7. The Informant
A couple of hours later, I was sitting on my bunk, reluctantly forcing cold prison slop into my mouth. A young guy of about twenty-five named Andrei Koval quietly sat down beside me. He was a cat burglar, by his own account, having robbed over forty apartments.
“Been through the investigation?”
“Through it.”
“Was the cop mean?”
“Not really, so-so.”
“So what are you in for, what are they hauling you around for?”
“For bad handwriting,” I answered, recalling Boris’s advice.
“What, did forensics prove it?”
“What forensics?”
“Well, you just said you’re in for bad handwriting.”
I realized he was a plant, and I shared about this conversation with Boris.
“Don’t talk to him about anything else, don’t give any sign,” Boris said. “We’ll check him out further.”
The next morning, Andrei was called out. When they took him away, Boris said: “I’m getting on the ‘horse’ now, riding it through the prison.” He wrote a note, tied it to a nail, slipped it through the grating, and lowered it to the first floor. “Never find out about plants over the phone—only by getting on the horse,” he taught me. “The horse is already making its rounds on the first floor. Now we need to send it up to the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. Eight-five, eight-five,” he shouted, “send the horse over to five-three.”
A minute later, he was already tying a note for the third floor.
“Now the horse will ride all the way to the sixth floor and through the whole prison.”
After lunch, the horse came back to us with a note: “Andrei Koval convicted on drug charges, originally from Nakhodka, used to be a sailor.” No one knew any more information about him than that, but it was enough. A convict could not be housed with those still under investigation, and he was no thief—he was a drug dealer. Boris immediately announced to the cell that we had a plant among us, and he provided the evidence. One of the hardened criminals, Anatoly, who was not in prison for the first time, said:
“Let’s throw a towel over him, work him over a bit, and put him on skis.”
“What does ‘towel’ and ‘skis’ mean?” I inquired. Boris explained:
“It’s done like this: a wet towel is twisted into a rope, but not too tight. This rope is thrown around the neck from behind, tied in a single knot in an instant, and then yanked tight with one sharp, strong motion. It all happens very fast. If they want to kill the guy, they shove him under the bunks right away, and he suffocates there—he can’t untie a knot like that himself. But if they just want to teach him a lesson, then when he’s about to suffocate, they loosen the towel, let him come to, and then tighten it again.”
“‘Putting on skis’ means forcing the plant to make a run from the cell during inspection. The guards start beating him and order him back into the cell; he resists, refuses to go, so they put him in a cell specially designated for exposed plants. Those cells are called ‘offended ones.’”
“I am against torturing him,” I said. “In general, I am against any kind of violence.”
“We don’t have the right, according to prison law, to leave him in the house,” said Boris. “Then we’ll just put him on skis—no beating.”
Toward evening, Andrei was brought back. He had brought five packs of cigarettes with him.
“Picked up the smokes in the transfer cell,” he said. “A guy was going down the transport route; I lifted a bit off him.”
“Let’s sit down and have a talk,” Boris said. “It’s been how long now you’ve been here, and we haven’t talked yet. How long have you been in this prison?”
“Yeah, about a month already.”
“And what cell were you in before?”
“One thirty-nine.”
“And weren’t you in the second block?”
“No, when would I have had time? I’ve only been here about a month.”
“So what are you in for? What’s your case?”
“Well, I told you already—I turned over more than forty apartments.”
“And you never dealt drugs?”
Here Andrei began to fidget, his little eyes started darting around. He started offering cigarettes. Paying no attention to this, Boris asked again:
“And didn’t you do time in cell two eighty-seven, in the second block?”
“Come on, brothers, who do you take me for? I told you I wasn’t in the second block.”
At that moment, Anatoly pulled off his boot and hit Andrei over the head with it. Andrei broke down.
“You dog, you’re already convicted. You’ve been knocking around this prison for a year, and you still call us brothers. The cops are your brothers. There’ll be an inspection soon—get on your skis and run down the corridor.”
“Guys, I understand everything, I’ll do everything—just don’t beat me.”
“Say thank you to him,” said Anatoly, pointing at me, and then, addressing everyone, he shouted: “Brothers, hold me back, or I won’t be able to take it—I’ll tear his rear end right across his fascist insignia!”
Kuzmin interrogated me for two months but couldn’t get anything out of me. During that time, on his orders, I was put in the ‘glass’ six times and once tortured with chemicals. As I understood later, Kuzmin, compared to others, was not especially cruel. At the end of the investigation, he even asked my forgiveness.
“Forgive me,” he said. “It’s the first time I took a sin on my soul with you. Before, I almost never dealt with people like you. I understand that you are a victim of Vasily Patrushev. He’s an old, seasoned wolf. He served in Soviet intelligence and then sold out to the Americans. He’s been training you, filling your head with his ideas, while he himself is standing to the side now, watching his handiwork.”
I recalled my friends and fellow-thinkers, Vasily Patrushev and Fedor Sidenko. They were the first ones, back in 1964, to make an attempt to send material to the West about the persecution of believers. It all started when they came across a brochure, the “Declaration of Human Rights.” Having read it, they decided, at any cost, to inform the West about what was happening to believers in the Soviet Union.
Vasily devised two plans to transmit information to the West. The first: tie papers to stones and throw them onto the decks of foreign ships in the port. The second plan: Fedya Sidenko was to get a job as a plumber at the Intourist Hotel and try to make contact with some Russian-speaking foreigner.
At the end of 1964, Fedya found out that the Japanese consul, Isida Isava, spoke Russian and that he was staying at the Intourist Hotel. According to the second plan, Fedya was to cause an accident in the consul’s apartment while the consul was home. During the repair, he was to talk to him.
To do this, Fedya climbed into the attic, and through the gas exhaust vent along the sewer riser, lowered a rope with a stopper, which, according to Fedya’s calculations, came down just below the toilet in the consul’s apartment. Fedya ran to the workshop and waited to be called to fix the emergency. About twenty minutes later, a commotion started in the hotel.
The consul’s apartment was flooding. Fedya was urgently called and allowed to make the repair without an accompanying KGB agent. During that time, Fedya managed to arrange with the consul for him to help send the documents to the UN. But Fedya violated Patrushev’s instructions, which warned that the consul’s apartment was bugged and that conversations should only be conducted through notes written on paper. Their conversation was overheard by the KGB, and Vasily and Fedya’s operation failed.
They were arrested. They were kept under investigation for a long time, placed in a psychiatric hospital, beaten, and forced to reveal those who supported them. Twice, they took Fedya out into the yard and staged a mock execution. In the end, having achieved nothing, they gave Fedya four years, and Vasily three years in a strict-regime camp, and sent them to a camp for political prisoners. That was a major mistake by the authorities. In the camp, Vasily and Fedya became acquainted with one of the first dissidents, Alexander Ginzburg. And it was Ginzburg, after his release, who helped establish a link with the West.
After the arrest of Sidenko and Patrushev, the congregation in Nakhodka split into two camps. One side, which was the majority, said out of fear that complaining about the authorities’ actions was politics, and that Fedya and Vasily should be disfellowshipped from the church for bringing the wrath of the authorities down on a congregation that was already suffering from judicial persecution.
In just the last four years, eight people had been convicted. Three were sentenced to loss of parental rights for raising their children in a religious spirit. Five were in camps for their religious activities. It was precisely information about these events that Fedya and Vasily were trying to send to the West. They wanted to somehow defend the church and help the prisoners, but they were condemned not only by the authorities but also by their own people.
Only a small group supported Fedya and Vasily. I was among their supporters. I was 22 years old when Vasily was released. I was drawn to Vasily—drawn by his deep knowledge of the Bible and his bold reasoning. Vasily noticed this, began inviting me to his home, and became my spiritual mentor.
One time in 1975, Vasily and I were walking home from Sunday worship, discussing the sermons we had heard. We stopped at the intersection where we were to part ways. Vasily looked me in the eye. I understood that he wanted to tell me something important. I sensed what he was going to talk about and had long awaited this conversation.
“Do you know how the spring in a gun’s breech works?” asked Vasily. “It’s compressed and remains compressed until the right moment; at the right moment, it expands with force and fires the shot. We, too, are compressed by life’s circumstances; they try to break us. But we must have the character of that spring—we must compress, become inconspicuous, but not break, nor rust in that state. And at the right moment, expand, to transmit the stored energy onward, to produce the shot. Now that time has come. The Communists signed the Helsinki Accords and are deceiving the whole world again. Freedom has been granted to us by international law—but where is this freedom, when thousands of churches are in an illegal position and multitudes of our brothers are in prisons? Though international law gives us freedom, we have to fight for this freedom. I think there will yet be victims in this struggle.”
“If you, Boris, are given the opportunity to suffer in this struggle for Christ, seize that opportunity—don’t let it slip away. Not everyone is granted this. And remember: ‘Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.’”
I was deep in thought and did not hear the door open as the old guard entered the cell. Again came his command: “Hands behind your back! One step to the right, one step to the left—I shoot without warning!” We moved once more along the same route. The corridor ended at a door that led out into the prison yard. In the yard, about fifteen meters from the entrance, a vehicle was already waiting for us.
The old man grew anxious because the vehicle was parked so far from the entrance, though there was nowhere to run. He was always anxious about this and always argued with the driver. This greatly amused the young guard. As soon as we stepped onto the concrete path of the prison yard, the young guard said:
“Suppose I shove him to the side—would you consider that an escape attempt? Would you shoot, or what?”
“Shut up, you fool!” yelled the old man. “We’re on duty. When are you going to get serious?”
They led me into the vehicle and drove me to the criminal prison, which was located about three kilometers from the KGB building. I looked out the vehicle’s window. The trees were drowning in the gold of leaves that had already begun to fall. Yellow, red, deep crimson, they swirled in the air and fell to the ground, onto the sidewalks. And people were walking along those sidewalks. I envied those people. They were walking—some unhurried, some in a rush—but no one was herding them, no one was giving them the command: “Hands behind your back!”
“Hands behind your back!”—as though waking from a dream, I heard the voice of the old guard. He had already opened the door of the vehicle.
We stood in the yard of the Vladivostok Criminal Prison. The guards handed me over to the prison administration, signed off that they had handed me over, and the others signed that they had received me. I was placed in a preliminary holding cell, a transfer cell, where there were already about ten people. The transfer cell was a staging point. People who had just been arrested ended up there, along with those being transported on the prison route from one prison to another. In general, one could hear a lot of news there and try to pass a note out to the free world.
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