Siberia - The river Ob

JOURNEY TO THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

THE FORGOTTEN LAND

Vorkuta 1991

The hospital stands on top of a mass grave, as does the buss station. The town has been built by prisoners 'on the skulls and bones of these very same prisoners'. For years Vorkuta was one of the main ports in the Gulag Archipelago and the signs are still there. So are the former prisoners, who stayed in this town north of the polar circle because they had nowhere else to go because no one wanted them back.

Julia Alexeyva Kapminya remembers well the night she was arrested together with her father. "It was March 12, 1937, his birthday," she says. "We had eaten at a restaurant, but it had not been fun. Father had been tense. He didn't want to talk and he was not his usual self. That night at 3 A.M. three men of the NKVD (the KGB's precursor) knocked on the door of our Moscow appartment. I remember Father's last words as he said good-bye. 'Don't loose faith in yourself, my little girl, otherwise you will die,' he said. "Those words saved my life."

She speaks in a low voice, telling her story coherently. A frail seventy-three year-old, she sits for hours on a kitchen chair next to her bed, her back straight as a rod, her skinny hands folded in her lap. Julia Kapminya was born in Moscow in 1918. A soldier in the Czar's army, her father had joined the communist forces in the early days. He had risen through the ranks of the Red Army and became senior aide to Gen. Mikhail Tukhashevsky.

"My father was off fighting the rebels in Central Asia when I was born. My mother found another lover and simply left me in the hospital," she says. "I was raised by relatives until my father returned from the war."

When Tukhashevsky and other senior officers were charged with espionage and treason and executed, so was her father. The daughter of an "enemy of the people," Julia was sentenced to 10 years hard labor and five years in exile. She was deported to Nar'yan Mar, a camp in the Gulag inside the Arctic Circle near the mouth of the Pechora river. "When the river was frozen they moved us south in a convoy of 800 men and women. All we had were our summer clothes. It was freezing 30 to 40 degrees below zero. We walked 35 to 40 kilometers across the ice every day. The guards were sadists. They cursed and shouted at us. They beat us. I remember a man too sick and weak to walk. He stumbled and fell. They stabbed him to death with a bayonet and left him there. By the time we arrived in Vorkuta, more than 100 prisoners had died."

* * *

Vorkuta was an important transit station in the Gulag Archipelago, the system of prison camps where according to a conservative estimate of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union "between 1930 and 1953 some 15 or 16 million people died of fatigue and malnutrition and approximately one million were executed."

Vorkuta was founded in 1934. Six years earlier, geologists had found huge coal reserves there. The city was built, according to its present architect, Vitaly Trushkin. "on the skulls and bones of prisoners."

Five years ago, Trushkin came from Leningrad to Vorkuta, situated 110 kilometers north of the Polar Circle where the sun shines no more than 14 days a year and the wind howls during the eight-month long polar night. Like all immigrants, he intended staying only temporarily to make a fast career and earn big money. But Trushkin was gripped by Vorkuta's history. He established a branch of Memorial, the organization that documents the crimes of the communist regime. Few in the city responded to his initiative. "They come here for a few years and then they leave again," he explains. He guides us to the mass graves he has discovered, neglected spots alongside the road with a few wooden crosses under which thousands lie buried. The local sewage purification plant has been built on the tombs of former inmates. The hospital stands on a mass grave. Miners still live in barracks built for prisoners. Everywhere the remains of the camps are visible: rows of barbed wire, guard towers and collapsing barracks.

"We were taught that the prisoners were enemies of the people," he says. "We believed they had no right to live in Soviet society. We forgot that they existed. Deep down we still believe what we were taught. We have lost our soul. That's why we seem to be able to live undisturbed on top of the graves."

* * *

Julia Kapminya arrived in Vorkuta in the winter of 1937 and was imprisoned in the camp attached to Coal Mine Number Eight. Twelve hours a day, she pushed coal carts up the mine shaft. Every cart weighed 300 kilograms, every day she pushed 60 carts. "If you didn't fulfill your quota," she says, "you'd get no food. We were given 300 grams of bread and a cup of soup; it was water. We called it fake soup. I was fragile. I had tuberculosis. I was as lean as a rake and coughing blood. That was my luck. The guards never bothered me. Who wants a woman with tuberculosis?"

Living conditions were horrendous. At first, the prisoners lived in tents. "It was so cold that your hair froze to the tent. I had beautiful long, black hair," she says and shows us a passport picture of herself as a young girl in Moscow before her troubles began.

The camp guards were common criminals. "Wild beasts," she says. "They stole our food and our belongings. They walked around with sticks and beat us awake in the morning. Whoever arrived last for roll-call was beaten." She displays a tattoo of a snake with a sword on her lower arm forced upon her by the guards. "I don't know what it symbolizes," she says. "I'm ashamed of it. My grandchildren ask me: 'What does it mean, grandmother? Did the Germans do that?' What am I supposed to answer them?"

She talks about one of the guards, a certain Kashketin, who would order prisoners to dig a grave. "He forced them to stand in a row and counted: one, two, three. Every third one was shot and thrown into the ditch. He didn't do it often," she says, "but everywhere in the camp we could hear the executions."

She gets up and walks toward a closet, takes a candle and asks me to accompany her to the bus stop opposite the elementary school. She wants to burn the candle on the mass grave where Kahketin shot the prisoners. Suddenly she reconsiders. It's late and she recently suffered a heart attack. She should be lying in bed. Again she sits upright on her chair, takes a pill and continues to talk. "Women were stronger than men," she says. "Just like now. My daughter takes care of her children when she is sick. Her husband is convinced he is dying as soon as his temperature rises to 37.1." She laughs for the first time since we began talking. "When he's hungry, he eats a loaf of bread. She is trying to save it for the children. Most of the men in the camps were intellectuals. They couldn't take the hard labor, they couldn't stand the cold, they died like flies."

Julia fell seriously ill in 1942 and was released. She stayed in Vorkuta. "I wasn't allowed to go anywhere else," she says. "I had no civil rights, so nobody offered me a job." She continued to work in the mine and married another former inmate. She laughs again. "I wasn't his first wife," she says with a twinkle in her eyes. "He found his wife one day in bed with a senior police officer. He threatened him with his own service pistol and took him in his underpants to the police station. My husband was convicted on charges of banditism." She laughs like a school girl.

She stayed in Vorkuta even after she was rehabilitated in 1957. "Where was I supposed to go?" she asks. "My father was dead and I had never known my mother. I had two small children and no husband."

She falls silent for the first time, refusing to reveal what happened to her husband. Her face darkens. "He behaved indecently," she says. "He doesn't deserve my respect."

In 1957, she was summoned before a commission. "They congratulated me with my rehabilitation. As if it were the simplest thing in the world. I said gruffly: 'Thank-you for destroying my life.' They didn't react. They sat there like stupid turkeys."

She sighs when asked whether her tormenters should be prosecuted. Three years after being released she met her interrogator at the mine. He beat her so badly during interrogations that she would have to be carried back to her cell. Since then, he'd been arrested himself and sent to Vorkuta. "We looked at each other, we recognised each other but neither said a word. My friends asked me the next day 'what have you done to this man? He is selling his gold teeth to pay for your assasination'. Several days later he hanged himself. Our hangmen were destroying themselves," she says.

Shortly after her rehabilitation in 1957, her mother showed up on her doorstep. "She was an old woman. She had nowhere to go, no one to turn to. Nobody wanted her any more. I let her into my house. She stayed untill she died. I tried to forgive her but I couldn't. But I never showed her." She sees the amazement on my face and after a long silence she says: "I think that everyone who has been abused as I have been will understand why I let her in, why I gave her shelter."

* * *

Zacharia Meron still works in the mine where he had been sent in 1951 to do forced labor. He is 63 years old. He can't live off his pension and does administrative work for the mine. "I had a beautiful handwriting," he says sitting under a huge portrait of Lenin. "But its difficult for me to write when its cold. My fingers froze in the camp."

Meron was transferred to Vorkuta in 1951. "We traveled by train, 120 men to a car. Escape was senseless," he says. "Where was I supposed to go? The local population would turn you in. We were traveling in winter. It was dark the whole time. Everything was covered with snow. We thought we were being brought to the edge of the world, a land where no one lived."

Zacharia Meron was given an easy job in the mine. First he worked underground in Mine Number 29, controlling the amount of gas in the shaft. Later he was given an administrative job. "I had a beautifull handwriting" he says " and most of the guards were illiterate."

In the summer of 1953, after Stalin's death, he noticed coal wagons covered with slogans entering the mine. "I don't know who painted them," he says. "They demanded a review of our sentences, the right to write letters home and better food.

On July 22, 1953, there was strike. Some of the miners refused to go down the shafts. The guards were furious. We organized a strike committee. But the authorities rejected our demands. They doubled the number of guards. Machine-guns were set up around the camp. They no longer gave us food. But we thought they would accept our demands because Stalin was dead. We were unarmed and our demands were reasonable. Instead, more soldiers arrived each day. On August 2, they demanded over loudspeakers that we immediately return to work. We refused and gathered at the entrance to the shaft. Two fire trucks entered the camp. They pointed their water cannons at us. The prisoners in the front row cut the hoses. The fire trucks retreated. As soon as they had left the camp, I heard the order to fire on the loudspeakers. They shot the whole camp to pieces. It was a massacre."

He takes us to the swamps where the prison barracks had been. "They now claim that shops were stocked during Stalin's rule," says Vitaly Trushkin who joined us. "Maybe that is true. But they forget that the shops were full because millions were treated as slaves in the Gulag. They were unpaid laborers forced to work without food."

Meron points to the spot where he hid in a trench. "When the shooting stopped the guards identified everyone who had participated in the strike. They were taken away. I don't know what happened to them."

Meron survived the massacre. "I was opposed to the strike," he says. "I knew they would use their weapons. I tried to convince my friends. I warned them. But they wouldn't listen to me. I was right and I survived" he says. "And I was not an enemy of the Soviet people."

* * *

She was arrested a year later on December 18, 1937. She had been away from home the night before the attempted assasination so that she could plant the bomb. Consumed by jealousy, her husband reported her to the NKVD. "We we were walking home after having been to the theater. Shortly before I had given birth to his child.. When they arrested me on the street, he said: 'The party is more important than a spouse.'"

"I was locked into the 'sauna,' a small room in which you were forced to stand. I couldn't move. Water dropped from the ceiling on my head. After two days, I fell unconcious. I had just given birth."

Her interrogator offered her a deal: in exchange for confessing the assassination attempt she would be given a lighter sentence. She signed a declaration that she was "a woman in love who tried to kill Stalin because he had rejected her" but nevertheless she was sentenced to death. "It was a conspiracy," she says as she rattles off a long list of names of senior officials who allegedly were involved in the attempt on Stalin's life. Preparations for the assassination began in December 1934, following the murder at Stalin's behest of Kirov, the communist party leader in Leningrad. "Maybe it began even earlier," she says, "following the death of Nadezda Alliluyeva, Stalin's second wife, when the prosecutor Vyshinsky, who was in charge of the show trials, became Stalin's most important advisor." She has no idea why after 84 days her death sentence was commuted to ten years in prison and a life in exile.

Like Julia Kapminya, she was put to work in Coal Mine Number Eight where she dug coal ten hours a day without a break, working first with a pickaxe and later with a pneumatic bore.

A year later she was transferred to the construction site of the Stalin Railroad that was being build to link Vorkuta with Salekhard on the Asian side of the Urals, the last harbor on the River Ob before the waterway flows into the Ob delta and the Northern Ice Sea. Olga helped build the railway's foundation, pouring gravel into the swamp. "It was terrible," she says, displaying emotion for the first time. "Some twenty people died every day in our brigade. Their bodies were thrown into the swamp. When the ground was frozen, the bodies were cut in half or burnt so that they wouldn't have to dig bigger graves." She begins to cry. "It was cold, there was a strong wind. If you sat down to rest, you froze to death."

Olga Petrovna was released in 1950. She married a former inmate with whom she had a daughter. She was rehabilitated in 1954, but was refused permission to live in Moscow.

She travelled to the Soviet capital in 1957 to apply for the rehabilitation of her second husband. There she met Vyshinsky, the man who had sentenced her to death twenty years earlier. "He recognized me immediately," she says flirting with me again. "I was 47 years old but young men still turned their heads on the street." She tells that Vyshinsky was frightened. "He promised to quickly rehabilitate my husband. But I was arrested as I left the building and locked into a psychiatric institution." She claims Vyshinsky was afraid she would disclose her attempt on Stalin's life as well as the names of her co-conspirators. "For the second time, I was deprived of all my rights," she says.

Twice more, I visited Olga Petrovna to go over the details of her story with her. She never changes it, despite my repeatedly expressed scepticism. Valentin, my interpreter, has no doubts that she is telling the truth. Back in Moscow, I discover that Vyshinsky died in 1954. The man she identified as the leader of the plot had already been executed in 1934. "Those are details," Valentin says as I run through my notes for the tenth time. He points to her opening remark: "Everbody in the camps claimed to be innocent. I was guilty," he says. "It's as if she wants to give reason to her suffering in the camps. That is how she tries to accept and explain the madness that we experienced."

* * *

On the morning of our departure from Vorkuta, I burn the candle Julia gave us at the bus station near the spot where she says there is a mass grave. The bystanders ignore us. It's raining. The cold polar wind blows out the match. I borrow an umbrella and try again as a gesture of respect for Julia and all the other camp survivors we have met. And out of respect of the millions of other victims whose story has yet to be told.