Gulag

Somehow this amnesty changed the basic discipline of the camp . . . One day we came from the fields in a rainstorm; we were completely soaked. The administration sent us to the baths without letting us first go to our rooms. We disliked this for we wanted to be able to exchange our wet clothing for dry things. The long line of prisoners began to protest by screaming and shouting insults, calling the administration “chekists” and “fascists.” Then we simply refused to move. Neither persuasion nor threats had any effect. After an hour of silent battle the administration gave in and we went to our rooms to pick up dry clothes.³⁰

The change affected the prisons too. During the months following Stalin’s death, Susanna Pechora was in a solitary prison cell, undergoing a second interrogation: as a Jewish “counter-revolutionary,” she had been recalled to Moscow from her camp in connection with the Doctors’ Plot. Then, quite suddenly, her investigation stopped. Her interrogator summoned her to a meeting. “You understand, I am not guilty of wronging you, I never beat you, I haven’t hurt you,” he told her. He sent her to a new cell, and there, for the first time, she heard one of the women speaking of Stalin’s death. “What’s happened?” she asked. Her cell mates fell silent: since everyone knew Stalin had died, they assumed she must be an informer who was trying to gauge their opinions. It took her a whole day to convince them of her genuine ignorance. After that, recalled Pechora, the situation began to change dramatically.

The guards were afraid of us, we did what we wanted, we shouted during exercise periods, made speeches, crawled through windows. We would refuse to stand up when they came into our cells and told us not to lie on our beds. We would have been shot for doing such things half a year earlier. ³¹

Not everything changed. Leonid Trus was also under interrogation in March 1953. While Stalin’s death may have saved him from execution, he still received a twenty-five-year sentence. One of his cell mates got ten years for saying something untactful about Stalin’s death.³² Nor was everybody freed. The amnesty had been limited, after all, to the very young, the very old, women with children, and prisoners with sentences of five years or less. Overwhelmingly, those with short sentences were criminal prisoners, or politicals with unusually thin cases. That still left well over a million prisoners in the Gulag, including hundreds of thousands of politicals with long sentences.

In some camps, those due to be released were showered with gifts, attention, and letters to take back to friends and families.³³ Just as often, terrible rivalries broke out between prisoners who were due to be released and those who were not. Forty years later, one prisoner who was not released in the initial amnesty still recalled it bitterly as an “amnesty for pickpockets,” a freedom for petty thieves: “the criminals were happy, they were all freed.”³⁴ In one camp, a gang of women prisoners with long sentences beat up a woman with a short sentence, out of spite. Those due to be released also provoked anger, holding themselves apart, looking down on the other “criminals” who would remain behind.³⁵

Other kinds of violence broke out as well. Some with long sentences approached camp doctors, demanding to be given the coveted “invalid” certificate which would mandate their immediate release. Doctors who refused were threatened or beaten. In Pechorlag, there were six such incidents: doctors were “systematically terrorized,” beaten, even knifed. In Yuzhkuzbasslag, four prisoners threatened the camp doctor with death. In other camps, the number of prisoners released as “invalids” exceeded the number of invalids previously recorded in the camps.³⁶