Cilka's Journey(103)
Escape was unthinkable. Some of the remoter camps had no barbed wire, so unlikely was the possibility of prisoners ever making it across hundreds of kilometers of wilderness to freedom. Those that did attempt to escape did so in threes—the third prisoner coming along as a “cow”—food for the other two in case they didn’t find any other nourishment.
Former prisoners frequently recall their time in the Gulag as a season in another world, one with its own climate, rules, values and even language. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, the “Gulag was a universe” with its own speech and codes. For camp administrators, pregnant women were “books,” women with children were “receipts,” men were “accounts,” released convicts who remained in exile were “rubbish,” prisoners under investigation were “envelopes,” a camp division was a “factory.” Tufta was the art of pretending to work, mastyrka, the art of malingering. There was a rich underground culture of tattoo designs for politicals, addicts, rapists, homosexuals, murderers. The slang of the Gulag soon spilled back into mainstream culture and became the slang of the entire Soviet Union; the rich vocabulary of Russian obscenity developed mainly in the camps.
Occasionally, the tormented slave laborers of the Gulag rose against their masters. The Vorkuta Uprising of July–August 1953 was one of the bravest, and most tragic, of such uprisings. Stalin died in March 1953, and his chief policeman, Lavrentiy Beria, was arrested shortly afterward after a Politburo power struggle. On a warm July day, the prisoners of one Vorkuta camp downed tools, demanding that inmates have access to a state attorney and due justice. Convicts in neighboring camps, seeing that the mine-head wheels in the rebel camp had stopped spinning, joined the strike. Top brass from Moscow were sent in—the State Attorney of the USSR and the commander of the Internal Troops tried to reason with the strikers. On July 26 prisoners stormed the maximum-security punitive compound, releasing seventy-seven of its inmates who had been kept in solitary cells that spelled death in wintertime. Days later, the authorities finally acted, massing armed troops to open fire on the rebels, killing sixty-six and wounding 135.
The Vorkuta Uprising changed nothing—but in Moscow, the political climate was shifting. The winner of the struggle to succeed Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, ordered the release of hundreds of thousands of political prisoners. Later, he would denounce Stalin’s crimes at a secret session of the Communist Party, and decree the re-examination of most of the political cases of the Great Terror. By the end of 1956, over 600,000 victims of the Terror would be officially—posthumously—pardoned.
Released prisoners were given a small sum of money and travel orders to other parts of the USSR. The vast majority remained limitchiki—forbidden to live within 101 kilometers of any major city, largely to limit the political fallout of their stories on the Communist faith or urban citizens. The remaining foreign prisoners, mostly German prisoners of war, were finally allowed home. A few found their way to the U.S. and testified to Congress about the horrors of the Gulag.
Today, around 40,000 people still live in Vorkuta—many the descendants of convicts or camp guards, plus a few hardy nonagenarian women who were imprisoned there and never left. In Soviet times, Vorkuta miners and residents enjoyed a generous state subsidy for enduring the harsh conditions. Those subsidies disappeared with the end of Communism, but nonetheless most of the population stayed. In the 2000s a new gas pipeline was built, bringing new prosperity and a new generation of workers. Every year on October 31st residents meet at a monument to the victims—a small space filled with a mass of rusty barbed wire on the spot where investigative geologist Georgy Chernov pitched his tent in 1931, effectively founding the city.
But the most enduring monument to the victims of the Gulag remains in the printed words of the survivors—the stories of their lives and their battle not just to live but to retain their humanity. Reading a simple litany of horrors quickly ceases to be meaningful. As Boris Pasternak wrote of the man-made famine that killed millions in the Ukraine in the early 1930s, “There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness.” Reading about the Gulag begins to seem like a story of another planet, too distant for comprehension.
But listen to how Varlaam Shalamov, a writer who survived seventeen years in Kolyma in the Soviet Far East, defined what it meant to feel fully human in the Gulag. “I believed a person could consider himself a human being as long as he felt totally prepared to kill himself,” a character says in one of Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales.” “It was this awareness that provided the will to live. I checked myself—frequently—and felt I had the strength to die, and thus remained alive.” Both he, and Cilka, lived. And that was their victory.
The last word must go to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. “I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it,” he wrote in the foreword to his classic study, The Gulag Archipelago. “And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all, nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it.”
Acknowledgments
Lale Sokolov—you gave me your beautiful story and shared with me what you knew of Cilka Klein. Sending you my heartfelt thanks for inspiring me to write Cilka’s Journey.
Angela Meyer, on a visit to Lale’s hometown of Krompachy you sat with me on a window ledge into the small hours of the morning, solving the world’s problems and drinking Slivovitz. You encouraged me to make Cilka’s story my next project. You have been with me every step of the way as my friend and editor in telling this story. You are simply brilliant, funny, dedicated to telling stories well. From the bottom of my heart—thank you.