Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [280]
In practice, the Gulag’s war on the thieves took both straightforward and covert forms. To begin with, the most dangerous, dedicated criminals were simply separated from other inmates, and given longer sentences— ten, fifteen, twenty-five years.32 In the winter of 1948, the Gulag also called for the creation of a group of strict-regime criminal lagpunkts for criminal recidivists. According to instructions issued in Moscow, only the most disciplined and “physically healthiest” of the camp guards were allowed to work in them, and they were to be surrounded by particularly high, reinforced fences. Separate instructions laid out the specifications. The Gulag called for the creation of twenty-seven such camps immediately, with space for more than 115,000 prisoners.33
Unfortunately, very little is known about daily life in these punishment lagpunkts, or even whether all of them were created: if they survived, these criminals were even less likely to write their memoirs than criminals in ordinary camps. In practice, though, most camps did have some form of separate incarceration for serious criminals and, thanks to an extremely bad twist of luck, Evgeniya Ginzburg found herself, briefly, in one of them: Izvestkovaya, a punishment lagpunkt in Kolyma. She was the lone political prisoner among a group of criminal women.
During her sojourn in Izvestkovaya, Ginzburg spent her days working in a limestone quarry, where she was unable to meet the norm and therefore received no food whatsoever. During her first few evenings she sat “bolt upright” in the corner of the barrack, since there was no space on the bunks, watching the mostly naked women drink ersatz alcohol in the vastly overheated cell. Later, one of the women, a syphilitic in the final stages of the disease, made way for Ginzburg and allowed her to lie down, but that was little comfort. “The overpowering stench of putrefaction” coming from the woman’s distintegrated nose nearly stifled her. “In Izvestkovaya, as in the most real of hells, there was not only no day and no night, there was not even an intermediate temperature to make existence bearable. It was either the glacial cold of the lime quarry or the infernal cauldron of the hut.”
At this camp, Ginzburg barely avoided rape. One night, the camp guards, who were “a long, long way from their bosses” burst into the barracks and began attacking the women. Another time, one of them thrust an unexpected loaf of bread at her. The camp management, expecting an inspection team, was worried she might die. “What with the total isolation, the gluttony, the alcohol, and their constant skirmishes with the girls, our soldiers had completely lost their bearings and hardly knew what they might get it in the neck for. At any rate a death certificate was something they could do without if the management arrived.”34
But she escaped. With the help of friends, Ginzburg managed to get transferred to a different camp, using the influence of the housecleaner of the boss of Sevvostlag, no less. Others would not have been so lucky.
Stricter regimes and longer sentences were not, however, the administration’s only weapon against the criminal leadership. All across central Europe, the Soviet Union’s great strength as an occupying power was its ability to corrupt local elites, to turn them into collaborators who willingly oppressed their own people. Precisely the same techniques were used to control the criminal elites in the camps. The method was straightforward: privileges and special treatment were offered to those professional criminals—the thieves-in-law—who would abandon their “law” and collaborate with the authorities. Those who agreed received complete freedom to abuse their former comrades, even to torture and murder them, while the camp guards looked away. These thoroughly corrupted criminal collaborators became known as suki, or “bitches,” and