Gulag

If the camp or colony was located near or within a city, the barbed-wire fence was usually replaced by a wall or fence made of bricks or wood, so that no one approaching the site would be able to see in from the outside. These barriers were well-built: in Medvezhegorsk, for example, the headquarters of the White Sea Canal, a high wooden fence, built in the early 1930s to contain prisoners, was still standing when I visited the town in 1998.

To get through the fence, prisoners and guards alike had to travel through the vakhta, or “guardhouse.” During the day, the guards of the vakhta monitored all of those who entered and left the camp, checking the passes of free workers coming into the camps, and of the convoy guards escorting prisoners on their way out. In the camp at Perm-36, which has been restored to its original state, the vakhta contains a passage blocked by two gates. A prisoner would walk through the first gate, then stop in the small space in between to be searched or checked. Only then would he be allowed to walk through the second gate. It was much the same system as one finds at the entrance to a Sicilian bank.

But barbed wire and walls alone did not define the zona’s boundaries. In most camps, armed guards observed the prisoners from high wooden watchtowers. Sometimes dogs also circled the camp, attached by chains to a metal wire which had been stretched all the way around the zona. The dogs, managed by special dog-handlers among the guards, were trained to bark at approaching prisoners and to follow the scent and chase anyone attempting escape. Prisoners were thus held in by barriers of sight, smell, and sound, as well as by barbed wire and brick.

They were also held in by fear, which was sometimes enough to keep prisoners within a camp that had no fence at all. Margarete Buber-Neumann was kept in a low-security camp which allowed prisoners to “move freely up to within half a mile of the camp perimeter; after that the guards shot without ceremony.”⁹ This was unusual: in most camps, the guards would shoot “without ceremony” much sooner than that. In his 1939 regulations, Beria ordered all camp commanders to line their fences with a no-man’s-land, a strip of earth no less than 5 meters (15 feet) wide.¹⁰ Guards regularly raked the no-man’s-land in summer and deliberately left it covered with snow in winter, in order that the footprints of escaping prisoners might always be visible. The beginning of the no-man’s-land was also marked, sometimes by barbed wire, sometimes by signs reading “ zapretnaya zona,” “forbidden zone.” The no-man’s-land was sometimes called the “death zone,” since guards were permitted to shoot anyone who entered it.¹¹

And yet—the fences and walls and dogs and barricades that surrounded lagpunkts were not totally impenetrable. Whereas German concentration camps were completely self-contained—“sealed off totally, hermetically,” is how one expert puts it¹²—the Soviet system was in this sense different.

To begin with, the Soviet system classified prisoners as konvoinyi or beskonvoinyi—“guarded” or “unguarded”—and the small minority of unguarded prisoners were allowed to cross over the boundary without being watched, to run errands for the guards, to work during the day on an unguarded bit of railway, even to live in private apartments outside the zona. This latter privilege had been established early in the history of the camps, in the more chaotic years of the early 1930s. ¹³ Although it was explicitly forbidden several times after that, it persisted. One set of rules written in 1939 reminded camp commanders that “all prisoners, without exception, are forbidden to live outside the zone in villages, private apartments, or houses belonging to the camp.” Theoretically, camps needed to get special permission even to let inmates live in a guarded accommodation, if it was outside the zona.¹⁴ In practice, these rules were frequently disregarded. Despite the edict of 1939, inspectors’ reports written long after that date list a wide variety of violations. In the city of Ordzhonikidze, one inspector complained, prisoners walked around the streets, went to bazaars, entered private apartments, drank, and stole. In one Leningrad prison colony, a prisoner had been given use of a horse, on which he escaped. In work colony No. 14 in Voronezh, an armed guard left thirty-eight prisoners standing on the street while he went into a shop.¹⁵