Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [214]
The views of those who ran the camps were even more extreme. Anonymously, a former camp administrator told me quite angrily that all of the stories of camp inmates living badly were simply untrue. Those who worked well lived extremely well, she said, much better than the general public: they could even purchase condensed milk—my italics—which ordinary people could not. “It was only those who refused to work, they lived badly,” she told me.17 Such views were generally not voiced in public, but there were some exceptions. Anna Zakharova, the wife of an NKVD officer, whose letter to Izvestiya circulated in the Russian underground press in the 1960s, was sharply critical of Solzhenitsyn. Zakharova wrote that she was “angered to the depths of my soul” by Ivan Denisovich:
We can see why the hero of this story, having such an attitude to the Soviet people, hopes for nothing but the sick bay in order somehow to get out of redeeming his guilt, the wrong he did to his motherland, through toil . . . And why exactly should a person try to avoid physical labor and show scorn for it? After all, for us labor is the foundation of the Soviet system, and it is only in labor that man becomes cognizant of his true powers. 18
Other, less ideological objections have also come from ordinary zeks. V. K. Yasnyi, a prisoner for five years in the early 1940s, wrote in his memoirs that “We tried to work honestly, and not for fear of losing rations, or ending up in the isolator . . . hard work, and that was what it was in our brigade, helped you forget, helped chase away anxious thoughts.”19 Nadezhda Ulyanovskaya, who was imprisoned along with her mother, wrote that her mother worked hard “in order to prove that Jews and intelligentsia work no worse than others.” (“I worked because I was forced to do so,” she writes of herself, however. “I fear that on this point, I did not hold up the honor of the Jewish people.”) 20
Prisoners who had worked enthusiastically on behalf of the Soviet regime all of their lives did not quickly change either. Alexander Borin, a political prisoner and aviation engineer, was assigned to a Gulag metalworking plant. In his memoirs, he proudly describes the technical innovations he made there, mostly worked out in his spare time.21 Alla Shister, another political arrested in the late 1930s, told me in an interview that “I always worked as if I were free. This is my personality trait, I cannot work badly. If a hole has to be dug, I’ll keep on digging until it is finished.” After two years on general work, Shister became a brigade leader, because, she said, “They saw that I work not like a prisoner works, but with all of my strength.” In that capacity, she then made every attempt to inspire those beneath her, although admittedly not by firing them up with love of the Soviet state. This is how she described her first encounter with the men who were to work for her:
I came to the quarry where they were digging. The guards offered to accompany me, but I said that was unnecessary, and I went alone. It was midnight. I came up to the team, and told them,