The Great Terror полностью

The veteran convicts in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich have learned that it is necessary to march as slowly as possible to the morning job, otherwise they get hot too early, and “won’t last long.”⁸⁴ And in fact, those who survived the first months became fantastically skilled in the arts of survival. At the same time, customs useful to them became thoroughly established and traditional. For example, Solzhenitsyn describes the prisoners’ habit of picking up odd scraps of wood on the building site and marching back with them.⁸⁵ This was illegal, but the guards did nothing about it until they reached camp again. They then ordered them to throw down the wood, as they, too, needed extra fuel and were unable to carry any in addition to their submachine guns. But only a certain amount of the wood was dropped. At the next checkpoint, the warders repeated the order. Again, only a certain amount of wood was dropped, and the prisoners reached the quarters with a portion of their original gleanings. It was necessary, and in the interests of both guards and warders, that the prisoners be able to get away with some wood; otherwise they would have no incentive to bother to carry it in, and guards and warders would not have got their share. But no overt arrangement had ever been made. The agreement was wholly unspoken. We see, in such things, the development of the rules and traditions of a whole new social order, in microcosm.

A genuine caste feeling seems to have been arising, with the prisoner beginning to be regarded as actually an inferior being, just as in ancient times. The sentiment gradually spread that “mere contact” with the prisoners was “an insult to a free man.” “It is considered inadmissible for a non-prisoner to eat the same food as a prisoner, to sleep under the same roof, or have any friendly relations with him.” Things reached the stage where the head of a camp admonished the man in charge of the disinfestation chamber for allowing a shirt belonging to a free mechanic employed in the power plant to be put in with the prisoners’ clothes for delousing.⁸⁶ As a recent Soviet article puts it, a camp commandant did not regard the prisoners as human.⁸⁷

Free citizens in Kolyma sometimes tried to help prisoners they came in contact with. In particular, we are told, “doctors, engineers, geologists” would try to get their professional colleagues employed according to their capacities. A geologist now described as “a hero of the north” lost his own life owing to an attempt to defend some of the Kolyma inmates. One of his interventions is described:

“These people might die!”

“What people?” the representative of the camp administration smiled, “These are enemies of the people.”⁸⁸

As a camp official told a foreign prisoner, “We are not trying to bring down the mortality rate.”⁸⁹

A recent Soviet account tells of a commandant refusing the camp doctor’s insistence that convalescents not be sent to work in the forest on 400 grams of bread a day. The commandant answered, “I spit on your ethics!” and sent out the 246 men convalescing, who were all dead in a week.⁹⁰

There are many accounts of camp officials, and even doctors, who came to regard the prisoners as their personal serfs. This selection of slaves was sometimes similar even in detail to the illustrations of books about Negro slavery, as when the chief of a Yertsevo camp section, Samsonov, honored the medical examination with his presence, and with a smile of satisfaction felt the biceps, shoulders, and backs of the new arrivals.⁹¹ It has been maintained that the Soviet forced-labor system might be considered as “a stage on the way to a new social stratification which might have involved slavery”—that is, in the old-fashioned overt sense—though the trend was changed by later events.⁹²

A Soviet critic has remarked that

the whole system in the camps Ivan Denisovich passed through was calculated to choke and kill without mercy every feeling for justice and legality in man, demonstrating in general and in detail such impunity of despotism that any sort of noble or rebellious impulse was powerless before it. The camp administration did not allow the prisoners to forget for a single moment that they had no rights at all….⁹³

In the 1940s, “a prisoner had to take his cap off at a distance of five paces when he saw a warder, and keep it off till he was two paces past him.”⁹⁴ Solzhenitsyn tells of a muddled count, leading to recount after recount, and another time an extra count when a missing prisoner has been found:

“What’s all this about?” the chief escort screamed. “D’you want to sit on your asses in the snow? That’s where I’ll put you if you like and that’s where I’ll keep you till morning!” And he sure would. He wouldn’t think twice about it if he wanted. It’d happened plenty of times before and sometimes they had to go down on their knees with the guards pointing their guns at the ready.⁹⁵