The nominal director of the power station was a certain Rachov. He had, in the past, been active in the Party, but he wasn’t a bad sort and didn’t interfere in matters he didn’t understand. At that time, I was working in the efficiency engineer’s office, and for many years afterward I carried around with me the written complaint the boiler stokers had sent to Rachov. On the letter, in which the stokers had listed their numerous requests, Rachov had scrawled a characteristically straightforward resolution: ‘To the head of the power plant. Look into the matter and refuse them as much as possible.’
Ramzin gave some practical advice but did not have a very high opinion of Holmes’s work.
Mr Holmes had always appeared at the station, accompanied not by Granovsky but by his deputy, the chief engineer Chistyakov. Nothing in this life is more dogmatic than diplomatic etiquette. Although Granovsky had all the free time in the world, he considered it beneath him to accompany the foreign firm’s chief engineer around the construction site. Of course, if the firm’s president were to come…
Mr Holmes was escorted around the site by the engineer, Chistyakov, a heavy, massive man of the type depicted in novels about the Russian gentry. At the factory Chistyakov had an enormous office opposite that of Granovsky. Chistyakov spent many hours there locked up with his young female courier.
I was young then and didn’t understand the physiological law that dictated that superiors sleep with their couriers, stenographers, and secretaries in addition to their wives. I often had business with Chistyakov, and I spent a lot of time swearing outside his locked door.
I then lived next to the soda factory in the same hotel where the writer, Konstantin Paustovsky, composed his Kara-Bugaz. Judging by what Paustovsky wrote about that period – 1930–31 – he failed to observe the events which, in the eyes of all our countrymen, colored those years and laid their stamp on the entire history of our society.
Here, right before Paustovsky’s eyes, there took place an enormous experiment in the corruption of human souls, an experiment that was to be repeated throughout the country and which would well up in a fountain of blood in 1937. This experiment was the newly developed system of labor camps with its ‘reforging’ of human souls, food rations, workdays dependent on work accomplished, and the practice of prisoners guarding each other. This system flowered with the construction of the White Sea Canal and collapsed with the construction of the Moscow Canal where to this very day human bones are found in mass graves.
The experiment in Berezniki was conducted by Berzin.* It was not, of course, his personal invention. Berzin could always be counted on to carry out other people’s ideas, whether or not they involved the shedding of blood. Berzin was also the director of the Vishera Chemical Factory. Filippov was his subordinate in the camps, but the Vishera camp, which encompassed both Berezniki and Solikamsk with its potassium mines, was enormous. Berezniki alone had three or four thousand people.
It was here that the question of the camps’ very existence was decided. Only after the Vishera experiment was judged profitable by the higher-ups did the camps spread all over the Soviet Union. No region was without a camp, no construction site was without convicts. It was only after Vishera that the number of prisoners in the country reached twelve million. Vishera blazed the trail to new areas of confinement. The prisons were handed over to the NKVD, the secret police, whose feats were sung by poets, playwrights, and film producers. Engrossed in his Kara-Bugaz, Paustovsky saw none of this.
Toward the end of 1931 I shared a room in the hotel with a young engineer by the name of Levin. He worked at the Berezniki Chemical Factory as an interpreter for the German engineers. When I asked Levin why he worked as a simple interpreter for a salary of only 300 old-style rubles a month when he was a chemical engineer, he answered: ‘It’s better this way. I don’t have any responsibility. The factory opening might be delayed for the tenth time, and a hundred people might be arrested, but that doesn’t concern me, because I’m just a translator. Besides, I don’t have much to do, so I have all the free time I need, and I make good use of it.’ Levin smiled.
I smiled back.
‘You don’t understand?’
‘No.’
‘Haven’t you noticed that I don’t get back till morning?’
‘No, I never noticed.’
‘You’re not very observant. I have a job that brings me all the money I need.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I play cards.’
‘Cards?’
‘Yes, poker.’
‘With foreigners?’
‘Why should I play with foreigners? The only thing I could get out of that would be a court trial.’
‘With Russians?’
‘Of course. There are a lot of bachelors here. And the stakes are high. So I have all the money I need. I get along fine and thank my father every day. He taught me to play poker. Want to try? I’ll teach you in no time at all.’
‘No thanks.’
I’ve inserted Levin by accident. I just can’t get started on the story of Mr Popp.
The work of the American firm was moving along at a rapid pace, the order was a large one, and the vice-director decided to come to Russia himself. M. Granovsky, director of the Berezniki Chemical Factory, was informed in advance a thousand times of Mr Popp’s arrival. Granovsky decided that diplomatic protocol would not permit him to go in person to meet Mr Popp. After all, Granovsky was a Party member of long standing, construction chief of the largest project undertaken during the first five-year plan, and he ranked higher than the American businessman. It just wasn’t proper. So Granovsky decided to meet him in his office, and not at the railroad station, Usolye, later renamed Berezniki.
Granovsky knew that the American guest was arriving by special train – just a locomotive and one car. Three days in advance the chief of construction was informed by telegram from Moscow of the arrival time at the Usolye station.
The protocol of meeting was worked out beforehand: the chief of construction’s personal car was to be sent to pick up the guest and take him directly to the hotel for foreigners. For the past three days, the director of the hotel, a party lackey by the name of Tsyplyakov, had been keeping the best room vacant. After freshening up and having breakfast, Mr Popp was to be brought to the office where the business part of the meeting had been scheduled to the minute.
The special train with the guest from beyond the seas was to arrive at nine in the morning, and on the previous evening Granovsky’s personal chauffeur had been called up, instructed, and sworn at repeatedly.
‘Comrade supervisor, maybe I ought to take the car to the station the night before and spend the night there,’ the chauffeur fretted.
‘Nothing doing. We have to show them that we do everything to the minute. The train whistle blows, and you pull up just as the train pulls in. That’s the only way to do things.’
‘Yes, sir, comrade supervisor.’
To rehearse the plan, the car was sent empty to the station ten times, and the exhausted chauffeur calculated the exact speed and time. On the night before Mr Popp’s arrival, Granovsky’s chauffeur fell asleep and dreamt he was on trial…
The chief of construction hadn’t honored the garage man with any confidential chats; he awakened the chauffeur when the phone rang with a call from the station.