"A young wife came to the lieutenant, saw what was happening in the zone, and shot herself." The final part of Ryhor Byarozkin's memoirs about the Gulag and Soviet Minsk has been released

The project "Do not let my life perish" is a transcript of conversations between Ryhor Byarozkin and Moscow literary scholar Isak Kramaw, which took place in March 1979. The recordings lay in a drawer for over 40 years, as both interlocutors soon died: Kramaw in October 1979, Byarozkin in December 1981. The handwritten notebooks, where the handwriting became almost illegible by the end, were deciphered and published by researcher Marusya Shanauryna.

As we wrote earlier, in the first parts Byarozkin recounted the pre-war Soviet terror, denunciations by colleagues, and his salvation during the execution of a column of prisoners in June 1941. The third part was dedicated to his service in post-war Berlin and his second arrest on July 19, 1949, when the investigator greeted the former frontline soldier with the question: "Well, where did we leave off on June 22, 1941?"

The last part begins with the convicted writer, sentenced to ten years, being transferred from a Minsk prison to the east. The publication also includes additional notes about the critic's youth and his personal letters to Kramaw from 1966–1978.

Erotic Tolstoy for "Urkagany" and a meeting in a "Black Raven"

After the Minsk investigation, Byarozkin was sent to Moscow in a Stolypin carriage, packed "like herring in a barrel" mixed with criminals, to the "Krasnaya Presnya" transit prison. On the way in a "black raven" (police van), where prisoners were crammed in with kicks, another person was forced into Byarozkin's solitary cell. In the darkness, he realized it was a woman.

It turned out to be Maria Sasyura — the wife of the famous Ukrainian Soviet poet Volodymyr Sasyura. The poet himself remained free, but she was arrested. Byarozkin recognized her, as they had known each other since 1938 from a vacation in Koktebel. Later they would meet again in a "black raven" on the way from transit to the Moscow railway station.

In "Krasnaya Presnya" itself, the terror of the "blatny" (career criminals) reigned, who immediately stripped and robbed political prisoners. The most terrifying, according to Byarozkin's memoirs, were juvenile delinquents as young as 12, who were ready for anything. To escape robbery and abuse, the literary critic found himself a role as a "romancer" — he recounted plots of classical literature to the criminals.

Павялічыць

Half-naked "pakhans" (bosses) covered in tattoos, where portraits of Stalin coexisted with naked girls, listened breathlessly to "Father Sergius," "The Three Musketeers," and especially "Anna Karenina." To please his audience, Byarozkin transferred the action of Tolstoy's novel to a fictional country and focused on eroticism:

"I started from afar: 'In one of the Englands lived a king. He had a chauffeur, Vasya. And a beautiful daughter, but there was no salvation. Anna is the king's daughter. Vronsky is a lord.' I focused on eroticism. Vronsky had Anna about 80 times, with all the details. That was the main thing. Everything I could remember, all the details. The pakhans – breathing heavily. [...] They no longer robbed me. (In my story, Father Sergius chopped off his penis with an axe – a finger wouldn't do. The listeners were horrified)."

There, in the transit prison yard, while columns were being formed for the echelon, Byarozkin remembered a 17-year-old intelligent girl from a Voronezh underground group who walked among the people asking: "Are there any Leninists among you?" No one answered her.

A kaleidoscope of the Gulag: from the Reichstag arsonist to the Belarusian translator of "Faust"

The transfer brought him to Kazakhstan, to Churubay-Nura near Karaganda, which was part of the Dzhezkazganlag system. Later, Byarozkin was transferred near Omsk to the construction of a thermal power plant. He spent his entire term on heavy earthworks: digging trenches for the construction of mine No. 6/7 without any machinery or excavators, moving earth with wheelbarrows, and carrying cement on stretchers. He принциповально did not look for "warm places" or "dummy" positions — prisoners on light household work — because such places were usually given by the operations officer to informers, and Byarozkin did not want people to think of him that way or say that "the Jew found a warm place."

Павялічыць

The camp in Byarozkin's description appears as a cross-section of all Soviet and European history of the 20th century. The first person he met in the zone was Estonian Captain Ivan Konga, whom Byarozkin himself had interviewed in Rostock, Germany, in 1948 about the "Marshall Plan" for the newspaper "Sovetskoe Slovo."

In the camp sat Bulgarian communist Blagoy Popov — one of the defendants in the famous Leipzig Trial concerning the Reichstag fire in 1933, whom the Nazis acquitted, but in 1937, the NKVD arrested him in Moscow's "Lux" hotel.

Popov recounted how the second defendant in that trial, Vasil Tanev, died before his eyes in Vorkuta from bloody diarrhea. Georgi Dimitrov risked interceding for Popov with Stalin, but Stalin snapped at him. On Soviet holidays — May 1st and the anniversary of the October Revolution — Popov and other old communists were always confined by the administration to the BUR, a strict regime barracks — an analogue of the SHIZO in Lukashenka's camps. Byarozkin, along with historian Lev Gumilyov, who was also imprisoned in that camp, playing with the words "bura" (storm) and "BUR," joked about it with lines from Lermontov: "But he, the rebellious one, yearns for the BUR, as if there is peace in the BUR."

Павялічыць

Among other prisoners were a former activist of the 1919 Hungarian Commune, who prayed on the upper bunks and said he deserved to be quartered for his former blindness; an old Putilov worker from St. Petersburg, Petyunchik, who, while hammering goats into the frozen ground, tormented himself with the theoretical question of why Lenin artificially classified one-horse peasants as proletarians; a former Red Army commander from Shchors's staff and director of the Donetsk Institute, Tabak-Schneider, who became a fervent Baptist presbyter in the zone and composed religious hymns to the tune of Soviet marches: "Almighty, Almighty, Almighty, take me with You" to the melody of the aviation march "Higher, and higher, and higher."

Why were people imprisoned?

Tanker and former aviation subordinate of Marshal Blücher, Vitya Solovyov, after the war worked as an electrician at a radio station in Magnitogorsk, couldn't stand it, and shouted into the microphone for the whole city to hear: "Comrades Magnitogorsk residents, you live not in a city, but in a concentration camp, surrounded by barbed wire!" He was sentenced to death, which was commuted to 25 years.

A boy named Vasya, out of mischief, wrote the word "Stalin" in the snow with urine – it froze, and in the morning the inscription was seen by an authorized officer, and the boy was sentenced to a long term for terrorism.

And a military pilot who forced a German plane to land and became interested in the captured machine received 10 years for the phrase: "Ours is probably no worse, but their optics are better."

Writers occupied a special place in the camp. Leonid Solovyov, author of "The Tale of Hodja Nasreddin," literary scholar Boris Suchkov, who worked as a norm-setter in the zone, and a whole galaxy of Jewish writers, crushed during the campaign against "cosmopolitans," were imprisoned there: Hirsh Asherovich, Abram Velednitsky, Naftali Hertz Kon, Hesel Rabinkov, and frontline soldier Motl Grubiyan, who was a paramedic in the camp.

There, Byarozkin reconnected with his friend from pre-war Minsk, the Belarusian writer and "Maladnyak" member Symon Khursik. He was first arrested in 1930 as part of the "Union for the Liberation of Belarus" case and exiled to Yoshkar-Ola. There, Khursik learned German, taught at a school, and in 1944 went to the front in a horse-drawn convoy, falling into captivity near Bialystok for two days. After the war, for these two days of captivity and his old term from the 1930s, he received 25 years in the Gulag. In the Kazakh camp, Khursik translated Goethe's "Faust" into Belarusian from memory.

Murders in barracks, punitive foreman, and suicides of guards

Relations between different groups of prisoners were harsh. Byarozkin speaks very sharply about Ukrainian nationalists — "Banderites" — of whom there was a huge mass in the camp. He calls them a dark and cruel mass, somewhat restrained only by their priests.

Once, an old Ukrainian man, to whom the critic used to give tobacco sent by his sister, crawled up to Byarozkin and warned: "Listen, today the boys are going to cut up the Jews. Change places." Lev Gumilyov, who was also taken for a Jew, was warned about the same. Byarozkin refused to move to another place, but the massacre somehow did not happen. Instead, before his eyes, a young Armenian struck a poet from the Literary Institute, half-Greek, half-Jew, with an axe to the head, after which Banderites approached Byarozkin and ordered: "You saw nothing."

No less complex was the psychological portrait of former military men. Near Omsk, Byarozkin's foreman was 30-year-old Vasya Matveyev, a former Red Army platoon commander who had been imprisoned since 1945. After being captured, he served with the Germans in punitive detachments, but the investigation probably didn't uncover everything, so he wasn't executed. An intelligent and cheerful fellow who lived by army jokes, he treated Byarozkin very well, feeling sorry for him during difficult work. The writer explained this kindness as repentance: Matveyev once confessed to him: "If you knew what I did to your people. Oh... It's hard to remember."

The camp system itself broke not only the prisoners but also those on the other side of the wire.

Byarozkin recalls that a young wife came to one of the security lieutenants, saw everything that was happening in the zone, went to the shooting range, and shot herself.

And after Stalin's death, when a worker died in the barracks at night and Byarozkin was summoned to the operations officer to clarify whether it was murder, the Chekist suddenly began to make excuses. He praised a complaint Byarozkin had written on behalf of an old Jew, called the superiors "executioners" if they refused, and added:

"Do you think I came here of my own free will? I worked at the Kyiv Opera and Ballet Theater, a horn player. They forced me into the organs."

Salvation through Kulyashow and return to Minsk

After Stalin's death, Byarozkin began writing complaints, but two months later he received a standard reply: convicted correctly, the case is not subject to review. Hope appeared when a poem by Konstantin Simonov about a former prisoner of war was published in the journal "Novy Mir." Byarozkin wrote to Simonov, but it didn't help. Then the poet Motl Grubiyan advised: "Write to Kulyashow — he's a deputy."

Павялічыць

Soon, an official reply arrived from Arkadz Kulyashow on a deputy's letterhead, requesting a detailed description of the case and the accusations. A few months later, in November 1955, Byarozkin received a telegram from his brother: "You are released."

Byarozkin returned to Minsk physically very weak, barely alive. In Minsk, his mother, sister, and brother huddled together in one room.

Byarozkin immediately went to Kulyashow. The poet told him the mechanics of his release: upon receiving a letter from the camp, he went to Moscow and met with Alexander Tvardovsky, the editor-in-chief of "Novy Mir." A petition to the USSR Prosecutor General Roman Rudenko, requesting a review of the case, was jointly signed by Tvardovsky, Simonov, and the Ukrainian writer Vadym Sabko, who happened to be nearby. The Prosecutor's Office reviewed the case, but initially kept the article "for inciting national hatred," which had not even been there before. However, soon after a call from Pyatrus Brouka, the Supreme Court in Minsk also dropped this charge, fully rehabilitating the critic.

Expulsion from "Nyoman" and the scandal surrounding Belarusian Gothic architecture

It seemed that normal life had begun, but the shadow of the past and ideological control had not disappeared. Byarozkin worked for twelve years at the "Nyoman" magazine. In 1966–1968, his sharp reviews of Alexander Isbach's memoirs and especially Sergei Smirnov's poem "I Testify Myself," which glorified Stalin, were published. This caused furious anger at the top, the critic was persecuted in the Moscow magazine "Oktyabr," and in 1967 he had to resign from "Nyoman."

The editor-in-chief of the newspaper "Literatura i Mastatstva" (Literature and Art), Nichypar Pashkevich, took Byarozkin on as the head of the literature department. But as soon as Pashkevich was transferred to Moscow, to "Pravda," in 1969, a "mini-repression" took place at the newspaper: Byarozkin was demoted to an ordinary literary staff member, as the leadership of the Writers' Union declared that after his review of Smirnov, he could not even be trusted with heading a department. He had to resign, but no one would hire him for work anymore.

Павялічыць

Kulyashow again came to his friend's rescue — this time to Pyotr Masheraw, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus. He listened and ordered the head of the culture department to find a job for the critic. They offered him a salary of 100 rubles — much less than in literary publications — in the bulletin "Monuments of History and Culture of Belarus," which came out once every three months.

Byarozkin approached the task with great enthusiasm and, in five years, transformed the dry bulletin into a popular illustrated magazine read by students and scholars. But he was put under surveillance. The chairman of the Society for the Protection of Monuments, deputy chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the BSSR, and nominal editor-in-chief of the publication was old party functionary Ivan Klimaw — former first secretary of the Vileyka, Maladzyechna, and Baranavichy regional party committees after the annexation of Western Belarus to the USSR.

Byarozkin characterizes Klimaw in his notes in the harshest possible terms: "a blockhead, a scoundrel, an uneducated brute."

Klimaw ordered Byarozkin to be watched with both eyes as an "aesthete and nationalist"; in the editorial office, he was treated like a spy and saboteur, and as soon as they saw too many churches in the photos, they immediately became annoyed.

Павялічыць

The conflict erupted when Byarozkin learned about a researcher of Lithuanian architecture from Vilnius, invited her to Belarus, and she wrote a brilliant article for the magazine about Belarusian Gothic with many photographs of ancient churches, mainly from Western Belarus.

The researcher's name is not mentioned in the notes, but from the magazine's bibliography, it can be understood that it was probably the famous Lithuanian architectural historian Algė Jankevičienė: her fundamental article "Original Features of Belarusian Gothic" was published in the first issue of "Monuments of History and Culture of Belarus" in 1974.

When the issue came out, Klimaw urgently convened the editorial board and all employees and began shouting at Byarozkin:

"What is this! Reviving religion, opium! We are not Romanians, we are Slavs!"

The fact that all these churches and cathedrals were protected by the state itself as cultural monuments did not interest the party functionary.

At the meeting, no one dared to contradict the boss, and Doctor of Architecture Uladzimir Chanturyya publicly supported Klimaw's dressing down: "Correct." It is amusing that Chanturyya's son, Yury, today the dean of the architectural faculty of BNTU, published an article "The Historical Center of Navahrudak" in the same issue, in which he could not have overlooked Belarusian Gothic and the ancient churches of the city.

After this, when a new executive secretary was also sent to the editorial office, Byarozkin couldn't stand it, wrote a resignation letter, and again became a freelance writer — living off meager internal reviews for publishing houses.

"Why is a Jew writing about our culture?"

One of the most painful themes of the final part of the memoirs is Byarozkin's status in Belarusian literature and the hidden antisemitism in the writers' circles of the 1970s. Already during the investigation in 1949, Major Nechaev told him that "Yiddish is the code of international espionage," and the young Jewish investigator Lifshits, who tried to warn Byarozkin during interrogation, was himself imprisoned a few days later. But even decades after Stalin, the national question had not disappeared.

Павялічыць

Byarozkin started in his youth with poems in Yiddish, but he dedicated his entire life to Belarusian poetry. He was the author of the first book about Yanka Kupala, published in Belarus in Russian, and in 1976 his fundamental work "Kupala, Bahdanovich and Russian Poetry" was released. The book was a great success; no Belarusian poet considered himself truly recognized until Byarozkin wrote an article about him.

And yet, in the Union of Writers of the BSSR, the critic was a nobody — he was not included in the board or the bureau. Colleagues wrote about his books through clenched teeth, annoyed that a Jew was writing about Belarusian classics:

"You wrote very well about our Bahdanovich." Sometimes I think — they are right. Why am I intruding? They want me to praise, but I am undesirable as a phenomenon. Somewhere, one can understand them. I have an awareness of my own inferiority. It traumatizes their national consciousness. I even understand them."

In a dispute with one Belarusian anti-Semitic poet, Byarozkin formulated his position thus: the greatness and significance of a particular culture can be judged by how attractive it is to representatives of other nations.

And as an example, he cited Yanka Kupala himself, who greatly loved the Jew Zmitrok Byadulya and considered him the best connoisseur of the Belarusian folk language. Nevertheless, in a private letter to Kramaw back in 1966, reporting on Vasil Bykaw's bold speech at the Writers' Congress, Byarozkin himself, in a moment of depression and illness, bitterly wrote about his own books: "firstly, they are in Belarusian, and secondly, they are bad — they have no meaning for life."

Isak Kramaw's notes end with the scene of their last evening on March 17, 1979, in Moscow, just before Byarozkin's departure back to Minsk.

Павялічыць

Severely ill after oncology surgery and radiation, the critic brought a reproduction of Mikhail Savitsky's new painting on the camp theme from Minsk (apparently, it refers to the famous canvas "Summer Theater," although it differs from the description below). On the canvas, against the background of a mountain of naked bodies and a German executioner, a prisoner was depicted with the terrifying face of a mad murderer and simultaneously a victim of torture — standing on one leg, in the submissive gesture of an executor of the executioner's orders, and with a Star of David and the inscription "Jude" on his chest.

Byarozkin was shaken by this image and even called the editor-in-chief of the Jewish magazine "Sovetish Heimland" in Moscow, but he fearfully replied that the painting "could be interpreted in different ways."

After this, the friends went to the station. The elderly and exhausted Byarozkin confused the train car, barely managed to get on the train, and as it was already moving, he said from the vestibule to his friend a phrase that decades later became the title of this book: "Izya, don't let everything I told you perish."

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