The Kolyma mining operation’s development roughly coincides with the years of Stalin’s Great Terror. Eventually there are 160 prison mining camps in the Kolyma area. Two unrelated aims, the mining of gold and the liquidation of undesirables, achieved a terrible symbiosis. Who were these undesirables? Among them, Ukrainian peasants who resisted joining the collectivized Soviet farming system (kolkhozes). Poles, Greeks, Germans and Kalmuks. Members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, another group that had fought against the Tsarist monarchy but ultimately lost out to the Bolsheviks in the post-revolutionary civil war. Academics who were Trotskyists, or just insufficiently Stalinist. Any Red Army soldier taken prisoner by the Germans during World War II. Ordinary citizens denounced by their neighbors or co-workers. Russians who worked abroad as, for example, engineers in western countries were often deported upon their return.

Varlam Shalamov was born in Vologda, a town in northern Russia, in 1907. Volgoda saw terrible violence in the revolution and following civil war, but “Shalamov sympathized with the revolutionaries, particularly the Trotskyist factions, even though, as the son of a priest, he was excluded by the Communists from higher education.”¹ Running in Trotskyist circles led to his public endorsement of "Lenin’s Testament," a document which described Stalin as unfit to be Secretary-General of the Communist Party. In 1929 he was arrested for that and spent three years at a chemical plant in the northern Ural mountains, but he was released in 1931.

In the Urals he met his first wife, Galina Gudz. They returned to Moscow after Shalamov’s 1931 release and started a family. Despite being a convicted Trotskyist, Shalamov was able to work in Moscow relatively unmolested. Galina’s brother, Boris Gudz, however, was an agent of the secret police (the OGPU, until it morphed into the NKVD in 1934) and worried about the political taint on his brother in law. Boris pressured Shalamov to write to the secret police, seemingly in an attempt to get ahead of the problem. But all this letter did was bring to the attention of the NKVD this Trotskyist who had been insufficiently punished. He was arrested again in 1937 (the most brutal year of Stalin’s Great Terror), given a new sentence of counterrevolutionary Trotskyist activity, and sent to Kolyma. Galina and her sister were exiled to collective farms in Turkmenistan. Boris, for his assiduousness, was fired from the secret police and became a bus driver. Shalamov and Galina's daughter, Elena, had been born in 1935 and brought up as a conventional Stalinist. When she came of age, she preferred to think of her father as dead or a criminal.

In the 1932-1937 period between his arrests, Shalamov saw some of his essays and articles published, including his first short story “The Three Deaths of Dr. Austin” (1936). Once in Kolyma, he wrote only one work of prose, a 600-page dictionary of fenia or blatnoi yazyk, the generational slang of the hereditary criminal class in Russia. The dictionary has been lost to time. The gangsters, with their elongated pinky-finger nails and pewter cross necklaces, are vivid characters in Kolyma Tales. They contrast sharply to the “politicals” convicted under Article 58, who start out as essentially moral, though fatally naive to the realities of the camps. Some gangsters are seen to have little fiefdoms, with hapless Article 58's tickling their feet or reciting Les Miserables or Arthur Conan Doyle from memory for protection and an extra slice of bread a day. Hundreds of tiny Caligulas.

Shalamov survived several years of gold mining in Kolyma due to the grace of a series of near-misses, many of which he would later record as stories. But after nine years his luck had run out. He had succumbed to the fate of most camp laborers: he was a dokhodyaga, a camp term for the walking dead, those who, while still technically breathing, had been starved and frozen past the experience of what anyone could call life. Just waiting for their time. The closest English translation is the clunky “goner.”

The mechanisms of death in Kolyma are somewhat indirect. Shalamov reports that prisoners refer to Kolyma as “Auschwitz without the ovens” and it’s true; there is no organized mass slaughter of prisoners. Instead, an environment is created in which death has a thousand entrances. You could be summarily shot by guards for stepping two paces out of a designated prisoner queue, perhaps you did so to pick some berries because you are starving. Shot for insulting a guard-- that meant no talking back in response to a beating. Guards or gangsters could freely beat a prisoner to death (or so badly that death found the prisoner three weeks later, in a hospital bed) at the slightest provocation.

I was haunted by the story “A Personal Quota”, which relates the fate of Dugayev, a 23-year-old university student who has gone “straight from the lecture room to this pit face.” His fellow workers have complained that, unused to the hard labor of gold mining as he is, he does not pull his own weight. He is assigned a “personal quota”-- moved to a special area he works alone, in which his progress is explicitly measured by a guard. The first time I read it, I was naive like Dugayev, until the story’s final paragraph. Reading it twice, you see that the cigarette suddenly offered by Dugayev’s bunkmate despite them “not being friends,” the averted glances of other prisoners, and the sudden uncharacteristic reverie of the foreman “to the evening star” are acknowledgments that the personal quota is a death sentence: an impossible amount of work for a starving and exhausted person to do in a day. The next night, after a brief session with an interrogator in which he gives only his name and the sentence he is currently serving, Dugayev is escorted by soldiers to a ravine some distance from the camp cordoned off by a barbed wire fence from which “at nights you could hear from this point the rumbling of tractors.” Auschwitz without the ovens indeed.

If not shot outright for failing to fulfil the norm, perhaps you’d be on the prisoner transport ship Kim and either mutinied with a majority of the prisoners or merely stood by– all the same, the escort guards flooded the hold with freezing water no one could escape.² But all these deaths, acts of direct murder, were still somewhat exceptional. More plainly, a brutal calculus emerges: sixteen-hour days of mining labor, not enough warm clothing or blankets in freezing temperatures, and starvation rations. The lack of Vitamin C in those rations led to near universal scurvy. Infectious diseases flourished in the packed, unsanitary conditions. At one point Shalamov was part of a large group quarantined for typhus.

Shalamov the goner weighed 105 lbs when he was admitted to a camp hospital in his ninth year of imprisonment. As recorded in the story "Dominoes", he was saved by Andrei Mikhailovich, a doctor who, for unknown reasons, in Shalamov's case breaks the deadly bureacratic shuffling of starving patients. "You don't need any treatment," Andrei Mikhailovich tells Shalamov, "you need to be fed and washed. You need to stay in bed and eat." This is an instance of a simple, true statement taking on a profound, near-revolutionary character under totalitarianism. As Shalamov is nursed back to health, he finds ways to become useful to the hospital administration, and eventually is able to enroll in a course for paramedic training. The stories dealing with his training and work in the hospital constitute a lightening of tone for Kolyma Tales, if only slightly. There are still unbelievable cruelties, such as in "Aortic Aneurysm", where prisoner Katia Glovatskaya, made in her first appearance to strip by a sexually predatory doctor, goes untreated for an ultimately fatal heart condition because of the political jockeying between camp and hospital administrators. But there are heroes, like the sympathetic doctor Andrei Mikhailovich, and the prisoner identified only as Lida.

Shalamov saves Lida through a snap judgement while managing the hospital admissions room. Lida is a secretary who was being abused by her boss for refusing to sleep with him. She attempts to gain entry to the hospital by feigning illness. Shalamov sees through her ruse, but admits her anyway. Her wretched boss does not have the authority to contravene hospital decisions, and when patients are released, they are always sent to a different camp than the one they came from, so the admission can save her from him permanently. Two years later, it is Lida, now working in the prisoner records office, whom Shalamov will ask to surreptitiously remove the "T" (for Trotskyist) certificate from his criminal file-- a black mark which serves as a signal to any boss or guard for maxiumum cruelty. This edit to his file aids greatly in his eventual release and probably saved his life. Shalmov "never said a word of thanks to Lida. She didn't expect thanks, either. For a favor like that you don't get thanked. Gratitude is not the right word." ³NEXT