30. Sverdlovsk Camp No. 10
On the fifth day, our transport arrived in Sverdlovsk. At dawn, they began leading us out of the train cars. Everywhere was cordoned off by soldiers with dogs. Everyone was forced to sit on the ground, which was already covered with snow. It was November, and in Sverdlovsk winter had already set in. Everyone sat on the snow. “Perchatkin!” shouted the convoy commander. I stood up. They put handcuffs on me, and two soldiers led me to a Black Maria, which stood about fifty meters away. An hour later, I was already in Sverdlovsk Camp No. 10. The camp is located in the city and the region headed by the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Regional Committee, the current president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin. What the camp looked like from the outside, I did not see. From the prison van, they led me through rows of barbed wire that was stretched and scattered in spirals all around. Wherever you looked, your eyes met either the maze of barbed wire through which I was led, or a high wooden fence, along the top of which a projecting canopy had been built, with barbed wire carefully twisted along it like a barbed snake, and above this snake two thin deadly strings were stretched, carrying high‑voltage current. Between this wire labyrinth and the fence ran a plowed strip of land ten meters wide. Along both sides of the plowed strip, neat rows of wooden posts, and on them, tangle wire. If you got in there, you wouldn’t get untangled; the more you struggled and tried to untangle yourself, the tighter it would bind and hold you.
The wire labyrinth led to the guardhouse. Later I learned that one could get to the guardhouse from the street simply through a door, but newcomers were deliberately brought in through the camp gates, to show them at once where they had ended up. The door from the street to the guardhouse was for inspectors, for prosecutors, for wardens, and for those who were being released. At the guardhouse, the handcuffs were taken off me. “Last name? Article? Start of term? End of term?” I give brief answers. That was the whole procedure of registration into the slaves of Sverdlovsk Concentration Camp No. 10.
I am led further through the guardhouse corridor. Behind me, electric locks click shut. I have a feeling as if my whole body has been locked in fetters. From the guardhouse, I enter the camp territory. On the right side, the headquarters, a three‑story building of neat brick construction. The camp administration is located here. Behind the headquarters extend three‑story barracks for the prisoners, and on the left, the work zone.
I am led across a wide parade ground where roll calls are held. I meet several prisoners harnessed to a cart instead of horses. The cart was loaded with construction material. A “horse” harness, by all rules, even a coachman walked alongside, neatly dressed, in polished boots, with a stick in his hand, a criminal. The driver cursed the harnessed people for pulling the cart feebly, and beat them on their backs with his stick. Later I learned that this was the camp supply manager, Kumushev, a very trusted person with the administration; he was allowed anything. He often got drunk, walked around the camp, and beat prisoners who did not manage to get out of his way. And God forbid anyone in his presence refused to work; he would simply knock their teeth out. The first impression of what I saw was oppressive.
I walk through the camp, terribly famished, weakened, with a sickly languor in my body, and tomorrow I will, with slave labor, bolster Yeltsin’s prestige and push him up the rungs of power. Forty‑five concentration camps in the region, not counting prisons, seventy thousand slaves in them are propelling Boris Yeltsin upward. Seventy thousand give double the norm and work for a bowl of gruel. Seventy thousand fell timber, build houses, work in workshops, all at a frantic pace, under the muzzles of submachine guns, under the fists of murderer‑brigade leaders. And every day, among other reports from plants and factories, the report of the chief of the camp administration lands on Yeltsin’s desk. The Sverdlovsk region, Yeltsin’s domain, is in good standing in the Kremlin. With the plan, everything is always in order for him. If some factory where free workers work fails to fulfill the plan, the prisoners will make up for it; many factories have their own workshops in the camps. In Camp No. 10, there are shops from the rubber‑technical plant, a turning shop from Uralmashzavod, a shop from the cable plant, and also several construction departments use prisoners from Camp No. 10 at their construction sites. So it is no trouble if the plan isn’t met; people like Kumushev will beat the plan out of the camp prisoners, deliver double the norm, and Yeltsin will report to the Kremlin.
People perish in the camps, perish under logs, perish on construction sites, perish, unable to endure, in a noose, ending their lives in suicide, perish from the bullets of guards while trying to escape from the camp, perish slowly from labor and dystrophy. Yet new transports of prisoners keep coming and coming. I am led to the camp barbershop. The barber, a criminal, an Armenian, handed me a shaving set. I began to shave and for the first time since my arrest saw myself in a mirror. I looked and did not recognize myself. From the mirror, a stranger looked at me, tormented, thin, pale, with dark circles under the eyes. After shaving, the bathhouse. After the bathhouse, I am issued prisoner’s clothing, and I merge into the two‑thousand‑strong mass of Camp Ten. Now I am like everyone else. On me are tarpaulin boots, gray trousers and jacket, a quilted jacket with a thin layer of cotton wool inside, and a cloth cap. In place of socks, footwraps. Nothing else is due to a prisoner. You are draft cattle here, and for you this is quite enough. The logic is simple: to squeeze as much out of you as possible and give nothing. To complaints, one answer: “Nobody invited you here.” I spent the night in the quarantine barrack. There were already about thirty people there. All, basically, were from the Urals. Next to me slept a young lad, a Tatar. He spoke Russian very poorly. I did not know what he had ended up in the camp for. He tried to explain something to me, but I never understood him. Back then I did not imagine that he would not last even two months in this camp.
In two months, he would tear his trousers into strips, braid a rope, and hang himself at night, unable to endure the frantic pace of work and the daily beatings of the brigade leader, he would prefer the noose. On the other side slept a fat, elderly man. He had been turned into a slave for a year because he carelessly rode into an intersection on a motorcycle and caused an accident. As a result of the accident, his son, who was riding with him, broke his leg, and a car, swerving to avoid the motorcycle, hit a pole, and its radiator was smashed.
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