21. New Year's Surprises

January 25, 2014 · Adam Bondaruk, Baptists, Victor Belykh, AUCECB, Persecution, Interview, KGB, Books, Unregistered Pentecostals, Nikolay Kotyakov, On Emigration, United Church of Evangelical Christians, Vestibule, Petr Saenko, Pentecostals, Religious Mafia, Slavik Radchuk, Contemporary Persecution, Security Services

The year 1980 was coming to an end. In prison, the dubaki always came up with various entertainments for themselves. These entertainments always boiled down to somehow mocking the prisoners.

On December 31, the cell door opened. A dubak entered.

“Gentlemen criminals, I congratulate you on the upcoming New Year! Now Father Frost and the Snow Maiden will bring you a gift. Father Frost, Snow Maiden, bring the little gift.”

Two balandery came into the cell. One of them had a cotton beard glued on, and the other was dressed in a woman’s dress. The “Snow Maiden” scattered bleach around the cell, and “Father Frost” poured a bucket of some stinking liquid onto the floor. Some didn’t even manage to lift their mattresses off the floor.

The reactions varied. Those who were serving time not for the first time had already got used to all kinds of bullying. They silently began to put away their mattresses. The others started shouting, protesting, demanding the building chief.

“What, you don’t like the gift?” the dubak asked, smiling. “Father Frost, add some more.”

In came “Durov” and splashed another bucket of the same filth onto the floor.

The dubak laughed merrily and slammed the door. We began to clean the cell.

“Fascists in concentration camps, even if they tormented prisoners, they didn’t do it to their own, but you Communists torment your own—too bad Hitler didn’t finish you off. Thank the Americans,” shouted one prisoner, covered in tattoos. He had fascist slogans tattooed on his body, an SS officer’s shoulder board on his shoulder, and on his right hand, covering his entire palm, a swastika.

“Heil Hitler!” he shouted again, lifting his hand with the swastika on his palm. “We’ll congratulate them too,” he said, and began banging the toilet bucket and the mug together like a telephone.

He shouted and asked to pass the word to other cells that after the evening check, the prisoners should shout: “Heil Hitler!”

After the check, in our cell, this prisoner immediately shouted:

“Heil Hitler!”

No one supported him except one drug addict. The two of them began shouting:

“Heil Hitler!”

And then, in other cells, individual shouts of “Heil Hitler!” also started to ring out. It was a timid beginning. Then the prisoners began to yell more boldly. The teenagers especially grew bolder.

Panic broke out among the dubaki. They rushed from cell to cell. At first they threatened, then they started begging the prisoners to be quiet. If this had happened in one or even ten cells, they would have quickly subdued the prisoners with dogs and clubs, but people were shouting in hundreds of cells. “Heil Hitler,” the prisoners shouted, driven to despair by the constant bullying of the dubaki and the unbearable conditions in the prison, trying to at least in this way take revenge on the dubaki, the Communists. This did not pass without consequence.

The next day, the prisoners from the cells where the shouting had been particularly zealous were taken to the bathhouse, and without distinguishing who had shouted and who hadn’t, they smeared everyone with a chemical solution, not allowing them to wash it off. They forced them to get dressed and led them back to the cells. They led them not through the corridors but across the prison yard, so that the whole prison could hear them screaming in pain. For an hour, the prisoners’ cries could be heard in the yard.

All the cells froze in anticipation. Everyone waited for the door to open and for them to be led to torture with the chemicals that they had cleaned up in the cells. That was how the prisoners welcomed the year 1981.

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