Of the half-a-million `convicts’ shipped to Siberia to fuel the engines of the Stalinist regime, only a few survived. Eventually, they were given their freedom, and a paper to say they had not committed any crime. Yet 50 years on, many are still living in their icy prison. James Meek reports
On a winter’s day in 1945, three men came into the shop where Olga Yeremchuk worked. They were in uniform, but so were most men of fighting age. She had no suspicion that they intended to enslave her. They picked a few items off the shelves to buy, some eau de cologne and cosmetics. Then they said: “Come with us.” They were from the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. She was never to be wholly free again.
They took her to Norilsk, a slave-labour colony in the Russian Arctic, 4 000km away from her green European home. Today, 54 years after her arrest, Yeremchuk is still caged there, in the frozen, choking wasteland of a city which stole her youth. Most cities contain a prison. Norilsk was a prison which gave birth to a city, on a bed of human bones.
To find Yeremchuk still living in this awful place in 1999 would be like finding a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz in a flat on the site of the death camp. In theory, she is free to leave. In practice, she has nowhere else to go. The authorities have grudgingly rehabilitated her – a scrap of paper with a terse acknowledgement that she was never guilty of any crime – and then forgotten that she exists.
Of the many evils of the new Russia, the fate of Yeremchuk and thousands of other elderly political prisoners shipped to the Arctic as slave labourers is the most shaming. Stalin’s network of slave-labour camps, where millions of innocents were worked or starved to death, was the cold foundation stone of Soviet tyranny. Yet the government of President Boris Yeltsin, which overthrew that tyranny, does little to honour its worst victims, let alone pay for them to leave the inhuman industrial wastelands where they are stranded. More disturbingly, the Russian people do not seem to care. When Russia became free, the ex-prisoners in the old polar outposts of the Gulag discovered that freedom and liberation were not the same.
“I was here as a convict for 10 years,” said Yeremchuk. “Then, for another five years, I wasn’t allowed to leave Norilsk. After that, I had nothing. I didn’t have any money to move. It’s been like that ever since.”
It took a month by convict train and nine days in the hold of an NKVD slave ship for the prisoners to reach Norilsk. Each spring, when the ice melted, cargoes of slaves were shuttled in from prisons all over the Soviet Union. For the 21 years, from 1935 to 1956, when the labour camps existed there, an estimated 500 000 prisoners passed through Norilsk. The peak was in the post-war years, when tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Belorussians, Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians arrived from the territories newly absorbed by the USSR.
A short, sharp injustice, like a sudden pain, makes victims angry. They shout and complain. A long, continual injustice stuns and tires. Anger demands energy, and in Norilsk, you could not afford to be angry if you wanted to stay alive. The female camp survivors I spoke to in the Arctic shied away from summoning up their feelings when they were, effectively, kidnapped by the state. When they were shipped to the Arctic, they had already seen great suffering: war had brought destruction, the Nazis and local collaborators had murdered the Jews, ruthless anti-Soviet partisan groups were active.
Yet the war was over. They were teenage girls, full of hope and energy, ready to help rebuild communities and lives in the Eastern Europe spring. Instead, they were arrested, beaten, humiliated, charged, sentenced, packed into convict wagons and exiled to a world of cold, darkness and pain.
Yeremchuk, an ethnic Ukrainian, had only been a citizen of the Soviet motherland for a few months when she was accused of betraying it. She was born and brought up in the eastern part of Poland, inhabited before the war by Ukrainians, Jews and Poles. The region was annexed by the USSR in 1944. The pretty 17- year-old barely spoke Russian and never fully understood what her captors were talking about. She was less a political prisoner than a part of Stalin’s spoils of war, like the tribute of slaves taken by the conquerors of antiquity.
She was among thousands of prisoners gathered by the NKVD in the jail in the regional capital, Lviv. In April 1945, as the victorious Red Army was about to complete its liberation of eastern Europe, the slaves were marched through town to the railway station, screened by armed guards and dogs. Yeremchuk’s mother and sister were among the Ukrainians who lined the streets, shrieking and weeping, to watch. (Later they, too, were arrested and sent to Siberia, where they died.)
The exact number of prisoners who perished in Norilsk is unknown. The former KGB still refuses to allow unrestricted access to the Norilsk prison records in Krasnoyarsk. Yeltsin does not think the issue important enough to intervene. The unnumbered, unmarked dead are buried in the flanks of Norilsk’s dominant landmark, Mount Schmidt, a colossus of rumpled grey stone and snow pocked with mine shafts.
“It was more the men who died,” said Yeremchuk. “They were taller. They were bigger. They needed to eat. And there was nothing to eat. What was a bit of bread and a bit of dry saltfish? They were hungry, the frost was intense. They became thinner and weaker, they went to work, and they were no more. No more. The Latvians and Lithuanians particularly, they were so tall – big healthy guys. I saw a lot of them when I worked in the mine. They went to work and never came back. They buried them all under Schmidt. The mountain is full of them.”
Norilsk is four hours by passenger jet from Moscow. But that doesn’t convey how remote it is. One way to locate Norilsk on the map is to find Calcutta and move your finger in a straight line due north until you reach open water. There, where the river Yenisey flows into the Kara Sea, is the world’s northernmost industrial city. No roads or railways lead to Norilsk. For little short of a thousand miles in any direction, there is nothing but rock, snow, ice, moss, icebergs, sparse, stunted larch and the occasional reindeer herder. In the brief summer, it can be reached by ship, but for most of the year, the only way to get there is by air or by nuclear-powered icebreaker from Murmansk.
When I first visited Norilsk, in 1994, it was during the 44-day-long Arctic night, when the sun never rises above the horizon. The Ilyushin passenger jet landed in the darkness of another planet, a tiny rectangle of light pegged out from the infinite wasteland. Preparing to emerge from the plane was like preparing for a space walk. The passengers draped themselves in complex layers of clothing and donned bulbous fur hats with thick, drooping ear flaps to cross the short stretch of packed snow to waiting cars and buses.
When I returned five years later, it was after the spring equinox, and deceptively bright. We sped from the airport in a comfortable taxi through undulating snowfields lit by the sun. It looked mild outside, but it wasn’t. It was -38C – perfect weather for a temperature inversion. We rounded a corner and saw ahead of us a wall of yellow smog, hundreds of metres high and thick as soup. Hanging between the smog cloud and the heavens were two immense chimneys, like the stilts of an unseen giant, the first monuments of the metallurgical enterprise which runs and justifies this city – Norilsk Nickel, known as The Combine. Inside the pollution bubble, a taste of sulphur settles at the back of the throat, a taste that never entirely leaves until you do.
Norilsk’s 200 000 inhabitants are used to the sensation, and prefer the days of smog to other kinds of weather. The most feared blizzard, the Black Purga, can dump fantastic quantities of snow in a short time. Drifts eight storeys high have been recorded, and the early slaves spent much of their time simply clearing snow.
One survivor, Yulia Dorenskaya, recalled that when she arrived in 1945, the little train which had been built at terrible human cost to run the 104km from Norilsk to the river port of Dudinka, took one-and-a-half weeks to reach the city as slave gangs toiled to clear the snow ahead of it. Another torment is pure, deep cold. Temperatures as low as -75C were experienced in the 1940s, within shouting distance of the world record low of -89C clocked in Antarctica.
Now there is central heating for each little flat in Norilsk. There are schools, a well- equipped hospital, a good theatre. What is eerily lacking is signs – monuments, plaques, street names – of the victims whose lives were spent, or ended, clawing the foundations for these buildings out of the frozen earth with pick and shovel under armed guard, for no greater reward than a couple of kilograms of bread and the hope of seeing another day.
When the first slaves arrived on the site in 1935, there was nothing there but rock and tundra. By the time the first post-war prisoners flooded in, the factories producing nickel and other strategic metals were smoking away. The megalomaniac futurist dreams of Stalin and his polar slave directors – that human beings could be made to live and work in the Arctic -had been made real. The fact that so many of them died along the way, and that those who did not were miserable, was not thought to matter.
One day, I went with Maria Kolmagorova, a 73- year-old survivor of the Norilsk labour camps, to see the only place in the city where there are public memorials to the dead. She grew up in a family of peasant farmers in what was then eastern Poland, near Lviv. She remembered their big orchard, with grapes, pears, plums, apricots and cherries.
Someone she knew had denounced her, and in January 1946 she was arrested. The tribunal accused her of treachery because she had relatives in the United States. She got 10 years. Her two granddaughters, Spice Girls fans, sat on their hands and swung their legs in the parlour-cum-bedroom of Kolmagorova’s tiny flat, watching as granny wrapped up against the cold: a thin blue coat, felt boots, a woollen scarf, a woollen hat. She couldn’t afford fur.
We drove in a taxi to the market. Kolmagorova bought a bunch of yellow narcissus from a trader who had airfreighted them in. We headed for Mount Schmidt. Close up, the hill is a forest of pylons, chimneys, cables, corroded pitheads, machine sheds and pipes. The rock is gouged and scored where the Combine has quested for metals. Camp survivors say the Combine’s bulldozers have ploughed through mass graves.
Our driver had heard of the monuments, but had no idea where they were. After several false starts, we found them: a group of memorials built by Russians, Balts and Poles, lost among the industrial clutter on the hillside. The Russian memorials consist of a tiny chapel and a slab set in the ground, about 50m up a slope from the road. Worried that the elderly Kolmagorova might fall, I went behind, ready to catch her. We set out up the hill. I was wearing a parka designed for Arctic expeditions, a heavy-duty synthetic fleece, a Norwegian woollen jumper and two layers underneath, besides a hat, balaclava, gloves and heavy boots. The cold seemed to penetrate to my skin immediately. Kolmagorova padded effortlessly across a steep, rippled patch of snow and ice. I followed and fell flat on my face. Kolmagorova turned with a look of mild concern and moved on.
The wind broke frozen petals from the flowers and they fell on to the slab. She read aloud the inscription, written in the Old Church Slavonic used in Orthodox church services: “Peace to their ashes/Honour to their names/May they be remembered forever/Grieve for those who passed through the Gulag/For the victims of political repression, the prisoners of Norilsk concentration camp, let there be repentance.”
She dropped the flower stalks, now brittle as glass, on to the memorial, and we returned to the car. It had been 10 minutes of very light exercise for a well-fed, well-clothed European male in his thirties, in typical March temperatures for Norilsk. Already it hurt. The men and women of the Gulag endured 12-hour working days, seven days a week, for years on end. In winter, they wore thin, ragged quilted jackets, trousers, hats and felt boots.
They were marched to work by armed escorts in the morning and marched back to barracks at night. They had a work quota to fulfil. If they did not fulfil it, they would be given less to eat. If they were given less to eat, they would weaken, making the next day’s quota harder still.
“If you didn’t fulfil your target, you got 700g of bread. If you did, you got a kilogram. Sometimes they’d give you 600g. It was easy to die,” said Jadwiga Malevich, taken from her home near Brest, Belorussia. A neighbour, afraid her friendship with occupying Germans would get her arrested, denounced Malevich instead. On her first morning in Norilsk, Malevich woke up to find her hair had frozen solid.
“I had typhoid and diptheria,” she said. “I survived the typhoid, but I saw how people were dying around me. So many died. A sledge would come, and they’d lay the bodies on it like logs, heads this way, feet that, and lay a stretch of canvas on top. They’d take it off to Schmidt. They’d throw you in a ditch, cover you up, and that was it. Their hearts stopped. They were hungry and they were cold. That was it.”
Dorenskaya, who had the relatively cushy job of camp hairdresser, recalled how she used to have to fetch coal for the stove from a bunker in a separate building. “There were convicts who were sick. They couldn’t walk any more; they were skin and bone. They just lay there. When they died, they stored them in the coal bunker. They’d tie a label to their toes and leave them there, naked as the day they were born, to wait for the sledge to take them to be buried. Sometimes, there’d be 100 or more.”
There are thought to be about 150 former slaves – or victims of political repression, in Russian terminology – still living in Norilsk. There are hundreds more in other bleak northern communities such as Vorkuta, Pevek and Magadan. Their lives followed much the same pattern: 10 years forced labour, followed by a five-year ban on leaving the town where they were registered. By that time, they had usually married and settled down; like other, voluntary Arctic workers, they planned to save up and move south when they were older. Then post-Soviet inflation destroyed their savings. Now they are trapped.
Sofia Diner, an ethnic German exiled to Siberia at the outbreak of war and posted to Norilsk after conscription into something called the Labour Army – not much better than being a convict slave – said she had not visited the south of the country since before the USSR collapsed. Her pension is worth less than R200 a month. She showed me her rehabilitated person’s ID. It read: “The holder of this document is entitled to the privileges detailed in article 16 of the law of the Russian Federation on rehabilitation of the victims of political repression.”
“There are a lot of privileges, but you can’t get them,” she said. “I had nowhere to go when I was released. I didn’t have a flat in Russia proper. And I still don’t have one. You need to work here 100 years to earn enough for a flat there. If they gave me a flat, of course I’d go. We’ve lived here for 56 years. We haven’t seen summers and green leaves. You see on television …” She stopped, trying not to cry. “On television, you see green forests. I haven’t seen them for so long. I haven’t seen a proper tree for so long.”
Echoing the view of most ordinary Russians, the country’s political establishment is reluctant to see Stalin-era prisoners as a special case worthy of honour and care from what little resources the state has. Last year, a coalition of communists, ultra- nationalists and Thatcherite-liberals in Parliament voted down an amendment which would have broadened the privileges enjoyed by former slaves. The idea of financial compensation for the years of forced labour is not even on the agenda.
Occasionally, the local authorities offer them flats in regions like southern Siberia on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, but the old prisoners are reluctant to trade in the meagre securities of life in Norilsk for housing elsewhere unless it is exactly where they want to be. It is not just a financial issue, but a moral one. The low status of former political prisoners compared to, for instance, veterans of World War II, is one of the enduring mysteries of post-Soviet Russia.
In Norilsk, a site has been earmarked, opposite the Combine headquarters, for a monument to the innocent slaves who made the enterprise possible, but the monument has not been built. The Combine, which effectively runs Norilsk, is not a state firm, nor is it run entirely by old functionaries seeking to defend Stalin’s methods: it was bought for a fraction of its commercial value in 1995 by Vladimir Potanin, one of Russia’s richest industrialists, a man made very wealthy now both by the old slavery and the new freedoms, and a business partner of George Soros.
The waning and death of censorship from the end of the 1980s could have been the start of a creative flood of artistic and documentary works dealing explicitly and head-on with the cruelty of the Stalin years as the need to be oblique, to work exclusively with hints, symbols and partial material, ended. Russian artists, writers, historians and film-makers have largely declined the opportunity.
There has been no Russian Schindler’s List, no Russian Shoah, no Russian Sorrow and the Pity. No Russian has taken up the torch of Alexander Solzhenitsyn – whose monumental 1974 book Gulag Archipelago, brave and brilliant as it is, is an idiosyncratic and necessarily partial account of what happened in the slave camps.
Many Russians still believe there were few, if any, innocent convicts, buying the old Soviet line that the labour camps were packed exclusively with traitors and criminals. But you might expect this group to be more than balanced out by the host of Russians whose families were touched by Stalin’s reign of terror.
Svetlana Ebejans, a researcher at Norilsk’s museum and the first outsider to be allowed a peep into the Norilsk prison camp records in Krasnoyarsk, said she felt that many Russians genuinely doubted whether those in the labour camps suffered more than those who were free. The country suffered from a martyrdom complex, she argued, with those who had experienced some of the harshest fates enduring it stoically and those who had not believing that they had.
“People my age and younger say that their parents weren’t prisoners, but that they also worked hard and lived badly,” said Ebejans. “They ask why we want to put up Gulag exhibits. They ask why the former prisoners need special pensions and benefits. No one wants to ask themselves what the difference is between freedom and confinement. Nobody wants to put themselves in the place of women who were humiliated and suffered pain every day. I don’t understand it.”
In some respects, the fate of Norilsk’s former slaves reflects the fate of Russia. With its suffocating restrictions on people’s movement and behaviour, even after Stalin died, the Soviet Union was a form of vast prison. Now the prison is open, and the prisoners are free to go. But most have nowhere to live except their cells, so they stay there.