The Prince of the Soviets

31. THE SOLOVKI PRISON CAMP

As soon as the passport made out in the name of Hilda Schultz was ready, Klim went to buy Nina’s ticket to Berlin. Fortunately, there were no queues for international trains.

On the way to Saltykovka, he pictured how Nina would meet him at the gate and ply him with impatient questions. “Well?” she would ask him. “How did it go with the ticket?” Then he would pull a sad face just to tease her before producing his prize.

Whenever Nina heard good news, she reacted with girlish delight, gasping excitedly and dancing in celebration, and Klim could not wait to make her happy.

But this time, it was not Nina who opened the gate to Klim but Countess Belov. Her face wore an anxious expression, her eyebrows set in a tragic arch.

Klim felt his blood run cold. “What is it?”

“Elkin’s here,” the countess answered in a dreadful whisper.

Klim followed her into the small kitchen, which was hung with garlands of dried mushrooms, and stopped still, staring at the man sitting by the window.

The man was so thin that his bony shoulders protruded from his dirty military-style tunic. His crew-cut hair had gone completely gray, and his face was deeply lined. He still resembled the Elkin of old, yet at the same time, he looked quite different. It was unbelievable that a man could age so much in two months.

“What happened to you?” asked Klim, stunned.

Elkin smiled. All the teeth on the left-hand side of his mouth were missing.

“I was sent to the Solovki prison camp,” he said, “but I managed to run away.”

Nina came in to the kitchen carrying two pails of water on a carrying pole and put them down on the floor.

“Now, we’ll heat up some water,” said Countess Belov, turning to Elkin, “and you shall have a proper wash.”

Nina nodded briefly in Klim’s direction and began helping their hostess to light the stove. Not a word of greeting. It was as if she was afraid of insulting their guest by showing Klim any particular attention.

“Why did they arrest you?” Klim asked Elkin.

“The Feodosia authorities got an order to find and detain any Nepmen, bourgeois, and other undesirable elements. They knew me personally—I fixed their cars for them, so they didn’t have to go very far to find me.”

“Did they formally accuse you of anything?”

“They don’t give a damn about formal accusations!” Nina snapped out. “The Bolsheviks need free labor. They don’t understand anything about efficient production, and their outgoing costs are so high that they don’t have enough money to pay the workforce. So, they need slaves to cut down timber in Solovki and work in the mines for nothing.”

Putting an iron pot of water inside the big masonry oven, Nina slammed its shutter. Her movements were abrupt and violent. It seemed she was on the point of grabbing something and smashing it to smithereens.

“How on earth did you escape?” Klim asked Elkin. “I’ve heard it’s impossible—Solovki is on some island in the White Sea.”

“I didn’t get that far,” said Elkin gloomily. “I ran away from a transit camp on the mainland.”

Klim felt a chill run down his spine. Everybody in the USSR had heard rumors of the camps in the north, but there was no reliable information about them.

“Perhaps you’d let me interview you?” he asked. “I’m sure United Press would be interested in your story.”

Elkin looked Klim up and down, scornfully. “So, you’re already thinking how to make a fast buck, are you?”

“I’d just like to know—”

“Mr. Rogov, I have nothing left but my story, and I intend to sell it to the highest bidder. I need to get out of this blessed country of ours, and it costs three hundred rubles to organize an illegal passage across the border to Poland.”

“We’ll give you the money!” Nina exclaimed, her voice full of emotion.

Neither she nor the countess seemed in the slightest bit concerned that Elkin had accused Klim of seeking to profit from another’s misfortune.

Countess Belov glanced at the clock on the wall. “We should put the potatoes on to boil,” she said. “The children will be back from school soon.”

Nina ran out to the yard to the cold cellar, and Klim set off after her.

She opened the hatch and was about to go down the cellar steps when he reached her.

“You never even asked me about the passport,” he said. “I’ve brought you everything.”

She turned and stared at him blankly. “Yes, thank you.”

There was no celebratory dance. Klim stood next to the open mouth of the cellar, breathing in the damp smell of earth and decay.

“It’s fine,” he said. “You don’t have to thank me.”

Nina came out again with a pipkin of small, sprouting potatoes.

“I know Elkin’s your friend,” said Klim. “I just want you to know that once you’ve chartered that boat for the German refugees, we won’t have any money left to live on. I don’t speak German, and it’ll be some time before I can find work. My friend Seibert is a famous journalist in Germany, and he’s barely scraping a living publishing articles here and there…. I hope you don’t mind me speaking honestly?”

“Of course not,” Nina nodded. Her face was wan and miserable. A curl had escaped her comb and hung down beside her cheek.

“I’ll do whatever I can to fix things for us,” said Klim. “But all of a sudden, you come up with some plan of your own like getting Elkin across the border to Poland—”

Nina looked down at the ground.

“I want to help him because it’s so easy to imagine myself in his place. The Bolsheviks are just like the Mongol army back in the middle ages. They ambush peaceful civilians and make them into slaves. If you’re set to work logging or building one of their mines or plants—then that’s it. You’ll end up a cripple, physically and morally…. I was just imagining what would happen to me if they got their hands on me. And it could happen at any minute! What would I do? I would have to rely on the kindness of others—and that’s all Elkin has to rely on.”

Nina took a deep, shuddering breath and put her arm around Klim. “You may not understand what I’m doing, but it won’t come between us, I promise you. Just trust me!”

Klim clasped Nina to him. The problem was he could not just trust her. The paradise they were building was too fragile. One false movement, one strong gust of wind, and the whole thing would collapse. What awaited them then? No waterfalls and sunsets; only jealousy and suspicion.

“It will be better for everyone,” said Nina, “if I give Elkin the money to get him over the border. He can take our dollars out of the country, and I’ll meet him in Berlin. And then we can pay for the ship.”

Klim sighed. “You do as you see fit.” He took the “Book of the Dead” from his pocket and handed it to her. “Here. This is my diary. Read it and then burn it. I can’t take it with me to Germany in any case. All printed material and manuscripts have to pass the censor if I want to take them across the border.”

“So, you’d let me into your innermost secrets?”

“I think we need to learn how to understand each other. Even if it means sharing some painful things.”

“Would you like me to tell you about Oscar too?” asked Nina.

Klim shook his head. “I’m prepared to postpone that particular pleasure until 1976. When you’re eighty years old, I’ll stop worrying that you’re about to leave me, and I’ll be ready to hear your confessions.”

I’m sorry, but I can’t destroy your notebook. So, I will try to smuggle it into Germany. I will read it to you when I am eighty, and you are scolding me about Oscar Reich. Your diary will be proof that we are both as bad as each other.

Elkin was sentenced to ten years of hard labor and sent off to the north.

The OGPU have the whole system working smoothly now: new prisoners are brought in on trains to the station in Kem town, and from there, they are driven like cattle to the transit camp beside the White Sea. They are referred to as “reinforcements” like soldiers at the front. Nobody hides the fact that they are meant to take the place of prisoners who have died.

The transit camp is a plot of land surrounded by a fence and barbed wire with a couple dozen wooden huts. These huts will house about fifteen hundred people at any one time, all living in atrociously cramped conditions and sleeping on long wooden platforms made of boards. At the end of each hut, there is a space partitioned off for the guards. The guards are prisoners too. They are former OGPU employees who have been sent north after being found guilty of professional misconduct. The only free men among the camp supervisors are the camp commander and his two assistants.

The Soviet camp system is organized as follows: prisoners fight for privileges because this seems simpler to them than fighting for freedom. This explains why none of the guards ever tries to run away or ever turns his weapon on his oppressors.

If you go to a labor camp as a prison guard, you sleep on a separate platform and eat from a special pot. You may even be given a fur coat. You won’t be kept outside in the wind for hours during inspections or sent down to the sea to retrieve the logs driven across the water from Solovki.

Discipline in the camps is maintained through fear: the fear of being deprived of warmth, food, rest, or the modicum of physical safety you enjoy.

Elkin arrived in the camp in August and realized straight away that if he was sent on to the islands to work at logging or peat cutting, he would never get out alive. There are no roads there and no horses, and all heavy loads are hauled on foot by prisoners who are said to be “temporarily carrying out the work of horses.”

On Solovki, a human life is valued no higher than the life of an insect. All the same, before they die of disease or exhaustion, all prisoners must do their bit for the Soviets and earn a few German marks or a couple of French francs with their own sweat and blood.

Elkin told me that several times he saw messages written in blood on logs right next to the official brand of “Timber for Export”: “They are killing us here.” Could there be anything more desperate than these communications scrawled in Russian and addressed to unknown sawmill workers in Germany or France? Who could ever decipher the impenetrable Cyrillic letters? And even if someone could understand them, what can the Germans or French do to help these modern-day Soviet slaves?

For breakfast, the prisoners are given hot water with bread, lunch consists of a broth of over-boiled vegetables, and supper is gruel. All the prisoners, without exception, are riddled with lice. Half are sick with anything from scurvy to complete mental derangement. The only hope is to get a job working in the office, the bathhouse, or the kitchen, but prisoners fight to the death for these positions. And of course, the political prisoners, the cultured men like Elkin, are never successful.

Every day, the camp supervisors do a little more to corrupt the prisoners and destroy their integrity. Snitch on your bunkmate, and you get an extra piece of bread. Volunteer to be an executioner, and you can avoid being sent out logging. Turn traitor, and you may even get yourself a pair of felt boots.

Without warm clothes, prisoners will fall victim to frostbite on their feet and hands as early as November. And that means death from gangrene because nobody in the camp can perform an amputation.

All prisoners, without exception, are beaten in the transit camp to show them what awaits them if they disobey orders. Many die from the beatings alone, from broken ribs or internal injury. Elkin was lucky that he only lost half his teeth.

Realizing that he needed to escape without delay before the winter cold set in, Elkin managed to persuade another prisoner—a young, strong fellow—to join him.

When they were sent out to the forest with a team to collect wood for brooms, they attacked the guard, tied him to a tree, and took his uniform and his gun.

Then they spent thirty days wandering about beside the railroad line. They couldn’t bring themselves to approach any settlements because they knew the peasants would not hesitate to hand them over to the authorities. The reward for capturing escapees was too tempting: they would receive a sackful of grain.

Before long, the cultured Elkin was forced, like it or not, to become a bandit. He and his companion had to eat, so they went into the first village they found and announced that they were going to carry out a search and confiscate any surplus grain. The chairman of the village Soviet brought them off with a bribe, a sack of food, and the fugitives ran back into the forest.

They did this several times until one day, they had the luck to rob an official carrying cash. They split the money and went their separate ways. Elkin set off for Moscow, and his companion decided to try to get to Finland.

A few days later, Elkin had read in the paper that his companion had been captured and shot.

Nina sewed the money to pay for the ship into Elkin’s coat, and the Belovs gave him a bundle of food for the journey.

Only Nina went to the railroad to see him off so as not to attract unwanted attention.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” she told him, “and I’ll probably get to Berlin a few days before you since you still have to think how to get from Poland to Germany. From the sixth of November on, I’ll come to the station every day at midday and wait for you under the main departures board.”

Everything was going much better than Elkin could have hoped. Thanks to Nina, he had almost immediately got ahold of money and a train ticket to Minsk, but he sensed that everybody was glad to see him leave. The Belovs were afraid he might get them arrested, and Nina was anxious not to annoy Mr. Rogov.

Elkin had never felt so lonely before in his life.

Nina felt ashamed in his company and kept talking about the great future awaiting him in Germany.

“You’ll soon find your feet,” she said, “and then you can rebuild Mashka. A man with your talent will be worth his weight in gold in Europe.”

But Elkin did not feel like doing anything. Ever since that first robbery, when a small, bearded Finn had fallen at his feet with a plaintive cry, “Have mercy on us!” something inside him had been destroyed.

Nobody commits evil for the sake of evil, he thought, except for out-and-out psychopaths. People always had their reasons for wrongdoing. They committed crimes to survive both in the camps and outside. And everybody fell into the same trap, even Nina, who had got hold of an enormous sum of money from somewhere and now seemed to be in hiding from the police.

So, which of us is responsible for evil? Elkin wondered. Every one of us, I suppose, in our own small way.

He and Nina walked along past boarded-up dachas. Overhead, the sky was overcast. Alongside the fence, the grass was reddish brown, and at the bend in the road stood a rusty sign announcing, “Danger! Beware Trains!”

“Who’s helping you cross the border?” Nina asked, jumping over a huge puddle that covered the whole path. “Are they smugglers? Do you know them well?”

“We did business together once,” Elkin said. “I ordered them one or two things for Moscow Savannah, but they weren’t very happy about it. Books are heavy things and less profitable than powders and perfumes.”

The train only stopped at the platform for a couple of minutes.

“Goodbye and God bless,” said Nina. “Don’t give up! Everything will turn out all right for us, you’ll see.”

She really is an extraordinary woman, thought Elkin with affectionate sadness. No matter what fate threw at her, she always landed on her feet and expected others to do the same.

And that was the spirit of Russia itself. The country had an incredible capacity for survival, an ability to adapt to anything on earth.

Elkin gazed into Nina’s face, flushed with emotion as if for the last time, and held her hand, unable to release it from his hard, calloused palm.

The whistle blew, and the train began to move. A song carried from the open window:

“Goodbye,” said Elkin, and grabbing hold of the handle, he mounted the footboard.

Clattering over the rails, the train passed gloomy huts, sparse coppices, and endless fields.

There’s no need for regret, thought Elkin. Everything was as it had always been. Russia was a steppe. Once in several decades, it produced a layer of fertile soil, but then the whirlwinds descended, crushed it into dust, and carried it away to the four corners of the earth. That was the purpose of the steppe: to bring forth fresh winds and the seeds of new growth.

Elkin was struck by the sheer quantity of well-dressed people in the streets of Minsk. Here and there among the crowd, he could see colorful shawls, new fur coats, and sometimes even the odd fedora. It was clear that the border was close by and trade was brisk.

The fresh snow was pitted with the marks of women’s high heeled shoes. Elkin stared at them lovingly. How many years had it been since he had seen such a thing in Moscow?

All around, people were shouting Russian, Belarusian, and Polish. The houses here were wooden like the houses in Russia, but their roofs were covered in red and black slates in the Polish style. Soviet banners, prepared for the latest anniversary of the revolution, fluttered in the breeze. On a nearby bench, Red Army soldiers sat beside fine-looking Jewish men with side locks.

After wandering for a while, Elkin found his way to Nemiga, a narrow street lined with low buildings with cluttered stores on the ground floor and living quarters up above.

Elkin found the house he was looking for and knocked at the padded door. A young man with closely cropped hair, dark eyes, and a crooked chin came out.

“What do you want?” he asked in Belarusian.

“I’m here to see Rygor,” replied Elkin.

The young man glanced to each side and then took Elkin through into a room piled high with packing cases full of goods.

“Stay here,” he said and disappeared into the back room.

Elkin waited for more than an hour. Eventually, he could stand it no more and went out into the corridor.

A narrow metal staircase led up to the floor above, and up above, he could hear voices speaking in Polish.

“They’re running out of confiscated goods. So, what have we got right now?”

“Ribbed tricot, French marquisette, velveteen—with and without silk—wool broadcloth…”

The Poles were cashing in on all sides on the Bolshevik economic experiment. As soon as certain goods began to disappear from the USSR, there was a tremendous surge in contraband items. In the villages on the Polish border, people were hard at work concocting mascara, making brassieres from poor-quality imitation silk, and even printing false consignment documents for all sorts of institutions. Nobody was concerned by the poor quality of these goods; they were still better than what was available in the USSR.

At last, there was a clatter of boots on the staircase, and Rygor, a plump man with a curly beard, came down from the floor above.

“Well, just look who it is!” he exclaimed in Russian on seeing Elkin. “So, what brings you here?”

Elkin explained he needed to get to Poland without delay.

Rygor scratched his head thoughtfully. “Well, you could set off tonight if you like. But I have to warn you, there’s shooting on the border at the moment.”

“What? Why?” asked Elkin in alarm.

“Russkies behaving like beasts, that’s what. Now, they’re waging war on well-off peasants. Our men don’t want to give up their produce, so they’re hiding in the forest. Folk around here are desperate and still armed to the teeth after the war. So, partisans are killing Red Army soldiers like pigs and then running across to Poland to escape arrest. My friend, Piatrus Kamchatka, is setting out to the border today, and he can take you with him.”

According to Rygor, Piatrus was an experienced smuggler. “For three years now, he’s been taking gold and artworks over to Poland. He brings all sorts of things back in to the country, from microscopes to toilet paper. He’s as strong as an ox. One time, he was asked to take a crippled old woman across the border. And what do you think he did? Took her over on his own back!”

Rygor asked for a hundred rubles for putting Elkin in contact with his friend.

“For God’s sake, I can’t give you that much!” said Elkin.

Rygor shrugged. “Well, so long as you’re no bourgeois, you can stay here, can’t you?”

With a heavy heart, Elkin handed over the money. Now, he might not have enough to pay a guide from the sum allocated by Nina for his passage across the border.

“Anyone with any sense is selling their possessions and getting out of the land of the Soviets,” said Rygor, putting the money in his pocket. “Piatrus can take you as far as Rakov—it’s what you might call the smugglers’ capital. I’ll be going there myself in three weeks. It’s a good little town, Rakov. For a population of seven thousand, it has one hundred and thirty-four shops, nighty-six restaurants, and four official brothels.”

Ales, the young man with the crooked chin who had opened the door to Elkin, took him to a village on the border.

They traveled for a long time along bad roads. It was a frosty night, and the cart jolted them mercilessly as it went over the frozen ruts.

Eklin tried to ask Ales about the smugglers and about the situation at the border, but the young man merely pulled a face and spat on the ground.

“Ask Piatrus,” he said.

All the way, he sang songs about the “Russkies” who had drawn up their borders without consulting the local peasants and about the wrath of the people, which was bound, sooner or later, to overtake the interlopers. The Belorussians had lived for many years between the devil and the deep blue sea, suffering all sorts of misery from both the Poles and the Russians, who kept sending armies sweeping through their land.

Elkin sensed that Ales saw him as an enemy too, as one of the “Russkies.” He found it hard to believe how he could be considered guilty of crimes of which he had no knowledge. But as far as Ales was concerned, ignorance of the plight of Belorussia was tantamount to approval of the injustices being done to his country.

Dusk was falling by the time they reached the village.

With trepidation, Elkin gazed at the clapboard houses with their dark blue window frames. Snow lay on their thatched roofs, and columns of smoke drifted from their chimneys.

Ales led the horse into a yard surrounded by a pole fence.

“Out you get!” he commanded to Elkin.

Clenching his body against the cold, Elkin jumped down. The icy puddles crunched beneath his feet.

An old woman wearing a checked dress and a padded jacket came out to meet them. She spoke to Ales rapidly in Belorussian. All Elkin could understand of their conversation was that Ales was going on farther while Elkin was to wait for Piatrus there.

The old woman took him inside the house where it was hot and smoky. Several hens were settling down to roost before an enormous stove.

“Won’t you take off your coat?” asked the old woman as Elkin sank, exhausted, onto a bench.

“I’m cold,” he told her. “I can’t seem to get warm.”

After the conversation with Ales, he was haunted by a sense of foreboding. Where had he ended up now? Who were these people? Could he trust them?

Fortunately, the old woman turned out to be good-natured and friendly. She even offered Elkin some bread.

Unlike Ales, she was more worried about the Poles than the “Russkies.” Sighing, she told him that when the Germans had come during the Great War, they hadn’t touched a thing, but with the Poles, it had been a different story. They stole animals, and any peasant who protested would be whipped with switches.

So, this is life on the border, thought Elkin. On the one hand, there’s no shortage of opportunities for trade, but on the other hand, everyone is out to get a piece of what was yours.

He soon felt drowsy from the food and the warmth and kept rubbing his eyes to keep himself awake.

“So, where’s Piatrus?” he asked at last.

There was a sound from the shelf above the stove, and the next minute, a great strong boy dressed in a faded soldier’s tunic without a belt jumped down to the ground. He stretched, yawned, and, turning to the icon in the corner of the hut, crossed himself.

“Have you got some money for me?” he asked Elkin.

Like Rygor, Piatrus was not prepared to bargain. He would settle for no less than three hundred rubles, and Elkin was forced to get the shortfall from the sum Nina had asked him to take across the border. He cut open the lining of his coat and took out a hundred-dollar note.

“So, you’re carrying American money?” Piatrus asked, looking at Elkin’s coat with a great interest. “Well, we can be on our way soon. We’ll be in Rakov by morning.”

Elkin had not expected the journey through the forest at night to be such a nightmare. But the memory of his wanderings after escaping the camp was still fresh in his mind, and every fiber of his being revolted.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to walk in the forest again without being afraid, he thought desperately.

And yet, he had to keep moving, clambering over fallen logs, descending into shallow ravines, and skirting impenetrable thickets of spruce trees.

He had no idea how Piatrus managed to find his way in the pitch dark. The sky was cloudy, and Elkin could barely make out the dim silhouette of his guide up ahead. The bushes rustled, and now and then, some night birds gave a hollow cry. And all the while, heavy drops of water fell from branches onto his cap and his shoulders.

Several times, Elkin slipped and fell in the muddy slush underfoot. Piatrus would curse in a whisper. They had to try to get as far as possible before the changeover of the guards at the border post.

Back in Crimea, Elkin had been able to walk for hours in the mountains without stopping. Now, he already had a stitch in his side, his knee joints were cracking, and there was a dull roar in his ears.

What if I don’t make it? he thought. What if my strength gives out and I just collapse?

From time to time, he fingered the money hidden under the lining of his coat. Piatrus had told him that if the border guards caught someone with goods, he might be released in return for a bribe. The guards were badly fed and were always glad to get their hands on a smuggler. But if they caught anyone carrying weapons or money, it meant certain death because anyone doing so would be considered an anti-government rebel.

Elkin tripped over a root and fell sprawling to the ground. For some time, he lay there, overwhelmed by an agonizing pain in his arm. Had he broken a bone or just wounded himself on a sharp stump?

Getting up on all fours, Elkin listened. It was deadly quiet all around. Only the hundred-year-old pines rustled and murmured high above him.

“Piatrus?” he called out quietly. “Where are you?”

There was no answer.

Elkin panicked. Where could he go? Where was he? Was he still on the Soviet side of the border or already on the Polish side?

A moment later, he felt a heavy blow to his temple and fell to the ground.