Life Is Art Is Life is Death

A recent poll reanimated the story of Kolpashevo, a Siberian town where thousands were put to their deaths by the NKVD during the Great Purge of the late 1930s.  In 1979, erosion at the banks of the river Ob revealed the bodies of thousands, hidden for decades just below the soil.

NY Times report, 1993: 

"From its headwaters on the Russian-Mongolian border, the Ob River flows northwest across Siberia, sweeping through thick fir forests and marshlands before emptying into the Arctic Ocean. Like the Mississippi, which also traverses flat, low-lying country, the Ob flows in lazy bends and loops, and changes its course slightly when it floods. 

In May 1979, swollen by melting snow, the Ob began eating away at its banks at a Siberian town called Kolpashevo. As the flood waters gnawed deeper into the base of the river bank, the earth and sand that crumbled into the water disclosed a mass of human skeletons. Beneath this strata of bones was another layer: whole corpses. Buried in dry, cold sand that lay just on top of permafrost, they had not decomposed; they had been mummified. Embedded in the river bank were more than a thousand skeletons and bodies in all. 

 The horrified townspeople of Kolpashevo knew why the dead were there. This spot had been the site of the regional headquarters of the N.K.V.D., the Stalin-era secret police. In the preserved corpses, some Kolpashevo residents recognized people they knew, still wearing the same shoes and clothes they had been arrested in some 40 years earlier."

Varlam Shalamov

Not all those arrested were put to death with a bullet. Hundreds of thousands of men were worked to death in the GULAG. Varlam Shalamov was twice sentenced to correctional labour and spent over a decade surviving, somehow. One of his 'crimes' was 'anti-Soviet agitation' - he'd declared Ivan Bunin "a classic Russian writer".

'Kolyma Tales', Shalamov's short stories of camp life were written between 1954-1973.

Shalamov's arrest photo

Kolyma Region

From the story 'Lend-Lease', Kolyma Tales:

       The mountain had been laid bare and transformed into a gigantic stage for a camp mystery play. A grave, a mass prisoner grave, a stone pit stuffed full with undecaying corpses of 1938 was sliding down the side of the hill revealing the secret of Kolyma.

       In Kolyma, bodies are not given over to earth, but to stone. Stone keeps secrets and reveals them. The permafrost keeps and reveals secrets. All of our loved ones who died in Kolyma, all those who were shot, beaten to death, sucked dry by starvation, can still be recognized even after tens of years.

There were no gas furnaces in Kolyma. The corpses wait in stone, in the permafrost.

       In 1938 entire work gangs dug such graves, constantly drilling, exploding, deepening the enormous gray, hard, cold stone pits. Digging graves in 1938 was easy work; there was no "assignment," no "norm" calculated to kill a man with a fourteen-hour working day. It was easier to dig graves than to stand in rubber galoshes over bare feet in the icy waters where they mined gold-the "basic unit of production," the "first of all metals."

       These graves, enormous stone pits, were filled to the brim with corpses. The bodies had not decayed; they were just bare skeletons over which stretched dirty, scratched skin bitten all over by lice.

       The north resisted with all its strength this work of man, not accepting the corpses into its bowels. Defeated, humbled, retreating, stone promised to forget nothing, to wait and preserve its secret. The severe winters, the hot summers, the winds, the six years of rain had not wrenched the dead men from the stone. The earth opened, baring its subterranean storerooms, for they contained not only gold and lead, tungsten and uranium, but also undecaying human bodies.

       These human bodies slid down the slope, perhaps attempting to arise. From a distance, from the other side of the creek, I had previously seen these moving objects that caught up against branches and stones; I had seen them through the few trees still left standing and I thought that they were logs that had not yet been hauled away.

       Now the mountain was laid bare, and its secret was revealed. The grave "opened," and the dead men slid down the stony slope. Near the tractor road an enormous new common grave was dug. Who had dug it? No one was taken from the barracks for this work. It was enormous, and I and my companions knew that if we were to freeze and die, place would be found for us in this new grave, this housewarming for dead men.

       The bulldozer scraped up the frozen bodies, thousands of bodies of thousands of skeleton-like corpses. Nothing had decayed: the twisted fingers, the pus-filled toes which were reduced to mere stumps after frostbite, the dry skin scratched bloody and eyes burning with a hungry gleam.

       With my exhausted, tormented mind I tried to understand: How did there come to be such an enormous grave in this area? I am an old resident of Kolyma, and there hadn't been any gold mine here as far as I knew. But then I realized that I knew only a fragment of that world surrounded by a barbed-wire zone and guard towers that reminded one of the pages of tent-like Moscow architecture. Moscow's taller buildings are guard towers keeping watch over the city's prisoners. That's what those buildings look like. And what served as models for Moscow architecture—the watchful towers of the Moscow Kremlin or the guard towers of the camps? The guard towers of the camp "zone" represent the main concept advanced by their time and brilliantly expressed in the symbolism of architecture.

       I realized that I knew only a small bit of that world, a pitifully small part, that twenty kilometers away there might be a shack for geological explorers looking for uranium or a gold mine with thirty thousand prisoners. Much can be hidden in the folds of the mountain.

Holiday in Kolyma

From Sergey Parkhomenko's account of the bodies by uncovered the River Ob:

Yegor Ligachev, Gumilev fan

        "In Tomsk, the authorities decided to get rid of the burial site and remove the bodies. It was the personal decision of the then-First Secretary of the Party’s regional committee, Yegor Ligachyov, having consulted with Moscow and directly with KGB Chairman [Yuri] Andropov. Officials in Kolpashevo were ordered to destroy the the burial site and rebury the bodies somewhere else. (...)
   
  In 1983, four years after the Kolpashevo incident, Yegor Ligachyov was promoted to a new position in Moscow. On Yuri Andropov’s recommendation, Ligachyov was appointed chief of the Party’s Department Organizational Work and made a secretary of the Central Committee. Yegor Ligachyov is alive today. Until 2010, he was active in public life, trying to participate in the activities of the Communist Party. He’s a big fan of Nikolay Gumilyov’s poems.

     
Yuri Andropov, meanwhile, became the Communist Party’s General Secretary in 1982, just three years after Kolpashevo. He designed a reform policy, but never managed to implement it. Andropov wrote his own poems, and it’s said he loved jazz and American films. He died surrounded by faithful companions and loving family members.

Nikolai Gumilyov in 1906

From Kolyma Tales, 'The Secondhand Bookseller':

       He had been recruited from the provinces by the aesthetes of the NKVD in the twenties as their worthy replacement. They grafted on to him tastes much broader than those provided by an ordinary school education. Not just Turgenev and Nekrasev, but Balmont and Sologub, not just Pushkin, but Gumilyov as well:

       ' "And you, watchdogs of the king, pirates guarding gold in the dark port..." I'm not quoting the line incorrectly, am I?'

       'No, that's right.'

       'I can't remember the rest. Am I a watchdog of the king? Of the state?'

       And smiling - both to himself and his past - he told with reverence how he had touched the file of the executed poet Gumilyov, calling it the affair of lycée pupils. It was as if a Pushkinist were telling how he had held the goose quill pen with which Pushkin wrote 

Poltava. It was just as if he had touched the Stone of Kaaba, such was the bliss, the purification in every feature of his face. I couldn’t help but think that this too was a way of being introduced to poetry, an amazing, extremely rare manner of introduction in the office of the criminal investigator. Of course the moral values of poetry are not transmitted in the process.

       'When reading books I would first of all turn to the notes, the comments. Man is a creature of notes and comments.'

       'How about the text?' 

       'Not always. There is always time for that.'