The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (14 page)

in the Soviet Union as a whole.

Stalin’s

last

year

featured

crackdowns on, among others,

biologists who believed in Charles

Darwin’s theory of natural selection

through

inherited

characteristics.

Stalin favoured the non-scientific but

ideologically purer Trofim Lysenko,

whose idea that you could pass on to

your children characteristics you had

acquired

during

your

lifetime

squared with the communists’ desire

to perfect human beings.

One of Stalin’s last acts was to

unleash an anti-Semitic campaign

against the Jews, marked by the

arrests of Kremlin doctors who were

allegedly plotting against him. Stalin

had come to believe that Jewish

nationalists were all American spies

and wanted them dismissed from

their jobs and arrested.

In the gulag, however, none of

this mattered since everyone shared

the

same

miserable

conditions,

Russians, and Jews, Darwinists and

charlatans alike. The bedside of the

ailing Karsavin became a debating

club and a university for young men

like Vaneyev. In one of the most

touching exchanges, the doctor

orders the debaters out of his

hospital ward when a winter evening

has gone on too long.

‘It is so cold, is it not time to go

to your homes?’ Then he paused.

‘Oh my God. What have we come

to, when we call these barracks

home, where your only home is a

bed and a table. Terrible, terrible.

And this is by our standards

comfort, most people don’t even

have this.’

People,

infinitely

adaptable,

found a way to survive even here.

They

even

adapted

to

the

mosquitoes. There are stories of the

insects swarming in numbers large

enough to suffocate reindeer; of

reindeer herds so maddened they

will drown in rivers to escape the

bites. People of Vaneyev’s age

called

the

mosquitoes

Messerschmitts after the German

fighter planes, and delighted in

killing them. One evening Vaneyev

sat with Karsavin in the open air,

along with Nikolai Punin, husband

of the poet Anna Akhmatova, when

a

mosquito

alighted

on

the

professor’s bald head. Karsavin did

not brush it off, but allowed it to

drink his blood and fly off.

‘You are like a Buddhist,’ Punin

remarked.

‘Not in everything,’ Karsavin

answered. ‘However, I definitely

sympathize

a

little

with

the

Buddhists’ attitude to small living

things.’

‘If you love mosquitoes, you

should have driven that one off

before it got too fat,’ Punin replied.

At that moment, a second

mosquito landed on Punin. ‘You’ll

never make a Buddhist out of me,’

he said, and killed it.

Back

at

the

museum,

the

director’s secretary was once more

coldly obstructive to my attempts to

gain access to her boss. Eventually,

enough time passed and she relented,

though if I thought my troubles were

over, I was wrong. The director –

Yevgeniya Ivanovna Kulygina –

greeted me with all the warmth of a

border guard. I had expected her to

be friendly, to be glad someone was

taking an interest in the gulag, so it

came as a shock when she demanded

my

passport

and

my

press

accreditation, insisting that I explain

myself and the nature of my journey.

I told her I was trying to trace the

movements of Father Dmitry, at

which point she asked me what I

already knew.

Cross with my reception, I then

described what I knew of his life in

ludicrous detail, from his birth in

Berezina

to

his

father’s

imprisonment, to his service in the

army, his education in Moscow and

finally his arrival here.

‘Well then, you know more than

us,’ she said coldly, and told me

there was nothing more she could do

to help. I was spoiling for an

argument, and she was swelling like

a thundercloud, when the door

opened and a second woman walked

in, middle aged and short haired.

She greeted the director as Zhenya,

the diminutive of her first name, and

introduced herself to me as Tanya

Podrabinek.

Surprised by being greeted

warmly for the first time since my

arrival in Inta, I told her that I knew

a man called Alexander Podrabinek

in Moscow. Were they by any

chance related?

He was her brother-in-law. And

it was as if a switch had flicked.

Yevgeniya

Ivanovna’s

frown

vanished. She sank back in her chair

and smiled. Tanya put the kettle on,

and suddenly it was decided that we

should all go to Abez the next day

together, because – apparently –

Father Dmitry had spent time in the

camp there. The table filled with pie

and coffee, and the room with buzz.

At times, there seemed to be more

conversations than people, especially

with

the

arrival

of

Nikolai

Andreyevich,

a

greying

man

summoned for my benefit. He was

renowned for his knowledge of the

gulag camps and lectured everyone

with good-natured persistence.

Yevgeniya

Ivanovna

had

delighted earlier in telling me I

would never make it back to

Moscow, that train tickets would be

unobtainable and that I was mad to

have come all this way without a

return berth. Now, she was on the

phone reserving me a ticket.

After a couple of cups of tea, she

tried to talk me out of leaving at all. I

should marry a local girl, she said,

and suggested a few candidates. I

shrugged

apologetically.

I

was

married already.

‘Ah, no problem, she can move

here too and you can live like

political exiles. Phone her up now

and invite her,’ she said, holding out

the phone.

An hour earlier I had been sitting

on a hard bench in the gloomy lobby

failing to gain access to this very

room. Three-quarters of an hour

earlier, we had been on the brink of

a full-scale row. Now it was like we

had been friends for ever.

I had read many times about

how, in the Soviet Union, access to

almost anything was a function of

who you knew, but I had never

witnessed such a dramatic example

of it. If Tanya had walked in ten

minutes later, or had failed to

mention her surname, I would never

have achieved anything. As it was, I

was having a great time. I reached

for another piece of pie. It was made

with berries that grew on the tundra

and was delicious.

Nikolai Andreyevich was all the

while piling relevant books and

magazines in front of me. It became

rather

overwhelming.

When

I

mentioned that I would like to talk to

someone who had known Inta in the

years when Father Dmitry was here,

he grabbed the phone and began to

make calls.

That was why an hour or two

later, he and I were sat at a small

table in a sixth-floor flat. David

Badaryan had had little warning of

our arrival, but our welcome was

warm: stew, rice, cutlets, cheese,

ham, tomatoes, bread and shot

glasses for the vodka we had

brought with us.

He was an Armenian from

Tbilisi, and had been arrested in

August 1942 aged seventeen and

sentenced to a decade in the gulag

for some non-specific anti-Soviet

activity (‘They accused me of being

in anti-Soviet groups. I was a

teenager. What groups could I have

been in?’). He was in the Urals for

six years before arriving in the town

in the same year as Father Dmitry.

‘A lot of people said it was bad

and of course it was. But when they

brought us here, we thought it was

heaven. There were barracks to live

in, and a bathhouse. When we came

to the Urals we lived in a tent, in

winter. Some mornings you would

wake up with your hair frozen to the

bed,’ he said.

He wore a blue shirt and dark-

blue jacket. He had a neat moustache

and almost no hair on his head at all.

‘My first impression of Inta was

the cold, but then I saw the northern

lights. You cannot imagine. They

went round round round, up up up

up then down. You never see them

like this now, it is rare. It was so

beautiful, but so cold. It was minus

50, minus 52 sometimes.’

He worked in a deep mine, 300

metres down, for four years. He

showed me a photo of himself in

1949. He had been a handsome man,

with thick dark hair pushed back

from his brow.

He said they lived in barracks in

groups of fifty or sixty, and one to a

shelf. They played backgammon a

lot, and clustered near their one big

stove in winter. If you worked near

your barracks, you could come back

for lunch, but often you did not have

time and only got fed at the end of

your fourteen-hour day.

‘Sometimes

though

I

am

thankful I came to the camps. I

survived. My friends from Tbilisi

who went into the army all died.

They were conscripting people born

in 1924 when I was arrested. I was

born in 1924 as it happens, but my

parents registered me in March

1925. I don’t know why they did

that, but that’s why I didn’t go to the

front. But you know the camp was

hard. All we got was just 600 grams

of black bread, soup and porridge.

In Inta, they started giving us

potatoes.’

The phone rang at this point and

he held a long conversation about

medicine for his legs, which would

cost him 3,500 roubles unless he

could find someone to buy it in

Moscow, where it was cheaper. His

pension is 19,000 roubles a month,

so the potential saving was a major

issue and he took his time about

discussing it.

Nikolai Andreyevich and I drank

some vodka. He held out his hands

to show me. They were pitted with

strange marks where the flesh was

sucked in between the bones. He

too, it transpires, had been a miner.

‘Who would go to their death in

the mine for pennies?’ he asked.

Badaryan nodded: ‘Look at me, I

have grey hair. Look at my hands.

These are not from a good life. I

survived by a miracle myself. If you

were a miner, it meant you were

somebody. This nation now is

completely ruined. The future of the

town is under threat even. If there

was a good boss it wouldn’t die, but

. . .’ He tailed off.

The two of them talked about the

one coal mine that is left in Inta, and

which provides fuel for the power

station and the central heating plant.

When that mine closes, the heating

plant must close too, since it is built

to burn only local coal, with its high

clay content. Coal from Ukraine

would burn too hot and ruin it.

Without a heating plant, without a

mine, the town would have to close.

Without a town, the villages near by

would vanish, and the tundra would

return to how it was before the

gulag, with just the graveyards and

the humps of rotted buildings to

show for the decades of human

endeavour.

Nikolai Andreyevich

and

I

walked back between the towers of

the apartment blocks and he showed