“All clear,” came the voice of the man sitting watching from the window.137
More broadly, involvement in some larger intellectual or artistic project kept many educated people alive, spiritually and physically—for those with gifts or talents often found practical uses for them. In a world of constant shortage, for example, where the most elementary possessions took on enormous significance, people who could supply something others needed were in constant demand. Thus did Prince Kirill Golitsyn learn to make needles of fishbone while still in Butyrka prison.138 Thus did Alexander Dolgun, before he found his job as feldsher, look around for a way to “make a few rubles or extra grams of bread”:
I saw that there was a very good supply of aluminium in the cables that the arc welders used. I thought that if I could learn to melt it down, I might be able to mold some spoons. I did a little talking around to some prisoners who seemed to know what they were doing with metal, and picked up some ideas without giving my own away. I also found some good hiding places, where you could spend part of the day without being rousted out to work, and some other hiding places where you could conceal tools or bits of scrap aluminium wire.
I built two shallow boxes for my foundry, stole myself some scraps of aluminium wire, fashioned a rough crucible from some thin steel from the stove works, scrounged some good charcoal and diesel fuel to fire my forge, and was ready to go into business.
Soon, wrote Dolgun, he was able to “turn out two spoons almost every day.” These he traded to other prisoners for a water flask, and for cooking oil to keep inside it. That way he had something in which to dip his bread.139
Not all of the objects that prisoners produced for one another were necessarily utilitarian. Anna Andreeva, an artist, received constant requests for her services—and not only from prisoners. She was asked by the camp authorities to decorate a tombstone during a funeral, to fix broken crockery and toys, and to make toys as well: “We did everything for the bosses, whatever they needed or asked.”140 Another prisoner carved small “souvenirs” for other prisoners out of mammoth tusks: bracelets, small figurines with “northern” themes, rings, medallions, buttons. Occasionally, he felt guilty for taking money from other prisoners: “But so what? Everyone is free to think for themselves . . . for work it is not shameful to take money.” 141
The museum of the Memorial Society in Moscow—set up by ex-prisoners and dedicated to telling the history of Stalin’s repressions—is to this day full of such things: bits of embroidered lace, hand-carved trinkets, painted playing cards, and even small works of art—paintings, drawings, sculptures— which prisoners preserved, brought home with them, and later donated.
The goods that prisoners learned to provide were not always tangible either. Strange though it sounds, in the Gulag it was possible to sing—or dance, or act—for your life. This was true particularly for talented prisoners in the larger camps, with the flashier bosses, those who longed to show off their camp orchestras and theatrical troupes. If the commander of Ukhtizhemlag aspired to maintain a real opera troupe—as one of them did—that meant that the lives of dozens of singers and dancers would be saved. At the very least, they would get time off from work in the forests for rehearsals. More important, they might regain some feeling of humanity. “When the actors were onstage, they forgot about their constant feeling of hunger, about their lack of rights, about the convoy waiting with guard dogs outside the gate,” wrote Alexander Klein.142 While playing in the Dalstroi orchestra, the prisoner and violinist Georgy Feldgun felt “as if I breathed the full air of freedom.”143
Sometimes the rewards were even greater. A document from Dmitlag describes the special clothing to be distributed to members of the camp orchestra—including highly coveted officers’ boots—and orders a lagpunkt commander to supply them with special barracks as well.144 Thomas Sgovio visited one such musicians’ barrack in Magadan: “Upon entering, to the right was a separate compartment with a small stove. Foot coverings and felt boots hung on wires stretched from wall to wall. Individual bunks were neatly covered by blankets. Mattresses and pillowcases were filled with straw. Instruments hung on the walls—a tuba, a french horn, a trombone, trumpet, etc. About half the musicians were criminals. All of them held soft jobs—the cook, the barber, the bath manager, the accountants, etc.” 145
Better conditions were supplied for performers in smaller camps as well, however, and even in some prisons. Georgy Feldgun received extra food while in transit camp, after performing on his violin for a group of criminals. He found the experience very strange: “Here we are on the edge of the world, in Vanino Port . . . and we are playing eternal music, written more than 200 years ago. We are playing Vivaldi for fifty gorillas.”146
Another prisoner found herself in a cell with a troupe of singers and actresses who were, thanks to their talents, not being sent out on the transports to the camps. Seeing their better treatment, she convinced them to let her appear with them, then sang off-key and made fun of herself. Throughout the rest of her camp career, her previously undiscovered comic talents won her extra food and help from her fellow prisoners.147 Others used humor to survive as well. Dmitri Panin has written of a professional clown from Odessa who performed for his life, knowing that if he made the camp authorities laugh, he would save himself from being transferred to a punishment camp. “The only incongruity in this gay dance came from the clown’s large black eyes, which seemed to be begging for mercy. I have never seen such an emotional performance.”148
Out of all the many ways of surviving through collaboration with the authorities, “saving oneself ” through acting in the camp theater or participating in other cultural activities was the method which seemed to prisoners the least morally problematic. This may have been because other prisoners derived some benefit too. Even for those who did not receive special treatment, the theater provided tremendous moral support, something which was also necessary for survival. “For the prisoners, the theater was the source of happiness, it was loved, it was adored,” wrote one. 149 Gustav Herling remembered that for concerts “the prisoners took their caps off at the door, shook the snow from their boots in the passage outside, and took their places on the benches with ceremonious anticipation and almost religious awe.”150
Perhaps that was why those whose artistic talent enabled them to live better inspired admiration, not envy and hatred. Tatyana Okunevskaya— the film star sent to the camps for her refusal to sleep with Abakumov, the head of Soviet counter-intelligence—was recognized everywhere, and helped by everyone. During one camp concert, she felt what seemed to be stones being thrown at her legs; she looked down and realized they were cans of Mexican pineapple, an unheard of delicacy, which a group of thieves had acquired just for her.151
Nikolai Starostin, the soccer player, was also held in the highest respect by the urki, who, he wrote, passed the message to one another: don’t touch Starostin. In the evenings, when he began to recount soccer stories, the “card games ceased” as prisoners gathered around him. When he arrived at a new camp, he was usually offered a clean bed in the camp hospital. “It was the first thing that was proposed to me, whenever I arrived, if, among the doctors or the bosses, there was a fan.”152
Only a very few were bothered by the more complex moral question of whether it was “right” to sing and dance while in prison. Nadezhda Joffe was one of them: “When I look back at my five years, I am not ashamed to recall them and I have nothing to blush about. There is only the question of the amateur theater . . . Essentially there was nothing wrong with it, and yet . . . our distant ancestors, in approximately analogous conditions, hung up their lutes and said they wouldn’t sing in bondage.” 153
Some prisoners, particularly those of non-Soviet origin, also had their doubts about the productions. One Polish prisoner, arrested during the war, wrote that the camp theater was “designed to destroy your self-respect further . . . Sometimes there were ‘artistic’ performances, or some sort of strange orchestra, but it was not done
for the satisfaction of the soul. Rather, it was designed to show you their [Soviet] ‘culture,’ to unnerve you further.”154
Still, for those who felt uncomfortable, it was not necessary to participate in the official performances. A striking number of political prisoners who wrote memoirs—and this may explain why they wrote memoirs—attribute their survival to their ability to “tell stories”: to entertain criminal prisoners by recounting the plots of novels or of films. In the world of the camps and the prisons, where books were scarce and films were rare, a good storyteller was highly prized. Leonid Finkelstein says that he will be “forever grateful to a thief who, on my first prison day, recognized this potential in me, and said, ‘You’ve probably read a lot of books. Tell them to people, and you will be living very well.’ And indeed I was living better than the rest. I had some notoriety, some fame . . . I ran into people who said, ‘You are Leonchik-Romanist [Leonchik-the-storyteller], I heard about you in Taishet.’” Because of this skill, Finkelstein was invited, twice a day, into the brigadier leader’s hut where he received a mug of hot water. In the quarry where he was then working, “that meant life.” Finkelstein found, he said, that Russian and foreign classics worked best: he had far less success retelling the plots of more recent Soviet novels.155
Others found the same. On her hot, stuffy train to Vladivostok, Evgeniya Ginzburg learned that “there were material advantages in reciting poetry . . . For instance, after each act of Griboyedov’s The Misfortune of Being Clever, I was given a drink of water out of someone else’s mug as a reward for ‘services to the community.’” 156
Alexander Wat retold Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to a group of bandits while in prison.157 Alexander Dolgun recounted the plot of Les Misérables.158 Janusz Bardach told the story of The Three Musketeers: “I felt my status rise with every twist of the plot.”159 In response to the thieves who dismissed the starving politicals as “vermin,” Colonna-Czosnowski also defended himself by telling them “my own version of a film, suitably embellished for maximum dramatic effect, which I had seen in Poland some years earlier. It was a ‘Cops and Robbers’ story, taking place in Chicago, involving Al Capone. For good measure, I threw in Bugsy Malone, maybe even Bonnie and Clyde. I decided to include everything I could remember, plus some extra refinements which I invented on the spur of the moment.” The story impressed its listeners, and they asked the Pole to repeat it many times: “Like children, they would listen intently. They didn’t mind hearing the same stories over and over again. Like children, too, they liked me to use the same words every time. They also noticed the slightest change or the smallest omission . . . within three weeks of my arrival I was a different man.”160
Yet an artistic gift did not need to earn a prisoner money or bread in order to save his life. Nina Gagen-Torn describes a musical historian, a lover of Wagner, who managed to write an opera while in the camps. Voluntarily, she chose to work cleaning camp sewers and outhouses, since this otherwise unpleasant job gave her enough freedom to think through her music.161 Aleksei Smirnov, one of contemporary Russia’s leading advocates of press freedom, tells the story of two literary scholars who, while in the camps, created a fictitious eighteenth-century French poet, and wrote pastiche eighteenth-century French verse.162 Gustav Herling also derived enormous benefit from the “lessons” in the history of literature which he received from a former professor: his teacher, he speculated, may have benefited even more.163
Irena Arginskaya was even helped by her aesthetic sensibility. Years after her release, she could still speak of the “incredible beauty” of the far north, how at times the sunsets and the views of the open spaces and great forests left her breathless. It even once happened that her mother made the long, terrible journey to visit her in camp, only to discover upon arrival that her daughter had been taken away to the hospital: the visit was in vain. Nevertheless, she spoke “until the end of her life,” as did her daughter, about the beauty of the taiga. 164
And yet—beauty could not help everybody, and its perception was subjective. Surrounded by the same taiga, the same open air, the same sweeping landscapes, Nadezhda Ulyanovskaya found that the scenery made her feel only disgust: “Almost against my will, I remember grandiose sunrises and sunsets, pine tree forests, bright flowers which for some reason had no scent.”165
So struck was I by this comment, that when I myself visited the far north in high summer, I looked with different eyes at the wide rivers and the endless forests of Siberia, at the empty moonscape that is the Arctic tundra. Just outside a coal mine, which stands on what used to be a Vorkuta lagpunkt, I even picked a handful of Arctic wildflowers to see if they had a scent. They do. Perhaps Ulyanovskaya had simply not wanted to detect it.
Chapter 18
REBELLION AND ESCAPE
If I had heard the sound of the sledge dogs announcing the start of the patrol now, I think I might have been physically sick. We ran the few yards to the outer fence . . . we were probably making little noise, but it seemed to me that the commotion was deafening . . . In a final mad scramble we leapt and tumbled over the last lot of barbed wire at the foot of the outer fence, picked ourselves up, breathlessly inquired if everyone was all right, and, with one accord, started to run.
—Slavomir Rawicz, The Long Walk1
AMONG THE MANY MYTHS about the Gulag, the myth of the impossibility of escape looms among the largest. Escape from Stalin’s camps, wrote Solzhenitsyn, was “an enterprise for giants among men—but for doomed giants.” 2 According to Anatoly Zhigulin, “Escape from Kolyma was impossible.” 3 Varlam Shalamov, with characteristic gloom, wrote that “convicts who try to escape are almost always newcomers, serving their first year, men in whose hearts freedom and vanity had not yet been annhilated.” 4 Nikolai Abakumov, the former deputy commander of the Norilsk garrison, dismissed the idea of successful escape: “Some people got out of the camps, but no one managed to reach the ‘mainland’”—by which he meant central Russia.5
Gustav Herling recounts the story of a fellow inmate who tried to escape and failed: after months of careful planning, a successful breakout, and seven days of hungry wandering in the forest, he found himself only eight miles from the camp, and, starving, voluntarily turned himself in. “Freedom isn’t for us,” the man concluded, whenever he told the story of his escape attempt to his fellow prisoners. “We’re chained to this place for the rest of our lives, even though we aren’t wearing chains. We can escape, we can wander about, but in the end we’ll come back.”6
Camps were, of course, constructed to prevent breakouts: ultimately, that was what the walls, barbed wire, watchtowers, and carefully raked noman’s-land were for. But in many camps, barbed wire was hardly necessary to keep prisoners inside. The weather worked against escape—ten months of the year, the temperature was below freezing—as did the geography, a fact it is impossible to appreciate until one has actually seen the location of some of the more distant camps for oneself.
It is, for example, fair to describe Vorkuta, the city which sprang up beside the coal mines of Vorkutlag, not only as isolated but also as virtually inaccessible. There is no road that leads to Vorkuta, which lies beyond the Arctic Circle: the city and its mines can only be reached by rail or by plane. In winter, anyone crossing the open, treeless tundra would be a moving target. In summer, the same landscape turns into an equally open, impenetrable swamp.
In the more southerly camps, distances were a problem too. Even if a prisoner did climb over the barbed wire, or slip away from his workplace in the forest—given the slovenliness of the guards, this was not so difficult— he then found himself miles from a road or a railway track, and sometimes miles from anything resembling a town or village. There was no food, no shelter, and sometimes very little water.
More to the point, there were sentries everywhere: the whole of the Kolyma region—hundreds and hundreds of square miles of taiga—was really a vast prison, after all, as was the entire Komi Republic, large swathes of the Kazakh desert,
and northern Siberia. In such places, there were few ordinary villages, and few ordinary inhabitants. Anyone walking alone without proper identity documents would have immediately been identified as a runaway, and either shot, or beaten up and returned to his camp. One prisoner decided against joining a group of escaping inmates for this reason: “Where could I go without papers or money in a territory packed with concentration camps and therefore scattered with control points?”7
The escaping prisoner was not likely to find much help from those local people who were not guards or prisoners, either, even if he encountered any. In Czarist Siberia, there had been a tradition of sympathy for runaway convicts and serfs, for whom bowls of bread and milk were placed on doorsteps at night. An old, pre-revolutionary prisoners’ song describes the attitude:
The peasant women provided me milk
The young lads supplied tobacco.8
In Stalin’s Soviet Union, the mood was different. Most people would have been inclined to turn in an escaped “enemy,” and even more inclined to turn in a criminal “recidivist.” This was not only because they believed, or half believed, the propaganda about the prisoners, but also because those who failed to turn in a runaway risked being given long prison sentences themselves.9 Not that their fears needed to be specific, given the paranoid climate of daily life:
As for the local population, nobody saved us and hid us, the way others saved and hid those who escaped from the German concentration camps. It was because for so many years, all had lived in constant fear and suspicion, from minute to minute awaiting some new misfortune, even being afraid of each other . . . In a place where everyone, from the smallest to the most important, was terrified of spies, it was impossible to count on a successful escape.10
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