Gulag полностью

In the more southerly camps, distances were a problem too. Even if a prisoner did climb over the barbed wire, or slip away from his workplace in the forest—given the slovenliness of the guards, this was not so difficult— he then found himself miles from a road or a railway track, and sometimes miles from anything resembling a town or village. There was no food, no shelter, and sometimes very little water.

More to the point, there were sentries everywhere: the whole of the Kolyma region—hundreds and hundreds of square miles of taiga—was really a vast prison, after all, as was the entire Komi Republic, large swathes of the Kazakh desert, and northern Siberia. In such places, there were few ordinary villages, and few ordinary inhabitants. Anyone walking alone without proper identity documents would have immediately been identified as a runaway, and either shot, or beaten up and returned to his camp. One prisoner decided against joining a group of escaping inmates for this reason: “Where could I go without papers or money in a territory packed with concentration camps and therefore scattered with control points?”⁷

The escaping prisoner was not likely to find much help from those local people who were not guards or prisoners, either, even if he encountered any. In Czarist Siberia, there had been a tradition of sympathy for runaway convicts and serfs, for whom bowls of bread and milk were placed on doorsteps at night. An old, pre-revolutionary prisoners’ song describes the attitude:

The peasant women provided me milk

The young lads supplied tobacco.⁸

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, the mood was different. Most people would have been inclined to turn in an escaped “enemy,” and even more inclined to turn in a criminal “recidivist.” This was not only because they believed, or half believed, the propaganda about the prisoners, but also because those who failed to turn in a runaway risked being given long prison sentences themselves.⁹ Not that their fears needed to be specific, given the paranoid climate of daily life:

As for the local population, nobody saved us and hid us, the way others saved and hid those who escaped from the German concentration camps. It was because for so many years, all had lived in constant fear and suspicion, from minute to minute awaiting some new misfortune, even being afraid of each other . . . In a place where everyone, from the smallest to the most important, was terrified of spies, it was impossible to count on a successful escape.¹⁰

If ideology and fear did not impel the locals to turn in escaped prisoners, greed did. Fairly or unfairly, many memoirists believe that local tribal peoples—the Eskimos of the far north, the Kazakhs to the south—were constantly on the lookout for runaways. Some became professional bounty-hunters, searching for prisoners in return for a kilogram of tea or a bag of wheat. ¹¹ In Kolyma, a local inhabitant who brought in the right hand of a runaway—or, by some accounts, the runaway’s head—received a 250-ruble prize, and the prizes seem to have been similar elsewhere.¹² In one recorded case, a local man recognized an escaped prisoner masquerading as a free man, and reported his presence to the police. He received 250 rubles. His son, who had gone to the police station, received 150 as well. In another case, a man who reported the location of a runaway to a camp chief was given the princely sum of 300 rubles.¹³

For those who were caught, the punishments were extreme. Many were shot instantly. The bodies of dead runaways had their propaganda uses as well:

As we approached the gate, I thought for a moment that I must be having a bad dream: a naked corpse was suspended from the gatepost. Its hands and feet were bound with wire, its head was sunk to one side, the rigid eyes were half open. Above the head was a board with the inscription: “This is the fate of all those who try to escape from Norilsk.”¹⁴