Gulag

Marchenko had served time both as an ordinary criminal and as a political prisoner, and his descriptions of the criminal world have a familiar ring. If anything, criminal culture had grown baser and degraded even further since Stalin’s death. In the wake of the thieves’ war of the late 1940s, the professional criminals had split into further factions. Zhenya Fedorov, a former prisoner arrested in 1967 for theft, describes several groups, not only “bitches” and “thieves” but also svoyaki, whom he explains were apprentice thieves, and “red caps,” thieves who followed their own law, probably the intellectual descendants of the “red caps” who emerged in the camps after the war. Other prisoners also grouped themselves into “families” for self-protection and other tasks: “When someone had to be murdered, ‘families’ would decide who would do it,” said Fedorov.³⁷

The violent culture of homosexual rape and domination—evident earlier in some descriptions of conditions in juvenile prisons—also now played a far greater role in criminal life. Unwritten rules now divided criminal prisoners into two groups: those who played the “female” role, and those who played the “male” role. “The former were universally despised, while the latter went about like heroes, boasting of their masculine strength and their ‘conquests,’ not only to each other but to the guards,” wrote Marchenko.³⁸ According to Fedorov, the authorities played along, keeping the “unclean” prisoners in separate cells. Anyone could wind up there: “if you lost at cards, you could be forced to ‘do it’ like a woman.”³⁹ In the women’s camps, lesbianism was equally widespread, and sometimes no less violent. One political prisoner wrote later of a prisoner who had refused a visit from her husband and small child, so greatly did she fear reprisals from her prison lesbian lover.⁴⁰

The 1960s were the beginning of the plague of tuberculosis in Russian prisons, a scourge which continues today. Fedorov described the situation like this: “If there were eighty people in a barrack, then fifteen had tuberculosis. No one tried to cure them, there was just one kind of tablet, for headaches, whatever. The doctors were some kind of SS men, they never talked to you, didn’t look at you, you were nobody.”⁴¹

To worsen matters, many of the thieves were now addicted to chifir, an extremely strong form of tea that produced a narcotic high. Others went to greater lengths than ever to get hold of alcohol. Those who worked outside the camp, as some did, developed a special method of smuggling it back in, past the guards:

A condom is hermetically attached to a long piece of thin plastic tubing. The zek then swallows it, leaving one end of the tube in his mouth. To avoid swallowing by accident, he wedges it in the gap between two teeth: there are not likely to be any zeks in existence with a full set of 32 teeth. Then, with the help of a syringe, up to three litres of spirit are pumped into the condom via the plastic tubing—and the zek goes back to his zone. If the bonding has been badly done, or if the condom happens to burst in the zek’s stomach, that means certain and painful death. Despite it, they run the risk: three litres of spirit makes seven litres of vodka. When the “hero” returns to the zone . . . he is hung headdown from a beam under the barrack roof and the end of the plastic tubing is held over a dish until every drop has been retrieved. Then the empty condom is hauled out . . .

The practice of self-mutilation was equally widespread, except that now it took even more extreme forms. Once, in a prison cell, Marchenko watched two thieves swallow first the handles of their spoon, and then, after stamping on them to make them flat, the bowls of the spoons as well. After that, they broke a pane of glass and began swallowing pieces of it, before the warders managed to drag them away.⁴² Edward Kuznetsov, condemned for having taken part in an infamous attempt to highjack an aircraft at Leningrad’s Smolny airport, described dozens of methods of selfmutiliation: