Gulag (45 page)

But the Westerners—a group which included Poles, Czechs, and other East Europeans—had a few advantages too. They were the object of special fascination and interest, which sometimes paid off in contacts, in gifts of food, in kinder treatment. Antoni Ekart, a Pole educated in Switzerland, was given a place in a hospital thanks to an orderly named Ackerman, originally from Bessarabia: “The fact that I came from the West simplified matters”: everyone was interested in the Westerner, and had wanted to save him.
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Flora Leipman, a Scottish woman whose Russian stepfather had talked her family into moving to the Soviet Union, deployed her “Scottishness” to entertain her fellow prisoners:

I pulled up my skirt above the knees to look like a kilt and turned down my stockings to make them look knee high. In Scots fashion my blanket was thrown over my shoulder and I hung my hat in front of me like a sporran. My voice soared with pride, singing “Annie-Laurie,” “Ye Banks and Braes o’Bonnie Doon,” always finishing up with “God Save the King”—without translation.
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Ekart also described what it felt like being an “object of curiosity” for Russian intellectuals:

At specially organized, carefully hidden meetings with some of the more trusted among them, I told them of my life in Zurich, in Warsaw, in Vienna and other cities of the West. My sports coat from Geneva, my silk shirts, were most carefully examined, for they were the only material evidence of the high standard of living outside the world of communism. Some of them were visibly incredulous when I said that I could easily buy all these articles on my monthly salary as a junior engineer in a cement factory.

“How many suits did you have?” asked one of the agricultural experts.

“Six or seven.”

“You are a liar!” said one man of not more than 25, and then, turning to the others: “Why should we tolerate such fantastic stories? Everything has its limits; we are not children.”

I had difficulty making it clear that in the West, an ordinary person, taking some care of his appearance, would aim at having several suits, because clothes keep better if one can change from time to time. For a member of the Russian intelligentsia, who seldom has more than one suit, this was difficult to grasp.
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John Noble, an American picked up in Dresden, also became a “Vorkuta VIP” and regaled his camp mates with tales of American life they found incredible. “Johnny,” one of them said to him, “you would have us believe American workers drive their own cars.”
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But although their foreignness won them admiration, it also prevented them from making the closer contacts which sustained so many in the camps. Leipman wrote that “even my new camp ‘friends’ were frightened of me because I was a foreigner in their own eyes.”
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Ekart suffered when he found himself the only non-Russian prisoner in a
lagpunkt
, both because Soviet citizens did not like him and because he did not like them: “I was surrounded by an aroma of dislike if not hatred . . . they resented the fact that I was not like them. At every step I felt their mistrust and brutishness, their ill-will and their innate vulgarity. I had to spend many sleepless nights in defense of myself and my belongings.”
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Again, his feelings have an echo in an earlier era. Dostoevsky’s descriptions of the relationship between Poles and Russian criminals in the nineteenth century suggest that Ekart’s forebears had felt the same: “The Poles (I speak only of the political offenders) behaved with a sort of refined, insulting politeness towards them, were extremely uncommunicative and could in no way conceal from the convicts the revulsion they felt for them; the convicts, for their part, understood this very well and repaid them in their own coin.”
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In an even weaker position still were the Muslim and other prisoners from central Asia and some of the Caucasian republics. They suffered the same kind of disorientation as Westerners, but usually were not able to entertain or interest the Russians either. Known as
natsmeny
(from the Russian for “national minorities”), they had been part of camp life from the late 1920s. Large numbers had been arrested during the pacification—and Sovietization—of central Asia and the northern Caucasus, and sent to work on the White Sea Canal, where a contemporary wrote that “Everything is hard for them to understand: the people who direct them, the canal which they are building, the food they are eating.”
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From 1933 on, many of them worked on the Moscow–Volga Canal as well, where the camp boss seems to have taken pity on them. At one point he ordered his subordinates to set up separate barracks and separate work brigades for them, so that they would at least be surrounded by fellow countrymen.
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Later, Gustav Herling encountered them in a northern logging camp. He remembered seeing them every evening in the camp infirmary, waiting to see the camp doctor:

Even in the waiting-room they clasped their stomachs in pain, and the moment they entered behind the partition burst into a sorrowful whining, in which moans were mixed indistinguishably with their curious broken Russian. There was no remedy for their disease . . . they were dying simply of homesickness, of longing for their native country, of hunger, cold and the monotonous whiteness of snow. Their slanting eyes, unused to the northern landscape, were always watering and their eyelashes were stuck together by a thin yellow crust. On the rare days on which we were free from work, the Uzbeks, Turcomen and Kirghiz gathered in a corner of the barrack, dressed in their holiday clothes, long colored silk robes and embroidered skullcaps. It was impossible to guess of what they talked with such great animation and excitement, gesticulating, shouting each other down and nodding their heads sadly, but I was certain that it was not of the camp.
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Life was not much better for the Koreans, usually Soviet citizens of Korean extraction, or the Japanese, a staggering 600,000 of whom arrived in the Gulag and the prisoner-of-war camp system at the end of the war. The Japanese suffered in particular from the food, which seemed not only scarce but strange and virtually inedible. As a result, they would hunt and eat things that seemed to their fellow prisoners equally inedible: wild herbs, insects, beetles, snakes, and mushrooms that even Russians would not touch. Occasionally, these forays ended badly: there are records of Japanese prisoners dying from eating poisonous grasses or wild herbs.
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A hint at how isolated the Japanese felt in the camps comes from the memoirs of a Russian prisoner who once, in a camp library, found a brochure—a speech by the Bolshevik Zhdanov—written in Japanese. He brought it to a Japanese acquaintance, a war prisoner: “I saw him genuinely happy for the first time. Later he told me that he read it every day, just to have contact with his native language.”
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Some of the other Far Eastern nationalities adapted more rapidly. A number of memoirists mention the tight organization of the Chinese— some of whom were “Soviet” ethnic Chinese born in the USSR, some of whom had been legal guest workers in the 1920s, and some of whom were unlucky people who had accidentally or whimsically walked over the very long Chinese–Soviet border. One prisoner recalled being told by a Chinaman that he, like many others, had been arrested because he had swum across the Amur River to the Soviet Union, attracted by the views on the other side: “The green and gold of the trees . . . the steppes looked so beautiful! And everyone who crossed the river from our area never came back. We thought this meant that life must be good over there, so we decided to cross. The minute we did we were arrested and charged under Article 58, Section 6, espionage. Ten years.”
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In the camps, remembered Dmitri Panin, one of Solzhenitsyn’s camp companions, the Chinese “communicated only among themselves. By way of reply to any question of ours, they put on a look of incomprehension.”
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Karlo Stajner recalled that they were very good at procuring jobs for one another: “All over Europe, the Chinese are famous as jugglers, but in the camps they were employed in the laundry. I cannot remember seeing any non-Chinese laundry workers in any of the camps I passed through.”
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By far the most influential ethnic groups in the camps were those formed by the Balts and west Ukrainians who had been swept en masse into the camps during and after the war (see Chapter 20). Fewer in numbers, but also influential, were the Poles, particularly the anti-communist Polish partisans who also appeared in the camps in the late 1940s—as well as the Chechens, whom Solzhenitsyn described as “the one nation which would not give in, would not acquire the mental habits of submission,” and who stood out, in a number of ways, from the other Caucasians.
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The strength of these particular ethnic groups was in their sheer numbers, and in their clear opposition to the Soviet Union, whose invasion of their respective countries they regarded as illegal. The postwar Poles, Balts, and Ukrainians also had military and partisan experience, and in some cases their partisan organizations were maintained in the camps. Just after the war, the general staff of UPA, the Ukrainian Rebel Army, one of several groups fighting for control of Ukraine at that time, issued a statement to all Ukrainians who had been deported into exile or sent to camps: “Wherever you are, in the mines, the forest or the camps, always remain what you have formerly been, remain true Ukrainian, and continue our fight.”

In the camps, ex-partisans self-consciously helped one another, and watched over newcomers. Adam Galinski, a Pole who had fought with the anti-Soviet Polish Home Army, both during and after the war, wrote that: “We took special care of the youth of the Home Army and kept up its morale, the highest in the degrading atmosphere of moral decline that prevailed among the different national groups imprisoned in Vorkuta.”
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In later years, when they acquired more power to influence the running of the camps, Poles, Balts, and Ukrainians—like Georgians, Armenians, and Chechens—also formed their own national brigades, slept separately in national barracks, and organized celebrations of national holidays. At times, these powerful groups cooperated with one another. The Polish writer Alexander Wat wrote that Ukrainians and Poles, bitter wartime enemies whose partisan movements fought one another over every inch of western Ukraine, related to one another in Soviet prisons “with reserve but with incredible loyalty. ‘We are enemies, but not here.’”
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At other times these ethnic groups competed, both with one another and with Russians. Lyudmila Khachatryan, herself arrested for falling in love with a Yugoslav soldier, remembered the Ukrainians in her camp refusing to work with the Russians.
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The national resistance groups, wrote another observer, “are characterized on the one hand by hostility to the regime, on the other by hostility to the Russians.” Edward Buca remembered a more generalized hostility—“It was unusual for a prisoner to give any help to anyone of a different nationality”
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—although Pavel Negretov, in Vorkuta at the same time as Buca, felt that most nationalities got along, except when they succumbed to the administration’s “provocations”: “they tried, through their informers . . . to get us to quarrel.”
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During the late 1940s, when the various ethnic groups took over the criminals’ role as de facto policemen within the camps, they sometimes fought one another for control. Marlen Korallov recalled that “they began to fight for power, and power meant a great deal: who controlled the dining hall, for instance, mattered a great deal, because the cook would work directly for its master.” According to Korallov, the balance between the various groups at that time was extremely delicate, and could be upset by the arrival of a new transport. When a group of Chechens arrived in his
lagpunkt
, for example, they entered the barracks and “threw all of the belongings on the lower bunks on to the floor”—in that camp the lower bunks were the “aristocratic” bunks—“and moved in with their own possessions.”
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Leonid Sitko, a prisoner who spent time in a Nazi POW camp only to be arrested on his return to Russia, witnessed a far more serious battle between Chechens, Russians, and Ukrainians in the late 1940s. The argument started with a personal dispute between brigade leaders and escalated: “it became war, all out war.” The Chechens staged an attack on a Russian barracks, and many were wounded. Later, all of the ringleaders were put in a punishment cell. Although the disputes were over influence within the camp, they had their origin in deeper national feelings, Sitko explained: “The Balts and Ukrainians considered Soviets and Russians to be one and the same thing. Although there were plenty of Russians in the camp, that didn’t stop them from thinking of Russians as occupiers and thieves.”

Sitko himself was once approached in the middle of the night by a group of west Ukrainians:

“Your name is Ukrainian,” they said to me. “Who are you, a traitor?”

I explained to them that I had grown up in the North Caucasus, in a family that spoke Russian, and that I didn’t know why I had a Ukrainian name. They sat for a while, and then left. They could have killed me though—they had a knife.
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One woman prisoner, who otherwise remembered national differences as being “no big deal,” also joked that this was true for everyone except the Ukrainians, who simply “hated everyone else.”
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Odd though it sounds, in most camps there was no clan for Russians, the ethnic group which formed the decided majority in the camps, according to the Gulag’s own statistics, throughout their existence.
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Russians did, it is true, attach themselves to one another according to what city or part of the country they came from. Muscovites found other Muscovites, Leningraders other Leningraders, and so on. Vladimir Petrov was helped, at one point, by a doctor who asked him,

“What were you, before?”

“A student in Leningrad.”

“Ah! So you are a countryman of mine—very good,” said the doctor, patting my shoulder.
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