Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [181]
Draft Portrait of Two Zeks: a drawing by Sergei Reikenberg, Magadan, date unknown
If the politicals were not necessarily political, the vast majority of criminal prisoners were not necessarily criminals either. While there were some professional criminals and, during the war years, some genuine war criminals and Nazi collaborators in the camps, most of the others had been convicted of so-called “ordinary” or nonpolitical crimes that in other societies would not be considered crimes at all. The father of Alexander Lebed, the Russian general and politician, was twice ten minutes late to work for his factory job, for which he received a five-year camp sentence.47 At the largely criminal Polyansky camp near Krasnoyarsk-26, home of one of the Soviet Union’s nuclear reactors, archives record one “criminal” prisoner with a six-year sentence for stealing a single rubber boot in a bazaar, another with ten years for stealing ten loaves of bread, and another—a truck driver raising two children alone—with seven years for stealing three bottles of the wine he was delivering. Yet another got five years for “speculation,” meaning he had bought cigarettes in one place and sold them in another. 48 Antoni Ekart tells the story of a woman who was arrested because she took a pencil from the office where she worked. It was for her son, who had been unable to do his schoolwork for lack of something to write with.49 In the upside-down world of the Gulag, criminal prisoners were no more likely to be real criminals than political prisoners were likely to be active opponents of the regime.
In other words, criminals were not always people who had committed a real crime. And it was even rarer for a political to have committed a political offense. This did not stop the Soviet judicial system from classifying them with great care, however. As a group, the status of the counter-revolutionaries was lower than that of the criminals; as I say, they were considered to be “socially dangerous,” less compatible with Soviet society than the “socially close” criminals. But the politicals were also ranked according to whatever section of Article 58 of the Criminal Code they had been sentenced under. Evgeniya Ginzburg noted that among the political prisoners it was by far “best” to have been sentenced under Section 10 of Article 58, for “Anti-Soviet Agitation” (ASA). These were the “babblers”: they had told an unfortunate anti-Party joke, or had let slip some criticism of Stalin or the local Party boss (or had been accused by a jealous neighbor of having done so). Even the camp authorities tacitly recognized that the “babblers” had committed no crime whatsoever, so those sentenced for ASA sometimes found it easier to get lighter work assignments.
Below them were those convicted for “counter-revolutionary activity” (KRD). Lower still were those convicted of “counter-revolutionary terrorist activity” (KRTD). The additional “T” could mean, in some camps, that a prisoner was actually forbidden to be assigned to anything but the most difficult “general work”—cutting trees, digging mines, building roads—particularly if the KRTD was accompanied by a sentence of ten or fifteen years or more.50
And it was possible to go lower still. Below KRTD was yet another category: KRTTD, not just terrorist activities, but “Trotskyist terrorist activities.” “I knew of cases,” wrote Lev Razgon, “when the additional T would appear in a prisoner’s camp documents because of a quarrel during a general head-count with the work distributor or the head of Distribution, who were both criminals.”51 A minor change like that could mean the difference between life and death, since no foreman would assign a KRTTD prisoner to anything but the toughest physical labor.
These rules were not