“There are no mistakes in arrests”

On the night of January 11-12, 1937, Varlam Shalamov was arrested in apartment No. 7 of building No. 8 on Chisty Lane in Moscow: this is how his “Kolyma Odyssey” began, later described in the famous “Kolyma Tales” and a book of memoirs.

The two and a half years that Shalamov lived in this apartment were the happiest in his life: here, with the parents of his wife Galina Gudz, he settled at the end of July 1934, after registering their marriage. Here, on April 13, 1935, their daughter Elena was born. Until that fateful January night in 1937, when they came for him, from 1932 Varlam Shalamov worked as a journalist in the trade union magazines For Shock Work, For Mastering Technology, and For Industrial Personnel. In this apartment, in the kitchen, where one could smoke, he wrote his articles and first stories in the evenings and at nights.

On January 12, 1937, Shalamov was arrested “for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities” and sentenced to five years in camps with use in physical labor. He was already in the pre-trial detention center when his story “The Pava and the Tree” was published in the journal Literaturny Sovremennik. The next publication of Shalamov took place only in 1957 – in the journal Znamya (No. 5, 1957) a small selection of poems from the Kolyma Notebooks was published.

Despite his fairly young age (in January 1937, Shalamov was 30 years old), for him it was already the second arrest and the second conviction: he received his first term in 1929 as a member of the student Trotskyist circle (Shalamov studied at the faculty of Soviet law at Moscow State University) for the distribution of the so-called “Lenin’s testament” – his famous “Letter to the Congress”. Therefore, when they came for him in 1937, he was already an experienced person and was not surprised at anything, did not hope for anything.

“From the first minute in prison, it was clear to me that there were no mistakes in the arrests, that there was a systematic extermination of an entire “social” group – everyone who remembered from Russian history of recent years not what should have been remembered in it … ”Varlam Shalamov wrote in his “Memoirs” (quoted from the book. Varlam Shalamov “Memoirs”. Moscow. AST ed., 2001).

Shalamov was convinced that in 1937, his wife’s older brother, Chekist Boris Gudz, wrote a denunciation against him, who immediately disliked his new relative as a “priest” (Shalamov’s father was a priest) and a “Trotskyite”. In his autobiography “Several of My Lives,” he directly wrote: “My wife’s brother wrote a denunciation against me” (autobiography is quoted from a publication in the journal “Voskresenye”, 1993, No. 1. Heading “From memories”).

“For counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activity” he was sentenced by a special meeting under the People’s Commissar of the NKVD, Comrade Yezhov, to five years of labor camps with a term in Kolyma. And went to Kolyma.

The chapter of “Memoirs”, which describes the long journey to the Kolyma, Shalamov called it – “The Road to Hell”:

The steamboat Kulu completed its fifth voyage in Nagaevo Bay on August 14, 1937. “Enemies of the people” – a whole train of Muscovites – were transported for forty-five days. The warm stillness of summer nights, the stupid joy of those who were transported in carts of thirty-six people. Burning the prison’s pale skin with hot wind from all the slots in the car, people were happy like a child. The investigation is over. Now their position has been determined, now they are going to the golden Kolyma, to distant camps, where, according to rumors, life is fabulous. Two people in the car did not smile – I (I knew what a distant camp was) and the Silesian communist, the German Weber – a Kolyma prisoner who was brought to Moscow for some kind of testimony. When another burst of laughter died down, nervous prisoner laughter, Weber nodded his black beard to me and said: “These are children. They do not know that they are being taken to physical destruction.”

Among the fellow travelers, as Shalamov recalled, was the hero of a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, which was known to all schoolchildren in the USSR, Iulian Petrovich Khrenov, who also turned out to be a Trotskyist:

“I remember the hold of the ship, where Khrenov joined our company – puffy, slow. Khrenov did not take things to Kolyma. But he was carrying a volume of Mayakovsky’s poems with a dedication by the author. And he found a page for everyone who wanted to and showed Khrenov’s Tale of Kuznetskstroy, and read:

“I know there will be a city.

I know the garden is blooming

When such people

There is in the Soviet country!”

Khrenov was the heaviest core. But the legless, and the seventy-year-old, and the sick in the last stage of tuberculosis were driven to Kolyma. “Enemies of the people” had no mercy. A serious illness saved Khrenov. He lived as an invalid until the end of his term, was released and died in Kolyma already as a civilian – one of the few “lucky ones.”

Varlam Shalamov himself turned out to be “lucky”: against all odds, he survived in Kolyma and, having gone through all the circles of hell, was released from prison in October 1951. In 1956 he was rehabilitated. When he met his wife, Galina, she asked him to make two promises:

“- Give me your word that you will leave Lenochka alone, you will not destroy her ideals. She was brought up by me personally, I emphasize this word, in official traditions, and I don’t want any other way for her. My waiting for you for 14 years entitles me to this request.

– Still – I will give such an obligation and fulfill it. What else?

“But this is not the main thing, the most important thing is that you have to forget everything.

– What all?

“…Well, back to normal…”

However, it was simply impossible to forget everything and return to normal life, although he seemed to have been given enough time, until 1982. The last three years of his life became for Shalamov, in fact, also prison. Being a seriously ill man who suffered from dementia, he was placed in a nursing home for the disabled. He was deprived of the right not only to a decent life, but also to a decent death. On January 17, 1982, Shalamov died of pneumonia. About 150 people came to see him on his last journey to the Kuntsevo cemetery.

Sergei Ishkov.

Photos from www.culture.ru and oms.ru