Gulag полностью

At no point did prisoners have full power to distribute trusty jobs, however. The camp administration had the ultimate say over who would become a trusty, and most camp commanders were inclined to give the cushier trusty jobs to those willing to collaborate more openly—in other words, to inform. Alas, it is difficult to say how many informers the system employed. Although the Russian state archives have opened up the rest of the Gulag administration archive, they have left closed the documents on the “Third Division,” the camp division responsible for informers. The Russian historian Viktor Berdinskikh, in his book on Vyatlag, cites some figures without naming a source: “In the 1920s, the leadership of the OGPU set itself the task of having no less than 25 percent informers among camp prisoners. In the 1930s and 1940s, this planned number was lowered to 10 percent.” But Berdinskikh also agrees that a real assessment of the numbers is “complicated” without better access to archives. ⁵⁷

Nor are there many memoirists who will admit openly to having been informers, although some admit that they were recruited. Clearly, prisoners who had served as informers in prison (or even before their arrests) would have arrived in the camp with a note of their willingness to cooperate already in their files. Others, it seemed, were approached just after their arrival in camp, when they were still extremely disoriented and afraid. On his second day in camp, Leonid Trus was taken to the operative commander— known in camp slang as the kum, the recruiter of informers—and asked to cooperate. Not really understanding what he was being asked, he refused. This, he thinks, is why he was initially given difficult physical work, a low-status job by camp standards. Berdinskikh also quotes from his own interviews and correspondence with former prisoners:

From the first day in the zone, the new arrivals were called to the kum. I was called to the kum as well. Flattering, slippery, smooth, he played on the fact that the car accident, for which I was sentenced (ten years in camp, plus three years without full legal rights) was not shameful (it was not robbery, murder or something similar) and he proposed that I inform—that I become a sneak. I politely refused and didn’t sign the proposal of the kum.

Although the kum swore at him, this prisoner was not sent to the punishment cells. Upon returning to his barracks, he found no one would come near him: knowing that he had been asked to inform, seeing that he had not been beaten up or punished, the other prisoners assumed he had agreed. ⁵⁸

Perhaps the most famous exception to the near-universal refusal to admit to informing is, once again, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who describes his flirtation with the camp authorities at length. He dates his initial moment of weakness to his early days in camp, when he was still struggling to accustom himself to his abrupt loss of status. When invited to speak to the operative commander, he was ushered into a “small, cozily furnished room” where a radio was playing classical music. After politely asking him whether he was comfortable and adjusting to camp life, the commander asked him, “Are you still a Soviet person?” After hemming and hawing, Solzhenitsyn agreed that he was.

But although confessing to being “Soviet” was tantamount to confessing a desire to collaborate, Solzhenitsyn initially declined to inform. That was when the commander switched tactics. He turned off the music, and began to speak to Solzhenitsyn about the camp criminals, asking how he would feel if his wife in Moscow were attacked by some who managed to escape. Finally, Solzhenitsyn agreed that if he should hear any of them planning to escape, he would report it. He signed a pledge, promising to report news of any escapes to the authorities, and chose a conspiratorial pseudonym: Vetrov. “Those six letters,” he writes, “are branded in shameful grooves on my memory.”⁵⁹

By his own account, Solzhenitsyn never did actually report on anything. When recruited again in 1956, he says he refused to sign anything at all. Nevertheless, his initial promise was enough to keep him, while in camp, in one of the trusty jobs, living in the trusties’ special quarters, slightly better dressed and better fed than other prisoners. This experience “filled me with shame,” he wrote—and doubtless provoked his disdain for all trusties.