Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [205]
Chapter 16
THE DYING
What does it mean—exhaustion? What does it mean—fatigue? Every movement is terrifying, Every movement of your painful arms and legs Terrible hunger—Raving over bread “Bread, bread,” the heart beats. Far away in the gloomy sky, The indifferent sun turns. Your breath is a thin whistle It’s minus fifty degrees What does it mean—dying? The mountains look on, and remain silent.
—Nina Gagen-Torn, Memoria1
THROUGHOUT THE GULAG’S EXISTENCE, the prisoners always reserved a place at the very bottom of the camp hierarchy for the dying—or rather, for the living dead. A whole sub-dialect of camp slang was invented to describe them. Sometimes, the dying were called fitili, or “wicks,” as in the wick of a candle, soon to be blown out. They were also known as gavnoedy “shit-eaters” or pomoechniki “slop-swillers.” Most often they were called dokhodyagi, from the Russian verb dokhodit, “to reach” or “to attain,” a word usually translated as “goners.” Jacques Rossi, in his Gulag Handbook, claims the expression was a sarcastic one: the dying were at last “reaching socialism.”2 Others, more prosaically, say the expression meant they were reaching not socialism, but the end of their lives.
Put simply, the dokhodyagi were starving to death, and they suffered from the diseases of starvation and vitamin deficiency: scurvy, pellagra, various forms of diarrhea. In the early stages, these diseases manifested themselves in the form of loosened teeth and skin sores, symptoms which sometimes even afflicted the camp guards.3 In later stages, prisoners would lose their ability to see in the dark. Gustav Herling remembered “the sight of the night-blind, walking slowly through the zone in the early mornings and evenings, their hands fluttering in front of them.”4
The starving also experienced stomach problems, dizziness, and grotesque swelling of the legs. Thomas Sgovio, who came to the brink of starvation before recovering, woke up one morning to discover that one of his legs was “purple, twice the size of the other leg. It itched. There were blotches all over it.” Soon, “the blotches turned into huge boils. Blood and pus trickled from them. When I pressed a finger into the purple flesh—an indentation remained for a long time.” When Sgovio found his legs could not fit into his boots, he was told to slit the boots.5
In the final stages of starvation, the dokhodyagi took on a bizarre and inhuman appearance, becoming the physical fulfillment of the dehumanizing rhetoric used by the state: in their dying days, enemies of the people ceased, in other words, to be people at all. They became demented, often ranting and raving for hours. Their skin was loose and dry. Their eyes had a strange gleam. They ate anything they could get their hands on—birds, dogs, garbage. They moved slowly, and could not control their bowels or their bladders, as a result of which they emitted a terrible odor. Tamara Petkevich describes the first time she saw them:
There behind the barbed wire was a row of creatures, distantly reminiscent of human beings . . . there were ten of them, skeletons of various sizes covered with brown, parchment-like skin, all stripped to the waist, with shaved heads and pendulous withered breasts. Their only clothing was some pathetic dirty underpants, and their shinbones projected from concave circles of emptiness. Women! Hunger, heat and hard toil had transformed them into dried specimens that still, unaccountably, clung to the last vestiges of life.6
Varlam Shalamov has also left an unforgettable poetic description