Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [189]
Yet in one sense, those men or women who arrived at a new camp and immediately joined a clan or a religious sect were lucky. For those who belonged to them, the criminal gangs, the more militant national groups, the true communists, and the religious sects provided instant communities, networks of support, and companionship. Most political prisoners, on the other hand, and most “ordinary” criminals—the vast majority of the Gulag’s inhabitants—did not fit in so easily with one or another of these groups. They found it more difficult to know how to live life in the camp, more difficult to cope with camp morality and the camp hierarchy. Without a strong network of contacts they would have to learn the rules of advancement by themselves.
1 Vasily Zhurid; Aleksandr Petlosy; Grigori Maifet; Arnold Karro; Valentina Orlova (top to bottom, left to right)
2a Prisoners arriving at Kem, the Solovetsky transit camp
2b Women harvesting peat, Solovetsky, 1928
3a Maxim Gorky (center), wearing a cloth cap, coat and tie, visiting Solovetsky, 1929, with his son, daughter-in-law, and camp commanders. Sekirka church— the punishment cell—is in the background.
3b The Solovetsky monastery, as it appears today
3c Naftaly Frenkel
4a Prisoners breaking rocks, with handmade tools
4b “Everything was done by hand . . . We dug earth by hand, and carried it out in wheelbarrows, we dug through the hills by hand as well . . .”
5a “The best shock-workers”: this placard hung in a place of honor
5b Stalin and Yezhov, visiting the White Sea Canal to celebrate its completion
6a “We will eradicate Spies and Diversionists, Agents of the Trotskyite-Bukharinite Fascists!”—NKVD poster, 1937
6b Arrest of an Enemy in the Workplace—Soviet painting, 1937
7a Four camp commanders, Kolyma, 1950. The daughter of a prisoner has written “Killers!” across the photograph.
7b Armed guards, with dogs
8a Beside a grandmother’s grave
8b In central Asia
8c Outside a zemlyanka, an earth dugout
9a Kolyma landscape
9b Entrance to a Vorkuta lagpunkt (the sign reads: “Work in the USSR is a matter of Honour and Glory . . .”)
10a Sawing logs
10b Hauling timber
11a Digging the Fergana Canal
11b Digging coal
12a “If you have your own bowl, you get the first portions.”
12b “They surrendered their bronze skin to tattooing and in this way gradually satisfied their artistic, their erotic, and even their moral needs.”
13a “We picked up a wooden tub, received a cup of hot water, a cup of cold water, and a small piece of black, evil-smelling soap . . .”
13b “Having been admitted with advanced signs of malnutrition, the majority would die in hospital . . .”
14a&b Polish children, photographed just after amnesty, 1941
15a Camp maternity ward: a prisoner nursing her newborn
15b Camp nursery: decorating a holiday tree
16a A crowded barracks . . .
16 b . . . a punishment isolator
Chapter 15
WOMEN AND CHILDREN
. . . the prisoner who was our barrack orderly greeted me with a cry: “Run and see what’s under your pillow!” My heart leaped: perhaps I’d got my bread ration after all! I ran to my bed and threw off the pillow. Under it lay three letters from home, three whole letters! It was six months since I’d received anything at all. My first reaction on seeing them was acute disappointment. And then—horror. What had become of me if a piece of bread was worth more to me now than letters from my mother, my father, my children. . . . I forgot all about the bread and wept.
—Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, My Journey1
THEY MET the same work norms and they ate the same watery soup. They lived in the same sort of barracks and traveled in the same cattle trains. Their clothes were almost identical, their shoes equally inadequate. They were treated no differently under interrogation. And yet—men’s and women’s camp experiences were not quite the same.
Certainly