فصل 18

CHAPTER 18

THE LAST GULAG

The country in which my books are printed will not be the same country that exiled me. And to that country I will certainly return.

—ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

On a summer afternoon in 1988, Yelena Chukovskaya was leading a tour through the small museum in the village of Peredelkino dedicated to the life and work of her grandfather, the children’s-book writer and eminent literary scholar Kornei Chukovsky. One of the tourists fixed on a small photograph of Solzhenitsyn, a friend of the family. “Why doesn’t Solzhenitsyn just come home?” the tourist asked. “What is he waiting for?” Yelena was stunned. “I could not believe how naive, how unknowing, the question was,” she told me. “And the younger people, they just had no idea who Solzhenitsyn was. A generation had already gone by since his exile, and he’d become little more than a legend to them, almost forgotten in his own country.” By that summer, Gorbachev’s glasnost had already opened the door to many of the “anti-Soviet” classics: Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. After a comic court case, the government even let Nabokov’s Lolita go through. But nothing of Solzhenitsyn. The Politburo would not sanction it. I asked Yegor Ligachev, Gorbachev’s conservative rival, about Solzhenitsyn, and he made it plain that the Politburo felt, for a long time, that it could not tolerate a writer—especially a living, exiled writer—who considered the entire reign of the Communist Party an unmitigated crime and catastrophe. Ligachev wanted me to know that he was no critic but he knew obscenity when he read it. Ligachev was in charge of presenting a report to the Politburo on Solzhenitsyn, and he portrayed himself as the put-upon Party apparatchik, staying up night after night at home reading through the entire oeuvre, from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to the historical volumes known as The Red Wheel.

“You know that adds up to a lot of pages,” he said proudly.

It was Solzhenitsyn’s merciless portrait of Lenin as a fanatical revolutionary, as the originator of a system based on state terror, that most disturbed Ligachev and, for a time, Gorbachev himself. “After all, Lenin is ours!” Ligachev said. “We adhere to his viewpoint, to Leninism, and we must defend him.” But why should the Politburo decide instead of the reader? I asked.

Ligachev grimaced and waved the question away in disgust. After all, it had always been so. It was Khrushchev himself, after a long day’s reading in 1962, who gave the word that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich could be published in Novy Mir. And it was also Khrushchev who led the campaign against Pasternak. It was the Party’s absolute right to decide.

“We have sacred things, just as you do,” Ligachev said dryly.

But why use censorship to enforce it?

“Okay, pardon me, but we have a different psychology, a different worldview,” he said, his voice rising. “I respect you and you should respect me. For me, Lenin is sacred.” A few days after the incident at the museum in Peredelkino, Yelena Chukovskaya sat down at her desk determined to “do something—and fast.” She wrote a brief article outlining the facts of Solzhenitsyn’s life and appealing to the government to return his citizenship. Then she sent it to Book Review, a weekly with a good reputation among the intelligentsia. The act seemed natural to Yelena, an extension of family tradition. Her mother, Lydia Chukovskaya, set an example in the 1970s when she went before the Writers’ Union and, at great risk, swore to it that despite its evil denunciations, Solzhenitsyn would return to Russia. For her troubles, Lydia Chukovskaya was denounced and Sofia Petrovna, her extraordinarily personal novel about the purges, banned. Now Yelena was picking up the battle. Just hours after receiving the piece, the editor of Book Review, Yevgeny Overin, took an enormous risk. He accepted the article for the August 5 issue on “editor’s responsibility,” an extraordinary step meaning that he did not wait for clearance from the censors.

Yelena Chukovskaya’s piece was an immediate sensation. Thousands of letters and telegrams of support arrived at her door and at Book Review’s ramshackle offices. Officials in the Central Committee reported that they, too, started getting more and more mail demanding the rehabilitation of Solzhenitsyn and his works. Chukovskaya’s article and the response to it were signals, hints of what was politically possible and morally necessary. Other publications quickly took the cue. The editors of Rabochoye Slovo (“Worker’s Word”), an obscure newsletter for Ukrainian railway workers, acted first, becoming the first aboveground publication to print Solzhenitsyn for nearly three decades. On October 18, the paper’s 45,500 subscribers heard the old vatic voice, Solzhenitsyn’s appeal to the young from 1974, the year he was exiled, to “Live Not by Lies”: “Let us admit it: we have not matured enough to march into the squares and shout the truth out loud, or to express openly what we think. It is not necessary. It is dangerous. But let us refuse to say what we do not think. This is our path, the easiest and most accessible one, which allows for our inherent, deep-rooted cowardice.” From his home in Cavendish, Vermont, Solzhenitsyn tried to manage the terms of his return. The editors of Novy Mir talked with him by phone and telegram and asked for permission to publish the two early novels, Cancer Ward and First Circle. Solzhenitsyn refused, insisting instead they they publish The Gulag Archipelago before any other of his books. Not only was Gulag his monument to the millions of victims of the Soviet regime, it was also the book, when it was published abroad, that hastened his arrest and his forced exile to the West. Solzhenitsyn’s demand was also a way of attacking in the quickest way possible the latest official version of the Soviet past. Unlike the Gorbachevian scheme of socialism-gone-errant, of blaming all sins on Stalin, Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume “literary investigation” argued that the forced labor camp system was no aberration, but began instead with Lenin.

The editors agreed to Solzhenitsyn’s demand. Now they had to deal with something only slightly less intimidating: the Communist Party. At first, Novy Mir’s editors thought they could somehow ignore the Party and slip Solzhenitsyn into the pages of the magazine, as if through a hidden door.

On the back cover of Novy Mir’s October 1988 issue, the editors printed a cryptic announcement, saying merely that Solzhenitsyn had given them permission to publish “some of his works” beginning in 1989. But the Central Committee’s ideological department, which certainly had its informers at the Izvestia plant where Novy Mir was printed, quickly suppressed the plan. In the middle of the night, the printers got a firm “stop work” order from an anonymous official in the ideological department of the Central Committee. “The printers were indignant,” said Vadim Borisov, the editor at Novy Mir who was working most closely with Solzhenitsyn. “They felt great respect for glasnost, democracy, and the name of Solzhenitsyn. They were furious and invited reporters from the newspapers and television to come to the print shop to see what had happened. But no one came.” The printers were forced to pulp more than a million covers and print new ones—without the Solzhenitsyn announcement. Only a few subscribers, mainly in Ukraine, got the journal as it was originally printed.

Not long after, Vadim Medvedev, who had replaced Ligachev as the chief Party ideologist in a shift in the leadership, attacked Solzhenitsyn for his “disdain” of Lenin and the Soviet system. The Gulag Archipelago and Lenin in Zurich, he told reporters at a news conference, “undermine the foundations on which our present life rests.” That foundation, however, was crumbling fast. The momentum of glasnost, fueled now by the publications of Solzhenitsyn in Book Review, Worker’s Word, and other journals, as well as by rumors of the Novy Mir incident, could not be contained or ignored. Novy Mir was well positioned to press the issue. The editor in chief, Sergei Zalygin, was a contradictory figure, an elfin man in his seventies who had “played the game” in the Brezhnev years, constantly compromising principles to stay afloat. Like Len Karpinsky at Moscow News or Vitaly Korotich at Ogonyok, Zalygin had much to regret. But he saw glasnost “as my last chance,” he told me. He would try now to right a great wrong. Zalygin adopted a strategy of defiant persistence. For six months running, he kept including Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize lecture in the galleys for the next issue—and for six months, the censors kept removing it. Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a legendary figure during the thaw, had used the same strategy when he ran Novy Mir in the sixties. Zalygin also made his rounds, campaigning quietly for publication with various members of the Politburo, including Gorbachev himself. Zalygin knew there were sharp ideological divisions in the leadership—especially on questions of history and glasnost—and he was prepared to wait for his opportunity. He knew, most of all, that Gorbachev was in an extremely difficult position. Many members of his earliest constituency, the middle class and the intelligentsia, were growing impatient, disillusioned with reform. Any further resistance to publishing Solzhenitsyn could only damage his popularity further. But as an avowed Leninist, a “committed Communist” dependent on the support of the Party apparatus, Gorbachev also had to find a graceful way to change the policy and, at the same time, keep his distance from a writer who despised the system.

On a June afternoon in 1989, Medvedev summoned Zalygin to his office at the Central Committee. The meeting, Novy Mir’s Vadim Borisov told me, was “extremely unpleasant,” and gave Zalygin the distinct impression that the delay in publishing Solzhenitsyn could be indefinite. The next day, the Politburo gathered for its usual Thursday meeting. To the surprise of some Politburo members, Gorbachev broached the “Solzhenitsyn problem.” He suggested that the Soviet Writers’ Union meet and decide the issue for themselves.

The Novy Mir contingent did not know what to expect of the union, an organization famous for its cowardice. Many of the leaders who still ran the union headed the smear campaigns against Solzhenitsyn in the early 1970s which led to his exile. Zalygin and Borisov settled uneasily into their seats at the Central House of Writers.

The first speaker was the union first secretary, Vladimir Karpov, a veteran toady of the regime. Karpov was one of those hack novelists who, in return for unstinting obedience, won huge printings for his books, a large apartment, and a dacha in the shade. Just a year before, Karpov had told reporters at a news conference that Solzhenitsyn would never be welcomed back in the Soviet Union if he did not renounce his views: “If someone wants to come back to take part in our reform process, then he is welcome. But if a person has lied through his teeth and slandered our country from abroad and wants to come back and do the same from here, then there is no place for him.” Surely, Karpov would do the Kremlin’s bidding, Zalygin thought. But what would that bidding be?

“Comrades,” Karpov began, “we used to think one way about Aleksandr Isayevich, but now things have changed.…” Borisov felt his entire body lighten with happiness. The long wait was over. Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture appeared in the July 1989 issue of Novy Mir along with an announcement that the first of several installments of The Gulag Archipelago would appear in August. The state-run publishing house, Sovetsky Pisatel, announced that it would issue a multivolume Collected Works. After long exile, Solzhenitsyn had returned.

A few days after I got the first “Solzhenitsyn issue” of Novy Mir in the mail, I went with my friend Lev Timofeyev to see a theatrical version of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich at the Independent Studio. There were no ads, no posters around town. The Independent Studio group was a poor, obscure troupe working out of a dank basement just around the corner from one of the most ominous buildings in Moscow: 38 Petrovka, the headquarters of the Interior Ministry police.

Backstage, I met with the lead actor, Yuri Kosikh. His head was shaved clean and he was dressed in his costume, the filthy padded jackets that prisoners wore in the camps throughout the Stalin era. Could it be that labor camp prisoners, like eccentric English colonels or French roués, were now “characters” on the Moscow stage?

Kosikh was quick to say, however, that the play was not distant to him. In rehearsals, he heard the voice of his father ringing in his head. His father had spent ten years in the labor camps of Kolyma. “I’ve played Chekhov, Shakespeare, every kind of role,” Kosikh said. “But never has it come so smoothly. It’s as if I’d internalized the being of Ivan Denisovich through my father.” Like the novella, the play began with five-o’clock reveille and ended with Ivan Denisovich falling asleep “fully content.” And as in the novella, Kosikh’s Ivan spends a day—one of hundreds—filled with petty humiliations, brutalities, and small triumphs of the spirit. The set was dreary, barbed wire draped over heating ducts, dirt scattered in clumps on the concrete floor. The light flickered weakly, even at “midday,” like winter afternoons in Siberia.

The production was sometimes overwrought, but, all the same, Lev was deeply moved. He idolized Solzhenitsyn. Lev spent more than two years in the labor camp at Perm in the Urals—more than six months of that time in an isolation cell. He was a Gorbachev-era prisoner who was released only during the “amnesty wave” following Sakharov’s return to Moscow from Gorky and the superpower summit in Reykjavik. No writer meant more to him than Solzhenitsyn. He had read Gulag in an underground edition, and just the memory of certain passages about the spiritual life of the prisoner helped sustain him throughout his own term. “Aleksandr Isayevich leveled the telling blow against the system,” he said. “The Gulag Archipelago is the criminal and spiritual indictment of a sick society.” Onstage, Ivan Denisovich was falling asleep. There was darkness for a while, then the dawn of the house lights at half power and a stunned, desultory applause. The people in the audience finally rose to their feet, everyone weary and stretching, stunned to be in a theater and thinking, suddenly, of ordinary things: the walk home and how to buy some milk and bread for breakfast. But the feeling stayed with Lev for hours. As we walked down the street, he said, “That smell. Even that smell of wet leather and wet wool and sweat is the smell of the camps. It takes me back.” By 1990, political prisoners became a new breed of politician. In Ukraine, nationalists looked to former “politicals” to lead them: Bogdan and Mikhail Horyn, Stepan Khamara, Vyacheslav Chernovil. I met the philologist Levon Ter-Petrossian in Yerevan a week after he was released from prison; two years later he was elected president of Armenia. Georgia adored the former political prisoner Merab Kostava, and then mourned him endlessly after he was killed in a car crash. A far lesser man, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, filled the gap. Gamsakhurdia was a paranoiac, an untrustworthy fool, but he was, after all, a comrade to Kostava. That was his selling point. He would be elected Georgian president and then chased out of Tbilisi in a coup d’etat. Sakharov’s protégé the biologist Sergei Kovalev, a prisoner in the Urals for many years, became a key leader in the Russian parliament. As a deputy, he suddenly found himself in a suit touring prison sites and instructing the commandants in the rudiments of decency and human rights.

According to the main human rights organizations in the Soviet Union and in the West, the last island of the gulag, the last outpost for political prisoners, was a camp in the Ural Mountains called Perm-35. Anatoly Shcharansky, Vladimir Bukovsky, Sergei Grigoryants, Timofeyev, and Kovalev had all spent time in Perm. Now the number of political prisoners had become so small that some of the Perm camps closed and were consolidated into just one, Perm-35.

Perm was a classic Soviet city—that is, an urban mass indistinguishable from hundreds of others, with a Lenin Avenue and broad and pitted streets and apartment blocks so ugly and uniform that you could weep looking at them. For a long time, Perm was closed to foreign journalists. Like many cities in the Urals, it was a center for military production. But now Perm was open, and getting to the camp turned out to be no problem at all. Accompanied by a local journalist I had gotten to know in Moscow, I paid a call on the chief of police. The Interior Ministry in the region was thoroughly bored by then with occasional visits by journalists or members of Congress. Colonel Andrei Votinov, the man in charge, was just a harmless wise guy. He wanted me to tell him why “in God’s name” I wanted to drive for hours to see “a rathole.” And after I explained my worthy reasons, I asked what conditions were like at Perm-35.

“You’ll see,” he said. “It’s just like Switzerland.”

I was told to return to my hotel and wait.

At eight the next morning, Major Nikolai Dronin, an unsmiling officer of the law, rapped on my door.

“So now we go to prison,” he said.

It was a four-hour drive to Perm-35 from the city, but I was happy for the boredom. In Moscow, and even on trips to other republican capitals, it was easy to lose the sense of the vastness of the country. Out here it was easier to understand how so many hundreds of islands in the gulag archipelago could go unseen, tucked away in forests and mining villages and on mountaintops. All the banalities of the size of the Soviet Union—the eleven time zones, the number of times you could fit France into Kazakhstan, etc.—took on real meaning just by driving hour after hour. In the Urals, as in so many other places, Russia seemed like an unending frontier, wild and huge with only occasional settlements, hastily built towns, unlivable places where tens of millions of people lived, not villages so much as population clusters, work forces built around workplaces: lumber works, chemical plants, coal mines. All along the road, we saw peasant men riding wooden carts heaped with coal, humpbacked women carting their heavy sacks down the road. We could have driven for a week or more to the east and seen little else.

Finally there was a turnoff, primitive and unmarked. “The road to Perm-35,” the major said.

My host would be Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Osin, who had been running the camp since it went up in 1972. Shcharansky, Bukovsky, Marchenko, Stus, Orlov, Timofeyev: they all knew Osin. Shcharansky, especially, remembered his eyes, the dull gleam in the ruddy meat of his face. “Osin was an enormous, flabby man,” Shcharansky wrote, “with small eyes and puffy eyelids, who seemed to have long ago lost interest in everything but food.… But he was a master of intrigue who had successfully overtaken many of his colleagues on the road to advancement.… I could see that he enjoyed his power over the prisoners and liked to see them suffer. But he never forgot that the zeks—the prisoners—were, above all, a means for advancing his career, and he knew how to back off in a crisis.” Once, when Shcharansky was refused permission to celebrate Hanukkah, he went on a hunger strike. Osin didn’t want a scandal and cut a quick deal: if Shcharansky would end the hunger strike, he could light his Hanukkah candles. Shcharansky agreed, but demanded that while he said the appropriate prayers, Osin would stand by with his head covered and, at the end, say “Amen.” “Blessed are You, oh Lord, for allowing me to light these candles,” Shcharansky began in Hebrew. “May you allow me to light the Hanukkah candles many times in your city, Jerusalem, with my wife, Avital, and my family and friends.” Inspired by the sight of Osin, Shcharansky added, “And may the day come when all our enemies, who today are planning our destruction, will stand before us and hear our prayers and say, ‘Amen.’ ” “Amen,” Osin repeated.

Shcharansky quickly spread the word in Perm-35 of Osin’s “conversion.” This meant a freezing stint in the isolation cell, but Shcharansky could not resist. Today, Shcharansky lives in freedom in Israel. After his release, his mother sorted through photographs of her son in Jerusalem. She wanted to send a little memento to Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Makarovich Osin.

Perm-35 was a tiny place, five hundred yards square, a few barracks, guard towers and razor wire everywhere. Osin was there to greet us, and he was much as Shcharansky had described him, enormously fat with dull, pitiless eyes. We went up a flight of stairs, past a few Party propaganda posters—“Socialism Is Order!”—to his office. Osin had a broad desk and a well-padded armchair, and he affected the pose of a contented chief executive officer. He was humbled only by the size of his work force. Just sixteen men remained in his charge. The Interior Ministry was planning to get rid of the “politicals” and bring in a “full population” of common criminals: rapists, murderers, thieves.

“So it’s time to retire,” the commandant said, leaning back as if waiting for the gold watch. “I’ll be on a pension by the end of the year.” Osin tried, but failed, to conceal his disdain for the latest turn of Soviet history, the fitful lurch toward a civil society that was making him a relic of the totalitarian past. For years, he had inflicted punishment on dissident poets, priests, and mathematicians. He was, to use the Stalinist accolade, an exemplary “cog in the wheel.” He did what he was told, “and all the prisoners were the same to me.” Equal under lawlessness.

“You know, they talk about political prisoners, but there were never any political prisoners here,” Osin said. “There were laws, and they were convicted on those laws, and that was it. They betrayed their Motherland. Later, the laws changed, but that’s something else.” There was no hint of repentance, or even self-doubt. “What do I have to regret?” he said. “People were sent here under the law, and I did what I was told to do. This was the work I chose, and I did it. This is what was required of me. I think the prisoners here have better living conditions than some people who are free. They have meat, after all.” At this, Osin grabbed his belly and shook with laughter. He was a card.

Osin was not completely out of work, of course. The courts were still capable of indulging the political intrigues of local and regional Communist Party bosses, and, of all the branches of government, the judicial system has probably been touched least by reform. But most of the remaining cases were not, in the jargon of monitoring groups, “pure” political cases. In fact, Gorbachev and the administration at Perm-35 claimed that there were no political prisoners in the country at all. “Most of the remaining cases are mixed—people who tried to flee the country illegally, people with ambiguous contacts with foreign groups,” said Sergei Kovalev, a former political prisoner who eventually became the chairman of the human rights committee in the Russian parliament. “What I’m mainly working on is the length of their terms. People with ten, fifteen years in a camp for trying to row a raft to Turkey is absurd.” Like a good host at a housewarming party, Osin rose from behind his desk and said, “So! Let’s give you the tour!” Osin’s tour, with an emphasis on the quality of the paint job and the cleanliness of the floors and toilet, was significant insofar as we saw no prisoners.

“They’re off at work,” Osin said.

When will they be back? I asked.

“Let’s have lunch,” Osin said.

And so we did, a meal beyond the imagination of the prisoners—cabbage soup, brown bread, salad, chicken, mashed potatoes, fruit juice. Then, like hurried tourists, we were off for more touring. We saw the infirmary. We saw the barracks where the men slept. But suddenly, as Osin was demonstrating the firmness of the camp beds, a pasty, middle-aged man with a shaved head and wearing prisoner coveralls burst through a door and down the hall, screaming.

“I must talk with you! They are beating me!”

“Yasin,” Osin said glumly, his eyes still on the mattress. The commandant pursed his lips. His neck turned crimson.

“I must talk to you!” Yasin said. The guards tried to wrestle him back down the hall and into a room where they had been keeping the prisoners. I asked Osin if it would be all right to talk to the man, fully identified later as Valery Yasin. The commandant rolled his eyes and made a signal with his hand to suggest that Yasin was mentally unbalanced and not worth listening to. Still, Osin said, “Bring him back in.” The guards led Yasin back into the room. He was out of breath and his skin was pale and damp. He had been in and out of prisons, mental hospitals, and camps like Perm-35 for more than fifteen years. He had been accused of fleeing the country illegally, consorting with foreign intelligence. His term was set to run until the year 2003. Yasin’s case, according to an official at Helsinki Watch, was murky—“the political and the criminal aspects are all tangled, confusing.” There was, however, no doubting Yasin’s fury. His words tumbled out between gasps for breath.

“For seven years I refused to go out for walks or to go out to the street.

This was my protest. I also demanded to stay alone in a one-man cell. I was in despair, sure I would be killed. They beat me. They demanded evidence that the KGB needed. They wanted me to cooperate with them and said that otherwise I’d be left to die here.

“I was desperate and slashed my arm. I was beaten and put in an isolation cell. This was in February. I lost one and a half liters of blood. I was half dead, and in this state I was dragged into the isolation cell, which was extremely cold, and they threw me in there naked. This was the order of Lieutenant Colonel Osin.” Osin, sitting nearby, rolled his eyes. He said nothing. A guard near the door spoke: “Let him say why he cut his veins!” “I have a written document stating why I cut my veins,” Yasin said. “They did barbaric things. On December 10, Human Rights Day, they forcibly shaved off my hair. I was beaten, my hands were twisted, my arms were twisted. This is how they celebrate Human Rights Day here.” The guard said, “You can only grow hair three months prior to release. How long until your release?” “My hair was already short,” Yasin said.

“If someone passes a new law, then maybe we won’t shave your hair,” the guard said. “Until then, if you don’t get it cut voluntarily, then we’ll do it by force.” Osin was silent.

Yasin was sweating. “So, this is how they abide by the law,” he said. “They put handcuffs on people and beat people, under the pretext that the guy will resist. People are forced to submit to this humiliating procedure. All over the world, when your head is shaved bald, it is considered a humiliation.” With an imperial wave of the hand, Osin signaled the guard to lead Yasin out of the room. I asked to talk to a few more of the prisoners. Osin rolled his eyes, but agreed. The first man I asked to see was Yuri Pavlov, who had been sentenced to seven years on charges of espionage for the United States. The man I met did not seem capable of dialing the United States on the telephone. He was lethargic and distant and admitted to some sort of “brain injury.” I asked him about the treatment of prisoners in Perm, and he said mechanically, “There are changes for the better. I remember how it was before, and I can compare with the present. When I was in Perm-36 with Timofeyev it was much worse. Now my complaints are mostly medical.” Pavlov asked to be remembered to Timofeyev and walked slowly out the door.

Then the guard brought in the last prisoner on my list, Vitaly Goldovitch, a physicist who had worked in defense research and had been charged with treason and other crimes when he tried to row a rubber raft across the Black Sea to Turkey. Goldovitch was nervous, his hands fluttering at his sides. Months passed with no visitors, no company except the guards and his fellow prisoners. No one had told him a reporter was coming, and now the words, half-pronounced, flew out of him. To try to calm him, I repeated what Pavlov had told me, that the treatment had gotten better lately. But Goldovitch said that was nonsense, that he was still manhandled and berated.

All the same, he said, “I’m trying to see the human being under the guards’ uniforms. I can see that some of them may be good people, but they are crushed psychologically. There are almost no free people in the Soviet Union.” Osin listened to all this with bored amusement. Once more he twirled his index finger around his ear, signaling that the charge was mere fantasy, craziness. Who would believe such a thing could happen in Perm-35?

As we left Goldovitch, I asked Osin to see the “isolators,” the punishment cells. Nearly everyone in Perm-35, nearly every political prisoner in the history of the Soviet Union for that matter, had spent time in such places.

“Is this really necessary?” Osin asked.

Still, Osin walked outside in a huff, opened a huge gate, and pointed to a small field covered with snow and mud. There were rusted soccer goals at either end of the field. “Recreational facilities,” he said angrily. “Here we let them play soccer, volleyball, whatever. I don’t suppose they have that in prisons where you live, do they?” Osin opened the door to a shed with a narrow hall and a series of tiny cells—the punishment cells. For now—perhaps for the benefit of the day’s visitor—they were empty. Each one had a wooden plank for a bed. “See?” Osin said. “Not so terrible.” In our talk, Goldovitch had said he spent more than a year in a punishment cell after a rebellion in Perm-35 in 1989. Some prisoners had refused to work, attend roll calls, or wear their names on their shirts. “We refused to do everything that was required as if we were soldiers of the army,” he said. “We wanted to make this revolt in compliance with the law, in the framework of the law. Nine people ended up in the isolation cells after that.

“It is very hard but you get used to it. The cell is three meters long, one meter wide, two meters high. The cell is like your clothes. You are very cold, but in three days your body heat keeps you warmer. You walk around all day, don’t sleep, look for some trifles, like filling the cracks with paper, to avoid going crazy. Or you wash your handkerchief over and over again. You think a lot and it helps.” Osin slammed shut the door to the cell and led me to our car. He said good-bye and did not smile.

During the ride back to the city, Major Dronin got to talking about politics, about the “lawlessness” in the country these days.

“There will be a dictatorship soon,” he said with a certain relish in his voice. “It won’t be the Communist Party organs, it will be the real organs—the KGB. They will try to develop the economy, but there will be a strict discipline.” As in Stalin’s day? I asked.

“No, that was too harsh,” he said. “But maybe as it was under Brezhnev or Andropov.” Dronin stared out the car window as the camp disappeared into the milky fog behind us. His eyes were open, but he seemed to be dreaming.