Gulag

But even those who wanted to return home often found it nearly impossible to do so. They had no money, and very little food. Camps released prisoners with the equivalent of 500 grams of bread for every day they were expected to be on the road—a starvation ration.²² Even that was insufficient, since they were often on the road much longer than expected, as it proved almost impossible to obtain tickets on the few planes and trains leading south. Arriving at the station in Krasnoyarsk, Ariadna Efron found “such a crowd, that to leave was impossible, simply impossible. People from all of the camps were there, from all of Norilsk.” She was finally given a ticket out of the blue by an “angel,” a woman who by chance had two. Otherwise, she might have waited for months.²³

Facing a similarly crowded train, Galina Usakova, like many others, solved the problem by riding home on a baggage rack.²⁴ Still others did not make it at all: it was not uncommon for prisoners to die on the difficult journey home, or within weeks or months of arrival. Weakened by their years of hard labor, tired out by exhausting journeys, the emotions surrounding their return overwhelmed them, resulting in heart attacks and strokes. “How many people died from this freedom!” one prisoner marveled.²⁵

Some wound up back in prison. The MVD itself produced a report revealing that freed prisoners coming out of Vorkuta, Pechora, and Inta camps could not buy clothes, shoes, or bedding, as “the towns above the Arctic Circle have no markets.” In desperation, some committed minor crimes in order to be re-arrested. At least in prison they were guaranteed a bread ration.²⁶ Not that those in charge of the camps necessarily minded this: facing an employment crisis, the Vorkuta administration disobeyed orders from above and actually tried to prevent certain categories of prisoners from leaving the mines.²⁷

If they did manage to return to Moscow, Leningrad, or whatever village they had originally come from, former camp inmates often found their lives no easier. Mere release, it turned out, was not sufficient to re-establish a “normal” life. Without the documents testifying to actual rehabilitation— documents which annulled the prisoners’ original sentence—former politicals were still suspect.

True, a few years earlier, they would have been handed the dreaded “wolves passports,” which forbade ex-political prisoners from living in or near any of the Soviet Union’s major cities. Others would have been sent directly into exile. Now the “wolves passports” had been abolished, but it was still difficult to find places to live, to find work, and, in Moscow, to get permission to remain in the capital. Prisoners returned to find their homes had long ago been requisitioned, their possessions disbursed. Many of their relatives, also “enemies” by association, were dead, or impoverished: long after they had been released, families of “enemies” remained stigmatized, subject to official forms of discrimination and forbidden from working in certain kinds of jobs. Local authorities were still suspicious of former prisoners. Thomas Sgovio spent a year “petitioning and hassling” before he was allowed to become a legal resident of his mother’s apartment. ²⁸ Older prisoners found it impossible to get a proper pension. ²⁹

These personal difficulties, coupled with their sense of injured justice, persuaded many to seek full rehabilitation—but this was not a simple or straightforward process either. For many, the option was not even available. The MVD categorically refused to review the case of anyone sentenced before 1935, for example.³⁰ Those who had gained an extra sentence in a camp, whether for insubordination, dissidence, or theft, were never given the coveted rehabilitation certificates either.³¹ The cases of the highest-ranking Bolsheviks—Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev—remained taboo, and those condemned in the same investigations as those leaders were not rehabilitated until the 1980s.

For those who could attempt it, the rehabilitation process was a long one. Appeals for rehabilitation had to come from prisoners or their families, who often had to write two, three, or many more letters before their appeals were granted. Even after they succeeded, the arduous process sometimes went backward: Anton Antonov-Ovseenko received a posthumous rehabilitation certificate for his father, which was then revoked in 1963.³² Many former prisoners also remained wary of applying. Those who received a summons to appear at a meeting of a rehabilitation commission, usually held within the offices of the MVD or the Justice Ministry, would often turn up in layers of clothes, gripping food parcels, accompanied by weeping relatives, certain they were about to be sent away again.³³