Gulag полностью

About 200 women, as if by command, suddenly undressed and ran completely naked into the yard. In rude poses, they crowded around the guards and shouted, screeched, laughed and swore, fell on the ground in terrifying convulsions, tore at their hair, scratched blood from their faces, fell again on the ground and again stood up and ran to the gate.

“A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-gy!” howled the crowd. ⁶⁵

Aside from these moments of madness and spontaneity, there was another, older tradition of protest used, the hunger strike, one whose goals and methods were inherited directly from the earliest politicals (who in turn had inherited them from pre-revolutionary Russia), the Social Democrats, Anarchists, and Mensheviks who were imprisoned in the early 1920s. This group of prisoners kept up their tradition of hunger strikes—inherited from pre-revolutionary Russia—after they were sent to isolator prisons, away from Solovetsky, in 1925. Aleksandr Fedodeev, one of the leaders of the Social Revolutionaries, went on conducting hunger strikes in Suzdal prison, demanding the right to correspond with his relatives, right up to the moment of his execution in 1937.⁶⁶

But even after they had been moved on again, from the prisons back to camps, some still tried to keep the tradition going. In the mid-1930s, the socialists were joined in their hunger strikes by some of the genuine Trotskyites. In October of 1936, hundreds of Trotskyites, Anarchists, and other political prisoners in one Vorkuta lagpunkt began a hunger strike that was to last, according to records, 132 days. Without question, their purpose was political: the strikers demanded that they be separated from criminal prisoners, that their working day be limited to eight hours, that they should be fed regardless of their work—and that their sentences should be annulled. In another Vorkuta lagpunkt, an even larger strike—joined, in this case, by a handful of professional criminals—was to last 115 days. In March 1937, the Gulag administration decreed that the strikers’ demands were to be met. By the end of 1938, however, most had been murdered in the mass executions of that year.⁶⁷

At about the same time, another group of Trotskyites went on strike in the Vladivostok transit camp, while awaiting transit to Kolyma. While in the camp, they held organizational meetings and elected a leader. He demanded the right to examine the boat that they would be transported in. The request was refused. Still, as they got on the boat, they sang revolutionary songs and even—if the reports of the NKVD’s informers are to be believed—unfurled posters with slogans such as “Hooray for Trotsky, Revolutionary Genius!” and “Down with Stalin!” When the steamer reached Kolyma, the prisoners again began making demands: everyone should receive work according to his speciality, everyone must be paid for his work, spouses must not be divided, all prisoners have a right to send and receive mail without restriction. In due course, they called a series of hunger strikes, one of which lasted 100 days. A contemporary observer wrote that “The leadership of the Trotskyite prisoners at Kolyma had entered a fantasy realm, and ignored the real power relationships.” In due course, they too were all sentenced and shot.⁶⁸ Yet their suffering made an impact. Years later, a former Kolyma prosecutor remembered the events very well:

Everything that happened afterwards made such a strong impression on me and my comrades, that for several days I myself wandered around as if in a fog, and in front of me seemed to walk a row of sentenced Trotskyite fanatics, fearlessly departing this life with their slogans on their lips . . .⁶⁹

In response, perhaps, to these incidents of rebellion, the NKVD began to treat political hunger strikes and work strikes with more seriousness. From the late 1930s on, perpetrators of such disruptions received additional prison sentences, even death sentences. Hunger strikes were taken seriously, but work refusals were taken most seriously of all: they ran counter to the entire ethos of the camp. The prisoner who would not work was not only a disciplinary problem; he was a serious obstacle to the camp’s economic goals as well. After 1938 in particular, strikers were severely punished, as one ex-prisoner described: