Most of the Gulag’s “classic” chroniclers— witnesses to the terror, the robbery, and the rape that the thieves inflicted on the other inhabitants of the camps—hated them with a passion. “The criminals are not human,” wrote Varlam Shalamov, point-blank. “The evil acts committed by criminals in camps are innumerable.” 21 Solzhenitsyn wrote that “It was precisely this universally human world, our world, with its morals, customs, and mutual relationships, which was most hateful to the thieves, most subject to their ridicule, counterposed most sharply to their anti-social, anti-public kubla or
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