Note to self: I must find and set up in Scrivener all my most recently abandoned essays. The two I have been working on are the oldest and are the origins of my present project, and there are many in the middle. But before I go to those or compose any new material I should line up and finish all the most recently abandoned or half finished things.
I was trying to imagine what Russia had looked like, visually, to Vallejo who first went there in 1928. At what moment does it become foolish not to know about the Gulag? The decision to use forced labor for industrialization had been made by then but things were not yet as they would be.
The camp Perm 36 is a museum now and you can see videos about it, and there is a Gulag Museum in Moscow. I know it is sacrilege to say so but these places remind me of places in the United States like Angola and Parchman, as they were in the same years. I thought about what it would be like to have police come to my house after midnight and felt grateful not to live in that kind of a police state or in a camp but this kind of thing did of course did happen on the other side of Maringouin in those days.
My father is a quarter Russian by blood, which makes the other relatives I knew half Russian. They were the first generation born here. My great-great-grandfather had come to escape a Siberian sentence. My great-grandfather, born in 1855 in St. Petersburg, can be found online, entering New York with his parents and seven siblings. All the boys have Benjamin as a middle name, after their father, which is of course quite Russian.
My great-aunt Lydia of Sevastapolski Prospect 36 was when I knew her the widow of a doctor who had at one point been offered a job at a high salary in one of these camps, which if I remember correctly was associated with an industrial city built under Stalin.
The tale is that he turned the job down as undesirable and was so arrested, to serve ten years in the same camp and do as a prisoner the job he had turned down for pay. My great-aunt got herself transferred to the relevant town so as to be able to visit. This was allowed every two weeks or so for an hour or two. It is said to have involved a ten mile trek by foot, although I am not sure how survivable that would have been on colder days.
It is not clear to me exactly when this took place. My great-aunt would have been about 40 in 1928. I have heard my great-uncle was sent to “Siberia,” of course, but this may just mean “a prison camp.” I also have heard it may have been “toward Kazakhstan” and this could point to Perm or somewhere even closer to Moscow, as there were in fact many camps nearby. I think of it as having happened in the 1950s but it is more likely to have been earlier.
Here is a map of the Perm area; you will see why it is a likely place for a doctor to be sent. Here is a map of all the camps from 1929-1960. You will see there were very few in Vallejo’s time, a lot during the war, and more afterwards. After Stalin died in 1953 their number diminished considerably. As I say I would like to know where and when, exactly, my great-uncle was imprisoned. This is Reyes, the first day of Carnaval, the last day of our Danish Christmas, and the Orthodox Christmas Eve, so it is a nice day to think of them.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 