lakes there. Hundreds! And chock-full of fish! You can bribe geologists or soldiers to take you out in a jeep, and they drop you where you want. As for thisââhe dismissed Vorkuta with a backhandââeverything will get better! Itâs the worst moment now. Soonâ¦â
But the town was slipping away, and before us unrolled a ghastly no manâs land. For miles its grasslands bunched and undulated with the scars of vanished buildings; and some forgotten war, it seemed, had littered its surface with scrap-iron and ruin. All colour had drained away. Even the sky hung in thundery black and white. Pylons and telegraph poles cross-hatched half the land, while enormous hot-water pipes wormed below, their lagging spilt out over the discoloured grass.
Our car shuddered into pot-holes. We were quite alone. Vasil started telling me fishing and hunting tales, and drove more carelessly as he dreamt of salmon and Arctic fox. Ahead our horizon was bloated with slag-heaps and chimneystacks. Polluted tributaries of the Vorkuta river wandered about. Sometimes I could not tell if a mine were working or wrecked. We would pass a ruin with no man or truck in sight, its shutes snapped off and chimneys extinct; then its pit-wheel would start turning. Surely that was the wind! But no. Deep beneath those installations the earth was teeming with men.
Yet above ground, we were driving among ghosts. Every mine was shadowed by the traces of a prison camp or cemetery. They ruffled the soil with terraces, crashed-in barracks, rotted watch-towers. Sometimes I would leave Vasil and tramp away alone. My imagination was failing me. I wanted to shock myself into pity; but instead I felt a distant recoil and bewilderment. The ground seemed sick underfoot. I was afraid of what I might kick there. I walked lightly over its corrugations. I tried to remember any individual who had died hereâa Mandelstam, a Babel. He might have stirred some sharp, particular loss. But I knew of no one. Only a nameless nation of the dead, whom I could not quite separate from its persecutors.
These camps were self-contained states. They evolved in a perverted reflection of the world outside. After Stalinâs pact with Hitler in 1939, the mass of Russian and Ukrainian convicts were joined by tens of thousands of Poles, and as early as 1943 Russian soldiers recaptured from the Germans were incarcerated here as traitors. With the annexation of the Baltic states, the Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians poured inâthose whoâd fought against Hitler and Stalin indifferentlyâand by the warâs end Vorkutaâs patchwork of nations embraced Germans, Japanese, Nationalist Chinese, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Persians, several French and Americans, even a Tibetan herdsman who had strayed over the Mongolian border.
Inside the camps the swarm of guiltless politicals was tyrannised by the tight-knit criminal fraternity imprisoned with them. These blatnye lived by their own savage laws, conducted their own executions, seized whatever privileges were going. The camp administration ignored or used them. The guards could be as vulnerable as the prisoners. Any carelessness, any untoward mercy, and they might be shot. The pervasive feel was one less of sadism than of brute indifference. By overwork, half-starvation and piercing cold, the convicts were ground down into an animal mass. On a daily ration of porridge, three ounces of fish and a few drops of oil, they laboured under a quota system often impossible to fulfil. They perished of typhus, tuberculosis, pneumonia, or dropped dead of heart failure as they hauled the coal-trucks up the pit. Sometimes their comrades concealed their corpses so they could draw their rations; but within three days the bodiesâ stench betrayed them.
ââ¦And in winter you just cut a hole in the ice, drop in a line, and up they comeâgraylings by the dozen!â Vasil was anticipating his next
But the town was slipping away, and before us unrolled a ghastly no manâs land. For miles its grasslands bunched and undulated with the scars of vanished buildings; and some forgotten war, it seemed, had littered its surface with scrap-iron and ruin. All colour had drained away. Even the sky hung in thundery black and white. Pylons and telegraph poles cross-hatched half the land, while enormous hot-water pipes wormed below, their lagging spilt out over the discoloured grass.
Our car shuddered into pot-holes. We were quite alone. Vasil started telling me fishing and hunting tales, and drove more carelessly as he dreamt of salmon and Arctic fox. Ahead our horizon was bloated with slag-heaps and chimneystacks. Polluted tributaries of the Vorkuta river wandered about. Sometimes I could not tell if a mine were working or wrecked. We would pass a ruin with no man or truck in sight, its shutes snapped off and chimneys extinct; then its pit-wheel would start turning. Surely that was the wind! But no. Deep beneath those installations the earth was teeming with men.
Yet above ground, we were driving among ghosts. Every mine was shadowed by the traces of a prison camp or cemetery. They ruffled the soil with terraces, crashed-in barracks, rotted watch-towers. Sometimes I would leave Vasil and tramp away alone. My imagination was failing me. I wanted to shock myself into pity; but instead I felt a distant recoil and bewilderment. The ground seemed sick underfoot. I was afraid of what I might kick there. I walked lightly over its corrugations. I tried to remember any individual who had died hereâa Mandelstam, a Babel. He might have stirred some sharp, particular loss. But I knew of no one. Only a nameless nation of the dead, whom I could not quite separate from its persecutors.
These camps were self-contained states. They evolved in a perverted reflection of the world outside. After Stalinâs pact with Hitler in 1939, the mass of Russian and Ukrainian convicts were joined by tens of thousands of Poles, and as early as 1943 Russian soldiers recaptured from the Germans were incarcerated here as traitors. With the annexation of the Baltic states, the Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians poured inâthose whoâd fought against Hitler and Stalin indifferentlyâand by the warâs end Vorkutaâs patchwork of nations embraced Germans, Japanese, Nationalist Chinese, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Persians, several French and Americans, even a Tibetan herdsman who had strayed over the Mongolian border.
Inside the camps the swarm of guiltless politicals was tyrannised by the tight-knit criminal fraternity imprisoned with them. These blatnye lived by their own savage laws, conducted their own executions, seized whatever privileges were going. The camp administration ignored or used them. The guards could be as vulnerable as the prisoners. Any carelessness, any untoward mercy, and they might be shot. The pervasive feel was one less of sadism than of brute indifference. By overwork, half-starvation and piercing cold, the convicts were ground down into an animal mass. On a daily ration of porridge, three ounces of fish and a few drops of oil, they laboured under a quota system often impossible to fulfil. They perished of typhus, tuberculosis, pneumonia, or dropped dead of heart failure as they hauled the coal-trucks up the pit. Sometimes their comrades concealed their corpses so they could draw their rations; but within three days the bodiesâ stench betrayed them.
ââ¦And in winter you just cut a hole in the ice, drop in a line, and up they comeâgraylings by the dozen!â Vasil was anticipating his next
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