Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [240]
The numbers did start to go down later in the war, but they never vanished altogether. In 1947, when escapes reached their postwar height, 10,440 prisoners attempted escape, of whom only 2,894 were caught.34 This is, perhaps, a small percentage of the millions who were in the camps at the time, but it nevertheless suggests that escapes were not as impossible as some remember. It may even be that their frequency helps to explain the harshening of camp regimes, and the higher levels of security, which characterized life in the Gulag during the last half-decade of its existence.
Generally, memoirists agree that the overwhelming majority of would-be runaways were professional criminals. Criminal slang reflects this, even referring to the coming of spring as the arrival of the “green prosecutor” (as in “Vasya was released by the green prosecutor”) since spring was when summer escapes were most often contemplated: “A trip through the taiga is possible only during the summer, when it is possible to eat grass, mushrooms, berries, roots, or pancakes baked from moss flour, to catch fieldmice, chipmunks, squirrels, jays, rabbits ...” 35 In the very far north, the optimum time to escape was the winter, which criminals there referred to as the “white prosecutor”: only then would the swamps and mud of the tundra be passable.36
In fact, professional criminals were more successful at escaping because once they had gone “under the wire” they stood a far better chance of surviving. If they made it to a major city, they could melt into the local criminal world, forge documents, and find hiding places. With few aspirations to return to the “free” world, criminals also escaped simply for the fun of it, just to be “out” for a little while. If they were caught, and managed to survive, what was another ten-year sentence to someone who already had two twenty-five-year sentences, or more? One ex-zek remembers a woman criminal who escaped merely to have a rendezvous with a man. She returned “filled with delight,” although she was immediately sentenced to the punishment cell.37
Political prisoners escaped much less often. Not only did they lack the network and the expertise, but they were also pursued with greater fervor. Tchernavin—who gave these issues much thought before escaping himself—explained the difference:
The guards did not take the escape of criminals very seriously and did not exert much effort in pursuing them: they would be caught when they came out to the railroad or reached a town. But for the pursuit of political prisoners, posses would be organized at once: sometimes all neighboring villages would be mobilized and the frontier guards called to assist. The political prisoner always tried to escape abroad—in his motherland he had no refuge.38
Most runaways were men, but not all of them. Margarete Buber-Neumann was in a camp from which a Gypsy girl escaped, running away with the camp cook. An older Gypsy woman, hearing the story, nodded knowingly: “She’s got an idea there’s a tabor [a Gypsy encampment] somewhere in the neighborhood. If she can get to that, she’s safe.”39 Usually, escapes were planned in advance, but they could be spontaneous too: Solzhenitsyn tells the story of a prisoner who jumped over a barbed-wire fence during a dust storm in Kazakhstan.40 Escape attempts were often launched from the more loosely guarded camp work sites, but that was not always the case either. In the randomly selected month of September 1945, for example, 51 percent of recorded escape attempts took place in the working zone; 27 percent took place from the living zone; and 11 percent took place during transport.41 Edward Buca planned an escape from a prisoner transport train bound for Siberia, along with a group of young Ukrainians:
With my hacksaw blade, we would try to cut through four or five planks, working only at night and concealing the marks with a mixture of bread