Gulag: A History

by Anne Applebaum

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 clan.”

vituperation

Another ex-prisoner remarked on the fact that a number of the words —shmon for “search,” musor for “cop,” fraier for “noncriminal” (also translatable as “sucker”)—seemed to come from Hebrew or Yiddish.27 Perhaps this is a testament to the role that the largely Jewish port city of Odessa, once the smugglers’ capital of Russia, played in the development of thieves’ culture.

These tattoos, mentioned by many others, also helped to distinguish members of the thieves’ world from the criminal prisoners, and to identify each thief’s role within that world. According to one camp historian, there were different tattoos for homosexuals, for addicts, for those convicted of rape and those convicted of murder.

As a professional artist, Thomas Sgovio was quickly sucked into the tattooing trade. Once, he was asked to draw Lenin’s face on someone’s chest: it was a common belief among thieves that no firing squad would ever shoot at a portrait of Lenin or Stalin.33

General Gorbatov encountered a thief in Kolyma who had only two fingers on his left hand. He explained: I was playing cards and I lost. I had no cash so I staked a good suit, not mine of course, one that a political had on. I meant to take the suit during the night when the new prisoner had stripped for bed. I had to hand it over before eight in the morning, only they took the political away to another camp that very day. Our council of seniors met to hand out my punishment. The plaintiff wanted all my left hand fingers off. The seniors offered two. They bargained a bit and agreed on three. So I put my hand on the table and the man I’d lost to took a stick and with five strokes knocked off my three fingers . . .

KONTRIKI AND BYTOVYE: THE POLITICALS AND THE ORDINARY PRISONERS

The father of Alexander Lebed, the Russian general and politician, was twice ten minutes late to work for his factory job, for which he received a five-year camp sentence.47 At the largely criminal Polyansky camp near Krasnoyarsk-26, home of one of the Soviet Union’s nuclear reactors, archives record one “criminal” prisoner with a six-year sentence for stealing a single rubber boot in a bazaar, another with ten years for stealing ten loaves of bread, and another—a truck driver raising two children alone—with seven years for stealing three bottles of the wine he was delivering. Yet another got five years for “speculation,” meaning he had bought cigarettes in one place and sold them in another. 48 Antoni Ekart tells the story of a woman who was arrested because she took a pencil from the office where she worked. It was for her son, who had been unable to do his schoolwork for lack of something to write with.

By the early 1950s, when official anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union began to grow stronger, buoyed by Stalin’s obsession with the Jewish doctors he thought were trying to kill him, it became more difficult to be Jewish once again.

Solzhenitsyn dedicated a chapter of The Gulag Archipelago to the communists, whom he referred to, not very charitably, as “Goodthinkers.” He marveled at their ability to explain away even their own arrest, torture, and incarceration as, alternately, “the very cunning work of foreign intelligence services” or “wrecking on an enormous scale” or “a plot by the local NKVD” or “treason.” Some came up with an even more magisterial explanation: “These repressions are a historical necessity for the development of our society.”

Solzhenitsyn tells the story, repeated in various forms by others, of a group of religious sectarians who were brought to Solovetsky in 1930. They rejected anything that came from the “Anti-Christ,” refusing to handle Soviet passports or money. As punishment, they were sent to a small island in the Solovetsky archipelago, where they were told they would receive food only if they agreed to sign for it. They refused. Within two months they had all starved to death. The next boat to the island, remembered one eyewitness, “found only corpses which had been picked by the birds.”

Thomas Sgovio writes of one brigadier who had a male “wife”—a young man who received extra food in exchange for sexual favors.

If love, sex, rape, and prostitution were a part of camp life, so too, it followed, were pregnancy and childbirth. Along with mines and construction sites, forestry brigades and punishment cells, barracks and cattle trains, there were maternity hospitals and maternity camps in the Gulag too—as well as nurseries for babies and small children. Not all of the children who found their way into these institutions were born in the camps. Some were “arrested” along with their mothers.

In practice, both pregnant and nursing women were regularly arrested. Upon carrying out routine examinations of a newly arrived prisoner convoy, one camp doctor discovered a woman having labor contractions. She had been arrested in her seventh month of pregnancy.42 Another woman, Natalya Zaporozhets, was sent on a transport when she was eight months pregnant: after being knocked around on trains and in the back of trucks, she gave birth to a dead baby.43 The artist and memoirist Evfrosiniya Kersnovskaya helped deliver a baby who was actually born on a convoy train.44

Every night for a whole year, I stood at my child’s cot, picking off the bedbugs and praying. I prayed that God would prolong my torment for a hundred years if it meant that I wouldn’t be parted from my daughter. I prayed that I might be released with her, even if only as a beggar or a cripple. I prayed that I might be able to raise her to adulthood, even if I had to grovel at people’s feet and beg for alms to do it. But God did not answer my prayer. My baby had barely started walking, I had hardly heard her first words, the wonderful heartwarming word “Mama,” when we were dressed in rags despite the winter chill, bundled into a freight car, and transferred to the “mothers’ camp.” And here my pudgy little angel with the golden curls soon turned into a pale ghost with blue shadows under her eyes and sores all over her lips. Volovich was put first into a forestry brigade, then sent to work at a sawmill. In the evenings, she took home a small bundle of firewood which she gave to the nurses in the children’s home. In return she was sometimes allowed to see her daughter outside normal visiting hours. I saw the nurses getting the children up in the mornings. They would force them out of their cold beds with shoves and kicks . . . pushing the children with their fists and swearing at them roughly, they took off their night-clothes and washed them in ice-cold water. The babies didn’t even dare cry. They made little sniffing noises like old men and let out low hoots. This awful hoo...

The nurse brought a steaming bowl of porridge from the kitchen, and portioned it out into separate dishes. She grabbed the nearest baby, forced its arms back, tied them in place with a towel, and began cramming spoonful after spoonful of hot porridge down its throat, not leaving it enough time to swallow, exactly as if she were feeding a turkey chick. Slowly, Eleonora began to fade. On some of my visits I found bruises on her little body. I shall never forget how she grabbed my neck with her skinny hands and moaned, “Mama, want home!” She had not forgotten the bug-ridden slum where she first saw the light of day, and where she’d been with her mother all of the time . . . Little Eleonora, who was now fifteen months old, soon realized that her pleas for “home” were in vain. She stopped reaching out for me when I visited her; she would turn away in silence. On the last day of her life, when I picked her up (they allowed me to breast-feed her) she stared wide-eyed somewhere off into the distance, then started to beat her weak little fists on my face, clawing at my breast, and biting it. Then she pointed down at her bed. In the evening, when I came back with my bundle of firewood, her cot was empty. I found her lying naked in the morgue among the corpses of the adult prisoners. She had spent one year and four months in this world, and died on 3 March 1944 . . . That is the story of how, in giving birth to my only child, I committed the worst crime there is.

A 1938 NKVD order describes one children’s home in which two eight-year-old girls were raped by some of the older boys, and another in which 212 children shared twelve spoons and twenty plates, and slept in their clothes and shoes for lack of nightclothes.

Children of arrested politicals had a particularly hard time in such homes, and were often treated worse than the ordinary orphans they shared them with. They were told, as was Svetlana Kogteva, age ten, to “forget their parents, since they were enemies of the people.”75 NKVD officers responsible for such homes were ordered to maintain special vigilance, and to single out the children of counter-revolutionaries, to ensure that they did not receive privileged treatment of any kind.

One prisoner remembered that upon arrival at the orphanage, children of “enemies” had their fingerprints taken, like criminals. The teachers and caretakers were all afraid to show them too much affection, not wanting to be accused of having sympathy with “enemies.”78

In 1935, the Soviet authorities also passed a notorious law making children as young as twelve liable to be charged as adults. Afterward, peasant girls arrested for stealing a few grains of wheat, and children of “enemies” suspected of collaborating with their parents, found their way into juvenile prison alongside the underage prostitutes, young pickpockets, street children, and others.

The war produced not only orphans but runaways as well, unsupervised children whose fathers were at the front, and whose mothers were working twelve-hour days in factories, as well as whole new categories of child criminals: underage workers who had run away from their factory jobs—sometimes after the factories had been evacuated, away from the children’s families—thereby violating the wartime law “On Unauthorized Departure from Work at Military Enterprises.”

Archives have also preserved the interrogation records of Vladimir Moroz, age fifteen, who was accused of conducting “counter-revolutionary activity” in his orphanage. Moroz’s mother and his seventeen-year-old elder brother had already been arrested. His father had been shot. Moroz had kept a diary, which the NKVD found, in which he decried the “lies and slander” all around him: “If someone had fallen into a deep sleep twelve years ago, and suddenly woken up now, he would be shocked by the changes which had taken place here in that time.” Although condemned to serve three years in camp, Moroz died in prison, in 1939.96

They were also known as gavnoedy “shit-eaters” or pomoechniki “slop-swillers.” Most often they were called dokhodyagi, from the Russian verb dokhodit, “to reach” or “to attain,” a word usually translated as “goners.”

Put simply, the dokhodyagi were starving to death, and they suffered from the diseases of starvation and vitamin deficiency: scurvy, pellagra, various forms of diarrhea.

The starving also experienced stomach problems, dizziness, and grotesque swelling of the legs. Thomas Sgovio, who came to the brink of starvation before recovering, woke up one morning to discover that one of his legs was “purple, twice the size of the other leg. It itched. There were blotches all over it.” Soon, “the blotches turned into huge boils. Blood and pus trickled from them. When I pressed a finger into the purple flesh—an indentation remained for a long time.” When Sgovio found his legs could not fit into his boots, he was told to slit the boots.5 In the final stages of starvation, the dokhodyagi took on a bizarre and inhuman appearance, becoming the physical fulfillment of the dehumanizing rhetoric used by the state: in their dying days, enemies of the people ceased, in other words, to be people at all.

Their eyes had a strange gleam. They ate anything they could get their hands on—birds, dogs, garbage. They moved slowly, and could not control their bowels or their bladders, as a result of which they emitted a terrible odor.

Sgovio was deeply shocked the first time he met someone in this state, an American communist named Eisenstein, a man who had been an acquaintance in Moscow: At first I did not recognize my friend. Eisenstein did not answer when I greeted him. His face wore the blank expression of the dokhodyaga. He looked through me as if I were not there. Eisenstein didn’t seem to see anyone. There was no expression at all in his eyes. Gathering the empty plates from the mess tables, he scanned each one of them for leftover food particles. He ran his fingers around the inside of the plates and then licked them. Eisenstein, wrote Sgovio, had become like the other “wicks,” in that he had lost all sense of personal dignity:

Todorov again also writes that many survivors of both the Gulag and of the Nazi camps saw suicide as an opportunity to exercise free will: “By committing suicide, one alters the course of events—if only for the last time in one’s life—instead of simply reacting to them. Suicides of this kind are acts of defiance, not desperation.”

One way or another, camp commanders made sure that doctors writing out prisoner death certificates did not write “starvation” as the primary cause of death. The surgeon Isaac Vogelfanger was, for example, explicitly ordered to write “failure of the heart muscle” no matter what the real cause of a prisoner’s death.26 This could backfire: in one camp, the doctors listed so many cases of “heart attack” that the inspectorate became suspicious. The prosecutors forced the doctors to dig up the corpses, establishing that they had, in fact, died of pellagra. 27 Not all such chaos was deliberate: in another camp, the records were in such disarray that an inspector complained that “the dead are counted as living prisoners, escapees as imprisoned and vice versa.” 28

corpses at Vorkuta: After they had been stacked like timber in an open-sided shed until enough had accumulated for a mass burial in the camp cemetery, they were loaded, naked, on to sledges, heads on the outside, feet inside. Each body bore a wooden tag, a birka, tied to the big toe of the right foot, bearing its name and number. Before each sledge left the camp gate, the nadziratel, an NKVD officer, took a pickaxe and smashed in each head. This was to ensure that no one got out alive. Once outside the camp, the bodies were dumped into a transeya, one of several broad ditches dug during summer for this purpose. But as the number of dead mounted, the procedure for making certain they were really dead changed. Instead of smashing heads with a pickaxe, the guards used a szompol, a thick wire with a sharpened point, which they stuck into each body. Apparently this was easier than swinging the pick.30

After his terms in Kolyma and a wartime sharashka, Sergei Korolev went on to become the father of the Soviet Union’s space program.

“Man is wolf to man”—the phrase Janusz Bardach used as the title of his memoir—was another.

Gustav Herling elaborated further, describing how it is that the new prisoner slowly learns to live “without pity”: At first he shares his bread with hunger-demented prisoners, leads the night-blind on the way home from work, shouts for help when his neighbor in the forest has chopped off two fingers, and surreptitiously carries cans of soup and herring-heads to the mortuary. After several weeks he realizes that his motives in all this are neither pure nor really disinterested, that he is following the egotistic injunctions of his brain and saving first of all himself. The camp, where prisoners live at the lowest level of humanity and follow their own brutal code of behavior toward others, helps him to reach this conclusion. How could he have supposed, back in prison, that a man can be so degraded as to arouse not compassion but only loathing and repugnance in his fellow prisoners? How can he help the night-blind, when every day he sees them being jolted with rifle-butts because they are delaying the brigade’s return to work, and then impatiently pushed off the paths by prisoners hurrying to the kitchen for their soup; how visit the mortuary and brave the constant darkness and stench of excrement; how share his bread with a hungry madman who on the very next day will greet him in the barrack with a demanding, persistent stare . . . He remembers and believes the words of his examining judge, who told him that the iron broom of Soviet justice sweeps only rubbish into its cam...

Most of the time, the camp administration was not trying to kill prisoners; they were just trying to fulfill impossibly high norms set by the central planners in Moscow. As a result, camp guards were more than willing to reward prisoners whom they found useful toward this end.

But hard work sometimes backfired. Lev Razgon described peasants who killed themselves trying to overfulfill the norm, earning themselves a “big ration,” 1.5 kilos of bread: “It may have been raw and badly baked, but it was real bread. For peasants who had lived in semi-starvation for years this appeared an enormous quantity, even without any cooked food.” Yet even this “enormous quantity” of food did not make up for the energy expended in doing the forestry work. The forest worker was thus condemned, Razgon wrote: “quite literally, he would starve to death while eating one and a half kilos of bread a day.”25 Varlam Shalamov has also described the “myth of the big ration,” and Solzhenitsyn wrote that “the big ration is the one that kills. In one season of hauling timber the strongest slogger would end up a hopeless last-legger himself.”

She had been arrested because she had “said something or other to an artist friend, and the friend had informed.” Because her father had also been arrested in 1937, she had been quickly convicted of promoting anti-Soviet propaganda.

she had changed from prisoner to collaborator, and then from collaborator to camp boss. She had adopted first the language of the criminal world, then its dress and its habits. Through that route she had, finally, attained the privileged status of the camp authorities.

Because the twisted moral hierarchy of the Soviet camp system decreed the “socially close”—not just the professional criminals, but the ordinary thieves, swindlers, murderers, and rapists—more capable of being reformed into good Soviet citizens, they were automatically more likely to receive trusty status.

scurvy boils—a condition caused by malnutrition,

Criminals in particular were famous for simply cutting off their three middle fingers with an ax, so they could no longer cut trees or hold a wheelbarrow in the mines. Others cut off a foot, or a hand, or rubbed acid into their eyes. Still others, upon departing for work, wrapped a wet rag around one foot: in the evening they returned with third-degree frostbite. The same method could be applied to fingers. In the 1960s, Anatoly Marchenko watched a man nail his testicles to a prison bench.109 Nor was he the first: Valery Frid describes a man who nailed his scrotum to a tree stump.110 But there were subtler methods used as well. The more daring criminal would steal a syringe and inject melted soap into his penis: the resulting ejaculation looked like venereal disease.

A striking number of political prisoners who wrote memoirs—and this may explain why they wrote memoirs—attribute their survival to their ability to “tell stories”: to entertain criminal prisoners by recounting the plots of novels or of films. In the world of the camps and the prisons, where books were scarce and films were rare, a good storyteller was highly prized. Leonid Finkelstein says that he will be “forever grateful to a thief who, on my first prison day, recognized this potential in me, and said, ‘You’ve probably read a lot of books. Tell them to people, and you will be living very well.’ And indeed I was living better than the rest. I had some notoriety, some fame . . . I ran into people who said, ‘You are Leonchik-Romanist [Leonchik-the-storyteller], I heard about you in Taishet.’” Because of this skill, Finkelstein was invited, twice a day, into the brigadier leader’s hut where he received a mug of hot water.

More to the point, there were sentries everywhere: the whole of the Kolyma region—hundreds and hundreds of square miles of taiga—was really a vast prison, after all, as was the entire Komi Republic, large swathes of the Kazakh desert, and northern Siberia. In such places, there were few ordinary villages, and few ordinary inhabitants. Anyone walking alone without proper identity documents would have immediately been identified as a runaway, and either shot, or beaten up and returned to his camp.

If ideology and fear did not impel the locals to turn in escaped prisoners, greed did. Fairly or unfairly, many memoirists believe that local tribal peoples—the Eskimos of the far north, the Kazakhs to the south—were constantly on the lookout for runaways. Some became professional bounty-hunters, searching for prisoners in return for a kilogram of tea or a bag of wheat. 11 In Kolyma, a local inhabitant who brought in the right hand of a runaway—or, by some accounts, the runaway’s head—received a 250-ruble prize, and the prizes seem to have been similar elsewhere.

As we approached the gate, I thought for a moment that I must be having a bad dream: a naked corpse was suspended from the gatepost. Its hands and feet were bound with wire, its head was sunk to one side, the rigid eyes were half open. Above the head was a board with the inscription: “This is the fate of all those who try to escape from Norilsk.”

The guards did not take the escape of criminals very seriously and did not exert much effort in pursuing them: they would be caught when they came out to the railroad or reached a town. But for the pursuit of political prisoners, posses would be organized at once: sometimes all neighboring villages would be mobilized and the frontier guards called to assist. The political prisoner always tried to escape abroad—in his motherland he had no refuge.38 Most

One of the standard methods of criminal escape involved cannibalism. Pairs of criminals would agree in advance to escape along with a third man (the “meat”), who was destined to become the sustenance for the other two on their journey. Buca also describes the trial of a professional thief and murderer, who, along with a colleague, escaped with the camp cook, their “walking supply”: They weren’t the first to get this idea. When you have a huge community of people who dream of nothing but escape, it is inevitable that every possible means of doing so will be discussed. A “walking supply” is, in fact, a fat prisoner. If you have to, you can kill him and eat him. And until you need him, he is carrying the “food” himself.

A man can’t live if he doesn’t know what he’s living for.”

In October of 1936, hundreds of Trotskyites, Anarchists, and other political prisoners in one Vorkuta lagpunkt began a hunger strike that was to last, according to records, 132 days. Without question, their purpose was political: the strikers demanded that they be separated from criminal prisoners, that their working day be limited to eight hours, that they should be fed regardless of their work—and that their sentences should be annulled.

In the annals of the Gulag, the Ust-Usa rebellion was, as far as we know, unique. If there were other mass breakouts while Stalin was alive, we do not yet know about them. About Ust-Usa we know quite a lot: garbled versions of the story have long been part of the Gulag’s oral history, but in recent years it has been carefully documented as well.71

According to the official statistics, which are almost certainly an underestimate, 352,560 prisoners died in 1942, or one in four. One in five, or 267,826, died in 1943.