Zhigulin remembers the dead bodies of men who had attempted escape lying in the center of his Kolyma
And yet—prisoners did try to escape. Indeed, to judge by the official statistics, and by the angry correspondence on the subject in the Gulag archives, both attempted and successful escapes were more common than most memoirists concede. There are, for example, records of punishments meted out following successful escapes. In 1945, following several group escapes from the camps surrounding “NKVD Construction Site 500”—a railroad across eastern Siberia—officers in the armed guards received five- or ten-day prison sentences, with their pay docked 50 percent for every day behind bars. In other instances, guards were put on trial following prominent escapes, while camp bosses sometimes lost their jobs.17
There are also records of guards who foiled escapes. A 300-ruble prize was awarded to a prison guard who sounded the alarm after escaping prisoners had suffocated a night watchman. His boss received 200 rubles, as did another prison chief, and the soldiers involved received 100 rubles apiece. 18
No camp was completely secure. Solovetsky, with its remote location, was thought to be impregnable. Yet a pair of White Guards, S. A. Malsagov and Yuri Bessonov, escaped from one of the SLON mainland camps in May 1925. After attacking their guards, they walked for thirty-five days to the Finnish border. Both later wrote books about their experiences, among the first about Solovetsky to appear in the West.19 There was another famous breakout from Solovetsky in 1928, in which half-a-dozen prisoners attacked their guards and broke through the gates of the camp. Most got away, probably escaping over the Finnish border too.20 Two particularly spectacular escapes, also from Solovetsky, occurred in 1934. One involved four “spies”; the other concerned “one spy and two bandits.” Both parties had managed to steal boats, and had escaped by water, presumably to Finland. As a result, the camp boss was fired, and others were reprimanded. 21
As the SLON camps expanded onto the Karelian mainland in the late 1920s, opportunities for escape multiplied—and Vladimir Tchernavin took advantage of them. Tchernavin was a fisheries expert who had bravely tried to inject some realism into the Murmansk Fishing Trust’s Five-Year Plan. His criticism of the project won him a conviction for “wrecking.” He received a five-year sentence and was sent to Solovetsky. SLON eventually put him to work as prisoner expert in northern Karelia, where he was meant to design new fishing enterprises.
Tchernavin bided his time. Over many months he won the trust of his superiors, who even granted permission for his wife and fifteen-year-old son, Andrei, to pay him a visit. One day during their visit, in the summer of 1933, the family headed off on a “picnic” across the local bay. When they reached the western edge, Tchernavin and his wife told Andrei that they were leaving the USSR—on foot. “Without compass or map, we walked over wild mountains, through forests and across swamps, to Finland and freedom,” wrote Tchernavin.22 Decades later, Andrei remembered that his father had believed he could change the world’s view of Soviet Russia if he wrote a book about his experiences. He did. It did not.23
But Tchernavin’s experience may not have been unique: indeed, the period of the Gulag’s early expansion might well have been the golden age of escape. The number of prisoners was multiplying rapidly, the number of guards was insufficient, the camps were relatively near to Finland. In 1930, 1,174 escaped convicts were captured on the Finnish border. By 1932, 7,202 had been found—and it may well be that the number of successful attempts also went up proportionately.24 According to the Gulag’s own statistics— which may not, of course, be accurate—in 1933, 45,755 people escaped from camps, of which only just over half—28,370—were captured. 25 The local population was reported to be terrorized by the huge number of convicts on the loose, and camp commanders submitted constant requests for reinforcements, as did the border guards and the local OGPU.26
