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in 1956 and re-enrolled at the shipbuilding institute where she had been studying when she was taken away. From then on, in the words of one of her fellow students, she “said nothing at all about her life ‘over there.’ ” Occasionally, she would reminisce about some of the good people she had met, or about those who helped her, but she did not describe in detail the horrors she had experienced.
    Perhaps her earlier reticence helps explain why the essay which follows, first published in the literary magazine Neva in 1989, came as such a profound shock to Glinka’s friends and family and to Russian readers in general. Until then stories of rape in the Gulag had been virtually taboo. Although many had witnessed such atrocities, they rarely mentioned them in published accounts. Glinka broke that taboo for good with this essay, which describes a mass rape of prisoners from one of the ships en route from the Pacific port of Vladivostok to Magadan, the “capital” city of the Kolyma peninsula, home of the notorious Kolyma camps. Although the account is written in the third person, one of the characters described is clearly herself.
    Glinka’s description of the phenomenon of mass rape has since been echoed by others, notably the Polish writer Janusz Bardach, who watched a group of criminal prisoners rip a hole in an interior wall of a Kolyma-bound ship in order to get at the female prisoners on the other side. In Bardach’s account, “hundreds of men hung from the bed boards to view the scene, but not a single one tried to intervene.” The mass rape on Bardach’s ship ended only when the guards on the upper deck sprayed water into the hold below; the dead women were then dragged out and presumably thrown overboard. “Anyone who has seen Dante’s hell,” wrote another surviving prisoner, “would say that it was nothing beside what went on in that ship.”
    It is important to remember while reading the following account that although this scene certainly occurred “under the government flag, with government collusion,” as Glinka writes, these outrages were not ordered by Moscow. According to the Gulag’s own rules, transportation of prisoners was not supposed to be a form of punishment: convoy guards were explicitly told to ensure that prisoners arrived at camps healthy enough to work. But although the archives are full of reprimands, angry letters to commanders of convoy battalions who killed or starved too many prisoners in the course of transporting them east, in practice few were punished. Mass rapes may not have been ordered, in other words—but they were easily tolerated by convoy guards who did not care enough to stop them, and administrators who were far away. Some of that indifference is conveyed in this account by Glinka’s carefully emotionless prose.
    The Kolyma Tram
    There was a saying in the camps: the Kolyma tram is something that runs you over, but maybe, just maybe, you might come out alive.
    The sad fishing village of Bugurchan, a barely visible dot on the coast of Okhostk, consisted of five or six scattered log huts plus a pitiful town hall with three small windows and a flag—perhaps the village chairman had no spare red calico for a new one, who knows? At any rate that same bleached-out flag had probably flown over Bugurchan since long before the war. But the hammer and sickle in its corner still stood out as distinctly as the numbers on a prison jacket.
    One day, a ship that regularly hauled supplies and workers to the villages and camps during summer navigation season brought in a holdful of female convicts, a “punishment brigade.” They disembarked to shouts and obscenities and the barking of guard dogs, and were driven to the town hall, where the guard detail diligently counted heads—after which the chief guard ordered them to stay where they were and went off to find the sole local representative of government authority, the village chairman, in order to officially transfer