Gulag

Prisoners organized their own “entertainments” as well. According to one memoir, a Polish aristocrat named Count Bobrinski opened a “café” in the camp, where he served “coffee”: “He threw something in the water, boiled it, and prisoners in the middle of a hot day sipped this drink with satisfaction, laughing.” The count himself sat in the corner of the café, played his guitar, and sang old romantic songs.³⁷ Other prisoners organized lecture series, as well as concerts. A group of self-motivated thespians rehearsed and performed a play. One of the religious sects, its male and female members reunited by the destruction of the walls, claimed that their prophet had predicted they would now all be taken to heaven, alive. For several days, they sat on their mattresses in the main square, in the center of the zona, waiting to be taken to heaven. Alas, nothing happened.

Large numbers of newlyweds also appeared, united by the many prisoner priests who had been arrested along with their Baltic or Ukrainian flocks. Among them were some of those who had been married while standing on opposite sides of the camp walls, and were now meeting face-to-face for the first time. But although men and women mingled freely, all descriptions of the strike agree that women were never molested, and certainly not attacked or raped, as they were so often in ordinary camps.

Songs were written, of course. Someone composed a Ukrainian hymn, which at times all 13,500 striking prisoners would sing at once. The refrain went like this:

We will not, we will not be slaves

We will not carry the yoke any longer . . .

Another verse spoke of:

Brothers in blood, of Vorkuta and Norilsk, of Kolyma and Kengir . . .

“It was a wonderful time,” remembered Irena Arginskaya, forty-five years later. “I had not before then, and have not since, felt such a sense of freedom as I did then.” Others felt more foreboding. Lyuba Bershadskaya recalls that we “did everything without any awareness: none of us knew or even thought about what was waiting for us.”

Negotiations with the authorities continued. By May 27, the MVD commission delegated to deal with the strike had held its first meeting with the prisoners. Among what Solzhenitsyn calls the “golden-epaulted personages” on the commission were Sergei Yegorov, the deputy chief of the MVD; Ivan Dolgikh, then the commander of the Gulag system; and Vavilov, the deputy state prosecutor responsible for overseeing the Gulag. They were met by a gathering of 2,000 prisoners, led by Kuznetsov, who presented them with a list of demands.

By the time the strike was in full swing, these demands would include both the imposition of criminal charges on guards who had shot prisoners— which the prisoners had demanded from the beginning—as well as more clearly political demands. Among these were the reduction of all twentyfive-year sentences; the review of all political prisoners’ cases; the liquidation of the punishment cells and punishment barracks; more freedom for prisoners to communicate with relatives; the removal of the requirement of forced eternal exile for freed prisoners; easier living conditions for women prisoners; and a permanent reuniting of the men’s and women’s camps.

The prisoners also demanded a meeting with a member of the Communist Party Central Committee. They continued to make this demand until the very end, on the grounds that they could not trust either the Steplag authorities or the MVD to abide by any promises made. “And who could have inspired in you such hatred for the MVD?” the MVD deputy chief Yegorov reportedly asked them in response.

Had the strike taken place a few years earlier, there would, of course, have been no negotiations at all. But by 1954, the re-examination of politicals’ cases had in fact begun, albeit slowly. During the course of the strike, it even happened that individual prisoners were summoned to leave the camp in order to attend meetings of the tribunal re-investigating their cases. Knowing that many prisoners had already died, and apparently wanting a peaceful and rapid conclusion to events, Dolgikh almost immediately began to concede to some of the prisoners’ minor demands, calling for bars to be removed from barrack windows, for the establishment of an eight-hour workday, even for the transfer of certain particularly hated camp guards and officials out of Kengir. Under direct orders from Moscow, Dolgikh at first refrained from using force. He did try to break the prisoners’ resistance, however, actively urging them to leave the camp, and forbidding any new shipments of food or medicine.