In those years – up to the beginning of the thirties – there was no additional sentence for an escape. If you got away, you were in luck; if they caught you alive, you were also in luck. It was not often that escaped convicts were returned alive; the convicts’ hatred for the guards developed the latters’ taste for human blood. The prisoner feared for his life – especially during transfers, when a careless word said to the guards could purchase a ticket to the next world, ‘to the moon’. Stricter rules were in effect during transfers of prisoners, and the guards could get away with a lot. During such transfers prisoners often demanded that their hands be tied behind their backs as a form of life insurance. The hope was that if this was done the guards would be reluctant to ‘write off’ a prisoner and then fill in his death certificate with the sacramental phrase: ‘killed during attempt to escape’.
Investigations of such instances were always conducted in a slipshod fashion, and if the murderer was smart enough to fire a second shot in the air, the investigation always produced a conclusion favorable to him. The instruction prescribed a warning shot.
At Vishera, which was the Fourth Division of SLON and the Urals branch of the Solovetsk camps, the commandant, Nesterov, would personally receive recaptured prisoners. He was a heavy-set man with dense black hair that grew on the backs of his long, white hands and even seemed to cover his palms.
The dirty, hungry, beaten, exhausted escapees were coated from head to foot with a thick layer of road dust. They would be brought to Nesterov and thrown at his feet.
‘All right, come closer.’
The prisoner would approach him.
‘Decided to take a stroll? That’s fine, just fine!’
‘Forgive me, Ivan Spiridonych.’
‘I’ll forgive you,’ Nesterov would say in a solemn sing-song voice as he got up from his seat on the porch. ‘I’ll forgive you, but the state won’t forgive…’
His blue eyes would become milky and lined with red veins. His voice, however, remained kind and well disposed.
‘Take your pick – a smack or isolation.’
‘A smack, Ivan Spiridonych.’
Nesterov’s hairy fist would soar at the head of the happy convict, who would wipe away the blood and spit out his broken teeth.
‘Get off to the barracks!’
Nesterov could knock anyone off his feet with one punch, and he prided himself on this famous talent. The returned prisoner too would consider the arrangement to his advantage, since his punishment went no further than Nesterov’s punch.
If the prisoner refused to resolve the matter family-style and insisted on the official punishment, he was locked up in an isolation cell with an iron floor, where two or three months of reduced rations was considerably worse than Nesterov’s ‘smack’.
If the escaped prisoner survived, there were no other unpleasant consequences – aside from the fact that he could no longer count on being lucky when prisoners were being selected for release to ‘unload’ camp.
As the camps grew, the number of escapes also increased, and simply hiring more guards was not effective. It was too expensive, and at that time very few people were interested in the job of camp guard. The question of responsibility for an escape attempt was being resolved in an inadequate, childish fashion.
Soon a new resolution was announced from Moscow: the days a convict spent on the run and the period he passed in a punishment cell after capture were not to be counted into his basic sentence.
This order caused considerable discontent in Bookkeeping. They had to increase personnel, for such complex arithmetical calculations were too much for our camp accountants.
The order was implemented and read aloud to the entire camp during head counts.
Alas, it did not frighten the would-be escapees at all.
Every day the ‘escaped’ column grew in the reports of the company commanders, and the camp director frowned more and more as he read these daily reports.
Kapitonov, a musician in the camp band, was one of the camp director’s favorites. He walked out of the camp, using his gleaming cornet as if it were a pass, and left the instrument hanging on the branch of a fir. At that point the camp head lost his composure altogether.
In late fall three convicts were killed during an escape. After the bodies were identified, the head of the camp ordered that they be exhibited for three days beside the camp gates – so that everyone had to pass them when leaving for work. But even this unofficial sharp reminder neither stopped nor even lessened the number of escapes.
All this took place toward the end of the twenties. Later came the notorious ‘reforging’ of men’s souls and the White Sea Canal. The ‘concentration camps’ were renamed ‘Corrective Labor Camps’, the number of prisoners grew exponentially, and escapes were treated as separate crimes: Article 82 of the 1926 criminal code laid down a punishment of one year, to be added on to the basic sentence.
All this took place on the mainland, but in Kolyma – a camp that had existed since 1932 – the question of escapees was dealt with only in 1938. From then on, the punishment for an escape was increased, and the ‘term’ was expanded to three years.
Why are the Kolyma years 1932–7 not included in the chronicle of escapes? At that time the camps were run by Edward Berzin. He had founded the Kolyma camp system and was the supreme authority where Party activity, governmental affairs and union matters were concerned. He was executed in 1938 and ‘rehabilitated’ in 1956. The former secretary of Dzerzhinsky and commander of a division of Latvian soldiers who exposed the famous conspiracy of Lokkar, Edward Berzin attempted – not without success – to solve the problem of colonizing this severe and isolated region and the allied problem of reforging the souls of the convicts. A man with a ten-year sentence could accumulate enough work credits to be released in two or three years. Under Berzin there was excellent food, a workday of four to six hours in the winter and ten in the summer, and colossal salaries for convicts, which permitted them to help their families and return to the mainland as well-to-do men when their sentences were up. Berzin did not believe in the possibility of reforging the professional criminals, since he knew their base, untrustworthy human material all too well. It was extremely difficult for professional criminals to be sent to Kolyma in the early years. Those who did succeed in being sent there never regretted it afterward.
The cemeteries dating back to those days are so few in number that the early residents of Kolyma seemed immortal to those who came later. No one attempted to escape from Kolyma at that time; it would have been insane…
Those few years are the golden age of Kolyma. The horrible Yezhov, who was a true enemy of the people, spoke indignantly of the period at one of the meetings of the Central Committee shortly before unleashing his own wave of terror that was to be christened the ‘Yezhovshchina’.
It was in 1938 that Kolyma was transformed into a special camp for recidivists and Trotskyites, and escapes began to be punished with three-year sentences.
‘Why did you escape? You couldn’t have had a compass or a map?’
‘We did it anyway. Alexander promised to be our guide…’
They were being held at a transit prison. There were three of them who had unsuccessfully tried to escape: Nicholas Karev, a twenty-five-year-old former Leningrad journalist, Fyodor Vasiliev, a bookkeeper from Rostov who was the same age, and Alexander Kotelnikov, a Kamchatka Eskimo and reindeer-driver who had been arrested for stealing government property. Kotelnikov must have been about fifty years old, but he could have been a lot older, since it is hard to tell the age of a Yakut, Kamchadal, or Evenk. Kotelnikov spoke good Russian, but he couldn’t pronounce the Russian ‘sh’ and always replaced it with ‘s’ as did all the dialect speakers of the Chukotsk Peninsula. He knew who Pushkin and Nekrasov were, had been in Khabarovsk, and was an experienced traveler. He was a romantic by nature, judging by the gleam in his eye.