The man who was not swallowed by darkness
Oleg Volkov's prison camp odyssey
Author: Sergey Tashevsky
"Camp fiction" is, unfortunately, a perennial trend in Russian literature, pioneered by Dostoevsky and his "House of the Dead," but it was the 60s and 70s that truly shaped this genre. Back then, as testaments to Stalin's hell, dozens of works appeared (and somehow found their way to readers through tam and samizdat), including the novels of Dombrovsky, Evgenia Ginzburg's "The Steep Route," and, of course, the prose of the two main "classics" of this "movement"—Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn. The latter two, if anyone still remembers, engaged in a seemingly indirect debate: was the camp experience inherently negative, or could a person be transformed, rising above their fate even in such inhumane circumstances? The pessimistic Shalamov, who spent 10 years being killed in the Kolyma camps, believed that the camps were always a negative experience, stealing life and dehumanizing everyone. Solzhenitsyn (especially in "The First Circle" and "Cancer Ward") demonstrated the inner freedom and dignity his characters retained in the most dire circumstances. But there was another writer, also a "classic" of camp prose, who never took part in this debate. He was more of a witness, an observer, honestly documenting the camp hell. And he only jokingly mentioned this at the end of his life, in 1987, when he gave an interview to his godson, the writer Andrei Bitov.
Here is an excerpt from it: "You haven't been in prison, have you, Andrei Georgievich? That's very good," he consoled me. "But generally speaking, five years of prison is good for a person, especially a writer..." He thought for a long time. “Well, even ten is still possible…” And he again became immersed in calculations for a long time. “But fifteen is the maximum, — he summed up. “More than fifteen is impossible.”
Oleg Volkov, author of "Plunge into Darkness," was naturally poking fun at his young colleague. But he knew what he was talking about, having spent more time in camps and exile than Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn combined. More than 27 years.
He was born in January 1900 in St. Petersburg, the son of a nobleman, Vasily Volkov, director of the Russo-Baltic Shipyard. His mother was the granddaughter of Admiral Lazarev. For turn-of-the-century Russia, the family was truly wealthy: his father owned a luxurious estate in the Tver province, and his uncle had a luxurious villa in Nice, where everyone went on summer vacations. Oleg, of course, studied at the famous Tenishevsky School, where he shared a desk with the young Vladimir Nabokov ("Yes, he was a good tennis player, we played a lot together, but even then he was already a monstrous snob"). Oleg himself was anything but a snob, although by the time he graduated, he had a brilliant command of three foreign languages and intended to continue his studies at the Faculty of Oriental Languages at St. Petersburg University. He spent his free time like a gentleman, hunting grouse on his father's lands near Tver. But then the revolution happened, and this whole idyllic life went upside down.
First of all, instead of university, Volkov suddenly decided to enroll in the Tver Cavalry School for Military Cadets. As soon as October 17 arrived, the authorities wisely disbanded the school—military cadets across Russia now faced execution. Oleg cautiously returned to his father's estate, where life had also changed. But there was life there—the local peasants somehow defended their landowner from the commissars and even accepted the Volkov family into the village commune. They were also granted full ownership of part of the manor house—something that happened back then. For six months, Oleg, along with the peasants, chopped wood, plowed the land, sowed, mowed, and worked in the forge (this would later prove very helpful). But upon learning that a cavalry detachment was gathering somewhere near Torzhok to march to the Don and resist the Reds, he immediately set out. Volkov concealed these pages of his turbulent past throughout the years of Soviet rule, so that not a single NKVD investigator learned of them. However, judging by his later slips of the tongue, he reached Kuban, found himself surrounded there, escaped, and in the summer of 1918, he led a detachment on a raid on Yekaterinburg, hoping to take part in the capture of the city and rescue the royal family. However, they were too late; the deed had already been done in the Ipatiev House, and Oleg decided to return south to Wrangel's army, but he was unsuccessful. And somehow, by autumn, he found himself back on his family estate. As if he had never left. That's exactly how the commissars saw things, and not a single peasant betrayed their desperate master.
Nevertheless, men in leather jackets were appearing at the estate more and more often, clearly keeping an eye on the "former" members. Staying there was becoming unsafe, and my father decided it would be best to leave for St. Petersburg, where he could still somehow "disappear." He categorically did not want to leave Russia, although the opportunity was still there, and the villa in Nice could likely welcome the family at any moment. But Volkov Sr. believed that one should live and die on one's own land. Apparently, death took this into account—and it wasn't long in coming. Vasily Volkov died of a heart attack in the summer of 1919.
After burying his father, Oleg decided not to return to his hometown and, after some time, went to Moscow. Given his background, however, he was unable to enroll in university—noblemen were now barred from entering. However, he did find work as a translator—first at the Nansen Mission, and later with an Associated Press correspondent at the Greek embassy.
It was already 1927, when clouds began to gather again over the "former" members of Russia who remained. Day after day, news of nighttime arrests arrived. Many of Oleg's acquaintances and friends were interrogated at Lubyanka, and some never returned. Volkov himself, although he hoped no one knew about his White Guard past, was under double threat: not only was he constantly communicating with foreigners at the embassy, but he was also writing articles about the state of affairs in the USSR for European newspapers. Admittedly, under a pseudonym. But if they so desired, they could easily "figure him out." And yet, he felt safe: arrests in Moscow almost always took place at night, and he spent the nights at the Greek embassy, where a special room had been assigned to him. "I lived in an extraterritorial house. And I could, having closed the front door behind me, thumb my nose at any detectives and agents, quite boyishly. “You can’t overestimate the feeling of security and safety that a person had when they could go to bed without fear of a midnight phone call!”
And yet, in February 1928, he was arrested. They simply approached him on the street, showed him a small red booklet, and shoved him… not even into a car, but into a light sleigh, which, somehow casually and leisurely, delivered him to Lubyanka. There, too, at first, everything seemed less terrifying. Investigators, one taking turns, gently and harshly persuaded him to become a secret informant—and spy on foreigners. Volkov calmly refused, saying he lacked the skills of an intelligence officer. Apparently, they knew nothing about his “sins” against the Soviet regime. But they didn’t need to know. After yet another refusal, the investigator announced that Volkov was accused of counterrevolutionary agitation, and a month later, he was sent from the Lubyanka internal prison north, to the notorious “SLON”—the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp.
Thus began Volkov's nearly uninterrupted 27-year prison camp odyssey, punctuated by camp sentences, exiles, arrests, and new convictions. He experienced five of these "cycles," ending in 1955, when it all abruptly ended with complete rehabilitation. Each sentence could have been fatal, but each time he was incredibly lucky.
He was first sent to Solovki during a rather "vegetarian" era, before the mass executions. It was a time when philosophical debates took place in the camp barracks, and even homemade magazines were published. The names of many prisoners later became symbols of Russian culture. But Volkov was deeply impressed by a simple priest, Father John, who, at his own risk, celebrated the liturgy in the forest—in a whisper, by starlight. It was probably then that he truly felt like a Christian.
And it seemed the angels hadn't abandoned him (though these were "Soviet," administrative angels). Having spent only six months on Solovki instead of the prescribed three years, he suddenly learned that his prison term had been commuted to exile in the Tula region. The efforts of his brother, who knew Kalinin, had taken their toll. The Kremlin's "intercession" came at just the right time: just a few months after Volkov's departure, mass protests began on Solovki. executions on Sekirnaya Mountain (First of all, they killed the “former ones”), and when he returned to the camp two years later, none of his old acquaintances were alive anymore….
Yes, he returned to Solovki because in 1931, history repeated itself: shortly before the end of his exile, he was arrested again, again accused of counterrevolutionary agitation, and sentenced to five years in a labor camp. And again, Kalinin interceded (though the "all-Union elder" was clearly losing influence in the Central Committee, so it took two years of work). In 1934, Volkov was exiled to Arkhangelsk, where he luckily found work at the Institute of Electrification of the Forestry Industry. The exiles were paid a meager wage, but at least they didn't have to go hungry.
But this was a time when the city was literally overflowing with exiled peasants from the "dekulakized" central and southern regions of Russia. Many had neither food nor shelter, and dozens and hundreds of them died of hunger and froze right in the center of Arkhangelsk. Every morning, trucks drove through the city collecting the corpses. Most locals tried to pretend they didn't notice what was happening, but Volkov collected some of his food rations every day and went out into the streets to save at least a few people. One day, he met a woman who was also giving the peasants her last crumbs, and she introduced him to her spiritual father. Bishop Luke (Voino-Yasenetsky), who was then serving his exile in Arkhangelsk. This meeting was, in many ways, a turning point for Volkov. He vividly remembers one of the last words he heard from Saint Luke: "Don't consider yourself an exile—consider yourself a witness." Perhaps it was this very phrase that helped him survive the following decades.
And the camp travels continued. There was a transfer to Kotlas, a camp in Ukhta (the famous Ukhtpechlag), work on a geological survey in the Komi ASSR, exile to Kirovabad (where he taught English), exiles in Maloyaroslavets and Kaluga, where he even worked as a translator for Soviet publishers, and so on and so forth. Months and years of living in inhumane conditions alternated with the relatively peaceful life of an exile. But again, not for long.
Finally, in 1950, he was arrested for the fifth and final time (on some completely outlandish charge, just to keep a man who had served more than two decades in prison), and exiled to the village of Yartsevo in Krasnoyarsk Krai, where he worked as a laborer, a water carrier, a carpenter, and then as a hunter. He was no stranger to simple labor. And hunting, even more so. The camp failed to "break" him, and in these final years of exile, he continued to defend his rights—even managing to get the village council to issue him a hunting rifle. A rifle in the hands of an exile! But there, in the taiga, he was simply another hunter, who with his dog, a pointer (a breed he had adored since childhood), would go off into the forest for weeks at a time.
Hunting became a kind of religion for him, and nature a temple where he always felt at home. It's therefore not surprising that after his release in 1955, having returned to Moscow and resumed his work as a translator, he began writing "hunting" prose in the spirit of Prishvin and Turgenev.
His writing talent, honed by decades of camp silence, as he observed, memorized, and chose his words, unhurriedly committing them to paper, proved so clear and penetrating that publishers literally seized upon the manuscript. The book "The Last Small-Grass and Other Notes of an Old Hunter" was published in 1957 and brought him such fame that he was noticed by Sergei Mikhalkov, then head of the Writers' Union. It seemed inappropriate for the author of the Soviet anthem to welcome a former prisoner, but a miracle occurred: Mikhalkov not only immediately accepted Volkov into the Writers' Union but also tried to constantly assist him, demonstrating his friendly disposition in every way. Perhaps this was a kind of solidarity that the Soviet classic, descended from nobility, felt for the great-grandson of Admiral Lazarev. Who knows.
But Volkov, despite accepting a "writer's card" (after all, it solved a host of everyday problems back then), remained a staunch opponent of Soviet power. In his convictions—both then and three decades later, in the early 90s—he was a monarchist, but of a liberal persuasion. He could not forgive the Bolsheviks, not for his many years of camp exile, or even for the regicide, but for the fact that they had deprived Russians of the best qualities he believed existed in Tsarist Russia. "Class hatred and inflexibility were preached. Denunciation and betrayal were encouraged. 'Kind-of-kind' people were ridiculed. Tolerance of other opinions, human compassion, and kindheartedness were outlawed." But he retained all of these qualities within himself. And, although “new” prose and poetry were stylistically not entirely clear to him, as a writer of the older generation, in the 80s he was the only member of the Writers’ Union who spoke out in defense of the participants of the Metropol almanac who were persecuted by the authorities.
He began writing his memoirs of the camp decades in the mid-60s. The first version was titled "Under the Horse." The manuscript delighted Tvardovsky, who had just published Solzhenitsyn's "One Day..." and was preparing "The First Circle" for publication. Volkov's novel was also included in Novy Mir's publishing plan. But the "thaw" ended abruptly, much faster than it had begun. The manuscript was once again shelved.
He worked on it for another 15 years. In the 80s, when he and his wife moved into a house on Bezbozhny Lane, they met a neighbor, a handsome Georgian who sang captivating songs. "I'm evicted from Arbat, an Arbat emigrant. My talent is wasting away on Bezbozhny Lane," Okudzhava would slyly wink at them. He became one of the first readers of "Immersion in Darkness." The book so captivated him that he convinced Volkov to take a risk and agreed to send the manuscript to Paris. There, it was published in 1987. However, the era of glasnost was already dawning, and two years later "Immersion...," albeit with edits, was published in the USSR. The book was reprinted several times, with hundreds of thousands of copies printed. For it, Volkov, already over 90, was one of the first to receive the Russian State Prize. It earned him several more European awards and the French Order of Merit for Literature and Art, but that's not the point, of course. Until his death at 96 (surely, the angels repaid his prison debt, adding a couple of happy decades), Oleg Volkov remained one of the freest men in Russia. And he never spared himself.
"Would I have endured what Shalamov endured? I'm not sure, I don't know. Because the depth of humiliation and deprivation he suffered in Kolyma… I certainly never experienced it. I was never beaten—I don't have a single memory. Well, they threatened to shoot me, that's all."
"...I didn't want to portray myself as a sufferer. I tried to distance myself from what I was describing, to be like a calm, detached observer. I avoided any exaggeration or exaggeration. And this manner of presentation proved accurate."
Essentially, he was simply following the advice he once received from Bishop Luka: "Don't consider yourself an exile—consider yourself a witness." And this makes his book, in some ways, more terrifying than Shalamov's stories and Solzhenitsyn's prose. Because it is a clear, transparent testimony of how things really were. It is a testimony of a great crime committed by some people against others. How was it possible? Could it really happen again? All these questions disappear after reading the book.
Yes, this is possible in Russia. Yes, it could happen again. At a certain level of immersion in darkness, human laws cease to apply. And one must have an enormous reserve of strength to remain human. To survive. To at least warn posterity.
Unfortunately, no one knows whether they will hear this warning or not.