Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [120]
They were also held in by fear, which was sometimes enough to keep prisoners within a camp that had no fence at all. Margarete Buber-Neumann was kept in a low-security camp which allowed prisoners to “move freely up to within half a mile of the camp perimeter; after that the guards shot without ceremony.”9 This was unusual: in most camps, the guards would shoot “without ceremony” much sooner than that. In his 1939 regulations, Beria ordered all camp commanders to line their fences with a no-man’s-land, a strip of earth no less than 5 meters (15 feet) wide.10 Guards regularly raked the no-man’s-land in summer and deliberately left it covered with snow in winter, in order that the footprints of escaping prisoners might always be visible. The beginning of the no-man’s-land was also marked, sometimes by barbed wire, sometimes by signs reading “ zapretnaya zona,” “forbidden zone.” The no-man’s-land was sometimes called the “death zone,” since guards were permitted to shoot anyone who entered it.11
And yet—the fences and walls and dogs and barricades that surrounded lagpunkts were not totally impenetrable. Whereas German concentration camps were completely self-contained—“sealed off totally, hermetically,” is how one expert puts it12—the Soviet system was in this sense different.
To begin with, the Soviet system classified prisoners as konvoinyi or beskonvoinyi—“guarded” or “unguarded”—and the small minority of unguarded prisoners were allowed to cross over the boundary without being watched, to run errands for the guards, to work during the day on an unguarded bit of railway, even to live in private apartments outside the zona. This latter privilege had been established early in the history of the camps, in the more chaotic years of the early 1930s. 13 Although it was explicitly forbidden several times after that, it persisted. One set of rules written in 1939 reminded camp commanders that “all prisoners, without exception, are forbidden to live outside the zone in villages, private apartments, or houses belonging to the camp.” Theoretically, camps needed to get special permission even to let inmates live in a guarded accommodation, if it was outside the zona.14 In practice, these rules were frequently disregarded. Despite the edict of 1939, inspectors’ reports written long after that date list a wide variety of violations. In the city of Ordzhonikidze, one inspector complained, prisoners walked around the streets, went to bazaars, entered private apartments, drank, and stole. In one Leningrad prison colony, a prisoner had been given use of a horse, on which he escaped. In work colony No. 14 in Voronezh, an armed guard left thirty-eight prisoners standing on the street while he went into a shop.15
The Moscow prosecutors’ office wrote a letter to another camp, near the Siberian city of Komsomolsk, accusing commanders of allowing no less than 1,763 prisoners to attain the status of “unguarded.” As a result, the prosecutors wrote angrily, “it is always possible to meet prisoners in any part of the town, in any institution, and in private apartments.”16 They also accused another camp of letting 150 prisoners live in private apartments, a violation of the regime, which had led to “incidents of drunkenness, hooliganism, and even robbery of the local population.”17
But within camps, prisoners were not deprived of all freedom of movement either. On the contrary, this is one of the quirks of the concentration camp, one of the ways in which it differs from a prison: when not working, and when not sleeping, most prisoners