Gulag Voices by Anne Applebaum Read Free Book Online Page B

worked in the cookhouse, the ration store, sauna; stoked the central heating plant; acted as barbers, hospital orderlies, administration personnel, bookkeepers, accountants, clerks, copy-typists (there were only two typewriters in the camp to cope with the immense amount of paperwork), cleaners, sweepers, transport workers, etc. A small party of prisoners was dispatched twice a week, heavily guarded, to the nearest village, Syemyonovka, about seventeen kilometers [ten and a half miles] distant. It was the last “station” where food was deposited for collection by men from a few camps in the area. Traveling in horse-drawn carts, these prisoners collected barrels of salt fish, black bread, and vegetables, and, for the use of the soldiers and such civilian personnel as were in the camp, white bread, cereals, oil, margarine, flour, sugar, tea, coffee and condensed milk, etc.
    For the rest of us, day after day, labor in the forest. Our departure each morning was bizarre. Among so many prisoners there were represented all the professions, and very soon after our arrival the commandant had organized a “band” of musicians. Some were professionals, others amateur, but together they made quite good music. Each morning the “band” stood near the gate playing military-style music, and we were exhorted to march out “strongly and happily” to our day’s work. Having played until the end of the column had passed through the gate, the musicians abandoned their instruments and, tacking themselves onto the end of the column, joined the workers walking into the forest.
    When we arrived at whatever site was being worked, the first task for two of the men was to build a fire for the guards. We worked, cutting as many trees down as possible, trimming and stacking the wood in the prescribed way. Work continued until midday, when if we were lucky in our guard and he was one of the kinder and more humane ones, he would arrange for small parties to take a break in turn, which meant that we could get nearer the fire while we rested and ate our bread. Work continued through the afternoon and early evening, until at 6:00 P.M. the guard took out his whistle and blew it.
    All the tools we used were potential weapons, and the guards were very much aware of this, as were we. As the ranks of men fell into formation to begin the long walk back to the camp each night, the guards walked up and down the line reminding us that any attempt to break ranks would earn a bullet.
    Carrying the heavy saws and choppers, ropes slung over shoulders, we straggled rather than marched back toward camp, where all the forestry equipment was stored for the night in large huts outside the gates. The equipment put away safely for the night, we entered the camp and were allowed one hour in which to wash, rest, and collect our evening soup. At 9:00 P.M. we once more stood in ranks of five on the barrack square while the guards counted (if we were lucky) and re-counted (if we were not); and so, finally, merciful sleep.

5.
    ANATOLY ZHIGULIN
    T hough his childhood was marked by war and his adolescence by arrest and incarceration, Anatoly Zhigulin retained a powerful nostalgia for an older, simpler, holier Russia throughout his life. He was born in 1930 in a small Russian village, and an idyllic image of what Russia had been—and should be—permeated the poetry for which he became famous after his return from the camps in 1954. At times that nostalgia also seeps into Black Stones, the memoir he wrote of the five years he spent in the Gulag.
    Though Zhigulin’s poetry was officially published during the Soviet period, Black Stones appeared only in the late 1980s following the introduction of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms. The book became a best seller in Russia not only because of Zhigulin’s portrayal of his Gulag experience but also because he described a forgotten generation of teenagers, young men and women who came of age in the late 1940s. Inspired by a