Faithful Ruslan (2 page)

The greater part of this flood of prison-camp literature was the work of actual survivors of the camps, written from bitter personal experience. At the same time the topic itself (and the possibility, since the appearance of
Ivan Denisovich
, that more of such writing might get published) also stimulated the creative imagination of writers of a generation younger than Solzhenitsyn, writers whose age had spared them from becoming the direct victims of Stalin’s terror but who had suffered from it through the murder or brutal incarceration of parents or close relatives.

One such writer was Georgi Vladimov, who started work on “The Dogs” in 1963, at the time when the shock effect of Solzhenitsyn’s revelations was at its height. It took him nearly two years to finish this short story, partly because he was simultaneously busy earning his living as a journalist and critic, but also because Vladimov is a fastidious and painstaking literary craftsman. In 1965 (the year after Khrushchev’s fall from power), he offered it for publication, but despite the support of several distinguished writers who were very impressed by it, the time had passed when a story like this could have any chance of being published in the USSR.

Indeed the mere fact of having shown such a “subversive” work to a number of editors had a dire effect on Vladimov’s career in general, and it was another four years before Tvardovsky found it possible to publish Vladimov’s next story in
Novy Mir’s
issue for July 1969. This is the moving, masterfully written story, entitled “Three Minutes Silence,”
of a confused but honest young man in search of an identity in a society that chiefly lives by false values. It is also the last of Vladimov’s fiction to have been published in the Soviet Union; since then this gifted and original writer has been banned from print in his own country. Although he has written other works, he has been writing them—in the expressive Russian phrase—“for the desk drawer.”

After enduring this humiliating and frustrating professional ostracism for nearly eight years, the last straw for Vladimov was the moment when, having never been outside the USSR in his life, he was refused an exit visa for a meeting with his Norwegian publisher. On October 10, 1977, in a bitter, scathing letter to the Executive Board of the Union of Soviet Writers, he poured out his scorn for the members of that board, servile bureaucrats who “manage” Soviet literature under orders from the Communist Party leadership; enclosed with the letter, Vladimov sent back his membership card of the Writer’s Union.
^*

At the same time he announced that he had joined the Moscow branch of Amnesty International, a move regarded by the Soviet authorities as tantamount to treason.

That those same Soviet cultural bureaucrats would regard
Faithful Ruslan
as, if anything, even more treasonable, will come as no surprise after reading the novel; in its ironic and telling fashion it is much more than just another angle on the prison camps: functioning at more than one level of meaning, it is a very subtle yet penetrating critique of the moral squalor inherent in Soviet communism—and which, by implication, it shares with all totalitarian systems.

The eponymous “Ruslan” of Vladimov’s novel is one of the guard dogs that were (and to a lesser extent still are) employed as auxiliaries to the human guards in Soviet prison camps.
Faithful Ruslan
was written for a Soviet Russian audience, and Vladimov naturally assumed in his readers a prior knowledge of recent Soviet history, which he therefore did not need to spell out. This framework, of dates, events, personalities and statistics may not, however, be quite so familiar to English-speaking readers, and since many key allusions in the story will not make much sense without a certain minimum of background information, a brief outline of the relevant facts may be helpful.

Prison camps, or “corrective-labor camps” as they are officially termed, have existed in the USSR since the earliest years of Soviet rule.
^*

From relatively modest beginnings in 1919–20, the scope of the prison-camp system was vastly expanded during the 1930s to accommodate the ever-growing numbers of the real or imagined objectors to Stalin’s drastic policies, until by the end of that decade it probably housed some twelve million prisoners, the vast majority of them not only innocent of any crime but innocent of any form of opposition to the regime; they were merely digits in the arithmetic of a calculated rule of terror.
^†

At the end of World War II there was a huge new influx into the camps, when, as a deliberate act of retributive policy, Stalin imprisoned en masse all returning Soviet prisoners of war and all Soviet civilians who had been deported by force to work in Germany during the war. Thereafter until Stalin’s death in 1953, his increasingly paranoid mind created
new categories of “enemies of the people” to be packed off to the camps: writers and intellectuals, Jews, Old Bolsheviks, former political refugees from Nazi Germany, religious believers, anyone having the most innocent contact with foreigners—the list was interminable.

So evil and grossly inhuman was Stalin’s system of terror that among the first priorities of his successors was to stop the flow of new prisoners, then to release the inmates and dismantle the whole prison-camp system. This, to his great credit, is what Khrushchev largely succeeded in doing after his denunciation of Stalin to the 20
^th
Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956. Over the next twelve months, an estimated eight million prisoners were released from the camps, and about six million who had perished there were “posthumously rehabilitated.”
^*

As part of this process, the monstrous organization (known by its Russian acronym as “Gulag”) that had kept them all behind barbed wire was almost entirely liquidated.

Although
Faithful Ruslan
does not always keep to a straight chronological sequence, making occasional uses of flashback, the main narrative covers an actual timespan of about eight or nine months. It starts in the winter of 1956–57, when Khrushchev’s policy of closing the prison camps and freeing the prisoners is being put into effect. The story opens, in fact, on the day after all the prisoners in a particular camp have been sent home and most of the guard troops have been demobilized. The locale of the story is a prison camp somewhere amid the vast forests of Siberia; it is sited at a distance of perhaps two or three miles from a small- to medium-sized
town on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, along which new prisoners were shipped into the camp in special prison trains, and the lumber, felled and cut by the prisoners as part of the corrective-labor regime, was shipped out. Temperatures in Siberia can be extreme: while very hot in the short summer, the thermometer can frequently hit −50 °C in winter. Soviet prison regulations stated that at temperatures below −40 °C prisoners could not be made to do outdoor work, but this rule was not always observed by prison-camp commandants.

The troops used to guard and escort the prisoners were not subordinate to the Ministry of Defense, as were the rest of the armed forces, but were under the authority of the Ministry of State Security, an immensely powerful organization that thus disposed of a very considerable private army, enjoying special privileges of pay, leave, pensions, etc. The security troops were also fortunate in that they were never sent to fight in the front line; on the other hand, a large proportion of them were obliged to endure the same extreme climatic conditions suffered by the inmates of the Siberian camps.

Within a prison camp, duties were divided between the internal guard, responsible for security inside the double-barbed-wire perimeter, and the external or escort guard, whose job it was to watch over the prisoners when they were taken to their work sites outside the camp. The latter was regarded as the harder and more responsible task; each soldier of the escort guard was a trained dog-handler, to whom was assigned a specially bred and schooled guard dog. For some years these animals were generally crossbred, mainly German shepherd crossed with various long-haired Russian hunting breeds (short-haired breeds, such as Doberman pinschers or boxers, could not survive in the Siberian climate),
but in time it was found that the most suitable breed was the
Kavkazskaya ovcharka
or Caucasian sheepdog, so that from World War II onward only this type of dog was bred for the prison service and frontier patrolling. “Ruslan” is of this breed.

All guard troops were armed with the standard Soviet infantry close-combat weapon, the Degtaryov 9-mm submachine gun, with an air-cooled barrel and a drum-type magazine holding seventy-two rounds. The watchtowers around the camp’s perimeter were manned by the internal guard and armed with the regular Soviet Army medium machine gun, the Maxim 7.62-mm with belt feed and a fluted water-cooled barrel—a very accurate weapon with a high rate of fire. All guards were under standing orders to shoot to kill any living creature that entered the No-Go Zone between the inner and outer perimeter fences.

The prisoners in “Ruslan’s” camp would have been a mixture of real criminals with totally innocent politicals, the latter greatly predominating in numbers. The criminal prisoners generally despised and bullied the politicals, and this fact was cynically exploited by the prison authorities; by giving minor privileges to the criminal element, they were utilized to keep the politicals in subjection. Another universally applied policy was to blackmail or bribe prisoners into acting as informers; in any group, such as a work team or a camp hut, at least one inmate was bound to be working as an informer to report on any subversive talk or behavior. These men were naturally feared and loathed by their fellow prisoners, and it was by no means uncommon for informers to be beaten up, mutilated or murdered when their role was discovered. A striking episode in
Faithful Ruslan
depicts the fate of just such an informer.

During the period covered by the novel, a prisoner could be serving a sentence of anything from five to twenty-five years. It was also very common for sentences to be extended as punishment for some real or trumped-up breach of regulations, so that a prisoner might serve for double the original length of his sentence, or more, without leaving the camps. The ex-prisoner who is one of the main characters in
Faithful Ruslan
—Vladimov gives him no name but simply calls him “the Shabby Man”—belonged to the large category of camp inmates, several millions of them, who were automatically imprisoned on being repatriated to the USSR from German prisoner-of-war camps in 1945. Formally, his release from the Soviet prison camp was due to a blanket “amnesty” extended by Khrushchev to all such ex-POWs; this term was distinct from the procedure known as “rehabilitation,” which was granted to civilians or soldiers who had been imprisoned for a specifically political offense under Stalin (the “offense” was, of course, fictitious and no more than a pretext by which the security forces fulfilled their quota of arrests). Rehabilitation carried with it certain privileges, such as a right to proper housing for victim and family, and a right to reinstatement in a job appropriate to his qualifications. Prisoners like “the Shabby Man” who were merely amnestied had no such rights of restitution; when freed, they had to fend for themselves, find whatever work was available for a man who might have lost his health or his skills, and reestablish a home without any special state assistance at a time when there was still a drastic housing shortage due to war damage. Thanks to yet another rotten deal from life’s deck of cards, “the Shabby Man” therefore finds himself in the worst possible category of the released prisoners; it is important for the reader to be aware of
this in order to understand the motivation for his behavior in the story.

Any further explanation would usurp the author’s rights.
Faithful Ruslan
must from here on speak for itself, and it is to be hoped that the reader will gain as much pleasure from reading it as did the translator from putting it into English.

MICHAEL GLENNY

ALL NIGHT IT HOWLED, THE LAMPS CREAKING and swinging, the outside latch rattling; then toward morning it subsided, grew quiet and Master came. He sat on a stool and smoked, waiting for Ruslan to finish his broth. Master had brought his submachine gun with him and hung it on a hook in the corner of the kennel, which meant that there was to be duty, after a long time in which there had been none; therefore he must eat without hurrying, but without lingering either.

Today the feed included a large marrowbone, so enticing that he felt like taking it away immediately into a corner and pushing it under the bedding. Later he would be able to gnaw at it in the proper way—in the dark and alone. With Master there, however, he felt shy of pulling it out of the feeding bowl, and contented himself with stripping all the meat off it, just in case; experience told him that when he came back the bone might not be there. Carefully pushing it aside with his nose, he lapped up the fatty juice and had started gulping down the lumps of warm, meaty stew, dropping them and picking them up again, when suddenly Master shifted on his seat and asked impatiently:

“Ready?”

As he stood up, he dropped his cigarette butt, which fell
into the feeding bowl with a hiss. This had never happened before, but Ruslan did nothing to show that it surprised or upset him. He merely looked up at Master and wagged his heavy tail in a token of gratitude for the food and of his readiness to earn it by a spell of duty. He refrained from even glancing at the bone, instead only hastily lapped up some more juice. And with that he was quite ready.