In an even weaker position still were the Muslim and other prisoners from central Asia and some of the Caucasian republics. They suffered the same kind of disorientation as Westerners, but usually were not able to entertain or interest the Russians either. Known as natsmeny (from the Russian for “national minorities”), they had been part of camp life from the late 1920s. Large numbers had been arrested during the pacification—and Sovietization—of central Asia and the northern Caucasus, and sent to work on the White Sea Canal, where a contemporary wrote that “Everything is hard for them to understand: the people who direct them, the canal which they are building, the food they are eating.” 67 From 1933 on, many of them worked on the Moscow–Volga Canal as well, where the camp boss seems to have taken pity on them. At one point he ordered his subordinates to set up separate barracks and separate work brigades for them, so that they would at least be surrounded by fellow countrymen. 68 Later, Gustav Herling encountered them in a northern logging camp. He remembered seeing them every evening in the camp infirmary, waiting to see the camp doctor:
Even in the waiting-room they clasped their stomachs in pain, and the moment they entered behind the partition burst into a sorrowful whining, in which moans were mixed indistinguishably with their curious broken Russian. There was no remedy for their disease . . . they were dying simply of homesickness, of longing for their native country, of hunger, cold and the monotonous whiteness of snow. Their slanting eyes, unused to the northern landscape, were always watering and their eyelashes were stuck together by a thin yellow crust. On the rare days on which we were free from work, the Uzbeks, Turcomen and Kirghiz gathered in a corner of the barrack, dressed in their holiday clothes, long colored silk robes and embroidered skullcaps. It was impossible to guess of what they talked with such great animation and excitement, gesticulating, shouting each other down and nodding their heads sadly, but I was certain that it was not of the camp.69
Life was not much better for the Koreans, usually Soviet citizens of Korean extraction, or the Japanese, a staggering 600,000 of whom arrived in the Gulag and the prisoner-of-war camp system at the end of the war. The Japanese suffered in particular from the food, which seemed not only scarce but strange and virtually inedible. As a result, they would hunt and eat things that seemed to their fellow prisoners equally inedible: wild herbs, insects, beetles, snakes, and mushrooms that even Russians would not touch. Occasionally, these forays ended badly: there are records of Japanese prisoners dying from eating poisonous grasses or wild herbs.70 A hint at how isolated the Japanese felt in the camps comes from the memoirs of a Russian prisoner who once, in a camp library, found a brochure—a speech by the Bolshevik Zhdanov—written in Japanese. He brought it to a Japanese acquaintance, a war prisoner: “I saw him genuinely happy for the first time. Later he told me that he read it every day, just to have contact with his native language.”71
