Filshtinskii begins his story on one of his first days in Kargopollag, the logging and construction camp which lay to the north of Arkhangelsk. Newly arrived himself, he met another newcomer, a young woman. She was part of a female contingent that had been temporarily attached to his brigade. Noticing her “timid, frightened appearance” and her ragged camp clothes, he moved closer to her in the line of prisoners. Yes, she said, answering his query, “I arrived yesterday on a transport from prison.” They began to talk. She had what Filshtinskii described as “for that era, a rather banal personal history.” She was an artist, twenty-six years old. She was married, with a three-year-old son. She had been arrested because she had “said something or other to an artist friend, and the friend had informed.” Because her father had also been arrested in 1937, she had been quickly convicted of promoting anti-Soviet propaganda.
As they talked, the woman, still looking around with a frightened gaze, held on to Filshtinskii’s arm. Such contacts were forbidden, but fortunately the guards did not notice. As they arrived at the work site the men and women were divided, but on the way home the young artist found Filshtinskii again. For the next week and a half, they walked to and from the forest together, she telling him of her homesickness, of the husband who had abandoned her, of the child she might not see again. Then the women’s brigade was separated from the men’s brigade for good, and Filshtinskii lost track of his friend.
Three years passed. It was a hot day—a rarity in the far north—when Filshtinskii caught sight of the woman again. This time she was dressed in a “new jacket, perfectly fitting her size and figure.” Instead of the average prisoner’s tattered cap she wore a beret. Instead of prisoners’ worn boots she wore shoes. Her face had grown fatter, her looks more vulgar. When she opened her mouth, she spoke in the foulest slang, her language “testifying to long and durable links with the criminal world of the camp.” Catching sight of Filshtinskii, a look of horror came over her face. She turned and walked away, “almost running.”
By the time Filshtinskii encountered her for the third and final time, the woman was dressed in what seemed to him to be “the latest in city fashions.” She was sitting behind a boss’s desk, and was no longer a prisoner at all. She was also now married to Major L., a camp administrator famous for his cruelty. She addressed Filshtinskii rudely, and was no longer embarrassed to speak to him. The metamorphosis was complete: she had changed from prisoner to collaborator, and then from collaborator to camp boss. She had adopted first the language of the criminal world, then its dress and its habits. Through that route she had, finally, attained the privileged status of the camp authorities. Filshtinskii felt he had “nothing more to say to her”— although, as he left the room, he turned to look at her again. Their eyes met for an instant, and he thought he perceived in hers a flash of “limitless melancholy” and a hint of tears.44
The fate of Filshtinskii’s acquaintance is one that readers familiar with other camp systems will recognize. In describing the Nazi camps, the German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky wrote that “absolute power is a structure, not a possession.” By this, he meant that power in the German camps was not a simple matter of one person controlling the lives of others. Instead, “by making a small number of victims into its accomplices, the regime blurred the boundary between personnel and inmates.” 45 Although the brutality that reigned in the Gulag was different, in its organization and its effects, Nazi and Soviet camps were similar in this respect: the Soviet regime also made such use of prisoners, tempting some into collaboration with the repressive system, raising them above the others, and granting them privileges which allowed them, in turn, to help the authorities exert their power. It is no accident that Filshtinskii concentrated, in his story, on the ever-improving wardrobe of his female acquaintance: in the camps, where everything was in chronic shortage, tiny improvements in clothing or food or living conditions were enough to persuade prisoners to cooperate, to strive for advancement. Those prisoners who succeeded were the pridurki, or “trusties.” And once they attained that status, their lives in the camps improved in a myriad of small ways.
Solzhenitsyn, who returns to the subject of trusties again and again, describes their obsession with small privileges and favors in The Gulag Archipelago:
Because of the human race’s customary narrow-minded attachment to caste, it very soon became inconvenient for trusties to sleep in the same barracks as ordinary sloggers, on the same multiple bunks, or even, for that matter, on any multiple bunk at all, or anywhere else except a bed, or to eat at the same table, to undress in the same bath, or to put on the same underwear in which the sloggers had sweated and which they had torn . . .
Although recognizing that “all classifications in this world lack sharp boundaries,” Solzhenitsyn did his best to describe the trusties’ hierarchy. On the lowest rung, he explained, were the “work trusties”: the prisoner engineers, designers, mechanics, and geologists. Ranked just above them were the prisoner foremen, planners, norm-setters, construction superintendents, technicians. Both of these groups had to line up and be counted in the morning, and marched to work under convoy. On the other hand, they did not do physical work and were therefore not “utterly exhausted” at the end of the day; this made them more privileged than prisoners on general work.
“Compound trusties” were more privileged still. These were prisoners who never left the zona during the day. According to Solzhenitsyn,
A worker in the camp workshops lived much more easily and better than the slogger out on general work: he did not have to go out for line-up, and this meant he could rise and breakfast much later; he did not have to march under convoy to the work site and back; there were fewer severities, less cold, less strength spent; also, his workday ended earlier; either his work was in a warm place or else a place to warm up was always handy . . . “Tailor” in camp sounds and means something like “Assistant Professor” out in freedom.46
The lowest in the compound trusty hierarchy actually did physical work: bathhouse attendants, laundresses, dishwashers, stokers, and orderlies, as well as those who worked in the camp workshops, repairing clothes, shoes, and machinery. Ranked above these indoor workers were the “genuine” compound trusties, who did no physical work at all: the cooks, bread-cutters, clerks, doctors, nurses, medical assistants, barbers, senior orderlies, work-assigners, accountants. In some camps, there were even prisoners employed as official food-tasters.47 This latter group, writes Solzhenitsyn, were “Not only well-fed, clad in clean clothes, and exempt from lifting heavy weights and from crooks in their backs, but they had great power over what was most needed by a human being, and consequently power over people.”48 These were the trusties who had the power to decide what sort of work ordinary prisoners were to do, how much food they were going to receive, and whether they would receive medical treatment or not—whether, in short, they would live or die.
Unlike the privileged prisoners in the Nazi camps, the trusties of the Soviet camps did not have to belong to a particular racial category. In theory, anybody could rise to the status of trusty—just as anybody could become a prison guard—and there was a great deal of fluctuation between the two groups. Although in principle ordinary prisoners could become trusties, and in principle trusties could be demoted to the ranks of ordinary prisoners, there were complicated rules governing this process.
These rules differed greatly from camp to camp and from era to era, although there do seem to be a few conventions that held more or less true over time. Most important, it was easier to become a trusty if a prisoner was classified as a “socially close” criminal prisoner, and not a “socially dangerous” political. Because the twisted moral hierarchy of the Soviet camp system decreed the “socially close”—not just the professional criminals, but the ordinary thieves, swindlers, murderers, and rapists—more capable of being reformed into good Soviet citizens, they were automatically more likely to receive trusty status. And in a certain sense, the thieves, who had no fear of
using brutality, made ideal trusties. “Everywhere and at all times,” wrote one political bitterly, “these convicts enjoyed almost unlimited confidence of the prison and camp administration, and were appointed to such soft jobs as working in offices, prison stores, canteens, bath-houses, barber shops and so on.”49 As I’ve said, this was particularly the case during the late 1930s and throughout the war, the years when criminal gangs ruled supreme in the Soviet camps. Even afterward—Filshtinskii was writing of the late 1940s— the “culture” of the trusties was hardly distinguishable from the culture of the professional criminals.
But the criminal trusties also presented a problem for the camp authorities. They were not “enemies”—but they were not educated either. In many cases they were not even literate, and did not want to become literate: even when camps set up literacy classes, criminals often did not bother to go to them.50 That left camp bosses with no choice, wrote Lev Razgon, except to employ the politicals: “The plan exerted an implacable pressure of its own which tolerated no excuses. Under its influence even the most zealous camp bosses who expressed the greatest hatred for the counter-revolutionary prisoners were obliged to put political prisoners to work.”51
In fact, after 1939, when Beria replaced Yezhov—and simultaneously set about trying to make the Gulag profitable—the rules were never clear one way or another. Beria’s instructions of August 1939, while explicitly forbidding camp commanders to make use of political prisoners in any administrative capacity whatsoever, did, in fact, make exceptions. Qualified doctors were to be used in their professional capacity and, under special circumstances, so were prisoners sentenced according to some of the “lesser” crimes of Article 58—Sections 7, 10, 12, and 14, which included “Anti-Soviet Agitation” (telling anti-regime jokes, for example) and “anti-Soviet propaganda.” Those sentenced for “terrorism” or “betrayal of the motherland,” on the other hand, were theoretically not to be employed as anything except hard laborers.52 When the war broke out, even this command was reversed. Stalin and Molotov sent out a special circular allowing Dalstroi, “in view of the exceptional situation,” to “conclude individual agreements for a particular time period with engineers, technicians, and administrative workers who have been sent to work in Kolyma.”53
Nevertheless camp administrators who had too many politicals in high-ranking jobs still risked censure, and a degree of ambivalence always remained. According to both Solzhenitsyn and Razgon, it sometimes therefore happened that political prisoners were given “good” indoor jobs, accounting and bookkeeping—but only temporarily. Once every year, when the inspection teams from Moscow were due to arrive, they were fired again. Razgon developed a theory about this procedure:
A good camp boss would wait for the commission to arrive, let the commission do its work, remove anyone who had to be removed. It was not a time-consuming process and anyone not removed would remain for a long time—for a year, until the next December, or for a half-year at least. A less capable camp boss, a more foolish one, would remove such persons in advance so as to report that everything was in order. The worst camp boss, those who had the least experience, would conscientiously carry out the orders of their superiors and not permit persons condemned under Article 58 to work with any instrument other than the pick and the wheelbarrow, the saw and the axe. Such camp bosses were the least successful. Such camp bosses were quickly fired.54
In practice, the rules were often simply nonsensical. As a political prisoner in Kargopollag, Filshtinskii was strictly forbidden from taking a prisoners’ course in forestry technology. However, he was allowed to read the course books, and once he had passed the exam, studying on his own, he was allowed to work as a forestry specialist as well.55 Meanwhile, V. K. Yasnyi, also a political prisoner in the late 1940s, worked as an engineer in Vorkuta without causing any controversy at all.56 In the postwar years, as the stronger national groups began to make an impact in the camp, the reign of the criminals was frequently supplanted by that of the better-organized prisoners, often Ukrainians and Balts. Those in better jobs—the foreman and supervisors—could and did look after their own, and distributed other plum posts to political prisoners who happened to be their countrymen.
At no point did prisoners have full power to distribute trusty jobs, however. The camp administration had the ultimate say over who would become a trusty, and most camp commanders were inclined to give the cushier trusty jobs to those willing to collaborate more openly—in other words, to inform. Alas, it is difficult to say how many informers the system employed. Although the Russian state archives have opened up the rest of the Gulag administration archive, they have left closed the documents on the “Third Division,” the camp division responsible for informers. The Russian historian Viktor Berdinskikh, in his book on Vyatlag, cites some figures without naming a source: “In the 1920s, the leadership of the OGPU set itself the task of having no less than 25 percent informers among camp prisoners. In the 1930s and 1940s, this planned number was lowered to 10 percent.” But Berdinskikh also agrees that a real assessment of the numbers is “complicated” without better access to archives. 57
Nor are there many memoirists who will admit openly to having been informers, although some admit that they were recruited. Clearly, prisoners who had served as informers in prison (or even before their arrests) would have arrived in the camp with a note of their willingness to cooperate already in their files. Others, it seemed, were approached just after their arrival in camp, when they were still extremely disoriented and afraid. On his second day in camp, Leonid Trus was taken to the operative commander— known in camp slang as the kum, the recruiter of informers—and asked to cooperate. Not really understanding what he was being asked, he refused. This, he thinks, is why he was initially given difficult physical work, a low-status job by camp standards. Berdinskikh also quotes from his own interviews and correspondence with former prisoners:
From the first day in the zone, the new arrivals were called to the kum. I was called to the kum as well. Flattering, slippery, smooth, he played on the fact that the car accident, for which I was sentenced (ten years in camp, plus three years without full legal rights) was not shameful (it was not robbery, murder or something similar) and he proposed that I inform—that I become a sneak. I politely refused and didn’t sign the proposal of the kum.
Although the kum swore at him, this prisoner was not sent to the punishment cells. Upon returning to his barracks, he found no one would come near him: knowing that he had been asked to inform, seeing that he had not been beaten up or punished, the other prisoners assumed he had agreed. 58
Perhaps the most famous exception to the near-universal refusal to admit to informing is, once again, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who describes his flirtation with the camp authorities at length. He dates his initial moment of weakness to his early days in camp, when he was still struggling to accustom himself to his abrupt loss of status. When invited to speak to the operative commander, he was ushered into a “small, cozily furnished room” where a radio was playing classical music. After politely asking him whether he was comfortable and adjusting to camp life, the commander asked him, “Are you still a Soviet person?” After hemming and hawing, Solzhenitsyn agreed that he was.
But although confessing to being “Soviet” was tantamount to confessing a desire to collaborate, Solzhenitsyn initially declined to inform. That was when the commander switched tactics. He turned off the music, and began to speak to Solzhenitsyn about the camp criminals, asking how he would feel if his wife in Moscow were attacked by some who managed to escape. Finally, Solzhenitsyn agreed that if he should hear any of them planning to escape, he would report it. He signed a pledge, promising to report news of any escapes to the authorities, and chose a conspiratorial pseudonym: Vetrov. “Those six letters,” he writes, “are branded in shameful grooves on my memory.”59
By his own account, Solzhenitsyn never did actually report on anything. When recruited again in 1956, he says he refused to sign anything at a
ll. Nevertheless, his initial promise was enough to keep him, while in camp, in one of the trusty jobs, living in the trusties’ special quarters, slightly better dressed and better fed than other prisoners. This experience “filled me with shame,” he wrote—and doubtless provoked his disdain for all trusties.
At the time of its publication, Solzhenitsyn’s description of the camp trusties was controversial—and it still is. Like his description of inmate work habits, it also sparked a running debate in the world of camp survivors and historians, one which continues to this day. Virtually all of the classic, most widely read memoirists were trusties at one time or another: Evgeniya Ginzburg, Lev Razgon, Varlam Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn. It may well be, as some claim, that the majority of all prisoners who survived long sentences were trusties at some point in their camp career. I once met a survivor who recounted to me a reunion of old camp friends he had once attended. The group had taken to reminiscing, and were laughing at old camp stories, when one of them looked around the room and realized what it was that held them together, what made it possible for them to laugh at the past instead of crying: “All of us had been pridurki.”
There is no doubt that many people survived because they were able to get indoor trusty jobs, thereby escaping the horrors of general work. But did this always amount to active collaboration with the camp regime? Solzhenitsyn felt that it did. Even those trusties who were not informers could, he alleged, still be described as collaborators. “What trusty position,” he asked, “did not in fact involve playing up to the bosses and participating in the general system of compulsion?”
Sometimes the collaboration was indirect, Solzhenitsyn explained, but damaging nonetheless. The “work trusties”—the norm-setters, bookkeepers, engineers—did not actually torture people, but they all participated in a system that forced prisoners to work to their deaths. The same was true of “compound trusties”: typists ran off orders for the camp command. Every bread-cutter who was able to steal an extra loaf for himself might be said to be depriving a zek working in the forest of his full portion, wrote Solzhenitsyn: “Who short-weighed Ivan Denisovich’s bread? Who stole his sugar by dampening it with water? Who kept fats, meat or good cereals from the common pot?”60
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