Letters and packages did not, however, evoke the greatest emotion, or the greatest agony, among prisoners. Far more wrenching were a prisoner’s actual meetings with his relatives, usually a spouse or mother. Only prisoners who had both fulfilled the norm and obediently followed the rules of the camp were allowed such meetings: official documents openly described them as a reward for “good, conscientious, and high-tempo work.”36 And the promise of a visit from a relative was indeed an extremely powerful motivation for good behavior.
Not all prisoners were in a position to receive visitors, of course. For one, their families had to be mentally courageous enough to maintain contact with their “enemy” relative. The journey to Kolyma, Vorkuta, Norilsk, or Kazakhstan, even traveling as a free citizen, required physical bravery as well. Not only would a visitor have to suffer a long train journey to a distant, primitive city, but he would also then have to walk, or hitch a bumpy ride in the back of a truck, to the
Leaving aside the physical hardships, the psychological strain of these meetings could be terrible too. The wives arriving to see their husbands, wrote Herling, “feel the boundless suffering of the prisoner, without fully understanding it, or being in any way able to help; the long years of separation have killed much of their feeling for their husbands . . . the camp, distant and barred off from the visitor, yet casts its shadowy menace upon them. They are not prisoners, but they are related to these enemies of the people...”37
Nor were wives alone in their mixed feelings. One prisoner tells the story of a woman who had brought her two-year-old daughter to see her father. Upon arrival, she told her to “go and kiss Daddy.” The girl ran up to the guard and kissed him on the neck.38 The daughter of the Soviet rocket scientist Sergei Korolev still remembers being taken to see her father while he was in a
In prisons—and in certain camps as well—such meetings were invariably brief, and usually took place in the presence of a guard, a rule which also created enormous strain. “I wanted to speak, to speak a great deal, to tell of everything that had happened that year,” remembered one prisoner of the single meeting he was granted with his mother. Not only was it hard to find words, but “if one did begin to speak, to describe something, the watchful guard would interrupt you: ‘Not allowed!’” 40
More tragic still is the story told by Bystroletov, who was granted a series of meetings with his wife in 1941—all with a guard present. She had come from Moscow to say goodbye: since his arrest, she had contracted tuberculosis, and was near death. Saying her final farewell, she reached up and touched him on the neck, which was technically not allowed. Visitors were forbidden physical contact with the prisoners. The guard roughly pushed her arm away, and she fell to the floor, coughing blood. Bystroletov writes that he “lost his head” and began beating the guard, who began to bleed. He was saved from dire punishment by the war, which broke out that same day: in the ensuing chaos, his attack on the guard was forgotten. He never saw his wife again.41
Guards were not always present, however. Indeed, in the larger
