Cilka's Journey(102)
Who were the guardians of this nightmare world? “Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our own people?” Alexander Solzhenitsyn asked. “Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood? It is ours.” Some of the guards in the Gulag were themselves former prisoners. Many more convicts served as druzhinniki—the prisoner trusties who were given extra food for their role in keeping order in the camp and informing on potential troublemakers.
Most guards, though, were professional secret policemen who volunteered for the service. The men drawn to serve in the Soviet secret police, in the famous phrase of its founder, Felix Dzerzhinsky, could be either “saints or scoundrels.” Clearly the service attracted more than its fair share of sadists and psychopaths, as witnessed by the memoirs of camp guard officer Ivan Chistyakov, who described “the bunch of misfits” who were his drunken subordinates. He called the Gulag a “madhouse shambles” and often dreamed of exposing his fellow officers’ “illiteracy” and “misdeeds.” Perhaps the most chilling psychological insight offered by Chistyakov’s diary is the portrait of a humane man conforming to an inhumane system. “I’m beginning to have that mark on my face, the stamp of stupidity, narrowness, a kind of moronic expression,” he wrote. “My heart is desolate, it alarms me.” And the diary is also a chronicle of the essential selfishness of human suffering: Chistyakov often lamented for himself but rarely for the inmates, whom he described as lazy and dishonest. “Today … I had to imprison one woman, there’s some muddle about an escape, a conflict with a phalanx leader, a knife fight,” wrote Chistyakov. “To hell with the lot of them!” But it was they, not he, who were being starved and worked to death.
“To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good,” wrote Solzhenitsyn. “Or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.” Chistyakov offered no justification for the slave-labor system that he was helping to run—only insight into the banality of evil. He, and hundreds of thousands of other officers, were only following orders, and the inhuman system of which he was a part seemed to Chistyakov as inexorable and invincible as the crushing frosts and the buzzing summer flies.
In the frozen hell of Vorkuta, male prisoners were expected to work ten-hour days—reduced in March 1944 from twelve hours after too many work accidents began to impair productivity—down jerry-built and desperately unsafe coal mines. Records for the year 1945 list 7,124 serious accidents in the Vorkuta coal mines alone. Inspectors laid the blame on the shortage of miners’ lamps, on electrical failures, and on the inexperience of workers.
Camp life was no less harsh for the tens of thousands of women imprisoned in Vorkuta. Though spared the mines, female prisoners were nonetheless expected to perform heavy physical labor, hauling coal and water, digging ditches, working in brickworks, carrying supplies and building barracks. The women’s quarters were separated from the men’s by walls of barbed wire—but prisoners mixed freely during the day. Many camp guards, and also the more powerful trusties, kept women prisoners as servants and mistresses. They were often referred to as camp “husbands” and “wives.” Rape by fellow inmates and guards was prevalent. A 1955 report noted that “venereal disease, abortions and pregnan cies were commonplace … pregnant women were sent to a special camp where work was lighter. A mother was allowed to stay with her child for two years, after which it was placed in a special nursery and the mother returned to her original camp. She received photographs and reports of the child’s development and was occasionally permitted to see it.” But in practice, not all were this fortunate. The same report noted that out of 1,000 female inmates at Vorkuta’s Brickworks No 2., 200 were suffering from tuberculosis.
In the harsh conditions of the camps, prisoners formed tribes in order to survive. Poles, Balts, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians and Chechens all formed their own national brigades, slept separately in national barracks and organized celebrations of national holidays. Adam Galinski, a Pole who had fought with the anti-Soviet Polish Home Army, wrote that: “We took special care of the youth … and kept up its morale, the highest in the degrading atmosphere of moral decline that prevailed among the different national groups imprisoned in Vorkuta.” Jews, however, were a special case—they lacked the common language and common national identity to form a coherent tribe. Many Jews—such as the influential Yiddish writer Der Nister, who died at Vorkuta in 1950, had been imprisoned for celebrating their Jewish identity. Yet they found themselves taunted and persecuted for their ethnic association with the Jewish Bolsheviks, such as Genrikh Yagoda, who had created the Gulag system.
For ten months a year, the intense cold was a constant, lethal companion of Vorkuta life. “Touching a metal tool with a bare hand could tear off the skin,” recalled one prisoner. “Going to the bathroom was extremely dangerous. A bout of diarrhoea could land you in the snow forever.” And prisoners were woefully equipped to deal with the brutal climate. In Vorkuta, according to camp records, only 25 to 30 percent of prisoners had underclothes, while only 48 percent had warm boots. The rest had to make do with makeshift footwear made from rubber tires and rags.
The Arctic summer of Vorkuta, when the scrubland bloomed with scarlet fireweed and the low-lying landscape turned into a vast bog, was scarcely more bearable. Mosquitoes and gnats appeared in huge gray clouds, making so much noise it was impossible to hear anything else. “The mosquitoes crawled up our sleeves, under our trousers. One’s face would blow up from the bites,” recalled a Vorkuta inmate. “At the work site, we were brought lunch, and it happened that as you were eating your soup, the mosquitoes would fill up the bowl like buckwheat porridge. They filled up your eyes, your nose and throat, and the taste of them was sweet, like blood.”