More often, however, such links were weak, providing prisoners with nothing more than people who remembered the street where they had lived or knew the school they had attended. Whereas other ethnic groups formed whole networks of support, finding places in barracks for newcomers, helping them to get easier jobs, the Russians did not. Ariadna Efron wrote that upon arrival in Turukhansk, where she was exiled with other prisoners at the end of her camp sentence, her train was met by exiles already living there:
A Jewish man took aside the Jewish women in our group, gave them bread, explained to them how to comport themselves, what to do. Then a group of Georgian women were met by a Georgian—and, after a while, there were only us Russians left, perhaps ten to fifteen people. No one came to us, offered us bread, or gave us any advice.87
Still, there were some distinctions among the Russian inmates—distinctions based on ideology rather than ethnicity. Nina Gagen-Torn wrote that the “definite majority of women in the camps understood their fate and their suffering as an accidental misfortune, not trying to look for reasons.” For those, however, who “found for themselves some kind of explanation for what was happening, and believed in it, things were easier.”88 Chief among those who had an explanation were the communists; those prisoners, that is, who continued to maintain their innocence, continued to profess loyalty to the Soviet Union, and continued to believe, against all of the evidence, that everyone else was a genuine enemy and should be avoided. Anna Andreeva remembered the communists searching one another out: “They found one another and clung together, they were clean, Soviet people, and thought everyone else were criminals.”89 Susanna Pechora described seeing them upon arrival in Minlag in the early 1950s, “sitting in a corner and telling one another, ‘We are honest Soviet people, hurrah for Stalin, we aren’t guilty and our state will free us from the company of all these enemies.’”90
Both Pechora and Irena Arginskaya, a prisoner in Kengir at the same time, recall that most of the members of this group belonged to the class of high-ranking Party members arrested in 1937 and 1938. They were mostly older; Arginskaya remembered that they were often grouped in the invalid camps, which still contained many people arrested in that earlier era. Anna Larina, the wife of the Soviet leader Nikolai Bukharin, was one of those arrested at this time who remained faithful to the Revolution at first. While still in prison, she wrote a poem commemorating the anniversary of the October Revolution:
Yet, though behind iron bars I stay, Feeling the anguish of the damned Still I celebrate this day Together with my happy land.
Today I have a new belief I will enter life again, And stride again with my Komsomol Side by side across Red Square!
Later, Larina came to regard this poem “as the ravings of a lunatic.” But at the time, she recited it to the imprisoned wives of the Old Bolsheviks, and “they were moved to tears and applause.” 91
Solzhenitsyn dedicated a chapter of The Gulag Archipelago to the communists, whom he referred to, not very charitably, as “Goodthinkers.” He marveled at their ability to explain away even their own arrest, torture, and incarceration as, alternately, “the very cunning work of foreign intelligence services” or “wrecking on an enormous scale” or “a plot by the local NKVD” or “treason.” Some came up with an even more magisterial explanation: “These repressions are a historical necessity for the development of our society.” 92
Later, a few of these loyalists also wrote memoirs, willingly published by the Soviet regime. Boris Dyakov’s novella, A Story of Survival, was published in 1964 in the journal Oktyabr, for example, with the following introduction: “The strength of Dyakov’s story lies in the fact that it is about genuine Soviet people, about authentic communists. In difficult conditions, they never lost their humanity, they were true to their Party ideals, they were devoted to the Motherland.” One of Dyakov’s heroes, Todorsky, describes how he helps an NKVD lieutenant write a speech on the history of the Party. On another occasion, he tells the camp security officer, Major Yakovlev, that despite his unfair conviction, he believes himself to be a true communist: “I am guilty of no crime against Soviet authority. Therefore I was, and I remain, a communist.” The major advises him to keep quiet about it: “Why shout about it? You think everyone in the camp loves communists?”93
Indeed they did not: open communists were often suspected of working, secretly or otherwise, for the camp authorities. Writing about Dyakov, Solzhenitsyn noted that his memoir appeared to leave some things out. “In exchange for what?” he asks, did security officer Sokovikov agree to secretly post Dyakov’s letters for him, bypassing the camp censor. “That kind of friendship—whence came it? ”94 In fact, archives now show that Dyakov had been a secret police agent all of his life—code-named “Woodpecker”—and that he had continued to work as an informer in the camps.95
The only group that surpassed the communists in their absolute faith were the Orthodox believers, as well as the members of the various Russian Protestant religious sects who were also subject to political persecution: Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Russian variations thereof. They were a particularly strong presence in the women’s camps, where they were colloquially known as monashki, or “nuns.” In the late 1940s, in the women’s camp in Mordovia, Anna Andreeva remembered that “the majority of the prisoners were believers,” who organized themselves so that “on holidays the Catholics would work for the Orthodox and vice versa.” 96
As previously noted, some of these sects refused to cooperate in any way with the Soviet Satan, and would neither work nor sign any official documents. Gagen-Torn describes one religious woman who was released on grounds of illness, but refused to leave the camps. “I don’t recognize your authority,” she told the guard who offered to give her the necessary documents and send her home. “Your power is illegitimate, the Anti-Christ appears on your passports . . . If I go free, you’ll arrest me again. There isn’t any reason to leave.”97 Aino Kuusinen was in a camp with a group of women prisoners who refused to wear numbered clothing, as a result of which “the numbers were stamped on their bare flesh instead,” and they were forced to attend morning and evening roll-calls stark naked. 98
Solzhenitsyn tells the story, repeated in various forms by others, of a group of religious sectarians who were brought to Solovetsky in 1930. They rejected anything that came from the “Anti-Christ,” refusing to handle Soviet passports or money. As punishment, they were sent to a small island in the Solovetsky archipelago, where they were told they would receive food only if they agreed to sign for it. They refused. Within two months they had all starved to death. The next boat to the island, remembered one eyewitness, “found only corpses which had been picked by the birds.” 99
Even those sectarians who did work did not necessarily mix with other prisoners, and sometimes refused to speak to them at all. They would huddle together in one barrack, keeping absolutely silent, or else singing their prayers and their religious songs at the appointed times:
I sat behind the prison bars Remembering how Christ Humbly and mildly carried his heavy Cross With penitence, to Golgotha.100
The more extreme believers tended to inspire mixed feelings on the part of other prisoners. Arginskaya, a decidedly secular prisoner, jokingly remembered that “we all loathed them,” particularly those who, for religious reasons, refused to bathe.101 Gagen-Torn remembered other prisoners complaining about those who refused to work: “We work and they don’t! And they take bread too! ”102
Yet in one sense, those men or women who arrived at a new camp and immediately joined a clan or a religious sect were lucky. For those who belonged to them, the criminal gangs, the more militant national groups, the true communists, and the religious sects provided instant communities, networks of support, and companionship. Most political prisoners, on the other hand, and most “ordinary” criminals—the vast majority of the Gulag’s inhabitants—did not fit in so easily with one or another of these groups. They found it more difficult to know how to live life in
the camp, more difficult to cope with camp morality and the camp hierarchy. Without a strong network of contacts they would have to learn the rules of advancement by themselves.
1 Vasily Zhurid; Aleksandr Petlosy; Grigori Maifet; Arnold Karro; Valentina Orlova (top to bottom, left to right)
2a Prisoners arriving at Kem, the Solovetsky transit camp
2b Women harvesting peat, Solovetsky, 1928
3a Maxim Gorky (center), wearing a cloth cap, coat and tie, visiting Solovetsky, 1929, with his son, daughter-in-law, and camp commanders. Sekirka church— the punishment cell—is in the background.
3b The Solovetsky monastery, as it appears today
3c Naftaly Frenkel
4a Prisoners breaking rocks, with handmade tools
4b “Everything was done by hand . . . We dug earth by hand, and carried it out in wheelbarrows, we dug through the hills by hand as well . . .”
5a “The best shock-workers”: this placard hung in a place of honor
5b Stalin and Yezhov, visiting the White Sea Canal to celebrate its completion
6a “We will eradicate Spies and Diversionists, Agents of the Trotskyite-Bukharinite Fascists!”—NKVD poster, 1937
6b Arrest of an Enemy in the Workplace—Soviet painting, 1937
7a Four camp commanders, Kolyma, 1950. The daughter of a prisoner has written “Killers!” across the photograph.
7b Armed guards, with dogs
8a Beside a grandmother’s grave
8b In central Asia
8c Outside a zemlyanka, an earth dugout
9a Kolyma landscape
9b Entrance to a Vorkuta lagpunkt (the sign reads: “Work in the USSR is a matter of Honour and Glory . . .”)
10a Sawing logs
10b Hauling timber
11a Digging the Fergana Canal
11b Digging coal
12a “If you have your own bowl, you get the first portions.”
12b “They surrendered their bronze skin to tattooing and in this way gradually satisfied their artistic, their erotic, and even their moral needs.”
13a “We picked up a wooden tub, received a cup of hot water, a cup of cold water, and a small piece of black, evil-smelling soap . . .”
13b “Having been admitted with advanced signs of malnutrition, the majority would die in hospital . . .”
14a&b Polish children, photographed just after amnesty, 1941
15a Camp maternity ward: a prisoner nursing her newborn
15b Camp nursery: decorating a holiday tree
16a A crowded barracks . . .
16 b . . . a punishment isolator
Chapter 15
WOMEN AND CHILDREN
. . . the prisoner who was our barrack orderly greeted me with a cry: “Run and see what’s under your pillow!” My heart leaped: perhaps I’d got my bread ration after all! I ran to my bed and threw off the pillow. Under it lay three letters from home, three whole letters! It was six months since I’d received anything at all. My first reaction on seeing them was acute disappointment. And then—horror. What had become of me if a piece of bread was worth more to me now than letters from my mother, my father, my children. . . . I forgot all about the bread and wept.
—Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey1
THEY MET the same work norms and they ate the same watery soup. They lived in the same sort of barracks and traveled in the same cattle trains. Their clothes were almost identical, their shoes equally inadequate. They were treated no differently under interrogation. And yet—men’s and women’s camp experiences were not quite the same.
Certainly many women survivors are convinced that there were great advantages to being female within the camp system. Women were better at taking care of themselves, better at keeping their clothes patched and their hair clean. They seemed better able to subsist on low amounts of food, and did not succumb so easily to pellagra and the other diseases of starvation.2 They formed powerful friendships, and helped one another in ways that male prisoners did not. Margarete Buber-Neumann records that one of the women arrested with her in Butyrka prison had been picked up in a light summer dress which had turned to rags. The cell determined to make her a new dress:
They clubbed together and bought half-a-dozen towels of rough, unbleached Russian linen. But how was the dress to be cut without a pair of scissors? A little ingenuity solved the problem. The “cut” was marked with the burnt ends of matches, the material was folded along the marked lines, and a lighted match was run backwards and forwards for a moment or two along the fold. Then the material was unfolded again and the line was burnt through. The cotton for sewing was obtained by carefully withdrawing threads from other clothing . . .
The towel dress—it was made for a fat Lettish woman—went from hand to hand and was beautifully embroidered at the neck, the sleeves, and round the bottom of the skirt. When it was finally finished it was dampened down and carefully folded. The fortunate possessor slept on it at night. Believe it or not, but when it was produced in the morning, it was really delightful; it would not have disgraced the window of a fashionable dress shop.3
Nevertheless, among many male ex-prisoners the opposite point of view prevails: that women deteriorated, morally, more rapidly than men. Thanks to their sex they had special opportunities to obtain a better work classification, an easier job, and with it superior status in the camp. As a result, they became disoriented, losing their bearings in the harsh world of the camp. Gustav Herling writes, for example, of a “black-haired singer of the Moscow Opera,” who was arrested for “espionage.” Because of the severity of her sentence, she was assigned immediately to work in the forest upon her arrival in Kargopollag:
Unfortunately for her, she was desired by Vanya, the short urka in charge of her brigade, and she was put to work clearing felled fir trees of bark with a huge axe she could hardly lift. Lagging several yards behind the hefty foresters, she arrived in the zone in the evening with hardly enough strength left to crawl to the kitchen and collect her “first cauldron” [the lowest-level soup ration] . . . it was obvious that she had a high temperature, but the medical orderly was a friend of Vanya’s and would not free her from work . . .
Eventually, she gave in, first to Vanya, then finally to “some camp chief” who “dragged her out by the hair from the rubbish heap and placed her behind a table in the camp accountant’s office.” 4
There were worse fates too, as Herling also describes. He gives, for example, an account of a young Polish girl, whom an “informal jury of urkas” rated very highly. At first, she walked out to work with her head raised proudly, and repulsed any man who ventured near her, with darting, angry looks. In the evenings she returned from work rather more humbly, but still untouchable and modestly haughty. She went straight from the guard-house to the kitchen for her portion of soup, and did not leave the women’s barracks again during the night. Therefore it looked as if she would not quickly fall a victim to the night hunts of the camp zone.
But these early efforts were in vain. After weeks of being carefully watched by her supervisor, who forbade her to steal a single carrot or rotten potato from the food warehouse where she worked, the girl gave in. One evening, the man came into Herling’s barracks and “without a word threw a torn pair of knickers on my bunk.” It was the beginning of her transformation:
From that time the girl underwent a complete change. She never hurried to get her soup from the kitchen as before, but after her return from work wandered about the camp zone till late at night like a cat in heat. Whoever wanted to could have her, on a bunk, under the bunk, in the separate cubicles of the technical experts, or in the clothing store. Whenever she met me, she turned her head aside, and tightened her lips convulsively. Once, entering the potato store at the center, I found her on a pile of potatoes with the brigadier of the 56th, the hunchbacked half-breed Levkovich; she burst into a spasmodic fit of weeping, and as she returned to the camp zone in the evening she held back her tears with two tiny fists . . .5
&nbs
p; That is Herling’s version of a frequently told story—one which, it must be said, always sounds somewhat different when told from the woman’s point of view. Another version, for example, is recounted by Tamara Ruzhnevits, whose camp “romance” began with a letter, a “standard love letter, a pure camp letter,” from Sasha, a young man whose cushy cobbler’s job made him a part of the camp aristocracy. It was a short, blunt letter: “Let’s live together, and I’ll help you.” A few days after sending it, Sasha pulled Ruzhnevits aside, wanting to know the answer. “Will you live with me or not?” he asked. She said no. He beat her up with a metal stave. Then he carried her to the hospital (where his special cobbler’s status gave him influence) and instructed the staff to take good care of her. There she remained, recovering from her wounds, for several days. Upon release, having had plenty of time to think about it, she then returned to Sasha. Otherwise, he would have beaten her up again.
“Thus began my family life,” wrote Ruzhnevits. The benefits were immediate: “I got healthier, walked about in nice shoes, no longer wore the devil knows what kind of rags: I had a new jacket, new trousers . . . I even had a new hat.” Many decades later, Ruzhnevits described Sasha as “my first, genuine true love.” Unfortunately, he was soon sent away to another camp, and she never saw him again. Worse, the man responsible for Sasha’s transfer also desired her. As there was “no way out,” she began sleeping with him too. While she does not write of feeling any love for him, she does recall that there were benefits to this arrangement as well: she was given a pass to travel unguarded, and a horse of her own.6 Ruzhnevits’s story, like the one Herling tells, could be described as a tale of moral degradation. Alternatively, it could be called a story of survival.
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