Travels in Siberia

The babushka agreed readily and took Vera’s place, where she chatted with the driver, perhaps about her recipes for boiling small children.

We know the Soviets killed or jailed people for offenses even more bizarre than any the tsars dreamed up. Biographical notes about Shalamov don’t say why he was sentenced to the Kolyma mines the first time, in 1937, but in 1943 he was given an additional ten years for, among other things, expressing the opinion that Ivan Bunin, a recent Nobel Prize laureate, was “a classic Russian writer.” People slaved in the gulag camps for five, ten, or fifteen years because they had used fake ration cards, or worked for the American Relief Organization during the famine that followed the First World War, or stolen a spool of thread, or perpetrated a “facial crime” (such as smiling during a serious party lecture), or inquired about the cost of a boat ticket to Vera Cruz, or studied Esperanto, or possessed a piece of Japanese candy (proof of spying for the Japanese), or danced the decadent Western dance called the fox-trot.

When Peter’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth, became empress in 1742, she lost no time in exiling Natalie Lopukhin, the French wife of a general in St. Petersburg, because Mme. Lopukhin was too beautiful and copied Elizabeth’s dresses. For good measure, Elizabeth branded her rival’s tongue. By the time her successor, Peter III, pardoned Mme. Lopukhin twenty years later, presumably that lady’s charms were not so threatening.