I shout them
The trees, bare and deaf,
Are frightened.
Only the echo from the distant mountains
Rings in the ears.
And with a deep sigh
I breathe easily again.
—Varlam Shalamov Neskolko moikh zhiznei1
IN THE END, prisoners survived. They survived even the worst camps, even the toughest conditions, even the war years, the famine years, the years of mass execution. Not only that, some survived psychologically intact enough to return home, to recover, and to live relatively normal lives. Janusz Bardach became a plastic surgeon in Iowa City. Isaak Filshtinsky went back to teaching Arabic literature. Lev Razgon went back to writing children’s fiction. Anatoly Zhigulin went back to writing poetry. Evgeniya Ginzburg moved to Moscow, and for years was the heart and soul of a circle of survivors, who met regularly to eat, drink, and argue around her kitchen table.
Ada Purizhinskaya, imprisoned as a teenager, went on to marry and produce four children, some of whom became accomplished musicians. I met two of them over a generous, good-humored family dinner, during which Purizhinskaya served dish after dish of delicious cold food, and seemed disappointed when I could not eat more. Irena Arginskaya’s home is also full of laughter, much of it coming from Irena herself. Forty years later, she was able to make fun of the clothes she had worn as a prisoner: “I suppose you could call it a sort of jacket,” she said, trying to describe her shapeless camp overcoat. Her well-spoken, grown-up daughter laughed along with her.
Some even went on to lead extraordinary lives. Alexander Solzhenitsyn became one of the best-known, and best-selling, Russian writers in the world. General Gorbatov helped lead the Soviet assault on Berlin. After his terms in Kolyma and a wartime sharashka, Sergei Korolev went on to become the father of the Soviet Union’s space program. Gustav Herling left the camps, fought with the Polish army, and, although writing in Neapolitan exile, became one of the most revered men of letters in post-communist Poland. News of his death in July 2000 made the front pages of the Warsaw newspapers and an entire generation of Polish intellectuals paid tribute to his work—especially A World Apart, his Gulag memoir. In their ability to recover, these men and women were not alone. Isaac Vogelfanger, who himself became a professor of surgery at the University of Ottawa, wrote that “wounds heal, and you can become whole again, a little stronger and more human than before . . .”2
Not all Gulag survivors’ stories ended so well, of course, which one would not necessarily be able to tell from reading memoirs. Obviously, people who did not survive did not write. Those who were mentally or physically damaged by their camp experiences did not write either. Nor did those who had survived by doing things of which they were later ashamed write very often either—or, if they did, they did not necessarily tell the whole story. There are very, very few memoirs of informers—or of people who will confess to having been informers—and very few survivors who will admit to harming or killing fellow prisoners in order to stay alive.
In the Fifth Year of the Camp (Survivors): prisoners’ faces, transformed over time— a drawing by Aleksei Merekov, a prisoner, place and date unknown
For these reasons, some survivors question whether written memoirs have any validity at all. Yuri Zorin, an elderly and not very forthcoming survivor whom I interviewed in his home city, Arkhangelsk, waved away a question I asked him about philosophies of survival. There weren’t any, he said. Although it might seem, from their memoirs, as if prisoners “discussed everything, thought about everything,” it was not like that, he told me: “The whole task was to live through the next day, to stay alive, not to get sick, to work less, to eat more. And that was why philosophical discussions, as a rule, were not held . . . We were saved by youth, health, physical strength, because there we lived by Darwin’s laws, the survival of the fittest.” 3
The whole subject of who survived—and why they survived—must therefore be approached very carefully. In this matter, there are no archival documents to rely upon, and there is no real “evidence.” We have to take the word of those who were willing to describe their experiences, either on paper or for an interviewer. Any one of them might have had reason to conceal aspects of their biographies from their readers.
With that caveat, it is still possible to identify patterns within the several hundred memoirs which have been published or placed in archives. For there were strategies for survival, and they were well-known at the time, although they varied a great deal, depending on a prisoner’s particular circumstances. Surviving a labor colony in western Russia in the mid-1930s or even late 1940s, when most of the work was factory work and the food was regular if not plentiful, probably did not require any special mental adjustments. Surviving one of the far northern camps—Kolyma, Vorkuta, Norilsk—during the hungry war years, on the other hand, often required huge reserves of talent and willpower, or else an enormous capacity for evil, qualities that the prisoners, had they remained in freedom, might never have discovered within themselves.
Without a doubt, many such prisoners survived because they found ways to raise themselves above the other prisoners, to distinguish themselves from the swarming mass of starving zeks. Dozens of camp sayings and proverbs reflect the debilitating moral effects of this desperate competition. “You can die today—I’ll die tomorrow,” was one of them. “Man is wolf to man”—the phrase Janusz Bardach used as the title of his memoir—was another.
Many ex-zeks speak of the struggle for survival as cruel, and many, like Zorin, speak of it as Darwinian. “The camp was a great test of our moral strength, of our everyday morality, and 99 percent of us failed it,” wrote Shalamov.4 “After only three weeks most of the prisoners were broken men, interested in nothing but eating. They behaved like animals, disliked and suspected everyone else, seeing in yesterday’s friend a competitor in the struggle for survival,” wrote Edward Buca.5
Elinor Olitskaya, with her background in the pre-revolutionary social democratic movement, was particularly horrified by what she perceived as the amorality of the camps: while inmates in prisons had often cooperated, the strong helping the weak, in the Soviet camps every prisoner “lived for herself,” doing down the others in order to attain a slightly higher status on the camp hierarchy.6 Galina Usakova described how she felt her personality had changed in the camps: “I was a well-behaved girl, well brought up, from a family of intelligentsia. But with these characteristics you won’t survive, you have to harden yourself, you learn to lie, to be hypocritical in various ways.”7
Gustav Herling elaborated further, describing how it is that the new prisoner slowly learns to live “without pity”:
At first he shares his bread with hunger-demented prisoners, leads the night-blind on the way home from work, shouts for help when his neighbor in the forest has chopped off two fingers, and surreptitiously carries cans of soup and herring-heads to the mortuary. After several weeks he realizes that his motives in all this are neither pure nor really disinterested, that he is following the egotistic injunctions of his brain and saving first of all himself. The camp, where prisoners live at the lowest level of humanity and follow their own brutal code of behavior toward others, helps him to reach this conclusion. How could he have supposed, back in prison, that a man can be so degraded as to arouse not compassion but only loathing and repugnance in his fellow prisoners? How can he help the night-blind, when every day he sees them being jolted with rifle-butts because they are delaying the brigade’s return to work, and then impatiently pushed off the paths by prisoners hurrying to the kitchen for their soup; how visit the mortuary and brave the constant darkness and stench of excrement; how share his bread with a hungry madman who on the very next day will greet him in the barrack with a demanding, persistent stare . . . He remembers and believes the words of his examining judge, who told him that the iron broom of Soviet justice sweeps only rubbish into its camps . . .8
Such sentiments are not unique to the survivors of Soviet camps.
“If one offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery,” wrote Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, “exacting in exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their comrades, there will certainly be someone who will accept.”9 Also writing of German camps, Bruno Bettelheim observed that older prisoners often came to “accept SS values and behavior as their own,” in particular adopting their hatred of the weaker and lower-ranking inhabitants of the camps, especially the Jews.10
In the Soviet camps, as in the Nazi camps, the criminal prisoners also readily adopted the dehumanizing rhetoric of the NKVD, insulting political prisoners and “enemies,” and expressing disgust for the dokhodyagi among them. From his unusual position as the only political prisoner in a mostly criminal lagpunkt, Karol Colonna-Czosnowski was able to hear the criminal world’s view of the politicals: “The trouble is that there are just too many of them. They are weak, they are dirty, and they only want to eat. They produce nothing. Why the authorities bother, God only knows . . .” One criminal, Colonna-Czosnowski writes, said he had met a Westerner in a transit camp, a scientist and university professor. “I caught him eating, yes, actually eating, the half-rotten tail fin of a Treska fish. I gave him hell, you can imagine. I asked him if he knew what he was doing. He just said he was hungry . . . So I gave him such a wallop in the neck that he started vomiting there and then. Makes me sick to think about it. I even reported him to the guards, but the filthy old man was dead the following morning. Serves him right!”11
Other prisoners watched, learned and imitated, as Varlam Shalamov wrote:
The young peasant who has become a prisoner sees that in this hell only the criminals live comparatively well, that they are important, that the all-powerful camp administration fear them. The criminals always have clothes and food, and they support each other . . . it begins to seem to him that the criminals possess the truth of camp life, that only by imitating them will he tread the path that will save his life . . . . the intellectual convict is crushed by the camp. Everything he valued is ground into the dust while civilization and culture drop from him within weeks. The method of persuasion is the fist or the stick. The way to induce someone to do something is by means of a rifle butt, a punch in the teeth . . .12
And yet—it would be incorrect to say there was no morality in the camps at all, that no kindness or generosity was possible. Curiously, even the most pessimistic of memoirists often contradict themselves on this point. Shalamov himself, whose depiction of the barbarity of camp life surpasses all others, at one point wrote that “I refused to seek the job of foreman, which provided a chance to remain alive, for the worst thing in a camp was the forcing of one’s own or anyone else’s will on another person who was a convict just like oneself.” In other words, Shalamov was an exception to his own rule.13
Most memoirs also make clear that the Gulag was not a black-and-white world, where the line between masters and slaves was clearly delineated, and the only way to survive was through cruelty. Not only did inmates, free workers, and guards belong to a complex social network, but that network was also constantly in flux, as we have seen. Prisoners could move up and down the hierarchy, and many did. They could alter their fate not only through collaboration or defiance of the authorities but also through clever wheeling and dealing, through contacts and relationships. Simple good luck and bad luck also determined the course of a typical camp career, which, if it was a long one, might well have “happy” periods, when the prisoner was established in a good job, ate well, and worked little, as well as periods when the same prisoner dropped into the netherworld of the hospital, the mortuary, and the society of the dokhodyagi who crowded around the garbage heap, looking for scraps of food.
In fact, the methods of survival were built in to the system. Most of the time, the camp administration was not trying to kill prisoners; they were just trying to fulfill impossibly high norms set by the central planners in Moscow. As a result, camp guards were more than willing to reward prisoners whom they found useful toward this end. The prisoners, naturally, took advantage of this willingness. The two groups had different goals— the guards wanted to dig more gold or cut more wood, and the prisoners wanted to survive—but sometimes they found shared means to meet these different ends. A handful of survival strategies in particular suited both prisoners and guards, and a list of them follows.
TUFTA: PRETENDING TO WORK
To write a straightforward description of tufta—a word which translates, very imprecisely, as “swindling the boss”—is not an easy task. For one, such practices were so deeply ingrained in the Soviet system that it is hardly fair to describe them as if they were somehow unique to the Gulag.14 Nor were they unique to the USSR. The communist-era proverb, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work,” could once be heard in most of the languages of the old Warsaw Pact.
More to the point, tufta permeated virtually every aspect of work—work assignments, work organization, work accounting—and affected virtually every member of the camp community, from the Gulag bosses in Moscow, to the lowliest camp guards, to the most downtrodden prisoners. This was true from the very beginning of the Gulag until the very end. One much-repeated prisoners’ rhyme dated from the days of the White Sea Canal:
Bez tufty i ammonala
Ne postroili by kanala.
Without tufta and dynamite
They would never have built the canal. 15
In the years since this topic became the subject of debate, controversy has also surrounded the question of how hard prisoners did or did not work, and how much effort they did or did not put into evading work. Ever since the 1962 publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich opened up a more or less public debate about the subject of the camps, the broader community of survivors, polemicists, and camp historians has had notable difficulty in coming to a unanimous agreement about the morality of camp work. For much of Solzhenitsyn’s groundbreaking novella was indeed dedicated to its hero’s attempts to avoid work. During the course of Ivan Denisovich’s day, he approaches a doctor, hoping for sick leave; fantasizes about becoming ill for a few weeks; gazes up at the camp thermometer, hoping it will prove too cold to go to the workplace; speaks admirably of brigade leaders who can “make it look as if the work’s done, whether it is or not”; feels relieved when his brigade leader gets a “good rate for the job,” despite the fact that “half the day was gone and they’d done nothing”; steals wood chips from the workplace to light the barracks fire; and steals extra gruel at dinnertime. “Work,” thinks Ivan at one point, “is what horses die of.” He tries to avoid it.
In the years that followed the book’s publication, this portrait of a typical zek was disputed by other survivors, both for ideological and personal reasons. On the one hand, those who believed in the Soviet system—and therefore also believed that the “work” of the camps was valuable and necessary—found Denisovich’s “laziness” offensive. Many of the “alternative,” more “pro-Soviet” accounts of camp life, published in the official Soviet press in the wake of Ivan Denisovich, even focused explicitly on the dedication to work shown by those who, despite the unfairness of their arrests, remained true believers. The Soviet writer (and lifelong informer) Boris Dyakov described an engineer employed on a Gulag construction project near Perm. The engineer had been so engrossed in the job, he told Dyakov’s narrator, that he forgot he was a prisoner: “For a while I enjoyed my work so much I forgot what I had become.” So conscientious was the engineer in Dyakov’s story that he even secretly sent a letter to a local newspaper, complaining about the poor organization of the camp’s transport and supply systems. Although admonished by the camp commander for this indiscretion—it was unheard of for a prisoner’s name to appear in the newspaper—the engineer, as Dyakov tells it, remained pleased that “after the article, things improved a little.”16
The views of those who ran the camps were even more extreme. Anonymously, a former camp administrator told me quite ang
rily that all of the stories of camp inmates living badly were simply untrue. Those who worked well lived extremely well, she said, much better than the general public: they could even purchase condensed milk—my italics—which ordinary people could not. “It was only those who refused to work, they lived badly,” she told me.17 Such views were generally not voiced in public, but there were some exceptions. Anna Zakharova, the wife of an NKVD officer, whose letter to Izvestiya circulated in the Russian underground press in the 1960s, was sharply critical of Solzhenitsyn. Zakharova wrote that she was “angered to the depths of my soul” by Ivan Denisovich:
We can see why the hero of this story, having such an attitude to the Soviet people, hopes for nothing but the sick bay in order somehow to get out of redeeming his guilt, the wrong he did to his motherland, through toil . . . And why exactly should a person try to avoid physical labor and show scorn for it? After all, for us labor is the foundation of the Soviet system, and it is only in labor that man becomes cognizant of his true powers. 18
Other, less ideological objections have also come from ordinary zeks. V. K. Yasnyi, a prisoner for five years in the early 1940s, wrote in his memoirs that “We tried to work honestly, and not for fear of losing rations, or ending up in the isolator . . . hard work, and that was what it was in our brigade, helped you forget, helped chase away anxious thoughts.”19 Nadezhda Ulyanovskaya, who was imprisoned along with her mother, wrote that her mother worked hard “in order to prove that Jews and intelligentsia work no worse than others.” (“I worked because I was forced to do so,” she writes of herself, however. “I fear that on this point, I did not hold up the honor of the Jewish people.”) 20
Prisoners who had worked enthusiastically on behalf of the Soviet regime all of their lives did not quickly change either. Alexander Borin, a political prisoner and aviation engineer, was assigned to a Gulag metalworking plant. In his memoirs, he proudly describes the technical innovations he made there, mostly worked out in his spare time.21 Alla Shister, another political arrested in the late 1930s, told me in an interview that “I always worked as if I were free. This is my personality trait, I cannot work badly. If a hole has to be dug, I’ll keep on digging until it is finished.” After two years on general work, Shister became a brigade leader, because, she said, “They saw that I work not like a prisoner works, but with all of my strength.” In that capacity, she then made every attempt to inspire those beneath her, although admittedly not by firing them up with love of the Soviet state. This is how she described her first encounter with the men who were to work for her:
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