Gulag

But the isolation of the “most dangerous” political prisoners did not make them more docile. On the contrary, the special camps freed the politicals from their constant conflicts with the criminals, and from the mitigating influence of other prisoners. Left to themselves, their opposition to the system only grew: this was 1948, not 1937. Ultimately, they would embark on a lengthy, determined, and unprecedented struggle with the authorities.

As the repressive mechanisms started to tighten again, political prisoners were not the only ones caught in the noose. Now that profits mattered more than ever, the Gulag’s bosses began to re-examine their attitudes to the professional criminals. Their corruption, laziness, and threatening behavior toward the guards harmed the productivity of the camps. Now that they no longer controlled the political prisoners, they brought no corresponding benefits either. Although criminals would never attract the same enmity as the politicals, and although they would never receive the same hateful treatment from camp guards, the Gulag’s postwar leadership nevertheless resolved to put an end to the criminals’ rule of the camps—and to eliminate forever the thieves-in-law who refused to work.

In practice, the Gulag’s war on the thieves took both straightforward and covert forms. To begin with, the most dangerous, dedicated criminals were simply separated from other inmates, and given longer sentences— ten, fifteen, twenty-five years.³² In the winter of 1948, the Gulag also called for the creation of a group of strict-regime criminal lagpunkts for criminal recidivists. According to instructions issued in Moscow, only the most disciplined and “physically healthiest” of the camp guards were allowed to work in them, and they were to be surrounded by particularly high, reinforced fences. Separate instructions laid out the specifications. The Gulag called for the creation of twenty-seven such camps immediately, with space for more than 115,000 prisoners.³³

Unfortunately, very little is known about daily life in these punishment lagpunkts, or even whether all of them were created: if they survived, these criminals were even less likely to write their memoirs than criminals in ordinary camps. In practice, though, most camps did have some form of separate incarceration for serious criminals and, thanks to an extremely bad twist of luck, Evgeniya Ginzburg found herself, briefly, in one of them: Izvestkovaya, a punishment lagpunkt in Kolyma. She was the lone political prisoner among a group of criminal women.

During her sojourn in Izvestkovaya, Ginzburg spent her days working in a limestone quarry, where she was unable to meet the norm and therefore received no food whatsoever. During her first few evenings she sat “bolt upright” in the corner of the barrack, since there was no space on the bunks, watching the mostly naked women drink ersatz alcohol in the vastly overheated cell. Later, one of the women, a syphilitic in the final stages of the disease, made way for Ginzburg and allowed her to lie down, but that was little comfort. “The overpowering stench of putrefaction” coming from the woman’s distintegrated nose nearly stifled her. “In Izvestkovaya, as in the most real of hells, there was not only no day and no night, there was not even an intermediate temperature to make existence bearable. It was either the glacial cold of the lime quarry or the infernal cauldron of the hut.”

At this camp, Ginzburg barely avoided rape. One night, the camp guards, who were “a long, long way from their bosses” burst into the barracks and began attacking the women. Another time, one of them thrust an unexpected loaf of bread at her. The camp management, expecting an inspection team, was worried she might die. “What with the total isolation, the gluttony, the alcohol, and their constant skirmishes with the girls, our soldiers had completely lost their bearings and hardly knew what they might get it in the neck for. At any rate a death certificate was something they could do without if the management arrived.”³⁴

But she escaped. With the help of friends, Ginzburg managed to get transferred to a different camp, using the influence of the housecleaner of the boss of Sevvostlag, no less. Others would not have been so lucky.