal of industrial objects, which entailed considerable problems in the distribution and constructive execution of all means of communication. In this connection a large volume of additional project work arose, which lay on the shoulders of the prisoners – the deported experts of numerous fields of specialization.
One of the biggest problems was the transportation of technical and food loads from Dudinka to Norilsk. Due to snowdrifts the narrow-gauge track was permanently unserviceable.
The removal of snow, under the conditions of the tundra, was done by hand, which cost much strength and time. One of the prisoners, the railway engineer Potapov, invented a construction for a solid snow protection fence, since the typical laths that had been put up did not help, and worked on a project for their installation along the railway line. Thus, the problem concerning snow drift protection measures had been successfully solved.
There would be many similar examples to be mentionned yet, but I just wish to point out that the “enemies of the people” did not only make a physical contribution to the people’s victory over the fascist Germany.
During the stagnation period, when they would tolerate all thinkable kinds of falsifications, it meant an enormous result to read and hear that Norilsk had been built by members of the Comsomol (Young Communists’ League). At the time about which I am writing here, there were umpteen other yound specialists, graduates from institutes of technology, who had to learn how to work and gather experience first. The Comsomol members only appeared in Norilsk after the war, when the collective combine was already running well, had been taken away from the sphere of responsibility of the NKVD, stood under the subordination of the USSR Ministery of Non-ferrous Metals and offered special allowances for those who worked in the cold far North. During the war there were no formations or military units in Norilsk, since the town was considered to be unreachable for the fascists. However, in August 1942, the inhabitants of Norilsk were deeply shocked by the attack of the fascist cruiser “Admiral Scheer” upon Dickson.
Dickson was rescued by the unselfishness and bravery of Soviet seamen. As later became evident, the cruiser – while approaching Dudinka – bumped into the steamship “Sibiryakov”, and after the latter had refused to surrender, they started shooting at it. While the crew beat off the attack, the “Sibiryakov” succeeded in informing Dickson on the impending attack of the German cruiser by radio, so that they were able to get prepared for it. Due to the hopeless situation, the Kingston valves were shut on the “Sibiryakov” and the steamer went down.
Out of 129 men and 3 women the Germans only fished 28 persons out of the water. Since that time the “Sibiryakov” is being deservedly called the arctic “Varangian”.
For Dickson’s defense they brought in the patrol ship “SKR19” (which had been rebuilt from the ice-breaker “Dezhnev”), the steamer “Revolutionist” and the shore battery. The defenders of Dickson welcomed the cruiser with the full power of their gunfire, which was absurdly minor compared to the gunpower of the cruiser. Later I read that the weight of the missiles on the “Admiral Scheer” totalled up to 2300 kilograms, while the entire weight of all missiles in Dickson only came up to – 122,5 kilograms.
Having fired off more than 400 projectiles on Dickson, the cruiser discracefully retreated. Afterwards not a single fascist surface vessel ever approached Dickson again, which was then fortified accordingly.
The losses of the defenders amounted to: 7 dead men and 30 wounded persons on the “SKR19”, 21 of which were seriously injured, 1 wounded man on the “Revolutionist” and
4 injured people with the shore battery.
The casualties were all taken to Norilsk, where they received medical treatment. Those, who remained invalids, stayed to work in Norilsk.
The German submarines did not forget about Norilsk till the end of the war, and even got up to the Yenissey Bay.
Norilsk was mainly supplied from America, by ships’ convoys, which had not been planned for long service life. These convoys transported to the spot everything needed, in quantities which would guarantee a smooth and continuous process of production in the combine during the ice-free period of the year, when river navigation was possible – from heavy mining technology up to various items of equipment, tools, technical materials, as well as a large assortment of manufactured goods, foodstuffs and mainly canned food, medicaments and gifts, which had been arranged by the Americans.
Two of such convoys passed Dickson and called out the port of Dudinka, ready for a quick discharge. Once they did not reach Dudinka, but were sent to the bottom by a German submarine in the Yenissey Bay – in a deepness of more than 60 metres. Efforts to raise them remained unavailing. Navigation came to an end, and there was no possibility to compensate for the losses that had arisen. The combine was in an extremely difficult situation, particularly with regard to the supply of food.
This mainly affected the prisoners. They started to feed them with cooked wheat germs, but only by fulfilling the minimum norm, which primarily resulted in the exhaustion of those, who were assigned to gang labor. During work a man might still look healthy and fit; but then, unexpectedly, he drops to the ground, the body temperature seriously falls, and he is no more able to move, is even too weak to stand on his own feet. In order not to find themselves compelled to call this physical state exhaustion, they came up with the term of “undercooling”. Sometimes the places of work were situated several kilometers away from the camp section. The working process of the brigades was not interrupted by such incidents, and the “undercooled” had to wait for the end of the working day – if only they held out until then. When returning to the camp after work, the accompanying guards forced all those who were yet able to move, to carry the seriously depleted comrades. Those were also tired and exhausted from the long workday, and now this was an additional physical strain. The dragged the immobilized (or dead bodies) back to the camp zone with their last ounce of strength, threw them into the snow and ran apart to their barracks. Of course, this was cruel, but each of them wanted to save his own life first.
Well, dead bodies all over again. Who ever counted them?
Yet before the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War the first prisoner transports with so-called “Finnish soldiers” arrived in Norilsk. They were our soldiers, young commanders, participants in the clumsily planned and actually lost war against the Finns. They were accused of all kinds of mortal sins, in order to keep the real culprits a secret from the people. They reported about what they had suffered and how insulted they felt about the punishment that had now been inflicted on them.
Afterwards the Estonian army found itself, completely or partly, in Norilsk. It arrived there with its command staff, including the generals. They told that they had received the order for their loading on a military transport, with all arms available, in order to take part in maneuvers. At some station, the name of which I do not remember, their train approached the unloading ramp, but at both sides, on the neighbouring platform, there were placed gun crews with machine guns. When getting off the train, the Estonians were ordered to hand out their arms, elsewise they would be shot by the machine guns.
After the disarming they had to get on the military train again. The waggons were closed, armed guards placed themselves on the platforms and at the station square, and the train continued its trip. The terminal point was Norilsk. In this way the shortage of workers for gang labor was compensated. The Estonians were quartered separately from the other prisoners, had to go to work in military formation, slowly, but with exact steps. The other prisoners called this “with Estonian steps”, meant as a joke.
To Norilsk they also deported the command of a Spanish ship; what they were accused of remained unknown. They were friendly, benevolent people, who imparted to us, the prisoners, the artistic skill of weaving uppers from some threads for fine women’s shoes. Soon all free working women put on beautiful shoes, which no one had ever seen there before. The shoes were stitched in the camp shoemakers’ shops.
The Spaniards did not withstand the endurance of the rough polar climate. They fell ill and died. Soon they were transported away from Norilsk, as were carried away the Estonian
generals.
The Russian people proved to be by far more robust to the hard conditions beyond the polar circle, although they were also hit by misery – scurvy, for example, which I have already told you about. But since potatoes do not grow in the tundra, one had to look for other drastic measures for the struggle against this disease. They started to collect fir needles and brewed some extract from them. Practice showed that it was utterly effective against scurvy. The production of the extract was done “by progressive assembly” - incessantly. At first the people were compelled to drink it, but when they were convinced of its benefit, they started gulping it voluntarily.
Many of us, too, fell victims to scurvy. In permfrost regions dead bodies are being buried like mammoths, and it may happen that, in the course of the further development of the town of Norilsk, on the occasion of goundwork, the corpses will be dug up in completely good condition.
During the war, the monotonous camp life was disturbed by the formation and sending off of smaller prisoner transports – it is not known, where they went to.
My former superior, comrade in the same criminal case and my “hirer”, was also ordered to get prepared for a prisoner transport. He came to my barracks to say good-bye and proposed to present our petition at the USSR Chied State Prosecutor in any case; in the petition we had got straight that he had not hired me and that our evidence had been forced during the preliminary proceedings. No sooner said than done. We said good-bye to eachother and then I never met with him again.
I was in possession of an utterly simple-looking peaked cap. Now I took off the peak, divided the cardboard into layers and put in Nikolay Alexandrovich’s petition, together with a photography of his wife and mother. With great care I sew the peak on again and kept the cap in a safe place, till the set in of better times. During the searches they did not pay attention to the peaked cap. Many years passed, until this cap finally fulfilled the hope placed in it.
After the end of the war they reduced the term of deprivation of freedom for some of the prisoners, as a reward for heroic labor. Upon the decision of the USSR NKVD Special Board of the 28th of August 1945 my degree of punishment was also reduced by 10 months.
In May 1942 I received a reward for the realization of rationalization measures, which had entailed an efficiency in the amount of 185100 rubels. I quote an excerpt from the decree No. 74 issued by the USSR NKVD Norilsk collective combine: “For having shown initiative the engineer Gayevskiy will be awarded a premium of 100 rubels with a corresponding entry in his personal file, as well as the granting of the special food supply for engineers and technical personal as of the 1st of June”.
During the war prisoner transports that had reached Norilsk in the summer navigation period mainly consisted of militaries – participants in the Great Patriotic War. I am not in a position to describe, how seriously they took to heart the unjust use of violence that had been committed against them. There was another kind of persecuted persons, too. Popov and Tanyev, for example, who had dropped under the same case as Georgiy Dimitrov in Leipzig. In what terrible hostile words did they talk about him during their conversations with us. This is what I recalled, when I read a praising article by K. Shirin, doctor of historical science, about Dimitrov’s activities, printed in the “Pravda” (No. 23 of the 23rd of January 1989). Doubts about its full veracity and objectivity involuntarily arose. And I had had my doubts at earlier times, on the occasion of other publications.
Thus, on the 11th of June 1988 an article by professor V. Klyukin, doctor of historic sciences, was published in the “Komsomolskaya Pravda” No. 134 – bearing the headline “Secretary of the Central Committee”. Describing in details the life of A. I. Milchakov, the former secretary of the Central Committee of the USSR Lenin Young Communists’ League, the author presents himself as a former friend and even quotes from two letters by Alexander Ivanovich, which, in fact, date back to the year 1967. In particular he says: “From 1938 to 1956 he served his sentence in Magadan”.
Had Klyukin been an old friend, he would have certainly known that Milchakov spent his camp life in Norilsk and was only transported away from there shortly before his release and rehabilitation. The author of the article mentions Milchakov’s wife and utters his fascination about her steadfastness, her refusal to break with Alexander Ivanovich, but he doesn’t mention a word of his children – a son and two daughters, who also deserve praise. They had affectionately loved their father and firmly believed in his innocence. All three of them had regularly written letters to him – to Norilsk. After my release, in 1947, I went to Moscow, where they had sent me on an official trip, and, at Alexander Ivanovich’s request, handed over a big heap of letters to his family there, letters, which they had written to him. These letters had been very valuable to Alexander Ivanovich, but he feared that they would take them away from him upon one of the searches. He had kept them in his desk in the combine admini-stration, where he had worked together with me.
V. Klyukin furthermore says that “Milchikov had been saved from being shot by A.A. Andreyev”. I can neither confirm nor refute this statement, but when I handed over the letters, I learned from conversations with his wife Maria Ilinichna, that he had disposed of high-ranking patrons in Moscow. She said: “You are all quite incautious and imprudent – just establishing contacts with people, who were specially assigned to you”. I immediately understood, who she was talking about. In the women’s barracks a new “convict” had appeared. Her surname was “Martsinkyevich” and they sent her to our section as a machinist. It also became clear, why she made use of any opportunity to enter into a conversation with Alexander Ivanovich and coquet with him.
In the women’s barracks, too, there were certain objects under special observation – Maria Viktorovna Naneyshvili (the wife of Kosarev), the Drabkina (daughter of the well-known revolutionist), who – after her rehabilitation – wrote the book “Black dried bread”, and other wives and relatives of “high-ranked enemies of the people”, who had not been executed.
The meaning of protection in the upper spheres is also indicated by the fact that Milchakov’s family stayed to live in the government building, at the embankment road, opposite the “Udarniki” motion-picture theatre. Early in 1947 I came there to meet with them. Between the numerous passages leading from one little inner court to the next, I barely found their stairway and their apartment. There, at the landing, I ran into a door-keeper for the first time in my life, who asked me questions – which apartment I was looking for, to whom I intended to go and for what reason.
They were glad about my visit and our conversation continued till nightfall. After we had said good-bye to eachother, I crossed the court and applied my weight against the locked gate, through which I had come in before. I started to look for another exit, but now only completely lost my way between all the open and locked gates, and terribly feared not to find my way out to the embankment road anymore. My fear was caused by the fact that I was in possession of a “Wolf’s Passport”, which did not give me the right to go to Moscow and many other towns. The only document I used to present everywhere when requested was my duty pass, signed by the head of the NKVD USSR Norilsk collective combine. It was my kind of a talisman, which opened me many doors.
I cannot understand Klyukin’s words: “His health condition did not allow Milchakov to be on duty”. Did his own friend not know, after all, that Michalkov was in charge of the Trade Union Committee for Technical Education after his rehabilitation?
I arrived at the conclusion that Klyukin became Milchakov’s “friend” only when such a friendshop had ceased to be dangerous. During our common years in the camp in Norilks, at work and in the barracks, I did not hear a single word from Alexander Ivanovich about such a friend. Maybe he only tried to behave very guarded in what he said? He told about his meetings with Stalin, that he called him Milchak, but he did not speak out any of his thoughts of disapproval. This was, beyond all doubt, a pure precaution measure.
When the moment of his release drew near, I found my wife with my mother’s help, got in touch with her by letter and received the permission of the collective combine administration that she could come to Norilsk to live there.
She arrived in Norilsk a little earlier than I had to leave from there. A couple of friends, who had already been released some time before, gave her shelter and assisted her to find a job.
I, who at that time availed myself of the right not to work around under escort anymore, had the possibility to meet with her daily
I was released on the 13th of January 1947 in consideration of the 10 months’ mitigation of the punishment. In the camp I received my discharge papers, which said that I would leave for the “chosen” place of residence, to the settlement of Norilsk, Krasnoyarsk region, which was not a town at that time yet. After the release I continued my job, however, as a free man now.
I became a free man, but not in the same way as all the others. Since I had been deprived of all rights for a period of five years, I only received a salary in acordance with the regular staff plan i.e. without any special allowances and agreements as they were usually reserved for workers and employees in the Far North. And this would have been quite a considerable amount.
They gave me a small room in a three-room apartment. We had to get us everything – furniture, clothes, dishes. My wife arrived by plane, in a jacket that was by far too short and not at all suitable for the climate beyond the polar circle. Lots of expenses awaited us yet, but both our salaries were low compared to Norilsk standards. Thus, we had to lead a more than modest and frugal life.
It became necessary that I undertook and urgent official trip to Moscow and Kiev. I received the order to procure the combine imperatively needed spare parts and items of equipment from Kiev and have them transported to Norilsk. This was a completely unexpected but wonderful opportunity to see my mother again and to live with her for a certain time.
As the execution of the order turned out to be extremely difficult, I had to stay in Kiev for more than six months. The spare parts and items of equipment lay scattered around on the territory of the cement works still under construction, everything in complete disorder. Workers were needed to sort out and complete the things, but the factory management did not seem to be in a position to put a couple of them at our disposal. I received the recommendation from Norilsk to contact the former deputy head of the Norillag, Colonel Romanchuk, who was now in charge of a prisoner-of-war camp in Kiev. I found him and persuaded him to meet me at his home. He received me in a friendly manner, inquired after any changes that had been carried out since his leave from Norilsk and promised to assign me twenty German prisoners of war. However, I would have to pick them up from the camp and bring them back with my own means of transport and would also have to be responsible for seeing that they received lunch. The cement factory under construction disposed of imoported trucks equipped for the transportation of people; only fuel was not available. I had to address myself to the NKVD representation in Kiev with the request to ration me out the necessary fuel; the costs would be payed off by funds of the Norilsk combine. As we use to say, a fairy tale can be told quite easily, but thin gs are not always done that quick. With such never-ending trouble, with trips to the petrol station, the prisoner-of-war camp and various authorities (as I already mentioned) more than six months passed by, much to my mother’s delight.
At that time bread was handed out against food ration cards, which I received from the NKVD administration. Any time the captain on duty expressed his astonishment about why I did not present him my officer’s certificate (he supposed me to be such), in order to obtain the set up food ration. I do not want to imagine what would have happened if I had told him that I was a former convict, a counter-revolutionary, who had been deprived of all rights. Fortunately. I ha d nothing to do with the militia, since I lived at my mother’s place without official registration.
I lived, worked, carried out the order they had charged me with and was in a permanent state of strain on my nerves, as if I was living under illegal circumstances.
A few times yet I had to make my appearance before Colonel Romanchuk. The balcony of his apartment was situated above the area of the Kiev diocese.
He lead me out on this balcony and told me with a touch of unconcealed envy, how nice the metropolitan lived in the lap of luxory, how many cars and servants he had, etc.
Under his subordination everything was tidy and in perfect order in the prisoner-of-war camp. When the soldiers went out to work, they were ordered around by officers and there ruled an iron discipline.
Finally, the selected equipment had been loaded. Thus, my long-drawn-out official trip came to an end, my first leave into the big , wide world after almost ten years of imprisonment. I returned to Norilsk.
Within short the conditions in the Norilsk camp changed for the worse. The enemies of the people were removed from all camp sections and concentrated in a common camp with an intensified regime, which, for inexplicable reasons, was called “Gorlag” (Mining Camp).
There was no work according to specialized knowledge, no walking around without guards, no new clothes or shoes, no special food supply for engineers and technical personal – just gang labour under strict escort.
One of the persons I utterly venerated, a Communist with many years of service and a meritious man – Anatoliy Nikolayevich Zlobin – also got to this camp. He had been sentenced to 15 years. He worked in the same department as did Milchakov and I. He was in an utterly weak condition of health.
Some time later, by the doctor’s intervention, I succeeded in arranging a reunion with him. It was a very unpleasant meeting. When Anatoliy Nikolayevich entered the hospital office, he wore a bath-robe and held his enormous belly, which gurgled with liquid at any movement, with both hands.
Words of sympathy and compassion or hope for recovery would have been a cruel tact-lessness. He had already realized the hopelessness of his situation. We talked a little about abstract subkects and tehn I handed over to him the parcel I had brought along – which was strictly forbidden according to the camp regime. We finally shook hands – and said good-bye forever. He died soonafter. He had no relatives or acquaintances, there was nobody I could have notified about his death.
This death affected me deeply, as did none of the other countless cases of death I had witnessed in the course of my stay in the camp.
My wife and I went to work and, little by little, bought ourselves a few things. We received a separate, quite spacious one-room apartment in the first-built Norilsk three-storey building. In 1949 our son was born; my wife went to Kiev for the delivery. He is not our Norilsk but our Kiev son. He mainly lived in Kiev, at his grandmother’s place. They came by plane to visit us.
Grandmother was mostly impressed by the polar summer, which she could not get accustomed to at all. How can one sleep, when the sun is shining all the time.
Early in 1951 I was summoned to the militia. “Your passport!” The document was torn into pieces before my eyes and thrown into the paper basket. I was told that following the decision of the USSR State Security Special Board I would now change into the state of being an exile without having the right to move off beyond the limits of Norilsk and with the imposed obligation to appear for registration and check once a month. I was not even allowed to go to the airport, in order to accompany or welcome my wife. That was the next jolt.
In 1953 I spent my vacation at home. Suddenly, I heard about Stalin’s death on the radio. Immediately, I gathered fresh hope that the situation of the repressed people might now change for the better. When the first unmistakable protents for an improvement of the situation became apparent, I cut off the peak of my cap and pulled out Nikolay Alexandrovich
Alleyev’s petition, who had been sentenced with me in the same matter. I addressed the petition to the USSR Chief Department of Public Prosecution pointing out that I could attest the authenticity of my written petition with the original and would be prepared at any time to present the local Public Prosecutor a verified copy of the original. I simply feared to give away the original.
Quite a lot of time passed by, until I was asked to appear before the Department of Public Prosecution. “You wrote to Moscow?” – “Yes, I did.”
There was a short conversation, in the course of which I presented the original petition written by Aleyev. This interrogation was not set down in writing in any kind of a protocol. “Wait for the results from Moscow.”
Time passed by, was neither asked to appear before the Public Prosecutor again, nor did I receive any news from Moscow.
Late in the first quarter of the year 1955 I went on rotational vacation and decided to go to Moscow on my own initiative. In Moscow I settled down at the parents of a former camp comrade – without official registration, of course. Once again I found myself in an illegal situation, but this time without my “talisman” from the NKVD.
Around the Main Military Procuracy which was situated in Kirov street, there stood a long queue – by far longer than thise, in which one is today lining up for sausages. They were all people like me, “enemies of the people” or their relatives.
I kept waiting, until I was my turn. I cam across a man, who was in charge of the calling hours. Struck with fear I waited for the question: “How did you get to Moscow, although you are not allowed to come here?” But he did not ask this question. He listened to me carefully, instead. “I will request the delivery of your file. Come back in ten days!”
Upon expiration of the term I went there again. They told me: “We received your file and are now going into the case again. Come back in two weeks’ time”.
When I came there for the third time, the man behind the desk got up, went around the table, stretched out his hand and said: “Alexander Alexandrovich, I congratulate you; we formally objected to your sentence and the matter was forwarded to the Supreme Court Military Collegium, which you now have to address yourself to”.
I started to systematically call on the Military Collegium. Finally, early in July, I received a certificate dated the 30th of June 1955. I quote the text in full length:
“The criminal case regarding the charge of Alexander Alexandrovich Gayevskiy was examined by the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court on the 25th of June 1955. The sentence pronounced by the Military Collegium on the 10th of March 1938, as well as the directive of the Special Board of the USSR Security Service of the 9th of December 1950 concerning A.A. Gayevskiy have been examined once again. The circumstances surrounding the case have changed and been declared void. The proceedings have been squashed in lack of factual findings. Signed: the chairman of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court, Lieutenant General of Justice A. Cheptsov”.
I was so excited that I immediately ran off to the notary’s office and made ten photocopies of the original document I had taken with me. And then I struted through the city of Moscow like a citizen equal to everybody else, who had the right to answer the question about previous condemnations with “not previously convicted”.
Thus, the prediction of the jurist Guryevich, which he had spoken out in the prison of Kustanay in 1939, came true.
Upon my release in 1947 I was paid 2561 rubels and 63 kopeks (the wages I had earned) and additionally received: a quilt, a straw mattress, a bed sheet and a pillowcase.
After the rehabilitation I received two monthly salaries in reparation, without deduction of the income tax, in accordance with the last position I had occupied before my arrest. The lost years of my life and my state of health are not subject to any compensation.
My wife, as the family member of an enemy of the people, did not receive any compensation for having been kept in prison and sent into exile.
After my rehabilitation I continued to work in Norilsk for another two years and saved up a little money, whereby I also made use of all the fixed allowances granted to me, after the corresponding rights had been re-established to me. In 1957 my wife and I wanted to go to Kiev via Krasnoyarsk, as we intended to settle there. Having arrived in Krasnoyarsk, I was given a vacancy for the Krasnoyarsk Council of National Economy, which was still in the process of being organized. Having discussed the matter with my wife, we decided that it would be more reasonable to gradually get accustomed to the change of climate and that we should therefore better stay in Krasnoyarsk for another two or three years.
However, we got so deeply rooted there that we did not manage to get to Kiev at all. My wife has already been buried in Krasnoyarsk soil, and now it is my turn.
From an enemy of the people I turned into a servant of the people – a deputy. Until 1982 I was working in leading positions and then went into well-deserved retirement.
When looking back to my life I must confess that I had been lucky in this life, although this might sound paradoxical. I was lucky having to do with so many clever, well-educated, honest and utterly ordinary people, from whom I learned a lot. Among them, and this is what I do not want to pass over in silence, was a doctor of sciences, who lead the Expedition of the Research of Mineral Resources in Norilsk, later was officially named an enemy of the people and then spent his term of confinement in the camp in Norilsk. Once again I succeeded to meet with him in Norilsk, when he had come there as a guest of honour to take part in the 25th anniversary of the collective combine.
I was also lucky to survive after all, to reunite with my wife and to have a good son and grand-children. I also count myself happy that I had the privilege to stay alive up to a time, in which the past is being judged correctly and objectively; in which is taken resolute action for the correction of mistakes that have been made in the grievous past. I only regret the fact that my active part in life has come to an end., that have meanwhile changed into a mere observer of all things going on around me.
I do hope that my descendants will experience better times, but I am tormented by serious doubts. The country has reached y fatal limited in any respect, the people is demoralized to the extreme. There is a secret but literally fierce resistence against the change to a normal human life. Unfortunately, there are too many people, who fear to lose their unlimited power and possibilities.
I yet managed to go to Norilsk on official trips for a couple of times and also as a guest for the celebrations on the occasion of the 25th and 30th anniversaries of the Norilsk combine. Each time I arrived there, I noticed, how quickly the town of Norilsk is growing and how seriously the ecological situation is getting worse. There is the smell of sulphur and other gases. It is possible to take a walk through Sevastopol street, where there is the house I lived in, particularly not on days, when the wind is blowing over the polluted air from the industrial zone. And the tundra around the town, where one used to shoot white partridges in former times, became a death zone.
Before closing I would yet like to mention that the will of fate sent me to Alma-Ata for business for some time, thirty years after my arrest.
I did not recognize the town anymore, so much it had changed during all those years. I barely found the house, which I had lived in. I also visited the building, where the OGPU department of transportation had been quartered, in the basement of which had been the cells for the prisoners awaiting trial. This house already belonged to the military guards of the Turkestan-Sibirian railroad. I went to the entrance, where I did not meet anybody, and went down the staircase, on which, thirty years ago, I had tried to clutch my slipping down trousers, when being guarded down to the cell.
The basement was well-illuminated and stuffed with bundles of blanks and other objects for business purposes. The doors of the former cells were locked, only the solid iron crossbars had disappeared, which, mainly at night time, had rattled loudly and evilbodingly, thus waking up the prisoners and making them tremble. This had also been an element of psychological influencing.
I heard steps from the staircase and a man in civil clothes appeared on the corridor. I greeted him and asked: “And you know what was going on in this basement thirty years ago?”
He seemed to be astonished. I told him that the remand prison had been located here and showed him the cell door, behind which I had been doing time in. He said he had heard about it and showed his compassion. Then we separated. All memories now gathered in my mind. I remember two surnames, the one of the teacher Litovchenko, the other of the student Fen. And only then, thirty years later, I understood that they had been informants, specially put on me.
With this I can now end my memoirs about my past. I am just on the point of collecting materials about the present time. Maybe, this will be useful one day for my son or my grand-children.
1. This was one of the stations between Yemtseya and Permilovo.
2. Teacher Yakushin from the East-Chinese railroad was arrested in 1936. His nephew had a different family name.
3. V.K. Dymnich, born around 1905, was exiled from the Ukraine in the matter of the “Ukrainian nationalists”. He was arrested in the first half of 1937.
4. N.A. Aleyev, born around 1895. In the prison in Kustanay he and A.A. Gayevskiy were detained in different cells, but got to the Norillag with the same prisoner transport. There he was assigned to gang labour only. In 1942-1943 he was sent away from the 3rd forced labour camp sector of the Norillag.
5. That very day the mother of A.A. Gayevskiy’s wife was arrested, a German teacher at the polytechnic – Anna Avgustovna Merz, German, born around 1880. Nothing is known about her fate.
6. There were no Poles among them. They were all Ukrainians.
7. Professor Babkov was already guarded to interrogations in 1938; the Military Collegium did not sentence him.
8. A.A. Gayevskiy was taken to the inner prison of the NKVD in February 1938.
9. Among the cell inmates there also was a certain Zherdetskiy, the organizer for the horse-breeding unit. The Military Collegium sentenced him late in February or early in Match. Presumably he was shot.
10. The prisoner transport started approximately in July 1938. It consisted of 50-60 persons.
11. The prison cells in Kustanay were equipeed with two-storey bed boards. When they took the newly arrived convicts to the prison, there were akready about five inmates, among them the jurist Guryevich (who looked older than 60 years). The prison of Kustanay also disposed of cells for women. The guards organized meetings (in the empty cells) for those, who wished to, and that was completely free of charge.
12. In the Norillag Zavgorodniy did not get to the 3rd camp sector, but to some other.