Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [239]
As the SLON camps expanded onto the Karelian mainland in the late 1920s, opportunities for escape multiplied—and Vladimir Tchernavin took advantage of them. Tchernavin was a fisheries expert who had bravely tried to inject some realism into the Murmansk Fishing Trust’s Five-Year Plan. His criticism of the project won him a conviction for “wrecking.” He received a five-year sentence and was sent to Solovetsky. SLON eventually put him to work as prisoner expert in northern Karelia, where he was meant to design new fishing enterprises.
Tchernavin bided his time. Over many months he won the trust of his superiors, who even granted permission for his wife and fifteen-year-old son, Andrei, to pay him a visit. One day during their visit, in the summer of 1933, the family headed off on a “picnic” across the local bay. When they reached the western edge, Tchernavin and his wife told Andrei that they were leaving the USSR—on foot. “Without compass or map, we walked over wild mountains, through forests and across swamps, to Finland and freedom,” wrote Tchernavin.22 Decades later, Andrei remembered that his father had believed he could change the world’s view of Soviet Russia if he wrote a book about his experiences. He did. It did not.23
But Tchernavin’s experience may not have been unique: indeed, the period of the Gulag’s early expansion might well have been the golden age of escape. The number of prisoners was multiplying rapidly, the number of guards was insufficient, the camps were relatively near to Finland. In 1930, 1,174 escaped convicts were captured on the Finnish border. By 1932, 7,202 had been found—and it may well be that the number of successful attempts also went up proportionately.24 According to the Gulag’s own statistics— which may not, of course, be accurate—in 1933, 45,755 people escaped from camps, of which only just over half—28,370—were captured. 25 The local population was reported to be terrorized by the huge number of convicts on the loose, and camp commanders submitted constant requests for reinforcements, as did the border guards and the local OGPU.26
In response, the OGPU instituted tighter controls. At about this time, the local population were actively recruited to help: one OGPU order called for the creation of a 16- to 19-mile belt around each camp, within which the local population would “actively fight escapes.” Those in charge of trains and boats in the vicinity of camps were also enlisted. An order was issued forbidding guards to take prisoners out of their cells after sundown.27 Local officials begged for more resources, and especially for more guards to prevent escapes.28 New laws mandated extra prison sentences for escapees. Guards knew that if they shot a prisoner in the course of an escape, they might even be rewarded.29
Nevertheless, the numbers did not fall so quickly. In 1930s Kolyma, group escapes were more common than they became later. Criminal prisoners, camping out in the forests, would organize themselves into bands, steal weapons, and even attack local residents, geological parties, and native villages. After no less than twenty-two such incidents, a special camp division was set up for 1,500 “especially dangerous elements”—prisoners likely to escape—in 1936.30 Later, in January 1938, at the height of the Great Terror, one of the deputy chiefs of the NKVD sent out a circular to all the camps across the Soviet Union, noting that “despite a series of orders on conducting a decisive war against prisoners’ escapes from camps . . . serious improvements in this matter have yet to be made.” 31
In the early days of the Second World War, the number of escapes rose sharply again, thanks to opportunities created by the evacuation of camps in the western part of the country, and the general chaos.32 In July 1941, fifteen prisoners escaped from Pechorlag, one of the more remote camps in the Komi Republic.