Such a meeting could be worse than no meeting at all. Izrail Mazus, arrested in the 1950s, recounts the story of one prisoner who made the mistake of announcing to his fellow inmates that his wife had arrived. As he endured the routines required of every prisoner due to encounter a visitor— he went to the baths, to the barber, to the storage room to retrieve some proper clothes—the other prisoners relentlessly winked at him and poked him, teasing him about the squeaky bed in the House of Meetings.46 Yet in the end, he was not even allowed to be alone in the room with his wife. What sort of “glimpse of liberty” was that?
Contacts with the outside world were always complicated—by expectations, by desires, by anticipation. Herling, again, writes that
Whatever the reason for their disappointment—whether the freedom, realized for three days, had not lived up to its idealized expectation, whether it was too short, or whether, fading away like an interrupted dream, it had left only fresh emptiness in which they had nothing to wait for—the prisoners were invariably silent and irritable after visits, to say nothing of those whose visits had been transformed into the tragic formality of separation and divorce. Krestynski . . . twice attempted to hang himself after an interview with his wife, who had asked him for a divorce and for his agreement to place their children in a municipal nursery.
Herling, who as a Polish foreigner “never expected to see anyone” in the House of Meetings, nevertheless saw the significance of the place more clearly than many Soviet writers: “I came to the conclusion that if hope can often be the only meaning left in life, then its realization may sometimes be an unbearable torment.”47
Chapter 13
THE GUARDS
To the Chekists
A great and responsible task
Was placed upon you by Ilyich,
The face of a Chekist is worn with cares
Which no one else can comprehend.
On the face of a Chekist is valor,
He is ready to fight, even today,
For the good of all, and their well-being,
He stands up for the working people.
Many, many in battle have fallen,
Many of our brothers’ tombs have arisen.
But there still remain many,
Honest and vigorous fighters.
Tremble, tremble, enemies!
Soon, soon, your end will come!
You, Chekist, stand always on guard
And in battle you will lead the throng!
—Poem by Mikhail Panchenko, an inspector in the Soviet prison system, preserved in the same personal file that describes his expulsion from the Party and from the NKVD1
STRANGE THOUGH IT may sound, not all of the rules in the camps were written by the camp commanders. There were also unwritten rules—about how to attain status, how to gain privileges, how to live a little better than everyone else—as well as an informal hierarchy. Those who mastered these unwritten rules, and learned how to climb the hierarchy, found it much easier to survive.
At the top of the camp hierarchy were the commanders, the overseers, the warders, the jailers, and the guards. I deliberately write “at the top of” rather than “above” or “outside” the camp hierarchy, for in the Gulag the administrators and guards were not a separate caste, apart and aloof from the prisoners. Unlike the SS guards in German concentration camps, they were not considered immutably, racially superior to the prisoners, whose ethnicity they often shared. There were, for example, many hundreds of thousands of Ukranian prisoners in the camps after the Second World War. There were also, in the same time period, a notable number of Ukrainian guards.2
Nor did the guards and prisoners inhabit entirely separate social spheres. Some guards and administrators had elaborate black-market dealings with prisoners. Some got drunk with prisoners. Many “co-habited” with prisoners, to use the Gulag’s euphemism for sexual relations.3 More to the point, many were former prisoners themselves. In the early 1930s, it was considered perfectly normal for well-behaved prisoners to “graduate” to the status of camp guards—and some even went higher.4 Naftaly Frenkel’s career represented perhaps the most outstanding transformation, but there were others.
Yakov Kuperman’s career was less exalted than Frenkel’s, for example, but more typical. Kuperman—who later donated his unpublished memoirs to the Memorial Society in Moscow—was arrested in 1930 and given a ten-year sentence. He spent time in Kem, the Solovetsky transit prison, and then went to work in the planning division of the White Sea Canal. In 1932, his case was re-examined and his status was changed from prisoner to exile. Eventually, he was freed, and took up a job on the Baikal–Amur Railway— BAMlag—an experience he remembered “with satisfaction” until the end of his life.5 His decision was not an unusual one. In 1938, more than half of the administrators and nearly half of the armed guards in Belbaltlag, the camp that ran the White Sea Canal, were former or actual prisoners.6
Status could be lost as well as gained, however. Just as it was relatively easy for a prisoner to become a jailer, so too was it relatively easy for a jailer to become a prisoner. Gulag administrators and camp commanders figured among the thousands of NKVD men arrested in the purge years of 1937 and 1938. In later years, top Gulag guards and Gulag employees were regularly arrested by their suspicious colleagues. In the isolated lagpunkts, gossip and backbiting were rife: whole files of the Gulag’s archives are devoted to denunciations and counter-denunciations, furious letters about camp deficiencies, lack of support from the center, poor working conditions—and subsequent calls for arrests of the guilty, or of the disliked.7
Armed guards and administrators were regularly arrested for desertion, drinking, stealing, losing their weapons, even for mistreating prisoners. 8 The records of the Vanino port transit camp, for example, contain descriptions of V. N. Sadovnikov, an armed guard who murdered a camp nurse, having meant to murder his wife; of I. M. Soboleev, who stole 300 rubles from a group of prisoners, and then got drunk and lost his Party membership card; of V. D. Suvorov, who organized a group drinking session and picked a fight with a group of officers—as well as others who “drank themselves into unconsciousness,” or who were too drunk to man their posts.9 The personal papers of Georgi Malenkov, one of Stalin’s henchman, contain a report on the case of two camp administrators who murdered two colleagues in the course of a drunken binge, among them a woman doctor with two small children.10 So boring was life in the more distant camp outposts, one camp administrator complained in a letter to Moscow, that lack of entertainment “pushes many of the boys into desertion, violations of discipline, drunkenness, and cardplaying—all of which regularly ends with a court sentence.”11
It was even possible, indeed rather common, for some to make the full circle: for NKVD officers to become prisoners, and then to become jailers again, making second careers in the Gulag administration. Certainly many former prisoners have written of the speed with which disgraced NKVD officers would find their feet in the camps, and go on to obtain positions of real power. In his memoirs, Lev Razgon records an encounter with one Korabelnikov, a low-level NKVD employee whom he met during the journey from Moscow. Korabelnikov told Razgon he had been arrested because he “blabbed to my best mate . . . about one of the bosses’ women . . . got five years as a Socially Dangerous Element—and into a transport with the rest.” But he was not quite like the rest. Some months later, Razgon met him again. This time he was wearing a clean, well-made camp uniform. He had wormed his way into a “good” job, running the punishment camp in Ustvymlag. 12
Razgon’s story reflects a reality which is recorded in archives. Many, many Gulag officers had criminal records, in fact. Indeed, it seems as if the Gulag administration openly functioned within the NKVD as a place of exile, a last resort for disgraced secret police.13 Once sent to the outer reaches of the Gulag’s empire, officers were rarely allowed to return to any other branch of the NKVD, let alone to Moscow. As a sign of their different status, the Gulag’s employees wore distinct uniforms,
and had a slightly altered system of badges and ranks.14 At Party conferences, Gulag officers complained about their inferior status. “The Gulag is seen as an administration from which everything can be demanded and nothing given in return,” griped one officer: “This excessively modest way of thinking—that we are worse than everyone else—is wrong, and it allows inequities in pay, in housing, and so on, to continue.” 15 Later, in 1946, when the NKVD was divided and renamed once again, the Gulag fell under the control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) while almost all of the NKVD’s more exciting functions, particularly intelligence and counter-intelligence, were moved to the more prestigious Ministry of State Security (MGB, later KGB). The MVD, which ran the prison system until the end of the Soviet Union, would remain a less influential bureaucracy. 16
In fact, camp commanders had had relatively low status right from the beginning. In a letter smuggled out of Solovetsky in the early 1920s, one prisoner wrote that the camp administration consisted entirely of disgraced Chekists who “have been convicted of speculation or extortion or assault or some other offense against the ordinary penal code.”17 In the 1930s and 1940s, the Gulag became the ultimate destination of NKVD officials whose biographies did not match requirements: those whose social origins were not proletariat enough, or whose Polish, Jewish, or Baltic nationality made them suspect during eras when those ethnic groups were being actively repressed. The Gulag was also the last refuge for those who were simply stupid, incompetent, or drunk. In 1937, the then-chief of the Gulag, Izrail Pliner, complained that
We get the leftovers from other sections; they send us people based on the principle “you can take what we do not need.” The cream of the crop are the hopeless drunkards; once a man goes over to drink he’s dumped on to the Gulag . . . From the point of view of the NKVD apparatus, if someone commits an offense, the greatest punishment is to send him to work in a camp.18
In 1939, another Gulag official described camp guards as “not second-class but fourth-class people, the very dregs.”19 In 1945, Vasily Chernyshev, at the time the Gulag boss, sent out a memorandum to all camp commanders and regional NKVD chiefs expressing horror at the low quality of the camp armed guards, among whom had been discovered high levels of “suicide, desertion, loss and theft of weapons, drunkenness, and other amoral acts,” as well as frequent “violation of revolutionary laws.”20 As late as 1952, when corruption was discovered at the highest levels of the secret police, Stalin’s first response was to “exile” one of the main pepetrators, who promptly became deputy commander of the Bazhenovsky camp in the Urals.21
The Gulag’s own archives also confirm the belief, delicately expressed by one former prisoner, that both guards and administrators were “more often than not, very limited people.”22 Of the eleven men who held the title “Commander of the Gulag,” for example—the administrator of the entire camp system—between 1930 and 1960, only five had had any kind of higher education, while three had never got any farther than primary school. Those who held this job rarely did so for long: over a thirty-year period, only two men, Matvei Berman and Viktor Nasedkin, held it for longer than five years. Izrail Pliner lasted only a year (1937–38), while Gleb Filaretov lasted only three months (1938–39).23
On the bottom of the NKVD hierarchy, on the other hand, personal files of the employees of the prison service from the 1940s show that even the most elite jailers—Party members and those applying for Party membership—came almost entirely from peasant backgrounds, having received minimal education. Few had completed even five years of school, and some had completed only three.24 As of April 1945, nearly three-quarters of the Gulag’s administrators had received no education beyond primary school, a percentage nearly double that in the rest of the NKVD.25
The camp armed guards—the voenizirovannaya okhrana, usually known, thanks to the Soviet mania for acronyms, as VOKhR—were even less educated. These were the men who walked around the perimeter of the camps, who marched prisoners to work, who manned the trains taking them east, often with only the dimmest idea of why they were doing it. According to one report from Kargopollag, “it appears that the guards don’t know the names of members of the Politburo, or leaders of the Party.”26 Another document lists a series of incidents involving guards who misused their weapons. One of them wounded three prisoners “as the result of not knowing how his gun worked.” Another, “at his post in a drunken state, wounded citizen Timofeev.”27
Division commanders complained at meetings that “The guards do not know how to oil, clean and take care of their weapons . . . A female guard stands on duty with her rifle barrel stuffed with a rag . . . Some guards take other people’s rifles out on duty, leaving their own back at home because they’re too lazy to clean them each time.”28 There were constant missives back and forth from Moscow to the camps urging local commanders to spend more time on “cultural-educational work” among the guards.29
Yet even the “leftovers” and “hopeless drunkards” from other departments of the NKVD managed to fill the Gulag’s demands for employees. Most Soviet institutions suffered from chronic lack of personnel, and the Gulag suffered particularly badly. Even the NKVD could not produce enough delinquent employees to fulfill the demand for an eighteenfold increase in staff between 1930 and 1939, or for the 150,000 people who had to be hired between 1939 and 1941, or for the enormous postwar expansion. In 1947, with 157,000 people serving just in the camp armed guards brigades, the Gulag still reckoned itself to be 40,000 guards short.30
Right up until the system was finally disbanded, this dilemma never ceased to plague the Gulag administration. With the exception of the very top jobs, work in the camps was not considered to be prestigious or attractive, and living conditions were hardly guaranteed to be comfortable, particularly in the smaller, more distant outposts of the far north. General food shortages meant that guards and administrators received rationed food in quantities distributed according to the rank of the recipient.31 Returning from a tour of inspection of the northern camps of the Vorkuta region, one Gulag inspector complained about the poor living conditions of the armed guards, who worked fourteen- to sixteen-hour days in “difficult northern climatic conditions,” did not always have proper shoes and clothes, and lived in dirty barracks. Some suffered from scurvy, pellagra, and other vitamin-deficiency diseases, just as prisoners did.32 Another wrote that in Kargopollag, twenty-six members of the VOKhR had been given criminal sentences, many for falling asleep at their posts. In the summer, they worked thirteen-hour days—and when they were not at work they had no forms of entertainment. Those with families were in particularly poor condition, as they often did not have apartments and were forced to live in barracks.33
Those who wanted to leave did not find it easy, even at the higher levels. The NKVD archives contain a plaintive letter from the prosecutor of Norilsk, begging to be removed from work in the “Arctic zone,” on the grounds of ill health and overwork: “If it isn’t possible to move me to a prosecutor’s job in another corrective-labor camp, then I would like to be put in a territorial job or else removed from the procuracy altogether.” In response, he was offered a transfer to Krasnoyarsk, which he turned down, as the conditions there—Krasnoyarsk lies to the south of Norilsk, but is still in northern Siberia—were almost the same.34
Since the death of Stalin, former camp officials have often defended their past livelihoods by describing the difficulties and hardships of the work. When I met her, Olga Vasileeva, a former inspector of camps for the road-building division of the Gulag, regaled me with tales of the hard life of a Gulag employee. During our conversation—held at her unusually spacious Moscow apartment, the gift of a grateful Party—Vasileeva told me that once, when visiting a distant camp, she was invited to sleep in the home of a camp commander, in his son’s bed. At night she became hot and itchy. Thinking perhaps she was ill, she switched on the light: “His gray soldier’s blanket was alive, swarming with lice. It wasn’t only prisoners who had lice, the bosses had them
too.” As a rule, when she returned home from an inspection trip, she would remove all of her clothes before entering the front door, to avoid bringing parasites into her house.
As Vasileeva saw it, the job of camp commander was extremely difficult: “It isn’t a joke, you are in charge of hundreds, thousands of prisoners, there were recidivists and murderers, those convicted of serious crimes, from them you could expect anything. That meant you have to be on guard the whole time.” Commanders, although under pressure to work as efficiently as possible, found themselves needing to solve all kinds of other problems as well:
The head of a building project, he was also the head of a camp, and spent at least 60 percent of his time not on the building works, making engineering decisions, and solving building problems, but dealing with the camp. Someone was ill, an epidemic might have broken out, or some kind of accident had happened which means someone has to be taken to the hospital, someone needs a car or a horse and cart.
Vasileeva also said that the “bosses” did not necessarily eat well in Moscow either, especially during the war. In the canteen at Gulag headquarters, there was cabbage, soup, and kasha: “I don’t remember meat, I never saw any.” During Stalin’s lifetime, employees of the Gulag in Moscow worked from nine o’clock in the morning until two or three o’clock the next morning every day. Vasileeva saw her child only on Sundays. After Stalin died, however, things improved. S. N. Kruglov, then the head of the NKVD, issued an order granting ordinary employees of the NKVD central administration a one-hour lunch break, and NKVD officers a two-hour lunch break. In 1963, Vasileeva and her husband also received a very large apartment in central Moscow, the same one she was living in when I met her in 1998. 35
In Stalin’s lifetime, though, work in the Gulag was less well-rewarded, leaving the central camp administration to address the problem of the job’s essential unattractiveness in different ways. In 1930, when the system was still perceived as part of the economic expansion of the time, the OGPU conducted internal advertising campaigns, asking for enthusiasts to work in what were then the new camps of the far north:
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