Category Archives: USSR

Laurence Jarvik notes that “Felix Kulov, the current Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan, a former Mayor of Bishkek and KGB officer, was sent to a Soviet-style penal colony by the country’s former ruler, Askar Akayev.” Here’s a short excerpt on self-government in Kulov’s penal colony from an interview with him on Ferghana.ru.

What is a penal colony? A territory fenced in, with watchtowers and soldiers on them, with people living inside that territory. It is absolutely deserted by night. Just two men somewhere on the tower, warrant officers on duty. They are unarmed, but have a radio to make their reports. A Soviet system, you know. A penal colony, not prison. In Western movies all cells open simultaneously, prisoners take their daily walk, and get herded back in later on. That’s probably how things are done there, I do not know. It is different in our penal colonies. You get in, there is not one other prisoner around, you are on your own. Decades of the Soviet regime and this penitentiary system resulted in appearance of certain rules.

Say, a prisoner is not supposed to carry a knife openly. No fights are permitted. Whoever has to settle some issue in that manner, they have to go to the so called forbidden zone beyond the barbed wire. The survivor comes back. That’s logical, or there will be endless fights. Sure, they occur too, but they always incur a punishment. A prisoner who got drunk should not show it because not everyone has access to booze. Prisoners do get drunk, but they are supposed to behave themselves. They’d have killed each other in no time at all otherwise. They are all “heroes” there, you know. Shortly speaking, it took many generations of prisoners literally decades to work out all these rules.

Some men become thieves by statute which elevates them to the highest status of the underworld hierarchy. It is they who see to it that these rules are observed and enforce them whenever necessary. Here is one of the rules. Whenever someone puts someone else on drugs, makes this someone else a needle-freak, then this man is in real trouble. He’ll be beaten to the inch of his life, until he wishes he did not do it. Whenever it is done in that other life, beyond the barbed wire and fence, it’s all right. In a penal colony it is forbidden.

The first principle of self-government in a penal colony is to govern yourself very carefully. LaurenceJarvikOnline posts a longer excerpt.

Our failure in the West to understand the magnitude of what happened in the Soviet Union and central Europe does not, of course, have the same profound implications for our way of life as it does for theirs. Our tolerance for the odd “Gulag denier” in our universities will not destroy the moral fabric of our society. The Cold War is over, after all, and there is no real intellectual or political force left in the communist parties of the West.

Nevertheless, if we do not start trying harder to remember, there will be consequences for us too. For one, our understanding of what is happening now in the former Soviet Union will go on being distorted by our misunderstanding of history. Again, if we really knew what Stalin did to the Chechens, and if we felt that it was a terrible crime against the Chechen nation, it is not only Vladimir Putin who would be unable to do the same things to them now, but we also would be unable to sit back and watch with any equanimity. Nor did the Soviet Union’s collapse inspire the same mobilization of Western forces as the end of the Second World War. When Nazi Germany finally fell, the rest of the West created both NATO and the European Community–in part to prevent Germany from ever breaking away from civilized “normality” again. By contrast, it was not until September 11, 2001, that the nations of the West seriously began rethinking their post-Cold War security policies, and then there were other motivations stronger than the need to bring Russia back into the civilization of the West.

But in the end, the foreign-policy consequences are not the most important. For if we forget the Gulag, sooner or later we will find it hard to understand our own history too. Why did we fight the Cold War, after all? Was it because crazed right-wing politicians, in cahoots with the military-industrial complex and the CIA, invented the whole thing and forced two generations of Americans and West Europeans to go along with it? Or was there something more important happening? Confusion is already rife. In 2002, an article in the conservative British Spectator magazine opined that the Cold War was “one of the most unnecessary conflicts of all time.” The American writer Gore Vidal has also described the battles of the Cold War as “forty years of mindless wars which created a debt of $5 trillion.”

Already, we are forgetting what it was that mobilized us, what inspired us, what held the civilization of “the West” together for so long: we are forgetting what it was that we were fighting against. If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is.

And not only our own particular past. For if we go on forgetting half of Europe’s history, some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted. Every one of the twentieth-century’s mass tragedies was unique: the Gulag, the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Nanking massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian revolution, the Bosnian wars, among many others. Every one of these events had different historical, philosophical, and cultural origins, everyone arose in particular local circumstances which will never be repeated. Only our ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow men has been–and will be–repeated again and again: our transformation of our neighbors into “enemies,” our reduction of our opponents to lice or vermin or poisonous weeds, our reinvention of our victims as lower, lesser, or evil beings, worthy only of incarceration or expulsion or death.

The more we are able to understand how different societies have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens from people into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature. This book was not written “so that it will not happen again,” as the cliché would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people. Destruction of the “objective enemy,” as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know why–and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, apart of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 575-577

Release [from the Gulag], whether it came in 1926 or 1956, had always left prisoners with mixed feelings. Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov, a prisoner released in the 1930s, was surprised by his own reaction:

I imagined that I would be dancing instead of walking, that when I finally got my freedom I’d be drunk with it. But when I was actually released, I felt none of this. I walked through the gates and past the last guard, experiencing no happiness or sense of uplift … There, along the sun-drenched platform ran two young girls in light dresses, merrily laughing about something. I looked at them in astonishment. How could they laugh? How could all these people walk around conversing and laughing as if nothing unusual was happening in the world, as if nothing nightmarish and unforgettable stood in their midst …

After Stalin’s death [in 1953] and Khrushchev’s speech [in 1956], the releases came more rapidly, and reactions became even more confused. Prisoners who had expected to spend another decade behind barbed wire were let go on a day’s notice. One group of exiles was summoned during working hours to the offices of their mine, and simply told to go home. As one remembered, Spetskomandant Lieutenant Isaev “opened a safe, pulled out our documents, and distributed them …” Prisoners who had filed petition after petition, demanding a re-examination of their cases, suddenly found that further letters were unnecessary–they could simply walk away.

Prisoners who had thought of nothing else except freedom were strangely reluctant to experience it: “Although I could hardly believe it myself, I was weeping as I walked out to freedom … I felt as though I had torn my heart away from what was dearest and most precious to it, from my comrades in misfortune. The gates closed–and it was all finished.”

Many were simply not ready. Yuri Zorin, riding a crowded prisoners’ train south from Kotlas in 1954, made it past only two stations. “Why am I going to Moscow?” he asked himself–and then turned around and headed back to his old camp, where his ex-commander helped him get a job as a free worker. There he remained, for another sixteen years. Evgeniya Ginzburg knew a woman who actually did not want to leave her barracks: “The thing is that I–I can’t face living outside. I want to stay in camp,” she told her friends. Another wrote in his diary that “I really don’t want freedom. What is drawing me to freedom? It seems to me that out there … there are lies, hypocrisy, thoughtlessness. Out there, everything is fantastically unreal, and here, everything is real.” Many did not trust Khrushchev, expected the situation to worsen again, and took jobs as free workers in Vorkuta or Norilsk. They preferred not to experience the emotions and undergo the hassle of return, if they were ultimately to be re-arrested anyway.

But even those who wanted to return home often found it nearly impossible to do so. They had no money, and very little food. Camps released prisoners with the equivalent of 500 grams of bread for every day they were expected to be on the road–a starvation ration. Even that was insufficient, since they were often on the road much longer than expected, as it proved almost impossible to obtain tickets on the few planes and trains leading south. Arriving at the station in Krasnoyarsk, Ariadna Efron found “such a crowd, that to leave was impossible, simply impossible. People from all of the camps were there, from all of Norilsk.” She was finally given a ticket out of the blue by an “angel,” a woman who by chance had two. Otherwise, she might have waited for months.

Facing a similarly crowded train, Galina Usakova, like many others, solved the problem by riding home on a baggage rack. Still others did not make it at all: it was not uncommon for prisoners to die on the difficult journey home, or within weeks or months of arrival. Weakened by their years of hard labor, tired out by exhausting journeys, the emotions surrounding their return overwhelmed them, resulting in heart attacks and strokes. “How many people died from this freedom!” one prisoner marveled.

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 511-512

Generally, memoirists agree that the overwhelming majority of would-be runaways [from the Gulag] 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…” 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.

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….

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. 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.

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 395-398

Perhaps the most famous exception to the near-universal refusal to admit to informing is, once again, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who describes his flirtation with the camp authorities at length. He dates his initial moment of weakness to his early days in camp, when he was still struggling to accustom himself to his abrupt loss of status. When invited to speak to the operative commander, he was ushered into a “small, cozily furnished room” where a radio was playing classical music. After politely asking him whether he was comfortable and adjusting to camp life, the commander asked him, “Are you still a Soviet person?” After hemming and hawing, Solzhenitsyn agreed that he was.

But although confessing to being “Soviet” was tantamount to confessing a desire to collaborate, Solzhenitsyn initially declined to inform. That was when the commander switched tactics. He turned off the music, and began to speak to Solzhenitsyn about the camp criminals, asking how he would feel if his wife in Moscow were attacked by some who managed to escape. Finally, Solzhenitsyn agreed that if he should hear any of them planning to escape, he would report it. He signed a pledge, promising to report news of any escapes to the authorities, and chose a conspiratorial pseudonym: Vetrov. “Those six letters,” he writes, “are branded in shameful grooves on my memory.”

By his own account, Solzhenitsyn never did actually report on anything. When recruited again in 1956, he says he refused to sign anything at all. Nevertheless, his initial promise was enough to keep him, while in camp, in one of the trusty jobs, living in the trusties’ special quarters, slightly better dressed and better fed than other prisoners. This experience “filled me with shame,” he wrote–and doubtless provoked his disdain for all trusties.

At the time of its publication, Solzhenitsyn’s description of the camp trusties was controversial–and it still is. Like his description of inmate work habits, it also sparked a running debate in the world of camp survivors and historians, one which continues to this day. Virtually all of the classic, most widely read memoirists were trusties at one time or another: Evgeniya Ginzburg, Lev Razgon, Varlam Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn. It may well be, as some claim, that the majority of all prisoners who survived long sentences were trusties at some point in their camp career. I once met a survivor who recounted to me a reunion of old camp friends he had once attended. The group had taken to reminiscing, and were laughing at old camp stories, when one of them looked around the room and realized what it was that held them together, what made it possible for them to laugh at the past instead of crying: “All of us had been pridurki [trusties].”

There is no doubt that many people survived because they were able to get indoor trusty jobs, thereby escaping the horrors of general work. But did this always amount to active collaboration with the camp regime? Solzhenitsyn felt that it did. Even those trusties who were not informers could, he alleged, still be described as collaborators. “What trusty position,” he asked, “did not in fact involve playing up to the bosses and participating in the general system of complusion?”

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 367-368