Although he had arrived a relatively robust man, after a year in the camps his health began to break. A front tooth had come loose, he developed boils on his face (which made it impossible for him to shave), and he had lost a great deal of weight. In a vain attempt to ward off scurvy, he was drinking a tea called slanyk, prescribed by the camp personnel and made from the needles of a low-spreading evergreen that was supposed to contain a lot of vitamin C. (It didn’t, as Varlam Shalamov, a survivor, would explain in his Kolyma Tales.)
By October 1937 he had begun to have rheumatic pains in his hands and feet; by November he had a bad back from lifting heavy buckets, as well as a bodywide rash for which he was given ineffectual camphor pills. Five months later, he confessed: “My chest – that is only skin and bones; all my ribs are showing. The veins on my hands and on my feet are swollen like those of old people, like those of my grandmother at which I wondered as a child... Sometimes, especially after lunch, I can hardly drag myself along to work, thinking how I shall handle the miner’s pick or shovel, but later, overcoming this weakness and starting to move, I am able to do it.”
At this point, his daily food ration was just 400 grams of bread, 50 grams of fish, and a spoonful of watery soup. The occasional potato he got a hold of was frostbitten; the compote sour. “Often I dream about tasty things and think mostly about food... Before I used to think about philosophical matters and now – about my stomach.” Sometimes in loving detail he recalled his favorite homemade dishes, and their very description gave him nourishment; at that penultimate moment of his life, he literally lived on words.
By June 1938, Dray-Khmara’s legs were swollen (from heart disease) and as a “treatment” for it, he was “hung upside down.” By autumn, he also had blisters on his hands and legs from scurvy and a tumor above one hip “caused by a fall from a truck,” and he was suffering from “heartburn and nausea.” Meanwhile his wife and daughter had been evicted from their apartment in Kiev and exiled to the little town of Belebej, in the Bashkir Republic. His wife complained about her situation, and in one of his last, brave letters to her, he gently rebuked her for it:
One thing I don’t understand is why you torment yourself so… If I, besides the heavy physical work that I do, were to torment myself and “deeply suffer” as you express yourself, there would be an end of me... Anguish can increase your strength, but only when you make the effort to control it, to rise above it, when you refuse to let it take possession of your soul... Rid yourself of this melancholy, forget the very word “suffering.”
As he tried to convey to her some shadow of what his anguish was, his own words failed him, and he asked her to recall the opening stanzas of Alexander Blok’s “Autumnal Love”:
When, in the damp and russet foliage,
The rowanberry clusters burn like flame,
When the executioner’s own sepulchral hand
Drives the last nail into my palm –
When, above the leaden rippling waters
On some anonymous, damp Golgotha, I,
Before the stern tribunal of my country
Am hung for nothing upon the cross to die;
Then, from that forsaken height,
Through my last tears of blood, I’ll see
Upon the wide expanse of water
Christ floating in a little boat to me.
With the same hopes his eyes are shining,
He wears the same torn, tattered clothes;
A nail-pierced hand pathetically extending
From underneath his outcast’s robes.
Christ! My country everywhere is sad!
My worn-out will itself begins to fail!
And your little boat – will it ever come to anchor
Upon the height of this crucifixion hill?
Sometime in the winter of 1938-39, Dray-Khmara died. His widow did her best to preserve as many of his poems as she could, but in Belebej one night some Tatars stole the manuscripts and sliced the thin paper into strips for rolling cigarettes.
17
HORIZONS
Despite Lenin’s ringing characterization of the Russian Empire as a “prison house of nations,” and early Bolshevik promises to redress imperial wrongs, the fate of the Siberian native population under the Soviets was harsh.
On November 1917, the Council of People’s Commissars had boldly proclaimed equality, sovereignty, and free cultural and political development for Russia’s different nationalities, in a “Declaration of Rights of the Peoples of Russia” signed by both Lenin and Stalin, the latter at the time People’s Commissar for Nationality Affairs. Nothing was done until after the Civil War to lend credence to this proclamation, but in 1924 a Committee of Assistance to the Peoples of the North was set up, and at first acted to improve the material conditions of native life. Six years later, the administration of Siberia was reorganized as part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), on a single day, December 10, 1930, six “national regions” – Koryak, Nenets (Samoyed), Chukchi, and so on – were set up in addition to the already existing Yakut and Buryat Autonomous Republics, established respectively in 1922 and 1923. These “Autonomous Republics,” not incidentally, were of enormous size – the Yakut, encompassing an Arctic and sub-Arctic area the size of India; the Buryat, with its capital at Ulan Ude (formerly Verkhneudinsk), one and a half times the size of Great Britain. The Chukotka National District encompassed the whole of the Chukchi Peninsula. Although their names appeared to give imposing recognition to the aborigines and their rights to ancestral lands, in substance the new Soviet federal structure allowed them little real autonomy.
Nevertheless, improvements in hygiene and health care were made, and an educational system was set up with all levels of schooling; but the Soviets never followed through on promises to develop textbooks in all the native languages, and after the Cyrillic alphabet replaced Roman-based alphabets in 1936, the effect was to encourage the study of the Russian language rather than the natives’ own. Meanwhile, many shamans and other leaders accused of being “kulaks” were eliminated, Tatar mosques were closed, and all but one of the Buryat temples were destroyed. Buryat open-pasture animal husbandry, as we have seen, was forcibly replaced by collective-farm cattle breeding, and when Soviet collectivization reached Arctic Siberia, the Samoyed nomads were organized into work units, each bossed by a brigadir, who made sure that their roamings with reindeer to patches of lichen followed an official plan. Although at first the government supposed that primitive native communism would make concepts of modern communism easier to apply, native ideas of sharing were found to be too generous, notably disconnected from the labor theory of value, and their failure to distinguish between work and leisure judged to be “unproductive” and “ideologically wrong.”
Wrong or right, they were never so valued as in World War II, when about 20 percent of the total native population was conscripted and sent to the front. One whole division was made up of Buryat-Mongol cavalry; others served with great distinction as snipers or scouts; and Siberian riflemen played an important part in the defense of Moscow and in the Battle of Stalingrad. Yakuts especially proved able to remain hardy under the harshest conditions, and were said to be the Red Army’s best marksmen because of their skill, as hunters, in shooting their quarry in the eye.