Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [121]
Arriving in the camps from claustrophobic Soviet prisons, inmates were often surprised and relieved by this change. One zek said of his arrival in Ukhtpechlag: “Our mood was wonderful, once we got into the open air.”19 Olga Adamova-Sliozberg remembered talking “from dawn to dusk about the advantages of camp over prison life” upon her arrival in Magadan:
The camp population (around a thousand women) seemed to us enormous: so many people, so many conversations to have, so many potential friends! Then there was nature. Within the compound, which was fenced with barbed wire, we could walk around freely, gaze at the sky and the faraway hills, go up to the stunted trees and stroke them with our hands. We breathed the moist sea air, felt the August drizzle on our faces, sat on the damp grass and let the earth run through our fingers. For four years we had lived without doing all this and discovered in doing so that it was essential to our being: without it you ceased to feel like a normal person.20
Leonid Finkelstein concurs:
You were brought in, you got out of the prison van, and you are surprised by several things. First, that the prisoners are walking around, without guards—they were going somewhere on their duties, whatever. Second, they look completely different from you. The contrast was even greater felt when I was in the camp and they would deliver new prisoners. The new prisoners all have green faces—green faces because of the lack of fresh air, miserable food, and all that. The prisoners in the camps have more or less normal complexions. You find yourself among relatively free, relatively good-looking people.21
Over time, the apparent “freedom” of this camp life usually palled. While in prison, wrote a Polish prisoner, Kazimierz Zarod, it was still possible to believe that a mistake had been made, that release would come soon. After all, “we were still surrounded by the trappings of civilization—outside the walls of the prison there was a large town.” In the camp, however, he found himself milling freely about among a “strange assortment of men . . . all feelings of normality were suspended. As the days went by I was filled by a sort of panic which slowly turned into desperation. I tried to push the feeling down, back into the depths of consciousness, but slowly it began to dawn on me that I was caught up in a cynical act of injustice from which there appeared to be no escape . . .”22
Worse, this freedom of movement could easily and quickly turn to anarchy. Guards and camp authorities were plentiful enough inside the lagpunktduring the day, but they often disappeared completely at night. One or two would remain within the vakhta, but the rest withdrew to the other side of the fence. Only when prisoners believed their lives were in danger, did they sometimes turn to the guards in the vakhta. One memoirist recalls that in the aftermath of a brawl between political and criminal prisoners— a common phenomenon of the postwar period, as we shall see—the criminal losers “ran to the vakhta ,” begging for help. They were sent away on a transport to another lagpunkt the following day, as the camp administration preferred to avoid mass murder.23 Another woman, feeling herself in danger of rape and possibly murder at the hands of a criminal prisoner, “turned herself in” to the vakhta, and asked to be placed in the camp punishment cell for the night for protection.24
The vakhta was not a reliable zone of safety, however. The guards residing within the guardhouse did not necessarily react to prisoners’ requests. Informed of some outrage committed by one group of prisoners against the other, they were just as likely to laugh. There are records, in both