Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [173]
Although there are no memoirs to document it, this attitude surely affected even those who occupied the posts at the very top of the camp system. Throughout the preceding chapters, I have been regularly quoting from reports found in the files of the Gulag inspectorate, a part of the Soviet prosecutors’ office. These reports, filed with great regularity and precision, are remarkable for their honesty. They refer to typhus epidemics, to food shortages, to clothing shortages. They report on camps where death rates are “too high.” They angrily accuse particular camp commanders of providing unsuitable living conditions for prisoners. They estimate numbers of “working days” lost to illness, accidents, death. Reading them, one can have no doubt that the Gulag bosses in Moscow knew—really and truly knew—what life was like in the camps: it is all there, in language no less frank than that used by Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov. 100
Yet although changes were sometimes made, although commanders occasionally were sentenced, what is striking about the reports is their very repetitiveness: they call to mind the absurd culture of phony inspection so beautifully described by the nineteenth-century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. It is as if the forms were observed, the reports were filed, the ritual anger was expressed—and the real effects on human beings were ignored. Camp commanders were routinely reprimanded for failing to improve living standards, living standards continued to fail to improve, and there the discussion ended.
In the end, nobody forced guards to rescue the young and murder the old. Nobody forced camp commanders to kill off the sick. Nobody forced the Gulag bosses in Moscow to ignore the implications of inspectors’ reports. Yet such decisions were made openly, every day, by guards and administrators apparently convinced they had the right to make them.
Nor was the ideology of state slavery exclusive to the Gulag’s masters. Prisoners too were encouraged to cooperate—and some did.
Chapter 14
THE PRISONERS
Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky The House of the Dead1
URKI: THE CRIMINALS
To the inexperienced political prisoner, to the young peasant girl arrested for stealing a loaf of bread, to the unprepared Polish deportee, a first encounter with the urki, the Soviet Union’s professional criminal caste, would have been bewildering, shocking, and unfathomable. Evgeniya Ginzburg met her first female criminals as she was boarding the boat to Kolyma:
They were the cream of the criminal world: murderers, sadists, adept at every kind of sexual perversion . . . without wasting any time they set about terrorizing and bullying the “ladies,” delighted to find that “enemies of the people” were creatures even more despised and outcast than themselves . . . They seized our bits of bread, snatched the last of our rags with our bundles, pushed us out of the places we had managed to find . . .2
Traveling the same route, Alexander Gorbatov—General Gorbatov, a Soviet war hero, hardly a cowardly man—was robbed of his boots while in the hold of the SS Dzhurma, crossing the Sea of Okhotsk:
One of them hit me hard on the chest and then on the head and said with a leer: “Look at him—sells me his boots days ago, pockets the cash, and then refused to hand them over!” Off they went with their loot, laughing for all they were worth and only stopping to beat me up again when, out of sheer despair, I followed them and asked for the boots back. 3
Dozens of other memoirists describe similar scenes. The professional criminals would descend upon the other prisoners in what appeared to be a mad fury, throwing them off bunks in barracks or trains; stealing what remained of their clothing; howling, cursing, and swearing. To ordinary people, their appearance and behavior seemed bizarre in the extreme. Antoni Ekart, a Polish prisoner,