Gulag

When the police came for her the second time, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg went to her cupboard to pack, then stopped. “Why should I bother to take anything with me? The children can make better use of my things than I,” she thought. “Obviously I won’t survive this time; how could I possibly stand it?”²⁰ Lev Razgon’s wife was re-arrested, and he demanded to know why. When told she had been sentenced again for the same crimes as before, he demanded further explanations:

“She’s already served her time. Does the law really permit you to punish a person twice for the same offense?”

The procurator looked at me in amazement.

“Of course not. But what’s the law got to do with it?”²¹

The majority of those re-arrested were not sent back to camps, but instead into exile, usually in particularly remote and underpopulated regions of the country: Kolyma, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Kazakhstan.²² There, most would live lives of unrelenting tedium. Shunned by the local communities as “enemies,” they found it difficult to find living space, difficult to work. No one wanted to be associated with a spy or a saboteur.

To the victims, Stalin’s plans seemed clear enough: no one who had received a sentence for spying, sabotage, or any form of political opposition was ever to be allowed to return home. If released, they would be given “wolves passports,” which forbade them from living anywhere near a major city, and would be constantly subject to re-arrest.²³ The Gulag, and the exile system which supplemented it, were no longer temporary punishments. For those condemned to them, they had become a way of life.

Yet the war did have a lasting impact on the camp system, albeit one which is hard to quantify. Camp rules and regulations were not liberalized following victory—but the prisoners themselves had changed, and the politicals in particular.

To begin with, there were more of them. The demographic upheaval of the war years, and the amnesties which had pointedly excluded the political prisoners, had left a much higher percentage of political prisoners in the camps. As of July 1, 1946, more than 35 percent of the prisoners in the entire system had been sentenced for “counter-revolutionary” crimes. In certain camps that number was far higher, well above half.²⁴

Although the overall figure would drop again, the position of the politicals had changed too. This was a new generation of political prisoners, with a different set of experiences. The politicals arrested in the 1930s—and particularly those arrested in 1937 and 1938—had been intellectuals, party members, and ordinary workers. Most were shocked by their arrests, psychologically unprepared for prison life, and physically unprepared for forced labor. In the immediate postwar years, however, the politicals included former Red Army soldiers, Polish Home Army officers, Ukrainian and Baltic partisans, German and Japanese prisoners of war. These men and women had fought in trenches, conducted conspiracies, commanded troops. Some had survived German prison camps; others had led partisan bands. Many were openly anti-Soviet or anti-communist, and were not in the least surprised to find themselves behind barbed wire, as one prisoner remembered: “Having looked death in the eyes, having passed through the fires and hell of war, having survived hunger and much tragedy, they were a completely different generation from the inmates of the prewar period.”²⁵

Almost as soon as they started appearing in the camps toward the end of the war, this new sort of prisoner began creating trouble for the authorities. By 1947, the professional criminals no longer found it so easy to dominate them. Among the various national and criminal tribes who dominated camp life, a new clan appeared: the krasnye shapochki, or “red hats.” These were usually ex-soldiers or ex-partisans who had banded together to fight against the dominance of the thieves—and, by extension, against the administration that tolerated them. Such groups operated well into the next decade, despite efforts to break them apart. In the winter of 1954–55, Viktor Bulgakov, then a prisoner in Inta, a far northern mining camp in the Vorkuta region, witnessed an administrative attempt to “break” a group of politicals by importing a contingent of sixty thieves into their camp. The thieves armed themselves, and prepared to start attacking the politicals: