Gulag

Instead of being in the usual place, the stage was built in the centre of the edifice, the audience sitting in a circle around it. The director’s aim was to draw the audience closer to the action of the play, to bridge the gap between actor and spectator. There was no curtain, and the stage settings were exceedingly simple, almost as in the Elizabethan theatre . . . the topic—life in a labour camp—was thrilling in itself. ³⁸

Outside the camps, such literature had a dual function. On the one hand, it played a role in the continuing campaign to justify the rapid growth of prison camps to a skeptical foreign public. On the other hand, it probably also served to calm Soviet citizens, disquieted by the violence of collectivization and industrialization, by promising them a happy ending: even the victims of the Stalinist revolution would be given a chance to rebuild their lives in the labor camps.

The propaganda worked. After seeing Aristokraty, Gliksman asked to visit a real labor camp. Somewhat to his surprise, he was soon taken to the “show” camp at Bolshevo, not far from Moscow. He later recalled “nice white beds and bedding, fine washing rooms. Everything was spotlessly clean,” and met a group of younger prisoners who told the same uplifting personal stories that Pogodin and Gorky had described. He met a thief who was now studying to become an engineer. He met a hooligan who had seen the error of his ways and now ran the camp storeroom. “How beautiful the world could be!” a French film director whispered into Gliksman’s ear. Alas for Gliksman, five years later he found himself on the floor of a packed cattle car, heading for a camp that would bear no relationship to the model camp at Bolshevo, in the company of prisoners very different from those in Pogodin’s play.³⁹

Inside the camps, similar propaganda played a role as well. Camp publications and “wall newspapers”—sheets posted on bulletin boards for prisoners to read—contained the same sorts of stories and poems told to outsiders, with some slight differences of emphasis. The newspaper Perekovka (“reforging”), written and produced by the inmates of the Moscow–Volga Canal, a project begun in the wake of the “success” of the White Sea Canal, is typical. Filled with praise for shock-workers, and descriptions of their privileges (“They don’t have to stand in line, they are given food straight at the table by waitresses!”), Perekovka spends less time than the authors of Kanal imeni Stalina singing hymns to the advantages of spiritual transformation, and more time discussing the concrete privileges inmates might gain if they worked harder.

Nor is there quite so much pretense about the higher justice of the Soviet system. The issue of January 18, 1933, reprinted a speech made by Lazar Kogan, one of the camp bosses: “We cannot judge whether someone was rightly or wrongly imprisoned. That’s the business of the prosecutor . . . You are obliged to create something valuable to the state with your work, and we are obliged to make of you someone who is valuable to the state.” ⁴⁰

Also notable is Perekovka’s open and extremely candid “complaints” department. Prisoners wrote in to complain about the “squabbling and swearing” in the womens’ barracks on the one hand, and the “singing of hymns” on the other; about unfulfillable norms; about shortages of shoes or clean underwear; about the unnecessary beating of horses; about the black-market bazaar in the center of Dmitrov, the headquarters of the camp; and about the misuse of machinery (“there are no bad machines, only bad managers”). This sort of openness about camp problems would disappear later, banished to the private correspondence between camp inspectors and their overlords in Moscow. In the early 1930s, however, such glasnost was quite common outside the camps as well as within them. It was a natural part of the urgent, frantic drive to improve conditions, improve work standards, and—above all—to keep pace with the feverish demands of the Stalinist leadership.⁴¹