Twenty Years in a Siberian Gulag

Leonid Bolotov graduated from Saratov State University in 1928, majoring in engineering; he then studied chemistry in Moscow before accepting a position as an engineer at the Red Triangle Factory in Leningrad. During Stalin’s purge of 1937, Leonid, along with 86 other engineers from his factory, were arrested and banished to Siberia.

Translator Irina Yevgenievna Barclay is Bolotov’s granddaughter.

On that pivotal white night, the six of us were all soundly asleep to the radio playing soft strains of Tchaikovsky’s in the background to drown out street and tram traffic. Suddenly, someone pounded on our apartment’s outer door. And screamed. I looked at the wall clock. 2:00 a.m. I grabbed my Boston suit pants, yanked them up, slipped on my suit-coat, and rushed to open both doors before their banging and shouting awoke my wife and kids. I swung the inner door into the narrow entryway and pushed the outer door into the hall that always reeked of cigarette butts and beer. Stalin needs to build Teen Centers for the kids instead of labor camps for innocents.

In the hall, I glanced up and into the glaring eyes of two secret agents wearing their dreaded blue caps with crimson bands and wrinkled khaki uniforms. NKVD! Behind them, peering over the shoulder of the first agent, was our street sweeper, a stocky, gray-haired worker twisting his cheek-to-cheek long, stained mustache and blinking his eyes like a traffic light gone berserk. He nodded at me and hardened his pale green eyes.

“That’s Bolotov!” he snarled, jabbing his dirty, yellow finger at me. “Arrest him!”

I was dumbfounded. Despite rumors of the seizures of Leningrad’s top party leaders since January 1937, I never expected to see secret agents at our door. How wrong I was.

The agents jostled through the doorway, stomping into our small entryway.

I heard our bed squeak as Nina rose from the pull-out couch. Her bare feet padded several soft steps across the living room’s wooden floor behind me. They stopped.

The taller of the officers pushed by me and strutted into the living room. He switched off the radio. The shorter agent followed. With neither provocation from me nor comments from them, the agents started to search our living room/bedroom and its three little storage drawers. They found nothing. They flipped over two upholstered chairs and ripped out the bottoms... searching for God knows what!

The short agent beamed unflinchingly at Valeria’s stroller/carriage/bed. Nina rushed to it to get the sleeping baby just as the agent flipped it over and pulled out his knife. He began slashing, looking for but not finding anything. He sneered harshly, “Where is it, Bolotov? Where are the lists?”

That awoke my parents in our second room. They peered at the agents from their doorway.

Nina gazed at me with a lost look. Her sky-blue eyes, always so cheerful, glittered with horror. In seven years of marriage, I had never seen that look but once, the day in 1930 she received the telegram of her mom’s death. Calling up inner strength, she, now, neither fell into hysterics nor screamed outrageously at the agents. With head high, back straight, and a determined set to her eyes, she stepped into our little kitchen to make me a sandwich.

Without any forewarning or prompting, my mother turned from the bedroom door and went back into her room and our one family-bureau to get me a change of underwear. She knew. While the agents continued their futile search, I stuffed the butter sandwich wrapped in an old Pravda newspaper in my Boston Suit-coat pocket along with my change of underwear rolled and tied with a string. Nina wrapped her red silk scarf around my neck and kissed me on the lips.

“Bolotov, you won’t need that sandwich; we serve meals three times a day in the NKVD!” the tall agent snarled.

Our son, Gena, awoke, crying from my parents’ room. “Daddy, are you going on a trip?”

“Yes, son,” I replied with all the zest I could muster.

“How long will you be gone, Daddy?”

“A day or two,” I replied. How wrong I was.

Unlike the women, my father stood as motionless as a mannequin. “We’ve been Communist Party Members since the Revolution,” he said.

Without another word, the agents smiled at father and shoved me out the door, poking me faster toward the stairs and down toward their Black Raven, the four-door, black, Ford sedan used by the government agents to whisk enemies of the people to prison. The sight of it made me shudder.

“Bolotov, in back!” ordered the tall agent.

The street sweeper did everything but clap. He anticipated a reward for turning me in.

The driver sped along the Obvodny Canal, through the industrial part of Leningrad to the Big House, or Palace of the Soviets, on Volodarsky Prospect. I remembered it well; during our first tour of Leningrad, Nina and I showed this massive six-story building to my parents during their visit, a momentous achievement of Soviet architects in 1933, then and now. It remains a tourist attraction, despite it having been designed and awarded first prize by New York’s Hector Hamilton.

Permission to reprint this excerpt granted by the publisher. Published as Twenty Years in a Siberian Gulag. Memoir of a Political Prisoner at Kolyma. (McFarland Publishers, 2020). All rights reserved.