I have hardly got used to prison routine in Syzran when the shout comes to pack up our things and assemble outside. We are marched through town to the station. I follow on behind in a cart with four women prisoners. My leg prevents me from keeping up with the men.
At the station we’re penned in by snarling Alsatians straining at their chains. With kicks and cuffs the guards make us sit on the floor. Townspeople and travellers mill about but no one stands and gawps. Men casually reach into their pockets as they pass and throw us cigarettes. An old lady pushes past the guards and silently places a bundle of pies on a prisoner’s lap.
From the outside, our ‘Stolypin’ carriages look no different to a normal passenger car except that there are no windows on one side. Each compartment holds about twenty men, and is sectioned off from the corridor by steel bars. Experienced prisoners make straight for the top bunk and kick away anyone who tries to follow them. We have no idea where we’re going. Finally, when the train starts to move we learn our destination is to be a camp near Tashkent.
Our bread and herring rations make us crazy with thirst. The guards give out scarcely any water since they can’t be bothered to escort us to the toilet. “Have patience lads,” says an elderly zek, “salt absorbs water, so if you eat the herring you won’t sweat so much. You’ll hold water in your bodies and the craving will pass.”
As the train pulls into Saratov news comes through that an earthquake has destroyed most of Tashkent. We are diverted to Astrakhan. When we reach that city I am squeezed into a Black Maria with 32 others. A prisoner loses consciousness in the stifling van. No one takes any notice of our cries for help.
The old zek raises his voice: “Okay lads, start rocking.”
We lean first to one side of the van and then the other. The vehicle begins to tilt dangerously and the driver stops. The guards unload the sick man and send him to hospital. Then they punish us by taking away our tobacco.
“We once derailed a train this way,” says the old man. “When you’re looking at 25 years’ hard labour you don’t care what you do.”
Corrective Labour Camp No. 4 holds people who have committed crimes against the person. The camp is so near the town that at night we can hear trolleybuses rattling past. While we’re waiting to be processed the elderly zek from the Black Maria explains the nature of the camp.
“It’s a bitches zone,[17] although there haven’t been any here for a long while. However there are a lot of goats.[18] Most of them are SVPs.”[19]
Almost half the inmates wear SVP armbands. They help to keep internal order. If for example, an SVP sees someone smoking in an unauthorised place, and the guards are taking no notice, he’ll run to the watch and point it out.
Recruitment for the SVP is carried out by the ‘Godfather,’ the head of the camp. He interviews everyone, explaining that only members of the SVP get remission and other concessions. When my turn comes I decide it best not to tell him what I think of SVPs. Instead I try to convince him of my unsuitability for the role.
“A condition of my sentence is that I am treated for alcoholism.”
“We have no such facilities in this camp.”
“And I am to serve my full sentence, so what’s the point of joining the SVP?”
The Godfather lets me go.
I didn’t become a Pioneer leader in my youth and I’m not about to start telling tales now. Our school teachers wanted to create a nation of stool-pigeons, but fortunately not everyone listened to them. It is the same in camp; the rest of us despise SVPs as the lowest form of human life.
Two SVPs in my cell agree to share all the extra food they receive from parcels and bonuses. When their locker is full one of them hides a razor blade in the other’s bed and informs the guard. A search party finds the blade, the culprit gets ten days in the isolator and his friend eats all the food. That incident teaches me a lot about the SVPs’ mentality.
Those who work and meet their quotas receive a small amount of money with which to buy goods in the camp shop. Anything unfit for sale in Astrakhan’s stores comes to us: piles of stuck-together sweets, dirty sugar, stinking herring and gritty rusks. The shop also sells rough shag tobacco for 6 kopecks a packet. Vodka and tea comes in via civilian workers in the industrial zone. They bribe the guards to look the other way.
On my arrival I go straight to the camp trader and offer my change of underwear for a very low price. Now I can buy enough tobacco to last until my first pay. I won’t have to humble myself by begging for it from other prisoners. Another prisoner tells me I’m an idiot, for I could have sold my new pair of pants and a vest for two roubles.
“The idiot was the one who bought them. He paid for rags and I bought independence!”
The next morning new arrivals are assembled for work detail. We are to be sent to an industrial zone to make prefab homes for the virgin lands of Siberia. As we line up one of the camp officers asks: “Is there anyone here who has completed their secondary education?”
I step forward.
“You will help in the library.”
I am lucky to get such a cushy job. In the morning I hand out letters and in the evening prisoners come for books and newspapers. ‘Soviet Woman’ is especially popular. Pictures of pretty women adorn walls and lockers. The prisoners replace them as soon as the guards tear them down. Convinced that the KGB checks which books they borrow, some zeks take out all 40 volumes of Lenin’s collected works.
My days pass easily enough; the only problem is the camp storekeeper, a former colonel, who keeps dropping into the library. This man destroys any lingering respect I might have for epaulettes: only in Russia could such an utterly stupid man have risen to such a high rank. His self-regard is so absolute it shocks me. He shows me the book he is writing. Life is not a Bed of Roses describes his life from birth to prison camp. In his childhood he was the top student, he ran the fastest and jumped the highest. In his youth he was more handsome and intelligent than his peers, in the army braver than his comrades-in-arms. His wife was the regimental beauty; he killed her from jealousy.
Our literary journals have already rejected the first volume of the colonel’s work; he assumes this is because it contains grammatical errors. Now he wants my help with corrections. I try to excuse myself, saying I’m not very literate, but he persists. In the end I give in. The task oppresses me but I haven’t got the courage to tell the colonel the truth.
A fellow prisoner named Oleg comes to my rescue. He is an intelligent lad who dropped out of university. We become friends and spend all our free time together. He helps me proofread the colonel’s book and we laugh over it together.
The library is stocked with classics and Dostoevsky’s works are constantly borrowed, especially Crime and Punishment. But the zeks are only attracted by the title. and return the book disillusioned, having failed to understand its archaic language. I try to warn them in advance: I don’t believe that someone of forty can suddenly become converted to Dostoevsky.
I can’t work out why the correspondence of our greatest authors should be in such constant demand. I’ve read Blok’s letters and was disappointed — and I’m more educated than most. One prisoner after another borrows Turgenev’s letters to Pauline Viardot. Old editions of local papers are also in heavy demand. Finally Oleg explains the mystery.
17
Bitches were renegades from the criminal element traditionally known as ‘thieves-by-code’.
‘Thieves by code’ were a criminal caste who refused to work, marry, own property or accumulate money. All stolen goods were pooled. When arrested they would not cooperate with the authorities in any way. From the 1920s onward the Soviet regime set out to destroy this old criminal underworld. Some thieves-by-code gave in under torture and agreed to cooperate with the authorities. They were then known as ‘bitches.’ In the 1950s special planeloads of these bitches, MVD agents among them, were flown from one camp to another where they fought for control.
If the authorities placed a thief-by-code in a bitches zone he would kill the first person he came across in order to get a transfer. When the death penalty was reintroduced the camp wars quietened down. By the late 1960s thieves-by-code no longer existed except in Georgia. Their successors were known as thieves of the western type, who ran organised crime and illicit business. These criminals formed the Russian mafia and the old type of thief disappeared.