Gulag (59 page)

The numbers did start to go down later in the war, but they never vanished altogether. In 1947, when escapes reached their postwar height, 10,440 prisoners attempted escape, of whom only 2,894 were caught.
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This is, perhaps, a small percentage of the millions who were in the camps at the time, but it nevertheless suggests that escapes were not as impossible as some remember. It may even be that their frequency helps to explain the harshening of camp regimes, and the higher levels of security, which characterized life in the Gulag during the last half-decade of its existence.

Generally, memoirists agree that the overwhelming majority of would-be runaways were professional criminals. Criminal slang reflects this, even referring to the coming of spring as the arrival of the “green prosecutor” (as in “Vasya was released by the green prosecutor”) since spring was when summer escapes were most often contemplated: “A trip through the taiga is possible only during the summer, when it is possible to eat grass, mushrooms, berries, roots, or pancakes baked from moss flour, to catch fieldmice, chipmunks, squirrels, jays, rabbits ...”
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In the very far north, the optimum time to escape was the winter, which criminals there referred to as the “white prosecutor”: only then would the swamps and mud of the tundra be passable.
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In fact, professional criminals were more successful at escaping because once they had gone “under the wire” they stood a far better chance of surviving. If they made it to a major city, they could melt into the local criminal world, forge documents, and find hiding places. With few aspirations to return to the “free” world, criminals also escaped simply for the fun of it, just to be “out” for a little while. If they were caught, and managed to survive, what was another ten-year sentence to someone who already had two twenty-five-year sentences, or more? One ex
-zek
remembers a woman criminal who escaped merely to have a rendezvous with a man. She returned “filled with delight,” although she was immediately sentenced to the punishment cell.
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Political prisoners escaped much less often. Not only did they lack the network and the expertise, but they were also pursued with greater fervor. Tchernavin—who gave these issues much thought before escaping himself—explained the difference:

The guards did not take the escape of criminals very seriously and did not exert much effort in pursuing them: they would be caught when they came out to the railroad or reached a town. But for the pursuit of political prisoners, posses would be organized at once: sometimes all neighboring villages would be mobilized and the frontier guards called to assist. The political prisoner always tried to escape abroad—in his motherland he had no refuge.
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Most runaways were men, but not all of them. Margarete Buber-Neumann was in a camp from which a Gypsy girl escaped, running away with the camp cook. An older Gypsy woman, hearing the story, nodded knowingly: “She’s got an idea there’s a
tabor
[a Gypsy encampment] somewhere in the neighborhood. If she can get to that, she’s safe.”
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Usually, escapes were planned in advance, but they could be spontaneous too: Solzhenitsyn tells the story of a prisoner who jumped over a barbed-wire fence during a dust storm in Kazakhstan.
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Escape attempts were often launched from the more loosely guarded camp work sites, but that was not always the case either. In the randomly selected month of September 1945, for example, 51 percent of recorded escape attempts took place in the working zone; 27 percent took place from the living zone; and 11 percent took place during transport.
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Edward Buca planned an escape from a prisoner transport train bound for Siberia, along with a group of young Ukrainians:

With my hacksaw blade, we would try to cut through four or five planks, working only at night and concealing the marks with a mixture of bread and horse dung from the floor of the car. When the opening was ready, we would wait until the train stopped in the forest and then push out the planks and leap from the wagon—as many of us as possible, scattering in all directions to confuse the guard. Some of us would be shot at, but most of us could get away.
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They had to give up the plan when the escape attempt was suspected. Others did try to escape from the trains, however: in June 1940, two criminal prisoners actually got out through a hole in a wagon.
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In that same year, Janusz Bardach slipped through some rotten boards in a wagon too. He neglected to fix them back in place, however, and was immediately caught, tracked down by dogs, and badly beaten—but allowed to live.
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Some escapes had their origins, as Solzhenitsyn puts it, “not in despairing impulse but in technical calculations and the love of fine workmanship.”
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False walls were built into railway boxcars; prisoners hammered themselves into boxes and had themselves shipped out of the camp.
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Once, twenty-six criminal prisoners dug their way under a wall. All made it out, although—according to the officer who led the search—they were also all captured again within the year.
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Others, like Tchernavin, used their special positions within the camp to organize their escape. Archives record the story of a prisoner who deliberately caused an accident on a goods train and escaped amid the confusion.
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In another recorded case, prisoners who had been assigned to bury bodies in the camp cemetery shot their convoy guard and placed him in the mass grave, so that his corpse would not be immediately noticed.
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Escape was also easier for “unguarded” prisoners who had passes allowing them to move about between camps.

Disguise was used as well. Varlam Shalamov tells the story of a prisoner who escaped and managed to spend two years in freedom, wandering through Siberia, pretending to be a geologist. At one point, regional authorities, proud to have such an expert in their midst, asked him very respectfully to give a lecture. “Krivoshei smiled, quoted Shakespeare in English, sketched something on the blackboard, and ran through dozens of foreign names.” He was caught, in the end, because he sent money to his wife.
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His story might possibly be apocryphal—but the archives do record similar tales. In one such episode, a Kolyma prisoner stole some documents, smuggled himself onto a plane, and flew to Yakutsk. There he was found, comfortably installed in a hotel, with 200 grams of gold in his pocket.
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Not all escapes involved clever flights of fancy. Many—probably the majority—criminal escapes involved violence. Runaways attacked, shot, and suffocated armed guards, as well as free workers and local residents.
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They did not spare their fellow inmates either. One of the standard methods of criminal escape involved cannibalism. Pairs of criminals would agree in advance to escape along with a third man (the “meat”), who was destined to become the sustenance for the other two on their journey. Buca also describes the trial of a professional thief and murderer, who, along with a colleague, escaped with the camp cook, their “walking supply”:

They weren’t the first to get this idea. When you have a huge community of people who dream of nothing but escape, it is inevitable that every possible means of doing so will be discussed. A “walking supply” is, in fact, a fat prisoner. If you have to, you can kill him and eat him. And until you need him, he is carrying the “food” himself.

The two men did as planned—they killed and ate the cook—but they had not bargained on the length of the journey. They began to get hungry again:

Both knew in their hearts that the first to fall asleep would be killed by the other. So both pretended they weren’t tired and spent the night telling stories, each watching the other closely. Their old friendship made it impossible for either to make an open attack on the other, or to confess their mutual suspicions.

Finally, one fell asleep. The other slit his throat. He was caught, Buca claims, two days later, with pieces of raw flesh still in his sack.
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Although there is no way of knowing how often this type of escape occurred, there are enough similar stories, told by a wide enough range of prisoners, from camps from the early 1930s to the late 1940s, to be certain that they did take place, at least from time to time.
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Thomas Sgovio heard the death sentence pronounced on two such escapees—they had taken a boy prisoner, and salted his flesh after murdering him—when he was in Kolyma.
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Vatslav Dvorzhetsky was told a similar story in Karelia, in the mid-1930s.
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There are also to be found, in the oral tradition of the Gulag, some truly extraordinary tales of escape and of escapees—many, again, quite possibly apocryphal. Solzhenitsyn relates the saga of Georgy Tenno, an Estonian political who escaped from camps over and over again, on one occasion traveling 300 miles by horse, boat, bicycle, very nearly making it to the central Siberian city of Omsk. While some of Tenno’s stories are probably true—he later befriended another Gulag survivor and memoirist, Alexander Dolgun, whom he also introduced to Solzhenitsyn—some of his other, more spectacular tales of escape are harder to verify.
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One English anthology contains the story of an Estonian, a preacher, who managed to escape from a camp, forge papers, and walk over the border to Afghanistan with his companions. The same anthology tells of a Spanish prisoner who escaped by pretending to be dead after an earthquake wrecked his camp. Later, he says, he slipped over the border to Iran.
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Finally, there is the curious case of Slavomir Rawicz, whose memoir,
The Long Walk
, contains the most spectacular and moving description of an escape in all of Gulag literature. According to his account, Rawicz was captured after the Soviet invasion of Poland, and deported to a camp in northern Siberia. He claims to have escaped, with the connivance of a camp commander’s wife, in the company of six other prisoners, one of them an American. Along with a Polish girl, a deportee whom they picked up along the way, they made their way out of the Soviet Union.

During what would have been an extraordinary journey—if it ever took place—they walked around Lake Baikal, over the border into Mongolia, across the Gobi Desert, over the Himalayas and Tibet, and into India. Along the way, four of the prisoners died; the rest suffered extremes of privation. Unfortunately, several attempts to verify this story—which bears a distinct resemblance to a Rudyard Kipling short story, “The Man Who Was”—have come to nothing.
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The Long Walk is a superbly told story, even if it never happened. Its convincing realism may well serve as a lesson to all of us who try to write a factual history of escapes from the Gulag.

For, in fact, fantasy about escape played an important part in many prisoners’ lives. Even for the many thousands of prisoners who never would attempt it, the thought of escape—the dream of escape—remained an important psychological prop. A Kolyma survivor told me that “one of the most obvious forms of opposition to the regime was to escape.” Young male prisoners in particular planned, discussed, and argued about the best ways of escape. For some, this discussion itself was a way of fighting the sensation of powerlessness, as Gustav Herling writes:

We would often meet in one of the barracks, an intimate group of Poles, to discuss the details of the plan; we collected scraps of metal found at work, old boxes and fragments of glass which we deluded ourselves could be made into an improvised compass; we gathered information about the surrounding countryside, and the distances, climatic conditions and geographical peculiarities of the north . . .

In the nightmare land to which we had been brought from the West on hundreds of goods trains, every grasp at our own private day-dreams gave us fresh life. After all, if membership of a non-existent terrorist organization can be a crime punished by ten years in a labor camp, then why should a sharpened nail not be a compass-needle, a piece of wood a ski, and a scrap of paper, covered with scribbled dots and lines, a map?

Herling suspects that everyone involved in these discussions believed, deep down, that their preparations were futile. Nevertheless, the exercise served its purpose:

I remember a junior officer of the Polish cavalry who, during the worst periods of hunger in the camp, found enough strength of will to cut a thin slice of bread from his daily ration, dry it over the fire, and save these scraps in a sack which he concealed in some mysterious hiding-place in the barrack. Years later, we met again in the Iraqi desert, and as we recalled prison days over a bottle in an army tent, I made fun of his “plan” of escape. But he answered gravely: “You shouldn’t laugh at that. I survived the camp thanks to hope of escape, and I survived the mortuary thanks to my store of bread. A man can’t live if he doesn’t know what he’s living for.”
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If escapes from the camp were impossible in the folk memory of most survivors, rebellion was unthinkable. The caricature of the downtrodden, defeated, and dehumanized
zek
, desperate to collaborate with the authorities, incapable even of thinking ill of the Soviet regime—let alone organizing against it—appears in many memoirs, not least those of two of the Russian survivor community’s greatest literary figures: Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov. And it may well be that, throughout much of the Gulag’s history, this image was not far off the mark. The system of internal spying and informers did make prisoners suspicious of one another. The grinding inevitability of the work and the dominance of the thieves-in-law did make it difficult for other prisoners to think of organized opposition. The humiliating experience of interrogation, prison, and deportation had robbed many of the will to live, let alone the will to oppose the authorities. Herling, who organized a hunger strike with a group of other Polish prisoners, describes the reaction of his Russian friends:

They were excited and fascinated by the very fact that we had dared to lift a hand against the unalterable law of slavery, which had never before been disturbed by one gesture of rebellion. On the other hand, there was the instinctive fear, which they had retained from their former lives, that they might be involved in something dangerous, perhaps a case threatened by a war tribunal. Who was to know whether the hearings would not reveal the “rebel’s” conversations in the barracks immediately after committing the offense?
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