Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [186]
At other times these ethnic groups competed, both with one another and with Russians. Lyudmila Khachatryan, herself arrested for falling in love with a Yugoslav soldier, remembered the Ukrainians in her camp refusing to work with the Russians.78 The national resistance groups, wrote another observer, “are characterized on the one hand by hostility to the regime, on the other by hostility to the Russians.” Edward Buca remembered a more generalized hostility—“It was unusual for a prisoner to give any help to anyone of a different nationality” 79—although Pavel Negretov, in Vorkuta at the same time as Buca, felt that most nationalities got along, except when they succumbed to the administration’s “provocations”: “they tried, through their informers . . . to get us to quarrel.”80
During the late 1940s, when the various ethnic groups took over the criminals’ role as de facto policemen within the camps, they sometimes fought one another for control. Marlen Korallov recalled that “they began to fight for power, and power meant a great deal: who controlled the dining hall, for instance, mattered a great deal, because the cook would work directly for its master.” According to Korallov, the balance between the various groups at that time was extremely delicate, and could be upset by the arrival of a new transport. When a group of Chechens arrived in his lagpunkt, for example, they entered the barracks and “threw all of the belongings on the lower bunks on to the floor”—in that camp the lower bunks were the “aristocratic” bunks—“and moved in with their own possessions.”81
Leonid Sitko, a prisoner who spent time in a Nazi POW camp only to be arrested on his return to Russia, witnessed a far more serious battle between Chechens, Russians, and Ukrainians in the late 1940s. The argument started with a personal dispute between brigade leaders and escalated: “it became war, all out war.” The Chechens staged an attack on a Russian barracks, and many were wounded. Later, all of the ringleaders were put in a punishment cell. Although the disputes were over influence within the camp, they had their origin in deeper national feelings, Sitko explained: “The Balts and Ukrainians considered Soviets and Russians to be one and the same thing. Although there were plenty of Russians in the camp, that didn’t stop them from thinking of Russians as occupiers and thieves.”
Sitko himself was once approached in the middle of the night by a group of west Ukrainians:
“Your name is Ukrainian,” they said to me. “Who are you, a traitor?”
I explained to them that I had grown up in the North Caucasus, in a family that spoke Russian, and that I didn’t know why I had a Ukrainian name. They sat for a while, and then left. They could have killed me though—they had a knife.82
One woman prisoner, who otherwise remembered national differences as being “no big deal,” also joked that this was true for everyone except the Ukrainians, who simply “hated everyone else.” 83
Odd though it sounds, in most camps there was no clan for Russians, the ethnic group which formed the decided majority in the camps, according to the Gulag’s own statistics, throughout their existence.84 Russians did, it is true, attach themselves to one another according to what city or part of the country they came from. Muscovites found other Muscovites, Leningraders other Leningraders, and so on. Vladimir Petrov was helped, at one point, by a doctor who asked him,
“What were you, before?”
“A student in Leningrad.”
“Ah! So you are a countryman of mine—very good,” said the doctor, patting