Gulag (71 page)

The change affected the prisons too. During the months following Stalin’s death, Susanna Pechora was in a solitary prison cell, undergoing a second interrogation: as a Jewish “counter-revolutionary,” she had been recalled to Moscow from her camp in connection with the Doctors’ Plot. Then, quite suddenly, her investigation stopped. Her interrogator summoned her to a meeting. “You understand, I am not guilty of wronging you, I never beat you, I haven’t hurt you,” he told her. He sent her to a new cell, and there, for the first time, she heard one of the women speaking of Stalin’s death. “What’s happened?” she asked. Her cell mates fell silent: since everyone knew Stalin had died, they assumed she must be an informer who was trying to gauge their opinions. It took her a whole day to convince them of her genuine ignorance. After that, recalled Pechora, the situation began to change dramatically.

The guards were afraid of us, we did what we wanted, we shouted during exercise periods, made speeches, crawled through windows. We would refuse to stand up when they came into our cells and told us not to lie on our beds. We would have been shot for doing such things half a year earlier.
³¹

Not everything changed. Leonid Trus was also under interrogation in March 1953. While Stalin’s death may have saved him from execution, he still received a twenty-five-year sentence. One of his cell mates got ten years for saying something untactful about Stalin’s death.
³²
Nor was everybody freed. The amnesty had been limited, after all, to the very young, the very old, women with children, and prisoners with sentences of five years or less. Overwhelmingly, those with short sentences were criminal prisoners, or politicals with unusually thin cases. That still left well over a million prisoners in the Gulag, including hundreds of thousands of politicals with long sentences.

In some camps, those due to be released were showered with gifts, attention, and letters to take back to friends and families.
³³
Just as often, terrible rivalries broke out between prisoners who were due to be released and those who were not. Forty years later, one prisoner who was not released in the initial amnesty still recalled it bitterly as an “amnesty for pickpockets,” a freedom for petty thieves: “the criminals were happy, they were all freed.”
³⁴
In one camp, a gang of women prisoners with long sentences beat up a woman with a short sentence, out of spite. Those due to be released also provoked anger, holding themselves apart, looking down on the other “criminals” who would remain behind.
³⁵

Other kinds of violence broke out as well. Some with long sentences approached camp doctors, demanding to be given the coveted “invalid” certificate which would mandate their immediate release. Doctors who refused were threatened or beaten. In Pechorlag, there were six such incidents: doctors were “systematically terrorized,” beaten, even knifed. In Yuzhkuzbasslag, four prisoners threatened the camp doctor with death. In other camps, the number of prisoners released as “invalids” exceeded the number of invalids previously recorded in the camps.
³⁶

But one particular group of prisoners, in one particular set of camps, experienced quite a different set of emotions. The prisoners of the “special camps” were indeed a special case: overwhelmingly, their inmates had ten-, fifteen-, or twenty-five-year sentences, and no hope of release under Beria’s amnesty. Only minor changes had been made to their regime in the first few months following Stalin’s death. Prisoners were now allowed to receive packages, for example, but only one per year. Grudgingly, the administration allowed camp soccer teams to play against one another. But they still wore numbered uniforms, the windows of their barracks were still barred, and the barracks remained locked at night. All contact with the outside world was kept to a minimum.
³⁷

It was a recipe for rebellion. By 1953, the inhabitants of the special camps had been kept separate from criminal and “ordinary” prisoners since 1948, more than five years. Left to themselves, they had evolved systems of internal organization and resistance which had no parallel in the earlier years of the Gulag. For years, they had been on the brink of organized uprising, plotting and planning, restrained only by the hope that Stalin’s death would bring their release. When Stalin’s death changed nothing, hope vanished— and was replaced by anger.

Chapter 24

THE ZEKS’ REVOLUTION

I cannot sleep. Blizzards are howling
From some unknown, forgotten time.
And the colored tents of Tamburlaine
Are out there on the steppe . . . blazing bonfires, blazing
bonfires

I shall become a Mongol princess
Galloping deep into the past
And lash to the tail of my horse
My loved ones, and my enemies . . .
And then, at one of the battles
In an unthinkable orgy of blood
At the moment of utter defeat
I will throw myself on my sword . . .

—Anna Barkova, “In the Prison Camp Barracks”
¹

IN THE WAKE OF STALIN’S DEATH, the special camps, like the rest of the country, were awash with rumors. Beria would take over; Beria was dead. Marshal Zhukov and Admiral Kuznetsov had marched into Moscow and were attacking the Kremlin with tanks; Khrushchev and Molotov had been murdered. All prisoners would be freed; all prisoners would be executed; the camps had been surrounded by armed MVD troops, ready to put down any sign of rebellion. Prisoners repeated these stories in whispers and shouts, hoping and speculating.
²

At the same time, the national organizations in the special camps were growing stronger, the links between them steadier. Typical of this era are the experiences of Viktor Bulgakov, who was arrested in the spring of 1953—on the night of Stalin’s death, in fact—and accused of participating in an anti-Stalinist student political circle. Soon after, he arrived in Minlag, the special camp in the coal-mining Inta complex, north of the Arctic Circle.

Bulgakov’s description of the atmosphere in Minlag contrasts sharply with the memoirs of prisoners of an earlier era. A teenager at the time of his arrest, he walked into a well-organized, anti-Stalinist, anti-Soviet community. Strikes and protests occurred “with regularity.” The prisoners had sorted themselves into several very distinct national groupings, each with its own character. The Balts had a “tight organization, but without a well-run hierarchy.” The Ukrainians, mostly ex-partisans, were “extremely well-organized, as their leaders had been partisan leaders prior to captivity, they all knew each other, and their structure appeared almost automatically.”

The camp also contained prisoners who believed in communism, although they had sorted themselves into two groups: those who merely toed the Party line; and those who considered themselves communists out of faith or conviction—and believed in the reform of the Soviet Union. Finally, it had become possible to be an anti-Soviet Marxist, something unthinkable in earlier years. Bulgakov himself belonged to the People’s Workers’ Union—the
Narodno-Trudovoi Soyuz
, or NTS—an anti-Stalinist opposition movement, which would gain a great deal of notoriety a decade or two later, as the paranoid authorities began to see signs of its influence everywhere.

Bulgakov’s preoccupations in camp would have stunned an earlier generation of prisoners too. In Minlag, the prisoners managed to put out a secret underground newspaper, written by hand and distributed around the camps. They intimidated the
pridurki
, who “became afraid of the prisoners” as a result. They kept tabs on camp informers too—as did other prisoners in special camps. Dmitri Panin has also described the increasingly deadly war against informers:

Retribution was carried out systematically. During the course of eight months forty-five informers were done away with. Operations against them were directed from a clandestine center . . . We saw how a number of stoolie prisoners, unable to stand the threat of liquidation that hung over them, sought to escape their fate by getting themselves put in the camp jail—the only place they could hide from certain retaliation. They were all kept in the same cell, which was dubbed the “funk hole.”
³

One camp historian has written that murders of informers became “such an ordinary occurrence that no one was surprised or interested,” and notes that the informers “died out quickly.”
⁴
Once again, life inside the camps mirrored and amplified life on the outside. The anti-Soviet partisan organizations in western Ukraine had also tried intensely to destroy informers, and their leaders brought the obsession with them to the camps.
⁵
Perhaps cognizant of this, the authorities in Panin’s camp separated the Ukrainian prisoners from the others, since the Ukrainians were thought to be responsible for the deaths of informers. This only increased their solidarity and their anger.
⁶

By 1953, Bulgakov’s comrades in Minlag were also making a systematic attempt to keep track of their own numbers and living conditions, and to transmit this information to the West, using cooperative guards and other techniques that would be perfected in the dissident camps of the 1970s and 1980s, as we shall see. Bulgakov himself took on responsibility for hiding these documents, as well as copies of songs and poetry composed by the prisoners. Leonid Sitko did the same job in Steplag, using the basement of a building that camp workers were constructing as a place to hide documents. Among them were “short descriptions of individual lives, the letters of dead inmates, a short document signed by a doctor, Galina Mishkina, on the inhuman conditions in the camps (including statistics on deaths, levels of starvation, and so on), an account of the organization and growth of the camps of Kazakhstan, a more detailed account of the history of Steplag—and poems.”
⁷

Both Sitko and Bulgakov believed, simply, that someday the camps would be shut, the barracks would be burned down, and that the information could be retrieved again. Twenty years earlier, no one had dared to think such a thing, let alone act upon it.

Very quickly, the tactics and strategy of conspiracy spread throughout the special camp system, thanks to the Gulag administration itself. In the past, prisoners who were suspected of hatching conspiracies had simply been split up. The central authorities had moved prisoners from camp to camp, destroying rebel networks before they began. Within the more specific climate of the special camps, however, this tactic backfired. Instead, the frequent movements of prisoners became an excellent means of spreading rebellion.
⁸

North of the Arctic Circle, the summers are very short, and very hot. Toward the end of May, the ice on the rivers begins to break up. The days grow longer, until night vanishes altogether. At some point in June—in some years as late as July—the sun suddenly begins to shine with real ferocity, sometimes for a month, sometimes two. From one day to the next, the Arctic wildflowers suddenly begin to bloom, and for a few short weeks, the tundra is awash with color. For human beings, who have been locked inside for nine months, the summer brings an overwhelming desire to go outdoors, to be free. During the few hot summer days that I spent in Vorkuta, the inhabitants of the city seemed to spend virtually all of their days and all of their white nights outside, strolling the streets, sitting in the parks, talking to one another on the doorsteps of their houses. It is no accident that springtime was the season for prisoners to attempt escape. Nor is it an accident that the Gulag’s three most important, most dangerous, and most famous uprisings all took place in northern camps in the spring.

In Gorlag, the special camp in the Norilsk complex, the mood was particularly angry in the spring of 1953. The previous autumn, a large group of prisoners, about 1,200 in all, had been transferred to Gorlag from Karaganda, where many seem to have been involved in the armed escape attempts and protests that had taken place there a few months earlier. All had been imprisoned for “revolutionary activity in the western Ukraine and Baltic States.” They had, according to the MVD’s records, started organizing a “revolutionary committee” even while still in transit to Norilsk.

According to prisoners’ accounts, they also murdered four camp informers—with pickaxes—within a few days of their arrival.
⁹
By the spring of 1953, deeply angered by the amnesty which had passed them by, this group had created what the MVD described as an “anti-Soviet organization” in the camp, which probably means that they had strengthened the national organizations already in place.

Unrest percolated throughout the month of May. On May 25, convoy guards shot a prisoner on his way to work. On the following morning, two of the camp’s divisions went on strike in protest. A few days later, guards opened fire on prisoners who were throwing messages over the wall that separated the male and the female camps. Some were wounded. Then, on June 4 , a group of prisoners broke down the wooden barrier which divided their camp’s punishment barrack from the rest of the
zona
, and freed twenty-four prisoners. They also captured a member of the camp administration, took him into the
zona
, and made him hostage. The guards opened fire, killing five prisoners and wounding fourteen others. Four more camp divisions joined the protest. By June 5, 16,379 prisoners were on strike. Soldiers surrounded the camps, and all of the exits were blocked.
¹⁰

At about the same time, a similar process was taking place in Rechlag, the special camp in the Vorkuta coal-mining complex. Prisoners had attempted to organize mass strikes in Rechlag as early as 1951, and the administration would later claim to have uncovered no less than five “revolutionary organizations” in the camp in 1951 and 1952.
¹¹
When Stalin died, the prisoners of Rechlag were also particularly well-equipped to follow world events. Not only were they organized into national groups, as in Minlag and elsewhere, but they had also designated particular prisoners to follow Western radio transmissions on stolen or borrowed radios, and to write up the news in the form of bulletins, with commentary, which they carefully distributed among other prisoners. Thus did they learn not only of Stalin’s death and Beria’s arrest, but also of the mass strikes in East Berlin, which took place on June 17, 1953, and were put down by Soviet tanks.
¹²

This piece of news appears to have galvanized the prisoners: if the Berliners could strike, so could they. John Noble, the American arrested in Dresden just after the war, recalled that “their spirit inspired us and we discussed nothing else for days afterwards . . . The next month we were cocky slaves. The long summer sun had melted the snow and its warmth was renewing our energy and courage. We discussed the chance of striking for our freedom, but no one knew what to do.”
¹³

By June 30, the inmates of the Kapitalnaya mine were distributing leaflets, calling on prisoners to “Stop delivery of coal.” On the same day, someone wrote a slogan on the walls of mine No. 40: “No deliveries of coal until there’s an amnesty.” The trucks themselves were empty: the prisoners had stopped digging coal.
¹⁴
On July 17, the authorities at Kapitalnaya mine had even greater cause for alarm: on that day, a group of prisoners beat up one of the foremen, allegedly because he had told them to “stop the sabotage.” When it came time for the second shift to begin, the next foreman refused to go down the mine shaft.

Just as the prisoners of Rechlag were absorbing news of these events, a large contingent of prisoners arrived—again from Karaganda. All had been promised better living conditions and a re-examination of their cases. When they arrived at work in Vorkuta’s mine No. 7, they found not an improvement, but the harshest conditions in the entire camp system. On the following day—July 19—350 of them went on strike.
¹⁵

Other strikes followed—thanks, in part, to the geography of Vorkuta itself. Vorkutlag lies at the center of a vast coal basin—one of the largest in the world. To exploit the coal, a series of mines were set up in a wide circle around the basin. Between the mines lay other enterprises—electric power stations, brick and cement factories—each one connected to a camp, as well as the city of Vorkuta and the smaller settlement of Yur-Shor. A railway line ran between all of these sites. The trains, like everything else in Vorkuta, were run by prisoners—which is how the rebellion spread: along with the coal and other supplies that they carried from one
lagpunkt
to the next, the prisoners manning the engines passed on news of the strike in camp No. 7. As the trains traveled around the great circle, thousands of prisoners heard the whispered accounts, thousands more saw the slogans painted on the trains’ sides: “To hell with your coal. We want freedom.”
¹⁶
One camp after another joined the strike until, by July 29, 1953, six of the seventeen divisions of Rechlag—15,604 people—were on strike.
¹⁷

Within most of the striking Vorkuta and Norilsk
lagpunkts
, strike committees took charge of what was clearly a dangerous situation. Terrified administrators had vacated the camps, and the potential for anarchy was great. In some cases, these committees found themselves organizing the prisoners’ food. In others, they tried to persuade inmates not to take out their aggression on the now completely defenseless informers. In the case of both Rechlag and Gorlag, memoirs and archives agree that those in charge (to the extent that anyone was in charge) were almost always western Ukrainians, Poles, and Balts. The MVD later fingered a Ukrainian named Herman Stepanyuk as the leader in Norilsk, and a Pole named Kendzerski—a “former captain in the Polish army”—as one of the leaders in Vorkuta. In his account of the rebellion, Edward Buca, another Pole, also claimed to have led the strike in Vorkuta’s mine No. 29. Although he was clearly in that camp at the time, there are reasons to doubt his account, not least because so many of the real strike leaders were later shot.
¹⁸