Gulag

Most of the “specialists” utilized the three free days to visit the offices and bureaus of the camp, seeking old acquaintances wherever they went and conducting suspicious negotiations with some of the camp officials. They were all excited and preoccupied. Every one of them had secrets of his own and was fearful lest another spoil his chances and grab the more comfortable work each coveted. In no time at all the majority of these people knew where to go, at whose door to knock, and what to say.

As a result, a genuinely qualified Polish doctor was sent to cut trees in the forest, while a former pimp was given an office job as an accountant, “although he had not the slightest notion of accounting and was altogether half illiterate.” ⁹⁴

Those prisoners who thus managed to avoid physical labor had indeed concocted the beginnings of a survival strategy—but only the beginnings. Now, they had to learn the strange rules that governed daily life in the camps.

Chapter 10

LIFE IN THE CAMPS

The sound of a distant bellEnters the cell with the dawn I hear the bell calling out to me:“Where are you? Where are you?”“Here I am!” . . . Then tears of greeting,Mean tears of captivity . . .Not for God, But for you, Russia.”

—Simeon Vilensky, 1948¹

ACCORDING TO THE most accurate count to date, there were, between 1929 and 1953, 476 camp complexes in the realm of the Gulag.² But this number is misleading. In practice, each one of these camp complexes contained dozens, or even hundreds, of smaller camp units. These smaller units—lagpunkts—have not yet been counted, and probably cannot be, since some were temporary, some were permanent, and some were technically parts of different camps at different times. Nor can very much be said about the customs and practices of the lagpunkts that is guaranteed to apply to every single one. Even during Beria’s reign over the system—which lasted, in effect, from 1939 until Stalin’s death in 1953—living and working conditions in the Gulag would continue to vary enormously, both from year to year and from place to place, even within the same camp complex.

“Every camp is its own world, a separate city, a separate country,” wrote the Soviet actress Tatyana Okunevskaya—and every camp had its own character.³ Life in one of the mass industrial camps of the far north was very different from life on an agricultural farm camp in southern Russia. Life in any camp during the most intensive period of the Second World War, when one in four zeks died every year, was quite different from life in the early 1950s, when death rates were nearly the same as in the rest of the country. Life in a camp headed by a relatively liberal boss was not the same as life in a camp led by a sadist. Lagpunkts also ranged widely in size, from several thousand to several dozen prisoners, as well as in longevity. Some lasted from the 1920s to the 1980s, when they still functioned as criminal prisons. Others, such as those set up to build the roads and railways across Siberia, lasted only as long as a single summer.

Nevertheless, on the eve of the war, certain elements of life and of work were common to the vast majority of camps. The climate still varied from lagpunkt to lagpunkt, but the huge fluctuations in national policy that had characterized the 1930s had come to a halt. Instead, the same inert bureaucracy that would eventually lay its dead hand on virtually every aspect of life in the Soviet Union slowly took over the Gulag as well.

Striking, in this regard, are the differences between the sketchy and somewhat vague rules and regulations for the camps issued in 1930, and the more detailed rules issued in 1939, after Beria had taken control. This difference seems to reflect a changing relationship between the organs of central control—the Moscow Gulag administration itself—and the commanders of camps in the regions. During the Gulag’s first, experimental decade, the order papers did not attempt to dictate what camps should look like, and barely touched on the behavior of prisoners. They sketched out a general scheme, and left local commanders to fill in the blanks.