Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [242]
Although there is no way of knowing how often this type of escape occurred, there are enough similar stories, told by a wide enough range of prisoners, from camps from the early 1930s to the late 1940s, to be certain that they did take place, at least from time to time. 54 Thomas Sgovio heard the death sentence pronounced on two such escapees—they had taken a boy prisoner, and salted his flesh after murdering him—when he was in Kolyma.55 Vatslav Dvorzhetsky was told a similar story in Karelia, in the mid-1930s.56
There are also to be found, in the oral tradition of the Gulag, some truly extraordinary tales of escape and of escapees—many, again, quite possibly apocryphal. Solzhenitsyn relates the saga of Georgy Tenno, an Estonian political who escaped from camps over and over again, on one occasion traveling 300 miles by horse, boat, bicycle, very nearly making it to the central Siberian city of Omsk. While some of Tenno’s stories are probably true—he later befriended another Gulag survivor and memoirist, Alexander Dolgun, whom he also introduced to Solzhenitsyn—some of his other, more spectacular tales of escape are harder to verify.57 One English anthology contains the story of an Estonian, a preacher, who managed to escape from a camp, forge papers, and walk over the border to Afghanistan with his companions. The same anthology tells of a Spanish prisoner who escaped by pretending to be dead after an earthquake wrecked his camp. Later, he says, he slipped over the border to Iran.58
Finally, there is the curious case of Slavomir Rawicz, whose memoir, The Long Walk, contains the most spectacular and moving description of an escape in all of Gulag literature. According to his account, Rawicz was captured after the Soviet invasion of Poland, and deported to a camp in northern Siberia. He claims to have escaped, with the connivance of a camp commander’s wife, in the company of six other prisoners, one of them an American. Along with a Polish girl, a deportee whom they picked up along the way, they made their way out of the Soviet Union.
During what would have been an extraordinary journey—if it ever took place—they walked around Lake Baikal, over the border into Mongolia, across the Gobi Desert, over the Himalayas and Tibet, and into India. Along the way, four of the prisoners died; the rest suffered extremes of privation. Unfortunately, several attempts to verify this story—which bears a distinct resemblance to a Rudyard Kipling short story, “The Man Who Was”—have come to nothing.59 The Long Walk is a superbly told story, even if it never happened. Its convincing realism may well serve as a lesson to all of us who try to write a factual history of escapes from the Gulag.
For, in fact, fantasy about escape played an important part in many prisoners’ lives. Even for the many thousands of prisoners who never would attempt it, the thought of escape—the dream of escape—remained an important psychological prop. A Kolyma survivor told me that “one of the most obvious forms of opposition to the regime was to escape.” Young male prisoners in particular planned, discussed, and argued about the best ways of escape. For some, this discussion itself was a way of fighting the sensation of powerlessness, as Gustav Herling writes:
We would often meet in one of the barracks, an intimate group of Poles, to discuss the details of the plan; we collected scraps of metal found at work, old boxes and fragments of glass which we deluded ourselves could be made into an improvised compass; we gathered information about the surrounding countryside, and the distances, climatic conditions and geographical peculiarities of the north . . .
In the nightmare land to which we had been brought from the West on hundreds of goods trains, every grasp at our own private day-dreams gave us fresh life. After all, if membership of a non-existent terrorist organization can be a crime punished by ten years in a labor camp, then why should a sharpened nail not be a compass-needle, a piece of wood a ski, and