Gulag полностью

Only later, in the labor camp, I understood the meaning of this fantastic scene. To stake the possessions of other prisoners in their games of cards is one of the urkas’ most popular distractions, and its chief attraction lies in the fact that the loser is obliged to force from the victim the item previously agreed upon.³⁷

One female prisoner was the inhabitant of an entire women’s barracks that had been “lost” in a card game. After hearing the news, the women waited anxiously for several days, “incredulous”—until, one night, the attack came: “The uproar was terrific—the women yelled, screamed the skies down, until men came to our rescue . . . in the end nothing but a few bundles of clothes were stolen and the starosta was stabbed.”³⁸

But cards could be no less dangerous for the professional criminals themselves. General Gorbatov encountered a thief in Kolyma who had only two fingers on his left hand. He explained:

I was playing cards and I lost. I had no cash so I staked a good suit, not mine of course, one that a political had on. I meant to take the suit during the night when the new prisoner had stripped for bed. I had to hand it over before eight in the morning, only they took the political away to another camp that very day. Our council of seniors met to hand out my punishment. The plaintiff wanted all my left hand fingers off. The seniors offered two. They bargained a bit and agreed on three. So I put my hand on the table and the man I’d lost to took a stick and with five strokes knocked off my three fingers . . .

The man concluded, almost proudly: “We have our laws too, only tougher than yours. If you do your comrades down, you have to answer for it.”³⁹ Indeed, the thieves’ judicial rituals were as elaborate as their initiation ceremonies, involving a “court,” a trial, and a sentence that could entail beating, humiliation, or even death. Colonna-Czosnowski witnessed a bitter, prolonged card game between two high-ranking thieves, which ended only when one of them had lost all of his possessions. Instead of an arm or a leg, the winner demanded a terrible humiliation as penalty: he commanded the barrack “artist” to tattoo an enormous penis on the man’s face, pointing at his mouth. Minutes later, the loser pressed a hot poker against his face, obliterating his tattoo, and scarring himself for life.⁴⁰ Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, the son of a leading Bolshevik, also claimed to have met a “deaf-mute” in the camps, who had lost at cards and thereby forfeited the use of his voice for three years. Even as he was shipped from camp to camp, he dared not violate this penalty, as every local urka would know about it: “Violations of this agreement would be punished by death. No one can evade the law of thieves.”⁴¹

The authorities knew of these rituals and occasionally tried to intervene, not always successfully. In one incident in 1951, a thieves’ court sentenced a thief called Yurilkin to death. Camp authorities heard of the sentence, and transferred Yurilkin, first to another camp, then to a transit prison, then to a third camp in a completely different part of the country. Nevertheless, two thieves-in-law finally tracked him down there and murdered him—four years later. They were subsequently tried and executed for murder, but even such punishments were not necessarily a deterrent. In 1956, the Soviet prosecutor’s office circulated a frustrated note complaining that “this criminal formation exists in all Corrective-Labor Camps and often the decision of the group to murder one or another prisoner who is in a different camp is executed in that camp unquestioningly.”⁴²

The thieves’ courts could exact punishment on outsiders too, which perhaps explains why they inspired so much terror. Leonid Finkelstein, a political prisoner in the early 1950s, remembered one such revenge murder: