Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [212]
Such sentiments are not unique to the survivors of Soviet camps. “If one offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery,” wrote Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, “exacting in exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their comrades, there will certainly be someone who will accept.”9 Also writing of German camps, Bruno Bettelheim observed that older prisoners often came to “accept SS values and behavior as their own,” in particular adopting their hatred of the weaker and lower-ranking inhabitants of the camps, especially the Jews.10
In the Soviet camps, as in the Nazi camps, the criminal prisoners also readily adopted the dehumanizing rhetoric of the NKVD, insulting political prisoners and “enemies,” and expressing disgust for the dokhodyagi among them. From his unusual position as the only political prisoner in a mostly criminal lagpunkt, Karol Colonna-Czosnowski was able to hear the criminal world’s view of the politicals: “The trouble is that there are just too many of them. They are weak, they are dirty, and they only want to eat. They produce nothing. Why the authorities bother, God only knows . . .” One criminal, Colonna-Czosnowski writes, said he had met a Westerner in a transit camp, a scientist and university professor. “I caught him eating, yes, actually eating, the half-rotten tail fin of a Treska fish. I gave him hell, you can imagine. I asked him if he knew what he was doing. He just said he was hungry . . . So I gave him such a wallop in the neck that he started vomiting there and then. Makes me sick to think about it. I even reported him to the guards, but the filthy old man was dead the following morning. Serves him right!”11
Other prisoners watched, learned and imitated, as Varlam Shalamov wrote:
The young peasant who has become a prisoner sees that in this hell only the criminals live comparatively well, that they are important, that the all-powerful camp administration fear them. The criminals always have clothes and food, and they support each other . . . it begins to seem to him that the criminals possess the truth of camp life, that only by imitating them will he tread the path that will save his life . . . . the intellectual convict is crushed by the camp. Everything he valued is ground into the dust while civilization and culture drop from him within weeks. The method of persuasion is the fist or the stick. The way to induce someone to do something is by means of a rifle butt, a punch in the teeth . . .12
And yet—it would be incorrect to say there was no morality in the camps at all, that no kindness or generosity was possible. Curiously, even the most pessimistic of memoirists often contradict themselves on this point. Shalamov himself, whose depiction of the barbarity of camp life surpasses all others, at one point wrote that “I refused to seek the job of foreman, which provided a chance to remain alive, for the worst thing in a camp was the forcing of one’s own or anyone else’s will on another person who was a convict just like oneself.” In other words, Shalamov was an exception to his own rule.13
Most memoirs also make clear that the Gulag was not a black-and-white world, where the line between masters and slaves was clearly delineated, and the only way to survive was through cruelty. Not only did inmates, free workers, and guards belong to a complex social network, but that network was also constantly