Anatoly Marchenko MY TESTIMONY Translated by Michael Scammell sceptre ANATOLY MARCHENKO The author was bom in 1938 in the small western Siberian town of Barabinsk, where both his parents were railway workers and illiterate. He was working as a foreman on a drilling site in 1958 when a fight broke out between two groups of workers in the hostel in which they lived. The police indiscriminately arrested the innocent and the guilty and Marchenko was sent to a prison camp near Karaganda, from which he escaped and made his way down to Ashkhabad with the intention of crossing the Iranian frontier. He was arrested at Ashkhabad and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for the ‘treason’ of wanting to leave the country. After his release he wrote this book which was published in the West in 1969. This, together with an open letter criticising the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia led to his arrest and one year sen­ tence to a labour camp in the Northern Urals. The rest of his life was a saga of unrelieved suffer­ ing, of time spent in labour camps throughout Russia. He participated in hunger strikes on behalf of his fellow prisoners, was denied visits from his family, and had his hearing aid removed, which left him completely deaf. He died in December, 1986, aged forty-eight, leav­ ing his widow and a son. CONTENTS Introduction by Max Hayward 11 Epigraph from Zola 21 Author’s Preface 23 PART ONE The Beginning 29 Convoys 37 Mordovia 55 Burov 67 Richardas’s Story 71 Excavations 77 The Cooler 81 The Last Attempt 89 Special Regime 99 PART TWO Vladimir 117 Prison Cell, Prison Regime 123 Hunger 129 Ivan Mordvin 135 Hunger Strike 141 Self-Mutilation 149 The ‘Terrorist’ 153 Hard to Stay Human 157 Our Neighbour Powers 165 Beria’s Men 169 Exercise 173 Tkach 177 Pyotr Glynya 185 Vitya Kedrov 187 The Bath House 189 Equality of the Sexes 193 Prison Service 197 Religious Prisoners 199 The Mentally Sick 203 The Man Who Hanged Himself 205 Cell No. 79 207 Return Journey 211 PART THREE Back in Camp 215 New Designs 227 Work 235 The Cons’ Economy - Double Entry Book-keeping 241 Everything Here is Just Like Outside 247 A Mordovian Idyll 253 PEU - Singing, Dancing and Sport 255 PIS - Political Instruction Sessions 259 Big Bosses and Little Bosses 265 Khrushchev Gets the Boot 281 A Visit 289 The Suicide 297 Friends and Comrades 303 Youth 317 The Bouquet 319 Flowers in the Compound 323 Hospital (Camp Division 3) 325 Love 341 The Loony Bin 349 A Skirmish with Authority 355 Back to the Compound 361 Yuli Daniel 365 Ears 379 Mishka Konukhov 385 Release 393 Appendix 409 ‘Anatoly Marchenko’s MY TESTIMONY is one of the most truthful Russian books in existence. Let us remember that the author laid down his life in defence of our right to read it’ Irina Ratushinskaya, Russian poet and survivor of Soviet labour camps; author of NO, I’M NOT AFRAID. INTRODUCTION On 27 March 1968, Literary Gazette published a long ‘Letter to a Reader’ by its editor-in-chief, Alexander Chakovsky. A few months previously, in November 1967, Chakovsky had come to London to debate with Malcolm Muggeridge in a BBC television studio the sentence on the Soviet writers Sinyavsky and Daniel. Just as he had then hotly defended the proceedings taken against them, so he now justified in a reply to a Soviet reader the trial in Moscow in January 1968 of two more young Soviet intellectuals, Ginzburg and Galanskov, one of whose offences, in the eyes of their prosecutors, was to have circulated detailed information about the case of Sinyavsky and Daniel. This has now become a familiar pattern in the Soviet Union - one trial inevitably leads to another in a chain reaction of protest and reprisal. The general policy of the Soviet press has been to ignore the great numbers of written protests (in the form of open letters to the Soviet authorities and newspapers) that circulate in type­ script in the country, and Chakovsky’s long statement in Literary Gazette was the first public response of any importance. While angrily condemning the victims of the trials and those who protest on their behalf, Chakovsky nevertheless affected to be personally in disagreement with the policy of sentencing young rebels to forced labour and suggested, in what was clearly a rhetorical flourish, that they be sent abroad to join the writer Tarsis and thus be maintained at the expense of the foreign tax payer, instead of ‘being fed ... at public expense in [Soviet] prisons or corrective labour colonies’. The same day that Chakovsky’s article appeared in Literary Gazette, Anatoly Marchenko, a young worker and the author of 12 MY TESTIMONY the present book, who had been released after six years’ hard labour in 1966, wrote an open letter in *reply. It has, needless to say, never been published in the Soviet Union, but it has circulated widely in the country. He pointed out that for the prisoners in the hard labour camps where he and a number of imprisoned intellectuals (including Sinyavsky and Daniel) served their sentences, the daily food ration was 2,400 calories a day - sufficient for a child of seven to eleven, but scarcely enough for an adult expected to do a full day’s work. In his book Marchenko goes into much greater detail and shows what a mockery it is to speak of Soviet prisoners being fed ‘at public expense’. The camps are in fact maintained at the expense of the prisoners themselves. They are paid a normal wage, of which 50 per cent is deducted for their ‘upkeep’ and the rest kept in an account from which they are paid only on their release. More than this, the ‘public’ exploits them in classical Marxist terms, since the State sells at enormous profit the product of their labour (furniture in the case of Marchenko and his fellow prisoners). It is possible that Chakovsky was genuinely ignorant of these facts. One thing that has definitely not changed since Stalin’s time is official reticence, unparalleled in any modem state, about the penal system. In the whole of the Soviet period no figure has ever been given for the number of political prisoners held at any one time in prisons or hard labour camps. Conditions in Soviet penal institutions have always been carefully hidden not only from the outside world, but from the Soviet public too. Occasional glimpses of ‘model’ prisons (such as the famous Bolshevo near Moscow), accorded to a handful of privileged visitors from abroad, were cynical attempts - often successful - to give the impression that there is not a great deal of difference between a Soviet prison and a sanatorium. After Stalin’s death there was for the first time some public admission of the exist­ ence of slave labour camps - the vast numbers of people returning from them under amnesty during 1954-6 in any case * For the text of this letter and further material concerning this episode, see Appendix, p. 409. INTRODUCTION 13 made further concealment pointless - but there still have not been any official data on the numbers of people involved. The publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, which appeared thanks to a squabble between Khrushchev and his colleagues, was the first and only occasion on which something of the truth about conditions in Stalin’s camps was allowed to reach Soviet readers. But Solzhenitsyn’s even more revealing work on the subject, The First Circle, is banned inside Russia and for several years now there has been a party instruction to the censorship forbidding anything on the ‘camp theme’ to appear in print. There has never been anything at all about the development of the Soviet penal system after Stalin. The importance of Anatoly Marchenko’s book is that it is the first detailed and completely unvarnished report on conditions in Soviet camps today by someone who knows them at first hand. It is therefore now possible for the first time to make some comparisons between the system as it was under Stalin, and as it is today. It immediately becomes apparent that the change is mainly a quantitative one. While the prisoners under Stalin were numbered in millions, they are now numbered in tens (or hundreds?) .of thousands. In the absence of official figures, or reliable estimates based on a study of all the materials, it is impossible to be more precise than this. It is quite likely that in the ‘peak’ years after the war there may have been as many as twenty million people doing forced labour, or condemned to permanent exile in the most remote and inhospitable areas of the country. As Solzhenitsyn shows in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and in The First Circle, whole sections of the Soviet populations were automatically suspect and were sent in large numbers, quite indiscriminately, to concentration camps - these included many of the millions of Soviet prisoners of war who returned home (it is a little known fact that about a third of a million stayed in the West, knowing that they would be victimised if they returned home), and people who had lived temporarily under German rule in the occupied territories. Then there were mass deportations from the Baltic states, the Western Ukraine and the exiling to Siberia and Central Asia 14 MY TESTIMONY of several small peoples in toto: the Chechens and Ingush, the Karachai, Balkhars, Kalmyks and the Crimean Tartars (who are still not allowed to go back home, because their lands were given to Ukrainian settlers).