Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"In general, prisoners were worked to death. Six percent or more died every year. But many were too sick to work. In 1984, only seven percent of the prisoners here were capable of hard work. The rest were sick or handicapped."

In the midday snowstorm, under a gunmetal sky, the snowdrifts piled to the windows, the damp rooms and dark corridors too cold to linger in, the outside temperature around 0° Fahrenheit, and crazies from the nearby asylum banging on the high iron gate, it seemed an appropriate day to visit a gulag. I did not want to see it in the summer, surrounded by high grass and picturesque log cabins and wildflowers and tweeting birds. It was most enlightening to see it at its worst, when the broken bunks and the exhibit of prisoners' artifacts—dented bowls and twisted spoons and ragged gloves—were given more meaning by the cold despair I could feel in my bones.

Viktor showed me an exhibit of photographs of well-known Soviet political prisoners: Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Babel, Varlam Shalamov; and they could have included Natan Sharansky, who had served six years in Perm 35, not far away. A leader of the struggle for Lithuanian independence, Balis Gayauskas, had been locked up for thirty-five years. One of his crimes was translating Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago into Lithuanian. He subsequently became head of state security in the Lithuanian government.

"He comes back from time to time," Viktor said.

In The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn had written: "A great writer is, so to speak, a second government. That's why no regime anywhere has ever loved its great writers, only its minor ones."

A Ukrainian dissident, Lenko Luk'ianenko, was sentenced to death; his sentence was reduced to fifteen years, which he served here, but before he was released he was given ten more years. A fellow Ukrainian, a poet named Vasyl Stus—"not a dissident," Viktor said, "but had the sort of spirit they didn't want"—spent fifteen years here, after being arrested and rearrested. A Nobel Prize candidate in 1980, Stus had lost out to Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish poet who had immigrated to California, where he wrote lyric poems in the Berkeley sunshine while Stus sat in an isolation or punishment cell translating Rilke from memory and made metal connectors in the machine shop. Stus died in the prison in 1985, "in mysterious circumstances," Viktor said. But what was the mystery? I saw Stus's horrible little cell and the narrow board of a shelf that was his bunk. I would not have lasted two days.

"I want to explain the slavery of this system," Viktor said. "I've been to the U.S. My friends there would say to me, 'We had slaves. It's like American slavery.' I said no. Here's the difference. You know Cato, the Roman? He said, To keep a slave you must give him meat, bread, and two bottles of not very good wine every week. Eh?" He let this sink in, and then he said, "On the Southern plantations, the slaves were fed because they were worth something. They were kept well. They had families and households. They had value." He smiled grimly and went on, "Gulag prisoners were slaves who were worth nothing!"

"The word the guards used for gulag prisoners," a middle-aged Russian woman who was also a historian later told me, "was dust—pwl"

She also said, "Stalin introduced fear. We lived in fear." His announced intention in setting up the gulag was "to isolate those who might possibly doubt our resolution and achievements in the great revolution."

"And look what we lost," the historian said. "Forty million in the purges from 1918 to 1953. Twenty-six million in World War Two. The best people. It's a wonder we're still here."

"What little freedom an American slave had was more than that of any gulag slave," Viktor said.

I went back to the old photographs to look at Varlam Shalamov's tormented, martyred-looking face. I had read his books but never seen his face. Where Solzhenitsyn served up piety, and redemption through suffering, Shalamov was clear-sighted about how everyone involved with the camps—prisoners and guards and party hacks—was debased: the camps represented "the corruption of the human soul." "The camps are in every way schools of the negative," he writes in one story. "Every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute." The prisoner clings to life but without any illusions because "we understood that death was no worse than life, and we feared neither." In another story, a fellow prisoner says flatly, "I'm going to Magadan. To be shot." All this in temperatures of 60 below. The wonder was that this highly intelligent man had survived, and in Kolyma Tales he had created a masterpiece out of the experience. "A human being survives by his ability to forget," he writes early in the book, and near the end, in a line that no writer would disagree with, "It's easier to bear a thing if you write it down."