Gulag (58 page)
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 Walk
1
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
If ideology and fear did not impel the locals to turn in escaped prisoners, greed did. Fairly or unfairly, many memoirists believe that local tribal peoples—the Eskimos of the far north, the Kazakhs to the south—were constantly on the lookout for runaways. Some became professional bounty-hunters, searching for prisoners in return for a kilogram of tea or a bag of wheat.
11
In Kolyma, a local inhabitant who brought in the right hand of a runaway—or, by some accounts, the runaway’s head—received a 250-ruble prize, and the prizes seem to have been similar elsewhere.
12
In one recorded case, a local man recognized an escaped prisoner masquerading as a free man, and reported his presence to the police. He received 250 rubles. His son, who had gone to the police station, received 150 as well. In another case, a man who reported the location of a runaway to a camp chief was given the princely sum of 300 rubles.
13
For those who were caught, the punishments were extreme. Many were shot instantly. The bodies of dead runaways had their propaganda uses as well:
As we approached the gate, I thought for a moment that I must be having a bad dream: a naked corpse was suspended from the gatepost. Its hands and feet were bound with wire, its head was sunk to one side, the rigid eyes were half open. Above the head was a board with the inscription: “This is the fate of all those who try to escape from Norilsk.”
14
Zhigulin remembers the dead bodies of men who had attempted escape lying in the center of his Kolyma
lagpunkt
, sometimes for as long as a month.
15
The practice was in fact an old one, dating back to Solovetsky. By the 1940s, it was nearly universal.
16
And yet—prisoners did try to escape. Indeed, to judge by the official statistics, and by the angry correspondence on the subject in the Gulag archives, both attempted and successful escapes were more common than most memoirists concede. There are, for example, records of punishments meted out following successful escapes. In 1945, following several group escapes from the camps surrounding “NKVD Construction Site 500”—a railroad across eastern Siberia—officers in the armed guards received five- or ten-day prison sentences, with their pay docked 50 percent for every day behind bars. In other instances, guards were put on trial following prominent escapes, while camp bosses sometimes lost their jobs.
17
There are also records of guards who foiled escapes. A 300-ruble prize was awarded to a prison guard who sounded the alarm after escaping prisoners had suffocated a night watchman. His boss received 200 rubles, as did another prison chief, and the soldiers involved received 100 rubles apiece.
18
No camp was completely secure. Solovetsky, with its remote location, was thought to be impregnable. Yet a pair of White Guards, S. A. Malsagov and Yuri Bessonov, escaped from one of the SLON mainland camps in May 1925. After attacking their guards, they walked for thirty-five days to the Finnish border. Both later wrote books about their experiences, among the first about Solovetsky to appear in the West.
19
There was another famous breakout from Solovetsky in 1928, in which half-a-dozen prisoners attacked their guards and broke through the gates of the camp. Most got away, probably escaping over the Finnish border too.
20
Two particularly spectacular escapes, also from Solovetsky, occurred in 1934. One involved four “spies”; the other concerned “one spy and two bandits.” Both parties had managed to steal boats, and had escaped by water, presumably to Finland. As a result, the camp boss was fired, and others were reprimanded.
21
As the SLON camps expanded onto the Karelian mainland in the late 1920s, opportunities for escape multiplied—and Vladimir Tchernavin took advantage of them. Tchernavin was a fisheries expert who had bravely tried to inject some realism into the Murmansk Fishing Trust’s Five-Year Plan. His criticism of the project won him a conviction for “wrecking.” He received a five-year sentence and was sent to Solovetsky. SLON eventually put him to work as prisoner expert in northern Karelia, where he was meant to design new fishing enterprises.
Tchernavin bided his time. Over many months he won the trust of his superiors, who even granted permission for his wife and fifteen-year-old son, Andrei, to pay him a visit. One day during their visit, in the summer of 1933, the family headed off on a “picnic” across the local bay. When they reached the western edge, Tchernavin and his wife told Andrei that they were leaving the USSR—on foot. “Without compass or map, we walked over wild mountains, through forests and across swamps, to Finland and freedom,” wrote Tchernavin.
22
Decades later, Andrei remembered that his father had believed he could change the world’s view of Soviet Russia if he wrote a book about his experiences. He did. It did not.
23
But Tchernavin’s experience may not have been unique: indeed, the period of the Gulag’s early expansion might well have been the golden age of escape. The number of prisoners was multiplying rapidly, the number of guards was insufficient, the camps were relatively near to Finland. In 1930, 1,174 escaped convicts were captured on the Finnish border. By 1932, 7,202 had been found—and it may well be that the number of successful attempts also went up proportionately.
24
According to the Gulag’s own statistics— which may not, of course, be accurate—in 1933, 45,755 people escaped from camps, of which only just over half—28,370—were captured.
25
The local population was reported to be terrorized by the huge number of convicts on the loose, and camp commanders submitted constant requests for reinforcements, as did the border guards and the local OGPU.
26
In response, the OGPU instituted tighter controls. At about this time, the local population were actively recruited to help: one OGPU order called for the creation of a 16- to 19-mile belt around each camp, within which the local population would “actively fight escapes.” Those in charge of trains and boats in the vicinity of camps were also enlisted. An order was issued forbidding guards to take prisoners out of their cells after sundown.
27
Local officials begged for more resources, and especially for more guards to prevent escapes.
28
New laws mandated extra prison sentences for escapees. Guards knew that if they shot a prisoner in the course of an escape, they might even be rewarded.
29
Nevertheless, the numbers did not fall so quickly. In 1930s Kolyma, group escapes were more common than they became later. Criminal prisoners, camping out in the forests, would organize themselves into bands, steal weapons, and even attack local residents, geological parties, and native villages. After no less than twenty-two such incidents, a special camp division was set up for 1,500 “especially dangerous elements”—prisoners likely to escape—in 1936.
30
Later, in January 1938, at the height of the Great Terror, one of the deputy chiefs of the NKVD sent out a circular to all the camps across the Soviet Union, noting that “despite a series of orders on conducting a decisive war against prisoners’ escapes from camps . . . serious improvements in this matter have yet to be made.”
31
In the early days of the Second World War, the number of escapes rose sharply again, thanks to opportunities created by the evacuation of camps in the western part of the country, and the general chaos.
32
In July 1941, fifteen prisoners escaped from Pechorlag, one of the more remote camps in the Komi Republic. In August of that same year, eight former sailors, led by a former senior lieutenant of the Northern Fleet, managed to get away from a distant outpost of Vorkuta itself.
33
