Gulag

But one particular group of prisoners, in one particular set of camps, experienced quite a different set of emotions. The prisoners of the “special camps” were indeed a special case: overwhelmingly, their inmates had ten-, fifteen-, or twenty-five-year sentences, and no hope of release under Beria’s amnesty. Only minor changes had been made to their regime in the first few months following Stalin’s death. Prisoners were now allowed to receive packages, for example, but only one per year. Grudgingly, the administration allowed camp soccer teams to play against one another. But they still wore numbered uniforms, the windows of their barracks were still barred, and the barracks remained locked at night. All contact with the outside world was kept to a minimum.³⁷

It was a recipe for rebellion. By 1953, the inhabitants of the special camps had been kept separate from criminal and “ordinary” prisoners since 1948, more than five years. Left to themselves, they had evolved systems of internal organization and resistance which had no parallel in the earlier years of the Gulag. For years, they had been on the brink of organized uprising, plotting and planning, restrained only by the hope that Stalin’s death would bring their release. When Stalin’s death changed nothing, hope vanished— and was replaced by anger.

Chapter 24

THE ZEKS’ REVOLUTION

I cannot sleep. Blizzards are howlingFrom some unknown, forgotten time.And the colored tents of TamburlaineAre out there on the steppe . . . blazing bonfires, blazing bonfires

I shall become a Mongol princess

Galloping deep into the past

And lash to the tail of my horse

My loved ones, and my enemies . . .

And then, at one of the battles

In an unthinkable orgy of blood

At the moment of utter defeat

I will throw myself on my sword . . .

—Anna Barkova, “In the Prison Camp Barracks” ¹

IN THE WAKE OF STALIN’S DEATH, the special camps, like the rest of the country, were awash with rumors. Beria would take over; Beria was dead. Marshal Zhukov and Admiral Kuznetsov had marched into Moscow and were attacking the Kremlin with tanks; Khrushchev and Molotov had been murdered. All prisoners would be freed; all prisoners would be executed; the camps had been surrounded by armed MVD troops, ready to put down any sign of rebellion. Prisoners repeated these stories in whispers and shouts, hoping and speculating.²

At the same time, the national organizations in the special camps were growing stronger, the links between them steadier. Typical of this era are the experiences of Viktor Bulgakov, who was arrested in the spring of 1953—on the night of Stalin’s death, in fact—and accused of participating in an anti-Stalinist student political circle. Soon after, he arrived in Minlag, the special camp in the coal-mining Inta complex, north of the Arctic Circle.

Bulgakov’s description of the atmosphere in Minlag contrasts sharply with the memoirs of prisoners of an earlier era. A teenager at the time of his arrest, he walked into a well-organized, anti-Stalinist, anti-Soviet community. Strikes and protests occurred “with regularity.” The prisoners had sorted themselves into several very distinct national groupings, each with its own character. The Balts had a “tight organization, but without a well-run hierarchy.” The Ukrainians, mostly ex-partisans, were “extremely well-organized, as their leaders had been partisan leaders prior to captivity, they all knew each other, and their structure appeared almost automatically.”

The camp also contained prisoners who believed in communism, although they had sorted themselves into two groups: those who merely toed the Party line; and those who considered themselves communists out of faith or conviction—and believed in the reform of the Soviet Union. Finally, it had become possible to be an anti-Soviet Marxist, something unthinkable in earlier years. Bulgakov himself belonged to the People’s Workers’ Union—the Narodno-Trudovoi Soyuz, or NTS—an anti-Stalinist opposition movement, which would gain a great deal of notoriety a decade or two later, as the paranoid authorities began to see signs of its influence everywhere.