Gulag

To begin with, the nature of the political prisoners evolved. In Stalin’s era, the repressive system had resembled a vast game of roulette: anyone could be arrested, for any reason, at any time—peasants, workers, and Party bureaucrats alike. After Khrushchev, the secret police still occasionally arrested people “for nothing,” as Anna Akhmatova had once put it. But most of the time, Brezhnev’s KGB arrested people for something— if not for a genuine criminal act, then for their literary, religious, or political opposition to the Soviet system. Usually called “dissidents,” or sometimes “prisoners of conscience,” this new generation of politicals knew why they had been arrested, identified themselves as political prisoners, and were treated as such. They were kept separate from criminal prisoners, given different uniforms, and were subjected to different regimes. They would also be marked as dissidents for the rest of their lives, subjected to discrimination at work, and mistrusted by their relatives and neighbors.

There were also far fewer political prisoners than there had been in Stalin’s time. In the middle of the 1970s, Amnesty International estimated that no more than 10,000 of the Soviet Union’s one million prisoners had political sentences, and most of them were incarcerated in the two “political” camp complexes, one in Mordovia, south of Moscow, and one in Perm, on the western edge of the Urals.³ In a given year, there were probably no more than a few thousand openly political arrests. Although this would have been a high number in any other country, it was certainly low by the standards of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

According to former prisoners’ accounts, this new sort of prisoner began appearing in the camps as early as 1957, in the wake of the Hungarian revolution of October 1956, following the arrests of Soviet soldiers and citizens who had sympathized with the rebellion.⁴ At about this time, the first tiny wave of “refuseniks,” Jews who were refused the right to emigrate to Israel, also appeared in Soviet prisons. In 1958, Bym Gindler, a Polish Jew who had been left on the Soviet side of the border after the war, was refused the right to be repatriated to Poland, on the grounds that he would take the opportunity to emigrate to Israel.⁵

The late 1950s also saw the arrests of the first groups of Soviet Baptists, who would quickly become the largest single dissident group behind barbed wire, as well as members of other religious sects. In 1960, the dissident Avraham Shifrin even encountered a group of Old Believers, followers of the older rites of the Orthodox Church, in a punishment cell in the political camp at Potma. Their community had emigrated to the virgin forests of the northern Urals in 1919, and had lived there in complete secrecy, until a KGB helicopter discovered them fifty years later. When Shifrin met them, they had become permanent residents of the camp punishment cells, having refused categorically to work for the Soviet anti-Christ.⁶

Shifrin himself also represented a new category of prisoner: the sons and daughters of “enemies of the people,” who found themselves, in the late 1950s, unable to slot easily into the routines of Soviet life. In subsequent years, a striking number of the members of the dissident generation, particularly the human rights activists, would turn out to be children or relatives of Stalin’s victims. The twin Medvedev brothers, Zhores and Roy, are among the most famous examples. Roy, a historian, became one of the best-known underground publicists in the Soviet Union; Zhores was a dissident scientist, who would be locked up in a psychiatric hospital as a result. Both were the sons of an “enemy of the people”: their father had been arrested when they were children.⁷

There were others. In 1967, forty-three children of communists, all repressed by Stalin, sent an open letter to the Central Committee, warning of the threat of neo-Stalinism. The letter, one of the first of many open protest letters to the authorities, contained several names of underground publishers and dissident leaders, many of whom would soon be in prison themselves: Pyotr Yakir, the son of General Yakir; Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, son of the Bolshevik revolutionary; and Larisa Bogoraz, whose father was arrested for Trotskyite activities in 1936. A family’s experience of the camps could be enough, it seemed, to radicalize its younger members. ⁸

If the prisoners had changed, so too had some aspects of the legal system. In 1960—the year usually remembered as the height of the Thaw—a new criminal code was established. Without question, the new code was more liberal. It specifically abolished nighttime interrogations, and limited the powers of the KGB (who conducted political investigations) and the MVD (who ran the prison system). It mandated the greater independence of prosecutors and, most of all, abolished the hated Article 58.⁹