Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [323]
There were even criminals who aspired to join their ranks. Believing that the political prisons were “easier,” some professional thieves attempted to get political sentences. They would write a denunciation of Khrushchev or the Party, sprinkled with obscenities, or make “American flags” out of rags and wave them out of windows. By the late 1970s, it was very common to see criminals with slogans tattooed on their foreheads: “Communists drink the blood of the people,” “Slave of the Communist Party,” “Bolsheviks give me bread.”46
The change in the relationship between the new generation of politicals and the authorities was even more profound. In the post-Stalin era, the politicals were prisoners who knew why they were in prison, who expected to be in prison, and who had already decided how they would act in prison: with organized defiance. As early as February 1968, a group of prisoners in Potma—Yuli Daniel among them—went on a hunger strike. They demanded an easing of the prison regime; an end to compulsory labor; the removal of restrictions on correspondence; and, in an echo of the early 1920s, recognition of their special status as political prisoners.47
The authorities made concessions—and then slowly withdrew them. Nevertheless, the politicals’ demand to be kept separate from criminal prisoners would eventually be met, not least because the camp administrators wanted to keep this new generation of politicals, with their constant demands and their penchant for hunger strikes, as far away from ordinary criminals as possible.
These strikes were frequent and widespread, so much so that the Chronicle, from 1969 on, contains a record of almost constant protest. In that year, for example, prisoners went on strike to demand the reinstatement of concessions made a year earlier; to protest at being forbidden visits from relatives; to protest after one of their number was placed in a punishment cell; to protest after another was forbidden from receiving a parcel from relatives; to protest against the transfer of still others from camp to prison; and even to mark International Human Rights Day on December 10.48 Nor was 1969 an unusual year. Over the next decade, hunger strikes, work strikes, and other protests became a regular feature of life in both Mordovia and Perm.
Hunger strikes, which took the form of short, one-day protests, as well as agonizing, drawn-out bouts with the authorities, even developed a wearisome pattern, as Marchenko wrote:
For the first few days, no one takes a blind bit of notice. Then, after several days—sometimes as many as ten or twelve—they transfer you to a special cell set aside for such people, and start to feed you artificially, through a pipe. It is useless to resist, for whatever you do they twist your arms behind your back and handcuff you. This procedure is usually carried out in the camps even more brutally than in remand prison—by the time you’ve been force-fed once or twice you are often minus your teeth... 49
By the mid-1970s, some of the “worst” politicals had been removed from Mordovia and Perm, and placed in special high-security prisons—most notably Vladimir, a central Russian prison of Czarist origins—where they occupied themselves almost exclusively with their struggle against the authorities. The game was dangerous, and it developed highly complex rules. The aim of the prisoners was to ease their conditions, and to score points, which could be reported, via the samizdat networks, to the West. The aim of the authorities was to break the prisoners: to get them to inform,