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But the KVCh instructors were also ultimately responsible for convincing “refusers” that it was in their interest to work, not to sit in punishment cells, or to attempt to get by on small rations. Clearly, not many took their lectures seriously: there were too many other ways to persuade prisoners to work. But a few did, much to the delight of the Gulag’s bosses in Moscow. In fact, they took this function terribly seriously, and even held periodic conferences of KVCh instructors, designed to discuss such questions as “What are the basic motives of those who refuse to work?” and “What are the practical results of eliminating the prisoners’ day off?”

At one such meeting, held during the Second World War, the organizers compared notes. One acknowledged that some “shirkers” could not work because they were too weak to live off the amount of food they were given. Still, he claimed, even starving people could be motivated: he had told one shirker that his behavior was “like a knife in the neck of his brother, who was at the front.” That was enough to persuade the man to ignore his hunger, and work harder. Another claimed he had shown some shirkers photographs of “Leningrad in battle,” after which they all went immediately to work. Yet another said that in his camp, the best brigades were allowed to decorate their own barracks, and the best workers were encouraged to plant flowers in their own individual plots. On the minutes from this meeting, preserved in the archives, someone has made a notation beside this latter comment: “Khorosho!” “Excellent!” ⁷⁰

This sharing of experiences was considered so important that at the height of the war, the Cultural-Educational Department of the Gulag in Moscow took the trouble to print a pamphlet on the subject. The title—with clear religious echoes—was Return to Life. The author, one Comrade Loginov, describes a series of relationships he had with prisoner “shirkers.” Using clever psychological tactics, he converted every one of them to a belief in the value of hard work.

The stories are fairly predictable. In one of them, for example, Loginov explains to Ekaterina Sh., the educated wife of a man condemned to death for “espionage” in 1937, that her ruined life can once again have meaning within the context of the Communist Party. To another prisoner, Samuel Goldshtein, Loginov recounts Hitler’s “racial theories” and explains to him what “Hitler’s new order” in Europe would mean for him. So inspired is Goldshtein by this surprising (in the USSR) appeal to his Jewishness, that he wants to leave immediately for the front. Loginov tells him that “today, your weapon is your labor,” and persuades him to work harder in the camp. “Your life is needed by your fatherland, and so are you,” he tells yet another prisoner who, with tears in his eyes, returns to work upon hearing these words.⁷¹

Clearly, Comrade Loginov was proud of his work, and applied himself to it with great energy. His enthusiasm was real. The rewards he received for his work were real too: V. G. Nasedkin, then the boss of the entire Gulag system, was so pleased with his effort that he ordered the pamphlet sent to all of the camps in the system, and awarded Loginov a bonus of 1,000 rubles.

Whether Loginov and his shirkers actually believed in what he was doing is less clear. We do not know, for example, whether Loginov understood, at some level, that many of the people he was “bringing back to life” were innocent of any crime. Nor do we know whether people like Ekaterina Sh. (if she existed) really reconverted to Soviet values, or whether she suddenly realized that by appearing to be so converted she might receive better food, better treatment, or an easier job. The two possibilities are not even mutually exclusive. For people shocked and disoriented by their rapid transition from useful citizen to despised prisoner, the experience of “seeing the light” and rejoining Soviet society may have helped them make a psychological recovery from their experiences, as well as providing them with the better conditions that saved their lives.

In fact, this question—“Did they believe in what they were doing?”—is actually a small part of a much larger question, one which goes to the heart of the nature of the Soviet Union itself: Did any of its leaders ever believe in what they were were doing? The relationship between Soviet propaganda and Soviet reality was always a strange one: the factory is barely functioning, in the shops there is nothing to buy, old ladies cannot afford to heat their apartments, yet in the streets outside, banners proclaim the “triumph of socialism” and the “heroic achievements of the Soviet motherland.”