Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Our last visit was to the isolation, or punishment, cells, each a bare cement box with four wooden shelves. I stepped in, and Sergei, in an exuberant fit of macabre humor, slammed the door shut and yelled at me through the door slit. I stood in the semi-darkness shivering, though some warmth was palpable on the pipes bolted to the wall. Trying to conceal my alarm, I shouldered the door open.

Viktor said, "A former prisoner told me, 'I remember every night I spent in that cell. I woke up five times a night. I rubbed my body against the pipes. I did exercises to stop shivering. We had no blanket.'"

Many former prisoners told Viktor the same story of the isolation cell. It was a torture chamber, he said as we walked outside into the snow. The prisoners got a quarter of the food the others were given. A zek, Anne Applebaum wrote, could be punished for sitting on his bed in the daytime, for not wearing socks, or for walking too slowly. And a sick or injured man might end up being held (as in one well-documented case) for two months "before being taken to the hospital."

All this history was well within the memory of most people I met. These were the sentiments of a woman activist, one Madam Alexeev, who appeared in a short film about Perm 36: "To see that this is not a labor camp but a museum is to realize what an incredible step we've taken from our years of slavery."

True, but the film had been underwritten by the Ford Foundation, and many of the prison guards, the floggers, the torturers, the spies, the men hissing the word "dust" at the suffering slave laborers, the hacks and political flunkies who had made this prison possible, were in the Russian government now—including Russian president Vladimir Putin, who had headed the KGB when Perm 36 had been a place of great suffering and death.

In the lowering darkness of late afternoon we drove back to the city of Perm on the empty roads. The snowstorm had not abated. The landscape seemed much bleaker and colder for my having seen the slave labor camp hidden in the hills.

***

FOR ALL THE UPBEAT TALK of Perm as the setting of Doctor Zhivago

and Chekhov's Three Sisters, I still could not ease my mind after I'd seen the gulag. Many places in Perm, some of them innocent-looking, were associated with repression or imprisonment. Sergei only depressed me more when he said things like "Dostoyevsky walked down this street on his way to prison in Omsk!" and, at the Kama River, "Look at this river—barges brought prisoners here from Moscow, before the railway! Even in czarist times."

And long afterwards, too. In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam recounts her experience of misery and suffering passing through Perm on a barge with her husband, Osip. The Perm Public Library had mounted an exhibit about Pasternak, which was also a recounting of repression, imprisonment, and book banning—the 1957 novel had not appeared in Perm until more than thirty years later.

And the churches, too, every one that I saw—lovely eighteenth-century onion-domed buildings, not just in Perm but in Kungur, down the Siberian Road, and the Belogorsky Monastery high on a hill outside the village of Kalinino—had served as either a prison or a madhouse, many of the rooms used for torture or solitary confinement. Some of these handsome buildings had functioned as prisons until 1990.

"See the bullet marks?" Sergei said.

He traced his gloved fingers on the deeply pitted brickwork of the Belogorsky Cathedral wall as we stood averting our faces from the sharp freezing wind. The wind was so strong it tipped my body, and I had trouble standing upright. This hilltop in the Urals was the coldest place I'd been in Russia. The whole wall was plastered with blown snow and ice, but the gouged bricks were unusual.

"After Stalin took over this church in 1930 and made it a prison, the police lined up seventy-four monks against this wall, five at a time, and shot them."

Later, a Russian told me in passing, "You know why people were imprisoned and tortured in churches? Huh? Because of the thick walls and the strong construction. They were soundproof. No one outside could hear the screams."

The next day, more memories of misery at the Peter and Paul Cathedral, the oldest stone building in Perm—and another former prison, like Belogorsky, and St. Nicholas in Kungur. Up to their knees in snow, nine children stood looking hopeful—most of them skinny and pale-faced adolescents who were very cold—with their hands out, begging as the snow fell on their heads.

"They are from poor families," Yelena said.

But after the experience of Perm 36, even their sadness was an anticlimax. We went to the ice caves outside the city of Kungur; they were dungeon-like, like a deep freeze three miles deep, just darkness, tumbled boulders, and slimy stalactites. The entrance was protected by clanking steel doors, making me think that these caves, too, might have served as a prison in earlier times.