Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [235]
Perhaps that was why those whose artistic talent enabled them to live better inspired admiration, not envy and hatred. Tatyana Okunevskaya— the film star sent to the camps for her refusal to sleep with Abakumov, the head of Soviet counter-intelligence—was recognized everywhere, and helped by everyone. During one camp concert, she felt what seemed to be stones being thrown at her legs; she looked down and realized they were cans of Mexican pineapple, an unheard of delicacy, which a group of thieves had acquired just for her.151
Nikolai Starostin, the soccer player, was also held in the highest respect by the urki, who, he wrote, passed the message to one another: don’t touch Starostin. In the evenings, when he began to recount soccer stories, the “card games ceased” as prisoners gathered around him. When he arrived at a new camp, he was usually offered a clean bed in the camp hospital. “It was the first thing that was proposed to me, whenever I arrived, if, among the doctors or the bosses, there was a fan.”152
Only a very few were bothered by the more complex moral question of whether it was “right” to sing and dance while in prison. Nadezhda Joffe was one of them: “When I look back at my five years, I am not ashamed to recall them and I have nothing to blush about. There is only the question of the amateur theater . . . Essentially there was nothing wrong with it, and yet . . . our distant ancestors, in approximately analogous conditions, hung up their lutes and said they wouldn’t sing in bondage.” 153
Some prisoners, particularly those of non-Soviet origin, also had their doubts about the productions. One Polish prisoner, arrested during the war, wrote that the camp theater was “designed to destroy your self-respect further . . . Sometimes there were ‘artistic’ performances, or some sort of strange orchestra, but it was not done for the satisfaction of the soul. Rather, it was designed to show you their [Soviet] ‘culture,’ to unnerve you further.”154
Still, for those who felt uncomfortable, it was not necessary to participate in the official performances. A striking number of political prisoners who wrote memoirs—and this may explain why they wrote memoirs—attribute their survival to their ability to “tell stories”: to entertain criminal prisoners by recounting the plots of novels or of films. In the world of the camps and the prisons, where books were scarce and films were rare, a good storyteller was highly prized. Leonid Finkelstein says that he will be “forever grateful to a thief who, on my first prison day, recognized this potential in me, and said, ‘You’ve probably read a lot of books. Tell them to people, and you will be living very well.’ And indeed I was living better than the rest. I had some notoriety, some fame . . . I ran into people who said, ‘You are Leonchik-Romanist [Leonchik-the-storyteller], I heard about you in Taishet.’” Because of this skill, Finkelstein was invited, twice a day, into the brigadier leader’s hut where he received a mug of hot water. In the quarry where he was then working, “that meant life.” Finkelstein found, he said, that Russian and foreign classics worked best: he had far less success retelling the plots of more recent Soviet novels.155
Others found the same. On her hot, stuffy train to Vladivostok, Evgeniya Ginzburg learned that “there were material advantages in reciting poetry . . . For instance,