For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 8.  Escapes – Morale and Mechanics

“In a category of their own we must put those escapes which originate not in a despairing impulse but in technical calculations and the love of fine workmanship.

“A celebrated scheme for escaping by rail was conceived in Kengir. Freight trains carrying cement or asbestos were regularly pulled in at one of the work sites for unloading. They were unloaded within the restricted area, and left empty. And five convicts planned their escape as follows. They made a false end wall for a heavy boxcar, and what is more, hinged it like a folding screen, so that when they dragged it up to the car it looked like nothing more than a wide ramp, convenient for wheelbarrows. The plan was this: while the boxcar was being unloaded, the convicts were in charge of it; they would haul their contraption inside and open it out; clamp it to the solid side of the boxcar; stand, all five of them, with their backs to the wall and raise the false wall into position with ropes. The boxcar was completely covered with asbestos dust, and so was the board. A casual eye would not see the difference in the boxcar’s depth. But the timing was tricky. They had to finish unloading the train ready for its departure while the convicts were still on the work site, but they couldn’t board it too soon: they must be sure that they would be moved immediately. They were making their last-minute rush, complete with knives and provisions – and suddenly one of the escapers caught his foot in a switch and broke a leg. This held them up, and they didn’t have time to complete the installation before the guards checked the train. So they were discovered. A full-dress investigation and trial followed.”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 8.  Escapes – Morale and Mechanics

“You may believe, if you wish, that everything depends on the star under which an escape begins. Your plans have been laid oh, so carefully, so very long in advance, but then at the crucial moment the lights go out in the compound and your chance of seizing a lorry goes up in smoke. Whereas sometimes when an attempt is made on the spur of the moment, circumstances fall into place as though made to order.

“In summer, 1948, in Dzhezkazgan again, First Division (not yet a Special Camp), a dump truck was detailed one morning to take on a load of sand at a quarry some distance away and deliver it to the cement mixers. The sandpit was not a work site, which meant that it was not guarded and that the loaders – three long-sentence prisoners, one serving a tenner, the other two quarters – had to be taken on a lorry. Their escort consisted of a lance corporal and two soldiers, and the driver was a nonpolitical offender, a trusty. Here was a chance! But chances must be seized as quickly as they arrive. A decision had to be taken and a plan concerted – all in sight and hearing of the guards, who stood by while the sand was loaded. The biographies of all three were identical – and like those millions at that time: first the front, then German prisoner-of-war camps, escape, recapture, punitive concentration camps, liberation when the war ended, and by way of thanks for it all – imprisonment by their own side. They hadn’t been afraid to flee across Germany; what could stop them from trying it at home? They finished loading. The corporal took his seat in the cab. The two soldiers sat to the front of the lorry, backs to the cab, with their Tommy guns trained on the convicts, who sat on the sand to the rear. As soon as they drove out of the quarry the prisoners exchanged signals, threw sand in the eyes of the guards, and piled on top of them. They took away their Tommy guns, and stunned the corporal with a blow from a gun butt through the cab window. The lorry stopped; the driver was almost dead with fright. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ they told him. ‘We won’t hurt you – you aren’t one of those dogs! Dump your load!’ The engine raced and the sand, that precious sand, worth more than its weight in gold because it had brought them freedom, poured onto the ground.

“Here, too, as in almost all escapes – let history not forget it! – the slaves showed themselves more generous than their guards: didn’t kill them, didn’t beat them up, merely ordered them to remove their clothes and their boots, and released them in their underwear. ‘What about you, driver, are you with us or with them?’  ‘You, of course – what do you think?’ the driver decided.

“To confuse the barefooted guards (this was the price of their clemency), they drove first to the west (on the flat steppe you can drive where you like), then one of them changed into the corporal’s clothes and the other two into those of the soldiers, and they sped northward; they were all armed. The driver had a pass; no one could suspect them. All the same, whenever their path crossed a telegraph route they broke the wires to disrupt communications (they tied a stone to a rope, slung it over the wires to weigh them down, then tugged at them with a hook). This took time, but gained them more in the end. They tore on at full speed all day long until the odometer had clocked up 300 kilometers and the petrol gauge registered zero. They began sizing up passing cars. A Pobeda came along. They stopped it. ‘Sorry comrade, we’re only doing our duty. Please let me see you papers.’ VIP’s they turned out to be. District Party bosses visiting their kolkhozes, to inspect, inspire, or maybe just to eat beshbarmak. ‘Right, out you get! Strip!’ Don’t shoot us, the big boys implored. The escapers led them out onto the steppe, tied them up, took their documents, sand rolled off in the Pobeda. It was not till evening that the soldiers whom they had stripped earlier in the day reached the nearest pit, only to hear from the watchtower: ‘Don’t come any nearer!’  ‘We’re soldiers like you.’  ‘Oh, no you aren’t – not while you’re walking around in your underpants!’

“As it happened, the Pobeda’s tank wasn’t full. When they had driven about 200 kilometers, the petrol ran out and there was nothing in the jerry can either. It was getting dark by then. They saw some horses grazing, managed to catch them although they had no bridles, and galloped bareback. The driver fell from his horse and hurt his leg. They suggested that he get up behind another rider. He refused. ‘Don’t be afraid, lads, I won’t rat on you!’ He gave them some money, and the papers form the Pobeda, and galloped away. After the driver, no one ever saw them again. They were never taken back to their camp. And so the lads had left their quarters and their ‘ten-no-change’ behind in the security officer’s safe. The ‘green prosecutor’ favors the bold!

“The driver kept his word and did not give them away. He fixed himself up in a kolkhoz near Petropavlovsk and lived in peace for four years. Love of art was his undoing. A good accordionist, he performed in the kolkhoz club, then competed at amateur festivals, first in the district center, then in the provisional capital. He himself had practically forgotten his former life, but one of the Dzhezkazgan jailers was in the audience and recognized him. He was arrested as soon as he left the stage – and this time they slapped twenty-five years on him under Article 58. He was sent back to Dzhezkazgan.”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 8.  Escapes – Morale and Mechanics

“The individual cruelties which mark any difficult escape attempt were seen vividly enlarged in a bloody and confused breakout, also from Dzhezkazgan and also in summer, 1951.

“Six prisoners escaping by night from a pit began by killing a seventh, whom they believed to be a stool pigeon. Then they climbed an old prospecting shaft out onto the steppe. The six prisoners included people of very different stripe and they immediately decided to separate. This would have been the right thing to do, if only they had had a sensible plan.

“But one of them went straight to the settlement where the free workers lived, right next to the camp, and knocked on the window of his woman friend. His intention was not to hide, to wait awhile under the floorboards or in the attic (that would have been very sensible), but simple to have a good time with her while it lasted (we recognize at once the characteristics of the professional criminal). He whooped it up for a day and a night, and then the following evening put on her former husband’s suit and took her to a film show in the club. Some of the jailers from the camp were there, recognized him, and collared him immediately.

“Two of the others, Georgians, thoughtlessly sure of themselves, walked to the station and got on the train to Karaganda. But from Dzhezkazgan, apart from cattle trails and escapers’ trails, there is no other way through to the outside world except this one – toward Karaganda and by train. Along the line there are camps, and at every station there is a security post, so that they were both collared before they reached Karaganda.

“The other three took the most difficult road – to the southwest. There were no people, but there was no water either. The elderly Ukrainian, Prokopenko, who had seen active service, had a map and persuaded them to choose this route, telling them that he would find them water. His companions were a Crimean Tatar turned into a criminal by the camps, and a foul, ‘bitching’ thief. They went on for four days and nights without food or water. When they could stand it no longer, the Tatar and the thief told Prokopenko: ‘We’ve decided to finish with you.’ He didn’t understand. ‘What do you mean, pals? Do you want to go on your own way?’  ‘No, to finish you. We can’t all get through.’ Prokopenko started pleading with them. He slit the lining of his cap and took out a photograph of his wife and children, hoping to stir their pity. ‘Brothers! Brothers! I thought we were all on our way to freedom together! I’ll get you through! There should be a well soon! There’s bound to be water! Hang on a bit! Have some mercy!’

“But they stabbed him to death, hoping to quench their thirst with his blood. They cut his veins, but the blood wouldn’t flow – it had curdled immediately!…

“Another striking scene: two men bending over another on the steppe, wondering why he wouldn’t bleed…

“Eyeing each other like wolves, because now one of them must die, they went on in the direction which the ‘old boy’ had pointed out to them, and two hours later found a well!

“The very next day they were sighted from a plane and captured.

“They admitted it all under interrogation, the camp got to know about it – and decided to avenge Prokopenko by knocking off the pair of them. But they were kept in a separate cell and taken elsewhere for trial.”

The dog disappeared not long after. Our parents told my sister and I that an elderly couple were going to take care of her. The husband was in a wheelchair and would be home a lot and the two of them were going to walk the dog every day. Mum and Dad made it clear that our former dog would be well taken care of.

To this day I have not heard anything to contradict this story but when I was a little older I realised that our dog was probably put down. Innocence was lost.

I have always felt guilty about it.

At the bookshop there is a large white bag in a corner in front of a blue door. Over the course of a day it is filled up with books. When full it is tied up and the blue door is opened and the bag is thrown in. The books are never seen again.

A new white bag is opened.

On my first day I was talked through the procedure:

“On the price sticker on the books are two numbers. In the top left is the books category. A number one means it’s a fiction book. There is a list of categories on the wall over there.”

“Right.”

“On the top left is the week the book was put out. We are in week forty-two. If a book has been on the shelf for more than two months you take it down and put in the white bag.”

“Okay.”

The books that are “culled” get recycled. I wasn’t sure what this meant.

Over the next few shifts I watched two or three or four white bags fill up each day and disappear behind the blue door. I am an enthusiastic contributer. The books must be sent off to be sold at other shops. Perhaps they are given away. There is nothing wrong with them.

It’s a Tuesday afternoon. I am culling the Biography shelves. After I drop a stack of paperbacks into the white bag I notice a glossy red cover and I reach in and remove the copy of The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Week thirty-one. I take it over to the counter. “Can I buy this one?”

S- takes it and looks at the price. “This is being culled?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Just take it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. They only get crushed anyway.”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 8.  Escapes – Morale and Mechanics

“Stepan was on the run for quite a while longer – another two weeks or so – but everywhere he went he religiously avoided his worst enemies: people, his fellow countrymen. He parted with the horse, tried to swim some river or other (although he couldn’t swim!), tried making a raft of rushes (and of course couldn’t do that either); he hunted, and got away from some large animal, perhaps a bear, in the dark. Then one day, tormented beyond endurance by hunger, thirst, and fatigue, and the longing for hot food, he made up his mind to enter a lonely yurt and beg something. There was a small enclosure in front of the yurt, with an adobe wall, and when he was already close to it Stepan belatedly saw two saddled horses standing there, and a young Kazakh in a bemedaled tunic and breeches, coming toward him. He had missed his chance to run and thought he was done for. The Kazakh had stepped outside for a breather. He was very drunk, was delighted to see Stepan, and seemed not to notice his tattered and scarcely human appearance. ‘Come in, come in, be our guest!’ Inside the yurt sat an identical young Kazakh with medals, and an old man: the two brothers, who had seen service at the front, were now both important people in Alma-Ata, and had borrowed horses from a kolkhoz to gallop over and pay their respects to their father in his yurt. These two young fellows had tasted war, and it had made human beings of them. Besides, they were drunk and bursting with drunken good nature (that good nature which, though he made it his business to do so, the Great Stalin never fully succeeded in eradicating). They were happy that another guest had joined the feast, though he was only a simple mine-worker on his way to Orsk, where his wife was expecting a baby at any moment. They did not ask to see his papers, but gave him food and drink and a place to sleep. That sort of thing sometimes happens, too… (Is drink always man’s enemy? Does it not sometimes bring out the best in him?)

“Stepan woke up before his hosts, and fearing a trap in spite of everything, he went out. No, both horses wer just where they had been, and he could galloped off on one of them immediately. But he was not the man to harm kind people – and he left on foot.

“After a few more days’ walking, he started meeting cars and lorries. He was always quick enough to get out of their way. At last he reached a railway line and followed it until that same night he found himself near Orsk station. All he had to do was board a train! He had won! He had performed a miracle – crossed a vast expanse of desert all alone, with nothing but a homemade knife and a stick – and now he had reached his goal.

“Suddenly by the light of the station lamps he saw soldiers pacing along the tracks. So he continued on foot along a cart track parallel with the railway line. He no longer troubled to hide, even when morning came: because he was in Russia now, his native land! A cloud of dust came toward him and for the first time Stepan did not run away from a car. Out of this first real Russian car jumped a real Russian militiaman. ‘Who are you? Show me your papers.’ Stepan explained that he was a tractor driver, looking for work. As it happened, a kolkhoz chairman was with the militiaman. ‘Let him be! I desperately need tractor drivers! How many people have papers down on the farm?’

“They traveled all day, haggling as they went, stopping for drinks and snacks, but just before nightfall Stepan couldn’t stand anymore and ran for the woods, which were some 200 meters away. The militiaman rose to the occasion and fired!

“Fired again! Stepan had to stop. They tied him up.

“It may well be that his trail was cold, that they had given him up for dead, that the soldiers at Orsk had been lying in wait for somebody else, because the militiaman was for releasing him, and at the district MVD station they made a great fuss over him to begin with – gave him tea and sandwiches and Kazbek cigarettes, and the commandant questioned him in person, addressing him politely (you never know with these spies – he’ll be taken to Moscow tomorrow, and might easily lodge a complaint).’Where’s your transmitter? Been dropped here to make a map or two, have you – which service are you with?’ Stepan was puzzled. ‘I’ve never worked in the geological service; I’m more of a miner.’

“This escape ended with something worse than sandwiches or even physical capture. When he got back to camp he was beaten lengthily and unmercifully. Worn out and broken by all his sufferings, Stepan fell lower than ever before: he signed on with the Kengir security officer Belyaev to help him flush out would-be escapers. He became a sort of decoy duck. He gave one or two cellmates in the Kengir jail a detailed account of his escape, and watched their reactions. If there was any response, any obvious hankering to repeat the attempt, Stepan ______ reported it to the godfather.”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 8.  Escapes – Morale and Mechanics

“There was another escape from a mine, also in Dzhezkazgan, but in 1951 this time: three men climbed an old shaft to the surface at night and walked for three nights. Thirst made them desperate, and when they saw some yurts two of them suggested that they should go over and get a drink from the Kazakhs. But Stepan _____ refused and watched them from a hill. He saw his comrades enter a yurt, and come out running, pursued by a number of Kazakhs, who quickly caught them. Stepan, a puny little man, went away, keeping to low places, and continued his flight alone, with a knife as his sole possession. He tried to make for the northwest, but was continually changing course to avoid people – he preferred wild animals. He cut himself a stick to hunt gophers and jerboas: he would fling it at them from some distance while they were sitting up on their hind legs by their burrows and squeaking, and he killed some of them in this way. He sucked their blood as best he could and roasted their flesh on a fire of dry steppe gorse.

“It was a fire that gave him away. One day Stepan saw a Kazakh horseman in a big red-brown fur hat galloping toward him, and he barely had time to hide his shashlik under some gorse so that the Kazakh would not see what choice food he was eating. The Kazakh rode up and asked who he was and where from. Stepan explained that he worked in the manganese mine at Dzhezdy (free men as well as convicts were employed there), and was on his way to a state farm 150 kilometers away to see his wife. The Kazakh asked the name of the farm. Stepan chose the most plausible – ‘The Stalin State Farm.’

“Son of the steppes! Why couldn’t you gallop on your way! What harm had the poor wretch done you? But no! The Kazakh said menacingly: ‘You sit prison! You go with me!’ Stepan cursed him and walked on. The Kazakh rode alongside, ordering him to come quietly. Then he galloped off a little way, waving his arm and calling to his fellows. But the steppe was deserted. Son of the steppes! Why, oh, why could you not just leave him? You could see that he had hundreds of versts of steppe to cross, with nothing but a bare stick in his hands and without food, so that he would perish anyway. Did you need a kilogram of tea so badly?

“In the course of that week, living on equal terms with the wild animals, Stepan had grown used to the rustling and hissing sounds of the desert: suddenly his ear caught a new whistling sound in the air, and he was not mentally aware of his danger but like an animal sensed it in the pit of his stomach, and leaped to one side. This saved him! The Kazakh, he realized, had tried to lasso him, but he had dodged the noose.

“Hunting bipeds! A man’s life for a kilogram of tea! The Kazakh swore and hauled in his lasso, and Stepan went on, warily taking care not to let his enemy out of his sight. The other rode up closer, coiled his rope, and flung it again. As soon as he had made his throw, Stepan rushed at him, struck him on the head with the stick, and knocked him off his horse. (He had barely strength enough for it, but he was fighting for his life.) ‘Here’s your reward, friend!’ Relentlessly, with all the savagery of one beast goring another, Stepan began beating him. But when he saw blood he stopped. He took both lasso and whip from the Kazakh and scrambled onto the horse. There was a saddlebag with provisions.”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 8. Escapes – Morale and Mechanics

“At night they would raid the village nearby, filch a pot or break into a pantry for flour, salt, an ax, some crockery. (Inevitably the escaper, like the partisan, soon becomes a thief, preying on the peaceful folk all around him.) Another time they took a cow from the village and slaughtered it in the forest. But then the first snow came, and to avoid leaving tracks they had to sit tight in their dugout. Kudla went out just once for brushwood and the forester immediately opened fire on him. ‘So you’re the thieves, are you! You’re the ones who stole the cow.’ Sure enough, traces of blood were found around the dugout. They were taken to the village and locked up. The people shouted that they should be shot out of hand and no mercy shown to them. But an investigating officer arrived from the district center with the picture sent around to assist the nationwide search, and addressed the villagers. ‘Well done!’ he said. ‘These aren’t thieves you’ve caught, but dangerous political criminals.’

“Suddenly there was a complete change in attitude. The owner of the cow, a Chechen as it turned out, brought the prisoners bread, mutton, and even some money, collected by the Chechens. ‘What a pity,’ he said. ‘You should have come and told me who you were and I’d have given you everything you wanted!’ (There is no reason to doubt it; that’s how the Chechens are.) Kudla burst into tears. After so many years of savagery, he couldn’t stand sympathy.

“The prisoners were removed to Kustanai and put in the railroad jail, where their captors not only took away the Chechen’s offering (and pocketed it), but gave them no food at all. (Didn’t Korneychuk tell you about it at the Peace Congress?) Before they were put on the train out of Kustanai, they were made to kneel on the station platform with their hands handcuffed behind their backs. They were kept like that for some time, for the whole world to see.

“If it had been on a station platform in Moscow, Leningrad, or Kiev, or any other flourishing city, everybody would have passed by the gray-headed old man, kneeling and manacled, like a figure in a Pepin picture, without noticing him or turning around to look – publishing executives, progressive film producers, lecturers on humanism, army officers, not to mention trade union and Party officials. All the ordinary, undistinguished citizens occupying no position worth mentioning would also have tried to go by without noticing, in case the guard asked their names and made a note of them – because if you have a residence permit for Moscow, where the shops are so good, you must not take risks… (Easy enough to understand in 1949 – but would it have been any different in 1965? Would our educated youngsters have stopped to intercede with his escort for the gray-haired old man in handcuffs and on his knees?)

“The people of Kustani, however, had little to lose. They were all either ‘sworn enemies,’ or persons with black marks against them, or simply exiles. They started crowding around the prisoners, and tossing them makhorka, cigarettes, bread. Kudla’s wrists were shackled behind his back, so he bent over to pick up a piece of bread with his teeth – but the guard kicked it out of his mouth. Kudla rolled over, and again groveled to pick it up – and the guard kicked the bread farther away. (You progressive film makers, when you are taking shots of inoffensive ‘senior citizens’ – perhaps you will remember this scene and this old man?) The people began pressing forward and making a noise. ‘Let them go! Let them go!’ A militia squad appeared. The policemen had the advantage and dispersed people.

“The train pulled in, and the prisoners were loaded for transport to the Kengir jail.

“Escape attempts in Kazakhstan are as monotonous as the steppe itself – but perhaps this monotony makes it easier to understand the most important thing?”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 8. Escapes – Morale and Mechanics

“One attempt was made a year before that of Tenno, and served as the model for it. In September 1949, two convicts escaped from the First Division of Steplag (Rudnik, Dzhezkazgan) – Grigory Kudla, a tough, steady, level-headed old man, a Ukrainian (but when his dander was up he had the temper of a Zaporozhian Cossack, and even the hardened criminals were afraid of him), and Ivan Dushechkin, a quiet Byelorussian some thirty-five years old. In the pit where they worked they found a prospecting shaft in an old workings, with a grating at its upper end. When they were on night shift they gradually loosened this grating, and at the same time they took into the shaft dried crusts, knives, and a hot-water bottle stolen from the Medical Section. On the night of their escape attempt, once down the pit each of them separately informed the foreman that he felt unwell, couldn’t work, and would lie down a bit. At night there were no warders underground; the foreman was the sole representative of authority and he had to bully discretely or else he might be found with his head smashed in. The escapers filled the hot-water bottle, took their provisions, and went into the prospecting shaft. They forced the grating and crawled out. The exit turned out to be near the watchtowers but outside the camp boundary. They walked off unnoticed.

“From Dzhezkazgan they bore northwest through the desert. They lay down in the daytime and walked at night. Not once did they come across water, and after a week Dushechkin no longer felt like standing up. Kudla got him on his feet with the hope that there might be water in the hills ahead. They dragged themselves that far, but the hollows held no water, only mud. Then Dushechkin said, ‘I can’t go on anyway. Cut my throat and drink my blood.’

“You moralists! What was the right thing to do? Kudla, too, could no longer see straight. Dushechkin was going to die – why should Kudla perish, too? But if he found water soon afterward, how could he live with the thought of Dushechkin for the rest of his days? I’ll go on a bit, Kudla decided, and if in the morning I come back without water I’ll put him out of his misery, and we needn’t both perish. Kudla staggered to a hillock, saw a cleft in it and – just as in the most improbable of novels – in the cleft there was water! Kudla slithered to it, fell flat on his face, and drank and drank. (Only in the morning had he eyes for the tadpoles and waterweed in it.) He went back to Dushechkin with the hot-water bottle full. ‘I’ve brought you some water – yes, water.” Dushechkin couldn’t believe it, drank, and still didn’t believe it (for hours he had been imagining that he was drinking). They dragged themselves as far as the cleft and stayed there drinking.

“When they had drunk, hunger set in. But the following night they climbed over a ridge and went down into a valley like the promised land: with a river, grass, bushes, horses, life. When it got dark Kudla crept up to the horses and killed one of them. They drank its blood straight from the wounds. (Partisans of peace! That very year you were loudly in session in Vienna or Stockholm, and sipping cocktails through straws. Did it occur to you that compatriots of the versifier Tikhonov and the journalist Ehrenburg were sucking the blood of dead horses? Did they explain to you in their speeches that that was the meaning of peace, Soviet style?)

“They roasted the horses’ flesh on fires, ate lengthily, and walked on. They by-passed Amangeldy on the Turgai, but on the highroad Kazakhs in a lorry going their way asked to see their papers and threatened to hand them over to the militia.

“Farther on they frequently came across streams and pools. Kudla also caught and killed a ram. By now they had been a month on the run! October was nearing its end; it was getting cold. In the first wood they reached they found a dugout and set up house in it. They couldn’t bring themselves to leave this land of plenty. That they settled in such surroundings, that their native places did not call to them or promise them a more peaceful life, meant that their escape lacked a goal and was doomed to fail.”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)

(The author has devoted two entire chapters to Georgi Tenno, who was one of the successful escapees mentioned in an earlier excerpt. His story is so extraordinary that I have decided to excerpt these two entire chapters verbatim. In easily-digestible segments, of course.)

“So we came to anchor in jail for a long time. We were not tried until July of the following year. For nine months we festered in the Disciplinary Barracks, except when we were dragged out occasionally for interrogation. This was conducted by Chief Prison Officer Machekhovsky and Security Lieutenant Weinstein. What the interrogators wanted to know was which prisoners had helped us. Who among the civilian personnel had ‘conspired with us’ to switch off the lights at the moment of our escape? (We didn’t of course, explain that our plan had been quite different, and that the lights’ going out had only been a hindrance to us.) Where was our rendezvous in Omsk? Which frontier were we intending to cross eventually? (They found it incredible that people might want to stay in their native land.) ‘We were running away to Moscow to the Central Committee, to tell them about illegal arrests, and that’s all there is to it!’ They didn’t believe us.

“Having failed to get anything ‘interesting’ out of us, they pinned on us the usual escaper’s posy: Article 58-14 (Counter-Revolutionary sabotage); Article 59-3 (banditry); the ‘Four-sixths’ decree, Article ‘One-two’ (robbery carried out by a gang); the same decree, Article ‘Two-two’ (armed robbery with violence endangering life); Article 182 (making and carrying an offensive weapon other than a firearm).

“But this daunting array of charges threatened us with chains no heavier than those we wore. The penal practice of the courts had long exceeded all reasonable bounds and, on these charges, promised nothing more than the twenty-five years which a Baptist could be given for saying his prayers, and which we were serving before we tried to escape. The only difference now was that when the roll was called we should have to say ‘end of sentence – 1975’ instead of ‘1973.’

“Hardly a palpable difference for us in 1951!

“Only once did the interrogation take a menacing turn – when they promised to try us as economic disrupters. This innocent word was more dangerous than the hackneyed ‘saboteur,’ ‘bandit,’ ‘robber,’ ‘thief.’ This word opened up the possibility of capital punishment, which had been introduced about a year before.

“We were ‘disrupters’ because we had brought disorder into the economy of the people’s state. As the interrogators explained it, 120,000 rubles had been spent on our recapture: some work sites had been at a standstill for several days (the prisoners were not marched out to work because their guards had been called off to join in the hunt); twenty-three vehicles had carried soldiers day and night about the steppe, and had spent their annual allotment of petrol in three weeks; operations groups had been dispatched to all neighboring towns and settlements; a nationwide search had been ordered, and four hundred pictures of myself and four hundred of Kolya distributed throughout the country.

“We listened to this inventory with pride…”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)

(The author has devoted two entire chapters to Georgi Tenno, who was one of the successful escapees mentioned in an earlier excerpt. His story is so extraordinary that I have decided to excerpt these two entire chapters verbatim. In easily-digestible segments, of course.)

“That same night, Kolya was riding on toward Omsk. He avoided the traffic, and whenever he saw headlights, rode into the steppe and lay down. Then in some lonely homestead he squeezed into a henhouse, and gratified the urge which had haunted him all the time he was on the run – by wringing the necks of three hens and tucking them into his sack. The others started squawking, so he hurried away.

“The irresolution which had made us so unsteady after our first mistakes tightened its hold on Kolya now that I was captured. Easily swayed and impressionable, he was fleeing now in desperation, unable to think clearly what to do next. He was incapable of realizing the most obvious facts: that the disappearance of the bicycle and the gun would of course have been discovered by now, so that they no longer camouflaged him, and he ought to throw them away first thing in the morning as too conspicuous; and also that he should not approach Omsk from that side and by the highway, but after a wide detour, by wasteland and back ways. The gun and the bicycle should be sold quickly, and he would have the money he needed. But he sat for half a day in the bushes near the Irtysh, then yet again lost patience before nightfall and set off by footpaths along the river. Very probably his description had already been broadcast by the local radio station – they have fewer inhibitions about this in Siberia than in the European part of the country.

“He rode up to a little house and went in. Inside were an old woman and her thirty-year-old daughter. There was also a radio. By an extraordinary coincidence, a voice was singing:

From Sakhalin a convict fleeing

By narrow tracks and hidden trails…

“Kolya went to pieces and began shedding tears. ‘What are you so unhappy about?’ the woman asked. Their sympathy caused Kolya to weep unashamedly. They began comforting him. ‘I’m all alone, abandoned by everybody,’ he explained. ‘Get married, then,’ the old woman said, whether in jest or in earnest. ‘My girl’s single, too.’ Kolya, more maudlin than ever, started taking peeps at the would-be bride. She gave the matter a businesslike twist: ‘Got any money for vodka?’ Kolya dug out his last few rubles, but there wasn’t enough. ‘Never mind, I’ll give you more later.’ She went off. ‘Oh, yes,’ Kolya remembered, ‘I’ve shot some partridges. Cook the marriage feast, mother-in-law.’ The old woman took then. ‘Hey, these are hens!’  ‘So it was dark when I shot them; couldn’t tell the difference.’  ‘Yes, but why have their necks been wrung?’

“Kolya asked for a smoke, and the old woman asked her daughter’s suitor for money in return for some makhorka. Kolya took his cap off, and the old woman became agitated. ‘You’re a convict, aren’t you, with your head shaven like that? Go away while you’re safe. Or else when my daughter comes back we’ll turn you in!’

“All the time the thought was going round and round in Kolya’s head: Why did we take pity on free people there on the Irtysh, when free people have no pity for us? He took a Moscow jacket down from the wall (it was getting cold out of doors, and he was wearing only a suit) and put it on: just his size. The old woman yelled, ‘I’ll hand you over to the militia!’ But Kolya looked through the window and saw the daughter approaching with someone on a bicycle. She had already informed on him!

“Only one thing for it – ‘Makhmadera!’ He seized the gun. ‘Into the corner! Lie down!’ he said to the old woman. He stood against the wall, let the other two come through the door, and ordered them to lie down. To the man he said: ‘And you give me your shoes, for a wedding present! Take them off one at a time!’ With the gun trained on him, the man took them off and Kolya put them on, throwing away his wornout camp shoes, and threatened that he would wing anyone who followed him out.

“Off he rode. But the other man dashed after him on his own bicycle. Kolya dismounted, and put the gun to his shoulder. ‘Stop! Leave the bike there! Get away from it!’ He drove the man away, went over to the bike, broke its spokes, slit a tire with his knife, and rode on.

“Soon he came out onto the highway. Omsk was ahead. So he just rode straight on. There was a bus stop. Women were digging potatoes in their gardens. A motorcycle carrying three workmen in jerkins tagged behind him. It drove on steadily for some time, then suddenly went straight for Kolya so that the sidecar struck him and knocked him off. They all jumped off, piled on top of Zhdanok, and hit him on the head with a pistol.

“The women in the vegetable garden shrieked: ‘What are you doing that for? What’s he done to you?’

“What, indeed, had he done to them?…

“But who has done, and will yet do, what to whom is beyond the understanding of the common people. Under their jerkins all three turned out to be wearing uniforms (the operations group had been on duty round the clock day after day at the entrance to the city). The women got their answer: ‘He’s a murderer.’ That was the simplest thing to say. And the women, trusting the Law, went back to digging potatoes.

“The first thing the operations group did was ask the penniless runaway if he had any money. Kolya said quite honestly that he hadn’t. They started searching him, and in one pocket of his new Moscow jacket found fifty rubles. They confiscated it, drove to an eating house, and spent the lot on food and drink. They did, however, feed Kolya, too.”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)

(The author has devoted two entire chapters to Georgi Tenno, who was one of the successful escapees mentioned in an earlier excerpt. His story is so extraordinary that I have decided to excerpt these two entire chapters verbatim. In easily-digestible segments, of course.)

“Lieutenant Yakovlev, who is riding in the cab, looks into the back at every stop and says with a grin: ‘Haven’t escaped, then?’ I ask permission to relieve myself, and he guffaws. ‘Go on, do it in your trousers; we don’t mind!’ I ask him to take off the handcuffs, and he laughs. ‘Lucky you weren’t caught by the lad who was on duty when you went under the wire. You wouldn’t be alive now.’

“The day before I had been glad that the beatings so far were ‘less than I had earned.’ But why damage your fists, when the back of the lorry will do it all for you? Every inch of my body was bruised and lacerated. My hands were being sawn off. My head was splitting with pain. My face was battered, full of splinters from the boards; my skin was in ribbons*.

“We traveled the whole day and almost all night.

“When I stopped struggling with the lorry, and ceased to feel my head banging against the boards, one of the sentries couldn’t stand it anymore, put a sack under my head, eased the handcuffs while no one was looking, and bending over me, whispered, ‘It’s all right, hold on, we’ll soon be there.’ (What prompted the lad to do it? Who was responsible for his upbringing? Not Maxim Gorky, and not his company political officer, that’s for sure.)

“Ekibastuz. A cordon. ‘Get out!’ I couldn’t stand up. (And if I had, they would have made me run the gauntlet to celebrate.) They let down the side, and yanked me out onto the ground. The camp guards, too, came out to have a look and a laugh at me: ‘Ooh, you aggressor, you!’ somebody yelled.

“They dragged me through the guardhouse and into the Disciplinary Barracks. They didn’t shove me in solitary but straight into the common cell so that anyone who fancied a bid for freedom could take a look at me.

“In the cell I was lifted by gentle hands and placed on the upper bed platform. But they had no food to give me until the morning rations came.”

* (Moreover, Tenno had hemophilia, He shrank from none of the risks of escaping, but a single scratch could have cost him his life. A.S.)

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)

(The author has devoted two entire chapters to Georgi Tenno, who was one of the successful escapees mentioned in an earlier excerpt. His story is so extraordinary that I have decided to excerpt these two entire chapters verbatim. In easily-digestible segments, of course.)

“(Meanwhile Kolya rides his bicycle along the road past the cottage, with the rifle slung over his shoulder, as though he hadn’t a care in the world. He sees a brilliantly lighted cottage, soldiers smoking and noisily talking on the veranda, and through the window, me, half-naked. And he pedals hard for Omsk. Soldiers will lie in wait all night around the bushes where I was caught, and comb them in the morning. Nobody knows yet that the neighboring buoy keeper’s bicycle and gun have disappeared – he, too, has probably sloped off to brag over a few drinks.)

“When he has reveled long enough in his success – and unheard-of success by local standards – the militia lieutenant gives orders for me to be delivered to the village. Once again they throw me on the cart, and take me to the lockup. (There’s always one handy! Every village soviet has one.) Two Tommy-gunners stand guard in the corridor, two more outside the window! An American espionage colonel! They untie my hands but order me to lie on the floor in the middle of the room and not edge toward any of the walls. That is how I spend an October night: lying on the floor, the upper half of my body bare.

“In the morning a captain arrives, and bores through me with his eyes. He tosses me my tunic (they’d already sold the rest of my things for drink). Quietly, and with one eye on the door, he asks me a strange question.

“’How do you come to know me?’

“’I don’t know you.’

“’Then how did you know that the officer in charge of the search was Captain Vorobyov? Do you know what sort of position you’ve put me in, you swine?’

“His name was Vorobyov! And he was a captain! In the night, when we were posing as security troops, I had mentioned Captain Vorobyov, and the workingman whose life I had spared had reported it all carefully. And now the captain was having trouble! If the commander of the pursuit has connections with an escaped prisoner, it’s not surprising that three weeks go by and still they can’t catch him!…

“Another pack of officers arrive, shout at me, and among other things ask about Vorobyov. I say that it’s a coincidence.

“They tied my hands with wire again, removed my shoelaces, and led me through the village in broad daylight. There must have been twenty Tommy-gunners in the escort party. The whole village poured out, women shook their heads, kids ran after me, shouting: ‘The bandit! They’re taking him off to shoot him!’

“The wire was cutting into my arms, my shoes fell off at every step, but I held my head high and looked openly and proudly at the villagers: letting them see that I was an honest man.

“They were taking me this way as an object lesson, something for these women and children to remember (legendary tales would be told of it twenty years from now). On the edge of the village they bundled me into the back of a truck, bare and seatless, with splintering old boards. Five Tommy-gunners sat with their backs to the cab, so as not to take their eyes off me.

“Now I must rewind all those kilometers in which we so rejoiced, all those kilometers which tool us farther from the camp. By the roundabout motor road it came to half a thousand. They put handcuffs on my wrists, tightened them to the limit. My hands were behind my back, and I had no means of protecting my face. I lay there more like a block of wood than a man. But this is how they punish our kind.

“And then the road became very bad. It rained and rained, and the lorry bumped over potholes. At every bump the bottom of the lorry scraped my head and face, scratched me, drove splinters into me. Not only could my hands not protect my face, but they themselves were cut more severely than ever over the bumps, and it felt as though the handcuffs were sawing through my wrists. I tried to crawl to the side and sit there with my back propped against it. No good! There was nothing to hold on to, and at the fist big bump I was hurled across the floor, and found myself sprawling helplessly. Sometimes I was tossed and hit the boards so violently that I thought my insides would jump out. I couldn’t stay on my back: it would tear my hands off at the wrist. I turn onto my side – no good. I roll over on my belly – no good. I try arching my neck so as to raise my head and save it from these blows. But my neck gets tired, my head droops, and my face strikes the boards.

“The five guards watch my torment, unconcerned.

“This trip will form part of their psychological training.”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)

(The author has devoted two entire chapters to Georgi Tenno, who was one of the successful escapees mentioned in an earlier excerpt. His story is so extraordinary that I have decided to excerpt these two entire chapters verbatim. In easily-digestible segments, of course.)

“Up top, the red tabs ask my name. ‘Stolyarov.’ (Maybe I can still wriggle out of it somehow. I am reluctant to give my name – if I do, that’s the end of my freedom.) They hit me in the face. ‘Name!’  ‘Stolyarov.’ They drag me into the hut, strip me to the waist, tie my hands tightly behind my back with wire that cuts into me. They press the points of their bayonets against my belly. A trickle of blood runs from under one of them. The militiaman who captured me, Senior Lieutenant Sabotazhnikov, jabs his revolver in my face and I can see that it is cocked. ‘Name!’ Resistance is useless. I tell them. ‘Where’s the other one?’ He wags his revolver, the bayonets bite deeper. ‘Where’s the other?’ I feel happy for Kolya. ‘We were together,’ I tell them. ‘Most likely he was killed.’

“A security officer with bright blue facings arrived, a Kazakh. He shoved me onto the bed with my hands tied and as I half-sat, half-lay there, began rhythmically striking me in the face – left, right, left, right, as though he were swimming. With every blow my head banged against the wall. ‘Where’s your weapon?’  ‘What weapon?’  ‘You were seen in the night with a gun.’ So the night hunter we had seen had also betrayed us. ‘That was a shovel, not a rifle.’ He didn’t believe me and went on hitting me. Suddenly there was no more pain – I had lost consciousness. When I came around someone was saying: ‘Don’t forget, if any one of us is wounded, we’ll finish you off on the spot!’

“(They must somehow have sensed it: Kolya really did have a gun. It all became clear to me later: when I said ‘To the boat,’ Kolya had run the other way, into the bushes. His explanation was that he hadn’t understood… but there was more to it: he had been itching to go his own way all day, and now he did so. Besides, he had remembered the bicycle. Taking his direction from the shots, he rushed away from the river and crawled back the way he had come. By now it was really dark, and while the whole pack of them were crowding around me, he rose to his feet and ran. Ran and wept as he went, thinking they’d killed me. He ran as far as the second little house, the neighbor’s. He kicked in a window and started searching for the gun. He fumbled around until he found it on the wall, and with it a pouch of cartridges. He loaded it. What was he thinking of, so he said, was whether he should avenge me. ‘Shall I go and take a few shots at them for Zhora?’ But he thought better of it. He found the bicycle, and he found an ax. He chopped down the door from inside, put salt into a bag – I don’t know whether this seemed the most important thing to him or whether he simply had no time to think – and rode off, first by a dirt lane, then through the village, straight past the soldiers. They thought nothing of it.)

“Meanwhile I was put in a cart, still tied up, with two soldiers sitting on top of me, and taken to a state farm two kilometers away. It had a telephone, and it was from there that the forest ranger (he had been in the boat with the foreman buoy keeper) had summoned the red tabs. That’s why they had arrived so quickly – because they had been phoned. I hadn’t allowed for that.

“A scene was enacted by myself and this forester which may seem unpleasant to relate but is typical of what a recaptured prisoner can expect. I wanted to relieve myself – standing up – and someone had to help me, in the most intimate way, since my hands were twisted behind my back. The Tommy-gunners felt that this was beneath them and ordered the forester to go outside with me. In the darkness we walked a little way from where the soldiers stood and as he was assisting me he asked my forgiveness for betraying me. ‘It’s my job. I had no choice.’

“I didn’t answer. How can anyone pass judgment? We had been betrayed by people with duties and people without. Everybody we met had betrayed us, except that old, old man with the gray mane.

“I sit in a hut by the highroad, stripped to the waist and bound. I am very thirsty but they give me nothing to drink. The red tabs glare at me like wild beasts, and every one of them looks for an excuse to prod me with the butt of his gun. But here they can’t very well kill me: they can kill you when there are only a few of them, and no witnesses. (Their rage is understandable. For so many days now they have been wading among the reeds, with no pause for rest, and eating from cans, with never a hot meal.)

“The whole family is in the cottage. The little children look at me curiously but are afraid to come nearer; they even tremble with fear. The militia lieutenant sits drinking vodka with his host, well pleased with his success and the reward it will bring. ‘Know who he is?’ he says boastfully to his host. ‘He’s a colonel, a famous American spy, a major criminal. He was running away to the American Embassy. They’ve murdered people and eaten them on their way here.’

“He may even believe it himself. The MVD will have disseminated rumors of this sort to catch us more easily, to make everyone denounce us. They’re not satisfied with the advantages of power, weapons, speed of movement – they need the help of slander as well.”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)

(The author has devoted two entire chapters to Georgi Tenno, who was one of the successful escapees mentioned in an earlier excerpt. His story is so extraordinary that I have decided to excerpt these two entire chapters verbatim. In easily-digestible segments, of course.)

“Off we go. But the house we’d seen turned out to be that of his neighbor, another buoy keeper, and our man’s house was 300 meters farther on. More company – no sooner had we entered the house than the neighbor cycled over to see us, with his sporting gun. He eyed my stubble and questioned me about life in Omsk. Some good, asking a jailbird like me about life outside. I babbled something vague, the gist of which was that the housing situation was bad, the food situation was bad, and the consumer-goods situation was bad – couldn’t go far wrong there, I thought. He looked sour and contradicted me – it appeared that he was a Party member. Kolya made soup – we must eat our fill while we could; we might not have another chance till Omsk.

“It was a wearisome wait for darkness. We couldn’t let either of them leave us. And what if a third came along? At last they both got ready to go and attend to their lights. We offered our help. The Party man refused. ‘I shall just set two lights and then I have to go to the village. I’m taking my family a load of brushwood. I’ll look in again later.’ I signal to Kolya not to take his eyes off the Party man and at the slightest hint of anything wrong to dive into the bushes. I show him where to meet me. I go with our man. For his boat I inspect the lie of the land and question him about distances. We return at the same time as the neighbor. That set my mind at rest: he hasn’t had time to turn us in yet. Shortly afterward he drives up, as he had said he would, with a load of brushwood on his cart. But instead of driving on, he sits down to sample Kolya’s soup. He won’t go away. What are we to do? Tie the pair of them up? Shut one in the cellar, tie the other to a bed?… They both have papers, and the neighbor has a bicycle and a gun. That’s what life on the run does to you – simple hospitality isn’t enough; you have to take more by force…

“Suddenly – the creak of oarlocks. I look through the window: three men in a boat, which makes it five to two now. My host goes out, and immediately returns for jerry cans. ‘Foreman’s brought kerosene,’ he says. ‘Funny he’s come himself; it’s Sunday today.’

“Sunday! We had stopped reckoning by the day of the week – it wasn’t the name that made one of our days different from another. It had been Sunday evening when we escaped. So that we had been on the run for exactly three weeks! What was going on in the camp? The dog pack would have despaired of catching us by now. In three weeks, if we had torn off in a lorry, we could long ago have fixed ourselves up somewhere in Karelia or Byelorussia, got passports and jobs. Or, with a bit of luck, even farther west… How galling it would be to have to give in now, after three weeks!

“’Right, Kolya – now we’re stoked up, what do you say to a hearty crap?’ We go out into the bushes and watch what is going on: our host is taking kerosene from the newly arrived boat, and the neighbor with the Party card has also joined them. They are talking about something, but we can’t hear what.

“They’ve gone. I send Kolya back to the house on the double. I don’t want to leave the buoy keepers alone to talk about us. I myself go quietly to our host’s boat. So as not the rattle the chain, I make an effort and pull up the post to which it is attached. I calculate how much time we have: if the foreman buoy keeper has gone to report us, he is seven kilometers, which means about forty minutes, from the village. If there are ‘red tabs’ in the village, it will take them another fifteen minutes or so to get ready and drive over here.

“I go into the house. The neighbor is still not ready to leave. He’s entertaining them with his conversation. Very strange. So we shall have to take both of them at once. ‘What about it, Kolya – shall we go and have a wash before bedtime?’ (We must agree on a plan.) The moment we go out we hear the tramp of boots in the darkness. Stooping, we can see against the pale sky (the moon hasn’t risen yet) men running in line past the bushes to surround the house.

“’To the boat,’ I whisper to Kolya. I run toward the river, slide down the steep bank, fall, and reach the boat. Every second may mean the difference between life and death. But Kolya is missing! Where, oh, where can he have got to? I can’t desert him.

“At last he comes running along the bank in the darkness, straight toward me. ‘That you, Kolya?’ A flash! A shot, point-blank! I do a swan dive – arms outstretched into the boat. Bursts of submachine-gun fire from the steep bank. Shouts: ‘We got one of them.’ They bend over me. ‘Wounded?’ I groan. They drag me out and lead me off. I limp (if I’m injured they will beat be less). In the darkness I surreptitiously throw the two knives into the grass.”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)

(The author has devoted two entire chapters to Georgi Tenno, who was one of the successful escapees mentioned in an earlier excerpt. His story is so extraordinary that I have decided to excerpt these two entire chapters verbatim. In easily-digestible segments, of course.)

“From that night – from the moment we went indoors for a warm-up, or perhaps when we met the white kitten – our escape began to go wrong. We had lost something: our confidence? our tenacity? our ability to think straight? the instinctive understanding between us? Now that we were nearly in Omsk we started making mistakes, pulling different ways. When runaways behave like that, they do not run much farther.

“Toward morning we abandoned the boat. We slept through the day in a haystack, but uneasily. Darkness fell. We were hungry. It was time to stew some meat, but we had lost our bucket in the retreat. I decided to fry it. We found a tractor seat – that would do for a frying pan; the potatoes we could bake.

“Nearby stood a tall hut, left by some haymakers. In the mental blackout which had come upon me that day, I thought it a good idea to light my fire inside the hut: it would be invisible form all sides. Kolya didn’t want any supper at all. ‘Let’s move on!’ Once again we couldn’t see eye to eye.

“I did light a fire in the hut, but I put too much wood on. The whole hut went up in flames, and I barely managed to crawl out. Then the fire jumped to the stack – the one in which we had spent the day – and it blazed up. Suddenly I felt sorry for that hey – so sweet-scented, and so kind to us. I started scattering it, and rolling on the ground in an attempt to put it out, to prevent the fire from spreading. Kolya sat aloof, sulked, and offered no help.

“What a trail I’d left now! What a conflagration it was; the glow could be seen many kilometers away. What’s more, this was an act of sabotage. For running away they would only give us the same quarter we already had. But for malicious destruction of kolkhoz hay they could ‘put us under’ if they wished.

“The worst of it is that each mistake increases the likelihood of further mistakes; you lose your self-confidence, your feel for the situation.

“The hut had burned down, but the potatoes were baked. The cinders took the place of salt. We ate some of them.

“We walked on in the night. Skirted a big village. Found a shovel. Picked it up in case in might be useful. We moved in closer to the Irtysh. And were brought to a halt by a creek. Should we make another detour? It was a nuisance. We looked around a bit and found a boat without oars. Never mind; the shovel would do for an our. We crossed the creek. Then I strapped the shovel to my back, so that the handle would stick up like the barrel of a gun. In the dark we might pass for hunters.

“Soon afterward someone came toward us and we stepped aside. ‘Petro!’ he said. ‘You’ve got the wrong man; I’m not Petro.’

“We walked all night. Slept in a haystack again. We were awakened by a steamer whistle. We stuck our heads out, and saw a wharf quite near. Lorries were carrying melons onto it. Omsk is near, Omsk is near, Omsk is near. Time to shave and get hold of some money.

“Kolya keeps on nagging me. ‘We shan’t make it now. What was the good of running away in the first place if you’re going to feel sorry for people? Our fate was in the balance, and you had to feel sorry for them. We shan’t make it now.’

“He was right. It seemed so senseless now: we had neither razor nor money; both had been in your hands and we didn’t take them. To think that after all those years longing to escape, after showing so much cunning, after crawling under the wire, expecting a bullet in the back any moment, after six days without water, after two weeks crossing the desert – we had not taken what was ours for the taking! How could I go into Omsk unshaven? How were we to pay for the journey on from Omsk?

“We lay through the day in a haystack. Couldn’t sleep, of course. About five o’clock Zhdanok says, ‘Let’s go right now and take a look around while it’s light.’  ‘Certainly not,’ I say. He says, ‘It’s nearly a month now! You’re overdoing the caution! I’m getting out of this and going by myself.’ I threaten him: ‘Watch you don’t get a knife in you.’ But of course I would never stab him.

“He quieted down and lay still. Then suddenly he rolled out of the stack and walked off. What should I do? Let him go, just like that? I jumped down, too, and went after him. We walked on in broad daylight, following the road along the Irtysh. We sat behind a haystack to talk things over: if we met anyone now we couldn’t let him go in case he reported us before it got dark. Kolya carelessly ran out to see whether the road was clear, and a young fellow immediately spotted him. We had to call him over. ‘Come on over here, pal, and let’s watch our troubles go up in smoke.’  ‘What troubles have you got?’  ‘Me and my brother-in-law are on holiday, taking a trip on the river. I’m from Omsk and he’s a fitter in the ship-repair yards at Pavlodar, and, well, our boat slipped its moorings in the night and got away, all we’ve got left is what was on the bank. Who are you, then?’  ‘I’m a buoy keeper.’  ‘Haven’t seen our boat anywhere, have you? In the reeds, maybe?’  ‘No.’  ‘Where’s your post?’  ‘Over there’ – he pointed to a little house. ‘So let’s go to your place, and we’ll stew some meat. And a have a shave.’”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)

(The author has devoted two entire chapters to Georgi Tenno, who was one of the successful escapees mentioned in an earlier excerpt. His story is so extraordinary that I have decided to excerpt these two entire chapters verbatim. In easily-digestible segments, of course.)

“A rare chance, an extraordinary chance, above all because no one would miss them. But what did we need from them? Did we need their lives? No, I had never murdered, and I didn’t want to now. And interrogator, or an operations officer, when he was tormenting me – yes; but I couldn’t raise my hand against ordinary working people. Should I take their money? All right, but just a little. How little, though? Enough for two tickets to Moscow, and some food. And some of their gear. That shouldn’t ruin them. What if we left them their papers and the boat, and made a deal with them not to report us? It wouldn’t be easy to trust them. And how could we manage without papers?

“If we took their papers, they would have no choice but to report us. To prevent their doing so we must tie them up here and now. Tie them up well and truly so that we should have two or three days’ head start.

“But in that case wouldn’t it be better simply to…?

“Kolya came back and signaled that everything was all right up above. He was waiting for me to say ‘Makhmadera!’ What was I to do?

“The slave camp of Ekibastuz rose before my eyes. Could I go back to that? Surely we had the right…

“And suddenly – suddenly something very light touched my legs. I looked down: something small and white. I bent over; it was a white kitten. It had jumped out of the boat, and with its tail stiff as a stalk in the air, it purred and rubbed itself against my legs.

“It didn’t know what I was thinking. I felt as though the touch of this kitten had sapped my will power. Stretched taut for twenty days, ever since I had slipped under the wire, it suddenly seemed to snap. I felt that, whatever Kolya might say to me now, I could never take their lives nor even the money they had earned in the sweat of their brows.

“Still keeping a stern face, I said, ‘Right, wait here; we’ll soon see what’s what.’

“We climbed the cliff. I had the papers in my hand. I told Kolya what I was thinking.

“He said nothing. He disagreed, but he said nothing.

“That’s how the world is arranged: they can take anyone’s freedom from him, without a qualm. If we want to take back the freedom which is our birthright – they make us pay with our lives and the lives of all whom we meet on the way.

“They can do anything, but we cannot. That’s why they are stronger than we. Without coming to an agreement, we went down again. Only the lame man was by the boat. ‘Where’s your wife?’

“’She was frightened; she ran off into the forest.’

“’Here are your papers. You can go on your way.’

“He thanks me, and shouts into the forest: ‘Ma-ria! Come back! They’re honest people!’

“We push off. I row quickly. The ordinary workingman, the man with the bad leg, suddenly remembers and shouts after me: ‘Comrade officer! We saw two chaps yesterday – looked just like bandits. If we’d known, we’d have held the rotters!’

“’Still feel sorry for him?’ asks Kolya.

“I say nothing.”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)

(The author has devoted two entire chapters to Georgi Tenno, who was one of the successful escapees mentioned in an earlier excerpt. His story is so extraordinary that I have decided to excerpt these two entire chapters verbatim. In easily-digestible segments, of course.)

“Could it be an MVD operations group? … We were following parallel courses. I decided to brazen it out, rowed strongly, and came closer to them. ‘Hey pal! Where are you headed?’  ‘Omsk.’  “And where are you from?’  ‘Pavlodar.’  ‘Why so far?’  ‘We’re moving for good.’ His voice, with its peasant o’s, was too uneducated for an operations officer, he answered unhesitatingly, and… he even seemed glad to see us. His wife was sleeping in the boat, while he spent the night at the oars. I looked in: it was more like an ox wagon, crammed with goods and chattels, heaped high with packages.

“I did a bit of quick thinking. A meeting like this – on our last night, in our last hours on the river! If he’s pulling up roots they must be carrying provisions, and money, and passports, and clothing, and even a razor. And no one, anywhere, will wonder where they are. He’s alone and there are two of us – his wife doesn’t count. I’ll travel on his passport. Kolya can dress up like a woman: he’s small, has a smooth face, we’ll mold him a figure. They must surely have a suitcase, to help us look like genuine travelers. Any driver we meet will drop us in Omsk this very morning.

“Who ever heard of a Russian river without pirates? Fate is cruel, but what else can we do? Now that we have left a trail on the river, this is our last, our only chance. It’s a pity to rob a workingman of his belongings – but who ever took pity on us? And who ever would?

“All this flashed through my mind, and through Zhdanok’s, too, in a moment. I only had to ask quietly, ‘Uh-huh?’ And he quietly replied, ‘Makhmadera.’

“I get steadily nearer and am now forcing their boat toward the steep bank, toward the dark forest. I must be quick to prevent them from reaching the next bend in the river, in case the forest ends there. I change my voice to one of authority and give my orders.

“’Attention! We are an MVD operations group. Put in the shore. I want to inspect your papers!’

“The rower threw down his oars: had he lost his head, or was he perhaps overjoyed to find that we were policemen and not robbers?

“’Of course,’ he said. ‘You can inspect them here, or on the river.’

“’I said put in to shore, and that’s what you’ll do. And be quick about it.’

“We got close to them. Our sides were almost touching. We jumped across, he scrambled with difficulty over his bundles, and we saw that he had a limp. His wife spoke up. ‘Is it far now?’ The young man handed over his passport. ‘What about your draft card?’  ‘I was invalided out, wounded; I’m exempt. Here’s the certificate.’ I saw a gleam of metal in the prow of their boat – an ax. I signaled to Kolya to remove it. He rushed too abruptly and seized the ax. The woman felt that something was wrong and set up a howl. ‘What’s all that noise?’ I said sternly. ‘Cut it out. We’re looking for runaways. Criminals. And an ax is as good a weapon as any.’ She calmed down a little.

“I give Kolya his orders.

“’Lieutenant! Slip down to the observation post. Captain Vorobyov should be there.’

“(The name and rank came to me automatically – I’ll tell you why: we had left a pal of ours, Captain Vorobyov, behind in Ekibastuz, confined to the cells for trying to escape.) Kolya understood: he was to see whether there was anyone around up top, or whether we could act. Up he ran. In the meantime I carried on questioning and inspecting. My suspect obligingly struck matches for me. I ran through their passports and certificates. His age was just right, too – the veteran was under forty. He had worked as a buoy keeper. Now they had sold their home and their cow. (He would have all the money with him, of course.) They were going to seek their fortune. They couldn’t get there in a day, so they had set off by night.”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)

(The author has devoted two entire chapters to Georgi Tenno, who was one of the successful escapees mentioned in an earlier excerpt. His story is so extraordinary that I have decided to excerpt these two entire chapters verbatim. In easily-digestible segments, of course.)

“It was obviously time to say goodbye to the Irtysh. At daybreak we must go ashore and thumb rides the rest of the way to Omsk. It wasn’t so very far now.

“The ‘katyusha’ and the salt had been left behind in the briefcase. And where could we get a razor? It wasn’t worth asking myself how we could dry our clothes. Look – on the bank there: a boat and a hut. Obviously a buoy keeper. We went ashore and knocked. No light came on. A deep male voice: ‘who is it?’  ‘Let us in the a warm-up! Our boat capsized and we nearly drowned.’ There was a lot of fumbling, then the door opened. In the dimly lit entrance a sturdy old man, Russian, stood to one side of the door, arms raised, threatening us with an ax. He could bring it down on us, and there would be no stopping him. I tried to reassure him. ‘Don’t be afraid. We’re from Omsk. We’ve been on business to the Abai State Farm. We intended to go by boat to the district center downstream, but there were nets in the shallows a bit higher up; we fouled them and turned over.’ He still looked suspicious and didn’t lower his ax. Where had I seen him before, in what picture? An old man out of a folk tale, with his gray mane, his gray beard. At last he decided to answer: ‘You were going to Zhelezyanka, you mean?’ Fine, now we know where we are. ‘That’s right, Zhelezyanka. The worst of it is my briefcase sank and there’s a hundred and fifty rubles in it. We bought some meat at the state farm, but we have no use for it now. Perhaps you’ll buy it from us?’ Zhdanok went to get the meat. The old man let me into the inner room, where there was a kerosene lamp, and a sporting gun on the wall. ‘Now we’ll check your papers.’ I tried to speak as confidently as I could. ‘I always keep my documents on me; it’s lucky they were in my top pocket or they would be soaked. I’m Stolyarov, Viktor Aleksandrovich, representing the Provincial Livestock Administration.’ Now I must quickly seize the initiative. ‘What about you?’  ‘I’m a buoy keeper.’  ‘Name and patronymic?’ Just then Kolya arrived and the old man didn’t mention papers again. He said that he couldn’t afford to buy meat but that he could give us a drink of tea.

“We sat with him for about an hour. He warmed up some tea for us on a fire of wood chips, gave us bread, and even cut off a piece of fat bacon. We talked about the navigation channels of the Irtysh, how much we had paid for the boat, where to sell it. He did most of the talking. He looked at us with compassion in his wise old eyes, and it seemed to me that he knew all about us, that he was a real human being. I even felt like confining in him. But it wouldn’t have helped us: he obviously had no razor – he was a shaggy as everything else in the forest. Besides, it was less dangerous for him not to know: otherwise it would be ‘You knew and didn’t tell.’

“We left him our veal, and he gave us some matches. He came out to see us off, and explained which side we should keep to at which points. We pushed off and rowed quickly to get as far away as possible in our last night. They would be looking for us on the right bank, so now we hugged the left most of the time. The moon was hidden by our bank but the sky was clear, and we saw a boat following the steep wooded right bank, going downstream like ourselves, but not as fast.”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)

(The author has devoted two entire chapters to Georgi Tenno, who was one of the successful escapees mentioned in an earlier excerpt. His story is so extraordinary that I have decided to excerpt these two entire chapters verbatim. In easily-digestible segments, of course.)

“In the light of an oil lamp two Kazakhs, a man and a woman, were sleeping on the floor. They jumped up in fright. ‘I have a sick man here,’ I explained. ‘Let him get warm. We are on official business from the Grain Procurement Agency. They ferried us over from the other side.’  ‘Lie down,’ the Kazakh said. Kolya lay down on a heap of felt, and I thought it would look better if I lay down a bit, too. It was the first roof we had had over our heads since our escape, but I was on hot bricks. I couldn’t even lie still, let alone go to sleep. I felt as though we had betrayed ourselves, stepped into a trap with our eyes open.

“The old man went out, wearing nothing but his underwear (otherwise I would have gone after him), and was away a long time. I heard whispering in Kazakh behind the curtain. Young men. ‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘Buoy keepers?’  ‘No, we’re from the Abai State Livestock Farm, number one in the republic.’ We couldn’t have chosen a worse place. Where there was a state farm there was officialdom and police. And the best farm in the republic, at that! They must be really keen…

“I pressed Kolya’s hand. ‘I’m off to the boat – come after me. With the briefcase.’ Out loud I said, ‘We shouldn’t have left the provisions on the bank.’ I went through to the entranceway and tried the outer door; it was locked. That’s it, then. I went back in, alerted Kolya by pulling his sleeve, and returned to the door. The carpenters had made a botched job of it, and one of the lower planks was shorter than the rest. I shoved my hand through, stretched my arm as far as I could and felt around… Ah, there we were – it was held by a peg outside. I dislodged it.

“I went out. Hurried down to the bank. The boat was where it had been. I stood waiting in broad moonlight. But there was no sign of Kolya. This was dreadful! Evidently he couldn’t make himself get up. He was enjoying an extra minute in the warmth. Or else they had seized him. I should have to go and rescue him.

“I climbed the cliff again. Four people were coming toward me from the house, Zhdanok among them. ‘Zhora!’ he shouted. (‘Zhora again!) ‘Come here! They want to see our papers.’ He wasn’t carrying the briefcase, as I had told him to.

“I go up to them. A new arrival with a Kazakh accent says, ‘Your papers!’ I behave as calmly as I can. ‘Who are you, then?’  ‘I’m the commandant.’  ‘All right, then,’ I say reassuringly. ‘Let’s go. You can check our papers anytime. There’s more light in the house there.’ We go into the house.

“I slowly lifted the briefcase from the floor, and went over to the lamp, looking for an opportunity to side-step them and dash out of the house, and talking all the time to distract them: ‘Welcome to see our papers anytime, of course. Papers must always be checked in such circumstances. You can’t be too careful. We had a case in the Procurement Agency…’ My hand was on the lock now, ready to undo the briefcase. They crowded around me. Then… I butted the commandant with my shoulder, he bumped into the old man, and they both fell. I gave the young man on my right a straight punch on the jaw. They yelled, they howled. ‘Makhmadera,’ I shouted, and bounded with the briefcase through the inner then the outer door. Then Kolya shouted after me from the entrance way: ‘Zhora! They’ve got me!’ He was clinging to the doorpost, while they tried to pull him back inside. I tugged at his arm, but couldn’t free him. Then I braced myself against the doorpost with my foot and gave such a heave that Kolya flew over my head as I fell to the ground. Two of them flung themselves on top of me. I don’t know how I wriggled out from under them. Our precious briefcase was left behind. I ran to the cliff, and bounded down it! Behind me I hear someone say in Russian: ‘Use the ax on him! The ax!’ Probably trying to scare us – otherwise they would be speaking Kazakh. I can almost feel their outstretched hands on me. I stumble, and almost fall! Kolya is in the boat already. ‘Good thing they didn’t have a gun,’ I shout. I pushed the boat out and was up to my knees in water before I jumped into it. The Kazakhs were reluctant to get wet. They ran along the bank, yelling, ‘Gir-gir-gir!’ I shouted back at them: ‘Thought you had us, didn’t you, you bastards?’

“Yes, it was lucky they had no gun. I made the boat race with the current. They bayed after us, running along the bank, until a creek barred their way. I took off my two pairs of trousers – naval and civilian – and wrung them out. My teeth were chattering. ‘Well, Kolya,’ I said, ‘we got warmed up, all right.’ He was silent.”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)

(The author has devoted two entire chapters to Georgi Tenno, who was one of the successful escapees mentioned in an earlier excerpt. His story is so extraordinary that I have decided to excerpt these two entire chapters verbatim. In easily-digestible segments, of course.)

“One problem was where to buy bread. Another was that we were now coming to inhabited places, and I could no longer go unshaven. We planned to sell one of our suits in Omsk, buy tickets several stations down the line, and get away by train.

“Toward evening we reached a buoy keeper’s hut and went up there. We found a woman, alone. She was frightened, and began rushing around. ‘I’ll call my husband at once!’ And off she went. With me following to keep an eye on her. Suddenly Zhdanok called out from the house in alarm: “Zhora!’ Damn you and your big mouth! We had agreed that I would call myself Viktor Aleksandrovich. I went back. Two men, one with a hunting rifle. ‘Who are you?’  ‘Tourists, from Omsk. We want to buy some groceries.’ And, to lull their suspicions: ‘Let’s go into the house – why are you so inhospitable?’ It worked, and they relaxed. ‘We’ve got nothing here. Maybe at the sovkhoz.* Two kilometers farther down.’

“We went to the boat and traveled another twenty kilometers downstream. It was a moonlit night. We climbed the steep bank: a little house. No light burning. We knocked. A Kazakh came out. And this first man we saw sold us half a loaf and a quarter of a sack of potatoes. We also bought a needle and thread (probably rather rash of us). We asked for a razor, too, but he was beardless and had no use for one. Still, he was the first kind person we had met. We got ambitious and asked whether there was any fish. His wife rose and brought us two little fishes and said, ‘Besh denga.’  ‘No money.’ This was more than we had hoped for – she was giving them to us free! These were really kind people! I started stowing the fish in my sack, but she pulled them back again. ‘Besh denga – five rubles,’ the man of the house explained. (Tenno had misunderstood the Kazakh words ‘besh denga’ (‘five rubles’) as Russian ‘bez deneg’ (‘without money’). Ah, so that’s it! No, we won’t take them; too dear. We rowed on for the rest of the night. Next day, our seventeenth on the run, we hid the boat in the bushes and slept in some hay. We spent the eighteenth and nineteenth in the same way, trying not to meet people. We had all we needed: water, fire, meat, potatoes, salt, a bucket. On the precipitous right bank there were leafy woods, on the left bank meadows, and a lot of hay. In the daytime we lit a fire among the bushes, made a stew, and slept.

“But Omsk was not far off, and we should be compelled to mix with people, which meant that I must have a razor. I felt completely helpless: with neither razor nor scissors, I couldn’t imagine how I was going to rid myself of all that hair. Pluck it out a hair at a time?

“On a moonlit night we saw a mound high over the Irtysh. Was it, we wondered, a lookout post? From the times of Yermak? We climbed up to look. In the moonlight we saw a mysterious dead township of adobe houses. Probably also from the early thirties… What would burn they had burned, the mud-brick walls they had knocked down, some of the people they had tied to the tails of their horses. Here was a place the tourists never visited…

“It had not rained once in those two weeks. But the nights were already very cold. To speed things up, I did most of the rowing, while Zhdanok sat at the tiller, freezing. And sure enough, on the twentieth night he started asking for a fire, and hot water to warm himself. I put him at the oars, but he shivered feverishly and could think of nothing but a fire.

“His comrade in flight could not deny him a fire – Kolya should have known that and denied himself. But that was the way with Zhdanok – he could never control his desires: remember how he had snatched the griddlecake from the table, and what a temptation the poultry was to him.

“He kept shivering and begging for a fire. But they would be keeping their eyes skinned for us all along the Irtysh. It was surprising that no search party had crossed our path so far. That we had not been spotted on a moonlit night in the middle of the Irtysh and stopped.

“Then we saw a light on the higher bank. Kolya stopped begging for a fire and wanted to go inside for a warm-up. That would be even more dangerous. I should never have agreed. We had gone through so much, suffered so many hardships – and for what? But how could I refuse him – perhaps he was seriously ill. And he could refuse himself nothing.”

* A Soviet farm administered directly by the state and operated like an industrial enterprise. It lacks the cooperative structure characteristic of a collective farm.

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)

(The author has devoted two entire chapters to Georgi Tenno, who was one of the successful escapees mentioned in an earlier excerpt. His story is so extraordinary that I have decided to excerpt these two entire chapters verbatim. In easily-digestible segments, of course.)

“A feast! And best of all, we feel at ease. At ease because we are on an island. The island segregates us from mean people. There are good people, too, but somehow runaways don’t often come across them – only mean ones.

“It is a hot, sunny day. No need for painful contortions to hide in a jackal’s hole. The grass is thick and lush. Those who trample it every day don’t know how precious it is, don’t know what it means to plunge into it breast high, to bury your face in it.

“We roam about the island. It is overrun by dog roses, and the hips are already ripe. We eat them endlessly. We eat more soup. And stew some more veal. We make kasha with kidneys.

“We feel light-hearted. We look back at our difficult journey and find plenty to laugh at. We think of them waiting back there for our sketch. Cursing us, explaining themselves to the administration. We make a play of it. We roar with laughter!

“We tear bark from a thick trunk and burn in the following inscription with red-hot wire: ‘Here on their way to freedom in October, 1950, two innocent people sentenced to hard labor for life took refuge.’ Let this sign of our presence remain. Out in the wilds here it will not help our pursuers, and someday people will read it.

“We decide not to hurry on. All that we ran away for we have: our freedom! (It can hardly be more complete when we reach Omsk or Moscow.) We also have warm, sunny days, clean air, green grass, leisure. And meat in plenty. Only we have no bread, and miss it greatly.

“We lived on the island for nearly a week: from our tenth to the beginning of our sixteenth day. In the thickest part of the weed we built ourselves a shelter of dry boughs. It was cold at night even there, but we made up for lost sleep in the daytime. The sun shone on us all this time. We drank a lot, trying to store water as camels do. We sat serenely, looking for hours through the branches at life over yonder, on shore. Over there vehicles went by. The grass was being mown again, the second crop this summer. No one dropped in on us.

“One afternoon while we were dozing in the grass, enjoying the last rays of the sun, we suddenly heard the sound of an ax at work on the island. Cautiously raising ourselves, we saw, not far away, a man lopping branches and moving gradually toward us.

“In a fortnight, with no means of shaving, I had grown a beard, a terrible reddish bristling bush, and was now a typical escaped convict. But Zhdanok had no growth at all; he was like a smooth-faced boy. So I pretended to be asleep and sent him to head the man off, ask for a smoke, tell him that we were tourists from Omsk, and find out where he came from himself. If needs be, I was ready to act.

“Kolya went over and had a chat with him. They lit up. He turned out to be a Kazakh from a nearby kolkhoz. Afterward we saw him walk along the bank, get into his boat, and row off without the branches he had cut.

“What did this mean? Was he in a hurry to report us? (Or perhaps it was the other way around: perhaps he was afraid that we might inform on him; you can do time for wood-stealing, too. That was what our lives had come to – everybody feared everybody else.) ‘What did you say we were?’  ‘Climbers.’  I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry – Zhdanok always made a muddle of things. ‘I told you to say hikers! What would climbers be doing on the flat steppe?!’

“No, we couldn’t stay there. Our life of bliss was over. We dragged everything back to the boat and cast off. Although it was daytime, we had to leave quickly. Kolya lay on the bottom, out of sight, so that from a little way off it would look as if there was just one man in the boat. I rowed, keeping to the middle of the Irtysh.”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)

(The author has devoted two entire chapters to Georgi Tenno, who was one of the successful escapees mentioned in an earlier excerpt. His story is so extraordinary that I have decided to excerpt these two entire chapters verbatim. In easily-digestible segments, of course.)

“When it got dark we set off along the river. Three days had gone by since we left a trail. The dog handlers would only be looking for us along the Irtysh by now. They would realize that we were making for the water. If we went along the bank we might easily stumble into an ambush. Besides, it was hard work – we had to go around bends, creeks, reed beds. We needed a boat!

“A light, a little house on the riverbank. The splash of oars, then silence. We lay low and waited for some time. They put the light out. We went quietly down to the water. There was the boat. And a pair of oars. Splendid! (Their owner might have taken them with him.) ‘The sailor leaves his troubles ashore.’ My native element! Quietly, to begin with, without splashing. Once out in midstream, I rowed hard.

“We move on down the Irtysh, and from around a bend a brightly lit steamer comes toward us. So many lights! The windows are all ablaze, the whole ship rings with dance music. Passengers, free and happy, stroll on the deck and sit in the restaurant, not realizing how happy they are, not even aware of their freedom. And how cozy it is in their cabins!

“In this way we traveled more than twenty kilometers downstream. Our provisions were running out. The sensible thing would be to stock up again while it was still night. We heard cocks crowing, put in to shore, and quietly climbed toward the sound. A little house. No dog. A cattle shed. A cow with a calf. Hens. Zhdanok is fond of poultry, but I say we’ll take the calf. We untie it. Zhdanok leads it to the boat while I, in the most literal sense, wipe out our tracks, otherwise it will be obvious to the tracker dogs that we are traveling by boat.

“The calf came quietly as far as the bank, but stubbornly refused to step into the boat. It was as much as the two of us could do to get him in and make him lie down. Zhdanok sat on him, to hold him down, while I rowed – once in the clear we would kill him. But that was out mistake – trying to carry him alive! The calf started getting to his feet, threw Zhdanok off, and heaved his forelegs into the water.

“All hands on deck! Zhdanok hangs on to the calf’s hindquarters, I hang onto Zhdanok, we all lean too far to one side, and water pours in on us. We are as near as need be to drowning in the Irtysh! Still, we drag the calf back in! But the boat is very low in the water and must be bailed out. Even that must wait, though, till we kill the calf. I take the knife and try to sever the tendon at the back of his neck – I know the place is there somewhere. But either I can’t find it or the knife is too blunt; it won’t go through. The calf trembles, struggles, gets more and more agitated – and I am agitated, too. I try to cut his throat – but this is no good either. He bellows, kicks, looks as if to jump clean out of the boat or sink us. He wants to live – but we have to live, too!

“I saw away, but cannot cut deep enough. He rocks the boat, kicks its sides – the silly idiot will sink us any minute now! Because he is so nasty and so stubborn, a red hatred for him sweeps over me, as though he were my worst enemy, and I start savagely, randomly pricking and jabbing him with the knife. His blood spurts forth and sprays us. He bellows loudly and kicks out desperately. Zhdanok clamps his hands around the calf’s muzzle, the boat rocks, and I stab and stab again. To think that at one time I couldn’t hurt a mouse or a fly! But this is no time for pity: it’s him or us!

“At last he lay still. We started hurriedly scooping out water with a bail and some tin cans, each of us using both hands. Then we rowed on.”

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Excerpted from Volume III, Part V – Katorga – Chapter 7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)

(The author has devoted two entire chapters to Georgi Tenno, who was one of the successful escapees mentioned in an earlier excerpt. His story is so extraordinary that I have decided to excerpt these two entire chapters verbatim. In easily-digestible segments, of course.)

“The following morning caught us in an awkward spot and we had to hide in some bushes not far from a road. Not the best of places – we could be spotted. A cart rattled by. We didn’t sleep that day either.

“As the eighth day ended we set off again. When we had gone a little way we suddenly felt soft earth underfoot: the plow had been here. We went on and saw headlights along the roads. Careful now!

“There was a young moon up among the clouds. Yet another dead and ruined Kazakh hamlet*. Farther on, the lights of a village, and the words of a song reached our ears:

“’Hey lads, unharness the horses…’

“We put the sacks down among the ruins, and made for the village with the briefcase and bucket. We had our knives in our pockets. Here’s our first house – with a grunting piglet. If only we’d met him out on the steppe. A lad rode toward us on a bike. ‘Hey, pal, we’ve got a truck over there; we’re moving grain. Where can we get some water for the radiator?’ The boy got off, went ahead of us, and pointed. There was a tank on the edge of the village; probably the cattle drank from it. We dipped the bucket in and carried it away full, without taking a drink. We parted with the lad, then sat down and drank and drank. We half-emptied the bucket at one go (we were thirstier than ever today, because we had eaten our fill).

“There seemed to be a slight chill in the air. And there was real grass under our feet. There must be a river near! We must look for it. We walk and walk. The grass is higher, there are bushes. A willow – where they are there is always water. Reeds! Water!!! No doubt a backwater of the Irtysh. Now we can splash around and wash ourselves. Reeds two meters high! Ducks start up from under our feet. We can breathe freely here! We shan’t come to grief here!

“And this was when for the first time in eight days the stomach discovered that it was still working. After eight days out of action, what torment it was! Birth pains are probably no worse.

“Then we went back to the abandoned village. There we lit a fire between the walls and boiled some dried mutton. We should have used the night to move on, but all we wanted was to eat and to eat insatiably. We stuffed ourselves until we could hardly move. Then, feeling pleased with life, we set off to look for the Irtysh. At a fork in the road something happened for the first time in eight days – we quarreled. I said, ‘Right,’ Zhdanok said, ‘left.’ I felt sure that it should be right, but he wouldn’t listen. Another of the dangers that lie in wait for escapers – falling out with one another. When you are on the run, one of your number must be allowed to have the last word, otherwise you are in trouble. Determined to have my way, I went off to the right. I walked a hundred meters, and still heard no footsteps behind me. My heart ached. We couldn’t just part like that. I sat down by a haystack and looked back… Kolya was coming! I hugged him. We walked on side by side as though nothing had happened.

“There are more bushes now and the air is chillier. We walk to the edge of a sharp drop. Down below, the Irtysh splashes and babbles and playfully breathes on us. We are overjoyed.

“We find a haystack and burrow into it. What about it, tracker dogs, still think you can find us? You haven’t a hope! We fall into a heavy sleep.

“We were awakened by a shot! And dogs barking quite near!…

“Was this it, then? Was our freedom to end so soon? We clung together and stopped breathing. A man went by. With a dog. A hunter!… We fell into an even deeper sleep… and slept the day through. This was how we spent our ninth day.”

*  The years 1930-1933 left many such ruined villages dotted about Kazakhstan. First Budenny passed through with his cavalry, then famine.