Gulag

For prisoners who had been traveling for many weeks—and memoirists report train journeys to Bukhta Nakhodka of up to forty-seven days³⁸ —the conditions in the transit camps on the Pacific coast were almost unbearable. One records that by the time his transport arrived at Bukhta Nakhodka, 70 percent of his comrades had night blindness, a side effect of scurvy, as well as diarrhea.³⁹ Nor was much medical assistance available. With no drugs or proper care, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam died in Vtoraya Rechka in December 1938, paranoid and raving.⁴⁰

For those not too incapacitated, it was possible to earn a little bit of extra bread in the Pacific transit camps. Prisoners could carry cement buckets, unload goods wagons, and dig latrines.⁴¹ In fact, Bukhta Nakhodka is remembered by some as the “only camp where prisoners begged to work.” One Polish woman remembered that “They feed only those who work, but because there are more prisoners than work, some die of hunger . . . Prostitution flowers, like irises on Siberian meadows.” ⁴²

Still others, remembered Thomas Sgovio, survived by trading:

There was one large, open space called the bazaar. Prisoners gathered there and bartered . . . Currency was of no value. Greatest in demand were bread, tobacco, and bits of newspaper which we used for smoking. There were non-politicals serving time as maintenance and service men. They exchanged bread and tobacco for the clothes of fresh arrivees, then resold our clothes to citizens on the outside for rubles, thus accumulating a sum for the day they would be let out into the Soviet world. The bazaar was the most populated spot in the camp during the daytime. There, in that communist hell-hole, I witnessed what was in reality the crudest form of a free enterprise system. ⁴³

Yet for these prisoners, the horrors of the journey did not end with the trains and the transit camps. Their journey to Kolyma had to be completed by boat—just like the prisoners traveling up the Yenisei River, from Krasnoyarsk to Norilsk, or on barges, in the early days, across the White Sea from Arkhangelsk to Ukhta. It was a rare prisoner boarding the ships to Kolyma, in particular, who did not feel that he was undertaking a journey into the abyss, sailing across the Styx away from the known world. Many had never been on a boat before at all.⁴⁴

The boats themselves were nothing out of the ordinary. Old Dutch, Swedish, English, and American cargo steamers—boats never built to carry passengers—plied the route to Kolyma. The ships were redesigned to fit their new role, but the changes were largely cosmetic. The letters D.S. (for Dalstroi) were painted on their smokestacks, machine-gun nests were placed on the decks, and crude wooden bunks were constructed in the hold, sections of which were blocked off from one another with an iron grille. The largest of Dalstroi’s fleet, originally designed to carry huge lengths of cable, was initially christened the Nikolai Yezhov. After Yezhov’s fall from grace, it was renamed the Feliks Dzerzhinsky—an alteration which required a costly change in international shipping registration. ⁴⁵

Few other concessions were made to the ships’ human cargo, who were forcibly kept below deck for the first part of the voyage, when the ships passed close to the coast of Japan. During these few days, the hatch leading from the deck to the hold would remain firmly shut, lest a stray Japanese fishing boat come into sight.⁴⁶ So secret were these voyages considered to be, in fact, that when the Indigirka, a Dalstroi ship containing 1,500 passengers—mostly prisoners returning to the mainland—hit a reef off the Japanese island of Hokkaido in 1939, the ship’s crew chose to let most of the passengers die rather than seek aid. Of course, there were no life-saving devices aboard the ship, and the crew still not wanting to reveal the true contents of their “cargo boat,” did not call upon other boats in the area to help, although many were available. A few Japanese fishermen came to assist the ship of their own accord, but to no avail: more than 1,000 people died in the disaster.⁴⁷