In the thirties, not only were petitioners for pardons forgiven but also those who had signed confessions that incriminated both themselves and others, often with bloody consequences.
Representatives of the former unyielding view had long since grown old and perished in exile or in the camps. Those who had been imprisoned and had passed through the process of investigation were all ‘petitioners’.
For this reason no one ever knew what moral torments Kipreev subjected himself to in his departure for the Sea of Okhotsk – to Vladivostok and Magadan.
Kipreev had been a physicist and engineer at the Kharkov Physical Institute, where the first Soviet experiments with nuclear reactions were conducted. The nuclear scientist Kur-chatov worked there. The purges had not passed over the Kharkov Institute, and Kipreev became one of the first victims of our atomic science.
Kipreev knew his own true worth, but his superiors did not. Moreover, moral stamina has little connection with talent, with scientific experience, or even with the love of science. Aware of the beatings at the interrogations, Kipreev prepared to act in the simplest manner – to fight back like a beast, to answer blow with blow without caring whether his tormentor was simply carrying out, or had personally invented, ‘method number three’. Kipreev was beaten and thrown into a punishment cell. Everything began again. His physical strength betrayed him, and then so did his moral stamina. Kipreev ‘signed’. They threatened to arrest his wife. Kipreev knew endless shame became of this weakness, because he, an educated man, had collapsed when he encountered brute force. Right there in the prison Kipreev swore an oath never again to repeat his shameful act. But then, Kipreev was the only one who perceived his act as shameful. On the neighboring bunks lay other men who had also signed confessions and committed slander. They lay there and did not die. Shame has no boundaries. Or, rather, the boundaries are always personal, and each resident of an interrogation cell sets standards for himself.
Kipreev arrived in Kolyma with a five-year sentence, confident that he would find the path to early release to the mainland. An engineer had to be of value. An engineer could always earn credit for extra working days, be released, have his sentence shortened. While Kipreev had nothing but contempt for physical labor in camp, he quickly realized that only death waited at the end of that path. If he could just find a job where he could apply even a tenth of his technical skills, he would obtain his freedom. At the very least, he would retain his skills.
Experience at the mine, fingers broken in the scraper, physical exhaustion, and emaciation brought Kipreev to the hospital and from there to the transit prison.
The engineer’s problem was that he could not resist the temptation to invent; he could not restrain himself from searching for scientific and technical solutions to the chaos that he saw all around him.
As for the camp and its directors, they looked upon Kipreev as a slave, nothing more. Kipreev’s energy, for which he had cursed himself a thousand times, sought an outlet.
The stakes in this game had to be worthy of an engineer and a scientist. The stakes were freedom.
There is a brief ironic verse about Kolyma that describes it as a strange or wonderful planet; nine months is winter and the rest is summer:
Kolyma, Kolyma – chudnaya planeta,
Deviat’ mesiatsev zima,
Ostal’noe – leto.
This is not the only strange thing about Kolyma. During the war, people paid a hundred rubles for an apple, and an error in the distribution of fresh tomatoes from the mainland led to bloody dramas. All this – the apples and the tomatoes – was for the civilian world, to which Kipreev did not belong. It was a strange planet not only because the taiga was the law, nor because it was a Stalinist death camp. And it wasn’t strange just because there was a shortage there of cheap tobacco and the special tea leaves used to make chifir, a powerful, almost narcotic drink. Chifir leaves and cheap tobacco were the currency of Kolyma, its true gold, and they were used to acquire everything else.
The biggest shortage, however, was of glass – glass objects, laboratory glassware, instruments. The cold increased the fragility of glass, but the permitted ‘breakage’ was not increased. A simple medical thermometer cost 300 rubles, but there were no underground bazaars that sold thermometers. The doctor had to present a formal request to the head of medical services for the entire region, since a medical thermometer was harder to hide than the Mona Lisa. But the doctor never presented any such request. He simply paid 300 rubles out of his own pocket and brought the thermometer with him from home to take the temperature of the critically ill.
In Kolyma a tin can is a poem. It is a convenient measuring cup that is always at hand. Water, various grains, flour, pudding, soup, tea can be stored in it. It is a mug from which to drink chifir. It is also a good vessel in which to brew chifir. The mug is sterile, since it has been purified by fire. Soup and tea can be heated in a tin can – either on a stove or over a camp-fire.
A three-liter tin can fastened to the belt with a wire handle is the classic cooking pot of every ‘goner’. And who in Kolyma has not been or will not eventually become a ‘goner’?
In a wooden window-frame, tiny pieces of broken glass, like cells, are arranged to serve as panes to let in light. A transparent jar can conveniently be used to store medication in the outpatient clinic. In the camp cafeteria, a pint jar is a serving dish for fruit compote.
But neither thermometers, nor laboratory glassware, nor simple jars make up the principal shortage of glass in Kolyma – the shortage of electric light-bulbs.
In Kolyma there are hundreds of mines, thousands of sites, sections, shafts, tens of thousands of mine faces with gold, uranium, lead, and tungsten, thousands of work groups dispatched from the camps, civilian villages, camp zones, guard barracks, and everywhere there is one crying need – light, light, light. Kolyma has no sun, no light for nine months. The raging, never-setting summer sun provides no salvation, for in winter nothing is left of it. Light and energy come from pairs of tractors, or from a locomotive.
Industrial tools, gold washers, mine faces all demand light. Mine faces lit up by floodlights lengthen the night shift and make labor more productive. Electric lights are needed everywhere. Three-hundred-, five-hundred-, one-thousand-watt bulbs are shipped in from the mainland to provide light for the barracks and the mines, but the uneven supply of electricity from the portable-generator motors guarantees that these bulbs will burn out earlier than they should.
The electric-light-bulb shortage in Kolyma is a national problem. It is not only the mine face that must be lit up but also the camp grounds, the barbed wire and the guard towers, which are built in greater and not lesser quantities in the Far North.
The guards on duty must have light. In the mines insufficient light is simply noted in the log, but in camp it might lead to escape attempts. Obviously there is nowhere to escape to from Kolyma, and no one has ever attempted to escape, but the law is the law, and if there isn’t sufficient lighting or enough bulbs, burning torches are carried to the outer perimeters of the camp and left there in the snow until morning. A torch is made from a rag soaked in oil or gasoline.
Electric bulbs burn out quickly and cannot be repaired.
Kipreev wrote a note that amazed the chief of Far Eastern Construction. The chief could already feel the medal he would add to his other military decorations (military, not civilian).
It seemed the bulbs could be repaired if the glass was in one piece.
All over Kolyma stern instructions were hurriedly circulated to the effect that burned-out bulbs must be delivered carefully to Magadan. At the industrial complex forty-seven miles from Magadan, a factory for the repair of electric light-bulbs was built. Engineer Kipreev was appointed director of the factory.