Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

One of the patients from the asylum had followed us to the big gate and began pleading in Russian as we drove through.

The compound was so simplified by the snowfall it could have been a Boy Scout camp, but that was a first and fleeting impression. The barbed wire at the top of the high walls and near every entrance told a truer story. So did the small barred windows, the windowless truck in which prisoners were transported, and, when I went inside, the cells, the bunks, the barracks, the torture chambers.

Perm 36 is the only intact gulag prison remaining in Russia. In Gulag, Anne Applebaum writes of Perm 36 as "a Stalinist-era lagpunkt

[camp division], later one of the harshest political camps of the 1970s and 1980s." All the other prisons have been destroyed or were converted to different uses. Perm 36 still exists because of the efforts of former prisoners, gulag historians such as Viktor Shmirov, and, as I learned later, money from the Ford Foundation.

"Not the Russian government?" I asked, though I suspected what the answer might be.

Sergei laughed and said, "Many of the people in this government were responsible for the prison"—for the fact was that Perm 36, which had operated for more than forty years, had been shut down only recently. Fifteen years ago, this had been a place of torture, forced labor, virtual slavery, and death.

"Who was sent here?" I asked as we walked from cell to cell.

"The same people as in other camps. Fifteen percent anti-Soviet, ten percent criminals, and all the others—three quarters—ordinary people accused of 'misbehavior.'"

"Petty crime?"

"No, no," Viktor said. "Missing workdays—say, if you missed three, they'd send you here for ten years. Or lateness. Or taking something from the government."

"Taking what, for example?"

"A peasant—a hungry peasant—who took three tassels of grain would be arrested and brought here. Like Sergei's uncles. But never mind these things. You have to keep in mind that people were needed. We had a bad economy. Stalin had started a program of economic modernization. You know what Churchill said: Stalin found Russia working with wooden plows and left it equipped with nuclear bombs."

"Let's keep moving," I said. Inside, even with the heat on, the barracks and cells were very cold. They had been repainted, but still they were primitive examples of inhumanity and terror.

"For twenty-four years under Stalin we became powerful," Viktor said, "but at the expense of freedom. We had no loans or credit from other countries. We had to do it all ourselves. The only source of labor was the people"—and he gestured to the workshop we were entering—"Russian people, prisoners, slaves."

Here at Perm 36 the "politicals," the criminals, the tardy workers, labored in the machine shop, making small metal Y-shaped connectors to attach wires to electrical terminals. I'd seen them on plugs, on carburetors, on batteries. Viktor said they had to be made by hand, and Perm 36 produced hundreds of thousands of them.

"Government needed labor," Viktor said, "so it enacted harsh legislation, creating fear and exploitation. This produced huge numbers of prisoners. And because they were slaves, they were an extremely mobile labor force."

As we tramped through the snowdrifts to the punishment cells, Viktor said that it was not only these slave laborers who suffered. He recalled that in his own family there was never enough food. "We were always hungry."

Perm 36 had gone through a number of phases. After 1953, some prisoners got their freedom, though they had been almost destroyed by their time in the labor camp. Then a power struggle between Khrushchev and his spy chief, Lavrenty Beria, resulted in Beria's being convicted as a spy and shot. Eight hundred of Beria's men were sent to Perm to suffer and work. Because they were canny—most of them had been spies or agents—security was increased, walls were heightened, and the camp was expanded. In 1973—and I reminded myself that I had rattled past Perm on the Trans-Siberian at that time, feeling sorry for myself—Perm was "only one of two political camps" in the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum wrote. Perm was restocked with political prisoners. In the 1980s, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, a former director of the KGB, had arrested many thousands. "The prisoners were educated and had been powerful. Some had lawyers!" More camps were built, including others around Perm.

"They built a toilet over there in 1972," Viktor said, pointing from an iced-up doorway to an outhouse in a distant part of the prison compound. "It had to serve five hundred and sixty prisoners. They lined up to use it. How did they do it? Yes, quickly."

Sergei said, "It was just another tool to humiliate prisoners."

"Exhaustion, frost, hunger, and endless humiliations," Shalamov had written of prison certainties.

I asked Viktor about the death rate at Perm 36.