Gulag (41 page)

Often, prisoners were required to help indulge these whims. Isaac Vogelfanger, a camp doctor, found himself constantly short of medicinal alcohol because his pharmacist used it to make brandy. The camp boss then used the brandy to entertain visiting dignitaries: “The more alcohol they consume, the better their opinion of work in Sevurallag.” Vogelfanger also witnessed a camp cook prepare a “banquet” for visitors, using things he had saved up for the occasion: “caviar, smoked eel, hot rolls made from french dough with mushrooms, Arctic char in lemon aspic, baked goose and baked piglet.”
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It was also in this period, the 1940s, that bosses like Nikishov began to see themselves as more than mere jailers. Some even began to compete with one another, in a fantastic version of keeping up with the Jones’s. They vied to produce the best prisoner theatrical groups, the best prisoner orchestras, the best prisoner artists. Lev Kopelev was in Unzhlag in 1946, at a time when its commander would select, straight from prison, “the best performers, musicians and artists, to whom he gave the best trusty jobs, working as cleaners and caretakers in the hospital.” The camp became known as an “asylum for artists.”
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Dalstroi also boasted an inmate troupe called the Sevvostlag Club, which performed in Magadan and in some of the outlying camps of the mining zone, benefiting from the many well-known singers and dancers incarcerated in Kolyma.
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Lev Razgon describes too the commander of Ukhtizhemlag, who “maintained a real opera troupe in Ukhta,” directed by a famous Soviet actor. He also “employed” a famous Bolshoi ballerina, as well as well-known singers and musicians:

Sometimes the head of Ukhtizhemlag would pay his neighboring colleagues a visit. Although the official purpose was to “share experience,” this flat description belies the elaborate preparations and protocol which more resembled a visit by a foreign head of state. The bosses were accompanied by a large entourage of section heads, special hotel accommodation was prepared for them, routes were carefully planned and presents were brought in . . . The Ukhtizhemlag boss also brought his best performers with him so that his hosts could see that the arts were just as flourishing there, if not more so.
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To this day, the former Ukhtizhemlag theater—a vast, white, columned building, with theatrical symbols on its pediment—is one of the most substantial buildings in the city of Ukhta. It stands within walking distance of the former camp commander’s residence, a spacious wooden house on the edge of a park.

But it was not just those with artistic tastes who indulged their whims. Those who preferred sport also had an opportunity to try their hand at founding their own soccer teams, which competed with one another quite fiercely. Nikolai Starostin—the star player who was arrested because his team had the misfortune to beat Beria’s—was also sent to Ukhta, where his transport was met right at the train station. He was taken to meet the local soccer manager, who addressed him politely and told him that the camp boss had specially requested his presence: “the General’s soul is in soccer. He was the one who got you here.” Starostin was to spend much of his camp career managing soccer teams for the NKVD, moving from place to place according to whichever commander wanted him as trainer.
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Occasionally, just occasionally, word of such excesses sparked alarm, or at least interest, in Moscow. Perhaps responding to complaints, Beria once commissioned a secret investigation into Nikishov’s luxurious lifestyle. The resulting report confirms, among other things, that on one occasion Nikishov spent 15,000 rubles, a huge sum at that time, on a banquet given to commemorate the visit of the Khabarovsk Operetta Company.
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The report also condemns the “atmosphere of sycophancy” around Nikishov and his wife, Gridasova: “The influence of Gridasova is so great, that even the deputies of Nikishov testify that they can work in their positions only so long as she looks kindly upon them.”
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No steps were taken, however. Gridasova and Nikishov continued to reign in peace.

In recent years, it has become fashionable to point out that, contrary to their postwar protestations, few Germans were ever forced to work in concentration camps or killing squads. One scholar recently claimed that most had done so voluntarily—a view which has caused some controversy.
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In the case of Russia and the other post-Soviet states, the issue has to be examined differently. Very often, camp employees—like most other Soviet citizens— had few options. A labor committee simply assigned them a place of work, and they had to go there. Lack of choice was built right into the Soviet economic system.

Nevertheless, it is not quite right to describe the NKVD officers and armed guards as “no better off than the prisoners they commanded,” or as victims of the same system, as some have tried to do. For although they might have preferred to work elsewhere, once they were inside the system, the employees of the Gulag did have choices, far more than their Nazi counterparts, whose work was more rigidly defined. They could choose to behave brutally, or they could choose to be kind. They could choose to work their prisoners to death, or they could choose to keep as many alive as possible. They could choose to sympathize with the prisoners whose fate they might have once shared, and might share again, or they could choose to take advantage of their temporary stretch of luck, and lord it over their former and future comrades in suffering.

Nothing in their past history necessarily indicated what path they would take, for both Gulag administrators and ordinary camp guards came from as many different ethnic and social backgrounds as did the prisoners. Indeed, when asked to describe the character of their guards, Gulag survivors almost always reply that they varied enormously. I put that question to Galina Smirnova, who remembered that “they were, like everyone, all different.”
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Anna Andreeva told me that “there were sick sadists, and there were completely normal, good people.” Andreeva also recalled the day, soon after Stalin’s death, when the chief accountant in her camp suddenly rushed into the accounting office where prisoners were working, cheered, hugged them, and shouted, “Take off your numbers, girls, they’re giving you back your own clothes!”
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Irena Arginskaya also told me that her guards were not only “very different sorts of people,” but also people who changed over time. The conscript soldiers in particular acted “like beasts” when they were new on the job, as they had been pumped full of propaganda, but “after a time they began to understand—not all of them, but a large part—and they often changed.”
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True, the authorities exerted some pressure on both guards and administrators, discouraging them from showing prisoners any kindness. The archive of the Gulag’s inspectorate records the case of Levin, the boss of the supply division for a section of Dmitlag in 1937, who was actively investigated for his lenience. His crime was to have allowed a prisoner to meet with his brother: normally, relatives within the prison system were kept far apart. Levin was also accused of being too friendly to
zeks
in general, and especially so to a group of
zeks
said to be Mensheviks. Levin—himself a former prisoner on the White Sea Canal—claimed, in return, that he had not known they
were
Mensheviks. Given that this was 1937, he was convicted anyway.
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Yet such strictures were not rigorously applied. Indeed, several top commanders actually became renowned for their kindness to prisoners. In
Let
History Judge
, his denunciation of Stalinism, the dissident historian and publicist Roy Medvedev describes one camp commander, V. A. Kundush, who took seriously the demands for increased production during wartime. He placed the better-educated political prisoners in clerical jobs, and set about treating his prisoners well, even securing some of them early release. His enterprise received the “Red Banner for Management” during the war. But when the war ended, he too was arrested, perhaps for the very humanity that had transformed his production.
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Lev Razgon describes an unusual transit prison in Georgievsk, which both he and his second wife, Rika, passed through:

The cells were not only swept but washed, both the floors and the bed boards. The food was so filling that the constant hunger of prisoners in transit disappeared. You could really get clean in the bath-house. There was even a special and fully equipped room (and this amazed Rika more than anything else) where the women could primp and perk...
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And there were others. At one point during his camp career, Genrikh Gorchakov, a Russian Jew arrested in 1945, was assigned to an invalids’ camp within the Siblag complex. The camp had recently been taken over by a new commander, a former frontline officer who could not find any other work after the war. Taking his job seriously, the commander built new barracks, saw to it that prisoners had mattresses and even sheets, and reorganized the work system, completely transforming the camp.
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Yet another ex
-zek
, Aleksei Pryadilov, arrested at sixteen, was sent to a farming camp in the Altai. There the camp boss “ran the camp like an economic organization, and behaved toward prisoners not as if they were criminals and enemies, whom it was necessary to ‘re-educate,’ but as though they were workers. He was convinced that there was no point in trying to get good work out of hungry people.”
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Even Gulag inspectors sometimes uncovered good commanders. One visited Birlag in 1942, and found that “the prisoners of this factory worked excellently because their conditions were excellent.” Their barracks were clean, each prisoner had his or her own sheets and blankets, good clothes and shoes.
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There were also more direct forms of kindness. The memoirist Galina Levinson recalled one camp commander who talked a woman prisoner out of having an abortion. “When you leave the camp you will be alone,” he told her. “Think how good it will be to have a child.” To the end of her life, the woman was grateful to him.
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Anatoly Zhigulin wrote too of a “good” camp boss, who “saved hundreds from death,” called his charges “comrade prisoners” in defiance of the rules, and ordered the cook to feed them better. Clearly, noted Zhigulin, he “didn’t know the rules yet.” Mariya Sandratskaya, arrested for being the wife of an “enemy,” also describes a camp boss who paid special attention to the mothers in the camp, making sure the nursery was well run, that nursing women had enough to eat, and that mothers did not work too hard.
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In fact, kindness was possible: at all levels, there were always a few who resisted the propaganda describing all prisoners as enemies, a few who understood the true state of affairs. And a startling number of memoirists do note a single experience of kindness from a prison guard, or a single instance of consideration. “I don’t doubt,” wrote Evgeny Gnedin, “that in the enormous army of camp administrators, there were honest workers who were distressed by their role as overseers to completely innocent people.”
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Yet at the same time, most memoirists also marvel at how exceptional such understanding was. For despite the few counter-examples, clean prisons were not the norm, many camps were lethal—and the majority of guards treated their charges with indifference at best, outright cruelty at worst.

Nowhere, I repeat, was cruelty actually required. On the contrary: deliberate cruelty was officially frowned upon by the central administration. Camp guards and administrators who were unnecessarily harsh to prisoners could be punished, and often were. The archives of Vyatlag contain reports of guards punished for “systematically beating up
zeks
,” for stealing prisoners’ belongings, and for raping women prisoners.
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The archives of Dmitlag record the criminal sentences handed out to camp administrators accused of beating prisoners while drunk. The Gulag’s central archives also record punishments for prison camp commanders who beat up prisoners, who tortured them during investigations, or who sent them on transports without proper winter clothes.
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Yet cruelty persisted. Sometimes it was genuinely sadistic. Viktor Bulgakov, a prisoner in the 1950s, recalled one of his guards, an illiterate Kazakh, who appeared to derive pleasure from forcing prisoners to stand, slowly freezing, in the snow, and another who liked to “show off his strength and beat prisoners” for no particular reason.
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The Gulag’s archives also contain, among many other similar records, a description of the chief of one of the
lagpunkts
at Volgostroi during the war, Comrade Reshetov, who put
zeks
in freezing cold cells as punishment, and ordered sick prisoners to work in severe frost, as a result of which many died on the job.
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More often, cruelty was not so much sadism as self-interest. Guards who shot escaping prisoners received monetary rewards, and could even be granted a vacation at home. Guards were therefore tempted to encourage such “escapes.” Zhigulin described the result:

The guard would shout at someone in the column, “Hey, bring me that plank!”

“But it’s across the fence . . .”

“Doesn’t matter. Go!”

The prisoner would go, and a line of machine-gun fire would follow him.
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Such incidents were common—as archives show. In 1938, four VOKhR guards working in Vyatlag were sentenced for killing two prisoners whom they had “provoked” to escape. In the aftermath, it emerged that the division commander and his assistant had helped themselves to the prisoners’ belongings as well.
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The writer Boris Dyakov also mentions the practice of provoking escapes in his “pro-Soviet” Gulag memoir, published in the USSR in 1964.
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As on the convoy trains, the cruelty in camps seemed, at times, to derive from anger or boredom at having to do a menial job. While working as a nurse in a Kolyma hospital, the Dutch communist Elinor Lipper sat up in the night beside a patient with pleurisy and high fever. He also had a carbuncle on his back which had burst, thanks to the guard who had brought him to the hospital: