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It was December 1976, and I really had very little time left to do—some five months or so in Vladimir Prison, before returning to my old camp, No. 35, in Perm Province, for about ten more months. That was tantamount to going on vacation, or even home. I was already wondering which of the fellows I would find back at the camp and who would be gone by then. Vague snippets of news were brought in by new arrivals to the prison—something was being done in the camp compound, some new regulations had come into force, there were new bosses. In March 1977, I was due to go into internal exile. And those benighted five years of exile infuriated me more than the whole of my prison sentence, like a useless appendage, neither one thing nor the other, neither prison nor freedom. And everything depended on where you were sent, what work you got, and who your bosses were. Sometimes it was worse than the camp. It was well known that from the Perm camps they used to send you to Tomsk, and then you knew you were in for felling timber, swamps, the back of beyond, where it was the law of the wild and bruin was king. But from Vladimir you went to Komi, and although Komi was no bed of roses either—it also meant logging and swamps—still it was closer to Moscow, still Europe. Therefore, I was calculating how I might get myself sent back from the camp to Vladimir again. But I hadn’t much hope. There were rumors that, according to a new ordinance, prisoners with less than a year to do would not be sent to prison but be reformed on the spot, using camp methods.
I had planned out my remaining five months in prison very carefully—which books I would read and when. In camp there was no hope of getting any reading done; you were kept too much on the run. And in exile I probably wouldn’t have any time. Where else would there be a better opportunity to study, if not in prison? There was time and plenty to spare, and it would only be wasted otherwise.
No matter how I looked at it, it was clear there could be no other university for me but Vladimir Prison. Even if they didn’t stick a new stretch on me, I’d be in exile until 1983, when I would be forty-one and that was no age for studying. And there was nothing good to be expected when I was let out. Only greenhorns, when they come in for their first stretch, look forward to their release and count the days. Life outside appears to them as some bright, sunny, unattainable shore. But I was in for the fourth time, I knew that there is nothing more disillusioning in life than to be released from jail. I also knew that I had never managed to last longer than a single damned year outside—and never would. Because the reasons that had landed me in jail in the first place would land me there again and again. These reasons were immutable, just as Soviet life itself was immutable, just as you yourself could never change. You would never be allowed to be yourself, and you would never agree to lie and dissimulate. And there was no other way out.
That was why, every time I was released, my only thought was how to get as much done as possible, so that afterward, back in prison again, I wouldn’t have to spend sleepless nights dwelling on lost opportunities, punishing myself, and making myself sick with rage over my own indecision. These nights of sleepless torment were my greatest torture, and therefore my brief spells at liberty couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be described as normal living. They were a feverish race against time in the constant expectation of arrest, with the KGB breathing down my neck, and meetings with people, people, people—so many I had no time even to check them properly. If you met someone once, and he didn’t squeal on you, you treated him as an acquaintance; twice, and he was your friend; three times, and he was the closest of blood brothers, as if you had spent half a lifetime shoulder to shoulder with him.
But when you met a person for the first time, you invariably thought of him as a witness at your future trial. Which interrogation he would crack at—the first or the second? Which of his weaknesses would the KGB seize upon? If he was timid, they would try to frighten him; if he was vain, humiliate him; if he loved his children, they would threaten to put them in a children’s home. And you looked searchingly into his eyes—would he crack when they threatened him with the lunatic asylum? Few can hold out then. Therefore, don’t burden your neighbor with information he doesn’t need, don’t place him in a position where he will later be stricken with a guilty conscience. You are a leper, you have no right to a normal human life, everyone who comes into contact with you runs the risk of being infected, and if you truly care for someone, avoid him, steer clear of him, pretend you didn’t recognize him and didn’t see him. Otherwise, the full weight of the state will descend on his head tomorrow.
And that is why, cramming twenty-five hours into twenty-four, stretching every week into a month, you have got to accomplish the maximum of what is possible and even impossible, because tomorrow you will be back in Lefortovo jail and it will be a long, long time, or perhaps never, before you get the chance to do anything again. And again you will agonize over the things you omitted to do, or could have done better and more effectively, and you will punish yourself for dawdling. Just think of all those decades when people were helpless to do anything at all—even to spit in the faces of their murderers. Millions went to their grave, dreaming of some way to avenge their agonies. And you—you had the chance to broadcast it to the whole world, you had friends you could rely on, and time—what did you do? Millions of dead eyes will scorch your soul with their reproachful, questioning look.
In Siberia I once heard of a method for hunting bears. Somewhere near the bear’s usual track you place some bait in a pine tree, usually a piece of carrion. Then you suspend a good, solid, heavy block of wood from the nearest suitable stout branch, blocking the bear’s path to the bait but swinging freely at the end of its rope. Sniffing the bait, bruin shins up the trunk and comes face to face with the block of wood. Being what he is, he doesn’t even attempt to go around the block, but simply shoves it aside and crawls on. The block of wood swings away and comes back, thumping the bear in the ribs. Bruin loses his temper and gives the block a harder shove, and naturally the block comes back harder as well, and so on, harder and harder. Eventually the block of wood knocks him unconscious and out of the tree. This is an approximate description of my relations with the powers that be: the longer the stretch they gave me, the more I tried to do when I was let out; and the more I did, the longer the next stretch they gave me. However, times were changing and my possibilities were growing, and it was difficult to say which of us was the bear and which the wooden block, and how it would all end. I, at any rate, had no thought of retreating.
It followed from this that I had planned out not only the next five months but my whole life: ten months in the camp, five years in internal exile, and then, at best, a year of the fever called freedom, and then ten more years of jail and five more in exile. By that time I would be fifty-seven. All right, time for one more turn of the wheel and back in prison in time to die. This was why I hadn’t been looking forward to my release, hadn’t been counting the days and months. I reminded myself of that genie in the bottle in the Arabian Nights, who spent the first five million years vowing to make a rich man of the person who let him out, and the second five million vowing to murder the person who let him out. Let me say that I understood the genie’s feelings.
There was, however, another reason why I felt obliged to plan out my prison time in advance and see that I spent every minute studying, and that was prison life itself.
Anyone who didn’t discipline himself, who didn’t concentrate his attention on some steady object of study, was in danger of losing his mind, or at the very least of losing control of himself. When subjected to such total isolation and absence of daylight, given the monotony and the constant cold and constant hunger of prison life, a man tended to fall into a kind of half-conscious trance. For hours and maybe even days on end he would sit there, gazing with unseeing eyes at a photograph of his wife and children, or leafing through the pages of a book, taking in and remembering nothing, or else he would suddenly start an endless, senseless altercation with one of his neighbors over some totally trivial issue, bogging down repeatedly in the same arguments, not bothering to listen to what his opponent was saying, and in fact not answering his objections at all. He would find it absolutely impossible to concentrate on anything definite or follow the thread of an argument.
Strange things happened to time. On the one hand, it seemed to pass with preternatural speed, beggaring belief. The entire daily routine, with its ordinary, monotonously repetitive events—reveille, breakfast, exercise, dinner, supper, lights-out, reveille, breakfast—fused into a sort of yellowish-brown blur, leaving behind nothing memorable, nothing for the mind to cling to. And lying down at night, a man would be at a loss to remember what he had been doing all day, what he had eaten for breakfast and what for dinner. Worse still, the days would become indistinguishable from one another and be completely erased from your memory, so that when you woke one day, as if someone had jogged you, you would realize: Christ, it’s bath day again! That meant that seven or sometimes even ten days had flown by. And so you lived with the sensation that you were getting a bath every day. On the other hand, this same time could crawl with agonizing slowness: it would seem as if a whole year must have gone by, but no, it was still the same old month, and no end was in sight.
Then again, a man could go into paroxysms of rage if something interrupted his monotonous routine. One day, for example, at the start of a new month, they would suddenly take you out for exercise not after breakfast but after dinner instead. What difference, you might ask, would such a little thing make? But this was enough to drive men into frenzies. Or you had a row with one of the guards, or were called out by the instructor and lost your cool with him—and now you couldn’t read and couldn’t sleep and couldn’t think of anything else. The book swam before your eyes, you couldn’t keep your mind on anything, and you would be trembling all over. So what? you might say. Nothing new about any of this. How many of these arguments and quarrels, how many rows with the guards had you had in your time? Too many to count. Still, for days and nights afterward you would continue to relive it all in your mind—what he said, what you said, what you might have said but didn’t because you couldn’t think quickly enough. And how you might have found a particular way of getting under his skin or stopping him dead in his tracks or finding answers that were more cutting and convincing. Like a scratched phonograph record this dialogue would go around and around in your head, and there was no way of stopping it. Or else you would get a picture postcard from home and sit there staring at it like an idiot, the bright colors so exotic and enticing that you couldn’t tear your eyes away.
I can’t say that prison hunger was particularly agonizing—it wasn’t a biting hunger but, rather, a prolonged process of chronic undernourishment. You very quickly stopped feeling it badly and were left with a kind of gnawing pain, like a quietly throbbing toothache. You even lost awareness that it was hunger, and only after several months did you notice it hurt to sit on a wooden bench, and at night, no matter which way you turned, something hard seemed to be pressing into you or against you—you would get up several times in the night and shake the mattress, toss and turn from side to side, and still it hurt. Only then did you realize that your bones were sticking out. But by then you didn’t care anymore. Nevertheless, you didn’t get out of your bunk too quickly in the mornings, otherwise your head would spin.
The most unpleasant thing of all was the sensation of having lost your personality. It was as if your soul, with all its intricacies, convolutions, hidden nooks and crannies, had been pressed by a giant flatiron, so that it was now as smooth and flat as a starched dickey. Jail makes you anonymous. As a result, every man strives to stand out from the crowd, to stress his individuality, to appear better and superior to the rest. There used to be constant fights in the criminals’ cells, constant struggles for leadership, culminating even in murder. Among the political prisoners, of course, there was none of that, but after four or five months of sitting in the same cell with the same people, you got to know them so well that you came to detest them, and they you. At any moment of the day you knew what they were going to do next, what they were thinking, what question they were about to ask you. And it usually ended up with nobody saying anything to anybody, because they already knew all there was to know. You wondered at the paucity of man’s resources, if after six months we have nothing left to say to each other.
It was particularly irritating when one of your cell mates had an unconscious tic—of sniffing his nose, say, or tapping his foot. After a couple of months you couldn’t bear it any longer and were ready to kill him. Yet if you were separated and put in different cells, or if you did a spell in the box, and met again after some time apart, you were like bosom pals—you smothered one another with questions, stories, bits of news, reminiscences, and celebrated for a whole week. There are cases, of course, of total psychological incompatibility, when men can’t bear to live two days in the same cell with one another yet are destined to spend years. In general it is possible to divide mankind into two categories—those you could share a cell with and those you couldn’t. But then your opinion is never asked. You are obliged to be extraordinarily tolerant of your cell mates and to suppress your own habits and peculiarities: you have to adapt yourself to everybody and get along with everybody, otherwise life becomes unbearable.
Now multiply all these burdens by years and years, square them, add all the years you’ve served in other camps and investigation prisons, and you will understand why it is essential to fill every spare minute of your time with constant activity—best of all with studying some complex subject that demands enormous concentration. From the unremitting electric light, your eyelids start to itch and grow inflamed. You read the same phrase dozens and dozens of times and still you can’t grasp it. With a superhuman effort you master a page, but no sooner have you turned it than you’ve forgotten it again. Go back. Read it twenty, thirty times. Don’t allow yourself a cigarette until you’ve finished the chapter, don’t allow yourself to think of anything else, don’t dream, don’t get distracted, don’t even allow yourself to go to the toilet—nothing in the world is more important than to finish what you have set yourself for that day. And if, by the next day, you’ve forgotten it all, go back and read it again. And if you’ve finished a whole book, you can allow yourself the luxury of a day off—but only one, because after the first day your memory starts to slacken again, your attention wanders, and you slowly start to go under, like a drowning man—down, down, until there’s a roaring in your ears and you see spots before your eyes, and it’s touch and go whether you will ever come up again.
This is particularly noticeable when you are alone in the punishment cell, in the box. There, you get no paper, no pencil, and no books. They don’t take you out for exercise or to the bathhouse; you get fed only every other day; the only window is blocked; and the one electric light bulb is set in a niche right at the top of the wall, where it meets the ceiling, so that its feeble light barely illuminates the ceiling. A ledge jutting out from the wall is your table, another your chair—ten minutes is as long as you can sit on it. At night they issue you a bare wooden duckboard for a bed; blankets or warm clothes are forbidden. In the corner there is usually a latrine bucket, or else simply a hole in the floor that stinks to high heaven all day. In short, it’s a concrete box. Smoking is forbidden. The place is indescribably filthy. Dried gobs of bloody saliva adorn the walls from the TB sufferers who have been incarcerated here before you. And right here is where you start to go under, to slip down to the very bottom, into the ooze and the slime. The words they have for it in jail express it exactly—you “go down” to the box, and you “come up” again.
You spend your first two or three days down there groping around the entire cell—maybe somebody has managed to smuggle some tobacco in and has left a bit behind, or has tucked away a fag end somewhere. You poke into every little hollow and crack. Day and night still mean something to you. You spend most of the day walking up and down, and at night you try to sleep. But the cold and hunger and boredom wear you down. You can doze off for only ten to fifteen minutes at a time before leaping up again and running in place for three-quarters of an hour to get yourself warm. Then you doze off for fifteen minutes again, huddled either on your duckboard (at night) or on the concrete floor (by day), with one knee drawn up under you and your back to the wall, until it’s time to jump up again and start running.
Gradually you lose all sense of reality. Your body stiffens, your movements become mechanical, and the more time passes the more you turn into some sort of inanimate object. Three times a day they bring you a drink of hot water, and that water affords you indescribable pleasure, melting your insides, as it were, and bringing you temporarily to life. For about twenty minutes or so, an exquisite ache permeates your entire being. Twice a day, before you use the latrine, they give you a scrap of old newspaper and you read it greedily, devouring every word, several times over. In your mind’s eye you run over every book you have ever read, every person you have ever met, every song you have ever heard. You begin doing additions and multiplications in your head. You remember snatches of tunes and conversations. Time comes to a halt. You fall into a stupor, starting up and running about the cell for a while, then lapsing into a daze again, but it doesn’t help the time to pass. Gradually the patches on the walls start to weave themselves into faces, as if the entire cell were adorned with the portraits of prisoners who have been here before you—it is a picture gallery of all your predecessors.
You can spend hours making them out, questioning them, arguing with them, quarreling, and making up again. But after a while they don’t help to pass the time either. You know everything there is to know about them, as if you’ve been cell mates for half a lifetime. Some of them irritate you, while others are still bearable. There are some that need to be cut short right at the beginning, otherwise you can’t get rid of them. They will bore you to tears with miserable, stupid stories about their miserable, stupid lives. They will spin yarns and invent things about themselves if they detect that you’re not listening to them. They are disgustingly fidgety and servile. Others stay silent and glower at you—with them you have to keep a sharp eye open: the moment you drop off they’ll swipe your rations. There are also friendly, sociable lads, usually the younger ones—with them it’s possible to swap a joke. They are easygoing, never downhearted, and will do anything just to keep you company. They are usually in for hooliganism, gang rape, or a gang robbery. The corner place, over the latrine bucket, belongs to a veteran crook who knows all the ropes. Before you know where you are, he is scheming, setting groups at one another, and all of them at you. He whispers in the corners with them, exchanges meaningful glances. Underlining his own importance and authority and addressing no one in particular, he tells tall stories about the old days, reminiscing about transit prisons, labor camps, murdered prisoners. He is clearly out to start a fight, to set it up the way he wants it. He knows who should get what and who not. There is no way of avoiding a serious confrontation with him, and the sooner you get it over with the better, before he forms his little gang and consolidates his authority. But then all this too recedes, disappears, and leaves you alone with eternity, alone in the abyss.
It is hard to understand where you yourself end and infinity begins. Your body is no longer you, your thoughts are no longer yours, they come and go of their own accord, independently of your wishes. But do you have any wishes? I am absolutely convinced that death is not a cosmic void, not a blissful zero. No, that would be too comforting, too simple. Death must be an agonizing repetition, an unbearable sameness. And that is why you fall prey to a monotonous, obsessive state somewhere between a waking dream and meditating in your sleep. This agonizing sense of emptiness festers in your consciousness like an open wound, and it is a long, long time before the scar tissue forms in your soul. Nothing at all remains in your memory from this period—it is a total blank.
On one occasion I had a fabulous piece of luck—I found about half a packet of shag neatly hidden in a crack in the wall. Half a packet of damp shag...but it would have been better for me if I hadn’t found it at all! I had a fiendish craving to smoke. Hundreds of times I felt around the cell to see if I could find some matches, but without success. The only course left open to me, if I wanted to smoke, was to climb the wall until I could reach the ceiling, push a scrap of clothing into the niche there, between the bars, with some sort of stick, and then balance it on the light bulb. After a couple of minutes the rag would start to smolder and from that it would be possible to get a light. But how could a starving, exhausted man climb ten feet up a bare wall without a single toehold to support him? Judging by certain spots and scratches, it was clear that a number of my predecessors had somehow managed it. And this made my craving insuperable. It took me half the next night to break a splinter off my bed boards with my fingernails—it had to be a long one, of course, to reach from the grille covering the niche to the light bulb. Then, the next morning, I began my assault on the wall. What a hopeless, idiotic occupation—to try to scramble up a bare wall, whether from a running or a standing start, scrabbling at it with your fingernails and literally snarling with helplessness and rage. Perhaps my predecessors had been taller, stronger, or better trained. Perhaps they had been mountaineers. But it was too late, I could think of nothing else; I grew savage with frustration and rage.
The first day ended in failure. But in the night I leaned my bed boards against the wall, scrambled up until I could reach the ceiling and succeeded in getting a light from the bulb. But that couldn’t satisfy me, it only tantalized me with its apparent accessibility, and the next morning I commenced the assault again. In this way another day passed, and another night, and yet another day and a night. I had completely ceased to exist. All that was left was an all-consuming desire to climb that wall. My nails were broken and bleeding, my fingers were swollen, and by night time I was usually so exhausted that it took me several attempts to clamber up the boards. I used to slip off, fall down, get up again, and again lunge for the light, like an insect drawn to a lamp. I could no longer feel anything, neither cold nor pain nor hunger—there was nothing left but desire, a desire that was outside of me and apart from me: an overwhelming desire to climb that damned wall and reach that blasted light bulb. I no longer knew why I needed it anymore, so that when, during the fourth day, after a series of unimaginable exertions—leaping, elbowing, and grabbing—I suddenly found myself under the ceiling, with my fist fastened viselike on the grille, I discovered that the splinter with the rag fastened to the end of it had long since slipped from my teeth and was lying on the floor. And there I was, dangling, hanging onto the grille for dear life, within six inches of that light bulb, with tears pouring down my cheeks.
It goes without saying that I had forgotten what exact combination of moves had got me up to the light bulb in the first place, but the main thing was that I now knew it could be done. It could be done even by me, with my lack of height, strength, and knowledge of climbing. I spent two more days on the assault. By the end of the fifth day I had achieved victory. Never in my life have I had a greater achievement, or one of which I was prouder. After that I used to clamber up three times a day just to light a tiny fag end. And it became such a normal part of my everyday life that it no longer even broke the monotony, or averted the usual gradual descent into the agonizing blankness of an endlessly repeating void.
Knowing all this in advance, I would try, when sent to the box, to smuggle in a fragment of pencil lead, usually by hiding it in my cheek. Then I could spend my time drawing castles on scraps of newspaper or directly on the floor and walls. I set myself the task of constructing a castle in every detail, from the foundations, floors, walls, staircases, and secret passages right up to the pointed roofs and turrets. I carefully cut each individual stone, covered the floor with parquet or stone flags, filled the apartments with furniture, decorated the walls with tapestries and paintings, lit candles in the chandeliers and smoking torches in the endless corridors. I decked the tables and invited guests, listened to music with them, drank wine from crystal goblets, and lit up a pipe to accompany coffee. We climbed the stairs together, walked from chamber to chamber, gazed at the lake from the open veranda, went down to the stables to examine the horses, walked around the garden—which also had to be laid out and planted. We returned to the library by way of the outside staircase, and there I kindled a fire in the open hearth before settling back in a cozy armchair. I browsed through old books with worn leather bindings and heavy brass clasps. I even knew what was inside those books. I could even read them.
This was enough to occupy me for my entire spell in the box, and still there were plenty of problems left over to solve the next time; and it was not unknown for me to spend several days trying to decide a single question, such as what picture to hang in the drawing room, what cabinets to put in the library, what table to have in the dining room. Even now, with my eyes closed, I can retrace that castle in every detail. Someday I shall find it—or build it.
Yes, someday I shall invite my friends and we shall cross the drawbridge over the moat, enter these chambers, and sit at the table. Candles will be burning and music will be playing, and the sun will gradually set behind the lake. I lived for hundreds of years in that castle and shaped every stone with my own hands. I built it between interrogations in Lefortovo, in the camp lockup, and in the Vladimir punishment cells. It saved me from apathy, from indifference to living. It saved my life. Because one must not let oneself be paralyzed; one cannot afford to be apathetic—that is precisely when they put you to the test. It’s only in sport that referees and competitors wait for you to reach your best form—records achieved that way are not worth a damn. In real life they make a point of testing you—to the limit—when you are sick, when you are tired, when you are most in need of a respite. At that point they take you and try to break you like a stick across their knees! And that’s the very moment, while you are still groggy, when the godfather, the fisher of men, hauls you out of your cellar, or the political instructor invites you in for a chat.
Oh no, they won’t put it to you point-blank, suggesting you collaborate. They need much less than that for now—just some trivial concessions. They simply want to accustom you to making concessions, to the idea of compromise. They carefully feel you out, to see if you’re ripe for it. Not yet? Okay, go back to your cellar, there’s plenty of time to ripen; they’ve got decades ahead of them.
Idiots! They didn’t know that I was returning to my friends, to our interrupted conversation before the fire. How were they to know that I was talking to them from my castle battlements, looking down on them, preoccupied more with how to fix the stables than with answering their stupid questions? What could they do against my thick walls, my crenellated towers and embrasures? Laughing, I returned to my guests, firmly closing the massive oak doors behind me.
It is at moments when you lapse into apathy, when your mind grows numb and can think of nothing better to do than gloomily count the days till your release—it is precisely then that someone in the next cell takes ill, loses consciousness, and falls to the ground. You should hammer on the door and demand that a doctor be sent. In return for that hammering and commotion the enraged prison governor will undoubtedly prolong your stay in the punishment cell. So keep your mouth shut, shove your head between your knees, tell yourself you were asleep and heard nothing. What business is it of yours? You don’t know the man, he doesn’t know you, you will never meet. And you might very well not have heard. But can a castle-dweller permit himself such behavior?
I lay my book aside, pick up a candlestick, and go to the gate to admit a traveler who has been overtaken by bad weather. What does it matter who he is? Even if he’s an outlaw, he must warm himself at my hearth and spend the night under my roof. Let the storm rage outside the castle—it can never tear off the roof, penetrate the thick walls, or extinguish my fire. What can it do, the storm? Only howl and sob down my chimney.
Prison as a social institution has been known to man since time immemorial, and it is safe to say that the moment society came into being, prison came with it. Evidently the literary genre of prison memoirs, diaries, notes, and observations has been flourishing for just as long. Not that jailbirds are particularly garrulous. On the contrary. A man just released from jail is more inclined to avoid company and conversation, and likes nothing better than to sit motionless in quiet solitude, staring at a single spot. But he is pestered to death by the people around him who inundate him with what are usually outlandish questions and demand ever-new stories; he begins to feel he will never have a quiet life until he writes his reminiscences. In the course of world history, millions have been in jail and thousands have written their impressions. But this has not slaked mankind’s burning curiosity about prison. Since ancient times, man has been accustomed to regard three things as the most terrifying on earth: death, madness, and imprisonment. This terror fascinates and attracts—terror always means the unknown. Let someone return from the next world—what a mountain of questions he’d have to answer!
These three events, outside our control and dependent on fate, are in a sense interrelated. Madness is spiritual death or spiritual imprisonment; imprisonment is a kind of death, and often enough drives a man to madness or death. An imprisoned man is mourned like a dead one and remembered as one who has gone to his grave—remembered less and less with the passage of time, as if he truly existed no more. And these three terrors that reside in every one of us are exploited by society to punish the disobedient. Or, rather, to deter the remainder; for who nowadays speaks seriously of punishment?
It is understandable that every member of society takes a lively interest in what is there to frighten him, and what is capable of being done to him. This deterrent function of imprisonment has become so firmly fixed in the minds of people—from legislator to prison guard—that they take it for granted that prison must be made evil and degrading. Tough luck on you! Neither air nor light, neither warmth nor food should you expect: this is no holiday camp, you’re not at home now, you know! Otherwise, you’ll never want to leave, wild horses won’t drag you back to freedom. And society is particularly upset if prisoners should start to stammer something about rights and human dignity. Well, I ask you, what would it be like if the sinners in hell suddenly started shouting for their rights—what sort of a situation would that be?
Somewhere along the line it seems to have been forgotten that the original aim of prison was to frighten not the prisoners but those who remained at liberty, that is to say, society itself. The more society tortures the prisoner, the more it is able to frighten itself. Consequently it craves the prisoner’s fear. Of course, the prison population too, like any respectable society, has its own internal prison—the punishment cells, and also a variety of different prison regimes, ranging from the ordinary through the strict to the especially strict. Even in prison, a man is not supposed to be indifferent to his fate. There is always something he can be deprived of. A man who has nothing to lose is, of course, mortally dangerous to society and constitutes a colossal temptation for honest people—provided, that is, that he isn’t a corpse. And in order that the rest of mankind don’t come to envy him and righteous souls are not tempted from the true path, all these regimens and internal punishments are calculated in such a way that the last stage, when a man truly has nothing to lose, is brought as close as possible to the state of actual death. That is why the experienced con doesn’t judge a jail by its appearance or its general cells, but by its box. Similarly it is more just to judge a country by its prisons than by its monuments.
For centuries prisons have been organized along more or less the same lines, and the average tourist who visits, say, the Peter and Paul Fortress of tsarist times hasn’t the least idea what it was that made that prison so special. Look, the bunks are like bunks, the walls are like walls. And bars across the windows, of course. But that’s what prison is for—to stop people from running away. And the prisoners were allowed to read—what more did they want? And the average tourist hasn’t the remotest idea what today’s “prison regime” means.
Well, what difference does it make whether you get a half-hour or a full-hour exercise period, 12 or 13½ ounces of bread a day, 2¼ or 1¾ of an ounce of fish? You have to be a bookkeeper or a cook to keep track of such figures. The average tourist asks only one question: Did the prisoners die on those rations or didn’t they? They didn’t? Ah, well then, what more is there to say? The thing that impresses them most of all is the vaulted ceilings and the thick walls. How gloomy, how oppressive! Look at that for a prison, eh!
No matter how many prison memoirs they might have read, they will never be able to understand these trivial and minor details. Take this bedstead, for instance, made of welded metal rods. It’s got a kapok mattress on it and looks completely normal. But it seems that cons sleeping on beds like these have been going on hunger strike to get the gaps between the rods reduced. How peculiar—those beds have been in use for twenty years at least, and it never occurred to anyone before to complain about the gaps between the rods. What’s the matter with those cons? Have they gone mad, don’t they want to eat anymore, are they trying to get in trouble? The painstaking researcher might perhaps ransack the prison archives and come up with the fact that at about the same time the prison governor ordered the prisoners to give up all their old newspapers and magazines. A perfectly reasonable regulation, obviously designed to prevent the prisoners from cluttering up their cells with trashy literature. Very commendable. But not even the conscientious researcher would see any connection between these two events, and only a con would perceive the vital link—what if, for instance, you were able to sleep on the bed only by stuffing magazines and newspapers between the mattress and the rods? And the instant they were taken away the bedstead became an instrument of torture? During the night the mattress would sink between the rods and you ended up sleeping on an iron grille.
In the punishment cell, for instance, you are supposed to have a stool or some other kind of seat, and every box has something of that kind, usually a ledge sticking out from the wall: go ahead, sit on it all day long if you like. But say they’ve placed the ledge a fraction higher than it should be, and made it a fraction narrower and shorter, so that you can’t quite sit on it properly and your feet don’t quite reach the floor. All it comes down to is an inch or two either way.
Or take those 1½ ounces of bread or ½ ounce of fish—how petty, one is almost ashamed to mention them. But you forget that it took only a straw to break the camel’s back. You forget that the difference between life and death is just as petty, just as trivial: you need only alter the body’s temperature by a degree or two and behold, it’s a corpse. Ever since prisons began, ever since this social institution came into being, this battle has been going on, this feverish war between convicts and society. For ounces, inches, degrees, minutes. And victory goes first to one side, then the other. One moment the cons advance—1½ ounces here, 2 inches there, 5 degrees more, and before you know it, life is bearable! But society cannot allow life to be bearable in prison. Prison has to be oppressive and brutal, not a holiday camp. Society starts to press forward: 1½ ounces is lopped off here, 4 inches there, 5 degrees less, and the cons start dropping like flies. Gnawing hunger, starvation, exhaustion, despair. And you get self-cannibalism, insanity, suicides, murders, escapes.
For many years I contemplated that war, so muffled and incomprehensible to outsiders. It has its own laws, its own great dates, battles, victories, and defeats, its heroes and military leaders. The front line in this war, as in most wars, is constantly moving. Here it is known as the prison regime.
Where the front is depends on the willingness of the cons to risk all for a single ounce, inch, degree, or minute. The moment they relax their defenses the squadrons with the red epaulettes or blue piping will dash forward with the cry of victory on their lips. They will break through the front, form a pincer movement, attack from the rear. And woe to the vanquished! The victors are never put on trial.
A new generation of prisoners will never succeed in winning back lost ground—they will accept the new situation as normal, time-honored, and inevitable. They may win their own battles dozens of times, but each time they lose only once. That is why cons who go on hunger strike and then call it off without achieving anything not only have lost their own war but have worsened life for many generations to come. This is another reason why you mustn’t lapse into apathy or fall into a stupor. Apathy will whisper in your ear: “The main thing is to survive, think only of today, thank God you’re still alive.” But that means the hooves are already drumming, the trumpet is sounding, and the squadrons are on the attack.
And so I was sitting quietly in Vladimir, reading books. Apart from my proper subject, biology, I was also learning English. Most of the prisoners used to learn some language or other: the Jews, as a rule, studied Hebrew, while the rest studied English, German, or Spanish. The method we used was the simplest possible, namely to read as many books as we could with the help of a dictionary, write down the new vocabulary, and sit and learn it. For the sake of convenience, we’d take a scrap of paper and write the word on one side and the Russian equivalent on the other. And so as not to mix them up or lose them, we made tiny chests of drawers out of empty matchboxes. They were extremely convenient, these miniature chests with five or six banks of drawers. You could group them according to sense or some other criterion in the different drawers. In this way, given a certain amount of concentration, you could learn up to two and even three thousand words in a month. The guards got so used to matchbox chests that they even stopped confiscating them during their routine searches.
With books, and especially with dictionaries, the situation was much more difficult. At Vladimir we were not allowed to receive books from home, the library was poor, and we could only order books from bookshops if we paid a surcharge. Even then, not all books were allowed. The authorities had a particular down on any books not published in the USSR, even dictionaries, and even if they were published in Warsaw or Prague. As a result, the cons contrived to get hold of books illegally.
I myself was lucky in this respect. While I was under investigation in Lefortovo Prison, my mother had started bringing me three to four books every month, along with the food parcels. Furthermore, among the Soviet books would be mixed some others published abroad, in England or the United States. The Lefortovo administration never passed them on to me, of course, but put them in the prison store. They were hoping I didn’t know about the books and wouldn’t demand them when I left. About thirty books thus accumulated. When I was dispatched from Lefortovo to Vladimir it was at night, and no senior officials were on duty. Naturally I kicked up a fuss, demanded my books, and threatened to inform my armed escort that the prison was refusing to give me my belongings. The escorts were subordinate neither to the prison administration nor to the KGB: indeed, like all Interior Ministry employees, they hated the KGB’s guts. So I calculated that they might well take the huff and refuse to convoy me as someone “having a material claim against the prison”, as they used to say in their jargon. And that, apparently, was what the Lefortovo guards feared as well. For the sake of appearances, the duty officer swore at me for half an hour or so and tried to force me to back down, but they knew me well by now. (This was my third time in Lefortovo.) They realized I wouldn’t budge, and they gave me the books. So I dragged a whole sack of books to Vladimir with me—I could hardly lift it off the ground.
Later I had constant headaches with those books. Sometimes the guards would take them away for inspection and not give them back; at others, on the contrary, they said they had no one to inspect them and for that reason couldn’t give them back; and on one or two occasions they introduced a limit of five books and confiscated the rest. Each time, I wrote complaints or went on hunger strike. Once when I was in camp, I even stole my books from the store, replacing them with others. In a word, it was a whole saga. What is interesting, however, is that no one ever looked at them and nobody knew that they included non-Soviet editions; if they had, no amount of hunger-striking would have helped me. It was simply that my sack irritated the prison officers. “This isn’t a university; you can study when you get out of here.” And that was all.
One way or another, we all had our sacks of books. What is more, they were usually passed on as a legacy from one generation of prisoners to another, and therefore were a sort of public property. That was another reason why we waged this constant book war with the administration. The books had to be concealed so that they weren’t seen by the guards, especially when the cells were cased. And this was no easy matter. A book isn’t a needle—where can you hide it? But no matter how hard it was, you always managed to find a place. There was absolutely nothing worse than suddenly hearing the food flap open and the block officer saying: “Pack up your things and get going.” You were bound to be frisked. What the hell could you do with all those books?
It was a great help if you ripped off the book’s covers, the title page, and occasionally the preface too. Then you could argue that it wasn’t a book at all, but toilet paper. That way you could get away with a couple of books. The boys also had the bright idea of forging a rubber stamp: “See, it’s a library book, not mine.” But in time they caught on to that one, too. Or you might tear the cover off and glue a magazine cover on in its place, so that you could pass it off as a literary journal—Oktyabr or Novy Mir. But then they started confiscating literary journals as well. The safest thing was simply to read the book fast and copy as much as you could into your notebook. Such notes were considered a con’s private property, though from time to time they were taken in by the KGB and checked—in case we were writing anti-Soviet novels or prison diaries. In brief, it was the Hundred Years’ War—in books.
Our bosses quickly tumbled to the fact that unlike the criminal prisoners, we political prisoners suffered much more from being deprived of books, visits, or correspondence with our families than from the loss of parcels or being put on strict regime or reduced rations, and therefore they deliberately focused on these psychological punishments. But striking at the stomach, as the criminals used to say, still remained our re-educators’ favorite weapon. On our side we had our own weapons: official complaints, hunger strikes, stubbornness, and resourcefulness. Our main instruments, without which no amount of resourcefulness would have helped us, were undoubtedly solidarity and publicity.
It is an astonishing fact that no more than thirty years ago, millions of political prisoners in Russia were rounded up and driven out to work on the great construction projects of communism. Hundreds of thousands of them died of scurvy and malnutrition. Meanwhile large numbers of people, overcome with admiration, lauded the Soviet regime. It wasn’t that they lacked the necessary information; simply that they didn’t want to know, didn’t want to believe it. People need their beautiful dream of justice and happiness somewhere on this earth. And even the most serious Western observers were astounded by the grandiosity of Soviet achievements, the sweep of their schemes, the enthusiasm of the Soviet people—and not a word was said about the prisoners.
In my day there were no more than ten to twenty thousand of us political prisoners in the entire country, about the same number as used to die in Norilsk in the course of a single winter. But the West had long since got wind of the fact that its own fate and its own future were in some part being decided within the walls of Vladimir Prison. The Western press started paying attention to us and even began to investigate our battles over food and living conditions—all those ounces, inches, and degrees. The world became interested in the question of whether you could have a prison with a human face. This for us was highly topical—prison we had known for ages, but the human face was exactly what was missing. And so it came about that sometimes we had barely finished one of our regular hunger strikes when the guards whispered to us the contents of some broadcast by the BBC or Radio Liberty on the subject of that very same strike; even they were intrigued by this radio war.
Our Kremlin leaders were also agitated by this new development—they were worried lest the facade of their grandiose structure be tarnished. And always at just the wrong moment! Just when the proletarians of the world were at last ready to unite and embody the centuries-old dream of mankind, just when it was necessary to direct the world’s energies into the struggle against the dictatorship in Chile or apartheid in South Africa, suddenly these cons would emerge from nowhere with their ridiculous hunger strikes, rations, ounces, and inches. And this distracted the workers, aided world imperialism, and postponed the bright future.
On the other hand, the nature of the State machine was also changing: the early revolutionary zeal and fervor had been wiped out by Stalin in the 1930s and 1940s, and the apparatus was growing more and more sclerotic, overtaken by bureaucratic inertia—fear of responsibility, fear of superiors—and by bureaucratic indifference. It was overgrown with a tangle of laws, regulations, and decrees, and it wasn’t always clear how to interpret them. Better just to pass the buck to your superiors and wait for instructions. At the top they were in no hurry to issue instructions. They much preferred to punish their subordinates for negligence, or to hand down new regulations and decrees, which all had to be interpreted and have their contradictions reconciled.
And the prison governor’s head was simply bursting. It was crystal clear to him that every new regulation was designed to be deployed against the cons, but the question was where to draw the line. If you overdid it a fraction, or put a bit too much pressure on, you had a hunger strike on your hands. And then you had London, Munich, Washington kicking up a stink again, which meant a Moscow commission on your backs within a few weeks. “What’s going on here, comrades? Falling for the provocations of world imperialism again?” And of course, these commissions were bound to find blemishes and blunders, note them down, draw attention to them, reprimand you, and sometimes even sack you for them—every bureaucrat had a horde of enemies just waiting to scheme against him, take his place, snatch the bread out of his mouth. For that reason, the prison guards and officers also listened to the Western radio stations, twiddling the knobs of their receivers at night, asking one another the next morning: “Did you hear anything?” And if they did, a commission was bound to come.
The old jailers used to sigh: “You’re hopelessly spoiled. Now, twenty years ago...” But we too were nothing like the rabbits who died without a murmur. We had grasped the great truth that it was not rifles, not tanks, and not atom bombs that created power, nor upon them that power rested. Power depended upon public obedience, upon a willingness to submit. Therefore each individual who refused to submit to force reduced that force by one 250-millionth of its sum. We had been schooled by our participation in the civil-rights movement, we had received an excellent education in the camps, and we knew of the implacable force of one man’s refusal to submit. The authorities knew it too. They had long since abandoned any idea of basing their calculations on Communist dogma. They no longer demanded of people a belief in the radiant future—all they needed was submission. And when they tried to starve us into it in the camps, or threw us into the punishment cells to rot, they were demanding not a belief in communism but simply submission, or at least a willingness to compromise.
We in Vladimir Prison had been culled from the camps as the most recalcitrant and obstinate cases—hunger strikers, sit-down strikers, troublemakers. Almost none of us was there by accident, and the few who were took their places willy-nilly in our line of defense.
The cons around us were on the same special regime and had been convicted under the same articles of the Criminal Code as we had been.But the majority of them were here by chance—they were mainly crooks who had reneged on gambling debts or had in some other way sinned against their cell mates according to the underworld code. Then, to escape retribution, they had put up political posters or tattooed themselves with anti-Soviet slogans—thus getting their sentences increased but enabling them to get transferred as “political recidivists” to this special regime. Of course, psychologically they had remained crooks. And the wonder is that in their case, special regime was an exact replica of the regime in Stalin’s camps. The same officers, the same guards treated them completely differently from the way they treated us: they were beaten and humiliated, they fought over crusts of bread, betrayed one another to the guards—and there was no question of solidarity!
Until 1975 political prisoners in Vladimir Prison were not obliged to work—the prison authorities regarded it as inexpedient: they knew the majority simply wouldn’t do it, and even those that did never met the quotas. It was too much of a loss for the prison to maintain the workshops, hire skilled foremen from outside, and work out additional targets for us without getting any real income from it. In the spring of 1975, however, Moscow decreed otherwise. It was decided to force us to work.
Forced labor is always degrading. But in prison conditions, where sixty percent of your earnings are deducted to pay for the armed guards, where further deductions are made to cover the cost of your food, clothing, and maintenance, where work is said to be one of the means of your re-education, where it robs you of eight hours a day six days out of every seven, and where the productivity quotas are artificially raised to a point where you can’t possibly meet them—working under such conditions is intolerable to a man with any self-respect.
Naturally we refused. And the long siege started. The whole lot of us were treated as vicious malingerers and repeatedly subjected to every imaginable form of punishment. I, for instance, spent eighteen months (out of a total of less than two years) on strict regime, while others saw more of the punishment cells, some spending as many as sixty and even seventy-five full days in them. Our letters home were cut off, and we were deprived of visits and food parcels. It was a war without quarter, a war of attrition. We all understood that we dare not lose. Therefore, besides the normal defense tactics—hunger strikes, the smuggling out of information about the violations taking place in the prison—we resorted to a weapon that took the authorities completely by surprise: we overwhelmed official channels with a veritable avalanche of complaints.
You need to know the Soviet system of bureaucracy to understand how effective this was. Under Soviet law, every prisoner has the right to petition any state or public institution and any public official with a complaint. Every complaint has to be forwarded by the prison administration within three days of its receipt. In the interim, the administration has to write an explanation to accompany the complaint, add relevant details from the prisoner’s dossier, and put everything into the same envelope for further dispatch. The public official or institution that receives the complaint records it in a daily register of incoming documents and must answer within a month. If the official or institution is not competent to deal with the matter complained of, he has to pass it on to someone who is. Repeated complaints set the whole machinery in motion each time they are made. The order in which complaints are scrutinized is regulated by a battery of laws and ordinances. In practice, it is never very effective to write just one complaint. Your complaint is invariably sent to the “competent official”, in other words the person you are complaining of, and he quite naturally finds the complaint unfounded. It is even more likely, however, that no one reads it at all, and it is simply sent back down the chain, from office to office. This is why most people have no faith in the system of complaints.
However, complaints can be decidedly effective, even in prison, provided certain rules are observed. All you have to do is to know the law and the system under which complaints are examined; have a detailed knowledge of all the regulations pertaining to the prison regime; and compose your complaint so that it is brief and to the point, preferably on not more than a single page—otherwise no one will read it. The complaint should merely state the fact that a law or regulation has been infringed, the date when the infringement occurred, the names of the people responsible, and the nature of the law or regulation in question. It should be written in large clear letters, with generous margins. If you want your complaint to be examined by a high official, complain about his immediate subordinate. In other words, if you want an answer from the Ministry of the Interior, complain not about the prison governor but about the head of the local Ministry office. And to get to that point you need to progress patiently up the bureaucratic ladder, complaining one rung higher each time about the reply received from the person immediately below. You should never complain about two different matters in the same letter. You should always send complaints by registered mail, with confirmation of delivery. And, most importantly of all, you should write enormous numbers of complaints and send them to the officials least equipped to deal with them.
At the height of our war, each of us wrote from ten to thirty complaints a day. Composing thirty complaints in one day is not easy, so we usually divided up the subjects among ourselves and each man wrote on his own subject before handing it around for copying by all the others. If there are five men in a cell and each man takes six subjects, each of them has the chance to write thirty complaints while composing only six himself. Copying out thirty lines of text in large letters takes about one and a half to two hours.
It is best to address your complaints not to run-of-the-mill bureaucrats, but to the most unpredictable individuals and organizations: for instance to all the deputies of the Supreme Soviet, or of the Soviets at republican, regional, or city levels; to newspapers and magazines; to astronauts, writers, artists, actors, ballerinas; to all the secretaries of the Central Committee; all generals, admirals; productivity champions; shepherds, deer breeders, milkmaids; sportsmen, and so on and so forth. In the Soviet Union, all well-known individuals are state functionaries.
The next thing that happens is that the prison office, inundated with complaints, is unable to dispatch them within the three-day deadline. For overrunning the deadline they are bound to be reprimanded and to lose any bonuses they might have won. When our war was at its hottest the prison governor summoned every last employee to help out at the office with this work—librarians, bookkeepers, censors, political instructors, security officers. And it went even further. All the students at the next-door Ministry of the Interior training college were pressed into helping out as well.
All answers to and dispatches of complaints have to be registered in a special book, and strict attention has to be paid to observing the correct deadlines. Since complaints follow a complex route and have to be registered every step of the way, they spawn dossiers and records of their own. In the end they all land in one of two places: the local prosecutor’s office or the local department of the Interior Ministry. These offices can’t keep up with the flood either and also break their deadlines, for which they too are reprimanded and lose their bonuses. The bureaucratic machine is thus obliged to work at full stretch, and you transfer the paper avalanche from one office to another, sowing panic in the ranks of the enemy. Bureaucrats are bureaucrats, always at loggerheads with one another, and often enough your complaints become weapons in internecine wars between bureaucrat and bureaucrat, department and department. This goes on for months and months, until, at last, the most powerful factor of all in Soviet life enters the fray—statistics.
It is reported to some senior functionary—along with details of other figures, tables, reports, and memoranda on the progress of communism—that, say, Vladimir Prison or maybe Vladimir Region has been the recipient over a given period of seventy-five thousand complaints. No one has read these complaints, but it’s an unheard-of figure. It immediately spoils the entire statistical record and the various indicators of socialist competition among collectives, departments, and even regions. Everybody suffers. The entire region drops from its leading place in the tables and becomes one of the worst, losing its red markers, pennants, and prize cups. The workers start seething with discontent, there is panic in the regional Party headquarters, and a senior commission of inquiry is dispatched to the prison.
This commission won’t help the prisoner personally; at the most it will resolve a few minor points raised in the complaints. But it is bound to find a mass of shortcomings and defects in the work of the prison administration. That’s why it has been sent here, its members paid traveling allowances, expenses, and bonuses. Admin is taken to pieces. Individuals are fired, demoted, bawled out. The commission reports back to its superiors and with a sigh of relief goes home. Meanwhile, to the extent that you have petitioned sundry milkmaids, deputies, ballerinas, and deer breeders, they too are obliged to respond, investigate, and comply with protocol, informing you of the commission’s decisions and the measures taken.
You go on writing and writing, spoiling the statistics for the next period under review and drumming up a new commission, and so on for years. Add to this the commissions and reprimands provoked by the leaking of information abroad, the directives, circulars, and counter-orders, the petitions of relatives, the campaigns and petitions abroad, and you will have some idea of what our prison administration endured in warring with us to make us go out to work. What prison governor, what prosecutor, what regional Party secretary would relish such a life? If it had depended only on them, the blockade would soon have been lifted. But the orders had come from Moscow.
My God, what didn’t they do with our complaints! They confiscated them by the sackful, they refused to give us paper or sell us envelopes and stamps, they forbade us to send them by registered mail with recorded delivery (so as to make it easier to steal them), they issued a special order making it an offense to petition anyone other than the Public Prosecutor and the Ministry of the Interior, they threw us into the punishment cells. And the answers—you should have seen the answers we got! It was fantastic. The bemused bureaucrats, having no time to read our complaints properly, answered completely at sixes and sevens, mixing up the complainants and confusing their complaints. They so twisted and garbled our poor laws that they could have been jailed for it themselves. A colonel in the local branch of the Interior Ministry, for example, overwhelmed by this paper hurricane, wrote to me that the Congress of the Communist Party was not a social organization and therefore could not be the recipient of complaints. Naturally I followed this up with a whole gamut of complaints against the colonel, and he sank in the ensuing whirlpool. Meanwhile the Vladimir judges, driven berserk by the mountains of suits and demands for criminal investigation pressed by us, replied that officers of the Interior Ministry do not come under the jurisdiction of Soviet judges. Sometimes two different offices gave diametrically opposed answers to the same complaint, and then we would set them at one another’s throats. Finally they washed their hands of the whole business and instead of answers started to send us receipts, which read approximately like this: “During the past month 187 complaints have been received from you and refused,” followed by the signature. The entire bureaucratic system of the Soviet Union found itself drawn into this war. There was virtually no government department or institution, no region or republic, from which we weren’t getting answers. Eventually we had even drawn the criminal cons into our game, and the complaints disease began to spread throughout the prison—in which there were 1,200 men altogether.
I think that if the business had continued a little longer and involved everyone in the prison, the Soviet bureaucratic machine would have simply ground to a halt: all Soviet institutions would have had to stop work and busy themselves with writing replies to us. But they surrendered. In 1977 the siege was lifted after two years of struggle. The governor of our prison was removed and pensioned off, some transfers were made within admin, and everything died down. Moscow had retreated from its orders. Our poor Colonel Zavyalkin! He suffered for nothing, the victim of an administrative injustice. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t a bad man, merely a bureaucrat who carried out orders. He had barely understood what was going on. Faced with the innumerable commissions and contradictory instructions that had rained down on his head, he had evolved a most original line of defense: he pretended to be a simpleton, a mere simpleton who did as he was told and wanted all to be for the best, though somehow or other things always seemed to go wrong. He was hauled over the coals, but he took it all with the air of an innocent down on his luck.
Our victory cost us dear. The prisoners were all gaunt and skinny, at death’s door in some cases, and every single one was suffering from some disease or other—a stomach ulcer, TB. Prison is hard even on the fit—for the sick it’s curtains. Sickness was simply a pretext for blackmail—be cooperative and we’ll treat you, put you on a diet, transfer you to the hospital. If a man has an ulcer or a kidney disease, he can’t stomach all that rotten herring and moldy sauerkraut which accounts for sixty percent of his diet, so what can he do? If he’s got TB or, say, is suffering from hunger spasms because of an ulcer, they love to send him to the punishment cells. Then on one of the starvation days, when no food is forthcoming, they contrive to call him out for a cozy chat.
In fact, no one gets proper medical treatment in the clink. They might just slow the progress of an illness a bit, give you some superficial treatment to keep you from dying. Which means, as a rule, that your illness becomes chronic and you are stuck with it forever, so that you can spend the rest of your life working to pay for the medicines. This is regarded as quite normal. “What? Did you come here for a rest cure? We didn’t ask you, you know. You shouldn’t have come in the first place,” the doctors would say. In any case, the prison hospital hardly differed from the regular cells: the same concrete floors, the same shutters on the windows, no light, and no air. The only thing was that they fed you a bit better. But they had no toilets—twice a day you were taken out to the latrines. Such a hospital was hardly missed.
Generally speaking, medical treatment was regarded as a reward for good conduct. In the neighboring cell to some crooks there was an epileptic. Every day the cons used to hammer on the door and call for a doctor. Fat chance! After four hours or so, a medical orderly might peep in through the food flap: “What is it? The epileptic? Don’t worry, he won’t die, stop your yelling.” And he would slam the flap shut again. When Gunnar Rode was taken ill in our cell, we spent half the night pounding on the door and roaring through the window. We wrenched a bench free of the floor and ran it at the door, using it as a battering ram. We knocked out the food flap and the door was starting to split. Afterward they threw us all in the punishment cells, but at least they took Gunnar Rode to the hospital. On another occasion they put Suslensky in the punishment cells. He had a heart complaint, and whenever they put him in the box, after a couple of days he would have a heart attack. This time it happened again. Then the entire block, every single cell, including the crooks, started battering at the doors—the noise was like an artillery barrage, and the block was shaken to its foundation. Suslensky was carried out on a stretcher and put in the box in another block, and that was all.
Yes, it was a hard-earned victory. On the other hand, who knows how many generations of political prisoners were assured of their right not to work as a result of our action? And we obtained many other improvements too. The most important result of all was that our prison bosses now feared us like the devil! And when the new prison governor made an attempt to restrict our book privileges again, it took only a handful of days on hunger strike to make him give in. After that they didn’t dare lift a finger to us. As for the crooks, not an evening passed without one of them being dragged into the toilets and beaten up. Sometimes they would be hustled there in handcuffs and kicked to a pulp. Every night there were yells and groans. Particularly notorious for this sort of thing was Major Kiselev. Permanently drunk and bleary-eyed, he couldn’t bear his shift to pass without somebody getting thrashed. But he gave us a wide berth, afraid even to breathe, in case we caught a whiff of the booze on his breath.
We came down on him especially hard at the end of 1974, when a crook nicknamed Savage was killed in the box during Kiselev’s shift. Nobody knew this poor fellow’s real name, and we didn’t know how to describe him in our statements—in the end we simply wrote “the criminal prisoner nicknamed Savage.” They beat him for ages, all night long probably, because he was moaning all night in the box. Several times we summoned the duty guard and asked him what was going on. “I’ve no idea,” he replied. “He’s probably off his head.” The next morning the crooks told us what had happened. For the next two years, poor Savage figured constantly in all our complaints (we wrote about fifteen hundred altogether), demanding that Kiselev be put on trial. We didn’t get our way, of course. The prosecutor’s office replied: “There are no grounds for implicating the prison administration in the death of the convict Gavrilin.” Only in this way did we find out his real name.
Kiselev drew in his horns after that and grew frightened of us. At the same time he hated us passionately and always tried to get us into trouble. His entire shift was exactly like him, as if specially picked for it: old Forty-One was a prize example! Sergeant Major Sarafanov, our diminutive block guard, was always on duty in Block Number One during Kiselev’s shifts. He had been given his nickname by the cons several years before for having reported forty-one cons in the course of a single shift. How he had found the time for so many was a mystery, especially since he could hardly read or write. He was a really vicious bastard! He and a block guard called Gypsy used to give us hell and openly hated our guts. But Gypsy was more direct and honest about it. He used to yell after us quite unabashed: “It’s a pity Hitler didn’t roast the lot of you in his ovens!” He regarded us all as Jews. Needless to say, we gave as good as we got.
The rest of the guards, especially the younger ones, treated us reasonably well and sometimes with open sympathy. Just like us, they hated Captain Obrubov of the KGB, who was attached to the prison as security chief. They used to call him Admiral Canaris, a nickname the crooks had given him. In appearance Obrubov really did resemble Canaris, though I think he must have been a lot stupider. He was always sending kitchen help, errand boys, and other trusties to offer to take messages and letters out of the jail for us. In return he used to slip them some tea on the sly (tea was banned in jail). Naturally the trusties told us all this, regarding it as the easiest way out, and begged us to supply them with fake messages. We also profited from the system, since in return the trusties agreed to smuggle tobacco or sometimes even bread into the punishment cells. So we regularly supplied Obrubov with fake messages for the outside, and even occasional petitions to the UN, all of which he sent up the line to prove his usefulness. The tea the kitchen help earned was subsequently sold to the gangsters in the cells, and everyone was satisfied. It was said that years before Obrubov had been far more arrogant and obstinate and had regularly summoned all the cons in turn and proposed that they work for him or write denunciations. As a reward, some had been promised food, others vodka, and yet others parole. Finally the men got sick and tired of it. They were particularly incensed after Obrubov summoned Boris Borisovich Zalivako, a former priest, and in return for his cooperation offered to help him get a parish after his release. It took a while to set it up, particularly to get the different blocks to agree, but on the appointed day everyone joined a unanimous hunger strike, demanding that these brazen attempts at enlistment be stopped and Obrubov removed from his post. To everyone’s surprise, the hunger strike met with jubilation on the part of admin and even in the prosecutor’s office. In no time at all the prison governor and the local prosecutor made personal appearances and asked if it was true that Obrubov had been using such crude recruiting methods. After that Obrubov ceased to appear around the prison, didn’t care to do any more recruiting, summoned hardly anyone to his office, and simply skulked in the background. The crooks told us that he was often seen to spend hours standing and listening at our cell doors.
It must be said that the attitude of the crooks to us politicals had completely changed. They say that only twenty years ago the crooks used to call us fascists, rob us on prisoner transports and in transit cells, terrorize us in the camps, and so on. But now these same crooks used to volunteer to help me with my sacks of books on convoys and share their smokes and grub with me. They used to ask us to tell them what we were in jail for and what we wanted. They read the text of my sentence with enormous interest, and the only thing they couldn’t believe was that we did all this for nothing, and not for money. They were absolutely astonished that people could go to prison just like that, deliberately and not for gain. In Vladimir Prison our relations with them were those of good neighbors: they constantly turned to us for answers to their questions, advice, and even help. We were the ultimate arbiters of all their quarrels, and we would help them to write complaints and explain the laws to them. And, of course, they questioned us endlessly on politics.
In prison even crooks read the newspapers, listen to the radio and—perhaps for the first time in their lives—get to thinking: Why is life such a mess in the Soviet Union? The overwhelming majority of them are violently anti-Soviet, and the word “Communist” is virtually an insult. Because of their lack of literacy and solidarity, they are incapable of sticking up for their rights. The administration takes advantage of their feuds and sets them against one another. Whenever a prison officer wants to break one of them, he does it by transferring him to a cell where the inmates hate his guts. Then it is merely a question of who would kill whom, and whoever did the murder would be sentenced to be shot.
It was well known that our new governor, LieutenantColonel Ugodin, had once transferred a crook named Tikhonov to a cell full of his enemies. They took a long time to polish him off—for almost two days they kicked him slowly to death. He screamed so much that the whole block could hear him, but nobody intervened. They say that Ugodin repeatedly went to the door of the cell, looked through the peephole, listened to Tikhonov’s screams, and then moved off with a satisfied expression on his face. He was caught at this by the cons from the cell next door, who were being led out for exercise, and the prisoners in the cell opposite could see him through a crack in the door. Only on the third day did the guards enter the cell to remove the corpse. The culprits were later sentenced to death, but nothing at all happened to Ugodin. When we learned about it we wrote to the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The answer, as usual, came from the local prosecutor’s office: “The involvement of prison personnel in the murder of Tikhonov has not been confirmed by our investigation.” And with this the affair ended.
Given the circumstances of our permanent war over prison conditions, the need to synchronize our actions and exchange information required us to have reliable methods of communication among the cells with politicals in them, which were scattered about the prison. And it was here that our criminal pals proved to be extraordinarily useful—for them, particularly if they were members of regular gangs, the whole prison was honeycombed with channels through which they could circulate messages. Invisible threads stretched from window to window, from exercise yard to exercise yard, linking all blocks and floors, and all we did was simply plug into this system.
The crooks in this respect were scrupulously honest: our messages never once fell into the hands of the guards and invariably arrived sealed and sewn round the edges exactly as we had sent them. In return, we had to cooperate in forwarding their mail too, and I must say we took more pains over theirs than over our own. It would have been terrible to let down friends who heroically went to the punishment cells for us or swallowed notes whole, rather than surrender them to the authorities.
Given our complete isolation and the strict regime in the prison, it was astonishing how many means of communication existed—it turned out that you could connect any two points in the jail at will. All of this, of course, was strictly forbidden, and people caught breaking the rules were severely punished for “inter-cell communication”, as it was called.
I remember the day I arrived in Vladimir Prison for the first time, still green. After frisking me they put me temporarily in the transit cell, which was dark, dirty, and cold. Instead of a toilet bowl there was a sort of throne—a hump about two feet off the floor, with steps leading up to it and a hole in the middle. It stank to high heaven. Above the hole was a tap—in lieu of a washbasin. I perched on my cot somewhat baffled by this cell. Was this where I was destined to spend the next three years? Suddenly I heard a noise: “Ahem!” Was I imagining things, or had somebody coughed right by my ear? I looked all around me—nobody there. And then again: “Ahem! Brother!” What the devil? To be on the safe side, I answered: “What do you want?” “Come closer to the bowl, brother, I can hardly hear you!” This was my first introduction to the prison telephone.
In other cells, where they had real toilet bowls, they used to siphon the water out of the cistern with a rag or a broom and then talk down the bowl just like a telephone. Particularly in the evenings you would often hear someone shouting from one cell window to another—say to cell thirty-one: “Hey, Thirty-one! Thirty-one! Pump!” Or: “Pump out!” Or else simply: “Thirty-one, telephone!”
However, not all the cells were connected to this telephone. Not all the cells had toilet bowls. Usually you could only phone up and down, although occasionally you could phone across as well, depending upon which way the drains went. But the cells were linked by central heating. Thus, if you took the aluminum mug that everyone in the prison was issued, pressed the bottom hard against the heating pipes and your mouth hard against the open top and gave a loud shout, the sound would be efficiently carried by the pipes in all directions. In the receiving cell you needed to press your mug just as carefully against the pipes and put your ear to it instead of your mouth. This was a terribly overloaded line, and all day the pipes hummed with voices. But it had a number of drawbacks. You had to wait your turn, since it couldn’t be used by several people at once. Second, it was very hard to hear when you were several cells away, and then you had to ask others to pass the message on from cell to cell. Third, not every message was suitable for open transmission. It was for these that the post office existed.
Such messages were usually passed on by “knight” the method also used for bulky objects such as food, books, and so on. The method was to unravel a number of socks and braid a stout cord out of the threads. The packet would be secured to the end of this cord. Then it would be eased through the crack in the shutters—which in most cases was barely a finger’s breadth—and swung sideways to the adjoining cell or lowered to the cell below. The receiving cell would then fish for the “knight” with an “arm”, a stick with a hook on the end or else simply a tightly rolled newspaper which they would push through the crack in the shutters. Having captured the “knight” in this way, they would haul it into the cell and tie whatever it was that they themselves wanted to send onto the end of the cord. And in this way your packet swung through the prison from window to window. Of course, if the guards caught you at it you were guaranteed fifteen days in the box.
Another method was to pass things on during your daily walk. This cheerful word “walk” was applied to what was in fact an abysmally boring procedure. Long gone are the times when prisoners used to stroll sedately around the prison yard in pairs. Now the exercise yards are concrete rectangles barely larger than a cell. The walls are covered with rough cement, a “fur coat”—to prevent you from writing messages on them—are ten feet high and instead of a ceiling have an iron grating over the top. The doors are just like cell doors, clad in sheet steel with a peephole in the middle. We were led out for our walk cell by cell, so that you got no variety. There were usually about ten to twelve of these rectangles built in a cluster—five or six on each side of a central gangway. Above the gangway on a raised catwalk, the guard could walk up and down and peer to right and left. The moment he turned his back the cons would try to toss notes or small packets over the walls. Any cell caught doing this was usually deprived of its walk.
Later, in an attempt to stop this form of communication, they stretched fine-gauge wire netting over the gratings, so that when it snowed heavily in winter, the snow settled on the top. Not even this did the trick, however, for the cons managed to prise the netting loose and push their messages underneath and into the next yard. In places they also tried to tear holes, so that one of them could stand on another’s shoulders, push his arm through, and toss whatever was necessary into the yard next door or opposite.
Having plugged into the general communications system in the jail, we politicals had to form links in the chain. The things we had to toss at our neighbors’ request! On one occasion it was a bag of tobacco—we could hardly get it through the gap under the wire. Another time it was fifteen bars of soap; and for each bar we had to find a moment when the guard’s back was turned. One day, before we had even had time to discover who our neighbors were to left and right (our usual procedure), the men on our right—with enormous difficulty—shoved a big fat book through the wire, quickly followed by another. These turned out to be the memoirs of Marshal Zhukov. We managed to pass on one of the books, but the other stuck in the wire, and neither we nor our neighbors could force it through.
And then there was what you might think was the most primitive method of all—writing on the walls—but it turned out to be extremely effective. You found tiny penciled messages absolutely everywhere you were taken: in the bathhouse, exercise yards, transit cell—people would simply write down their names or list their cell occupants, and sometimes a brief message. Practice showed that these inscriptions would invariably come to the notice of whomever they were meant for. We usually wrote in English so that the guards couldn’t understand us. They guessed, of course, that politicals were doing the writing. English quickly became a form of code, or special lingo, for us—we could even shout from the windows in English or talk along the pipes, because nobody else understood us.