The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (53 page)

over in 1992. At first they just

wanted to preserve it, so future

generations could see what a

functioning camp had looked like.

Having patched it up, however, they

were faced with the question of what

to do with it.

The obvious solution was to

open it to visitors, which is what

they did. It remains the only

functioning museum on the territory

of the gulag anywhere in Russia,

which means it is the closest

equivalent

Russia

has

to

the

memorial at Auschwitz. Perm-36

may not have been one of the most

terrible islands in Solzhenitsyn’s

archipelago, but it remains a unique

memorial to the inhumanity of the

twentieth century, and deserves to be

far better known.

Driving there from Perm took

about

two

hours,

a

distance

considered insignificant by locals but

deeply monotonous for those not

used to the forest. The trees were

occasionally birch with white trunks

and light-green leaves, but normally

pines, all orange trunks and dark

needles. Sometimes fields opened

out on either side of the road, and

they heralded a village of single-

storey houses huddled together.

When the turning to Perm-36 finally

appeared to the right of the road it

was a relief.

We passed through the village of

Kuchino, which seemed largely

abandoned, then Makhnutino, which

looked little better. The road was

gravel, and we trailed a cloud of dust

that billowed around us when we

stopped at the police checkpoint.

This was the weekend of the year

when Perm-36 organizes a festival.

Organizers expected 10,000 visitors

and the police were taking a close

interest. Among the blue-shirted

officers, however, were volunteers

in red T-shirts with the words

‘Territory of Freedom’ on the back,

and they waved us through.

The camp headquarters was a

two-storey cream building on a bluff

above the River Chusovaya. The

river curved away around a broad

flat field. Sand banks stretched

alluringly out into the water, offering

the chance of a swim. Swallows

swooped to sip the river, and fish

left ripples on its smooth surface.

The prisoners, of course, saw none

of this. They arrived in closed trucks

and

were

ushered

immediately

behind the camp’s high fences and

barbed wire. Often they had no clear

idea of where they were. According

to a camp legend, one intake of

prisoners included an ornithologist

who was able to judge by the birds

he heard that they were near the Ural

Mountains. Previously, no one had

known.

The headquarters is the only

building in the camp above a single

storey, and most of the others are

brick

and

timber

barracks

overshadowed by green watchtowers

armed with searchlights. These were

where the prisoners lived for the

duration of their sentences.

We were among the first people

to arrive for the three-day festival,

and the camp was still largely

deserted. We joined a tour run by a

local pensioner called Sergei Spodin,

who guided his group of eight with

great skill and knowledge. The

camp, he said, had included both

living quarters and working quarters,

where prisoners were expected to

earn their keep. Outside the barracks

were multiple rings of fences and

barbed wire. Inside the barracks

were informers paid with privileges

like an extra tea ration.

‘In forty-one years there was not

a single escape. The system worked

very well.’

Between this Tough Regime

section of the camp and a second

section, where prisoners lived in the

even

harsher

Special

Regime

conditions, was a shooting range

where the guards practised.

‘There was shooting day and

night. As you can imagine, this had a

significant

effect

on

people’s

psychology, because everyone knew

they were not practising to shoot

rabbits but to shoot people. This is a

quiet region and you could hear the

shooting 10 or 20 kilometres away.

Everything was done to try to break

people’s spirits.’

Despite the guards’ best efforts,

when Yakunin arrived in the Perm

triangle in 1981 the dissidents were

as defiant as ever. They had evolved

a highly complex game to play with

their jailers. Their aim was to

publicize their plight and to smuggle

information to the West, whence it

would be broadcast back on foreign

radio. This would embarrass the

Soviet government, which insisted it

protected its citizens’ human rights.

The jailers’ aim was to break the

dissidents’ spirits, to make them

recant as Father Dmitry had done.

Failing that, they just wanted to

interrupt the flow of news updates.

Yakunin’s arrival was heralded

by an immediate flurry of reports on

his progress in the underground

Chronicle of Current Events
(even

now, he refused to tell me how the

news reached the outside world).

‘Not long before Yakunin’s

arrival in the camp all the Bibles

were confiscated. On Yakunin’s

arrival,

his

Bible

was

also

confiscated,’ said the
Chronicle’s

issue number 62, dated July 1981.

On 4 May 1981, it said, Yakunin

and a group of others had started a

hunger strike to protest against the

Soviet Union’s failure to fulfil its

international commitments to protect

the human rights of its citizens. The

hunger strike, Yakunin told me, had

been the one weapon of the

dissidents.

‘We wrote these statements for

anniversaries and so on, and we

were always smuggling them out.

We organized hunger strikes and the

guards hated it. They would beat us

but they couldn’t stop us,’ he said,

with a chuckle. ‘We wanted to show

we were not broken, that we were

taking part in the struggle in as far as

we could.’

Throughout the 1980s, the jailed

dissidents risked their health and

sometimes their lives by forcing

themselves to go for extended

periods without food. Sakharov

went on hunger strike for the right

of his wife to have medical treatment

abroad, Yakunin for the right to

have a Bible, others just to show

they were alive. This was in itself a

sign of how much the camps had

changed since Stalin’s days. In the

1930s, a hunger strike would have

led inevitably to death, since no one

cared whether prisoners ate or not.

Now, thanks to the pressure exerted

by Western states, officials were

under orders to keep the dissidents

alive, and that gave the prisoners a

lever to exert pressure on their

guards.

There was always something to

go on hunger strike for, if only for

the right to be officially considered a

political

prisoner.

Anatoly

Marchenko died in 1986 after a

three-month hunger strike aiming to

secure the release of political

prisoners.

Other prisoners looked for less

terrible ways to make their points.

Vladimir

Bukovsky,

a

poet

imprisoned in the 1970s, described

the lengths prisoners would go to to

irritate their jailers, whose time could

be wasted almost indefinitely by

exploiting

the

bureaucratic

complaints procedure.

As he wrote in his memoirs:

We had been schooled by

our participation in the

civil rights movement, we

had received an excellent

education in the camps,

and we knew of the

implacable force of one

man’s refusal to submit.

The authorities knew it too.

They

had

long

since

abandoned any idea of

basing their calculations on

communist dogma. They

no longer demanded of

people a belief in the

radiant future – all they

needed was submission.

And when they tried to

starve us into it in the

camps, or threw us into the

punishment cells to rot,

they were demanding not a

belief in communism, but

simply submission, or at

least

a

willingness

to

compromise.

Bukovsky and his comrades had no

intention of compromising. They

reacted to every departure from strict

procedure by writing an official

complaint, and they could write up

to thirty letters of complaint a day.

They patiently sent them higher and

higher up the chain of command,

then branched out sideways in ever

more elaborate directions.

It is best to address your

complaints not to run-of-

the-mill bureaucrats, but to

the

most

unpredictable

individuals

and

organizations, for instance

to all the Deputies of the

Supreme Soviet, or of the

Soviets

at

republican,

regional or city levels, to

newspapers

and

magazines, to astronauts,

writers, artists, ballerinas,

to all the secretaries of the

Central

Committee,

all

generals,

admirals,

productivity

champions,

shepherds, deer-breeders,

milkmaids, sportsmen, and

so on and so forth.

The guards came, if not to respect

this kind of activism, at least to fear

it and the extra work it created.

Complaints could trigger committees

of investigation, which had to be

responded to, and it was best to

avoid generating them. Although

political prisoners had no special

status in the camp system, they won

the right to be addressed with the

respectful plural form of the word

‘you’ and by their first name and

patronymic. In any other prison,

inmates were treated like rats.

This peculiar ritualized battle has

been all but forgotten in Russia

today. If you have not read the

history of the dissident movement,

and do not understand the complex

relationship between the officials’

equal but opposite desires to punish

the

prisoners

while

avoiding

publicity, it makes no sense at all.

Spodin, however, as he guided us

around Perm-36, spoke of the

prisoners like the heroes they were.

‘Everything was done to break

their spirits, to demean them, but

they resisted.’

Further down the track was the

Special Regime camp, which made

the ordinary Tough Regime barracks

seem luxurious. Here the cells were

gloomy, their windows fitted with

downward-slanting slats so prisoners

would never see outside. The cell

walls were plastered with uneven

concrete – called ‘fur’ in prison

slang – to make them ugly and

uncomfortable to lean against. The

exercise yard is a square of three

paces by three paces. Its walls are

three metres high, and topped with a

mesh of barbed wire, meaning

inmates here would never see

anything but sky and walls.

‘When I was a teenager, I

thought this was a warehouse,’ said

Spodin. ‘There were never any

people, it was so quiet, it was only

later I realized it was a camp. Our

parents used to say people were

locked up because of the war. They

never told us these were political

prisoners or anything.’

As we walked out of the barracks

and back into the open air, Spodin