Conditions were worsened by Gulag bureaucracy. In 1940, a camp inspector complained that one camp simply did not have enough hospital beds for sick prisoners. Since a prisoner who was not actually lying down inside a hospital was not allowed to receive a hospital ration, this meant that ill prisoners outside the hospital were simply receiving the reduced “shirkers” ration.95
Nor, although many camp doctors can be said to have saved the lives of many people, were they all necessarily inclined to be helpful. Some, from their privileged perspective, had come to sympathize more with the bosses than with the “enemies” whom they were required to treat. Elinor Lipper described one doctor, the head of a hospital for 500 patients: “She behaved like a pomeshchitsa, a great lady and landowner of Tsarist times, and considered the entire staff of the hospital her personal serfs. With her fleshy hand, she once took hold of a neglectful orderly and pulled his hair until he screamed.”96 In another camp, the wife of the camp commander, a doctor in the hospital section, was actually censured by the camp inspectorate because she “allowed the seriously ill into the hospital far too late, didn’t free the sick from work, was rude, and threw sick prisoners out of the infirmary.”97
In some cases, doctors knowingly mistreated prisoner patients. While working in a mining camp in the early 1950s, one of Leonid Trus’s legs was crushed. The camp doctor bound the wound, but more was needed. Trus had already lost a great deal of blood, and was beginning to feel very cold. Because the camp did not have its own facilities for blood transfusions, the camp authorities sent him, in the back of a truck, to a local hospital. Half-conscious, he heard the doctor ask a nurse to begin a blood transfusion. The friend accompanying him gave his personal details: name, age, sex, place of work—after which the doctor halted the blood transfusion. Such help was not given to a prisoner. Trus recalls being given some glucose to drink— thanks to the friend, who paid a bribe for it—and some morphine. The following day, his leg was amputated:
The surgeon was so convinced I wouldn’t live that he didn’t even do the operation himself, but gave it to his wife, a therapist who was trying to re-qualify as a surgeon. Later they told me that she did everything well, that she knew what she was doing, except that she left out a few details. She hadn’t forgotten them, but she didn’t think I would live, and therefore it was immaterial whether these medical details were completed. And look, I remained alive!98
Not that camp doctors, whether kind or indifferent, were necessarily qualified either. Those who carried the title ranged from top Moscow specialists serving out their prison sentences, to charlatans who knew nothing whatsoever about medicine, but were willing to fake knowledge in order to get a high-status job. As early as 1932, the OGPU had complained of the dearth of qualified medical personnel.99 This meant that prisoners with medical degrees were the exception to every rule governing trusty jobs: whatever counter-revolutionary terrorist act they were alleged to have committed, they were almost always allowed to practice medicine.100
Shortages also meant that prisoners received training as nurses and feldshers—training which was often rudimentary. Evgeniya Ginzburg qualified as a nurse after spending “several days” in a camp hospital, learning the art of “cupping” and how to give an injection.101 Alexander Dolgun, having been taught in one camp the basics of the feldsher’s job, was tested on his knowledge after being transferred to another camp. Told to do an autopsy by an officer suspicious of his qualifications, he “put on the best show I could and acted as if I did this sort of thing all the time.”102 In order to get his job as feldsher, Janusz Bardach also lied: he claimed to be a third-year medical student when, in fact, he had not yet entered university. 103
The results were predictable. Upon arriving at his first posting as a convict doctor in Sevurallag, Isaac Vogelfanger, himself a qualified surgeon, was surprised to find the local feldsher treating scurvy boils—a condition caused by malnutrition, not infection—with iodine. Later, he witnessed a number of patients die because an unqualified doctor insisted upon injecting patients with a solution made of ordinary sugar. 104
None of this would have come as a surprise to the Gulag bosses, one of whom complained, in a letter to his Moscow boss, of a doctor shortage: “In several lagpunkts, medical help is given by self-taught nurses, prisoners without any medical qualification whatsoever.” Another wrote of a camp medical system which defied “all principles of the Soviet health service.” 105 The bosses knew they were flawed, the prisoners knew they were flawed— and yet the camp medical services went on functioning all the same.
Even with all of their faults—even when doctors were venal, wards were poorly equipped, medication was scarce—so attractive did life in the hospital or the infirmary seem to prisoners, that to get there they were willing not only to injure or threaten doctors, but to hurt themselves too. Like soldiers trying to avoid the battlefield, zeks also engaged in samorub (self-mutilation) and mastyrka (faking illness) in desperate attempts to save their lives. Some believed they would eventually receive an invalid’s amnesty. So many belived this, in fact, that the Gulag on at least one occasion issued a declaration denying that invalids would be freed (although they were, occasionally).106 Most, however, were simply glad to avoid work.
The punishment for self-mutilation was particularly high: an extra camp sentence. This reflected, perhaps, the fact that a disabled worker was a burden to the state and a drag on the production plan. “Self-mutilation was punished viciously, like for sabotage,” wrote Anatoly Zhigulin. 107 One prisoner tells the story of a thief who cut off four fingers of his left hand. Instead of being sent to an invalid camp, however, the invalid was made to sit in the snow and watch as others worked. Forbidden to move around, on pain of being shot for attempted escape, “very soon he himself requested a shovel and, moving it like a crutch, with his surviving hand, poked at the frozen earth, crying and swearing.”108
Nevertheless, many prisoners thought the potential benefits made the risk worth taking. Some of the methods were crude. Criminals in particular were famous for simply cutting off their three middle fingers with an ax, so they could no longer cut trees or hold a wheelbarrow in the mines. Others cut off a foot, or a hand, or rubbed acid into their eyes. Still others, upon departing for work, wrapped a wet rag around one foot: in the evening they returned with third-degree frostbite. The same method could be applied to fingers. In the 1960s, Anatoly Marchenko watched a man nail his testicles to a prison bench.109 Nor was he the first: Valery Frid describes a man who nailed his scrotum to a tree stump.110
But there were subtler methods used as well. The more daring criminal would steal a syringe and inject melted soap into his penis: the resulting ejaculation looked like venereal disease. Another prisoner found a way to fake silicosis, a lung disease. First, he filed a small quantity of silver dust from a silver ring which he had managed to keep among his personal belongings. He then mixed the silver dust with tobacco, and smoked it. Although he felt nothing, he then took himself to the hospital coughing in the way that he had seen silicosis victims cough. On the subsequent X ray, a terrible shadow appeared on his lungs—enough to disqualify him from hard labor and get him sent to a camp for the incurably ill.111
Prisoners also attempted to create infections, or long-term illnesses. Vadim Aleksandrovich treated a patient who had infected himself with a dirty sewing needle.112 Gustav Herling watched one prisoner thrust his arm in the fire, when he thought no one was looking; he did it once every day, the better to maintain a mysteriously persistent wound.113 Zhigulin made himself ill by drinking ice water and then breathing cold air. It gave him a temperature high enough to allow him to be excused from work: “Oh happy ten days in the hospital!” 114
Prisoners also faked insanity. Bardach, during his career as feldsher, worked for a time in the psychiatric ward of the central Magadan hospital. There, the primary method of unmasking fake schizophrenics was to put them on a ward with real schizophrenics: “Within hours, many prisoners, even the most determined, knocked on th
e door to be let out.” If that failed, the prisoner was given a camphor injection, which induced a seizure. Those who survived rarely wanted the procedure repeated. 115
There was even a standard procedure for prisoners who attempted to fake paralysis, according to Elinor Lipper. The patient was put on an operating table and given a slight anesthetic. When he awoke, the doctors would place him on his feet. Inevitably, when they called his name, he would take a few steps before remembering to collapse to the floor.116 Dmitri Bystroletov also witnessed a woman cured of “deafness” by her own mother. The administration, suspicious of the woman’s claim to be hard of hearing, invited the mother to visit her imprisoned daughter, but refused to let her in the barracks. Instead, she was made to stay outside the gates, where she stood, calling her daughter’s name. Naturally, the daughter responded.117
But there were also doctors who helped patients find methods of self-mutilation. Alexander Dolgun, although very weak and suffering from uncontrollable diarrhea, did not have a fever high enough to merit being excused from work. Nevertheless, when he told the camp doctor, an educated Latvian, that he was American, the man brightened. “I’ve been dying to find someone to talk English with,” he said—and showed Dolgun how to infect his own cut. This produced an enormous purple boil on his arm, enough to impress the MVD guards inspecting the hospital with the seriousness of his illness.118
Once again, ordinary morality was reversed. In the free world, no doctor who deliberately made his patients ill would be considered a good man. In the camps, however, such a doctor was revered as a saint.
“ORDINARY VIRTUES”
Not all of the strategies for survival in the camps necessarily derived from the system itself. Nor did they all involve collaboration, cruelty, or selfmutiliation. If some prisoners—perhaps the vast majority of prisoners— managed to stay alive through manipulating the rules of the camp to their advantage, there were also some who built upon what Tzvetan Todorov, in his book on concentration camp morality, has called the “ordinary virtues”: caring and friendship, dignity, and the life of the mind.119
Caring took many forms. There were prisoners, as we’ve seen, who built their own survival networks. Members of the ethnic groups which dominated some of the camps in the late 1940s—Ukrainians, Balts, Poles—created whole systems of mutual assistance. Others built up independent networks of acquaintances over years in the camps. Still others simply made one or two extremely close friends. Perhaps the best known of these Gulag friendships was that between Ariadna Efron, the daughter of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, and her friend Ada Federolf. They exerted enormous efforts in order to remain together, both in camps and in exile, and later published their memoirs together in one volume. At one point in her half of the story, Federolf told of how they were reunited after a long separation when Efron was put on a different transport:
It was already summer. The first days after we arrived were horrible. They took us out to exercise once a day—the heat was intolerable. Then suddenly a new transport from Ryazan and—Alya. I gasped with happiness, pulled her on to the upper bunks, closer to the fresh air . . . There it is, prisoners’ happiness, the happiness of simply meeting a person.120
Others agreed. “It is very important to have a friend, a trusted face, who will not leave if you are in trouble,” wrote Zoya Marchenko. 121 “It was impossible to survive alone. People organized themselves into groups of two or three,” wrote another prisoner.122 Dmitri Panin also attributes his ability to withstand the attacks of criminals to the self-defense pact he made with a group of other prisoners.123 There were limits, of course. Janusz Bardach wrote of his best camp friend that “neither one of us ever asked the other for food, nor did we offer it. We both knew that this sanctum could not be violated if we were to remain friends.”124
If respect for others helped some maintain their humanity, respect for themselves helped others. Many, particularly women, speak of the need to keep clean, or as clean as possible, as a way of preserving one’s dignity. Olga Adamova-Sliozberg describes how a prison cell mate “washed and dried her white collar and sewed it back on her blouse” every morning.125 Japanese prisoners in Magadan set up a Japanese “bath”—a large barrel, to which benches were attached—along the bay.126 During sixteen months in Leningrad’s Kresty prison, Boris Chetverikov washed his clothes over and over again, as well as the walls and the floors of his cell—before going through all of the opera arias he knew in his head.127 Others practiced exercise or hygienic routines. This is Bardach again:
. . . despite my fatigue and the cold, I kept the exercise routine I had followed at home and in the Red Army, washing my face and hands at the hand pump. I wanted to retain as much pride in myself as I could, separating myself from the many prisoners I had seen give up day by day. They’d stop caring first about their hygiene or appearance, then about their fellow prisoners, and finally about their own lives. If I had control over nothing else, I had control over this ritual which I believed would keep me from degradation and certain death.128
Still others practiced intellectual disciplines. Many, many prisoners wrote or memorized poetry, repeating their verses and those of others to themselves over and over again, later repeating them to friends. In Moscow, in the 1960s, Ginzburg once met a writer who could not believe that in such conditions prisoners had really been able to repeat poems to themselves and derive mental relief from doing so. “Yes, yes,” he told her: “he knew I was not the first person to attest to this, but, well, it still seemed to him that the idea came to us after the event.” Ginzburg writes that the man did not understand her generation, the men and women who still belonged to an “epoch of magnificent illusions . . . we were flinging ourselves into Communism from the poetic heights.”129
Nina Gagen-Torn, herself an ethnographer, wrote poetry, often singing her own verses to herself:
In the camps I understood, at a practical level, why pre-literate cultures had always passed on texts in the form of song—otherwise you don’t remember, you can’t be sure of the exact words. Books appeared among us accidentally, they were given and then taken away. Writing was forbidden, as were study groups: the authorities feared they would lead to counter-revolution. Thus did everyone prepare for himself, as well as he could, food for the brain.130
Shalamov has written that poetry, among “pretense and evil, decay” saved him from becoming completely callous. This is one verse he wrote, entitled “To a Poet”:
I ate as a beast, growling over food A simple sheet of writing-paper Seemed a miracle Falling from the sky to the dark forest.
I drank as a beast, lapping up water Soaking my long whiskers Measuring my life not by months or years But by hours.
And every evening Surprised that I was still alive I repeated verses As if I heard your voice.
And I whispered them as prayers, I honored them as the water of life As an icon saved in battle As a guiding star.
They were the only link with another life There, where the world choked us With everyday filth And death followed closely on our heels. 131
Solzhenitsyn “wrote” poetry in the camps, composing it in his head and then reciting it to himself with the aid of a collection of broken matchsticks, as his biographer Michael Scammell recounts:
He would lay out two rows of ten pieces of matchstick with his cigarette-case, one row representing tens and the other units. He then recited his verses silently to himself, moving one “unit” for each line and one “ten” for every ten lines. Every fiftieth and hundredth line was memorized with special care, and once a month he recited the whole poem once through. If a line was misplaced or forgotten, he would go through the whole thing again until he got it right.132
Perhaps for similar reasons, prayer helped some too. The memoir of one Baptist believer, sent to the post-Stalinist camps in the 1970s, consists almost entirely of accounts of when and where he prayed, and of where and how he hid his Bibles.133 Many memoirists have written of the importance of religious festivals. East
er could take place secretly, in a camp bakery—as it did one year in a Solovetsky transit prison—or it could take place openly, in transport trains: “the wagon rocked, the songs were discordant and shrill, the guards banged on the wagon walls at every stop. Still, they kept singing.”134 Christmas could take place in a barrack. Yuri Zorin, a Russian prisoner, recalled with amazement how well the Lithuanians in his camp had organized the celebration of Christmas, a feast which they had begun preparing for a year in advance: “Can you imagine, in the barracks, a table laid with everything, vodka, ham, everything.” They had, he thought, brought the vodka in “by thimblefuls” in their shoes.135
Lev Kopelev, himself an atheist, attended a secret Easter ceremony:
The beds were placed alongside the walls. There was a fragrant smell of incense. A little table covered by a blanket was the altar. Several homemade candles cast their glow on an icon. The priest, wearing vestments made of sheets, held up an iron cross. The candles flickered in the dark. We could hardly see the faces of the others in the room, but I felt sure that we were not the only unbelievers present. The priest chanted the service in an old man’s quaver. Several women in white handkerchiefs joined in softly, their voices ardent and pure. A choir gave harmonious responses, softly, softly, in order not to be heard outside.136
Kazimierz Zarod was among fellow Poles who celebrated the Christmas Eve of 1940 in a labor camp, under the guidance of a priest who stole quietly around the camp that evening, saying mass in each barrack:
Without benefit of Bible or prayer book, he began to speak the words of the Mass, the familiar Latin, spoken in a whisper barely audible and answered so quietly it was like a sigh—
“Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison—Lord have mercy on us. Christ have mercy on us. Gloria in excelsis Deo . . .”
The words washed over us and the atmosphere in the hut, usually so brutal and raw, changed imperceptibly, the faces turned towards the priest softening and relaxing as the men strained to hear the barely discernible whisper.
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