Gulag

Bulgakov’s preoccupations in camp would have stunned an earlier generation of prisoners too. In Minlag, the prisoners managed to put out a secret underground newspaper, written by hand and distributed around the camps. They intimidated the pridurki, who “became afraid of the prisoners” as a result. They kept tabs on camp informers too—as did other prisoners in special camps. Dmitri Panin has also described the increasingly deadly war against informers:

Retribution was carried out systematically. During the course of eight months forty-five informers were done away with. Operations against them were directed from a clandestine center . . . We saw how a number of stoolie prisoners, unable to stand the threat of liquidation that hung over them, sought to escape their fate by getting themselves put in the camp jail—the only place they could hide from certain retaliation. They were all kept in the same cell, which was dubbed the “funk hole.” ³

One camp historian has written that murders of informers became “such an ordinary occurrence that no one was surprised or interested,” and notes that the informers “died out quickly.”⁴ Once again, life inside the camps mirrored and amplified life on the outside. The anti-Soviet partisan organizations in western Ukraine had also tried intensely to destroy informers, and their leaders brought the obsession with them to the camps.⁵ Perhaps cognizant of this, the authorities in Panin’s camp separated the Ukrainian prisoners from the others, since the Ukrainians were thought to be responsible for the deaths of informers. This only increased their solidarity and their anger.⁶

By 1953, Bulgakov’s comrades in Minlag were also making a systematic attempt to keep track of their own numbers and living conditions, and to transmit this information to the West, using cooperative guards and other techniques that would be perfected in the dissident camps of the 1970s and 1980s, as we shall see. Bulgakov himself took on responsibility for hiding these documents, as well as copies of songs and poetry composed by the prisoners. Leonid Sitko did the same job in Steplag, using the basement of a building that camp workers were constructing as a place to hide documents. Among them were “short descriptions of individual lives, the letters of dead inmates, a short document signed by a doctor, Galina Mishkina, on the inhuman conditions in the camps (including statistics on deaths, levels of starvation, and so on), an account of the organization and growth of the camps of Kazakhstan, a more detailed account of the history of Steplag—and poems.” ⁷

Both Sitko and Bulgakov believed, simply, that someday the camps would be shut, the barracks would be burned down, and that the information could be retrieved again. Twenty years earlier, no one had dared to think such a thing, let alone act upon it.

Very quickly, the tactics and strategy of conspiracy spread throughout the special camp system, thanks to the Gulag administration itself. In the past, prisoners who were suspected of hatching conspiracies had simply been split up. The central authorities had moved prisoners from camp to camp, destroying rebel networks before they began. Within the more specific climate of the special camps, however, this tactic backfired. Instead, the frequent movements of prisoners became an excellent means of spreading rebellion.⁸

North of the Arctic Circle, the summers are very short, and very hot. Toward the end of May, the ice on the rivers begins to break up. The days grow longer, until night vanishes altogether. At some point in June—in some years as late as July—the sun suddenly begins to shine with real ferocity, sometimes for a month, sometimes two. From one day to the next, the Arctic wildflowers suddenly begin to bloom, and for a few short weeks, the tundra is awash with color. For human beings, who have been locked inside for nine months, the summer brings an overwhelming desire to go outdoors, to be free. During the few hot summer days that I spent in Vorkuta, the inhabitants of the city seemed to spend virtually all of their days and all of their white nights outside, strolling the streets, sitting in the parks, talking to one another on the doorsteps of their houses. It is no accident that springtime was the season for prisoners to attempt escape. Nor is it an accident that the Gulag’s three most important, most dangerous, and most famous uprisings all took place in northern camps in the spring.