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“Then you won’t be against it . . . if . . . I . . . have to . . . do it?” With a great effort she looked at him. Her eyes were very wide. The fine pinpoints of her grey pupils were alight with a plea for forgiveness and understanding. “It would be . . . pseudo,” she added, breathing the word rather than speaking it.⁴⁵

Such a meeting could be worse than no meeting at all. Izrail Mazus, arrested in the 1950s, recounts the story of one prisoner who made the mistake of announcing to his fellow inmates that his wife had arrived. As he endured the routines required of every prisoner due to encounter a visitor— he went to the baths, to the barber, to the storage room to retrieve some proper clothes—the other prisoners relentlessly winked at him and poked him, teasing him about the squeaky bed in the House of Meetings.⁴⁶ Yet in the end, he was not even allowed to be alone in the room with his wife. What sort of “glimpse of liberty” was that?

Contacts with the outside world were always complicated—by expectations, by desires, by anticipation. Herling, again, writes that

Whatever the reason for their disappointment—whether the freedom, realized for three days, had not lived up to its idealized expectation, whether it was too short, or whether, fading away like an interrupted dream, it had left only fresh emptiness in which they had nothing to wait for—the prisoners were invariably silent and irritable after visits, to say nothing of those whose visits had been transformed into the tragic formality of separation and divorce. Krestynski . . . twice attempted to hang himself after an interview with his wife, who had asked him for a divorce and for his agreement to place their children in a municipal nursery.

Herling, who as a Polish foreigner “never expected to see anyone” in the House of Meetings, nevertheless saw the significance of the place more clearly than many Soviet writers: “I came to the conclusion that if hope can often be the only meaning left in life, then its realization may sometimes be an unbearable torment.”⁴⁷

Chapter 13

THE GUARDS

To the Chekists

A great and responsible task

Was placed upon you by Ilyich,

The face of a Chekist is worn with cares

Which no one else can comprehend.

On the face of a Chekist is valor,

He is ready to fight, even today,

For the good of all, and their well-being,

He stands up for the working people.

Many, many in battle have fallen,

Many of our brothers’ tombs have arisen.

But there still remain many,

Honest and vigorous fighters.

Tremble, tremble, enemies!

Soon, soon, your end will come!

You, Chekist, stand always on guard

And in battle you will lead the throng!

—Poem by Mikhail Panchenko, an inspector in the Soviet prison system, preserved in the same personal file that describes his expulsion from the Party and from the NKVD¹

STRANGE THOUGH IT may sound, not all of the rules in the camps were written by the camp commanders. There were also unwritten rules—about how to attain status, how to gain privileges, how to live a little better than everyone else—as well as an informal hierarchy. Those who mastered these unwritten rules, and learned how to climb the hierarchy, found it much easier to survive.