Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [160]
Yakov Kuperman’s career was less exalted than Frenkel’s, for example, but more typical. Kuperman—who later donated his unpublished memoirs to the Memorial Society in Moscow—was arrested in 1930 and given a ten-year sentence. He spent time in Kem, the Solovetsky transit prison, and then went to work in the planning division of the White Sea Canal. In 1932, his case was re-examined and his status was changed from prisoner to exile. Eventually, he was freed, and took up a job on the Baikal–Amur Railway— BAMlag—an experience he remembered “with satisfaction” until the end of his life.5 His decision was not an unusual one. In 1938, more than half of the administrators and nearly half of the armed guards in Belbaltlag, the camp that ran the White Sea Canal, were former or actual prisoners.6
Status could be lost as well as gained, however. Just as it was relatively easy for a prisoner to become a jailer, so too was it relatively easy for a jailer to become a prisoner. Gulag administrators and camp commanders figured among the thousands of NKVD men arrested in the purge years of 1937 and 1938. In later years, top Gulag guards and Gulag employees were regularly arrested by their suspicious colleagues. In the isolated lagpunkts, gossip and backbiting were rife: whole files of the Gulag’s archives are devoted to denunciations and counter-denunciations, furious letters about camp deficiencies, lack of support from the center, poor working conditions—and subsequent calls for arrests of the guilty, or of the disliked.7
Armed guards and administrators were regularly arrested for desertion, drinking, stealing, losing their weapons, even for mistreating prisoners. 8 The records of the Vanino port transit camp, for example, contain descriptions of V. N. Sadovnikov, an armed guard who murdered a camp nurse, having meant to murder his wife; of I. M. Soboleev, who stole 300 rubles from a group of prisoners, and then got drunk and lost his Party membership card; of V. D. Suvorov, who organized a group drinking session and picked a fight with a group of officers—as well as others who “drank themselves into unconsciousness,” or who were too drunk to man their posts.9 The personal papers of Georgi Malenkov, one of Stalin’s henchman, contain a report on the case of two camp administrators who murdered two colleagues in the course of a drunken binge, among them a woman doctor with two small children.10 So boring was life in the more distant camp outposts, one camp administrator complained in a letter to Moscow, that lack of entertainment “pushes many of the boys into desertion, violations of discipline, drunkenness, and cardplaying—all of which regularly ends with a court sentence.”11
It was even possible, indeed rather common, for some to make the full circle: for NKVD officers to become prisoners, and then to become jailers again, making second careers in the Gulag administration. Certainly many former prisoners have written of the speed with which disgraced NKVD officers would find their feet in the camps, and go on to obtain positions of real power. In his memoirs, Lev Razgon records an encounter with one Korabelnikov, a low-level NKVD employee whom he met during the journey from Moscow. Korabelnikov told Razgon he had been arrested because he “blabbed to my best mate . . . about one of the bosses’ women . . . got five years as a Socially Dangerous Element—and into a transport with the rest.” But he was not quite like the rest. Some months later, Razgon met him again. This time he was wearing a clean, well-made camp uniform. He had wormed his way into a “good” job, running the punishment camp in Ustvymlag. 12
Razgon’s story reflects a reality which is recorded in archives. Many, many Gulag officers had criminal records, in fact. Indeed,