Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [268]
For ordinary soldiers, amnesty did not guarantee survival. Many speculate—although the archives have not yet confirmed this—that the prisoners released from the Gulag into the Red Army were assigned to “penal battalions” and sent directly to the most dangerous sections of the front. The Red Army was notorious for its willingness to sacrifice men, and it is not hard to imagine that commanders were even more willing to sacrifice former prisoners. One ex-prisoner, the dissident Avraham Shifrin, claimed to have been put into a penal battalion because he was the son of an “enemy of the people.” According to his account, he and his comrades were sent directly to the front despite a shortage of weapons: 500 men were given 100 rifles. “Your weapons are in the hands of the Nazis,” the officers told them. “Go get them.” Shifrin survived, although he was wounded twice.8
Nevertheless, Soviet prisoners who joined the Red Army often distinguished themselves. Perhaps surprisingly, few seem to have objected to fighting for Stalin either. At least from the way he tells it, General Gorbatov never had a moment’s hesitation about rejoining the Soviet army, or about fighting on behalf of a Communist Party which had arrested him without cause. Upon hearing of the German invasion, his first thought was of how fortunate he was to have been freed: he could use his regained strength for the benefit of the motherland. He also writes with pride of the “Soviet arms” that his soldiers were able to use, “thanks to the industrialization of our country,” with no comment about how that industrialization was achieved. True, on a number of occasions he showers scorn upon the Red Army’s “political officers”—the military secret police—for meddling too much with the work of the soldiers, and he was once or twice mistreated by NKVD officers, who murmured darkly that he “hadn’t learned much in Kolyma.” But the sincerity of his patriotism is hard to doubt.9
This also appears to have been true of many other released prisoners, at least from the evidence contained in NKVD files. In May 1945, the Gulag’s boss, Viktor Nasedkin, composed an elaborate, almost gushing report on the patriotism and the fighting spirit shown by former prisoners who had entered the Red Army, quoting extensively from letters they sent back to their former camps. “First of all, I inform you that I am in a hospital in Kharkov, wounded,” wrote one. “I defended my beloved Motherland, disregarding my own life. I too was sentenced for working badly, but our beloved Party gave me the chance to pay back my debts to society by achieving victory on the front line. By my own calculations, I killed 53 fascists with my steel bullets.”
Another wrote to express his thanks:
First of all, I write to thank you sincerely for re-educating me. In the past, I was a recidivist, considered dangerous to society, and therefore was placed more than once in a prison, where I learned to work. Now, the Red Army has put even more trust in me, it has taught me to be a good commander, and trusted me with fighting comrades. With them, I go bravely into battle, they respect me for the care I take of them, and for correctness with which we fulfill the military tasks we are set.
Occasionally, officers wrote back to camp commanders too. “During the storming of Chernigov, Comrade Kolesnichenko commanded a company,” wrote one captain. “The former prisoner matured into a cultured, steadfast, and militant commander.”
With the exception of five ex-zeks who became Heroes of the Soviet Union, receiving the highest military distinction in the Red Army, there do not appear to be separate records of how many other ex-prisoners won medals. But the records of the more than 1,000 zeks who wrote back to their camps are instructive: 85 had become officers, 34