Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [222]
Nevertheless camp administrators who had too many politicals in high-ranking jobs still risked censure, and a degree of ambivalence always remained. According to both Solzhenitsyn and Razgon, it sometimes therefore happened that political prisoners were given “good” indoor jobs, accounting and bookkeeping—but only temporarily. Once every year, when the inspection teams from Moscow were due to arrive, they were fired again. Razgon developed a theory about this procedure:
A good camp boss would wait for the commission to arrive, let the commission do its work, remove anyone who had to be removed. It was not a time-consuming process and anyone not removed would remain for a long time—for a year, until the next December, or for a half-year at least. A less capable camp boss, a more foolish one, would remove such persons in advance so as to report that everything was in order. The worst camp boss, those who had the least experience, would conscientiously carry out the orders of their superiors and not permit persons condemned under Article 58 to work with any instrument other than the pick and the wheelbarrow, the saw and the axe. Such camp bosses were the least successful. Such camp bosses were quickly fired.54
In practice, the rules were often simply nonsensical. As a political prisoner in Kargopollag, Filshtinskii was strictly forbidden from taking a prisoners’ course in forestry technology. However, he was allowed to read the course books, and once he had passed the exam, studying on his own, he was allowed to work as a forestry specialist as well.55 Meanwhile, V. K. Yasnyi, also a political prisoner in the late 1940s, worked as an engineer in Vorkuta without causing any controversy at all.56 In the postwar years, as the stronger national groups began to make an impact in the camp, the reign of the criminals was frequently supplanted by that of the better-organized prisoners, often Ukrainians and Balts. Those in better jobs—the foreman and supervisors—could and did look after their own, and distributed other plum posts to political prisoners who happened to be their countrymen.
At no point did prisoners have full power to distribute trusty jobs, however. The camp administration had the ultimate say over who would become a trusty, and most camp commanders were inclined to give the cushier trusty jobs to those willing to collaborate more openly—in other words, to inform. Alas, it is difficult to say how many informers the system employed. Although the Russian state archives have opened up the rest of the Gulag administration archive, they have left closed the documents on the “Third Division,” the camp division responsible for informers. The Russian historian Viktor Berdinskikh, in his book on Vyatlag, cites some figures without naming a source: “In the 1920s, the leadership of the OGPU set itself the task of having no less than 25 percent informers among camp prisoners. In the 1930s and 1940s, this planned number was lowered to 10 percent.” But Berdinskikh also agrees that a real assessment of the numbers is “complicated” without better access to archives. 57
Nor are there many memoirists who will admit openly to having been informers, although some admit that they were recruited. Clearly, prisoners who had served as informers in prison (or even