Gulag (43 page)

URKI: THE CRIMINALS

To the inexperienced political prisoner, to the young peasant girl arrested for stealing a loaf of bread, to the unprepared Polish deportee, a first encounter with the
urki
, the Soviet Union’s professional criminal caste, would have been bewildering, shocking, and unfathomable. Evgeniya Ginzburg met her first female criminals as she was boarding the boat to Kolyma:

They were the cream of the criminal world: murderers, sadists, adept at every kind of sexual perversion . . . without wasting any time they set about terrorizing and bullying the “ladies,” delighted to find that “enemies of the people” were creatures even more despised and outcast than themselves . . . They seized our bits of bread, snatched the last of our rags with our bundles, pushed us out of the places we had managed to find . . .
²

Traveling the same route, Alexander Gorbatov—General Gorbatov, a Soviet war hero, hardly a cowardly man—was robbed of his boots while in the hold of the SS
Dzhurma
, crossing the Sea of Okhotsk:

One of them hit me hard on the chest and then on the head and said with a leer: “Look at him—sells me his boots days ago, pockets the cash, and then refused to hand them over!” Off they went with their loot, laughing for all they were worth and only stopping to beat me up again when, out of sheer despair, I followed them and asked for the boots back.
³

Dozens of other memoirists describe similar scenes. The professional criminals would descend upon the other prisoners in what appeared to be a mad fury, throwing them off bunks in barracks or trains; stealing what remained of their clothing; howling, cursing, and swearing. To ordinary people, their appearance and behavior seemed bizarre in the extreme. Antoni Ekart, a Polish prisoner, was horrified by the “complete lack of inhibition on the part of the
urki
, who would openly carry out all natural functions, including onanism. This gave them a striking resemblance to monkeys, with whom they seemed to have much more in common than with men.”
⁴
Mariya Ioffe, the wife of a famous Bolshevik, also wrote that the thieves had sex openly, walked naked around the barracks, and had no feelings for one another: “Only their bodies were alive.”
⁵

Only after weeks or months in the camps did the uninitiated outsiders begin to understand that the criminal world was not uniform, that it had its own hierarchy, its own system of ranks; that, in fact, there were many different kinds of thieves. Lev Razgon explained: “They were split up into castes and communities, each with its own iron discipline, with many rules and customs, and if these were infringed the punishment was harsh: at best the individual was expelled from that group, and, at worst, he was killed.”
⁶

Karol Colonna-Czosnowski, a Polish prisoner who found himself the only political in an otherwise exclusively criminal northern logging camp, also observed these differences:

The Russian criminal was extremely class-conscious in those days. In fact, class to them was everything. In their hierarchy, big-time criminals, such as bank or train robbers, were members of the upper class. Grisha Tchorny, the head of the camp Mafia, was one of them. At the opposite end of the social scale were the petty crooks, like pickpockets. The big boys would use them as their valets and messengers and they received very little consideration. All other crimes formed the bulk of the middle class, but even there, there were distinctions.

In many ways this strange society was, in caricature, a replica of the “normal” world. In it one could find the equivalent of every shade of human virtue or failing. For example, you could readily recognize the ambitious man on his way up, the snob, the social climber, the cheat as well as the honest and generous man . . .
⁷

At the very top of this hierarchy, setting the rules for all the others, were the professional criminals. Known as
urki
,
blatnoi
, or, if they were among the criminal world’s most exclusive elite,
vory v zakone—
the expression translates as “thieves-in-law”—Russian professional criminals lived by a whole set of rules and customs which preceded the Gulag, and which outlasted it. They had nothing whatsoever to do with the vast majority of Gulag inmates who had “criminal” sentences. The so-called “ordinary” criminals—people convicted of petty theft, infringements of workplace regulations, or other nonpolitical crimes—hated the thieves-in-law with the same passion as they hated political prisoners.

And no wonder: the thieves-in-law had a culture very different from that of the average Soviet citizen. Its origins lay deep in the criminal underground of Czarist Russia, in the thieves and beggars guilds which controlled petty crime in that era.
⁸
But it had grown far more widespread during the first decades of the Soviet regime, thanks to the hundreds of thousands of orphans—direct victims of revolution, civil war, and collectivization—who had managed to survive, first as street children, then as thieves. By the late 1920s, when the camps began to expand on a mass scale, the professional criminals had become a totally separate community, complete with a strict code of behavior which forbade them to have anything to do with the Soviet state. A true thief-in-law refused to work, refused to own a passport, and refused to cooperate in any way with the authorities unless it was in order to exploit them: the “aristocrats” of Nikolai Pogodin’s 1934 play,
Aristokraty
, are already identifiable as thieves-in-law who refuse, on principle, to do any work.
⁹

For the most part, the indoctrination and re-education programs of the early 1930s were in fact directed at thieves-in-law rather than political prisoners. Thieves, being “socially close” (sotsialno-blizkii)—as opposed to politicals, who were “socially dangerous” (sotsialno-opasnyi)—were assumed to be reformable. But by the late 1930s, the authorities appear to have given up on the idea of reforming the professional criminals. Instead, they resolved to use the thieves-in-law to control and intimidate other prisoners, “counter-revolutionaries” in particular, whom the thieves naturally loathed.
¹⁰

This was not a wholly new development. A century earlier, criminal convicts in Siberia already hated political prisoners. In
The House of the Dead
, his lightly fictionalized memoir of his five years in prison, Dostoevsky recounts the remarks of a fellow prisoner: “No, they don’t like gentlemen convicts, especially political ones; they wouldn’t mind murdering them, and no wonder. To begin with, you’re a different sort of people, not like them .. .”
¹¹

In the Soviet Union, the camp administration openly deployed small groups of professional criminals to control other prisoners from about 1937 until the end of the war. During that period the highest-ranking thieves-in-law did not work, but instead ensured that others did.
¹²
As Lev Razgon described it:

They did not work but they were allocated a full ration; they levied a money tribute from all the “peasants,” those who did work; they took half of the food parcels and purchases from the camp commissary; and they brazenly cleaned out the new transports, taking all the best clothes from the newcomers. They were, in a word, racketeers, gangsters, and members of a small mafia. All the ordinary criminal inmates of the camp—and they made up the majority—hated them intensely.
¹³

Some political prisoners found ways to get along with the thieves-in-law, particularly after the war. Some top criminal bosses liked to have politicals as mascots or sidekicks. Alexander Dolgun won the respect of the criminal boss in a transit camp by beating up a lower-ranking criminal.
¹⁴
Partly because he too had defeated a criminal in a fistfight, Marlen Korallov—a young political prisoner, later a founding member of the Memorial Society—was noticed by Nikola, his camp’s criminal boss, who allowed Korallov to sit near him in the barracks. The decision changed Korallov’s status in the camp, where he was immediately regarded as “protected” by Nikola, and given a much better sleeping arrangement: “The camp understood: if I become part of the
troika
around Nikola, then I become part of the camp elite . . . all attitudes to me changed instantly.”
¹⁵

For the most part, however, the thieves’ rule over the politicals was absolute. Their superior status helped to explain why they felt, in the words of one criminologist, “at home” in the camps: they lived better there than other prisoners, and had a degree of real power in camps that they did not enjoy on the outside.
¹⁶
Korallov explains, for example, that Nikola inhabited the “only iron bed” in the barrack, which had been pushed into a corner. No one else slept on the bed, and a group of Nikola’s sidekicks lurked around it to make sure this remained so. They also hung blankets on the sides of the beds around their leader, to prevent anyone from looking in. Access to the space around the leader was carefully controlled. Such prisoners even looked upon their long sentences with a form of macho pride. Korallov observed that

There were some young guys, who in order to heighten their authority would make an attempt to escape, a hopeless attempt, and then they received an additional twenty-five years, maybe another twenty-five for sabotage. Then when they pitched up at a new camp, and told people they had 100-year sentences, that made them great figures according to camp morality.
¹⁷

Their higher status made the thieves’ world attractive to younger prisoners, who were sometimes inducted into the fraternity at elaborate initiation rituals. According to accounts put together by secret police officers and prison administrators in the 1950s, new members of the clan had to swear an oath promising to be a “worthy thief” and to accept the strict rules of the thieves’ life. Other thieves recommended the novice, perhaps praising him for “defying camp discipline” and bestowing upon him a nickname. News of the “coronation” would be passed throughout the camp system via the thieves’ network of contacts, so that even if the new thief was transferred to another lagpunkt, his status would be maintained.
¹⁸

That was the system that Nikolai Medvedev (no relation to the Moscow intellectuals) found in 1946. Arrested as a teenager for stealing grain from a collective farm, Medvedev was taken under the wing of one of the leading thieves-in-law while still on the transports, and gradually inducted into the thieves’ world. Upon arrival in Magadan, Medvedev was put to work like other prisoners—he was assigned to clean the dining hall, hardly an onerous task, but his mentor shouted at him to stop: “and so I didn’t work, just like all the other thieves didn’t work.” Instead, other prisoners did his work for him.
¹⁹

As Medvedev explains it, the camp administration were not concerned about whether particular prisoners worked or not. “For them only one thing mattered: that the mine produced gold, as much gold as possible, and that the camp stayed in order.” And, as he writes rather approvingly, the thieves did ensure that order prevailed. What the camps lost in prisoner work hours, they gained in discipline. He explained that “if someone offended someone else, they would go to the criminal ‘authorities’ with their complaints,” not to the camp authorities. This system, he claimed, kept down the level of violence and brawling, which would otherwise have been distractingly high.
²⁰

Nikolai Medvedev’s positive account of the thieves’ reign in the camps is unusual, partly because it describes the thieves’ world from the inside— many of the
urki
were illiterate, and hardly any wrote memoirs—but mainly because it is sympathetic. Most of the Gulag’s “classic” chroniclers— witnesses to the terror, the robbery, and the rape that the thieves inflicted on the other inhabitants of the camps—hated them with a passion. “The criminals are not human,” wrote Varlam Shalamov, point-blank. “The evil acts committed by criminals in camps are innumerable.”
²¹
Solzhenitsyn wrote that “It was precisely this universally human world,
our
world, with its morals, customs, and mutual relationships, which was most hateful to the thieves, most subject to their ridicule, counterposed most sharply to their anti-social, anti-public kubla or clan.”
²²
Anatoly Zhigulin described, graphically, how the thieves’ imposition of “order” actually worked. One day, while sitting in a virtually empty dining hall, he heard two prisoners fighting over a spoon. Suddenly Dezemiya, the senior “deputy” of the camp’s senior thief-in-law, burst through the door:

“What’s this noise, what’s this quarrel? You’re not allowed to disturb the peace in the dining hall!”

“Look, he took my spoon and changed it. I had a whole one, he gave me back a broken one . . .”

“I will punish you both, and reconcile you,” chortled Dezemiya. And he made two rapid movements toward the quarrelers with his pick; as quick as lightning he had knocked out one eye apiece.
²³

Certainly the thieves’ influence over camp life was profound. Their slang, so distinct from ordinary Russian that it almost qualifies as a separate language, became the most important means of communication in the camps. Although famed for its huge vocabulary of elaborate curses, a list of criminal slang words collected in the 1980s (many still the same as those used in the 1940s) also includes hundreds of words for ordinary objects, including clothes, body parts, and utensils, which are quite different from the usual Russian words. For objects of particular interest—money, prostitutes, theft, and thieves—there were literally dozens of synonyms. As well as general terms for crime (among them
po muzike khodit
, literally “move to the music”) there were also many specific terms for stealing: stealing in a train station (
derzhat sadku
), stealing on a bus (
marku derzhat
), an unplanned theft (
idti na shalynuyu
), a daytime theft (
dennik
), a thief who stole from a church (klyusvennik), among others.
²⁴

Learning to speak
blatnoe slovo
, “thieves’ talk”—sometimes called
blatnayamuzyka
, literally “thieves’ music”—was an induction ritual that most prisoners endured, though not necessarily willingly. Some never got used to it. One female political later wrote that