Read Online Gulag Voices by Anne Applebaum - Free Book Online

fifteen men in the brigade, the railroad maintenance crew, “Maintenance” for short. That spring was short, and then it was summer.
    Sometimes people ask me whether there were ever any good times in the camps, ever a good mood.
    Of course there were. The soul always seeks joy, yearns for it. Not all our bright days or bright months had to do with receiving letters or packages or the like. There were good, even joyful moments that had nothing to do with material comforts. Of course there was an indirect connection, a natural one.
    My best time in the camps came at the start of my second year, when I was part of Sergei Zakharchenko’s crew.
    We would march out of the gates early in the morning. We weren’t the first out, though. The felling and skidding crews left first. They had farther to go and backbreaking work to do in a single day. Not like us. We weren’t in any hurry.
    So finally, when the crowd at the guardhouse dispersed, big Lomakin, the dispatcher, would boom: “Maintenance! Zakharchenko! Move out!”
    He would usually throw in a few unprintable phrases—no insult intended. Just for the sake of form. We walked through the gates, where we were met by our usual guard detail. The soldier who had pegged me for shooting was long gone. After spending some time in solitary in the brig, he’d been transferred to a mental hospital. The underboss and his rosy-cheeked helper, both western Ukrainians, picked up our tools—sledgehammers, wrenches, axes, saws—and we were on our way. Ahead of us, behind us, alongside us, walked our four guards (sometimes five), peacefully puffing on their little cigars. Zakharchenko was good at dealing with them; they respected him and therefore us.
    The taiga was beautiful in those early morning hours. Close to the camp it was hacked, mutilated. Stumps jutted out of the ground; blackened, half-burned waste wood lay everywhere. Great yellow sandpits. But once we left the clear-cut we would come into virgin taiga, where the pines, each more choice than the next, towered like a wall of bronze. The sun had just risen. Great drops of dew shone on the blue rails and the grayish ties, and the tops of the pines were golden in the sun. Cool, fair, clear everywhere. Chipmunks occasionally scurried across our path—a sign of good luck. It was easy walking along the railway tracks, feeling the weight of the sledgehammer on our shoulders, the polished handle smoothed by our rough hands. A good mood, a lively mood, and I would drift away …
    And suddenly instead of a hammer I was carrying a rifle. And all of Siberia was burning; the camps were in revolt. And we were not a work crew, we were a platoon led by a seasoned officer, Sergei Zakharchenko. And we were going to free our comrades. Just around the corner was Camp No. 6, and shots would ring out …
    “Citizen boss, stop here.”
    Zakharchenko’s voice would bring me back to reality.
    “We need to stop here.”
    We’d stop for half an hour. We’d replace a rotten tie, drive in some spikes, and head on down the line. We’d scramble over skid roads, up and down gullies and embankments, over wooden bridges with hardwood supports. And around every turn, over every rise, one far vista after another would unfold—the endless reaches of the taiga, shades of blue, purple, and smoky green.

6.
    NINA GAGEN-TORN
    P erhaps because she was an ethnographer by profession, Nina Gagen-Torn’s descriptions of her fellow Gulag inmates have an unusual sharpness. Born in Saint Petersburg in 1900, Gagen-Torn was the daughter of a respected physician, a Russified Swede. This fact may have saved her life: upon her arrival at one camp, a doctor inspecting the prisoners asked her whether her father was Ivan Gagen-Torn, his former professor. When she said yes, he immediately declared that she was “ill,” plucked her out of the brigade of women being marched off to work, and sent her to rest in the camp hospital.
    Arrested in 1936, Gagen-Torn served two terms