Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [104]
The ship rolled, strained, groaned . . .
—Soviet prisoners’ song
IN 1827, Princess Maria Volkonskaya, the wife of the Decembrist rebel Sergei Volkonsky, left her family, her child, and her safe life in St. Petersburg to join her husband in his Siberian exile. Her biographer described her journey, which was thought, at the time, to have been one of almost unendurable hardship:
Day after day, the sledge raced onwards into the endless horizon. Enclosed as if in a time capsule, Maria was in a state of feverish elation. There was a sense of unreality to the journey: lack of sleep and little food. She stopped only at an occasional relay for a glass of hot lemon tea from the ever-present brass samovar. The intoxicating speed of the sleigh, pulled by three plunging horses, devoured the empty distances at a gallop. “Onward . . . forward!” shouted the drivers, dashing on as great plumes of snow rose from under the horses’ hooves, and harness bells jingled relentlessly, warning of the approach of the vehicle . . .1
More than a century later Evgeniya Ginzburg’s cell mate read a similar description of an aristocrat’s journey across the Urals—and sighed with envy: “And I always thought that the wives of the Decembrists endured the most frightful sufferings . . .”2
No horses and no sleighs drove twentieth-century prisoners with “intoxicating speed” across the Siberian snow, and there were no glasses of hot lemon tea to be had from brass samovars at the relay stations. Princess Volkonskaya may have wept during her journey, but the prisoners who came after her could not even hear the word étap—prison jargon for “transport”—without feeling a jolt of mouth-drying fear, even terror. Every journey was a wrenching leap into the unknown, a move away from familiar cell mates and familiar arrangements, however poor those might be. Worse, the process of moving prisoners from prison to transit prison, from transit prison to camp, and between camps within the system, was physically grueling and openly cruel. In some senses, it was the most inexplicable aspect of life in the Gulag.
For those undergoing the ordeal for the first time, the event was pregnant with symbolism. Arrest and interrogation had been an initiation into the system, but the train journey across Russia represented a geographical break with the prisoners’ former life, and the start of a new one. Emotions always ran high in the trains that left Moscow and Leningrad, headed north and east. Thomas Sgovio, the American who had failed to retrieve his passport, remembered what had happened when his train left for Kolyma: “Our train left Moscow on the evening of June 24th. It was the beginning of an eastward journey which was to last a month. I can never forget the moment. Seventy men . . . began to cry.”3
Most of the time, long transports took place in stages. If they were being held in large city prisons, the zeks were first transported to the trains in trucks whose very design spoke of the NKVD’s obsession with secrecy. From the outside, the “Black Ravens,” as they were nicknamed, appeared to be regular heavy-goods trucks. In the 1930s, they often had the word “bread” painted on the sides, but later more elaborate ruses were used. One prisoner, arrested in 1948, remembered traveling in one truck marked “Moscow Cutlets” and another labeled “Vegetables/Fruits.”4
On the inside, the trucks were sometimes divided into “two rows of tiny, pitch-black, airless cages,” as one prisoner described them.5 According to a design of 1951, others simply had two long benches, upon which prisoners squeezed beside one another.6 Peasants, and those being transported at the start of the mass deportations from the Baltic States and eastern Poland, had a rougher time of it. They were often packed into ordinary-goods trucks, as an elderly Lithuanian once described to me, “like sardines”: the first prisoner spread his legs, the second sat between the first’s legs and spread his own legs—and so on, until the truck was full.7 Such arrangements were particularly uncomfortable when