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PREFACE In
this book, published in 1993, I wrote, “Here in
America, I ask myself a new question: Could anything
like that happen here?
It is America that I am now concerned about
most of all.” I
see the assault of Donald Trump & Co. on the body of
American institutions, values, and traditions as a
political gang rape. It was cheered, unfortunately, by
a large part of Americans. The
absurdity of “alternative facts” and the cold cruelty
of the now infamous “ban on Muslims” revived my
memories of the so-called “refusal”: the Russian
ban on emigration of Jews of 1979-1987. I spent the
actual 1984 in a Siberian prison camp on the Mongolian
border. The
Orwellian relics of the bygone Soviet-Russian life,
some of which have been restored and burnished in
Putin’s Russia, seem to be tested for import to the
USA. I
see with bitter satisfaction that George Orwell’s 1984 is
being read again in America and some prominent Russian
immigrants in the U.S. are shivering like in a cold
draft. The
worldwide march of anti-Trump protesters makes me
hopeful, but not enough to ease my worries. It is hard
to guess what the elephant in the china shop can do
next. With
all that, I clearly see that Donald Trump has touched
upon some real and important problems and his voters
are not necessarily bigots, retrogrades, and rednecks. He has a
point. He
is strong. I
am worried all the more because he is strong enough to
open the floodgates for lies, absurdity, and hate. The freaky
fatal attraction—and similarity—between him and the
current Russian virtuoso of absurdity has been widely
noted. Paraphrasing Napoleon, from two party-system to
one-party system there is but one step. I
am a chemist, but in my youth, projecting my future
occupation, I vacillated between chemistry and
psychiatry. I
was engrossed in both.
There is more about it in the book. Witnessing
the recent presidential denial of the absolutely
indisputable and visible with naked eye facts, and
remembering my now antiquated medical textbooks, I am
worried even more. “Delirium was the very essence of
the Soviet ideology in a very clinical sense,” I
wrote. After
some style and content editing of the original
manuscript, correcting at least a part of numerous
errors, and adding a few footnotes, I am uploading my
Memoirs of 1984
– my personal story of the real 1984—on the Web. For a
while, I will continue editing and updating the site.
As
for modern Russia, Bill Browder’s Red Notice: a
True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's
Fight for Justice
(Simon &
Schuster, 2015)
is a fascinating personal story and a factual source
for understanding post-Soviet Russia and pre-Trump
America. Yuri Tarnopolsky
February, 2017 |
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THE SMOKE IN THE WIND It
was a bright, cold day in April, and the clock was
supposed to be striking thirteen, as George Orwell
predicted. The
year was 1984.
As a matter of fact, there was no clock at all. But the day
was really bright, so I could use the shade of the
electric pole in the yard outside as a sundial.
By that time, I had gotten used to not having a
watch on my wrist.
It had been taken away by the investigator more
than a year ago, upon my arrest. Time did not
matter much in the labor camp anyway.
I stood in a narrow, dark hallway with three
iron doors along it, all locked on the hall side. Behind the
doors were three camp factory workshops. The drone of
seventy sewing machines coming from those rooms was as
loud as the sound of a turbojet.
To emerge once in a while into this forbidden
area was a special privilege granted to me by the
doorman. Upon
my request, he would occasionally unlock the door of
my workshop and let me out of the crowded, dusty, and
noisy room so that I could peep out into a larger
world.
From the dark hallway, I was watching the
brightly lit yard through a grated window the size of
a book page. The
afternoon shadow of the pole was pointing to the left,
I noted, toward the latrine.
The doorman was nice to me because we were
about the same age and had both been arrested for the
first time in our almost fifty years of life. That was
enough to form a bond between us. We could
even talk a little, with my part limited to "Oh,
really?" "Sure," and
"Oh, yeah.”
The doorman could not see, however, that our
similarity extended beyond age. Both of us
had attempted to steal state property from the Soviet
government. His
crime was losing a dozen state-owned sheep in a
snowstorm. Mine,
much more heinous, was my desire to leave my country
for good. In
the state where I was a sheep, I wanted to be my own
herdsman, and I wanted to be lost in the snowstorm of
history.
I was a refusenik—an
applicant for emigration who had been denied an exit
visa. As
a black sheep that marred the pristine white flock, I
was sent here for correction.
In the caste system of the labor camp, the
doorman, formerly a shepherd at a government farm, was now one of
the billy-goats—inmates who had repented and were
cooperating with the prison administration,
agreeing—not necessarily honestly—to squeal on other
prisoners. Therefore,
they were trusted to be doormen, cooks, dishwashers,
hospital nurses, storekeepers, librarians, accounting
clerks, artists, and writers for the prison newspaper.
The doorman pushed me aside and looked into the
yard. “Lunch”! he yelled
out in a rough voice.
He unlocked the outer door and three others. Several
other voices in the workshops repeated the call,
adding obscenities, and the deafening roar of the
sewing machines gradually subsided.
The doorman had no watch either, but he had not
used the shadow to tell time. He just
noticed an officer on duty who had appeared in the
distant corner of the yard, waving his hand.
The yard was surrounded by rows of barbed wire
on the ground and a high plank fence. On the north
was a wooden fence between the working zone and the
school zone. The
western fence with four parallel gable-roofed adobe
workshops along it separated the working and the
living zones. On
the south, the roofs of camp warehouses could be seen
behind the fence.
The main workshop, a long flat-roofed barrack
with four iron doors, one of them behind me, ran along
the eastern edge of the yard.
All of the fences were adorned on top with the
curls of barbed wire.
Casual-looking guards with machine guns over
the shoulder stood on corner watchtowers. It was a
picture of utter peace and security.
I was ready for lunch.
The contents of my pockets included an aluminum
spoon in a small fabric bag, another fabric bag with a
piece of bread, and a handful of fabric shreds used as
napkins, handkerchiefs, and toilet paper. I had also a
pencil stub, a self-made French dictionary, a page of
Moscow News, a Soviet newspaper in English, and
the small luxury of two cheap caramel candies.
When we watch old films shot on the streets in
the 1920s, the world looks very different. First, it is
black, white, and gray.
The clothes look wrinkled and crumpled, streets
overcrowded and littered. As it
appears on the screen, the world of the past seems
devoid of vacant, smooth surfaces, straight lines,
grace, and order.
It looks like its inhabitants have just moved
in and they are not sure they would like to stay.
The labor camp seemed to belong to the world of
old movies and photographs. The
buildings did not show even a square foot of uniformly
colored flat surface.
There were no straight lines or pure colors, no
symmetry, smoothness, or uniformity of detail. Everything
was done haphazardly, everything made by prisoners who
hated what they were doing. All was
jagged, rough, and coarse. Glass
splinters, threads, sewing needles, and cardboard
cores of spools were stamped into the dirt yard. The
windowpanes were a patchwork of dirty pieces of glass
remarkable for their rich collection of the various
defects the glass industry could produce.
Now people were coming out into the
football-field-sized yard from several of the
workshops lining its borders. They were
smoking, chatting, walking to the latrine.
The latrine was a typical example of camp
architecture. It
was hackwork of unshaved wooden planks of various
forms and sizes, all cracked and rotten.
The tin-plated gutter for urine was supposed to
accommodate about four hundred men per shift. During the
severe local winter, the urine froze before it could
reach the end of the gutter. It
overflowed onto the floor, and by the end of the
season two feet of yellow ice accumulated both inside
and around the structure. The lowest
caste had the job of breaking it up with a heavy
crowbar. The
strikes of the tool revealed the daily layers, like
the year rings on a tree stump. With strict
periodicity, some of them showed a reddish tint,
probably because of blood from kidneys injured by
excess salt and by weeks spent on the cold concrete
floor of the punishment block.
Little wonder that during the night shift, and
frequently during the day, the inmates did not bother
going to the slippery shack but simply used the yard.
It was the windy season—a cold spring after an
almost snowless winter, on the eve of a short rainy
summer. The
wind carried dust mixed with dry urine and scarce
snowflakes. Hopefully,
it was the last snow of the spring. The soil was still
deeply frozen. Some
hillocks thawed under the sun, and the rare black wet
spots were the only signs of April.
The inmates, mostly Siberian aborigines, were
used to much colder weather. Despite the
wind, many of them were bare-chested. An
occasional scarf served more as a sign of prison
prosperity than as protection against cold. Russian
political, ethnic, and geographical terms can be
confusing for a stranger.
The part of Siberia that sheltered me in 1984
was called Trans-Baikalia. One can find
it on a map of Asia right above the Soviet-Mongolian
border, east of the narrow strip of Lake Baikal, the
deepest and largest freshwater reservoir on Earth.
From a historical point of view, Russia was the
old name of the whole country that was renamed the
USSR, or the Soviet Union, by the Communists. Ethnic
Russians, often of mixed blood, made up only about
half the population, which consisted of hundreds of
different ethnicities, from Assyrians to Eskimos. The
country hosted believers in all major world religions,
as well as pagans.
Most of the ethnicities had inhabited their
territories as long as they could remember themselves,
some since biblical times.
Russia was also the name of one of the fifteen
Soviet republics such as Lithuania, Armenia, Ukraine,
Georgia, etc., most of which had been acquired during
the eastward expansion of the original Russian state. Russia was a
walking-distance empire—one did not need to cross an
ocean to reach the colonies.
By no means were Soviet republics the
counterparts of American states. Each
republic had its own languages, culture, history,
religion, and mentality.
Ethnically, they could be as different as
Germany, Iran, Egypt, China, Poland, and Finland. Yet most of
them had never been independent states.
The colonization of Greater Siberia, including
Trans-Baikalia, by the Russians, which took several
centuries, did have something in common with the birth
of America. Siberia
was not only the land of hard laborers and exiles but
also the freest part of Russia for those who stayed
there of their own will.
The Trans-Baikalian counterpart of Native
Americans was Buryat-Mongols, a people closely related
to the Mongols by language, culture, and the Tibetan
branch of Buddhism.
They considered themselves a part of the
Mongolian people, or Tartars, who once ruled the whole
of Asia and almost all of Russia.
The Trans-Baikalians were proud of living in
the area that had been the notorious penal colony of
Russia since the advent of the czars. It was the
area with the so-called super-continental climate—the
most severe known climate except the polar one—and the
part of Siberia that accounted for perhaps the only
romantic page in the stern volume of Russian history.
The Decembrists were Russian aristocrats who,
driven by the French ideals of liberty, equality, and
fraternity, conspired against the czar but failed to
overthrow him in December 1825. He hanged
five of them and sentenced the rest to hard labor in
mines, mostly in the Chita region, where my labor camp
was located. Many
of their young and beautiful wives, despite various
obstacles imposed by the czar, moved from western
Russia to the frozen land to be closer to their
chained aristocratic husbands. The
region of Chita was one of the most backward parts of
the country. Every
fourth man there was said to be locked in a labor
camp, sooner or later, either for petty theft or for
giving a black eye to his neighbor. Judging by
the stories of inmates, the aborigines skinned dogs
and ate them, using the fur for warm hats. They beat
women and children, drank cheap perfume, and fought
each other without mercy. They cared
very little about human life and the rest of Russia,
and cared not at all about the rest of the world,
except Mongolia, which supplied forage for the cattle. Civilization
meant nothing to them.
Comfort and even freedom meant very little. During a
winter night, a herdsman could sleep in the steppe
right on the snow.
Of course, one should not judge the
hardworking, friendly, and generous population of
Chita by prison stories that knew no bounds to
fantasy. Still,
the presence of an enormous number of convicts, as
well as drunk and reckless soldiers and officers, very
much defined the way of life in that God-forsaken
area. The
prisoners were convenient and profitable labor, which
was desperately needed in this underpopulated region
along the border, part of it with China. The largest
Soviet military district was located here, among the
hills stuffed with hidden missiles pointing at China
and America. There
was no place in the camp for animals, children, age
difference, retirement, and women—occasional female
technical personnel did not count. The two
polar constituents of the camp were the prisoners (zeks)
and the officers (ments). Zeks and
ments needed each other like two sexes.
For political prisoners, the KGB (State
Security) was a third force, invisible and powerful. For reasons
that will be explained later, I and my refusenik
friends—about that term also later—called the KGB dybbuks,
evil spirits in Jewish mythology.
An average local zek was a young man, strong,
roughly hewn, resourceful, cruel, and proud of being a
zek—at least that was the impression the zek was
supposed to give.
Some zeks were sons of zeks and future fathers
of zeks. Many
of them, as soon as they came out of the camp gate,
immediately got drunk and started to fight with the
first poor fool who came along. The
re-arrest of a zek on the day of his release was a
common story.
At first glance, all zeks looked alike. They were,
or pretended to be, composed, cool, and slow in
movement and words.
Outbreaks of anger and threats mostly were
faked as part of zek rituals. The zeks
became truly irritable only when there was no tobacco
to smoke.
A member of the highest caste of thieves was
supposed to talk and move in a special ritualistic
way, spreading his fingers as if to illustrate the
laws of electromagnetism.
It took a newcomer like me a certain period of
adaptation to see in rough, ugly, cruel, wrinkled,
sallow faces the diversity of personalities
distributed along the universal human pattern. So, now I can
say “we”.
We, the zeks, wore dark gray padded jackets
stuffed with cotton wool. The green
uniform looked like ordinary pajamas. On the left
side of the chest we had identity tags—small
rectangles of fabric with the name and number of the
brigade. Our
pants were tucked into classical solid Russian high
boots with tarpaulin tops and no shoelaces. Only the
color of the jacket distinguished us from the army
construction troops.
The unarmed ments who worked in prisons and
camps wore regular military uniforms although they had
no military training and no military discipline.
Every barrack housed a brigade of about one
hundred zeks and was enclosed by a metal cage with a
double-gate trap at the checkpoint and fence-netted
top. It
was forbidden to enter another barrack or workshop. The
big gate between the working and the living zones was
now open. The
yard was full of officers in trench coats. We lazily
lined up in a column of five in each row and made for
the gate. We
moved across the yard, passed through the gate, turned
left, walked between the fence of the working zone and
the barracks, through a small central plaza, and
turned to the right, where the poster "Out into
freedom with clean consciousness" invited us not into
freedom but into the mess hall.
The mess hall was the only place where all
prisoners of one shift could see each other. It was also
the movie theater on Sundays. Saturday was
always a workday, as was at least one Sunday a month.
The concrete mess hall was also the place for
rare official meetings of the whole camp. There was a
stage with political slogans, a movie screen, and a
pulpit. On
the walls were posters with happy faces of the
builders of communism.
The other end of the hall had openings in the
wall for food and dishes. Long tables,
each seating twenty people, covered by scratched and
rumpled zinc sheets wiped with dirty rags. The zeks of
the lower castes ate at separate tables.
The zeks sat tightly pressed, hardly able to
move a hand, especially with their winter clothes on. The ments
were standing or walking in the aisles. There was no
time for talk at the tables.
It was as cold in the mess hall as outdoors,
but at least there was no wind.
"Hats off”!
an officer on duty commanded. The
prisoners exposed to the cold their shaven heads, many
marked with scars.
First, soup consisting of potatoes, sauerkraut,
carrot, beet, traces of tomato paste, and the cheapest
artificial fat, arrived in aluminum cauldrons. In the
spring, only dried vegetables were available, the
sauerkraut was half-rotten, and pieces of dried beet
were carbon black.
Instead of the legally required two ounces of
meat a day for each prisoner, only rare meat fibers
could be found by a lucky few. If there was
a big piece, a privileged zek from a high caste would
get it all.
The zek who sat on the edge of the bench stood
up and dispensed the soup into gray aluminum bowls,
all dented and coated with dirty water after washing. Pieces of
bread were put right on the grimy zinc, alongside a
bowl of coarse salt.
The zeks consumed salt, the only available
seasoning, in huge quantities.
I was not very hungry. In the mess
hall, I could never eat a meal without disgust, even
if I was hungry and even today, when I knew it would
be my last meal before a hunger strike.
The second course was barley gruel with the
same artificial soap-like grease. They called
it margarine. There
were no drinks, not even water.
I wiped my spoon with a piece of fabric and put
it into a fabric sheath.
My mates licked their spoons up and tucked them
into their high boots.
"Got guzzled?
Now get out!" the foreman
commanded. We
went out, lined up in a column, and moved back to the
working zone, past gloomy officers shivering in the
cold wind.
At the door of my working barrack, I tried to
stay in the fresh air as long as possible.
Camp life dragged on under unrelenting stress. Although the
labor camp was supposed to depress any sensation of
change, movement, and achievement, existing there was
like driving in rush hour traffic. Every minute
was charged with compressed danger. On these
alleys and aisles, nobody had any insurance, so you
had to watch out.
In the free life, the safest place could be in
hiding; in the camp, it was out in the open. My eyes and
ears were working as radar, automatically pinpointing
all the changes around me while I savored the candies
bought in the prison store. Once a month
I could buy tea, caramel, cheap cookies, and canned
fish for a total of about six dollars. The money
came from my strictly limited prison account opened
and maintained by my wife.
Lunch left heaviness in the stomach but no
feeling of satisfaction.
The prison food did not contain any ready
nutrients. Food
had to undergo a complex process of chemical change
before glucose could be released into my veins.
Luckily, I was a former professor of chemistry,
because that somewhat quirky science, irritating to
most non-chemists, gave me lots of knowledge that was
especially valuable here, where both the sturdy and
fragile mechanisms of life could be put to a test. Astronomy
would have been of much less use.
The sight of the smoke inspired and depressed
me at the same time.
I admired the persistence of the smoke, and I
saw that the smoke was doomed.
I felt sorrow because somebody cared about the
smoke and kept it alive by feeding the furnace with
coal, but there was no one to replenish the internal
fuel that sustained my soul. I was like a
self-contained planet, all the coal I had under the
ground was my last one, and I was surrounded by empty
and cold space. The
aftertaste of the candies was the light of a distant
world, which had probably already ceased to exist,
like faraway stars that we see in the skies long after
they have flickered out.
It would be sheer idiocy to begin a new hunger
strike tomorrow.
Dying was not a way of living. There was no
immediate threat to my life. As a
chemist, I knew that however black the beet was,
however rotten the cabbage, the barley gruel was as
good a source of glucose as honey. My mind did
not want to fast; neither did my body. I did not
want to resist, to struggle, to suffer. Yet there
was something else totally immaterial and irrational,
neither mind nor body.
Pride? Honor? Tenacity? I did not
know. I
have always wondered what it was. I believe it
was scientific curiosity. Life for me
was an experiment that I wanted to complete and gain from a
loss by learning something new.
To remain strong and to keep my soul alive, I
had to burn my own body in the metabolic fire.
Soon the candies shot enough sugar into my
brain to resume the humming of thoughts. The real
1984 was not that bad.
My brain was free, and nobody was trying to
make me love Big Brother. Moreover,
prison seemed to relieve me from the daily chores of
free life. FULL TEXT : spirospero.net/1984.pdf |