Gulag полностью

They did not work but they were allocated a full ration; they levied a money tribute from all the “peasants,” those who did work; they took half of the food parcels and purchases from the camp commissary; and they brazenly cleaned out the new transports, taking all the best clothes from the newcomers. They were, in a word, racketeers, gangsters, and members of a small mafia. All the ordinary criminal inmates of the camp—and they made up the majority—hated them intensely.¹³

Some political prisoners found ways to get along with the thieves-in-law, particularly after the war. Some top criminal bosses liked to have politicals as mascots or sidekicks. Alexander Dolgun won the respect of the criminal boss in a transit camp by beating up a lower-ranking criminal.¹⁴ Partly because he too had defeated a criminal in a fistfight, Marlen Korallov—a young political prisoner, later a founding member of the Memorial Society—was noticed by Nikola, his camp’s criminal boss, who allowed Korallov to sit near him in the barracks. The decision changed Korallov’s status in the camp, where he was immediately regarded as “protected” by Nikola, and given a much better sleeping arrangement: “The camp understood: if I become part of the troika around Nikola, then I become part of the camp elite . . . all attitudes to me changed instantly.”¹⁵

For the most part, however, the thieves’ rule over the politicals was absolute. Their superior status helped to explain why they felt, in the words of one criminologist, “at home” in the camps: they lived better there than other prisoners, and had a degree of real power in camps that they did not enjoy on the outside.¹⁶ Korallov explains, for example, that Nikola inhabited the “only iron bed” in the barrack, which had been pushed into a corner. No one else slept on the bed, and a group of Nikola’s sidekicks lurked around it to make sure this remained so. They also hung blankets on the sides of the beds around their leader, to prevent anyone from looking in. Access to the space around the leader was carefully controlled. Such prisoners even looked upon their long sentences with a form of macho pride. Korallov observed that

There were some young guys, who in order to heighten their authority would make an attempt to escape, a hopeless attempt, and then they received an additional twenty-five years, maybe another twenty-five for sabotage. Then when they pitched up at a new camp, and told people they had 100-year sentences, that made them great figures according to camp morality.¹⁷

Their higher status made the thieves’ world attractive to younger prisoners, who were sometimes inducted into the fraternity at elaborate initiation rituals. According to accounts put together by secret police officers and prison administrators in the 1950s, new members of the clan had to swear an oath promising to be a “worthy thief” and to accept the strict rules of the thieves’ life. Other thieves recommended the novice, perhaps praising him for “defying camp discipline” and bestowing upon him a nickname. News of the “coronation” would be passed throughout the camp system via the thieves’ network of contacts, so that even if the new thief was transferred to another lagpunkt, his status would be maintained. ¹⁸

That was the system that Nikolai Medvedev (no relation to the Moscow intellectuals) found in 1946. Arrested as a teenager for stealing grain from a collective farm, Medvedev was taken under the wing of one of the leading thieves-in-law while still on the transports, and gradually inducted into the thieves’ world. Upon arrival in Magadan, Medvedev was put to work like other prisoners—he was assigned to clean the dining hall, hardly an onerous task, but his mentor shouted at him to stop: “and so I didn’t work, just like all the other thieves didn’t work.” Instead, other prisoners did his work for him.¹⁹