Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [192]
Their low numbers meant, however, that women were—like food, clothing, and other possessions—almost always in shortage. So although they might have had little value to those compiling the camp production statistics, they had another sort of value to the male prisoners, the guards, and the camp free workers. In those camps where there were more or less open contacts between male and female prisoners—or where, in practice, certain men were allowed access to women’s camps—they were frequently propositioned, accosted, and, most commonly, offered food and easy work in exchange for sex. This was not, perhaps, a feature of life unique to the Gulag. A 1999 Amnesty International report on women prisoners in the United States, for example, uncovered cases of male guards and male prisoners raping female prisoners; of male inmates bribing guards for access to women prisoners; of women being strip-searched and frisked by male guards.10 Nevertheless, the strange social hierarchies of the Soviet camp system meant that women were tortured and humiliated to an extent unusual even for a prison system.
From the start, a woman’s fate depended greatly on her status and position within the various camp clans. Within the criminal world, women were subject to a system of elaborate rules and rituals, and received very little respect. According to Varlam Shalamov, “A third or fourth generation criminal learns contempt for women from childhood . . . woman, an inferior being, has been created only to satisfy the criminal’s animal craving, to be the butt of his crude jokes and the victim of public beatings when her thug decides to ‘whoop it up.’” Women prostitutes effectively “belonged” to leading male criminals, and could be traded or bartered, or even inherited by a brother or friend, if the man were transferred to a different camp or killed. When an exchange occurred, “usually the parties concerned do not come to blows, and the prostitute submits to sleeping with her new master. There are no ménages à trois in the criminal world, with two men sharing one woman. Nor is it possible for a female thief to live with a non-criminal.”11
Women were not the only targets either. Among the professional criminals, homosexual sex appears to have been organized according to equally brutal rules. Some criminal bosses had young male homosexuals in their entourages, along with or instead of camp “wives.” Thomas Sgovio writes of one brigadier who had a male “wife”—a young man who received extra food in exchange for sexual favors.12 It is hard to describe the rules governing male homosexuality in camps, however, because memoirists so rarely mention the subject. This may be because homosexuality remains, in Russian culture, partly taboo, and people prefer not to write about it. Male homosexuality in the camps also seems to have been largely confined to the criminal world—and criminals left few memoirs.
Nevertheless, we do know that by the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet criminals did develop extremely complicated rules of homosexual etiquette. “Passive” male homosexuals were ostracized from the rest of prison society, ate at separate tables, and did not speak to the other men.13 Although rarely described, similar rules seem to have existed in some quarters as early as the late 1930s, when Pyotr Yakir, age fifteen, witnessed an analagous phenomenon in a cell for juvenile criminals. At first, he was shocked to hear the other boys speaking of their sexual experiences, and believed them to be embellished, but I was mistaken. One of the kids had hung on to his bread ration until evening when he asked Mashka, who had had nothing to eat all day. “Do you want a bite?”
“Yes,” Mashka replied.
“Then take your trousers down.”
It took place in a corner, into which it was difficult to see from the spy-hole, but in full view of everybody in the cell. It surprised no one and I pretended not to be surprised