12.2 An Abyss of Bitterness

This Lithuanian took him on a small motorboat across the river to places like Igarka, Kureika, Ermakovo and to the Dead Road. Jõnas Katinas was a young painter from Lithuania who fled at his age of seventeen and came to Poland where he found refuge with his arch-rivals, the Russians, in the outskirts of Kraków. He could barely sell two of his paintings per week, in the streets of Kraków, that barely paid his rent. One day a stranger called at his door with a Steyr-Hahn handgun and asked him if he used one. He demanded Jõnas to kill a Polish merchant who helped Lenin during his emigrant travel in Europe. This man was an Okhrana agent and said that his fellow Russians in the quarters shouldn’t know. He would pay a quarter million marka when the job was done.

Jõnas entered the vast mansion on Smolensk on a beautiful morning. He was told that a maid would open the doors and draw the curtains in the morning. It easily led access to the long corridors and Petrowski would be sleeping in bed alone. Jõnas entered the room. Petrowski was up sitting in his bed facing the door. Jõnas raised his gun and released repetitiously. It was extremely loud. He heard a rumble of noises as the maid dropped a tray full of saucers. He shot again and the old man dropped back in bed.

He appeared at the door to see the fear-stricken old maid standing at the end of the corridor, Petrowski’s breakfast smashed on the floor in glass and ceramic.

“She reminded me of my grandmother,” he said, “I couldn’t shoot her. I left the house and I wasn’t caught. That was 1916, I was twenty-one.”

The Okhrana agent bargained to take half of the reward promising that he could get more hitjobs. It was not much worth though in the end, Jõnas killed him with the same gun and had to run. He became a hired assassin, a young painter in ragged clothes but a professional hitman and a Cheka predator before he got caught in 1932. By this time, he was married to a Polish woman and with a nine-year daughter. He was thrown into an overcrowded prison in Butyrskaya before being exiled to Siberia to a punitive labour camp in Ermakovo in 1935.

That labour camp still remained intact. Regular barracks got bars on the doors and windows and locked from outside at night. Thick timber and decks separated sleeping quarters. Alongside a solitary section, a large jail surrounded by barbed wire and a wooden fence stood in the ground. A watchtower elevated above the birch trees. There were dog kennels and guardhouses. Prisoners were forced to work in these camps in strict conditions.

Around 1947, Jõnas was transferred to the 11^th kilometre camp in his 12^th year, 10 kilometres due south, which was the site they visited next treading through the swampy land. Here again the structures remained in good condition. Prison barracks, dining hall, an administrative building, latrines, a bakery and a work building. They left those large pots on the stoves, numerous other items left there, even newspapers dating back to the early 50s.

Jõnas and a thousand prisoners had to build the road and track for the Salekhard-Igarka Railway that was abandoned in 1953 after Stalin’s death. This construction was manned on slave labour by the GULAG. Through the bitter winters and mosquito-clouded summers, with lack of equipment and rationed food, by primitive means and under the tyranny of guards, they embarked to build this line which was a tragic mistake – hundreds of thousands perished. The construction of the railroad network was divided into two parts; 501 in the western half and 503 in the eastern half of the Yenisei River. A thousand felons from his camp were involved in building the railway; road and bridges of 501. This segment near Barabanikha River and the bridge over water remained in pristine condition. It was never operated apart from the corridor’s telephone network. This abandoned railway became known as the Dead Road.

Jõnas was released and he married at his age of fifty-nine to a shaman woman and got a child, seven years old. He became a fisherman catching fish with line and hook through a hole in ice on a frozen body of water.