A popular joke from the time went as follows:
Who dug the White Sea Canal?
The right bank was dug by those who told jokes….
And the left bank?
By those who listened.
Lev had listened to Mandelstam’s joke and his fate was sealed.
Shumovsky and Lev were given a loaf of black bread and two cured fish – a travel ration for three days – and then stuffed into the overcrowded, stinking hold of the river barge, ‘as slave traders did to the slaves taken away from Africa in the Middle Ages’, as Shumovsky put it.2 On the third day of the journey up the Vodla river, the hatch to the deck was opened and the guards ordered everyone out. The barge was on a wide river, by its berth. Beyond that was a high, solid fence made of planks. The prisoners got out and stopped at a checkpoint. A yawning sergeant appeared from the guard house, took the documents from the guard, opened a gate and let the prisoners into the camp, or ‘zone’. ‘The barrack with its log walls, wet from the dampness that filled the air, was waiting for the newcomers.’3
Gumilev and Shumovsky were just two of the 15 million people to be sent to the USSR’s Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei or Main Camp Administration – GULAG for short. Over 1 million would not survive the ordeal. Forced labour brigades had been used as far back as the seventeenth century to work in Siberia and Russia’s north. But under the USSR, the administration and organization of slave labour reached a new level of sophistication. Throughout the twentieth century, labour camps such as the White Sea Canal project became an indelible part of the imagery of the USSR, especially after the publication in the West of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in 1974.
The ‘Archipelago’, as Solzhenitsyn described the camp system, coexisted with Soviet reality amid a sort of hidden muteness. Everyone knew it was there, but few knew the scale, and most pretended that it didn’t. It was almost as if the camps were a trapdoor in reality: falling through it meant to disappear, not just physically, but to be wiped from the public memory. In most years up until the mid-1950s, when following Stalin’s death it started to be slowly dismantled, between 500,000 and 1.7 million Soviet citizens were confined to such camps, completely unnoticed by the public.
The day after they arrived, Gumilev and Shumovsky were sent across the river to saw timber in the camp warehouse. Over the next four months, they worked themselves nearly to the point of death:
By the new year of 1939 I had reached my final limit. I could hardly drag my feet from the barracks into the wood. Felling trees in the icy forest, waist-deep in snow, in torn footwear, without warm clothes, refreshing myself with gruel and small bread rations – even village muzhiks, who were used to hard physical labour, would melt down like snow on this work….4
Lev only found escape in cerebral musings; and he had ample material to muse on in his present circumstances, however awful they were. One thing that continued to occupy him was his amateur sociological survey of his fellow convicts and how they adapted to their new, arbitrary surroundings as they struggled to survive. Many camp survivors spoke of the camp life as ‘cruel’ and ‘Darwinian’. Lev’s friend Alexander Savchenko described the process of arriving in camp as ‘being stripped naked’:
All the past was deleted from him like clothes in a dressing room. The bygone social status, career, profession disappeared like a light steam cloud off a red-hot frying pan. The prisoner’s moral face began to be drawn up all anew.5
This sense of the camp as a descent into a pure state of nature was often expressed by former inmates in their memoirs: ‘The camp was a test of our moral strength, of our everyday morality, and 99 per cent of us failed it’, wrote ex-prisoner Varlam Shalamov in an account of his camp life.6
Gumilev was a keen and oddly academic observer of his own fate, and that of his fellow zeks (from the Russian for someone incarcerated, zaklyuchenny). Later, in a series of journal articles and interviews, he spoke with great interest and a somewhat odd detachment about watching men interacting with each other as they plummeted closer and closer to the primordial state of pure Darwinian survival. Lev was eventually to make his academic career with theories about the role of ‘nature’ in social relations. What types of relationships did men form in a state of pure competition to survive? Camp life was his laboratory. And what he gradually came to understand was that, while brutal and violent, life among inmates was not entirely Hobbesian – a war of all against all. There were certain ‘laws’ of social organization that seemed to be immutable, natural.
Gumilev noticed that the zeks, irrespective of background, education or cultural level, all displayed a tendency to form into small groups of 2–4 people. These groups were defined by who ‘ate together’:
Groups of from two to four persons emerged on this principle; they ‘eat together’, that is, share their meal. These are real consortiums, the members of which are obliged to help each other. The composition of such a group depends on the internal sympathy of its members for each other.7
The members of these small groups would also make sacrifices for each other and defend each other. These groups, he believed, were not an example of a ‘social structure’ that he believed to be different. This was not social; it was nature.
This process of distinguishing order from chaos, he noticed, was universal. For example, half the camp’s inmates were ‘criminals’ – i.e. they had been convicted of ordinary crimes, rather than political ones, as Gumilev and his circle had. But even among the criminals there was a tendency to distinguish the lawless from the law-abiding: the criminals divided themselves into urki – criminals who obeyed the ‘laws’ or informal code of criminals – and ‘hooligans’ who did not. He wrote in 1990 about his later experience at another camp where he was a prisoner, in Norilsk:
Criminals made up about half of the incarcerated. But true hooligans were very rare. My acquaintance, a murderer, said: ‘The hooligan is an enemy to us all, to you the friars (as politicals were known) and to us urki (slang for professional criminal). The hooligans have to be killed, because they create evil for evil’s sake, and not for the sake of good, as thieves and robbers do.8
The emergence of social order from chaos that Lev witnessed evidently made a profound impression on him, and formed a core part of the theory of history that would make him famous. Prison taught him that man is not the master of nature, but is subject to it; and the human virtues that we know – society, friendship, and so on – are not a mark of human advancement, but a natural biological impulse, the instinctual urge, common to all humans at all times, to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them’.
As he continued to fell logs in the permafrost, watching fellow inmates die daily of exhaustion and hypothermia, he slowly became fascinated by the irrational in history. One example he often referred to in later writings was the march of Alexander the Great across Eurasia. Alexander, Lev surmised, could not have been driven by any rational calculation – the small Greek army could not possibly have held all the territory they conquered, and Alexander would be unlikely ever to get back home.
In 1939 he was confined to the camp’s infirmary, after he split his leg open with an axe while felling trees. In a state of near delirium, he seems to have been visited by an inspiration that he would carry with him throughout his life: