As ought those refusing to work who got a “tenner” instead of execution.
But it was not the number of years, not the empty and fantastic length of years, that made these second terms so awful—but how you got them. How you had to crawl through that iron pipe in the ice and snow to get them.
It would seem that arrest would be a nothing for a camp inmate. For a person who had once been arrested from his warm domestic bed—what did it matter to be arrested again from an uncomfortable barracks with bare bunks? But it certainly did! In the barracks the stove was warm and a full bread ration was given. But here came the jailer and jerked you by the foot at night. “Gather up your things!” Oh, how you didn’t want to go! People, people, I love you. . . .
Chapter 14
Changing One’s Fate!
TO DEFEND YOURSELF in that savage world was impossible. To go on strike was suicide. To go on hunger strikes was useless.
And as for dying, there would always be time.
So what was left for the prisoner? To break out! To go change one’s fate!
Chekhov used to say that if a prisoner was not a philosopher who could get along equally well in all possible circumstances (or let us put it this way: who could retire into himself) then he could not but wish to escape and he ought to wish to.
He could not but wish to! That was the imperative of a free soul. True, the natives of the Archipelago were far from being like that. They were much more submissive than that. But even among them there were always those who thought about escape or who were just about to. The continual escapes in one or another place, even those that did not succeed, were a true proof that the energy of the zeks had not yet been lost.
Here is a camp compound. It is well guarded; the fence is strong and the inner cordon area is reliable and the watchtowers are set out correctly—every spot is open to view and open to fire. But all of a sudden you grow sick to death of the thought that you are condemned to die right here on this bit of fenced-off land. So why not try your luck? Why not burst out and change your fate? This impulse is particularly strong at the beginning of your term of imprisonment, in the first year, and it is not even deliberate. In that first year when, generally speaking, the prisoner’s entire future and whole prison personality are being decided. Later on this impulse weakens somehow; there is no longer the conviction that it is more important for you to be out there, and all the threads binding you to the outer world weaken, and the cauterizing of the soul is transformed into decay, and the human being settles into camp harness.
During all the years of the camps, there were evidently quite a few escapes. Here are some statistics accidentally come by: In the month of March, 1930, alone, 1,328 persons escaped from imprisonment in the R.S.F.S.R. (And how inaudible and soundless this was in our society.)
With the enormous development of the Archipelago after 1937, particularly during the war years, when battle-fit infantrymen were rounded up and sent to the front, it became even more difficult to provide proper convoy, and not even the evil notion of self-guarding could solve all the problems of the chiefs. So they relied on certain invisible chains which kept the natives reliably in their place.
The strongest of these chains was the prisoners’ universal submission and total surrender to their situation as slaves. Almost to a man, both the 58s and the nonpolitical offenders were hardworking family people capable of manifesting valor only in lawful ways, on the orders of and the approval of the higher-ups. Even when they had been imprisoned for five and ten years they could not imagine that singly—or, God forbid, collectively—they might rise up for their liberty since they saw arrayed against them the state (their own state), the NKVD, the police, the guards, and the police dogs. And even if you were fortunate enough to escape unscathed, how could you live afterward on a false passport, with a false name, when documents were checked at every intersection, when suspicious eyes followed passers-by from behind every gateway?
Another chain was the death factory—camp starvation. Although it was precisely this starvation that at times drove the despairing to wander through the taiga in the hope of finding more food than there was in camp, yet it was this starvation that also weakened them so that they had no strength for a long flight, and because of it it was impossible to save up a stock of food for the journey.
And there was another chain too—the threat of a new term. A political prisoner was given a new tenner for an escape attempt under that same Article 58 (and gradually it proved best to give Article 58-14—Counter-Revolutionary Sabotage).
Another thing restraining the zeks was not the compound but the privilege of going without convoy. The ones guarded the least, who enjoyed the small privilege of going to work and back without a bayonet at their backs, or once in a while dropping into the free settlement, highly prized their advantages. And after an escape these were taken away.
The geography of the Archipelago was also a solid obstacle to escape attempts—those endless expanses of snow or sandy desert, tundra, taiga.
The hostility of the surrounding population, encouraged by the authorities, became the principal hindrance to escapes. The authorities were not stingy about rewarding the captors. (This was an additional form of political indoctrination.) And the nationalities inhabiting the areas around Gulag gradually came to assume that the capture of a fugitive meant a holiday, enrichment, that it was like a good hunt or like finding a small gold nugget.
But the desperate heart sometimes did not weigh things. It saw: the river was flowing and a log was floating down it—and one jump! We’ll float on down. Vyacheslav Bezrodny from the Olchan Camp, barely released from the hospital, still utterly weak, escaped down the Indigirka River on two logs fastened together—to the Arctic Ocean! Where was he going? And what was he hoping for? In the end he was not so much caught as picked up on the open sea and returned over the winter road to Olchan to that very same hospital.
It is not possible to say of everyone who didn’t return to camp on his own, who was not brought in half alive, or who was not brought in dead, that he had escaped. Perhaps he had only exchanged an involuntary and long-drawn-out death in camp for the free death of a beast in the taiga.
The quiet escapes were usually more fortunate in their results. Some of them were surprisingly successful. But we rarely hear of these happy stories; those who broke out do not give interviews; they have changed their names, and they are in hiding. Kuzikov-Skachinsky, who escaped successfully in 1942, tells the story now only because he was caught in 1959—after seventeen years.
And we have learned of the successful escape of Zinaida Yakovlevna Povalyayeva because in the end it fell through. She got her term because she had stayed on as a teacher in her school during the German occupation. But she was not immediately arrested when the Soviet armies arrived, and before her arrest she was married to a pilot. Then she was arrested and sent to Mine No. 8 at Vorkuta. Through some Chinese working in the kitchen she established communication with freedom and with her husband. He was employed in civil aviation and arranged a trip to Vorkuta for himself. On an appointed day Zina went to the bath in the work zone, where she shed her camp clothing and released her hair, which had been curled the night before, from under her head scarf. Her husband was waiting for her in the work sector. There were security officers on duty at the river ferry, but they paid no attention to a girl with curly hair who was arm in arm with a flier. They flew out on a plane. Zina spent one year living on false papers. But she couldn’t resist the desire to see her mother again—and her mother was under surveillance. At her new interrogation she managed to convince them she had escaped in a coal car. And they never did find out about her husband’s participation.
We have not yet described the group escapes, and there were many of them too. They say that in 1956 a whole small camp escaped near Monchegorsk.
The history of all the escapes from the Archipelago would be a list too long to be read, too long to be leafed through. And any one person who wrote a book solel
y about escapes, to spare his reader and himself, would be forced to omit hundreds of cases.
Chapter 15
Punishments
AMONG THE MANY joyous renunciations brought us by the new world were the renunciation of exploitation, the renunciation of colonies, the renunciation of obligatory military service, the renunciation of secret diplomacy, secret assignments and transfers, the renunciation of secret police, the renunciation of “divine law,” and many, many other fairy-tale renunciations in addition. But not, to be sure, a renunciation of prisons.
So it must have seemed ridiculous not only to the prison keepers but to the prisoners themselves that for some reason or other there was no punishment cell, that it should have been banned. For if you didn’t intimidate the prisoner, if there was no further punishment you could apply—how could he be compelled to submit to the regimen?
And where could you put the captured fugitives?
What was the ShIzo given for? For whatever they felt like: You didn’t please your chief; you didn’t say hello the way you should have; you didn’t get up on time; you didn’t go to bed on time; you were late for roll call; you took the wrong path; you were wrongly dressed; you smoked where it was forbidden; you kept extra things in your barracks—take a day, three, five. You failed to fulfill the work norm, you were caught with a broad—take five, seven, or ten. And for work shirkers there was even fifteen days. And even though, according to the law (what law?), fifteen days was the maximum in penalty cells (though according to the Corrective Labor Code of 1933 even that was impermissible!), this accordion could be stretched out to a whole year. In 1932 in Dmitlag (this is something Averbakh writes about—black on white!) they used to give one year of ShIzo for self-mutilation! And if one bears in mind that they used to refuse treatment in such cases, then this meant they used to put a sick, wounded person in a punishment cell to rot—for a whole year!
What was required of a ShIzo? It had to be: (a) cold; (b) damp; (c) dark; (d) for starvation. Therefore there was no heat: not even when the temperature outside was 22 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. They did not replace missing glass panes in the winter. They allowed the walls to get damp. (Or else they put the penalty-block cellar in moist ground.) The windows were microscopic or else there were none at all (more usual). They fed a “Stalin” ration of ten and a half ounces a day and issued a “hot” meal, consisting of thin gruel, only on the third, sixth, and ninth days of your imprisonment there. But at Vorkuta-Vom they gave only seven ounces of bread, and a piece of raw fish in place of a hot dish on the third day. This is the framework in which one has to imagine all the penalty cells.
It is very naïve to think that a penalty cell has of necessity to be like a cell—with a roof, door, and lock. Not at all! At Kuranakh-Sala, at a temperature of minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit, the punishment cell was a sodden frame of logs. (The free physician Andreyev said: “I, as a physician, declare it possible to put a prisoner in that kind of punishment cell.”) Let us leap the entire Archipelago: at Vorkuta-Vom in 1937, the punishment cell for work shirkers was a log frame without a roof. And in addition there was a plain hole in the ground. Arnold Rappoport lived in a hole like that (to get shelter from the rain they used to pull some kind of rag over themselves), like Diogenes in a barrel.
In the Mariinsk Camp (as in many others, of course) there was snow on the walls of the punishment cell—and in such-and-such a punishment cell the prisoners were not allowed to keep their camp clothes on but were forced to undress to their underwear.
The BUR—the Strict Regimen Barracks—could be the most ordinary kind of barracks, set apart and fenced off by barbed wire, with the prisoners in it being taken out daily to the hardest and most unpleasant work in the camp. It could also be a masonry prison inside the camp with a full prison system—with beatings of prisoners summoned one by one to the jailers’ quarters (a favorite method that didn’t leave marks was to beat with a felt boot with a brick inside it); with bolts, bars, locks, and peepholes on every door; with concrete floors to the cells and an additional separate punishment cell for BUR inmates.
The favored candidates for the penalty compounds were: religious believers, stubborn prisoners, and thieves. (Yes, thieves! Here the great system of indoctrination broke down because of the inconsistency of the local instructors.) They kept whole barracks of “nuns” there who had refused to work for the devil. (At the penalty camp for prisoners under convoy at the Pechora State Farm they held them in a penalty block up to their knees in water. In the autumn of 1941 they gave them all 58-14—economic counterrevolution—and shot them.) They sent the priest Father Viktor Shipovalnikov there on charges of conducting “religious propaganda” (he had celebrated vespers for five nurses on Easter Eve).
And often prisoners were sent to penalty compounds for refusal to become informers. The majority died there and naturally cannot speak about themselves. And the murderers from State Security are even less likely to speak of them.
There were stories of women in this context too. It is impossible to reach a sufficiently balanced judgment on these stories because some intimate element always remains hidden from us. However, here is the story of Irena Nagel as she told it herself. She worked as a typist for the Administrative Section of the Ukhta State Farm, in other words as a very comfortably established trusty. Heavy-set and imposing, she wore her hair in long braids wrapped around her head; and partly for convenience she went around in wide Oriental-type trousers and a jacket cut like a ski jacket. Whoever knows camp life will understand what an enticement this was. A security officer, Junior Lieutenant Sidorenko, expressed a desire to get more intimately acquainted. And Nagel replied: “I would rather be kissed by the lowliest thief in camp! You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I can hear your baby crying in the next room.” Repulsed by her outburst, the security officer suddenly changed his expression and said: “Surely you don’t really think I like you? I merely wanted to put you to the test. So here’s the way it is: you must collaborate with us.” She refused and was sent to a penalty camp.
Chapter 16
The Socially Friendly
LET MY FEEBLE pen, too, join in praise of this tribe! They have been hailed as pirates, as freebooters, as tramps, as escaped convicts. They have been lauded as noble brigands—from Robin Hood on down to operetta heroes. And we have been assured that they have sensitive hearts, that they plunder the rich and share with the poor.
And, indeed, has not all world literature glorified the thieves? It is not for us to reproach François Villon; but neither Hugo nor Balzac could avoid that path; and Pushkin, too, praised the thief principle in his Gypsies. (And what about Byron?) But never have they been so widely glorified and with such unanimity and so consistently as in Soviet literature. Who was there who was not breathless with sacred emotion in describing the thieves to us—their vivid, unreined nihilism at the beginning, and their dialectical “reforging” at the end—starting with Mayakovsky (and, in his footsteps, Shostakovich with his ballet The Young Lady and the Hooligan) and including Leonov, Selvinsky, Inber—and you could go on and on?
In Old Russia there existed (just as there still exists in the West) an incorrect view of thieves as incorrigible, permanent criminals (a “nucleus of criminality”). Because of this the politicals were segregated from them on prisoner transports and in prisons. In Old Russia there was just one single formula to be applied to the criminal recidivists: “Make them bow their heads beneath the iron yoke of the law!” And so it was that up to 1914 the thieves did not play the boss either in Russia as a whole or in Russian prisons.
But the shackles fell and freedom dawned. In the desertion of millions in 1917, and then in the Civil War, all human passions were largely unleashed, and those of the thieves most of all, and they no longer wished to bow their heads beneath the yoke; moreover, they were informed that they didn’t have to. It was found both useful and amusing that they were enemies of private property and therefore a revolutionary force which had to be guided into the
mainstream of the proletariat, yes, and this would constitute no special difficulty. Reasoning on a social basis: wasn’t the environment to blame for everything? So let us re-educate these healthy lumpenproletarians and introduce them into the system of conscious life!
And now, when more than forty years have gone by, one can look around and begin to have doubts: Who re-educated whom? Did the Chekists re-educate the thieves, or the thieves the Chekists? The urka—the habitual thief—who adopted the Chekist faith became a bitch, and his fellow thieves would cut his throat. The Chekist who acquired the psychology of the thief was an energetic interrogator of the thirties and forties, or else a resolute camp chief—such men were appreciated. They got the service promotions.
And the psychology of the urki was exceedingly simple and very easy to acquire:
1. I want to live and enjoy myself; and f—the rest!
2. Whoever is the strongest is right!
3. If they aren’t [beat]ing you, then don’t lie down and ask for it. (In other words: As long as they’re beating up someone else, don’t stick up for the ones being beaten. Wait your own turn.)
Beat up your submissive enemies one at a time! Somehow this is a very familiar law. It is what Hitler did. It is what Stalin did.
Come on now, stop lying, you mercenary pens! You who have observed the Russian thieves through a steamship rail or across an interrogator’s desk! You who have never encountered the thieves when you were defenseless.
The thieves—the urki—are not Robin Hoods! When they want, they steal from last-leggers! When they want they are not squeamish about—taking the last footcloths off a man freezing to death. Their great slogan is: “You today, me tomorrow!”
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