Off they went with their loot, laughing for all they were worth and only stopping to beat me up again when, out of sheer despair, I followed them and asked for the boots back. The other “trusties” watched, roaring with laughter. “Let him have it!” “Quit yelling—they’re not your boots now.”
Only one of the political prisoners spoke up: “Look, what are you up to? How can he manage in bare feet?” One of the thieves took off his pumps and threw them at me.29
Similar things happened to Gorbatov on several other occasions. Once, buying a tin of fish from a “trusty,” he had his money stolen, together with letters and photographs of his wife, by criminals who refused to return even the latter. (When he opened the tin, it was full of sand.)30
He was surprised to see that the guards did nothing to discourage this sort of thing. At the Maldyak gold-field camp in the Magadan area, where he served his sentence, there were 400 politicals and 50 common criminals. The latter had all the privileges and in one way or another did the politicals out of much of their meager food ration:
Work at the goldfield was pretty killing, particularly so considering the bad food we were given. The “enemies of the people,” as a rule, were detailed for the heaviest jobs, the lighter work being given to the “trusties” or common criminals…. [I]t was they who were appointed foremen, cooks, orderlies, and tent seniors. Naturally enough the small amounts of fat released for the pot chiefly found their way into the bellies of the “trusties.” There were three types of rations: one for those who had not fulfilled their quota, another for those who had, and a third for those who had exceeded their quota. The latter automatically included the “trusties.” They did little enough work, but the tally clerks were of their persuasion and so they swindled, putting to their own and their mates’ credit the work that we had done. As a result the criminals fed well and the politicals went hungry.31
Outside the camps proper—that is, in the transit camps and stations—the criminals continued to be almost completely out of control. One of their customs was to gamble with one another for the clothes of some strange political; the loser then had to pull them off the victim and hand them over to the winner. This game was also played for prisoners’ lives. A Hungarian who was in Vorkuta in 1950 to 1951 reports it played by fifteen-year-old juvenile criminals, the loser then knifing the chosen victim. These young delinquents, usually aged from fourteen to sixteen, were seldom seen in the usual camps, being held in special centers. They were far more terrifying than any other element in Soviet society: their egos were completely unsocialized. Killing meant nothing at all to them. They formed the hard core of the “hooligan” youth element which still persists in the Soviet Union and, politically speaking, may be thought to form the potential storm troops, on one side or another, in any future upsets in the country.
Gorbatov mentions a criminal with fingers missing who explained to him that he had “lost” a political’s clothes to another criminal, and before he could steal them to hand them over, the political had been transferred. So he was at once tried for negligence by his mates and sentenced to the loss of his fingers. The criminal “prosecutor” demanded all five, but the “court” settled for three. “We also have our laws,” the victim commented.32 In another case, one who, in a mass rape aboard the convict ship Magadan, had taken a woman the leader of his band had marked down, had his eyes put out with a needle.33 Another leader, also on a convict ship, had gambled his brigade’s bread ration away at cards. He was tried and cut to pieces.34
In fact, the criminals (who had such names as “The Louse,” “Hitler,” and “The Knout”), known at the time of the Purges as urkas and later as blatniye, in the 1950s had come to call themselves “Those with the Law”—that is, their own code.
One of its provisions (though the urkas later split into two factions on the issue) was refusal to work. Since the urka groups had sanctions just as effective as any disposed of by the camp administration, nothing could usually be done about this. One commandant is reported given the urkas jobs in the camp which existed only on paper. As Gorbatov describes above, the criminals in effect had arrangements with the authorities to ensure that the politicals worked on their behalf as well as on their own.
WOMEN IN CAMPS
Women criminals, who formed a high percentage of all women in the camps, were in the main tough and shameless—though one prisoner mentions a woman of the criminal class who never took her knickers off even in the washroom: it was said that the tattooing on her belly was so indecent that “even she was a little embarrassed by it.”35 The criminal women referred to themselves as “little violets” and sneered at the politicals as “little roses.” But they were somewhat restrained in their attitude towards nuns.36
Women on the whole seem to have survived much better than men. For this reason, we have perhaps a disproportionate number of accounts of the camps from their hands. In fact, they seem to have numbered “less than ten per cent” of the total, and many of these were in the criminal group.37 This was enough, all the same, to account for “the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north,” to which Pasternak refers in Doctor Zhivago.
In the mixed camps, noncriminal women were frequently mass-raped by urkas, or had to sell themselves for bread, or to get protection from camp officials. Those who did not were given the heaviest possible tasks until they gave in. A typical story from the Baltic–White Sea Canal camps is of a young woman who refused to give in to an official, who thereupon assigned her to a team of ordinary criminals who the same night blindfolded her, raped her, and pulled out several gold teeth from her mouth. There was no one to whom she could complain, for the camp chief himself was known to have raped several prisoners.38
The guards were often brutal to them. A woman prisoner describes an attempt by a girl to evade work by hiding under the floorboards. She was attacked by the guard dogs and dragged out so violently by the guards that she was literally scalped. Serving five years for stealing potatoes, she was one of the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girls frequently reported in the camps.39
Decent prisoners did what they could do for them. But the demoralization of their physical deterioration was intense. A man wrote of them, “I suppose there is no more horrifying sight for the normal man than a few hundred filthy, diseased-looking, shabby women. The deep-rooted romanticism of the male is outraged.”40 And they felt this keenly. All accounts agree that even the debilitating work and diet did not damp down their sexual feelings, as it did in the case of men. Hysteria was common from this cause.
A French peasant woman, divorced from a Russian and unable to leave the country, got an eight-year sentence as the wife of a traitor in November 1937. She describes being marched twenty-five miles and then left standing in the freezing rain outside the barbed wire for two hours while the camp officers were being shown a film.41
In the labor camps, there were seldom tractors or horses, and sleds of wood were pulled by the prisoners. If the team was made up of men, five were harnessed; if of women, seven.42 A Polish journalist who served in the Pechora camps reports seeing several hundred women carrying heavy logs, and later rails for the railway .43