Authors: Varlan Shalanov
After the war, ship after ship delivered their replacements – former Soviet citizens who were ‘repatriated’ directly to the far north-east.
Among them were many people with different experiences and habits acquired during the war, courageous people who knew how to take chances and who believed only in the gun. There were officers and soldiers, fliers and scouts…
Accustomed to the angelic patience and slavish submissiveness of the ‘Trotskyites’, the camp administration was not in the least concerned and expected nothing new.
New arrivals asked the surviving ‘aborigines’:
‘Why do you eat your soup and kasha in the dining-hall, but take your bread with you back to the barracks? Why can’t you eat the bread with your soup the way the rest of the world does?’
Smiling with the cracks of their blue mouths and showing their gums, toothless from scurvy, the local residents would answer the naïve newcomers:
‘In two weeks each of you will understand, and each of you will do the same.’
How could they be told that they had never in their lives known true hunger, hunger that lasts for years and breaks the will? How could anyone explain the passionate, all-engulfing desire to prolong the process of eating, the supreme bliss of washing down one’s bread ration with a mug of tasteless, but hot melted snow in the barracks?
But not all of the newcomers shook their heads in contempt and walked away.
Major Pugachov clearly realized that they had been delivered to their deaths – to replace these living corpses. They had been brought in the fall. With winter coming on, there was no place to run to, but in the summer a man could at least die free even if he couldn’t hope to escape completely.
It was virtually the only conspiracy in twenty years, and its web was spun all winter.
Pugachov realized that only those who did not work in the mine’s general work gang could survive the winter and still be capable of an escape attempt. After a few weeks in the work gang no one would run anywhere.
Slowly, one by one, the participants of the conspiracy became trusties. Soldatov became a cook, and Pugachov himself was appointed activities director. There were two work gang leaders, a paramedic and Ivashenko, who had formerly been a mechanic and now repaired weapons for the guards.
But no one was permitted outside ‘the wire’ without guards.
The blinding Kolyma spring began – without a single drop of rain, without any movement of ice on the rivers, without the singing of any bird. Little by little, the sun melted the snow, leaving it only in those crevices where warm rays couldn’t pierce. In the canyons and ravines, the snow lay like silver bullion till the next year.
And the designated day arrived.
There was a knock at the door of the guard hut next to the camp gates where one door led in and the other out of the camp. The guard on duty yawned and glanced at the clock. It was five a.m. ‘Just five,’ he thought.
The guard threw back the latch and admitted the man who had knocked. It was the camp cook, the convict Gorbunov. He’d come for the keys to the food storeroom. The keys were kept in the guardhouse, and Gorbunov came for them three times a day. He returned them later.
The guard on duty was supposed to open the kitchen cupboard, but he knew it was hopeless to try to control the cook, that no locks would help if the cook wanted to steal, so he entrusted the keys to the cook – especially at five in the morning.
The guard had worked more than ten years in Kolyma, had been receiving a double salary for a long time, and had given the keys to the cooks thousands of times.
‘Take ’em,’ he muttered and reached for the ruler to write up the morning report.
Gorbunov walked behind the guard, took the keys from the nail, put them in his pocket, and grabbed the guard from behind by the neck. At that very moment the door opened and the mechanic, Ivashenko, came through the door leading into the camp.
Ivashenko helped Gorbunov strangle the guard and drag his body behind the cabinet. Ivashenko stuck the guard’s revolver into his own pocket. Through the window that faced outward they could see a second guard returning along the path. Hurriedly Ivashenko donned the coat and cap of the dead man, snapped the belt shut, and sat down at the table as if he were the guard. The second guard opened the door and strode into the dark hovel of the guardhouse. He was immediately seized, strangled, and thrown behind the cabinet.
Gorbunov put on the guard’s clothing; the two conspirators now had uniforms and weapons. Everything was proceeding according to Major Pugachov’s schedule. Suddenly the wife of the second guard appeared. She’d come for the keys that her husband had accidentally taken with him.
‘We won’t strangle the woman,’ said Gorbunov, and she was tied, gagged with a towel, and put in the corner.
One of the work gangs returned from work. This had been foreseen. The overseer who entered the guardhouse was immediately disarmed and bound by the two ‘guards’. His rifle was now in the hands of the escapees. From that moment Major Pugachov took command of the operation.
The area before the gates was open to fire from two guard towers. The sentries noticed nothing unusual.
A work gang was formed somewhat earlier than usual, but in the north who can say what is early and what is late? It seemed early, but maybe it was late.
The work gang of ten men moved down the road to the mine, two by two in column. In the front and in the rear, six meters from the column of prisoners as required by the instructions, were two overcoated guards. One of them held a rifle.
From the guard tower the sentry noticed that the group turned from the road on to the path that led past the buildings where all sixty of the guards were quartered.
The sleeping quarters of the guards were located in the far end of the building. Just before the door stood the guard hut of the man on duty, and pyramids of rifles. Drowsing by the window the guard noticed, in a half-sleep, that one of the other guards was leading a gang of prisoners down the path past the windows of the guard quarters.
‘That must be Chernenko,’ the duty officer thought. ‘I must remember to write a report on him.’
The duty officer was grand master of petty squabbles, and he never missed a legitimate opportunity to play a dirty trick on someone.
This was his last thought. The door flew open and three soldiers came running into the barracks. Two rushed to the doors of the sleeping quarters and the third shot the duty officer point-blank. The soldiers were followed by the prisoners, who rushed to the pyramid of weapons; in their hands were rifles and machine-guns. Major Pugachov threw open the door to the sleeping quarters. The soldiers, barefoot and still in their underwear, rushed to the door, but two machine-gun bursts at the ceiling stopped them.
‘Lie down,’ Pugachov ordered, and the soldiers crawled under their cots. The machine-gunners remained on guard beside the door.
The ‘work gang’ changed unhurriedly into military uniform and began gathering up food, weapons, and ammunition.
Pugachov ordered them not to take any food except biscuits and chocolate. In return they took as many weapons and as much ammunition as possible.
The paramedic hung the first-aid bag over his shoulder.
Once again the escapees felt they were soldiers.
Before them was the taiga, but was it any more terrible than the marshes of Stokhod?
They walked out on to the highway, and Pugachov raised his hand to stop a passing truck.
‘Get out!’ He opened the door of the driver’s cab.
‘But I…’
‘Climb out, I tell you.’
The driver got out, and Georgadze, lieutenant of the tank troops, got behind the wheel. Beside him was Pugachov. The escapee soldiers crawled into the back, and the truck sped off.
‘There ought to be a right turn about here.’
‘We’re out of gas!’
Pugachov cursed.
They entered the taiga as if they were diving into water, disappearing immediately in the enormous silent forest. Checking the map, they remained on the cherished path to freedom, pushing their way straight through the amazing local underbrush.
Camp was set up quickly for the night, as if they were used to doing it.
Only Ashot and Malinin couldn’t manage to quiet down.
‘What’s the problem over there?’ asked Pugachov.
‘Ashot keeps trying to prove that Adam was deported from paradise to Ceylon.’
‘Why Ceylon?’
‘That’s what the Muslims say,’ responded Ashot.
‘Are you a Tartar?’
‘Not me, my wife is.’
‘I never heard anything of the sort,’ said Pugachov, smiling.
‘Right, and neither did I,’ Malinin joined in.
‘All right, knock it off. Let’s get some sleep.’
It was cold and Major Pugachov woke up. Soldatov was sitting up, alert, holding the machine-gun on his knees. Pugachov lay on his back and located the North Star, the favorite star of all wanderers. The constellations here were arranged differently than in European Russia; the map of the firmament was slightly shifted, and the Big Dipper had slid down to the horizon. The taiga was cold and stern, and the enormous twisted pines stood far from each other. The forest was filled with the anxious silence familiar to all hunters. This time Pugachov was not the hunter, but a tracked beast, and the forest silence was thrice dangerous.
It was his first night of liberty, the first night after long months and years of torment. Lying on his back, he recalled how everything before him had begun as if it were a detective film. It was as if Pugachov were playing back a film of his twelve comrades so that the lazy everyday course of events flashed by with unbelievable speed. And now they had finished the film and were staring at the inscription,
The End
. They were free, but this was only the beginning of the struggle, the game, of life…
Major Pugachov remembered the German prisoner-of-war camp from which he had escaped in 1944. The front was nearing the town, and he was working as a truck driver on clean-up details inside the enormous camp. He recalled how he had driven through the single strand of barbed wire at high speed, ripping up the wooden posts that had been hurriedly punched into the ground. He remembered the sentry shots, shouting, the mad, zigzag drive through the town, the abandoned truck, the night road to the front and the meetings with his army, the interrogation, the accusation of espionage, and the sentence – twenty-five years.
Major Pugachov remembered how Vlasov’s emissaries had come to the camp with a ‘manifesto’ to the hungry, tormented Russian soldiers.
‘Your government has long since renounced you. Any prisoner of war is a traitor in the eyes of your government,’ the Vlasovites said. And they showed Moscow newspapers with their orders and speeches. The prisoners of war had already heard of this earlier. It was no accident that Russian prisoners of war were the only ones not to receive packages. Frenchmen, Americans, Englishmen, and prisoners of all nations received packages, letters, had their own national clubs, and enjoyed each other’s friendship. The Russians had nothing except hunger and bitterness for the entire world. It was no wonder that so many men from the German prisoner-of-war camps joined the ‘Russian Army of Liberation’.
Major Pugachov did not believe Vlasov’s officers until he made his way back to the Red Army. Everything that the Vlasovites had said was true. The government had no use for him. The government was afraid of him. Later came the cattle cars with bars on the windows and guards, the long trip to Eastern Siberia, the sea, the ship’s hold, and the gold-mines of the far north. And the hungry winter.
Pugachov sat up, and Soldatov gestured to him with his hand. It was Soldatov who had the honor of beginning the entire affair, although he was among the last to be accepted into the conspiracy. Soldatov had not lost his courage, panicked, or betrayed anyone. A good man!
At his feet lay Captain Khrustalyov, a flier whose fate was similar to Pugachov’s: his plane shot down by the Germans, captivity, hunger, escape, and a military tribunal and the forced-labor camp. Khrustalyov had just turned over on his other side, and his cheek was red from where he had been lying on it. It was Khrustalyov to whom Pugachov had first chosen several months before to reveal his plan. They agreed it was better to die than be a convict, better to die with a gun in hand than be exhausted by hunger, rifle butts, and the boots of the guards.
Both Khrustalyov and the major were men of action, and they discussed in minute detail the insignificant chance for which these twelve men were risking their lives. The plan was to hijack a plane from the airport. There were several airports in the vicinity, and the men were on their way through the taiga to the nearest one. Khrustalyov was the group leader whom the escapees sent for after attacking the guards. Pugachov didn’t want to leave without his closest friend. Now Khrustalyov was sleeping quietly and soundly.
Next to him lay Ivashenko, the mechanic who repaired the guards’ weapons. Ivashenko had learned everything they needed to know for a successful operation: where the weapons were kept, who was on duty, where the munitions stores were. Ivashenko had been a military intelligence officer.
Levitsky and Ignatovich, pilots and friends of Captain Khrustalyov, lay pressed against each other.
The tankman, Polyakov, had spread his hands on the backs of his neighbors, the huge Georgadze and the bald joker Ashot, whose surname the major couldn’t remember at the moment. Head resting on his first-aid bag, Sasha Malinin was sound asleep. He’d started out as a paramedic – first in the army, then in the camps, then under Pugachov’s command.
Pugachov smiled. Each had surely imagined the escape in his own way, but Pugachov could see that everything was going smoothly and each understood the other perfectly. Pugachov was convinced he had done the right thing. Each knew that events were developing as they should. There was a commander, there was a goal – a confident commander and a difficult goal. There were weapons and freedom. They slept a sound soldier’s sleep even in this empty pale-lilac polar night with its strange but beautiful light in which the trees cast no shadows.