Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [238]
As for the local population, nobody saved us and hid us, the way others saved and hid those who escaped from the German concentration camps. It was because for so many years, all had lived in constant fear and suspicion, from minute to minute awaiting some new misfortune, even being afraid of each other . . . In a place where everyone, from the smallest to the most important, was terrified of spies, it was impossible to count on a successful escape.10
If ideology and fear did not impel the locals to turn in escaped prisoners, greed did. Fairly or unfairly, many memoirists believe that local tribal peoples—the Eskimos of the far north, the Kazakhs to the south—were constantly on the lookout for runaways. Some became professional bounty-hunters, searching for prisoners in return for a kilogram of tea or a bag of wheat. 11 In Kolyma, a local inhabitant who brought in the right hand of a runaway—or, by some accounts, the runaway’s head—received a 250-ruble prize, and the prizes seem to have been similar elsewhere.12 In one recorded case, a local man recognized an escaped prisoner masquerading as a free man, and reported his presence to the police. He received 250 rubles. His son, who had gone to the police station, received 150 as well. In another case, a man who reported the location of a runaway to a camp chief was given the princely sum of 300 rubles.13
For those who were caught, the punishments were extreme. Many were shot instantly. The bodies of dead runaways had their propaganda uses as well:
As we approached the gate, I thought for a moment that I must be having a bad dream: a naked corpse was suspended from the gatepost. Its hands and feet were bound with wire, its head was sunk to one side, the rigid eyes were half open. Above the head was a board with the inscription: “This is the fate of all those who try to escape from Norilsk.”14
Zhigulin remembers the dead bodies of men who had attempted escape lying in the center of his Kolyma lagpunkt, sometimes for as long as a month.15 The practice was in fact an old one, dating back to Solovetsky. By the 1940s, it was nearly universal.16
And yet—prisoners did try to escape. Indeed, to judge by the official statistics, and by the angry correspondence on the subject in the Gulag archives, both attempted and successful escapes were more common than most memoirists concede. There are, for example, records of punishments meted out following successful escapes. In 1945, following several group escapes from the camps surrounding “NKVD Construction Site 500”—a railroad across eastern Siberia—officers in the armed guards received five- or ten-day prison sentences, with their pay docked 50 percent for every day behind bars. In other instances, guards were put on trial following prominent escapes, while camp bosses sometimes lost their jobs.17
There are also records of guards who foiled escapes. A 300-ruble prize was awarded to a prison guard who sounded the alarm after escaping prisoners had suffocated a night watchman. His boss received 200 rubles, as did another prison chief, and the soldiers involved received 100 rubles apiece. 18
No camp was completely secure. Solovetsky, with its remote location, was thought to be impregnable. Yet a pair of White Guards, S. A. Malsagov and Yuri Bessonov, escaped from one of the SLON mainland camps in May 1925. After attacking their guards, they walked for thirty-five days to the Finnish border. Both later wrote books about their experiences, among the first about Solovetsky to appear in the West.19 There was another famous breakout from Solovetsky in 1928, in which half-a-dozen prisoners attacked their guards and broke through the gates of the camp. Most got away, probably escaping over the Finnish border too.20 Two particularly spectacular escapes, also from Solovetsky, occurred in 1934. One involved four “spies”; the other concerned