Gulag

by Anne Applebaum

  Others felt the same way. One ex-zek wrote that she had deliberately remained assigned to general work for nine years in order to avoid being caught up in the corrupt relationships which were needed to stay in a trusty job.61 Dmitri Panin (who, as I’ve written, knew Solzhenitsyn in the camps and features in his novel The First Circle) also confessed that he was greatly embarrassed by the two weeks he had held a soft job in the camp kitchen: “Even worse was the realization that I was stealing food from other prisoners. I tried to gain comfort from the thought that when a man has been reduced to the condition I was in then, he doesn’t fret over niceties; but it did not lighten my sense of wrongdoing, and when they kicked me out of the kitchen, I was actually glad.”62

  Bitterly opposed to Solzhenitsyn—as many others were and are—was Lev Razgon, a writer who became, in the 1990s, almost as great an authority on the Gulag inside Russia. While in the camps, Razgon had been a norm-setter, one of the top trusty jobs. Razgon argued that for him, and for many others, choosing to become a trusty was simply a matter of choosing to live. Particularly during the war years, “it was impossible to survive if you were felling timber.” Only peasants survived: “those who knew how to sharpen and set instruments, and those given familiar agricultural work to do who could make up their diet with filched potato, radish, or any other kind of vegetable.”63

  Razgon did not believe that it was immoral to choose life, nor that those who did so were “no better than the people who arrested them.” He also disputed Solzhenitsyn’s venal portrait of the trusties. Once they were in more comfortable jobs, many trusties routinely helped other prisoners:

  It was not that they were indifferent to the Ivan Denisoviches who went out to fell timber or that they felt estranged from them. Simply, they could not help those who did not know how to do anything other than physical work. And even among the latter they sought and found people with the most unexpected skills: those who knew how to make shaft-bows and barrels were sent to the outpost where skis were produced; those who could weave baskets began to fashion basketwork armchairs, chairs and sofas for the bosses. 64

  Just as there were good guards and bad guards, Razgon argued, so too were there good trusties and bad trusties, people who helped other people, people who harmed them. And in the end, they were no more secure than the people who came below them on the hierarchy. If they were not being worked to death, they knew that they soon could be. At any moment, a distant camp boss could order a transfer to take them away to another camp, to another job, to another, deadlier fate.

  SANCHAST: HOSPITALS AND DOCTORS

  Of the many absurdities found in camp life, perhaps the strangest was also one of the most mundane: the camp doctor. Every lagpunkt had one. If there were not enough trained doctors, then at the very least the lagpunkt would have a nurse or a feldsher, a medical assistant who may or may not have had medical training. Like guardian angels, medical personnel had the power to pluck inmates out of the cold, to deposit them in clean camp hospitals, where they might be fed and nursed back to life. Everyone else—the guards, the camp commander, the brigadiers—constantly told the zeks to work harder. The doctor alone was not obligated to do so. “Only the doctor,” wrote Varlam Shalamov, “has the authority to save the convict from going out into the white winter fog to the icy stone face of the mine for many hours a day.”65

  Some inmates were quite literally saved thanks to a few words from a medical man. Burning with fever, reduced to a skeleton, tortured by hunger, one doctor diagnosed Lev Kopelev with pellagra, a bowel infection, and a bad cold. “I’m sending you to the hospital,” she declared. It was not an easy journey from the lagpunkt to the camp central hospital, the sanchast. Kopelev gave up all of his property—on the grounds that all camp belongings must stay in the camp—marched through “deep, icy puddles” and crowded into a cattle car with other sick and dying prisoners. The journey was hellish. But when he awoke in his new surroundings, he found his life transformed:

  In a blissful half-sleep, I sat in a bright, clean hospital room, on a bunk covered with an unbelievably clean sheet . . . The doctor was a small, round-faced man, whose grey moustache and thick eyeglasses added to his air of kindness and concern. “In Moscow,” he asked, “did you know a literary critic named Motylova?”

  “Tamara Lazarevna Motylova? Of course!”

  “She’s my niece.”

  Uncle Borya, as I came to know him, looked at the thermometer. “Oho! Have him washed,” he told his assistant. “Have his clothes boiled. Get him into bed.”

  Upon awaking again, Kopelev discovered he had been brought six pieces of bread: “Three pieces of black bread and—miraculous sight! Three pieces of white bread! I ate them greedily, my eyes filled with tears.” Better still, he was given anti-pellagra rations: turnips and carrots, as well as yeast and mustard to spread on bread. He was for the first time allowed to receive parcels and money from home, and was thus able to buy boiled potatoes, milk, and makhorka, the cheapest form of tobacco. Having been, it seemed, condemned to a living death, he realized he was now destined to be saved.66

  This was a common experience. “Paradise” is what Evgeniya Ginzburg called the hospital where she worked in Kolyma.67 “We felt like kings,” wrote Thomas Sgovio of the “recovery barracks” in the Srednikan lagpunkt, where he received a “fresh, sweet roll in the morning.”68 Others write with remembered awe of the clean sheets, of the kindness of nurses, of the lengths to which doctors went to save their patients. One prisoner tells the story of a doctor who, risking his own position, illegally left the camp to procure necessary medications. 69 Tatyana Okunevskaya wrote that her doctor “brought the dead back to life.”70 Vadim Aleksandrovich, who was himself a camp doctor, remembered that “The doctor and his assistant in the camps are, if not gods, then demi-gods. Upon them hangs the possibility of a few days’ freedom from killing work, even the possibility of being sent to a sanatorium.”71

  Janos Rozsas, an eighteen-year-old Hungarian who found himself in the same camp as Alexander Solzhenitsyn after the war, wrote a book entitled Sister Dusya, named in honor of the camp nurse he believed had saved his life. Not only did she sit and talk to him, convincing him that it was impossible to die under her care, Sister Dusya even traded her own bread ration in order to procure milk for Rozsas, who could digest very little food. He remained grateful for the rest of his life: “I conjured up in my head two beloved faces, the faraway face of my natural mother, and the face of Sister Dusya. They were amazingly similar . . . I told myself that if, in time, I were ever to forget my mother’s face, I would only need to think of the face of Sister Dusya, and through her I would always see my mother.” 72

  Rozsas’s gratitude to Sister Dusya eventually translated itself into a love of the Russian language and Russian culture. When I met Rozsas in Budapest half a century after his release, he still spoke elegant, fluent Russian, still maintained contact with Russian friends, and proudly told me where to find the references to his story in The Gulag Archipelago and in the memoirs of Solzhenitsyn’s wife.73

  Yet there was, as many also noticed, another paradox at work here. When a prisoner with mild scurvy was in the work brigade, no one was interested in his loose teeth or the boils on his legs. His complaints would bring derisive scorn from the guards, or worse. If he became a dokhodyaga dying on a camp bunk, he would be a figure of fun. But when his temperature finally reached the requisite level or his illness reached the critical moment—when he “qualified” as sick, in other words—the same dying man would immediately be given “scurvy rations” or “pellagra rations,” and would receive all the medical care that the Gulag could muster.

  This paradox was built right into the system. From the beginning of the camps’ existence, sick prisoners had been treated differently. Invalid brigades were set up, for prisoners who could no longer do hard physical work, as early as January 1931.74 Later, there would be invalid barracks, and even whole invalid lagpunkts, devoted to nursing weak prisoners back to life. In 1
933, Dmitlag organized “recovery lagpunkts ” designed to hold 3,600 prisoners.75 Official Gulag documents carefully describe the extra rations for hospitalized prisoners: a few meat products, real tea (as opposed to the surrogate offered to ordinary prisoners), onions to ward off scurvy, and, inexplicably, pepper and bay leaves. Even if, in practice, the extra food only amounted to “a bit of potatoes or dried green peas (only half-cooked to retain the vitamins) or sauerkraut” it was, compared to ordinary rations, real luxury.76

  So bizarre did Gustav Herling find this contrast between the murderous conditions of camp life, and the efforts which camp doctors invested in reviving the prisoners whose health had been duly destroyed, he concluded that a “hospital cult” must exist in the Soviet Union:

  There was something incomprehensible in the fact that the moment a prisoner left the hospital he became a prisoner again, but as long as he had been lying motionless in a clean bed all the rights of a human being, though always with the exception of freedom, had been accorded to him. For a man unaccustomed to the violent contrasts of Soviet life, camp hospitals seemed like churches which offer sanctuary from an all-powerful Inquisition. 77

  George Bien, a Hungarian prisoner who was sent to a well-stocked hospital in Magadan, also found it hard to understand: “I asked myself why they were trying to save me when it had seemed that they only wanted my tortured death—but logic had left a long time ago.”78

  Certainly the Gulag bosses in Moscow took the problems posed by the large numbers of invalid “work-incapable” prisoners very seriously. Although their existence was hardly new, the problem became acute after Stalin and Beria’s 1939 decision to eliminate the policy of “conditional early release” for invalids: suddenly, the ill could no longer be easily shucked off the work rolls. This, if nothing else, would have forced camp commanders to turn their attention to camp hospitals. One inspector did a precise calculation of the time and money lost to illness: “From October of 1940, to the first half of March 1941, there were 3,472 cases of frostbite, thanks to which 42,334 working days were lost. Two thousand four hundred prisoners became too weak to work.” Another inspector reported that in that same year, of 2,398 prisoners in the labor camps in the Crimea, 860 had only a limited ability to work, and 273 could not work at all. Some were in hospital beds, some, for lack of beds, were being kept in prison cells, producing a drag on the whole system.79

  Yet, like everything else in the Gulag, there was nothing straightforward about the need to heal the sick. In some camps, it seems the special invalid lagpunkts were created largely to prevent the invalids from dragging down the camp production statistics. This was the case in Siblag, which counted 9,000 invalids and 15,000 “half-invalids” among its 63,000 prisoners in 1940 and 1941—more than a third. When these weak prisoners were removed from the significant work sites and replaced with brigades of “fresh” new workers, the camp’s production figures magically rose much higher.80

  Pressure to meet the plan forced many camp commanders into a dilemma. On the one hand, they genuinely wanted to cure the sick—so that they could be put back to work. On the other hand, they did not want to encourage the “lazy.” In practice, this often meant that camp administrations set limits—sometimes very precise—on how many prisoners were allowed to be ill at any one time, and how many could be sent to recovery lagpunkts. 81 Whatever the actual number of suffering prisoners, in other words, they permitted doctors to grant rest days only to a small percentage. Aleksandrovich, the camp doctor, remembered that in his camp “about 10 percent of the lagpunkt,” thirty or forty people, showed up every evening at the doctor’s receiving hour. It was understood, however, that no more than 3 to 5 percent could be freed from work: “more than that, and an investigation would begin.”82

  If more were ill, they would have to wait. Typical was the story of one prisoner in Ustvymlag, who stated several times that he was ill and could not work. According to the official report filed afterward, “The medical workers paid no attention to his protest, and he was sent to work. Not being in a condition to work, he refused to work, for which he was shut up in the punishment cell. There he was kept for four days, after which he was taken in very poor condition to the hospital, where he died.” In another camp, a tubercular patient was sent out to work and, according to the inspectors’ report, “was in such poor condition that he could not return to the camp without assistance.”83

  The low numbers set on those “allowed” to be sick meant that doctors were under terrible, conflicting pressures. They could be censured, or even sentenced, if too many sick prisoners died, having been refused access to the camp hospital.84 They could also be threatened by the more violent and aggressive members of the camp criminal elite, who wanted release from work. If the camp doctor wanted to give rest days to genuinely sick prisoners, he had to resist these criminals’ advances. Shalamov, again, described the fate of one Doctor Surovoy, sent to work in the largely criminal lagpunkt at the Spokoiny mine in Kolyma:

  He was a young doctor, and—more important—he was a convict doctor. Surovoy’s friend tried to persuade him not to go. He could have refused and been sent to a general work gang instead of taking on this patently dangerous work. Surovoy had come to the hospital from a general work gang; he was afraid to return to it and agreed to go to the mine and work at his profession. The camp authorities gave him instructions but no advice on how to conduct himself. He was categorically forbidden to send healthy thieves from the mine to the hospital. Within a month he was killed while admitting patients; on his body were fifty-two knife wounds.85

  When he arrived to work as a feldsher in a criminal lagpunkt , Karol Colonna-Czosnowski was also warned that his predecessor had been “hacked to death” by his patients. On his first night in camp, he was confronted with a man carrying an ax, demanding to be excused from the following day’s work. Karol managed, he claims, to surprise him and throw him out of the feldsher’s hut. The next day he did a deal with Grisha, the camp criminal boss: in addition to the genuinely ill, Grisha would give him the names of two additional people a day who were to be freed from work. 86

  Alexander Dolgun also describes a similar experience. On one of his first days as a feldsher, a criminal prisoner presented himself to Dolgun, claiming to have a stomachache—and demanding opium. “He motioned me to come close. ‘Here!’ he whispered fiercely, pulling back his shirt. His right hand was inside his shirt, holding a wicked carved knife like a miniature scimitar. ‘I want opium. I am always treated very well here. You’re new. You might as well know that if I don’t get my opium, you get the knife.’” Dolgun managed to fend him off with a fake opium solution. Others were not so quick-witted, and could be kept in the criminals’ power indefinitely.87

  Even when a prisoner finally made it into the hospital, he often found that the quality of medical care varied widely. The larger camps had proper hospitals, with staff and medicines. The central Dalstroi hospital, in the city of Magadan, was known for having the latest equipment, as well as for being staffed by the best prisoner doctors, often Moscow specialists. While most of its patients were NKVD officers or camp employees, some of the more fortunate prisoners got treated by specialists as well, there and elsewhere: during his camp sentence, Leonid Finkelstein was even allowed to visit a dentist.88 Some of the invalid lagpunkts were also well-appointed, and seem to have been genuinely intended to nurse prisoners back to health. Tatyana Okunevskaya was sent to one, and marveled at the open spaces, the generous barracks, the trees: “I hadn’t seen them in so many years! And it was springtime!”89

  In the smaller lagpunkt hospitals, the situation was far grimmer. Usually, lagpunkt doctors found it impossible to maintain even minimal standards of sterility and cleanliness.90 Hospitals were often no more than ordinary barracks in which the sick were simply dumped on ordinary beds—sometimes two to a bed—with only minimal supplies of medicine. An inspector reporting on one small camp complained that it had no designated hospital building, no sheets and underwear
for patients, no medicine, and no qualified medical personnel. Death rates, as a result, were extremely high.91

  Eyewitnesses concur. In one small hospital, in a lagpunkt of Sevurallag, “treatment and documentation were poor,” according to Isaac Vogelfanger, once the camp’s chief surgeon. Worse, food rations were remarkably inadequate and very few drugs were available. Surgical cases such as fractures and major injuries to soft tissues were badly handled and neglected. Seldom, as I later discovered, were patients discharged to return to work. Having been admitted with advanced signs of malnutrition, the majority would die in the hospital.92

  A Polish prisoner, Jerzy Gliksman, remembered that in one lagpunkt prisoners actually lay “in a clutter” on the floor: “All passages were crowded with lying bodies. Filth and wretchedness were everywhere. Many of the patients raved and shouted incoherently, while others lay motionless and pale.”93

  Worse were the barracks, or rather mortuaries, for terminally ill patients. In one such barrack, set up for prisoners with dysentery, “patients lay in bed for weeks. If they were lucky they recovered. More often they died. There was no treatment, no medicines . . . patients usually tried to conceal a death for three or four days in order to get the dead man’s rations for themselves.”94