Gulag полностью

In Kmiecik’s juvenile camp, there were only evening classes. Among other things, he was taught there that “England is an island in Western Europe . . . It is ruled by lords wearing red robes with white collars. They own the workers who toil for them, paying them little money.” ¹⁰³ Not that the children were there primarily to be educated: in 1944, Beria proudly informed Stalin that the Gulag’s juvenile camps had contributed impressively to the war effort, producing mines, grenades, and other goods worth a total of 150 million rubles.¹⁰⁴

Children were also subjected to the same sort of camp propaganda as adults were. Camp newspapers of the mid-1930s feature child Stakhanovites, and gush with praise for the “35ers,” the street children placed in camps according to the law of 1935, glorifying those who had seen the light and been reformed by physical work. The same newspapers also lambast those children who had not understood that “they must abandon their past, that it is time to start a new life . . . Card games, drunkenness, hooliganism, refusal to work, thievery, etc., are all widespread among them.” ¹⁰⁵ To combat this youthful “parasitism,” children were made to take part in the same sorts of cultural-educational concerts as adults, singing the same Stalinist songs.¹⁰⁶

Finally, children were subject to the same psychological pressures as adults. Another NKVD directive of 1941 called for the organization of an agenturno-operativnoe obsluzhivanie—a “network of informers”—within NKVD children’s colonies and children’s reception centers. Rumors had spread of counter-revolutionary sentiments among both the staff and the children in the camps, particularly the children of counter-revolutionaries. The children in one camp had even staged a mini-revolt. They took over the dining room, trashed it, and attacked the guards, wounding six of them.¹⁰⁷

In only one sense were the children of the juvenile camps lucky: they had not been sent to ordinary camps, to be surrounded by ordinary adult prisoners, as other children were. Indeed, just like ubiquitous pregnant women, the endlessly expanding numbers of juveniles in adult camps provided a perennial headache for camp commanders. In October 1935, Genrikh Yagoda angrily wrote to all camp commanders that “despite my instructions, underaged prisoners are not being sent to work colonies for juveniles, but are being mixed up in prison with adults.” At last count, he stated, there had been 4,305 juveniles still in ordinary prisons. ¹⁰⁸ Thirteen years later, in 1948, investigators from the prosecutors’ office were still complaining that there were too many underaged prisoners in adult camps, where they were being corrupted by adult criminals. Even camp authorities noticed when a camp’s reigning criminal boss transformed one eighteen-year-old petty thief into a contract murderer.¹⁰⁹

The maloletki—“juveniles”—inspired little sympathy among their fellow inmates. “Hunger and the horror of what had happened had deprived them of all defenses,” wrote Lev Razgon, who observed that the juveniles gravitated naturally toward those who seemed the strongest. These were the professional criminals, who turned the boys into “servants, mute slaves, jesters, hostages, and everything else,” and both boys and girls into prostitutes.¹¹⁰ Their horrifying experiences failed to inspire much pity, however; on the contrary, some of the harshest invective in camp memoir literature is reserved for them. Razgon wrote that whatever their background, child prisoners soon “all displayed a frightening and incorrigibly vengeful cruelty, without restraint or responsibility.” Worse,

They feared nothing and no one. The guards and camp bosses were scared to enter the separate barracks where the juveniles lived. It was there that the vilest, most cynical and cruel acts that took place in the camps occurred. If one of the prisoners’ criminal leaders was gambling, lost everything and had staked his life as well, the boys would kill him for a day’s bread ration or simply “for the fun of it.” The girls boasted that they could satisfy an entire team of tree-fellers. There was nothing human left in these children and it was impossible to imagine that they might return to the normal world and become ordinary human beings again.¹¹¹