There were also more direct forms of kindness. The memoirist Galina Levinson recalled one camp commander who talked a woman prisoner out of having an abortion. “When you leave the camp you will be alone,” he told her. “Think how good it will be to have a child.” To the end of her life, the woman was grateful to him. 72 Anatoly Zhigulin wrote too of a “good” camp boss, who “saved hundreds from death,” called his charges “comrade prisoners” in defiance of the rules, and ordered the cook to feed them better. Clearly, noted Zhigulin, he “didn’t know the rules yet.” Mariya Sandratskaya, arrested for being the wife of an “enemy,” also describes a camp boss who paid special attention to the mothers in the camp, making sure the nursery was well run, that nursing women had enough to eat, and that mothers did not work too hard.73
In fact, kindness was possible: at all levels, there were always a few who resisted the propaganda describing all prisoners as enemies, a few who understood the true state of affairs. And a startling number of memoirists do note a single experience of kindness from a prison guard, or a single instance of consideration. “I don’t doubt,” wrote Evgeny Gnedin, “that in the enormous army of camp administrators, there were honest workers who were distressed by their role as overseers to completely innocent people.” 74 Yet at the same time, most memoirists also marvel at how exceptional such understanding was. For despite the few counter-examples, clean prisons were not the norm, many camps were lethal—and the majority of guards treated their charges with indifference at best, outright cruelty at worst.
Nowhere, I repeat, was cruelty actually required. On the contrary: deliberate cruelty was officially frowned upon by the central administration. Camp guards and administrators who were unnecessarily harsh to prisoners could be punished, and often were. The archives of Vyatlag contain reports of guards punished for “systematically beating up
Yet cruelty persisted. Sometimes it was genuinely sadistic. Viktor Bulgakov, a prisoner in the 1950s, recalled one of his guards, an illiterate Kazakh, who appeared to derive pleasure from forcing prisoners to stand, slowly freezing, in the snow, and another who liked to “show off his strength and beat prisoners” for no particular reason.77 The Gulag’s archives also contain, among many other similar records, a description of the chief of one of the
More often, cruelty was not so much sadism as self-interest. Guards who shot escaping prisoners received monetary rewards, and could even be granted a vacation at home. Guards were therefore tempted to encourage such “escapes.” Zhigulin described the result:
Such incidents were common—as archives show. In 1938, four VOKhR guards working in Vyatlag were sentenced for killing two prisoners whom they had “provoked” to escape. In the aftermath, it emerged that the division commander and his assistant had helped themselves to the prisoners’ belongings as well.80 The writer Boris Dyakov also mentions the practice of provoking escapes in his “pro-Soviet” Gulag memoir, published in the USSR in 1964.81
As on the convoy trains, the cruelty in camps seemed, at times, to derive from anger or boredom at having to do a menial job. While working as a nurse in a Kolyma hospital, the Dutch communist Elinor Lipper sat up in the night beside a patient with pleurisy and high fever. He also had a carbuncle on his back which had burst, thanks to the guard who had brought him to the hospital:
