Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [237]
AMONG THE MANY MYTHS about the Gulag, the myth of the impossibility of escape looms among the largest. Escape from Stalin’s camps, wrote Solzhenitsyn, was “an enterprise for giants among men—but for doomed giants.” 2 According to Anatoly Zhigulin, “Escape from Kolyma was impossible.” 3 Varlam Shalamov, with characteristic gloom, wrote that “convicts who try to escape are almost always newcomers, serving their first year, men in whose hearts freedom and vanity had not yet been annhilated.” 4 Nikolai Abakumov, the former deputy commander of the Norilsk garrison, dismissed the idea of successful escape: “Some people got out of the camps, but no one managed to reach the ‘mainland’”—by which he meant central Russia.5
Gustav Herling recounts the story of a fellow inmate who tried to escape and failed: after months of careful planning, a successful breakout, and seven days of hungry wandering in the forest, he found himself only eight miles from the camp, and, starving, voluntarily turned himself in. “Freedom isn’t for us,” the man concluded, whenever he told the story of his escape attempt to his fellow prisoners. “We’re chained to this place for the rest of our lives, even though we aren’t wearing chains. We can escape, we can wander about, but in the end we’ll come back.”6
Camps were, of course, constructed to prevent breakouts: ultimately, that was what the walls, barbed wire, watchtowers, and carefully raked noman’s-land were for. But in many camps, barbed wire was hardly necessary to keep prisoners inside. The weather worked against escape—ten months of the year, the temperature was below freezing—as did the geography, a fact it is impossible to appreciate until one has actually seen the location of some of the more distant camps for oneself.
It is, for example, fair to describe Vorkuta, the city which sprang up beside the coal mines of Vorkutlag, not only as isolated but also as virtually inaccessible. There is no road that leads to Vorkuta, which lies beyond the Arctic Circle: the city and its mines can only be reached by rail or by plane. In winter, anyone crossing the open, treeless tundra would be a moving target. In summer, the same landscape turns into an equally open, impenetrable swamp.
In the more southerly camps, distances were a problem too. Even if a prisoner did climb over the barbed wire, or slip away from his workplace in the forest—given the slovenliness of the guards, this was not so difficult— he then found himself miles from a road or a railway track, and sometimes miles from anything resembling a town or village. There was no food, no shelter, and sometimes very little water.
More to the point, there were sentries everywhere: the whole of the Kolyma region—hundreds and hundreds of square miles of taiga—was really a vast prison, after all, as was the entire Komi Republic, large swathes of the Kazakh desert, and northern Siberia. In such places, there were few ordinary villages, and few ordinary inhabitants. Anyone walking alone without proper identity documents would have immediately been identified as a runaway, and either shot, or beaten up and returned to his camp. One prisoner decided against joining a group of escaping inmates for this reason: “Where could I go without papers or money in a territory packed with concentration camps and therefore scattered with control points?”7
The escaping prisoner was not likely to find much help from those local people who were not guards or prisoners, either, even if he encountered any. In Czarist Siberia, there had been a tradition of sympathy for runaway convicts and serfs, for whom bowls of bread and milk were placed on doorsteps at night. An old, pre-revolutionary prisoners’ song describes the attitude:
The peasant women provided me milk
The young lads supplied tobacco.8
In Stalin’s Soviet Union, the mood was different. Most people would have been inclined to turn in an escaped “enemy,” and even more inclined to turn in a criminal “recidivist.” This was not only because they believed, or half believed, the propaganda about