I thought about how my file had traveled all the way across the Soviet Union on a parallel journey, how it had followed me without getting lost among the thousands and thousands of other files. My fate was in that file. . . . On the front page was a large stamp—“KOLYMA-TFT.” The last three letters stood for . . . “hard physical labor.”
—Janusz Bardach on seeing his prisoner file
In corrective-labor places of imprisonment, it is very important who [a prisoner is] and for what [a prisoner] finds himself [in the place of imprisonment].
—A prisoner of the Dolinka division of Kazitlag objecting to the wall newspaper article “Down with Chauvinism,” October 4, 1931, in which the author stated, “It is not important, who [a prisoner is], for what and how [a prisoner] finds himself here, but it is very important who [a prisoner is] and how he holds himself here.”
The Soviet Regime Expended tremendous energy in its effort to learn who its prisoners were. While it herded millions of people into the Gulag, often as members of mass collectives, it created a separate personal file on each prisoner held in camps, colonies, and prisons, and frequently kept individual files on exiles as well. In their attempt to “know” their prisoners, Gulag authorities gathered several types of information that could be used for individual evaluation along with the generalization and categorization of the inmate population. Each individual file typically contained an identity questionnaire, a copy of the prisoner’s conviction (usually a summary of the case, if a court convicted the prisoner, and a brief statement of the crime and sentence, if a secret police organ did the deed), and a number of prisoner evaluations (kharakteristiki). Often, the file contained copies of appeals of conviction and action taken, information on disciplinary violations while in the camp, receipts for personal property brought to the camp, and release papers or death certificates. Out of this information, Gulag officials at the central and local level created statistical generalizations about their prisoner population—gender, nationality (ethnicity), education level, category of crime, length of sentence, health, labor utilization, norm fulfillment, escapes, disciplinary violations, and so forth. The individualization of prisoners coexisted at times easily and at other times uneasily with the generalization and categorization of prisoners.1 These files accompanied prisoners throughout their Gulag experience, and authorities reviewed the files repeatedly—during amnesties, general release, appeals, and so on—as the primary way of determining if a prisoner deserved to be released under this or that legal provision.2
In the individual evaluations evident through prisoner files, the most important documents were the evaluations, which summed up in brief the prisoner’s current camp identity and served to determine the prisoner’s station in camp life. As a rule, the evaluation included, among other items, the prisoner’s age, article of conviction, by whom convicted, term, beginning and ending of sentence, date of arrival to the labor camp, category of labor capacity, specialty, quality of work, norm fulfillment percentage, attitude toward labor, illnesses and their length, rewards and punishments, and an educational evaluation, including the prisoner’s attitude toward the camp administration and other prisoners, their participation in cultural work, and their behavior.3 Many of these files still exist in the archives of local Gulag camps. Working in the archives of Karaganda, I was given wide access to these files on former prisoners, while the archivists spent their time using the files to provide information on former prisoners to the survivors themselves or their descendants. The files almost without exception showed significant care in completing these evaluations.
In many ways, then, the evaluation of prisoners was specifically individualized, but this practice of individualized evaluation coexisted uneasily with the use of collective responsibility (krugovaia poruka). Through much of Gulag history, prisoners lived, worked, and ate as part of a labor brigade. The responsibility for meeting labor norms was placed on the entire brigade, and escape attempts could lead to punishment for everyone. Assigning individual credit for labor quota fulfillment fell to the brigadier, typically a fellow prisoner, thus placing an important element of the prisoner evaluation in the hands of prisoners themselves. The upside, for authorities, was that collective responsibility extended social control beyond where Soviet authority could reach, giving every member of a brigade incentive to keep their fellow prisoners in line. It did remove some control over the individualization of evaluation, punishment, and ultimately survival, however. It could be difficult for a prisoner to survive a bad brigade or even a bad brigade leader.4
One of the common features of the modern polity is the obsession with categorizing its members. This categorization arises from and is integral to the modern political need to know the social body in order to transform it, and is evident in the emergence of the census, ethnographic expeditions, public health, surveillance, and other practices designed to provide information to the state about its population. The practice of categorization allows the modern state to simplify and represent a population too large to know on an individual basis. It combines the seemingly contradictory elements of individualization and generalization. Knowing every detail of every individual citizen’s life supplies more data than even the modern state can use. Consequently, the state simplifies and generalizes certain elements of individual identity that it deems particularly critical. The explicit and implicit assumptions derived from an individual polity’s ideological assumptions shape the selection of the defining categories of generalization. At times—for example, in the case of Jewish identity in the Nazi polity—a single category of identity can virtually trump and render moot all others. In other cases, states operate based on a complicated matrix of identities not easily reduced to the one or two most significant categories. This process is both individualizing and de-individualizing. On the one hand, it leads to a certain leveling of individual differences among a state’s population. On the other hand, the constant drive to subject every single citizen to this process of categorization forces the modern state to engage with each citizen individually.
In the Soviet Union, the practice of categorization took on an especially political form. Whatever the specific criteria of categorization, and as we will see, they changed frequently, categories related directly to the individual’s perceived political reliability. The practice of population cataloging existed in a particularly intense form in the Gulag. In camps and exile, an elaborate and ever-shifting hierarchy of identities emerged from this incessant categorization, bearing tremendous similarities to the social hierarchies found in Soviet society at large. Not only were prisoners defined in opposition to the camp authorities but they also were themselves divided at different times by class background, national origin, gender, article of conviction, military status, and so on, all of which bore a direct relationship to a prisoner’s perceived redeemability. Categorization in the Gulag served as a source of power, both in the relationship between authorities and prisoners, and among the prisoners themselves. As Ginzburg noted, “There was no equality in this new circle of Dante’s Inferno. The camp population was divided by the devilish ingenuity of our torturers into numerous ‘classes.’”5 Categorization also served as a means of social prophylaxis, allowing camp authorities to define dangerous prisoners and take measures to prevent them from contaminating the less dangerous prisoner population.
Identity in the Gulag operated primarily along two axes: who the prisoner was prior to their arrival in the Gulag, and who the prisoner had become while in the Gulag. When a prisoner arrived in the Gulag, they stepped right into a matrix of identity in which they held a specific place defined by the type of crime committed, or their gender, class, or national identity. Nonetheless, the prisoner was not completely precluded from improving their position in the eyes of Soviet authorities.
From at least the promulgation of the corrective labor code in 1924, penal policy in the Soviet Union was engaged in this sort of relentless categorization of prisoners. The code envisioned a complex classification of prisoners based first on the class identity of the individual prisoner and the category of crime committed, and second on the prisoner’s behavior while in the place of imprisonment. Thus, prisoners were initially divided into three categories: category one for prisoners requiring “strict isolation”; category two for those not belonging to the laboring classes who committed crimes owing to their class habits, views, or interests, and category three for all prisoners not belonging to the first two categories. These three categories were then assigned to three ranks: beginning, intermediate, and higher. All prisoners from categories one and two began their imprisonment in the beginning rank, while prisoners from category three could begin in any of the three ranks according to the penal authorities’ decision. Based on their success in work and study, or their violations of the rules of penal institutions, prisoners could be transfered to higher or lower ranks, although prisoners from the first category were not allowed to advance beyond the beginning rank before completing half of their sentence and prisoners of the second category not before completing a quarter of their sentence. All prisoners were required to spend a third of their sentence in the intermediate rank before becoming eligible for further advancement. The three ranks were associated with a progressive system of privileges and relaxation of the level of detention in their penal institution.6 As we will see, the system of categories and ranks envisioned by these rules laid out the basic principles on which the system of prisoner categorization operated throughout the Gulag’s history.
While the gap between camp authorities and individual prisoners was overwhelming, identity in the Gulag was to some extent a two-way street. As we have seen, camp authorities were never able to monitor every minute or inch occupied by the prisoners. In their free movement around the camp zone after working hours, work in labor brigades, functioning as camp administrators, doctors, cooks, and guards, the prisoners had time and space to claim as their own. In all these moments and inches, prisoners shaped their own society, often using the same categories of identity favored by camp authorities themselves. While the Gulag authorities foisted distinct identities on the camp population, the prisoners also played an important role in taking on and giving form to the emerging categories of identity. Typical is the experience of Danylo Shumuk in his first cell of a Gulag prison, where he was immediately asked, “When and where were you arrested, and on what charges?” Only after hearing his response did the other prisoners treat him to white bread and sour cream.7 Scholmer faced the same questions: How many years? What paragraph were you sentenced under? Were you really a spy?8 As Gustav Herling explains it, “Those who guarded closely the secret of their sentence and imprisonment were considered either too proud to be admitted to the solidarity of the prisoners, or else as potential spies and informers.”9 One’s past, sentence, and nationality—in short, the categories of one’s identity—were the admission tickets to the “solidarity of the prisoners” as surely as they conditioned the authorities’ treatment of the prisoner. The effectiveness of official categorization is only emphasized further by its utilization in prisoner relationships.
The remainder of this chapter will assess the main axes on which Gulag identity was formed, revealing both the way that identities were defined by Gulag authorities but also the way that individual prisoners utilized these identities in organizing their own life and their own Gulag society. With small distinctions, these forms of identity operated across the Gulag, in all its range of institutions and locales.
In accord with the fundamental tenets of Marxist ideology, class was from the revolution a primary category of identity in the Soviet Union. This was no less true inside the Gulag, where discrimination according to class was a near-constant feature of daily life. While the ways in which class was understood in the Gulag and the Soviet Union changed over the course of the 1930s, particularly with the promulgation of the new Soviet constitution in 1936 and the concomitant declaration of the obliteration of enemy classes in the Soviet Union, class never entirely surrendered its role in the Soviet matrix of identity.10 In the Soviet Union, class was always understood in a rather Manichaean fashion. Classes were either friendly or the enemy. In the Gulag, class was represented by the political prisoner/common criminal axis. The common criminal represented the proletariat of the Gulag—the friendly class—while the political prisoner—in official Gulag parlance, the counterrevolutionary criminal—stood in for the bourgeoisie, the class enemy.
The Russian revolutionary movement looked proudly on the history of political prisoners in pre–Soviet Russia.11 These prisoners attained a certain notoriety and popularity among segments of tsarist society. In prisons and exile, they held dear their moral code of behavior, privileges vis-à-vis criminals, and self-government. Identification as a political prisoner was crucial to obtain these privileges. In the periodic tsarist amnesties, only political prisoners were released.
In the first years of the Soviet period, the term political prisoner was reserved for those individuals who were members of leftist political parties. In the 1920s’ Solovetskii camp, only the 450 or so members of the leftist political parties were given the rights of political prisoners. They were quartered separately, free to move within their territory of the camp, lived with their families, received rations from the political Red Cross, and “were spared re-education.”12 Over time, Soviet authorities limited the use of the term political prisoner, with its connotation of the innocent martyr suffering for the cause. First, the term was refused to the “White guardists” of the “counterrevolutionary” parties—that is, all parties that were not expressly socialist. The socialists themselves then were excluded from the ranks of the political prisoner until only a Communist could be a political prisoner. With the promulgation of the criminal code and introduction of Article 58 in 1926, the political prisoner in the Soviet Union officially disappeared.13 While the prisoners themselves generally referred to all those arrested under Article 58 as politicals, Soviet authorities referred to these individuals as counterrevolutionaries.14
Being tagged a counterrevolutionary had real and sometimes lethal consequences for the Gulag prisoner. Nonetheless, Soviet justice used the term in a malleable fashion. The provisions of Article 58 were so broad and vague that a crime prosecuted under other articles of the code today could be reinterpreted as Article 58 offenses tomorrow (and vice versa).15 As Solzhenitsyn quite properly noted, “In all truth, there is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58.”16 Furthermore, Soviet authorities frequently treated groups of prisoners sentenced under other articles of the criminal code as the virtual equivalents of counterrevolutionaries. One need not necessarily be branded with Article 58 to be treated as the worst enemy of the Soviet state.17 Of course, individuals in the Soviet Union could easily find themselves arrested and charged as a counterrevolutionary for having committed no crime at all. The prevalence of arrests under Article 58 should not necessarily be taken as evidence of widespread counterrevolutionary activity or even opposition to Soviet rule.
Even the 58s were subject to a further subcategorization. For example, when building the Moscow-Volga Canal, some 58s were taken into the labor collectives, but only those with sentences under five years. When the new special regime camps were created after the war, only a select portion of the “most dangerous” 58s was transferred into its institutions. The transfers were based on the particular sections of Article 58 under which the prisoner was sentenced.18
No matter how malleable the application of Article 58, those branded with the number were subjected to a much harsher Gulag regime. No matter the number of prisoners sentenced under Article 58, official documents and memoirs attest time and again to the importance of the category in the construction of Gulag identity. In general, the authorities treated the so-called counterrevolutionary prisoners with great suspicion. The redeemability of this group was questionable at best. They received the longest sentences. They were often excluded from early release. They were most likely to serve their sentences in the Gulag’s most extreme geographic locales, and were usually excluded from working in their specialties. As early as 1930, their redeemability was placed in question when they were denied the opportunity to join the new work communes at the Solovetskii camps. The members of this new shock worker movement were placed in their own barracks, where they got softer beds, warmer clothes, and better food. Although these communes were short-lived, the principle of excluding the 58s from many of the most progressive forms of correction survived.19 Time and again, being a counterrevolutionary in the Gulag meant that it would be much more difficult to survive the Gulag.20
Of course, the exclusion of the 58s in practice never quite reached that imagined in theory. Regulations officially prohibited 58s from holding privileged positions in the camps, but the predominance of engineers and other specialists among the political prisoner population ultimately overran this official proclamation.21 Although the 58s were supposed to have only limited exposure to the cultural activities of the camp, Solzhenitsyn himself participated in amateur theatricals in the camps.22 In addition, while their capacity for redemption was questionable, the counterrevolutionary criminal who had survived to reach the Gulag was not considered hopelessly irredeemable. If they were, they would have been executed, as so many others were. At the final conference of the GPU construction of Belomor, Firin propagandistically declared:
When we sentenced them, we did not consider them—either the political or the criminal law-breakers—to be hopeless material for the coming classless State. . . . We tried to re-educate our class enemy as well. We did a great deal of work with them. . . . And now the Soviet workers must receive them well, in a friendly fashion, with no reservations or doubts.23
Karlag loudly and proudly trumpeted the heroic activities of many Article 58 prisoners in the history prepared and submitted to central Gulag officials in 1934. In a section enumerating the active organizers and builders of Karlag agriculture, a host of current and former Article 58 prisoners were celebrated for their contributions. For instance, the prisoner Trautman, sentenced under Article 58 for wrecking, was “from the first days” an active participant in the organization of work in the camp. Together with several other engineers, he prepared the technical foundations for Karlag’s work.24 Then the prisoner Gureev, an agronomist sentenced under Article 58, arrived at Karlag in 1931. He organized and completed the sowing campaign of 1931, was subsequently released, and then became the director of a Karlag production division.25 The list continues with zoologists working in livestock breeding, agronomists involved in scientific crop research, professors, veterinarians, engineers, and economists. In all, over thirty Article 58 prisoners are trumpeted as examples of the successes of Karlag, in both its productive pursuits and remaking of the individual. Many of these prisoners, it was noted, had already been released or had seen their sentences reduced substantially for their good works, and all of those released had chosen to stay on at Karlag and work as free individuals.26
In 1936, a crossroads was reached, where the definition of the Gulag’s enemies was sharply altered. The adoption of the Stalin constitution in December of that year was accompanied by the announcement that socialism had been achieved, and that the Soviet Union was now officially a socialist state of workers and peasants.27 The capitalist past could no longer excuse crime. Consequently, achieving redemption in the near term became much more difficult. As the Great Terror ensued, massive numbers of enemies were executed in and out of the Gulag. Order 00447, the mass operation of the Great Terror against “former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements” included a quota of 10,000 to be sentenced to death among the prisoners of NKVD camps.28 Outside the Gulag, the NKVD executed at least some 680,000 people in 1937–38—more than twenty times the execution total for any other two-year period.29 In Karlag, long lists of executed prisoners appear frequently in the records. Those unable to prove their capacity for rehabilitation during the preceding transition period were now annihilated. The threshold of redeemability was drawn significantly higher during the terror. Central Gulag authorities, in the midst of the terror, undertook a review of individual prisoner files, including surveillance reports, in a search for compromising materials on all counterrevolutionary criminals whose camp terms had recently expired or were about to expire. Although it is not spelled out specifically, the implication was clear that some portion of these prisoners were not going to be released.30 They may have been fit for rehabilitation and release in an earlier era, but times had changed, and the criteria for release had stiffened.
After 1936, a significant rhetorical shift accompanied the rigidified definition of the counterrevolutionary. Class enemies were transformed into enemies of the people, anti-Soviet elements, and fascists, in accord with the declining importance of class and rising importance of ethnicity that accompanied the “victory” of socialism.31 Not coincidentally, the term enemy of the people appears in two articles of the Soviet constitution of 1936 itself.32 Galina Ivanova uncovered further changes in terminology during this period. While the early 1930s saw Gulag prisoners called shock workers and Stakhanovites, a decree in September 1937 declared that it was “a political mistake” to apply the term Stakhanovite to a prisoner. From that point forward, such positive terminology was to be replaced with more neutral terms like camp population, labor fund, or simply zeki, an abbreviated form of zakliuchennye or prisoners.33 All these terms continued to refer to the same prisoners, yet a reconfiguration of the crucial categories ordering Soviet society was reflected in the shift in the Gulag’s terminology. During the terror years of 1937 and 1938, the transformation was lethal for many Gulag prisoners.
The opposite side of the authorities’ innate (but not inflexible) distrust of the socially harmful 58s was their fundamental belief in the reformability of the socially friendly common criminal. This vision of criminal reformability derived directly from the Bolshevik worldview. As Maksim Gorky once stated to a group of convicted thieves: “After all, any capitalist steals more than all of you combined!”34 The Bolsheviks held to certain truths: “there are no inveterate criminals, no inveterate rascals, but there were once abominable and odious circumstances, which manufactured criminals and rascals [but] our country is magnanimous, beautiful and strong. . . . [W]e must love and beautify our country.”35 Common criminals, it was reasoned, arose only in response to the devaluation of labor under repressive capitalist control. As a result and part of the beautification (socialization) of the social body, the criminal would come to recognize the value of work and would be redeemed. In accordance with the Bolshevik preference for the “proletarian” common criminal, an order was issued at Belomor declaring, “All criminals coming under Article 35 of the Code, all social miscreants and women, were to receive the best and most humane treatment.”36 At Karlag, the deputy chief wrote in 1932 that one of the camp’s main tasks was the cultural and political education of the prisoners, “in the first order the layers socially close to the working class.”37
The construction of a boundary between the 58s and common criminals served to focus the self-representation of the socially friendly on the negative portrait of the socially harmful. By revealing a picture of the less redeemable to the thieves, their own redeemability was affirmed. The link was made explicit. Speaking to the convicts at Belomor, a GPU officer pointed out that the working person who had committed some criminal act or other had to be punished. “But,” he proceeded, “we must prevent this worker who has got into trouble from falling under the influence of the counter-revolutionaries, who have been sent here for entirely different things.” Nonetheless, the counterrevolutionaries were not cast off, nor were they isolated totally from the common criminal to whom they posed a threat. In fact, as part of their own rehabilitation, common criminals must actively aid the rehabilitation of counterrevolutionaries. As the GPU officer concluded, “The road for your return to your factory or kolkhoz [collective farm] before your terms expire is not closed, provided you show us here that you work loyally and honestly and will help us take care of and re-educate the counter-revolutionaries.”38 In accord with this level of trust, camp authorities were authorized to take prisoners sentenced for noncounterrevolutionary crimes and exhibiting exemplary behavior in camp into a wide array of positions within the camp, including administrative positions and armed camp guards.39
In some limited sense, the authorities were able to fix the representation of the socially friendly/socially harmful boundary. A former thief proclaimed in a letter to literaturnaia gazeta in 1962: “I was even proud that although a thief I was not a traitor and betrayer. On every convenient occasion they tried to teach us thieves that we were not lost to our Motherland, that even if we were profligate sons, we were nevertheless sons. But there was no place for the ‘Fascists’ on this earth.”40 Frequently, the 58s became the verbal target of the common criminals’ own declaration of importance. Gustav Herling recalls the insults tossed about by the “children” in the prisons after a lesson from the education officer: “Accusations of ‘Trotskyism,’ ‘nationalism,’ and ‘counterrevolution’ were constantly flung out at us from their corner, then assurances that ‘Comrade Stalin did well to lock you up,’ . . . all this repeated again and again with . . . cruel, sadistic persistence.”41
While the authorities ascribed a negative but malleable connotation to the term counterrevolutionary, the educated prisoners—largely from among the ranks of the political prisoners—who left us memoir evidence reverse the signs, drawing an even sharper distinction between politicals and thieves. These prisoners carried with them a social memory of the privileged position of politicals in prerevolutionary prisons and places of exile. Even as late as the 1940s, when Solzhenitsyn first passed through the Gulag’s gates, this identity was directly descended from the glorious tsarist history of political prisoners. In Solzhenitsyn’s first cell at Lubianka, he met an “old fellow,” Anatolii Fastenko, a sixty-something social democrat, who proved to be an important “keeper of the old Russian prison traditions.”42 The prisoners often discussed “how it used to be in prison,” and listened to Fastenko’s firsthand stories about the former “honor” of being a political prisoner and the traditional generosity extended to them even by those with whom they were not acquainted.43 In this living tie to the past, and through those acquainted with him and others like him, the tales of the “triumphant ethics of the political prisoners,” the long-established privileges, and the self-government for political prisoners were passed on to new generations of inmates.44 As a result of this reverence for the glorious past of the political prisoners, individuals with lengthy experience in the camps came to serve as the de facto leaders of the prisoners in times of crisis and uprising. The bonds to the world of the political prisoner were further strengthened after the annexations of territory and their accompanying arrests in 1939. By that time, more than twenty years after the October Revolution, direct veterans of the prerevolutionary prisons like Solzhenitsyn’s Fastenko must have become relatively rare. The annexations created a whole new generation of prisoners, many with experience as political prisoners in Polish or German detention. They would bring their prison traditions and utterly different ideologies to the Soviet Gulag.
The self-styled politicals counterposed their identity to that of the common criminal, uniformly claiming consistent and continuous victimization of the politicals by the criminals. Furthermore, they asserted that this victimization was carried out at the behest of—or at least with the acquiescence of—the camp authorities themselves. Of all the tales of torture and privation that fill Solzhenitsyn’s multivolume opus, he seems most offended by the loss of the privileged position of the political prisoner and the perceived coddling of the thieves. More than any other memoirist, Solzhenitsyn draws the picture of these two groups in garish terms. Politicals were “guilty of nothing” and “unprepared to put up any resistance.” They were “submissive sheep” at the mercy of the “wolf.” On the other hand, “the tattooed chests [the common criminals] were merely the rear ends of the bluecaps [Gulag officials].” “You’ll not get fruit from a stone, nor good from a thief.”45 He accuses these “parasites” of an unwillingness to work, entering the war only to pillage the occupied territories, and illiteracy or indifference to written literature. Solzhenitsyn denies a distinction between the “honest thieves” and the “bitches.”46 (Typically the former are identified as those refusing to cooperate with the camp authorities, while the latter were those who did.) Nor was Solzhenitsyn in any sense alone in his extreme characterizations of the criminal element. Ginzburg declared that “the professional criminals are beyond the bounds of humanity.”47
Even memoirists who did not go to such extremes often expressed shock after contact with the criminal world. Stefanskaia recalls her arrival at Karlag. “First I saw the criminals, ‘the blatnye’ as they were called here. . . . Seeing us coming on etap [a prisoner transport] dressed decently with suitcases, they shouted: ‘Counterrevolutionaries, they are bringing the counterrevolutionaries . . . now we will smoke!’” Unfortunately for the blatnye, however, the new camp arrivals were immediately placed in quarantine and strictly isolated. Among the many pleasures for Stefanskaia, when she went to work in the veterinary service outside the camp zone, was the escape from the filth of the criminal world—their tattooed bodies, vulgar language and songs, and “criminal exotica.”48
Other prisoners had a different perspective. Petrov remembers “two sharply different groups” of nonpolitical criminals, surprisingly characterizing prisoners convicted of more serious crimes as less threatening in the camps.
The smaller group . . . consisted of well-seasoned bandits and murderers, largely with a death sentence commuted to ten years in a concentration camp. On the whole they were quite decent fellows who realized their own worth, feared no person or thing, were able to crack anybody’s head without a moment’s hesitation, and knew how to make others respect them. . . .
The other nonpolitical group, made up of petty crooks and pickpockets, was a constant source of trouble. . . . These creatures in the image of man sang prison songs incessantly. . . . Most of their songs were utterly obscene, and their perpetual swearing was done with variations of the most elaborate kind. One had to be constantly on the alert in order not to have something stolen by them. . . . [They] stole from the “devils,” the name applied mostly to peasants sentenced for counter-revolution. These devils, who included all helpless prisoners, mainly of the political category, had a miserable time of it. Downtrodden and frightened to death . . . they did not have the courage to offer resistance to the “socially elect” dregs of society.49
Still other memoirists attribute their successful survival at various points to their capacity to come to some accommodation with the camps’ criminal elements. Bardach frequently befriended criminal elements by serving as their storyteller. He entertained them with tales that he derived from books he had read and stories he knew. Moreover, he exhibited a mastery of the crudities of the criminal language, the use of which distinguished him from the “mama’s boys” in the eyes of his criminal companions. Through his friendships with criminal elements, Bardach earned their protection from attacks by other criminals, and gained access to additional (often stolen) food, space, clothing, and other material items, which allowed him to maintain his bodily strength.50 Buber-Neumann was advised by acquaintances to tell other prisoners during transport that she was a prostitute or thief, not a political. Criminal prisoners were willing to make space in the train cars for a prostitute as opposed to a political.51
Professional criminals—that is, those who formally or informally associated themselves with criminal gangs in the Gulag—marked their identities in a number of specific ways. First, they famously tattooed their bodies, offering immediate visual evidence of their identity. Yet the professional criminals also identified themselves through participation in an elaborate Gulag criminal subculture—a subculture that Soviet officials battled unsuccessfully to destroy. The professional criminals played cards, sang, listened to stories, and swore. Their language was notorious for its vulgarity. Bardach recalled his initial encounter with them in his first prison cell:
I stayed near the latrine barrel. . . . One of the young hoodlums jerked my head toward him. His hand was filthy, and his outstretched arm was blackened with tattoos. “Bet you’d like one like this.” He pulled his penis out of his pants and held it in both hands, pointing it toward me. “Take a good look. You’re gonna suck a lot of ’em.” . . . He squatted and peered at my face. “You look at me when I piss, but don’t open your mouth or I’ll piss in it.”52
No wonder, then, that the writers of Belomor focused on the need for beautification in the criminal’s life. While Belomor often praised the work of the KVCh, progress in creating a cultured society was less successful. “The liquidation of illiteracy is spreading? True enough, but the shockworkers of the fourth division complained of the vulgar language used at the club. The wall newspapers still sang vulgar songs. The string orchestras amused themselves with public-house ditties.”53 The theater groups at the Solovetskii camp were defended on the grounds that “a criminal joining the group drops such deplorable habits as gambling, using foul language, etc., not to mention the benefit of his or her own involvement in cultural pursuits.”54 The Gulag officially aimed to instill new habits of cleanliness, both of body and language, in order to make the professional criminal prisoner suitable for a return to society. Of course, this aspect of Gulag ideology was particularly ironic, given that one would never describe anything about the Gulag with the term cleanliness, and the Gulag itself served the maintenance, development, and spread of the vulgar criminal language.
The politicals were in a lot of ways a more diffuse group. They did not even agree among themselves, at least in memoirs, about who the legitimate political prisoners were. Solzhenitsyn refuses to grant that all the 58s were politicals, or that all politicals necessarily 58s. He writes, “If not struggle with the regime, then moral or energetic resistance to it—that is the chief criterion [in determining who was a political]. And the manner of which ‘article’ was pasted on didn’t mean a thing. (Many sons of the liquidated ‘kulaks’ were given thieves’ articles, but in camp showed themselves to be genuine politicals.)”55 In a way, Solzhenitsyn is quite right. The question of who was a political and who was a thief was a complex one. True professional criminals, those who were members of criminal gangs with all the accompanying rituals and tattoos, could just as easily find themselves arrested and convicted for a crime placed under Article 58. The provisions of Article 58 were so broad that any criminal act could be interpreted also as a counterrevolutionary crime. At the same time, vast numbers of Soviet citizens were arrested for offenses that were not political in nature but instead were so minor that it would be quite difficult to understand them as criminal—the peasant arrested for taking a few potatoes from a field during a famine, say, or the worker who came afoul of harsh labor laws that threatened criminal punishment for tardiness to work. In some ways, all of these prisoners really made up a third category, sometimes referred to in the Gulag as bytoviki, or those who committed byt or “everyday life” crimes. Many of these prisoners no doubt worked too well in the camps for Solzhenitsyn to consider them truly political, though. Stefanskaia saw the work of some of these prisoners at a Karlag dairy farm. There, the petty criminal prisoners (she specifically uses the term bytoviki) worked “seriously and conscientiously” even without a convoy guard on duty.56
Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn was pointedly trying to cleanse the ranks of the politicals from Trotskyites, Communists, and other pro-Soviet prisoners.57 The question of both Communists and pro-Soviet political prisoners in the Gulag was indeed an interesting one. As Buber-Neumann described it:
Gradually I got to know the Russian prisoners. We were all supposed to be political offenders, but they were strange political prisoners. . . . I never heard a word of criticism of the Soviet regime from a Russian prisoner the whole time I was in the Butirka [prison in Moscow]. If they had kept quiet for fear of denunciation, it would have been understandable, but there were one or two cliques in our cell who vied with each other in proclaiming their devotion to the Soviet regime and their loyalty to the Party.58
These political prisoners widely believed that their own arrest was a mistake or the result of enemy activity, but they thought that their fellow prisoners were guilty of their crimes. Buber-Neumann recalls a conversation with one such prisoner named Katia:
“What on earth are you here for?” I asked.
“I’m the victim of a Trotskyite slander,” she declared, sticking out her chest virtuously. “But you just wait: I’ll pay them back for it, the scoundrels.”
“Oh, so you’re innocent, like everyone else here,” I said.
“I don’t know about that,” she replied. “I only know my own case and that of one or two of my friends. You must remember that I come from a family in which there are nine Stakhanovites and in my factory I was known as the non-Party Bolshevist.”
“But, Katia,” I continued, “you’ve talked with the others here just as I have; haven’t you got the impression that they’re really all innocent; that they really haven’t done anything against the Soviet government?”
She looked at me with fanatical hatred in her eyes. She didn’t want them to be innocent. “They haven’t arrested half enough yet,” she spat. “We must protect ourselves from the traitors.”59
Ginzburg, herself a former party member, recalls similar attitudes among Communists in the Gulag. Anna, a fellow prisoner, confided in Ginzburg “as one Party member to another.” Anna often expressed her concern that another prisoner, a Socialists Revolutionary, might overhear her. “You realize, Genia, she really is the class enemy. Mensheviks and SR’s, you remember.”60
If their fellow prisoners were not necessarily taken for innocent, many Communists in the Gulag were reluctant also to cast blame on Stalin or the Soviet system as a whole. As Ginzburg noted, “I met many people in the camp who managed to combine a shrewd sense of what was going on in the country at large with a religious cult of Stalin.”61 Yet even if she were one of the “shrewd” ones, adding this up to a thorough critique of the Soviet system was near impossible. She wondered if
even now—we asked ourselves—after all that has happened to us, would we vote for any other than the Soviet system, which seemed as much a part of us as our hearts and as natural to us as breathing? Everything I had in the world—the thousands of books I had read, memories of my youth, and the very endurance which was now keeping me from going under—all this had been given me by the Soviet system, and the revolution which had transformed my world while I was still a child. How exciting life had been and how gloriously everything had begun! What in God’s name had happened to us all?62
The political prisoner/common criminal axis of identity was only one of many that operated in the Gulag. Nonetheless, it was accorded tremendous importance by both prisoners and authorities. It shifted in the war and postwar eras, especially as it was more and more displaced by the significance of national identity in the camps with the annexation of the western borderlands in the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939. Nonetheless, national identity was already assuming prominence prior to 1939.
Overlapping the boundaries of the political prisoner/common criminal categorization was the broad hierarchy of nationalities. Official Soviet policy and practice on the issue of nationality—a Russian term almost but not quite coterminous with ethnicity—have been discussed in great detail in recent historical works.63 Despite its official Marxist presumption that nationalities would disappear, Soviet authorities accepted nationality as a really existing phenomenon and even took significant measures toward the development of national identity among the peoples of the Soviet Union. As with the issue of social class, official Soviet policy and practices outside the Gulag strongly affected the authorities’ attitude toward national identity inside it. This impact, again similar to that of class identity, extended to the prisoners themselves, though the results were not what Soviet authorities expected.
In the early 1930s, precisely during the period in which Soviet authority was fostering the development of national identity, especially among the smallest ethnic groups (the so-called national minorities, or natsmeny) of the Soviet Union, and denouncing great power chauvinism, especially among the Russian population, the same policies found their way into the Gulag. Gulag officials treated national minorities—essentially the non-European prisoners in the Gulag—(along with women) as a group of prisoners requiring remedial training to raise them to a cultural level appropriate for Soviet society. Prisoners among these groups were deemed unfit for Soviet society merely by the presumed cultural level of their nationality. Yet unlike later Soviet peoples repressed on account of their nationality, these prisoners were by no means treated as unredeemable. Their nationality was not genetically incapable of achieving the appropriate cultural level for socialism. Rather, their cultural growth, in the minds of Soviet authorities, had been stunted by the repressive Russian chauvinism of the tsarist empire. Their time in camp, then, was officially aimed at overcoming these historical handicaps.
At Belomor, many spent their time as members of a “national minority division.”64 Although membership in a particular nationality did not foreclose the possibility of rehabilitation, the redeemability, especially of the non-European nationalities, was by no means assured. On the one hand, we find in Belomor that “it is hard to guess, looking at these people, dressed in Bokhara robes, turbans, long mountaineer’s coats, jackets, and long shirts, which of them are the future record-breaking brigadiers and which the intractable obstructors.” That is, you could not tell merely by their national and cultural origins which would become fit Soviet citizens, and which would not. On the other hand, we read that “it was dark and dirty in the national minority barracks. On the beds sat Uzbeks, Bashkirs, Tadzhiks, Yakuts—the most backward people on the construction, branded as idlers in the camp paper Reforging.”65 The official view of national identity in the Soviet 1930s, even when it offered the promise of lifting up (civilizing, in the favored imperialist term) these oppressed peoples, continued to operate within an essentializing script toward nationality—in short, all members of a nationality were viewed as alike. It is but a short step from that view to one in which an entire national group is irredeemable.
Much as particular organizations were being created for Soviet nationalities around the Soviet Union, Karlag created special national minority divisions and brigades in the early 1930s, with particular attention to the creation of separate divisions for Kazakh prisoners. In these divisions, Kazakhs were brigade leaders, and production meetings were held in the native language. Karlag published an edition of the camp newspaper in the Kazakh language. Furthermore, Karlag authorities demanded that translators be provided to these Kazakh divisions so that prisoners could gain access to services in the camp as well as the camp administration. Though officials expended many words calling for attention to the Kazakh divisions, the reality was quite different. Life in one of the Kazakh divisions, even in official documentation, was difficult. Karlag authorities frequently complained that the European prisoner populations and even Karlag employees themselves treated the national minorities poorly, consigning them to the worst living spaces, providing them the worst food, and even engaging in beatings of Kazakh prisoners. These activities were all taken as signs of continuing national chauvinism that must be defeated, but little indicates that real changes occurred.66
The national divisions in the early 1930s differed from those created in the 1940s and 1950s at Karlag for Chechens. These later divisions were primarily focused on keeping Chechens separated from Russians to prevent ethnic violence, while the national divisions for Kazakhs were ostensibly created to assist these prisoners in developing national consciousness and to raise their cultural level. Yet Karlag officials always cast a wary eye on the Kazakh prisoner population. Since most of the Kazakh prisoners lived in much closer proximity to the camp prior to their arrest than most other prisoners, Karlag authorities particularly feared their capacity to escape and quickly mix in with local populations. This was especially possible given their ability to speak a language indecipherable to most Karlag authorities. Karlag always worried contact between its large mobile and unguarded prisoner population and the local free populations, but these fears were enhanced in the case of the Kazakh prisoners. By the late 1930s, Kazakh prisoners in Karlag would become a rarity, as most Kazakhs were sent to Gulag locales outside the republic.
By the mid-1930s, concerns with national minorities and great power chauvinism disappeared from the Karlag administrative records. This did not indicate, however, that national identity had become less important in the Gulag. Rather, the focus of concern had changed. The national minorities were no longer assumed to be “backward” in the Soviet Union but instead on the level of everybody else.67 This increased anxiety as opposed to reducing it. In fact, from the mid-1930s to the 1950s, one finds a mountain of evidence pointing toward a certain “ethnicization” of official conceptions of the enemy and in the Gulag. While this ethnicization process gained momentum in the war and postwar years, it began in the 1930s, especially after the adoption of the constitution. With the class enemy “officially” destroyed, the Soviet Union, it was declared, had become “a unified brotherly family of the working peoples of all nations.”68 Henceforth, individuals—and enemies—were defined less in class and more in national terms. Of course, class as a category was never abandoned, but nationality became more important than ever. As class enemies became enemies of the people or anti-Soviet elements, they became defined as enemies of the Soviet nation—that is, they came to be understood in the language of nation.69
The process of ethnicizing the enemy is most obvious in the case of the population of internal exiles. In the early 1930s, the process of internal exile that created the populations of the special settlements was almost entirely a result of the drive to collectivize agriculture and destroy the kulaks “as a class.” By the end of 1932, the number of deported kulaks reached 3.2 million. Exile in the early 1930s was thus a matter of class identities and class enemies. Granted, the first deportations of ethnic minorities commenced as early as 1930 with the deportation of Poles from the Vinnytsia and Kiev regions, but these were rather exceptional cases.
Since kulak was a category of class, defined in Marxist terms by one’s relationship to the means of production, it was something that could be changed and was not inherent in a person from birth. Class and class attitudes came from one’s social surroundings. Soviet authorities showed particular concern that kulak parents not be allowed to influence negatively their children’s development. The children were especially innocent—not born kulaks, but potentially susceptible to the wrong kind of influence. They were the most redeemable. Consequently, serious attention was paid to educating the younger generation in the special settlements in order to counteract any negative influence from their social surroundings.70
Even the parents, though, were considered potentially open to reeducation in the right social surroundings. Soviet policy toward these kulaks therefore would undergo numerous changes. As the Soviet Union officially approached socialism and the official destruction of enemy classes, which would no longer exist under socialism, restrictions on the kulak exiles were eased. As early as 1931, a decree promised to restore voting rights to exiled kulaks after five years if during the interim they proved themselves to be honest Soviet working citizens.71 Broad amnesties in 1935 and 1938 removed many former kulaks from the status of special settlers. Nikolai Bugai estimates that their number had dropped to just over 970,000 by 1939.72 Furthermore, conventional terminology quickly named these people “former kulaks,” placing the focus on putting their kulak identities into their past and providing a strong indication of the perceived malleability of class identities. In fact, one finds variations on the term “former” throughout official Gulag and Soviet documentation—former lawbreakers, former kulaks, former criminals, former people, and so forth, all indicating a belief in individual human malleability. In the suspicious Stalinist Soviet Union, however, nothing was ever really former. It was never truly possible to prove that you had put your old life and ways behind you. You might, after all, simply be clever, mouthing the words and doing the right things as a way to hide your enemy activity. Soviet authorities were never comfortable that they could really see into the individual’s soul and be certain of where they stood. Given such a mind-set, it is unsurprising that one of the mass operations of the Great Terror of 1937–38 was aimed in part precisely at those former kulaks who had allegedly continued their enemy activities, including many who were still in the Gulag itself, whether in exile or camps.73
The trajectory of these former kulaks from dangerous to (semi)rehabilitated is strikingly reversed in the case of nationalities, and by the time of the war, exile by nationality became the predominant form of internal deportations. Starting with the early 1930s, one can follow a trajectory that saw exile by nationality take on an ever more undifferentiated form. At first, Soviet authorities exiled small national populations from border regions, and even then the border area was not completely cleansed of a particular nationality.74 The first big turning point occurred in August 1937, when all Soviet Koreans living in the Far Eastern regions of the USSR, no fewer than 175,000 people, were deported to the Central Asian republics. While this was not the first Soviet ethnic deportation—not even the first deportation of Soviet Koreans—the Korean deportation in 1937 was a watershed moment. This was the first time that an entire nationality was removed from a particular region.75 The deportation of the Koreans was undifferentiated. Neither class position nor even Communist Party membership could exempt one from deportation.
Nevertheless, the deportation of the Far Eastern Koreans still differed from the wartime deportations, when every last member of particular nationalities living anywhere in the Soviet Union were subject to exile. In 1937, only the Far Eastern Koreans—those Soviet Koreans living in prescribed geographic areas of the Soviet Union—were subject to deportation. Soviet Koreans living outside these regions were initially subject to no official discrimination. While their conationals in exile were not allowed to serve in the Soviet military, a few dozen of the small number of Soviet Koreans not subject to exile and its restrictions served in the army, and three received the title “Hero of the Soviet Union.”76 Only in 1945–46 was internal exile extended to all Soviet Koreans.77 Wartime exile operated in a much more undifferentiated fashion, as entire nationalities, regardless of their location in the Soviet Union, were deported. Additionally, the war saw the transition from national enemies from among the Soviet nationalities with external homelands to Soviet nationalities collectively punished for the alleged treasonous activities of the entire nationality.
Gulag labor camp authorities of the 1930s were also concerned about nationalities with external homelands, and these concerns directly affected practices in the camps. For example, an order in 1935 for one Karlag division to provide forty of its prisoners for transfer to a camp near the Soviet Union’s eastern border (the exact location is not revealed) included an explicit provision forbidding the inclusion of prisoners of Chinese, Korean, or Japanese nationality, regardless of the crime for which they were imprisoned.78 The Great Terror included a significant national orientation as well, although it continued to seek out enemies from among the former kulaks.
While the story of the reeducation of these Gulag inmates and deportees defined by national “contingent” is a complicated one that will be explored in future chapters, a few words are necessary now. Kate Brown, in her study on the peoples of the Ukrainian-Polish borderlands, argues that “deportees were transformed into mostly willing colonizers of the Kazakh steppe as they took up a stake in the Soviet modernizing project.” Drawing this conclusion largely from interviews conducted with the Ukrainian and Polish exiles who remained in northern Kazakhstan in the late 1990s, and NKVD reports of conversations among deportees in the 1930s, she shows how these people focused on “the accomplishments of resettlement.” For example, she relates one story of Edward Vinglinskii, who “speaks with a pride of how he and others covered the naked steppe with a mantle of crops and built with their own hands European-style farm communities.” Further, she notes that “even former deportees still bitter about the Soviet state spoke with pride about its accomplishments.” And she indicates a certain colonizing impulse in their stories of their past as they wrote of bring civilization to the steppe and “teach[ing] the Kazakhs how to live.”79 While this by no means signals that these people had been thoroughly reeducated, it is suggestive of the way in which a certain Soviet ethos operated that focused on labor accomplishments as the measure of a person.80
So the Gulag had already experienced a certain ethnicization by the end of the 1930s. Nonetheless, the war was a watershed in the development of this axis of identity for both authorities and prisoners.
Although Soviet authorities sought from the earliest days of the revolution to create equality between the genders, by no means did they ever try to eliminate gender difference and separate gender identities.81 Women had their own special place in the Gulag’s identity universe. They were treated as remedial subjects, officially required to work on par with men, but nonetheless subjected to cruelty specifically due to their gender. In the early 1930s, women appeared in a position similar to the national minorities. That is, they were considered to be a group in need of remedial instruction, although their cultural level was generally low due to their oppression in the tsarist era; special attention was required to raise the cultural level of women so they could take their rightful place in Soviet society. Gulag authorities continued to operate based on notions that women were best suited for certain labor tasks. Thus, the women of Karlag were more likely than the men to be involved in the production of textiles and less likely to work in the mines. Yet the actual content of educational activities with women was typically similar to that used with the national minorities.
While women were supposedly separated from men in the Gulag, complete physical separation of the sexes would never occur. From the early 1930s right through the late 1950s, Gulag authorities repeatedly called for the separation of men and women into independent camp divisions. This happened in some corners of the Gulag, but in most places at least some contact between the genders continued to take place. Women often would be located just across the barbed wire from men in separate divisions of the same camp. Thus, few women lived their Gulag experience in the complete absence of men. Given that men made up an overwhelming portion of the camp population, however, many Gulag divisions did exist that were completely male with no women in sight.
The separation of men and women had profound effects on the lives of Gulag inmates, who frequently spent many years in the camps. Far beyond the issue of sexual relations, gender separation disrupted many aspects of individuals’ social life. Prisoners often struggled to maintain their normal lives. Consider, for example, Catholics in the camps. Since the church only allowed men to serve in the priesthood, the separation of Catholic women from Catholic men denied these women access to the sacraments. While men could find many corners in the camps invisible to the prying eyes of the state to practice their beliefs, women could not. Mass was celebrated in the barracks, mine shafts, and forests whenever the guards had been drawn away. But women did find their own methods to practice their religion. In some camps, where men were nearby, “Catholic women would write down their sins on a piece of paper or tree bark with a number, which would be smuggled to the priests on the men’s side. The priests would go along the fence and silently dispense absolution to the women, who held up their fingers to identify themselves, and smuggle penances back to them.” Similarly, Catholic camp marriages also took place, with the bride and groom standing on opposite sides of the barbed wire fence while the priest witnessed their vows.82
While all Gulag prisoners were vulnerable to the arbitrariness and brutality of Gulag staff, leadership, and guards, women faced a particular vulnerability. Euphemistically termed “compulsion [of women] to cohabitation” in Gulag communiqués, administrative staff took advantage of their access to the means of survival to force female prisoners into sexual relationships with them. As one complaint of the Karlag leadership reveals, these women were typically “called out for night work” or were “selected” to work as domestic servants. Women usually were not only beholden to camp staff but also to prisoner specialists or other privileged prisoners who had been allowed to employ female prisoners as domestic workers as well. Repeated orders to end these practices were never successful.83
The exact level of coercion involved in sexual relationships between prisoners and camp employees is not always clear. To a certain extent, the prisoners and camp employees were part of the same social circle. Prisoners often worked in the camp guard and the camp’s administrative offices. Camp employees were frequently themselves former prisoners. The ties between camp employees and prisoners, as repeatedly condemned in official documents, were generally quite close. Yet the relationship was inherently an unequal one.
One Karlag directive from 1938 revealed not only sexual relations between prisoner women and the camp’s male employees that amounted to “the violent compulsion of female prisoners to cohabitation” but also sexual relationships between male prisoners and female camp employees or female members of a camp employee’s family.84 Conflicts over women could at times turn violent. In April 1934, one Karlag employee named Egorov decided he wanted to “cohabit” with a female prisoner who was already involved with a male prisoner working in the camp administration. Egorov sent his male competitor off on business and “entered into ties” with the female prisoner. On his competitor’s return and discovery of the duplicity, the male prisoner killed Egorov.85
Pregnancies and the spread of venereal diseases provided a constant reminder to Karlag authorities that the “problem” of sex in the camp had not dissipated. Venereal disease, in particular, was thought to arise from newly arriving prisoners already having the disease, sexual contact between prisoners or between prisoners and those who came to visit them, and sexual contact between the free population surrounding the camp and Karlag’s militarized guard (many of whom were also prisoners). Karlag authorities ordered that “all decisive measures” be used to stop sexual promiscuity in the camp, including the “concentration of women in separate camp subdivisions from men” along with the elimination of all possible contact between free and prisoner populations except that occurring in official matters. The spread of venereal diseases in the camp had become so common in 1937 that two camp points were specifically set up to serve as “venereal isolators”—one for female prisoner patients, and the other for males—while the camp’s chief ordered a universal medical exam of the prisoner population to uncover all hidden venereal cases. Prisoners were not excused from work during their recovery period, though.86
Karlag authorities complained a lot, as they did in June 1936, about “camp disorders” such as “the open cohabitation of male and female inmates” with the full knowledge of local camp administrators. Promiscuity and prostitution, it was noted, led to other violations of camp and labor discipline. The contact between male and female prisoners had become so open that on many occasions, a released prisoner would stay in the area “for several months” awaiting the release of their “husband” or “wife.” Prisoners would refuse to work in protest of decisions to relocate them or their camp spouse to other camp subdivisions, and even had the temerity to make what they thought were “legal demands” to live together with their spouse in the camp. These things happen, it was explained, because the camp’s leading workers and division chiefs “have forgotten that we work in a camp, where the camp regime for prisoners is a mandatory and integral part of the measures for carrying out corrective- labor policy.” Karlag central authorities under these circumstances ordered that cohabiting prisoners be sent to separate camp divisions, promiscuity and especially prostitution be punished by the deprivation of accounted working days earned toward a reduced sentence, and all prisoners working in administrative, specialist, or leadership posts who used these positions to manipulate women into sexual relationships be threatened with punishment.87
In October 1941, the cohabitation of guards with female prisoners (along with guards drunk on duty) was criticized at the Gulag’s central level. Some guards were found to have provided material assistance to women in exchange for sexual relations. In one case, the guard Novikov committed suicide after his cohabitation with four different female prisoners was uncovered. Even worse, from the point of view of Moscow, many of the outrages were happening with the acquiescence and even participation of the camp subdivision commanders as well as the guard command staff themselves. Furthermore, 50 percent of all disciplinary charges had been brought against either Communist Party or Komsomol members.88
Gender identity was a complex affair in the Gulag. Both male and female prisoners have described a certain loss of “womanhood” among female Gulag prisoners—an erasure of the difference between the sexes. As Petrov put it,
The fate of a woman fallen into the hands of the N.K.V.D. is a terrible one, particularly if she is young. A man can sometimes go through all his prison years and not lose his human image. This is difficult to accomplish, especially on a long term, but it is possible. A woman can never do it. Once cast into a prison or a concentration camp, she is lost forever, both to her family and to society as a whole.89
Ginzburg felt similarly. She recounted the wailing of a certain peasant woman. “Saints above . . . they must think we’re not human, making us walk past the men with nothing on like this. Are they out of their minds or something?” To which came the response, “Didn’t your interrogators teach you in ‘37 that there are no differences of sex where spies, saboteurs, terrorists, and traitors are concerned?” The erasure of differences between the sexes seemed even starker when Ginzburg saw a group of prisoner women: “With their shaven heads, they all looked alike, as though mass-produced in a horror factory.”90
Reclaiming some semblance of a normal life and their gender identity was, for some, a celebrated triumph for a Gulag prisoner. For Stefanskaia, new clothes and true love allowed her to reclaim her womanhood. She recalled the indignities of wearing camp clothing and related happily the day that she received packages from her parents filled with her clothes—dresses, skirts, and boots. She was allowed to wear these clothes in Karlag. Dressed like a free woman, she felt that her life in the camp improved remarkably. Stefanskaia was soon working on one of the camp’s dairy farms when she met and fell in love with a fellow prisoner, Igor Frolov, a twenty-six-year-old veterinary assistant from Leningrad with seven years of experience as a Gulag prisoner.91 While Stefanskaia found love in Karlag, she thought of her experience as unique: “Love in a camp is a difficult thing! A camp was not made for love.” Sure, she observed, in an agricultural camp where men and women worked side by side deep in the steppe without an armed guard, things happened. “But this was not love, and it was not marriage.” The camp was a place of fleeting acquaintances, she remarked, where people could never count on being together for long, so “love died.”92 Yet she did fall in love, and given the nature of life in Karlag, was even able to live with her true love in the camp almost freely. Frolov had earned a position with a great amount of freedom to move around the camp, and he used that freedom to set him and Stefanskaia up in their own residence near one of Karlag’s remote lakes. The two managed to live together for some time, dodging authorities who, given the conditions of Karlag, thought little about seeing a male and female prisoner moving about freely through the camp territory. Eventually Stefanskaia even became pregnant, gave birth to a son, and was released from the camp.
Semenova recalled a female prisoner who became involved with a prisoner who was a former high NKVD official. They had a daughter while in the camp and also got an official marriage after they were both released. Semenova helped the woman get a job in the mine construction trust in Karaganda, where the woman awaited the release of her husband.93 Orlando Figes recounts the story of Ketevan Orakhelashvili, who was arrested after her husband had been shot in 1937. Orakhelashvili married a Karaganda camp administrator on her release in 1942. They continued to live in Karaganda, and her new husband continued to work for the Gulag system.94
Love was not always, however, an uplifting story in the Gulag. Although the exact facts of their relationship (that is, whether it was one of love or coercion) and their demise cannot be determined, one report tells of a camp guard, Fedor Bondar’, who killed the prisoner Aleksandra Medvedeva before turning the gun on himself. On examination, authorities found a note in his pocket declaring that the prisoners were cohabiting and had decided to commit suicide together.95 Semenova recalled one female prisoner who “had ties” with a prisoner tractor driver, a bytovik. From jealousy, the bytovik bit off her nose. According to Semenova, she wanted to kill herself, until one surgeon managed to fashion something of a nose for her.96
During the years of the Great Terror, Karlag became home for a famous subdivision dubbed Alzhir. This Russian acronym, with the same Russian name as Algeria, stood for the Akmolinsk Lager’ ZHen Izmennikov Rodiny (Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland). It held many women who had been charged under NKVD order no. 00486 as ChSIR—Chlen Semei Izmennikov Rodiny (Member of the Family of Traitors to the Motherland)—for their marriage to those charged and often executed during the Great Terror.97 Their sentences were not to be less than five to eight years. The initial order required that all “wives” be sent to a special division of Temlag, but that camp soon became overcrowded, necessitating Alzhir’s creation at Karlag. Alzhir, the largest of the camps for wives, held many notable individuals from the Soviet Union’s cultural and political elite.
The order forbade the arrest of wives who were pregnant or had nursing children, but in practice this was frequently violated.98 Their children were also to be investigated if they were older than fifteen. If determined to be socially dangerous, then depending on their age, the level of danger they presented, and the possibility of their correction, these children were to be sent to camps, colonies, or “special-regime” orphanages. Other younger children were to be placed in orphanages, unless nonrepressed family members could take them.99 Many women would never find their children again or would only be reunited with them after many years.100
The women of Alzhir performed a wide variety of economic tasks. Semenova, a prisoner at Alzhir, recounted her initial work:
My first responsibility in the Akmolinsk camp in the winter (when our etap arrived) was to take the frozen horse feces out of the zone, where I passed the reins to the next criminal in line, and he took it on to the fields. The feces were frozen in clumps; its loading and unloading was not my responsibility, as I was suffering with the attacks of a femoral hernia.101
Other women participated in heavy outdoor work. According to Semenova, the hardest work was the manual creation and transfer of adobe bricks, each weighing twenty kilograms. She explained that the work was too heavy for many of the women prisoners, and as if to emphasize the “de-womanizing” nature of the work, she wrote that several ended up with a prolapsed uterus. Further, nearly all women at Karlag “stopped their female functions (that is, their monthly).”102
Although it took some time for a correct diagnosis of her hernia, Semenova was transferred to light physical labor afterward. Soon, though, Karlag officials came looking for specialists, and Semenova went to work as a construction engineer in the camp. She was the chief engineer on Alzhir’s main project: the construction and operation of a major textile factory that mostly produced clothing for the Red Army. The textile factory, she wrote, saved many women from heavy outdoor labor in the extreme conditions in Karlag. Semenova worked on other projects in Karlag, including the construction of a mechanized butter factory (which she proudly noted won an award for the highest-quality butter production in Kazakhstan) and a vegetable-drying enterprise. The vegetable-drying enterprise was nearly destroyed in a fire near the end of Semenova’s time in Karlag. She earned an early release for her productive work, but chose to stay and work on the reconstruction of the vegetable-drying enterprise. After its completion, Semenova remained in Karaganda, where she worked in the mine construction trust in the region and for other enterprises in construction.103
Semenova earned great trust from Karlag’s authorities. She was ultimately allowed to travel freely around the territory as part of her work. When on business, she was dressed in civilian clothing so that nobody would know she was a prisoner. Usually, she wrote, those who accompanied her on these trips “were unarmed and got drunk,” so she was freed from their escort. Her work was not without significant dangers, though, as traveling around the territory of Karaganda was quite difficult, especially in the winter months. She recalled one trip to the city of Karaganda to visit the camp’s meat combine in early 1941. The four travelers returned on a dark, moonless night on two young stallions. With the danger of unseen wolves in the steppe, it took them twenty-two hours to make their way through the negative-forty-eight-degree weather, and the party was reprimanded for returning late.104 She was also subject to denunciation, including once during the early days of the war when a “stoolie” informed on her for “praising German technology.” Luckily for her, camp authorities brushed aside most of the complaints against her, given her successful work for Karlag.105
The special divisions of the corrective labor camps for wives, including Alzhir, were dismantled on May 21, 1939, and their inmates were reintegrated into the general camp population unless they were deemed socially dangerous, in which case they were sent to Kolyma or the camps of the far north.106 After this point, Alzhir’s inmates were integrated into the general camp population of Karlag, although at least some effort was made to keep them in separate female-only divisions.
Though much less commonly discussed in official documentation and memoirs, women were not the only victims of sexual assault in the Gulag. Similar to other prison systems that practiced gender segregation, some men—especially those who were young or of small stature—were frequently raped and sexually subjugated. Bardach, one of the least reticent memoirists about describing the brutality of the Gulag in stark detail, wrote about one incident:
An excited group of prisoners gathered around a bench next to the wall. Those in the back row were jumping up, trying to see over the heads and shoulders of those in front, who were shouting obscenities and holding their penises. . . . A young man lay on his stomach [in the baths], and another man lay on top of him, embracing him around the chest and moving his hips back and forth. His back was tattooed with shackles, chains, and the popular Soviet slogan “Work is an act of honor, courage, and heroism.” On both sides were trumpeting angels. He breathed heavily, while the young man underneath moaned and cried out. The spectators shouted. I caught sight of the young man’s grimacing face.107
Nonetheless, even Bardach was unwilling to specifically say whether he had personally been a victim of rape in the Gulag. The existence of homosexuality in the Gulag and its manifestations as well as the issue of sexual assault on men, thus have been understudied to date.108
• • • • •
The institutions, practices, and identities of the Gulag were shaped by official Soviet understanding of its enemies along with the line between redemption and death. As prisoners attempted to negotiate survival in the Gulag, and as local Gulag authorities wrestled with the sometimes-conflicting demands placed on them by central Gulag authorities, a Gulag society emerged that in many ways mirrored Soviet society at large. The line between redemption and death, however, was in constant flux. As such, the institutions, practices, and identities were also in flux. Events external to the Gulag itself would reshape Soviet society and hence also life inside the camps.