The Great Terror полностью

There is an interesting postwar account in the British Medical Journalfn1 of a medical examination of twenty-four women, former inhabitants of East Prussia, who had just excaped to western Germany after returning to the Eastern Zone from Soviet labor camps. On their way to the latter, they had been packed about eighty to a truck, and they lived on bread and a spoonful of sugar a day. But the worst deprivation was the lack of water. It was estimated that about 40 to 50 in one transport of 2,000 women died en route. In one of the camps described, it was estimated that about half the women died in the first eight or nine months, mostly from intestinal diseases.

It was usual for political prisoners to be robbed almost at once of their most valued possessions, such as warm clothing and good footwear, either on the journey or immediately on arrival at camp. This was done quite openly under the eyes of the guards. The old criminal underworld of Tsarist Russia, which since the Time of Troubles had developed as an extraordinary milieu with its own dialect and its own law, had been greatly reinforced, and its character much modified, by the tumults of the Civil War and the famine of the early 1920s. Already then, the bezprizorniye, the homeless orphan children assembling in gangs and living by their wits, had become a problem. Collectivization and other social experiments disrupted millions more families and provided large reinforcements to these now maturing criminals.

The percentage of “criminals” was around 10 to 15 percent, but the majority of these were of the petty embezzler type, rather than urkas proper, who were seldom more than around 5 percent of a camp total. In some camps, indeed, there were none or almost none—particularly the more severe camps like the one described in Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, where almost all prisoners were in under Article 58, as interpreted by the Special Board. In other camps, their rule, which led to the slow murder of many politicals at night in the barracks when guards did not dare to interfere, was the norm. By 1940, the NKVD was often more fully in control, permitting only, in mixed camps such as Kargopol, regular rape hunts. Even these were largely suppressed in 1941. But later, a considerable relapse seems to have taken place. And in no case was there any serious interference with ordinary robbery and beating up.

Soviet sources as long ago as the 1960s confirmed all this. General Gorbatov relates:

While we were in the Sea of Okhotsk misfortune befell me. Early in the morning, when I was lying half-awake as many of us did, two “trusties” came up to me and dragged away my boots which I was using as a pillow. One of them hit me hard on the chest and then on the head and said with a leer: “Look at him—sells me his boots days ago, pockets the cash, and then refuses to hand them over!”

Off they went with their loot, laughing for all they were worth and only stopping to beat me up again when, out of sheer despair, I followed them and asked for the boots back. The other “trusties” watched, roaring with laughter. “Let him have it!” “Quit yelling—they’re not your boots now.”

Only one of the political prisoners spoke up: “Look, what are you up to? How can he manage in bare feet?” One of the thieves took off his pumps and threw them at me.²⁹

Similar things happened to Gorbatov on several other occasions. Once, buying a tin of fish from a “trusty,” he had his money stolen, together with letters and photographs of his wife, by criminals who refused to return even the latter. (When he opened the tin, it was full of sand.)³⁰

He was surprised to see that the guards did nothing to discourage this sort of thing. At the Maldyak gold-field camp in the Magadan area, where he served his sentence, there were 400 politicals and 50 common criminals. The latter had all the privileges and in one way or another did the politicals out of much of their meager food ration:

Work at the goldfield was pretty killing, particularly so considering the bad food we were given. The “enemies of the people,” as a rule, were detailed for the heaviest jobs, the lighter work being given to the “trusties” or common criminals…. [I]t was they who were appointed foremen, cooks, orderlies, and tent seniors. Naturally enough the small amounts of fat released for the pot chiefly found their way into the bellies of the “trusties.” There were three types of rations: one for those who had not fulfilled their quota, another for those who had, and a third for those who had exceeded their quota. The latter automatically included the “trusties.” They did little enough work, but the tally clerks were of their persuasion and so they swindled, putting to their own and their mates’ credit the work that we had done. As a result the criminals fed well and the politicals went hungry.³¹