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Irena Arginskaya was even helped by her aesthetic sensibility. Years after her release, she could still speak of the “incredible beauty” of the far north, how at times the sunsets and the views of the open spaces and great forests left her breathless. It even once happened that her mother made the long, terrible journey to visit her in camp, only to discover upon arrival that her daughter had been taken away to the hospital: the visit was in vain. Nevertheless, she spoke “until the end of her life,” as did her daughter, about the beauty of the taiga. ¹⁶⁴

And yet—beauty could not help everybody, and its perception was subjective. Surrounded by the same taiga, the same open air, the same sweeping landscapes, Nadezhda Ulyanovskaya found that the scenery made her feel only disgust: “Almost against my will, I remember grandiose sunrises and sunsets, pine tree forests, bright flowers which for some reason had no scent.”¹⁶⁵

So struck was I by this comment, that when I myself visited the far north in high summer, I looked with different eyes at the wide rivers and the endless forests of Siberia, at the empty moonscape that is the Arctic tundra. Just outside a coal mine, which stands on what used to be a Vorkuta lagpunkt, I even picked a handful of Arctic wildflowers to see if they had a scent. They do. Perhaps Ulyanovskaya had simply not wanted to detect it.

Chapter 18

REBELLION AND ESCAPE

If I had heard the sound of the sledge dogs announcing the start of the patrol now, I think I might have been physicallysick. We ran the few yards to the outer fence . . . we wereprobably making little noise, but it seemed to me that thecommotion was deafening . . . In a final mad scramble weleapt and tumbled over the last lot of barbed wire at the footof the outer fence, picked ourselves up, breathlessly inquiredif everyone was all right, and, with one accord, started torun.

—Slavomir Rawicz, The Long Walk¹

AMONG THE MANY MYTHS about the Gulag, the myth of the impossibility of escape looms among the largest. Escape from Stalin’s camps, wrote Solzhenitsyn, was “an enterprise for giants among men—but for doomed giants.” ² According to Anatoly Zhigulin, “Escape from Kolyma was impossible.” ³ Varlam Shalamov, with characteristic gloom, wrote that “convicts who try to escape are almost always newcomers, serving their first year, men in whose hearts freedom and vanity had not yet been annhilated.” ⁴ Nikolai Abakumov, the former deputy commander of the Norilsk garrison, dismissed the idea of successful escape: “Some people got out of the camps, but no one managed to reach the ‘mainland’”—by which he meant central Russia.⁵

Gustav Herling recounts the story of a fellow inmate who tried to escape and failed: after months of careful planning, a successful breakout, and seven days of hungry wandering in the forest, he found himself only eight miles from the camp, and, starving, voluntarily turned himself in. “Freedom isn’t for us,” the man concluded, whenever he told the story of his escape attempt to his fellow prisoners. “We’re chained to this place for the rest of our lives, even though we aren’t wearing chains. We can escape, we can wander about, but in the end we’ll come back.”⁶

Camps were, of course, constructed to prevent breakouts: ultimately, that was what the walls, barbed wire, watchtowers, and carefully raked noman’s-land were for. But in many camps, barbed wire was hardly necessary to keep prisoners inside. The weather worked against escape—ten months of the year, the temperature was below freezing—as did the geography, a fact it is impossible to appreciate until one has actually seen the location of some of the more distant camps for oneself.

It is, for example, fair to describe Vorkuta, the city which sprang up beside the coal mines of Vorkutlag, not only as isolated but also as virtually inaccessible. There is no road that leads to Vorkuta, which lies beyond the Arctic Circle: the city and its mines can only be reached by rail or by plane. In winter, anyone crossing the open, treeless tundra would be a moving target. In summer, the same landscape turns into an equally open, impenetrable swamp.