House of the dead
RUSSIA TIBOR SZAMUELY
In July 1951, en route to a forced labour camp, I spent three weeks in the transit prison of the north Russian town of Kirov. It was a very hot summer, and about seventy of us were crammed into a cell some twenty feet square. But there were consolations—chief among them the right to read newspapers again after eight months of total isolation from the world. Each cell received one daily copy of Pravda, and since I was just out of univer- sity it became my job- to read it aloud.
At that time the Soviet government was conducting one of its regular campaigns for the release of Greek political prisoners, and one fine day a whole page was devoted to this issue. With tremendous moral indignation Pravda printed letters from the prisoners' families and various western progressives de- scribing the inhuman treatment meted out by the `monarcho-fascist clique' to its unfortunate victims: confining them four and even five to a cell, limiting the number of visits, forbidding them to receive progressive publications, and other similarly bestial practices. The signa- tories were appealing to Generalissimo Stalin —knowing his proven devotion to the principles of liberty and humanity—to induce the Greek government to ameliorate these unspeakable conditions. And, sure enough, the Father of the Peoples replied, telling of his horror and grief that such atrocities were still being prac- tised, and assuring his correspondents of his unswerving humanitarian support for every victim of injustice and brutality.
While I was reading all this out, complete silence reigned in the cell. Suddenly someone, unable to contain himself any longer, snorted —and the next moment we were all roaring with laughter, rolling over the bunks, slapping each other's backs, gasping for breath, tears pouring down our faces. I have never seen anything like it. The mood of hilarity lasted for days: if anyone complained, say, that the noisome overspill from the bucket had drenched him during the night, another would always be sure to rebuke him: 'Comrade, you ought to be ashamed of yourself—think of the sufferings of our Greek comrades!'—and it would start all over again.
Sixteen years have passed since then. Much has changed, but not as much as one might think. Nothing, for instance, seems to affect that curious phenomenon, the precious leftist conscience. To be sure, after the shattering Soviet self-revelations it is hardly possible -to go on flatly denying the existence of a Russian slave-labOur empire of unprecedented scope and brutality. The tactic now is to treat this
enormity as a deplorable aberration, but one which belongs to the dead and buried past.
Unfortunatel), the subject of Soviet forced labour camps and their inhuman conditions is by no means a dead issue. So far from having been abolished, the Soviet labour camp system is at present enjoying rude health and ex- panding quite vigorously. Since, unlike 'fascist' countries like Greece or Rhodesia, the Russian press is not merely censored by the government, but also written, edited. proof- read, set up, printed and distributed by it, information about the camps is hard to come by. All the more valuable, therefore, is a recent first-hand description of current conditions in the notorious Potma camp, about 200 miles south-east of Moscow, by a former inmate of the camp who has now reached the West, and whose authenticity is not questioned. It is at Potma that the three most famous prisoners are held: Andrei Sinyaysky, Yuli Daniel and Gerald Brooke.
Like other institutions of Socialist slave labour, Potma is actually not just one camp but a huge network of camps, scattered over an area of some 750 square miles—equivalent to Berks or Bucks. The whole complex is run by the camp authorities as a semi-independent KGB state, with 'frontier guards' patrolling the perimeter, special passes for entry, and even a thirty-mile-long railway of its own which is not shown on any railway map of the USSR. After Stalin's death the number of camps in the Potma complex was cut down to twenty- six, but today it has once again grown to thirty-six. The total convict population is about 100,000 men and women, mostly 'politicals.' Within the complex—a microcosm of the pseudo-egalitarian 'Socialist' state—there exists a wide range of varying categories of camps: `invalid camps,' general camps,' regime camps,' `hard labour camps,' and even one camp with the ominous nickname of 'Vale of death.'
It appears that Sinyaysky, Daniel and Brooke are held in 'general camps'—the mildest variety. Here the daily ration consists of 600 grammes (twenty ounces) of bread, three bowls of soup and a bowl of porridge. As we used to say: you won't die, but you won't think much about women either. In case some in- mates get carried away by such princely hos- pitality there is always the punishment barrack to remind them of a sterner reality: no heating, ten ounces of bread daily and a bowl of soup every fourth day. Not a good place for the health, especially in winter. But then, as the guards and other `chiefs' never tire of remind- ing one, a camp is not a sanatorium. The object of a forced labour camp is forced labour—as much of it as can pOssibly be squeezed out of the convicts. Fifteen years ago the legal working day in camps was eleven hours, with three days off per month; I have seen nothing to indicate that things are any different today. Indeed, this latest account shows that in some respects conditions are even worse than those described in Solzhenit- syn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For instance, it is now prohibited to wear non- convict clothing even inside the 'zone,' or prison stockade. And, what is far worse, only one parcel of five kilogrammes (eleven pounds) can be received every five months (fifteen years ago, under Stalin, the permitted weight was eight kilogrammes and the number unlimited).
The prisoners of Potma speak with great bitterness of the campaigns (extensively re- ported in the freedom-loving Soviet press) by the UN and other international organisations to send commissions of inquiry into detention centres in South Africa and certain other countries. 'Doesn't anyone give a damn about us?' they ask in bewilderment. One can hardly expect them to understand the intricate con- volutions of the western liberal conscience. Apparently the joke—which we still found funny in 1951—of seeing western progressives solicit the support of the greatest mass-jailer of all in combating sporadic injustices in their own part of the world has now worn very thin. Would they. I wonder, be able to appre- ciate the fact that last year a delegation of eminent British jurists returned from chatting with their jailers, full of praise for the Soviet labour camp system? Or that a Sunday paper had recently devoted its colour supplement to an excited account of the marvellous Soviet experiment in rehabilitation through labour? Hardly likely.
Most interesting of all would be the reaction of the inmates of Potma to the news that the BBC, highly revered in Russia, has in- definitely postponed the showing of a docu- mentary play about their two companions, Sinyaysky and Daniel. for fear of annoying the Soviet authorities. Would they be able to raise a laugh at the curious idea that today in Britain, just when the last vestiges of native literary censorship are being demolished, some quarters appear ready to defer to the political censorship of the Soviet state? And at the truly farcical justification: that it is in the prisoners' own interest that the world should know as little about them as possible?
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