Gulag

Stricter regimes and longer sentences were not, however, the administration’s only weapon against the criminal leadership. All across central Europe, the Soviet Union’s great strength as an occupying power was its ability to corrupt local elites, to turn them into collaborators who willingly oppressed their own people. Precisely the same techniques were used to control the criminal elites in the camps. The method was straightforward: privileges and special treatment were offered to those professional criminals—the thieves-in-law—who would abandon their “law” and collaborate with the authorities. Those who agreed received complete freedom to abuse their former comrades, even to torture and murder them, while the camp guards looked away. These thoroughly corrupted criminal collaborators became known as suki, or “bitches,” and the violent battles which erupted between them and the remaining professional criminals became known as the “war between the bitches and the thieves.”

Like the politicals’ own fight for survival, the thieves’ war was one of the defining elements of postwar camp life. Although conflicts between criminal groups had occurred before, none had been so vicious, nor so clearly and so openly provoked: separate battles broke out simultaneously, all across the camp system, in 1948, leaving little doubt as to the authorities’ role. ³⁵ Many, many memoirists have recorded aspects of this struggle, although, again, most of those who wrote about it were not a part of it themselves. They watched instead, as horrified observers and sometimes as victims. “Thieves and bitches fought one another to the death,” wrote Anatoly Zhigulin:

Thieves finding themselves in a bitches’ lagpunkt, if they hadn’t managed to hide in a punishment barrack, would often find themselves facing a dilemma: die, or become a bitch. Likewise, if a large group of thieves arrived at a lagpunkt all of the bitches would hide in the punishment barracks, as the power had shifted . . . when the regime changed, there were often bloody results.³⁶

One thief told a prisoner that all bitches are “already dead men, sentenced by the rest of us, and at the first opportunity some blatnoi [thief-in-law] will kill him.”³⁷ Another witnessed the aftermath of one of their battles:

After an hour and a half, the thieves from our group were carried back and thrown on the ground. They were unrecognizable. All of their good clothes had been ripped off and removed. In exchange, they had received ragged camp jackets, and instead of boots they had foot coverings. They had been beaten like animals, many had lost teeth. One couldn’t lift his arm: it had been broken with an iron pipe.³⁸

Leonid Sitko witnessed the start of one particularly vicious battle:

A guard ran down the corridor and shouted “War! War!”—whereupon all of the thieves, who were less numerous than the bitches, ran to hide in the camp punishment cell. The bitches followed them there, and murdered several. The guards then helped the remainder to hide, not wanting them all to die, and then smuggled them out of the camp the next day.³⁹

Noncriminal prisoners sometimes became involved in the battles too, particularly when camp commanders granted broad powers to the bitches. Although “it isn’t worth romanticizing the thieves and the laws, which is what they do in their lives and folklore,” Zhigulin continued: