Gulag полностью

Indeed, sex was so public that it was treated with a certain amount of apathy: rape and prostitution became, for some, part of a daily routine. Edward Buca was once working beside a woman’s brigade in a sawmill. A group of criminal prisoners arrived. They “grabbed the women they wanted and laid them down in the snow, or had them up against a pile of logs. The women seemed used to it and offered no resistance. They had their own brigade-chief, but she didn’t object to these interruptions, in fact, they almost seemed to be just another part of the job.”²⁷ Lev Razgon also tells the story of a very young, fair-haired girl whom he happened to encounter sweeping the courtyard of a camp medical unit. He was a free worker by then, visiting a doctor acquaintance, and although not hungry, was offered a generous lunch. He gave it to the girl, who “ate quietly and neatly and one could tell that she had been brought up in a family.” She reminded Razgon, in fact, of his own daughter:

The girl finished eating, and neatly piled the plates on the wooden tray. Then she lifted her dress, pulled off her pants and, holding them in her hand, turned her unsmiling face in my direction.

“Lying down or what?” she asked.

At first not understanding, and then scared by my response, she said in self-justification, again without a smile, “People don’t feed me without it . . .”²⁸

It also happened, in some camps, that certain women’s barracks became little more than open brothels. Solzhenitsyn described one which was incomparably filthy and rundown, and there was an oppressive smell in it, and the bunks were without bedding. There was an official prohibition against men entering it, but this prohibition was ignored and no one enforced it. Not only men went there, but juveniles too, boys from twelve to thirteen, who flocked in to learn . . . Everything took place very naturally, as in nature, in full view, and in several places at once. Obvious old age and obvious ugliness were the only defenses for women there—nothing else. ²⁹

And yet—running directly counter to the tales of brutal sex and vulgarity, there are, in many memoirs, equally improbable tales of camp love, some of which began simply out of women’s desire for self-protection. According to the idiosyncratic rules of camp life, women who adopted a “camp husband” were usually left alone by other men, a system which Herling calls the “peculiar ius primae noctis of the camp.”³⁰ These were not necessarily “marriages” of equals: respectable women sometimes lived with thieves.³¹ Nor, as Ruzhnevits described, were they necessarily freely chosen. Nevertheless, it would not be strictly correct to describe them as prostitution either. Rather, writes Valery Frid, they were “braki po raschetu” “calculated marriages”—“which were also sometimes marriages for love.” Even if they had begun for purely practical reasons, prisoners took these relationships seriously. “About his more or less permanent lover, a zek would say ‘my wife,’” wrote Frid, “And she would say of him ‘my husband.’ It was not said in jest: camp relationships humanized our lives.”³²

And, strange though it may sound, prisoners who were not too exhausted or emaciated really did look for love. Anatoly Zhigulin’s memoirs include a description of a love affair he managed to conduct with a German woman, a political prisoner, the “happy, good, grey-eyed, golden-haired Marta.” He later learned that she had a baby, whom she named Anatolii. (That was in the autumn of 1951, and, as Stalin’s death was followed by a general amnesty for foreign prisoners, he assumed that “Marta and the child, supposing no bad luck had occurred, returned home.”³³) The memoirs of the camp doctor Isaac Vogelfanger at times read like a romantic novel, whose hero had to tread carefully between the perils of an affair with the wife of a camp boss, and the joys of real love.³⁴