Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [229]
In some cases, doctors knowingly mistreated prisoner patients. While working in a mining camp in the early 1950s, one of Leonid Trus’s legs was crushed. The camp doctor bound the wound, but more was needed. Trus had already lost a great deal of blood, and was beginning to feel very cold. Because the camp did not have its own facilities for blood transfusions, the camp authorities sent him, in the back of a truck, to a local hospital. Half-conscious, he heard the doctor ask a nurse to begin a blood transfusion. The friend accompanying him gave his personal details: name, age, sex, place of work—after which the doctor halted the blood transfusion. Such help was not given to a prisoner. Trus recalls being given some glucose to drink— thanks to the friend, who paid a bribe for it—and some morphine. The following day, his leg was amputated:
The surgeon was so convinced I wouldn’t live that he didn’t even do the operation himself, but gave it to his wife, a therapist who was trying to re-qualify as a surgeon. Later they told me that she did everything well, that she knew what she was doing, except that she left out a few details. She hadn’t forgotten them, but she didn’t think I would live, and therefore it was immaterial whether these medical details were completed. And look, I remained alive!98
Not that camp doctors, whether kind or indifferent, were necessarily qualified either. Those who carried the title ranged from top Moscow specialists serving out their prison sentences, to charlatans who knew nothing whatsoever about medicine, but were willing to fake knowledge in order to get a high-status job. As early as 1932, the OGPU had complained of the dearth of qualified medical personnel.99 This meant that prisoners with medical degrees were the exception to every rule governing trusty jobs: whatever counter-revolutionary terrorist act they were alleged to have committed, they were almost always allowed to practice medicine.100
Shortages also meant that prisoners received training as nurses and feldshers—training which was often rudimentary. Evgeniya Ginzburg qualified as a nurse after spending “several days” in a camp hospital, learning the art of “cupping” and how to give an injection.101 Alexander Dolgun, having been taught in one camp the basics of the feldsher’s job, was tested on his knowledge after being transferred to another camp. Told to do an autopsy by an officer suspicious of his qualifications, he “put on the best show I could and acted as if I did this sort of thing all the time.”102 In order to get his job as feldsher, Janusz Bardach also lied: he claimed to be a third-year medical student when, in fact, he had not yet entered university. 103
The results were predictable. Upon arriving at his first posting as a convict doctor in Sevurallag, Isaac Vogelfanger, himself a qualified surgeon, was surprised to find the local feldsher treating scurvy boils—a condition caused by malnutrition, not infection—with iodine. Later, he witnessed a number of patients die because an unqualified doctor insisted upon injecting patients with a solution made of ordinary sugar. 104
None of this would have come as a surprise to the Gulag bosses, one of whom complained, in a letter to his Moscow boss, of a doctor shortage: “In several lagpunkts, medical help is given by self-taught nurses, prisoners without any medical qualification whatsoever.” Another wrote of a camp medical system which defied “all principles of the Soviet health service.” 105 The bosses knew they were flawed, the prisoners knew they