expedition. âAnd later you get the big one, the salmon. In July last year I was on the Usa, not thinking of anything, and suddenly the rodâs torn out of my hands. The creature weighed fifty kilos, I could swearâthatâs my wifeâs weight!âand it flashed round and looked at meâ¦.â
On either side of us they continued: mineâgraveyardâcampâmineâgraveyardâall in ruins. Sometimes a village enfoldedthe barracks where a few ex-prisoners or their descendants lingered, with nowhere else to go. But most places remained only in memory, like the brickyard where 1,300 politicals were executed in 1937 by the ruthless commandant Kashketin. (He was awarded the Order of Lenin, then shot.) But a grey obelisk commemorates them. The punishment camp of Cementny Zavod had shrivelled to a huddle of gaunt tenements and a vomiting smokestack. Pallid women waited outside shops or sat round a vacant netball-pitch. Even five years before, minersâ strikes could rock the Kremlin; but now their pay was six months in arrears, Vasil said, and still the depleted gangs were going to work.
Then we reached the shell of Mine 17. Here, in 1943, was the first of Vorkutaâs katorga death-camps. Within a year these compounds numbered thirteen out of Vorkutaâs thirty: their purpose was to kill their inmates. Through winters in which the temperature plunged to -40°F, and the purga blizzards howled, the katorzhane lived in lightly boarded tents sprinkled with sawdust, on a floor of mossy permafrost. They worked twelve hours a day, without respite, hauling coal-trucks, and within three weeks they were broken. A rare survivor described them turned to robots, their grey-yellow faces rimmed with ice and bleeding cold tears. They ate in silence, standing packed together, seeing no one. Some work-brigades flailed themselves on in a bid for extra food, but the effort was too much, the extra too little. Within a year the first 28,000 of them were dead. A prisoner in milder times encountered a remnant of the hundreds of thousands who were sentenced between 1943 and 1947. They had survived, he said, because they were the toughestâa biological eliteâbut were now brutalised and half-insane.
Under the mineâs disembowelled head-frame, the heaps of slag and rubbish were inhabited by vagrants scavenging for metal. A horde of vicious dogs was on the loose. I started along the pit railway through shrubs and swamps and an undergrowth of ruin. The rails along the track had been torn up yard by yard. I thrust past waste-tips snowed under flocks of gulls. Then I came to a solitary brick building enclosing a range of cramped rooms. The roof was gone, but the iron-sheathed timbers of their door-framesstill stood, and their walls were windowless. They were isolation cells. Solzhenitsyn wrote that after ten daysâ incarceration, during which a prisoner might be deprived even of clothing, his constitution was wrecked, and after fifteen he was dead. Now their concrete was splitting underfoot. Into each cell the skeleton of a door still swung. Outside, wild camomile lapped against the bricks.
I stumbled into a quagmire curtained by shrubs, and waded out again. In front of me the coal trains were wheezing and clanking over the tundra. I began to imagine myself here fifty years ago. What would I have done? But knowing how physical depletion saps the will, the answer returned: You would have been no different from anyone else .
I came upon a message scratched on a stone: âI was exiled in 1949, and my father died here in 1942. Remember us.â
Â
âThey come in thousands! Flying south in autumn, thatâs when you get them. Geese, duck, teal! And thereâs a red salmon that descends the Pechora river from the Arctic into the Vorkutaâ¦.â Vasil swung the car past Mine 29, and we clambered out. The pit-wheels hung stark against the sky. A low hill, slushy with reeds and mosses,
On either side of us they continued: mineâgraveyardâcampâmineâgraveyardâall in ruins. Sometimes a village enfoldedthe barracks where a few ex-prisoners or their descendants lingered, with nowhere else to go. But most places remained only in memory, like the brickyard where 1,300 politicals were executed in 1937 by the ruthless commandant Kashketin. (He was awarded the Order of Lenin, then shot.) But a grey obelisk commemorates them. The punishment camp of Cementny Zavod had shrivelled to a huddle of gaunt tenements and a vomiting smokestack. Pallid women waited outside shops or sat round a vacant netball-pitch. Even five years before, minersâ strikes could rock the Kremlin; but now their pay was six months in arrears, Vasil said, and still the depleted gangs were going to work.
Then we reached the shell of Mine 17. Here, in 1943, was the first of Vorkutaâs katorga death-camps. Within a year these compounds numbered thirteen out of Vorkutaâs thirty: their purpose was to kill their inmates. Through winters in which the temperature plunged to -40°F, and the purga blizzards howled, the katorzhane lived in lightly boarded tents sprinkled with sawdust, on a floor of mossy permafrost. They worked twelve hours a day, without respite, hauling coal-trucks, and within three weeks they were broken. A rare survivor described them turned to robots, their grey-yellow faces rimmed with ice and bleeding cold tears. They ate in silence, standing packed together, seeing no one. Some work-brigades flailed themselves on in a bid for extra food, but the effort was too much, the extra too little. Within a year the first 28,000 of them were dead. A prisoner in milder times encountered a remnant of the hundreds of thousands who were sentenced between 1943 and 1947. They had survived, he said, because they were the toughestâa biological eliteâbut were now brutalised and half-insane.
Under the mineâs disembowelled head-frame, the heaps of slag and rubbish were inhabited by vagrants scavenging for metal. A horde of vicious dogs was on the loose. I started along the pit railway through shrubs and swamps and an undergrowth of ruin. The rails along the track had been torn up yard by yard. I thrust past waste-tips snowed under flocks of gulls. Then I came to a solitary brick building enclosing a range of cramped rooms. The roof was gone, but the iron-sheathed timbers of their door-framesstill stood, and their walls were windowless. They were isolation cells. Solzhenitsyn wrote that after ten daysâ incarceration, during which a prisoner might be deprived even of clothing, his constitution was wrecked, and after fifteen he was dead. Now their concrete was splitting underfoot. Into each cell the skeleton of a door still swung. Outside, wild camomile lapped against the bricks.
I stumbled into a quagmire curtained by shrubs, and waded out again. In front of me the coal trains were wheezing and clanking over the tundra. I began to imagine myself here fifty years ago. What would I have done? But knowing how physical depletion saps the will, the answer returned: You would have been no different from anyone else .
I came upon a message scratched on a stone: âI was exiled in 1949, and my father died here in 1942. Remember us.â
Â
âThey come in thousands! Flying south in autumn, thatâs when you get them. Geese, duck, teal! And thereâs a red salmon that descends the Pechora river from the Arctic into the Vorkutaâ¦.â Vasil swung the car past Mine 29, and we clambered out. The pit-wheels hung stark against the sky. A low hill, slushy with reeds and mosses,
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