One was hardly likely to imagine that interior like a honeycomb when looking at that laughing maiden on the outside: “Drink Soviet Champagne!”
They drive you into the Black Marias to the tune of the same shouts coming from the convoy from all sides at once: “Come on there, get a move on, quick!” And so that you shouldn’t have time to look around and figure out how to escape, you are shoved and pushed so that you and your bag get stuck in the narrow little door and you knock your head against the lintel. The steel rear door slams shut with a bang—and off you go.
It was rare, of course, to spend hours in a Black Maria; twenty to thirty minutes were more likely. But you got flung around, it was a bone-breaker, it crushed all your insides during those half-hours, your head stooped if you were tall, and you remembered the cozy Stolypin with longing.
And the Black Maria means one thing further—it is a reshuffling of the deck, new encounters, and among them those which stand out most clearly are, of course, your encounters with the thieves. You may never happen to be in the same compartment with them, and maybe they won’t put you in the same cell with them even at the transit prison, but here in the Black Maria you are in their hands.
Sometimes it is so crowded that even the thieves, the urki, find it awkward to filch. Your legs and your arms are clamped between your neighbors’ bodies and bags as tightly as if they were in stocks. Only when all of you are tossed up and down and all your insides are shaken up by ruts and bumps can you change the position of your legs and arms.
Sometimes, in less crowded circumstances, the thieves can check out the contents of all the bags in just half an hour and appropriate all the “bacilli”—the fats and goodies—and the best of the “trash”—the clothing. Cowardly and sensible considerations most likely restrain you from putting up a fight against them. (And crumb by crumb you are already beginning to lose your immortal soul, still supposing that the main enemies and the main issues lie somewhere ahead and that you must save yourself for them.) And you might just throw a punch at them once and get a knife in the ribs then and there. (There would be no investigation, and even if there should be one, it wouldn’t threaten the thieves in any way: they would only be delayed at the transit prison instead of going to the far-off camp. You must concede that in a fight between a socially friendly prisoner and a socially hostile prisoner the state simply could not be on the side of the latter.)
In 1946, retired Colonel Lunin, a high-ranking official in Osoaviakhim—the Society for Assistance to Defense and to Aviation-Chemical Construction of the U.S.S.R.—recounted in a Butyrki cell how the thieves in a Moscow Black Maria, on March 8, International Women’s Day, during their transit from the City Court to Taganka Prison, gang-raped a young bride in his presence (and amid the silent passivity of everyone else in the van). That very morning the girl had come to her trial a free person, as attractively dressed as she could manage (she was on trial for leaving her work without official permission—which in itself was a repulsive fabrication worked up by her chief in revenge for her refusal to live with him). A half-hour before the Black Maria, the girl had been sentenced to five years under the decree and had then been shoved into this Black Maria, and right there in broad daylight, somewhere on the Park Ring (“Drink Soviet Champagne!”), had been turned into a camp prostitute. And are we really to say that it was the thieves who did this to her and not the jailers? And not her chief?
And thief tenderness too! Having raped her, they robbed her. They took the fashionable shoes with which she had hoped to charm the judges, and her blouse—which they shoved through to the convoy guards, who stopped the van and went off to get some vodka and handed it in so the thieves could drink at her expense too.
And when they got to the Taganka Prison, the girl sobbed out her complaint. And the officer listened to her, yawned, and said: “The government can’t provide each of you with individual transportation. We don’t have such facilities.”
Yes, the Black Marias are a “bottleneck” of the Archipelago. If there is no possibility of separating the politicals from the criminals in the Stolypins, then it isn’t possible to keep women separate from men in the Black Marias. And just how could one expect the thieves not to live it up en route from one jail to another?
Well, and if it weren’t for the thieves, we would have to be grateful to the Black Marias for our brief encounters with women! Where, if not here, is one to see them, hear them, and touch them in a prison existence?
Once in 1950 they were transporting us from the Butyrki to the station in a not at all crowded van—fourteen people in a Black Maria with benches. Everyone sat down, and suddenly they pushed in one more—a woman, alone. She sat down beside the rear door, fearfully at first. After all, she was totally defenseless against fourteen men in a dark cell. But it became clear after a few words that all those present were comrades. Fifty-eights.
She gave us her name—Repina, a colonel’s wife, and she had been arrested right after he had. And suddenly a silent military man, so young and thin that it seemed he had to be a lieutenant, said to her: “Tell me, weren’t you arrested with Antonina I.?” “What? Are you her husband? Oleg?” “Yes!” “Lieutenant Colonel I.? From the Frunze Academy?” “Yes!”
What a yes that was! It emerged from a trembling throat, and in it there was more fear of finding out something bad than there was happiness. He sat down next to her. Twilight shafts of summer daylight, diffused through two microscopic gratings in the two rear doors, flickered around the interior as the van moved along and across the faces of the woman and the lieutenant colonel. “She and I were imprisoned in the same cell for four months while she was undergoing interrogation.” “Where is she now?” “All that time she lived only for you! Her fears weren’t for herself but were all for you. First that they shouldn’t arrest you. And then later that you should get a lighter sentence.” “But what has happened to her now?” “She blamed herself for your arrest. Things were so hard for her!” “Where is she now?” “Just don’t be frightened”—and Repina put her hands on his chest as if he were her own kin. “She simply couldn’t endure the strain. They took her away from us. She, you know, became—well, a little confused. You understand?”
And that tiny storm boxed in sheets of steel rolled along so peacefully in the six-lane automobile traffic, stopped at traffic lights, and signaled for a turn.
I had met Oleg I. in the Butyrki just a few moments before—and here is how it happened. They had herded us into the station “box” and had brought us our things from the storage room. They called him and me to the door at the same moment. Through the opened door into the corridor we could see a woman jailer rifling the contents of his suitcase, and she flung out of it and onto the floor a golden shoulder board with the stars of a lieutenant colonel that had survived until then all by itself, heaven only knows how; she herself hadn’t noticed it, and she had accidentally stepped on its big stars with her foot.
She had trampled it with her shoe—exactly as in a film shot.
I said to him: “Direct your attention to that, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel!”
And he glowered. After all, he still had his ideas about the spotlessness of the service.
And now here was the next thing—about his wife.
And he had had only one hour to fit all this in.
Chapter 2
The Ports of the Archipelago