Return to the "zone of death": Perm Camp 36 (10/11/98)

Return to the "zone of death": Perm Camp 36

The last remaining and most severe political concentration camps of the former USSR were located in the village of Kuchyno, Chusovskyi raion, Perm Oblast, located in the Ural Mountains of the Russian SFSR. The camps were dismantled on December 9, 1987. It is on this last site, a grim reminder of a repressive system, that the human rights group Memorial and Perm Oblast officials have decided to build a museum.

On August 29, two former political prisoners and inmates of Perm Camp 36, Ukrainian human and national rights activists Lev Lukianenko and Yevhen Sverstiuk, returned to witness the museum's founding.

Following are Dr. Sverstiuk's impressions of his return to the "zone of death." (The text was translated for The Ukrainian Weekly by Irena Kowal.)

Editor's note: Rights activists in the USSR were sentenced for various forms of "anti-Soviet" activity and were sent to the same prison camps as were rapists, murderers and other dangerous criminals. The term "zek" used throughout the article below refers to the inmates of the camps; the root of this slang term is the Russian word for prisoner.

by Yevhen Sverstiuk

When I received an invitation signed by a former inmate of Camp 36 to come to Perm for a visit I thought, "No. Anywhere but there. I will only return with a police escort," and put aside the invitation. I often return to Perm in my thoughts and dreams.

Last year in London I dreamed of a reunion with Serhii Kovalov in our camp. In August I actually received a telephone call from Mr. Kovalov proposing that we meet in Perm as help was needed to recreate the physical characteristics of the camps. To recreate daily life in the zone, where half of the year is bitter winter, with the ever-present smells of drying wet boots and prison jackets; where, locked up in isolation, a zek (prisoner) is deprived even of a jacket - that would be impossible to recreate, even in my dreams.

I tried to imagine the barbed wire without electric currents and Major Fedorov replaced by a giant weed. The zone located near the Chusova River would be terrible even without the barbed wire, the dogs and the KGB watchdogs who were referred to as "the black wolves."

Could there be a worse punishment than taking away seven of the best years of a man's life together with his hopes for the future? No one is able to come out of those seven years of daily gloom, monotonous, tiring work, moral degradation and stagnation and return to a normal, socially active life.

Going back to Camp 36 was going back to hell, where demons of various ranks waited for you at the entrance. In the first two months they tried to find out your most vulnerable pressure points. KGB agents used systematic pressure to morally break an individual so he was forced to bend to the system. To break down was to turn against friends and go over to the side of the police. The individual who didn't break was beaten daily, deprived of the privilege of five kopeks worth of tea, crackers or candy, and punished in other degrading ways.

Most of the inmates carried out the ritual of forced labor. Punishment was organized around individuals who were singled out by the KGB and put through all the circles of hell. Punishment encompassed the prisoner's family, parents and/or wife, who came once a year for a one- or two-day visit only to be told that because the convict had broken the rules, he was deprived of visiting privileges. And these relatives, denigrated, humiliated and bitten by bugs on their return journey went home with nothing.

I gasped when I walked down the corridor that led to the cell in which Vasyl Stus was incarcerated and died. [Stus was sentenced in 1980 to 10 years of strict-regime labor camp and five years of exile. He died on September 4, 1985, at Camp 36.] How dark and cold it seemed. I felt as if I were touching the tools of murder.

A living exponent remained in this zone: a guard called Kukushkin who reconfirmed that he had witnessed Stus' "suicide," even though he was assigned to another zone at the time. It was difficult for me to recall the insidious nature of this man who wrote reports about me without my knowledge.

I asked Kukushkin, "If Stus did hang himself in his cell, how could the report state that he hit his head against the radiator when, if you measured the string, he would have hit his legs or back but not his head? Wasn't this an obvious attempt to explain the fracture of his skull?" The witness was silent. I asked Kukushkin another question. "If Stus had hanged himself, why were the guards not held responsible and none of the three guards punished?" Again, silence.

Moreover, none of the documents about Stus were in Perm. Memos were shown to representatives of Memorial indicating that Stus' documents were sent to Moscow. From Moscow the answer came back that no documents regarding Stus had ever been received.

Vasyl Stus was buried without the presence of a legal commission one day before his wife's arrival. A reburial was organized at night, when the only legal representative present was a guard. No trace exists of the poet or his last collection of poems, "Bird of my Soul."

Lev Lukianenko, who was imprisoned for 27 years, and Balys Gayauskas, who sat in prison for 37 years, were in their cells at the time of Stus' death and heard nothing save some suspicious rustling. I asked Mr. Gayauskas who was often confined in the same cell with Stus, about Stus' death. He answered, "He was a fighter, one of those ready to fight to the end - not one who would commit suicide."

Mr. Gayauskas began to recount his own story, which began several months prior to the terrible day, September 4, 1985. He took us into the working cell. "Here was a table where I worked with a screwdriver putting together some parts. Romashov, a former criminal, was sitting here grinding the tip of another screwdriver. Suddenly he hit me over the head. I lost consciousness. When he beat my chest with the metal I screamed. Another zek sent out an alarm. The metal did not touch my heart but made two wounds near it. And what happened to Romashov? Nothing. He continued to stay in the cell. Then I remembered a conversation with a KGB guard: "They will kill you if you don't change."

The director of Memorial asked: "Wouldn't a zek who needed to be liquidated, i.e. in the case of Stus, who was being nominated for the Nobel Prize, be transferred to an intermediate camp from which he would never return?" Mr. Gayauskas answered: "A zek's records followed him everywhere. Even killing a zek during his escape had to be documented. Here in this solitary confinement cell all sounds were deafened. I always looked on this cell as the place where they would kill without a trace."

On the third day of our visit, September 1, a group of teachers and students came to the Perm site. They were told they would be able to meet with a few former inmates. After listening to me talk about my experiences, one of the group, Nina, asked if I was sentenced in Kyiv or here. I answered, "in Kyiv." Were there similar camps in Ukraine? "No", I answered, "political concentration camps for the entire USSR were located here and in Mordovia."

At the end of our conversation she asked me for a book which she could put in the school library. Then she said, "I am ashamed for my country. It's as if some dark cloud hangs over us. How do we rescue our children? They should know about these atrocities."

The Memorial Museum Perm 36 has been founded by the Perm branch of the international human rights organization Memorial as well as the Perm Oblast administration.

In Perm an epitaph to the victims of repression reads:

O people, people with numbers,
You were men, not slaves!
You were higher and better
Than your tragic fate.

In the Gulag Archipelago this is the only testament to past crimes, to the half million graves in Semipalatinsk, to the graves in Norilsk, Vorkuta and Komsomolsk. Almost all of the construction in the north [of the Russian SFSR] is built on the bones of zeks. Certain death awaited the young men and women inmates after two years in these camps.

Western journalists look for traces of these camps and find only rotting barracks among tall weeds. Meanwhile, Western Europe has put up many "monuments" recalling the Nazis' genocide. On the sites of Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and others, museums have been constructed to remember what happened there.

Western human rights activists have decided to help the Russians preserve their history. Western organizations are appropriating funds to aid Memorial. Only two zones are left to represent the colossal empire of the gulag. In the early '90s there was an attempt to destroy even these last traces.

Young people also are taking part in establishing the museum in Perm. Student volunteers are reconstructing the barbed wire around the camp.

In the zone the barracks stand partially in ruins. Birch and linden trees have grown tall, and the area is covered in weeds.

Why do Western Europeans come to Perm to initiate a memorial museum? Why do the Japanese go to the graves of their ancestors? Why do the Germans continue to look for the graves of their soldiers? Perhaps they want to bring peace to their souls, to their consciences. Perhaps they feel a responsibility for a historical process. Man begins from this. Otherwise we will never cut the chord of past terror and inhumanity.

Each individual must cultivate peace in his soul. Otherwise, weeds will grow there.

| Home Page |