But it wasn't really a hospital. It was an old-fashioned asylum where the patients had been rusticated, and during the day many of them were turned out to wander in the snow. Until they were sent here, they had been locked in a gold-domed cathedral—decommissioned to serve as a madhouse—near the city of Kungur, ninety miles down the Siberian road.
A few miles beyond Kuchino, we came to a steel wall surrounded by trees, and a big gate, and a sign beside it saying that we'd come to Perm 36. A former corrective labor colony, I read, and the rest was obscured by the falling snow.
One of the patients from the asylum had followed us to the big gate and began pleading in Russian as we drove through.
The compound was so simplified by the snowfall it could have been a Boy Scout camp, but that was a first and fleeting impression. The barbed wire at the top of the high walls and near every entrance told a truer story. So did the small barred windows, the windowless truck in which prisoners were transported, and, when I went inside, the cells, the bunks, the barracks, the torture chambers.
Perm 36 is the only intact gulag prison remaining in Russia. In Gulag, Anne Applebaum writes of Perm 36 as "a Stalinist-era lagpunkt [camp division], later one of the harshest political camps of the 1970s and 1980s." All the other prisons have been destroyed or were converted to different uses. Perm 36 still exists because of the efforts of former prisoners, gulag historians such as Viktor Shmirov, and, as I learned later, money from the Ford Foundation.
"Not the Russian government?" I asked, though I suspected what the answer might be.
Sergei laughed and said, "Many of the people in this government were responsible for the prison"—for the fact was that Perm 36, which had operated for more than forty years, had been shut down only recently. Fifteen years ago, this had been a place of torture, forced labor, virtual slavery, and death.
"Who was sent here?" I asked as we walked from cell to cell.
"The same people as in other camps. Fifteen percent anti-Soviet, ten percent criminals, and all the others—three quarters—ordinary people accused of 'misbehavior.'"
"Petty crime?"
"No, no," Viktor said. "Missing workdays—say, if you missed three, they'd send you here for ten years. Or lateness. Or taking something from the government."
"Taking what, for example?"
"A peasant—a hungry peasant—who took three tassels of grain would be arrested and brought here. Like Sergei's uncles. But never mind these things. You have to keep in mind that people were needed. We had a bad economy. Stalin had started a program of economic modernization. You know what Churchill said: Stalin found Russia working with wooden plows and left it equipped with nuclear bombs."
"Let's keep moving," I said. Inside, even with the heat on, the barracks and cells were very cold. They had been repainted, but still they were primitive examples of inhumanity and terror.
"For twenty-four years under Stalin we became powerful," Viktor said, "but at the expense of freedom. We had no loans or credit from other countries. We had to do it all ourselves. The only source of labor was the people"—and he gestured to the workshop we were entering—"Russian people, prisoners, slaves."
Here at Perm 36 the "politicals," the criminals, the tardy workers, labored in the machine shop, making small metal Y-shaped connectors to attach wires to electrical terminals. I'd seen them on plugs, on carburetors, on batteries. Viktor said they had to be made by hand, and Perm 36 produced hundreds of thousands of them.
"Government needed labor," Viktor said, "so it enacted harsh legislation, creating fear and exploitation. This produced huge numbers of prisoners. And because they were slaves, they were an extremely mobile labor force."
As we tramped through the snowdrifts to the punishment cells, Viktor said that it was not only these slave laborers who suffered. He recalled that in his own family there was never enough food. "We were always hungry."
Perm 36 had gone through a number of phases. After 1953, some prisoners got their freedom, though they had been almost destroyed by their time in the labor camp. Then a power struggle between Khrushchev and his spy chief, Lavrenty Beria, resulted in Beria's being convicted as a spy and shot. Eight hundred of Beria's men were sent to Perm to suffer and work. Because they were canny—most of them had been spies or agents—security was increased, walls were heightened, and the camp was expanded. In 1973—and I reminded myself that I had rattled past Perm on the Trans-Siberian at that time, feeling sorry for myself—Perm was "only one of two political camps" in the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum wrote. Perm was restocked with political prisoners. In the 1980s, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, a former director of the KGB, had arrested many thousands. "The prisoners were educated and had been powerful. Some had lawyers!" More camps were built, including others around Perm.
"They built a toilet over there in 1972," Viktor said, pointing from an iced-up doorway to an outhouse in a distant part of the prison compound. "It had to serve five hundred and sixty prisoners. They lined up to use it. How did they do it? Yes, quickly."
Sergei said, "It was just another tool to humiliate prisoners."
"Exhaustion, frost, hunger, and endless humiliations," Shalamov had written of prison certainties.
I asked Viktor about the death rate at Perm 36.
"In general, prisoners were worked to death. Six percent or more died every year. But many were too sick to work. In 1984, only seven percent of the prisoners here were capable of hard work. The rest were sick or handicapped."
In the midday snowstorm, under a gunmetal sky, the snowdrifts piled to the windows, the damp rooms and dark corridors too cold to linger in, the outside temperature around 0° Fahrenheit, and crazies from the nearby asylum banging on the high iron gate, it seemed an appropriate day to visit a gulag. I did not want to see it in the summer, surrounded by high grass and picturesque log cabins and wildflowers and tweeting birds. It was most enlightening to see it at its worst, when the broken bunks and the exhibit of prisoners' artifacts—dented bowls and twisted spoons and ragged gloves—were given more meaning by the cold despair I could feel in my bones.
Viktor showed me an exhibit of photographs of well-known Soviet political prisoners: Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Babel, Varlam Shalamov; and they could have included Natan Sharansky, who had served six years in Perm 35, not far away. A leader of the struggle for Lithuanian independence, Balis Gayauskas, had been locked up for thirty-five years. One of his crimes was translating Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago into Lithuanian. He subsequently became head of state security in the Lithuanian government.
"He comes back from time to time," Viktor said.
In The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn had written: "A great writer is, so to speak, a second government. That's why no regime anywhere has ever loved its great writers, only its minor ones."
A Ukrainian dissident, Lenko Luk'ianenko, was sentenced to death; his sentence was reduced to fifteen years, which he served here, but before he was released he was given ten more years. A fellow Ukrainian, a poet named Vasyl Stus—"not a dissident," Viktor said, "but had the sort of spirit they didn't want"—spent fifteen years here, after being arrested and rearrested. A Nobel Prize candidate in 1980, Stus had lost out to Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish poet who had immigrated to California, where he wrote lyric poems in the Berkeley sunshine while Stus sat in an isolation or punishment cell translating Rilke from memory and made metal connectors in the machine shop. Stus died in the prison in 1985, "in mysterious circumstances," Viktor said. But what was the mystery? I saw Stus's horrible little cell and the narrow board of a shelf that was his bunk. I would not have lasted two days.
"I want to explain the slavery of this system," Viktor said. "I've been to the U.S. My friends there would say to me, 'We had slaves. It's like American slavery.' I said no. Here's the difference. You know Cato, the Roman? He said, To keep a slave you must give him meat, bread, and two bottles of not very good wine every week. Eh?" He let this sink in, and then he said, "On the Southern plantations, the slaves were fed because they were worth something. They were kept well. They had families and households. They had value." He smiled grimly and went on, "Gulag prisoners were slaves who were worth nothing!"