Gulag

The Moscow prosecutors’ office wrote a letter to another camp, near the Siberian city of Komsomolsk, accusing commanders of allowing no less than 1,763 prisoners to attain the status of “unguarded.” As a result, the prosecutors wrote angrily, “it is always possible to meet prisoners in any part of the town, in any institution, and in private apartments.”¹⁶ They also accused another camp of letting 150 prisoners live in private apartments, a violation of the regime, which had led to “incidents of drunkenness, hooliganism, and even robbery of the local population.”¹⁷

But within camps, prisoners were not deprived of all freedom of movement either. On the contrary, this is one of the quirks of the concentration camp, one of the ways in which it differs from a prison: when not working, and when not sleeping, most prisoners could walk in and out of the barracks at will. When not working, prisoners could also decide, within limits, how to spend their time. Only those prisoners subjected to the katorga regime, set up in 1943, or later those put in the “special regime camps,” created in 1948, were locked into their barracks at night, a circumstance they bitterly resented and later rebelled against.¹⁸

Arriving in the camps from claustrophobic Soviet prisons, inmates were often surprised and relieved by this change. One zek said of his arrival in Ukhtpechlag: “Our mood was wonderful, once we got into the open air.”¹⁹ Olga Adamova-Sliozberg remembered talking “from dawn to dusk about the advantages of camp over prison life” upon her arrival in Magadan:

The camp population (around a thousand women) seemed to us enormous: so many people, so many conversations to have, so many potential friends! Then there was nature. Within the compound, which was fenced with barbed wire, we could walk around freely, gaze at the sky and the faraway hills, go up to the stunted trees and stroke them with our hands. We breathed the moist sea air, felt the August drizzle on our faces, sat on the damp grass and let the earth run through our fingers. For four years we had lived without doing all this and discovered in doing so that it was essential to our being: without it you ceased to feel like a normal person.²⁰

Leonid Finkelstein concurs:

You were brought in, you got out of the prison van, and you are surprised by several things. First, that the prisoners are walking around, without guards—they were going somewhere on their duties, whatever. Second, they look completely different from you. The contrast was even greater felt when I was in the camp and they would deliver new prisoners. The new prisoners all have green faces—green faces because of the lack of fresh air, miserable food, and all that. The prisoners in the camps have more or less normal complexions. You find yourself among relatively free, relatively good-looking people.²¹

Over time, the apparent “freedom” of this camp life usually palled. While in prison, wrote a Polish prisoner, Kazimierz Zarod, it was still possible to believe that a mistake had been made, that release would come soon. After all, “we were still surrounded by the trappings of civilization—outside the walls of the prison there was a large town.” In the camp, however, he found himself milling freely about among a “strange assortment of men . . . all feelings of normality were suspended. As the days went by I was filled by a sort of panic which slowly turned into desperation. I tried to push the feeling down, back into the depths of consciousness, but slowly it began to dawn on me that I was caught up in a cynical act of injustice from which there appeared to be no escape . . .”²²