Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [182]
Official sentences alone did not determine the politicals’ place in the camp hierarchy. Although they did not have a rigid code of behavior like the criminals, or a unifying language, they did eventually segregate themselves into distinct groups. These political clans hung together for comradeship, for self-protection, or because they shared a common worldview. They were not distinct—they overlapped with one another, and with the clans of nonpolitical prisoners—and they did not exist in every camp. When they did, however, they could be vital to a prisoner’s survival.
The most fundamental, and ultimately the most powerful, of the political clans were those formed around nationality or place of origin. These grew more important during and after the Second World War, when the numbers of foreign prisoners increased dramatically. Their derivation was natural enough. A new prisoner would arrive, and immediately search his barracks for fellow Estonians, fellow Ukrainians, or, in a tiny number of cases, fellow Americans. Walter Warwick, one of the “American Finns” who wound up in the camps in the late 1930s, has described, in a manuscript he wrote for his family, how the Finnish speakers in his camp banded together specifically in order to protect themselves from the thievery and banditry of the professional criminals: “We came to the conclusion that if we wanted to have a little rest from them, we must have a gang. So we organized our own gang to help each other. There were six of us: two American Finns . . . two Finnish Finns . . . and two Leningrad District Finns ...”53
Not every national clan had the same character. Opinions differ, for example, as to whether Jewish prisoners actually had their own network, or whether they melded into the general Russian population (or, in the case of the large numbers of Polish Jews, into the general Polish population). At different times, it seems, the answer was different, and much depended on individual attitudes. Many of the Jews arrested in the late 1930s, during the repressions against top nomenklatura and the army, appear to have considered themselves communists first and Jews second. As one prisoner put it, in the camps “Everyone became Russian—Caucasians, Tartars, Jews.”54
Later, as more Jews arrived along with the Poles during the war, they seem to have formed recognizable ethnic networks. Ada Federolf, who wrote her memoirs together with Ariadna Efron, Marina Tsvetaeva’s daughter, described one camp where the tailors’ workshop—by camp standards a luxurious place to work—was run by a man called Lieberman. Whenever a new transport arrived, he would go through the crowd calling out, “Any Jews, any Jews?” When he found Jews he arranged for them to work for him in his workshop, thereby saving them from general work in the forests. Lieberman also devised ingenious plans to save rabbis, who needed to pray all day. He built a special closet for one rabbi, hiding him inside it so that no one would know that he was not working. He also invented the job of “quality controller” for another rabbi. This allowed the man to walk up and down the lines of sewing women all day long, smiling at them and praying under his breath.55
By the early 1950s, when official anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union began to grow stronger, buoyed by Stalin’s obsession with the Jewish doctors he thought were trying to kill him, it