Gulag

by Anne Applebaum

  Georgy Feldgun, also in the camps in the 1940s, remembered that the thieves had a distinctive walk, “with small steps, legs held slightly apart,” and wore gold or silver crowns on their teeth which they had affixed as a sort of fashion: “The vor of 1943 went around normally in a dark-blue three-piece outfit, with trousers tucked into boxcalf boots. Blouse under the waistcoat, tucked out. Also a cap, pulled over the eyes. Also tattoos, usually sentimental: ‘I’ll never forget my beloved mother.’ ‘There is no happiness in life . . .’”30

  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.31 Solzhenitsyn is more explicit:

  They surrendered their bronze skin to tattooing and in this way gradually satisfied their artistic, their erotic, and even their moral needs: on one another’s chests, stomachs, and backs they could admire powerful eagles perched on cliffs or flying through the sky. Or the big hammer, the sun, with its rays shooting out in every direction; or women and men copulating; or the individual organs of their sexual enjoyment; and all of a sudden, next to their hearts were Lenin or Stalin or perhaps both . . . Sometimes they would laugh at a droll stoker hurling coal into their rear orifice, or a monkey engaged in masturbation. And they would read slogans on each other which, even if they were already familiar, they none the less dearly loved to repeat! “—all the girls in the mouth!” . . . . Or else on a girl thief’s stomach there might be “I will die for a hot—!”32

  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

  The thieves also distinguished themselves from other prisoners in their manner of entertainment. Elaborate rituals surrounded their card games, which involved huge risks, both from the games themselves, which had high stakes, and from the authorities, who punished anyone caught playing. 34 But the risks were probably part of their attraction for people accustomed to danger: Dmitri Likhachev, the literary critic imprisoned on Solovetsky, noted that many thieves “compare their emotions during card games to the emotions they feel while carrying out a crime.”35

  Indeed, the criminals outwitted all NKVD attempts to stop the games. Searches and confiscations were of no use. “Experts” among the thieves specialized in the production of playing cards, a process which had become, by the 1940s, highly sophisticated. First, the “expert” would cut squares of paper with a razor blade. To ensure the cards were sturdy enough, he then pasted five or six squares together using “glue” made by rubbing a piece of damp bread against a handkerchief. After that, he put the cards under one of the bunks overnight to harden. When they were ready, he stamped the suits onto the card, using a stamp carved out of the bottom of a mug. He used black ash for the black cards. If the medicine streptomycin was available—if the camp or prison doctor had it, and could be threatened or bribed to give some away—he would make red cards as well.36

  The card-playing rituals were another part of the terror that the thieves exerted over the political prisoners. When playing with one another, the thieves bet money, bread, and clothes. When they had lost their own they bet the money, bread, and clothes of other prisoners. Gustav Herling first witnessed such an incident on a Stolypin wagon bound for Siberia. He was traveling with a fellow Pole, Shklovski. In the same car, three urki, among them a “gorilla with a flat Mongolian face,” were playing cards.

  . . . the gorilla suddenly threw down his cards, jumped down from the bench and came up to Shklovski.

  “Give me the coat,” he yelled. “I’ve lost it at cards.”

  Shklovski opened his eyes and, without moving from his seat, shrugged his shoulders.

  “Give it to me,” the gorilla roared, enraged, “give it, or—glaza vykolu—I’ll poke your eyes out!” The colonel slowly got up and handed over the coat.

  Only later, in the labor camp, I understood the meaning of this fantastic scene. To stake the possessions of other prisoners in their games of cards is one of the urkas’ most popular distractions, and its chief attraction lies in the fact that the loser is obliged to force from the victim the item previously agreed upon.37

  One female prisoner was the inhabitant of an entire women’s barracks that had been “lost” in a card game. After hearing the news, the women waited anxiously for several days, “incredulous”—until, one night, the attack came: “The uproar was terrific—the women yelled, screamed the skies down, until men came to our rescue . . . in the end nothing but a few bundles of clothes were stolen and the starosta was stabbed.”38

  But cards could be no less dangerous for the professional criminals themselves. 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 . . .

  The man concluded, almost proudly: “We have our laws too, only tougher than yours. If you do your comrades down, you have to answer for it.”39 Indeed, the thieves’ judicial rituals were as elaborate as their initiation ceremonies, involving a “court,” a trial, and a sentence that could entail beating, humiliation, or even death. Colonna-Czosnowski witnessed a bitter, prolonged card game between two high-ranking thieves, which ended only when one of them had lost all of his possessions. Instead of an arm or a leg, the winner demanded a terrible humiliation as penalty: he commanded the barrack “artist” to tattoo an enormous penis on the man’s face, pointing at his mouth. Minutes later, the loser pressed a hot poker against his face, obliterating his tattoo, and scarring himself for life.40 Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, the son of a leading Bolshevik, also claimed to have met a “deaf-mute” in the camps, who had lost at cards and thereby forfeited the use of his voice for three years. Even as he was shipped from camp to camp, he dared not violate this penalty, as every local urka would know about it: “Violations of this agreement would be punished by death. No one can evade the law of thieves.”41

  The authorities knew of these rituals and occasionally tried to intervene, not always successfully. In one incident in 1951, a thieves’ court sentenced a thief called Yurilkin to death. Camp authorities heard of the sentence, and transferred Yurilkin, first to another camp, then to a transit prison, then to a third camp in a completely different part of the country. Nevertheless, two thieves-in-law finally tracked him down there and murdered him—four years later. They were subsequently tried and executed for murder, but even such punishments were not necessarily a deterrent. In 1956, the Soviet prosecutor’s office circulated a frustrated note complaining that “this criminal formation exists in all Corrective-Labor Camps and often the decision of the group to murder one or another prisoner who is in a different camp is executed in that camp unquestioningly.”42

  The thieves’ courts could exact punishment on outsiders too, which perhaps explains why they inspired so much terror. Leonid Finkelstein, a political prisoner in the early 1950s, remembered one such revenge murder:

  I personally saw only one killing, but that was very spectacular. Do you know what a big metal file is? Such a file, sharpened at one end, is an absolutely murderous weapon . . .

  We had a naryadchik, the man who assigned work to prisoners—what he was guilty of, I canno
t tell. But the thieves-in-law decided he should be killed. It happened when we were standing at the count, before going to work. Every brigade was standing separate from the others. The naryadchikwas standing in front. Kazakhov was his name, he was a heavy man with a heavy paunch. One of the thieves darted out of the formation, and thrust this file into his stomach, into his belly. It was probably a trained assassin. The man was caught immediately—but he had twenty-five years. He was of course retried, and given another twenty-five years. So his term was extended for a couple of years, so who cares . . . 43

  Nevertheless, it was relatively rare for the thieves to aim their “justice” at those running the camps. By and large they were, if not exactly loyal Soviet citizens, then at least happy to cooperate in the one task that Soviet authorities set for them: they were perfectly happy, that is, to lord it over the politicals—that group which was, to quote Evgeniya Ginzburg again, “even more despised and outcast than themselves.”

  KONTRIKI AND BYTOVYE: THE POLITICALS AND THE ORDINARY PRISONERS

  With their special slang, distinctive clothing, and rigid culture, the professional criminals were easy to identify, and are easy to describe. It is far harder to make generalizations about the rest of the prisoners, the people who formed the raw material of the Gulag’s workforce, since they came from every strata of Soviet society. Indeed, for too long, our understanding of who exactly the majority of the camps’ inmates were has been skewed by our forced reliance on memoirs, particularly memoirs published outside the Soviet Union. Their authors were usually intellectuals, often foreigners, and almost universally political prisoners.

  Since Gorbachev’s glasnost in 1989, however, a wider variety of memoir material has become available, along with some archival data. According to the latter, which must be treated with a great deal of caution, it now appears that the vast majority of prisoners were not intellectuals at all—not people, that is, from Russia’s technical and academic intelligentsia, which was effectively a separate social class—but workers and peasants. Some figures for the 1930s, the years when the bulk of the Gulag’s inmates were kulaks, are particularly revealing. In 1934, only .7 percent of the camp population had higher education, while 39.1 percent were classified as having only primary education. At the same time, 42.6 percent were described as “semiliterate,” and 12 percent were completely illiterate. Even in 1938, the year the Great Terror raged among Moscow and Leningrad intellectuals, those with higher education in the camps still numbered only 1.1 percent while over half had primary education and a third were semiliterate. 44

  Comparable figures on the social origins of prisoners do not seem to be available, but it is worth noting that in 1948, less than one quarter of prisoners were politicals—those sentenced, according to Article 58 of the Criminal Code, for “counter-revolutionary” crimes. This follows an earlier pattern. Politicals accounted for a mere 12 and 18 percent of prisoners in the terror years of 1937 and 1938; hovered around 30 to 40 percent during the war; rose in 1946 to nearly 60 percent, as a result of the amnesty given to criminal prisoners in the wake of victory; and then remained steady, accounting for between a quarter and a third of all prisoners, throughout the rest of Stalin’s reign.45 Given the higher turnover of nonpolitical prisoners—they often had shorter sentences and were more likely to meet requirements for early release—it is safe to say that the vast majority of the inmates who passed through the Gulag system in both the 1930s and 1940s were people with criminal sentences, and therefore more likely to be workers and peasants.

  Yet although these numbers may help to correct past impressions, they can be misleading too. Looking at the new memoir material accumulated in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is also becoming clear that many of the politicals were not really “political prisoners” in the way we define the term today. In the 1920s, the camps did indeed contain members of anti-Bolshevik parties, who actually called themselves “politicals.” There were also, in the 1930s, a few genuine Trotskyites—people who really did support Trotsky against Stalin. In the 1940s, following mass arrests in Ukraine, the Baltic States, and Poland, a wave of authentically anti-Soviet partisans and activists also arrived in the camps. In the early 1950s, a handful of anti-Stalinist students were arrested too.

  Nevertheless, of the hundreds of thousands of people referred to in the camps as political prisoners, the vast majority were not dissidents, or priests saying mass in secret, or even Party bigwigs. They were ordinary people, swept up in mass arrests, who did not necessarily have strong political views of any kind. Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, once an employee of one of the industrial ministries in Moscow, wrote, “Before my arrest, I led a very ordinary life, typical of a professional Soviet woman who didn’t belong to the Party. I worked hard but took no particular part in politics or public affairs. My real interests lay with home and family.”46

  Draft Portrait of Two Zeks: a drawing by Sergei Reikenberg, Magadan, date unknown

  If the politicals were not necessarily political, the vast majority of criminal prisoners were not necessarily criminals either. While there were some professional criminals and, during the war years, some genuine war criminals and Nazi collaborators in the camps, most of the others had been convicted of so-called “ordinary” or nonpolitical crimes that in other societies would not be considered crimes at all. 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.49 In the upside-down world of the Gulag, criminal prisoners were no more likely to be real criminals than political prisoners were likely to be active opponents of the regime.

  In other words, criminals were not always people who had committed a real crime. And it was even rarer for a political to have committed a political offense. This did not stop the Soviet judicial system from classifying them with great care, however. As a group, the status of the counter-revolutionaries was lower than that of the criminals; as I say, they were considered to be “socially dangerous,” less compatible with Soviet society than the “socially close” criminals. But the politicals were also ranked according to whatever section of Article 58 of the Criminal Code they had been sentenced under. Evgeniya Ginzburg noted that among the political prisoners it was by far “best” to have been sentenced under Section 10 of Article 58, for “Anti-Soviet Agitation” (ASA). These were the “babblers”: they had told an unfortunate anti-Party joke, or had let slip some criticism of Stalin or the local Party boss (or had been accused by a jealous neighbor of having done so). Even the camp authorities tacitly recognized that the “babblers” had committed no crime whatsoever, so those sentenced for ASA sometimes found it easier to get lighter work assignments.

  Below them were those convicted for “counter-revolutionary activity” (KRD). Lower still were those convicted of “counter-revolutionary terrorist activity” (KRTD). The additional “T” could mean, in some camps, that a prisoner was actually forbidden to be assigned to anything but the most difficult “general work”—cutting trees, digging mines, building roads—particularly if the KRTD was accompanied by a sentence of ten or fifteen years or more.50

  And it was possible to go lower still. Below KRTD was yet another category: KRTTD, not just terrorist activities, but “Trotskyist terrorist activities.” “I knew of c
ases,” wrote Lev Razgon, “when the additional T would appear in a prisoner’s camp documents because of a quarrel during a general head-count with the work distributor or the head of Distribution, who were both criminals.”51 A minor change like that could mean the difference between life and death, since no foreman would assign a KRTTD prisoner to anything but the toughest physical labor.

  These rules were not always clear-cut. In practice, prisoners constantly weighed the value of these different sentences, trying to work out what effect they would have on their lives. Varlam Shalamov records that after he had been selected to take a paramedical course, one which would enable him to become a feldsher—a doctor’s assistant, one of the most prestigious and comfortable jobs in the camp—he was worried about the effect his sentence would have on his ability to complete the course: “Would they accept political prisoners convicted under Article 58 of the Criminal Code? Only those who came under Section 10. And how about my neighbor in the rear of the truck? He too was ASA, anti-Soviet agitation.” 52

  Official sentences alone did not determine the politicals’ place in the camp hierarchy. Although they did not have a rigid code of behavior like the criminals, or a unifying language, they did eventually segregate themselves into distinct groups. These political clans hung together for comradeship, for self-protection, or because they shared a common worldview. They were not distinct—they overlapped with one another, and with the clans of nonpolitical prisoners—and they did not exist in every camp. When they did, however, they could be vital to a prisoner’s survival.

  The most fundamental, and ultimately the most powerful, of the political clans were those formed around nationality or place of origin. These grew more important during and after the Second World War, when the numbers of foreign prisoners increased dramatically. Their derivation was natural enough. A new prisoner would arrive, and immediately search his barracks for fellow Estonians, fellow Ukrainians, or, in a tiny number of cases, fellow Americans. Walter Warwick, one of the “American Finns” who wound up in the camps in the late 1930s, has described, in a manuscript he wrote for his family, how the Finnish speakers in his camp banded together specifically in order to protect themselves from the thievery and banditry of the professional criminals: “We came to the conclusion that if we wanted to have a little rest from them, we must have a gang. So we organized our own gang to help each other. There were six of us: two American Finns . . . two Finnish Finns . . . and two Leningrad District Finns ...”53