Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [170]
Frightened to the end, the man refused to repeat the story in the presence of nonprisoners. “We let him die in peace,” wrote Lipper, “and the guard went on beating prisoners undisturbed.”82
Most of the time, however, the cruelty of Soviet camp guards was unthinking, stupid, lazy cruelty, of the sort that might be shown to cattle or sheep. If guards were not explicitly told to mistreat prisoners, neither were they taught to consider prisoners, particularly political prisoners, as fully human either. On the contrary, great effort was put into cultivating hatred for prisoners, who were constantly described as “dangerous criminals, as spies and saboteurs trying to destroy the Soviet people.” Such propaganda had an enormous effect on people who were already embittered by misfortune, by their unwanted jobs, and by poor living conditions.83 It also shaped the views of the camp’s free workers—the local people working in the camp who were not NKVD employees—as much as the armed guards, as one prisoner remembered: “Usually, from the free workers we were cut off by a wall of mutual distrust . . . Our gray shapes, being led under convoy and sometimes with dogs, [were] probably, for them, something very unpleasant, of which it was better not to think.”84
This was true as early as the 1920s, the era when Solovetsky guards were forcing freezing prisoners to jump into rivers at the cry of “Dolphin!” It grew worse, of course, in the late 1930s, with the downgrading of political prisoners to “enemies of the people,” and the harshening of the camp regimes. In 1937, hearing that a large transport of Trotskyites were on their way to Kolyma, the boss of the camp, Eduard Berzin, told a group of co-workers that “If these swine, who are now on their way here, committed sabotage on the mainland, let’s make sure that here in Kolyma they work for the Soviet Union. We have the means to force them to work . . .” 85
Even after the Great Terror ended, however, the propaganda never really let up. Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, prisoners were regularly referred to as war criminals and collaborators, traitors and spies. The Ukrainian nationalists who began pouring into the camps after the Second World War were variously called “snake-like, slavish dogs of the Nazi hangmen,” the “Ukrainian German Fascists,” or the “agents of foreign intelligence services.” Nikita Khrushchev, then the leader of Ukraine, told a Central Committee plenum that the Ukrainian Nationalists had “killed themselves trying to please their master, Hitler, and to get only a small portion of the loot for their doggish service.”86 During the war, guards called almost all political prisoners “fascists” or “Hitlerites” or “Vlasovites” (followers of General Vlasov, who deserted the Red Army and supported Hitler).
This was especially galling for Jews, for veterans who had bravely fought the Germans, and for foreign communists who had fled fascism in their own countries.87 “We’re not fascists, most of us are former Party members,” the Yugoslav communist Karlo Stajner indignantly told a group of jeering criminal prisoners, who had flung the “fascist” insult at a brigade of politicals.88 Margarete Buber-Neumann, a German communist who was released from the Gulag only to be transferred directly into a German concentration camp, Ravensbruck, also wrote that she was repeatedly referred to as “the German Fascist.”89 And when one arrested NKVD officer, Mikhail Shreider, told his interrogator that as a Jew he could hardly be accused of collaborating with Hitler, he was told that he was not a Jew, but rather “a German disguised as a Jew.” 90
This name-calling was not just a pointless juvenile exercise, however. By describing their prisoners as “enemies” or as “subhuman,” guards reassured themselves of the legitimacy of their own actions.