Читаем Gulag полностью

The camp armed guards—the voenizirovannaya okhrana, usually known, thanks to the Soviet mania for acronyms, as VOKhR—were even less educated. These were the men who walked around the perimeter of the camps, who marched prisoners to work, who manned the trains taking them east, often with only the dimmest idea of why they were doing it. According to one report from Kargopollag, “it appears that the guards don’t know the names of members of the Politburo, or leaders of the Party.”²⁶ Another document lists a series of incidents involving guards who misused their weapons. One of them wounded three prisoners “as the result of not knowing how his gun worked.” Another, “at his post in a drunken state, wounded citizen Timofeev.”²⁷

Division commanders complained at meetings that “The guards do not know how to oil, clean and take care of their weapons . . . A female guard stands on duty with her rifle barrel stuffed with a rag . . . Some guards take other people’s rifles out on duty, leaving their own back at home because they’re too lazy to clean them each time.”²⁸ There were constant missives back and forth from Moscow to the camps urging local commanders to spend more time on “cultural-educational work” among the guards.²⁹

Yet even the “leftovers” and “hopeless drunkards” from other departments of the NKVD managed to fill the Gulag’s demands for employees. Most Soviet institutions suffered from chronic lack of personnel, and the Gulag suffered particularly badly. Even the NKVD could not produce enough delinquent employees to fulfill the demand for an eighteenfold increase in staff between 1930 and 1939, or for the 150,000 people who had to be hired between 1939 and 1941, or for the enormous postwar expansion. In 1947, with 157,000 people serving just in the camp armed guards brigades, the Gulag still reckoned itself to be 40,000 guards short.³⁰

Right up until the system was finally disbanded, this dilemma never ceased to plague the Gulag administration. With the exception of the very top jobs, work in the camps was not considered to be prestigious or attractive, and living conditions were hardly guaranteed to be comfortable, particularly in the smaller, more distant outposts of the far north. General food shortages meant that guards and administrators received rationed food in quantities distributed according to the rank of the recipient.³¹ Returning from a tour of inspection of the northern camps of the Vorkuta region, one Gulag inspector complained about the poor living conditions of the armed guards, who worked fourteen- to sixteen-hour days in “difficult northern climatic conditions,” did not always have proper shoes and clothes, and lived in dirty barracks. Some suffered from scurvy, pellagra, and other vitamin-deficiency diseases, just as prisoners did.³² Another wrote that in Kargopollag, twenty-six members of the VOKhR had been given criminal sentences, many for falling asleep at their posts. In the summer, they worked thirteen-hour days—and when they were not at work they had no forms of entertainment. Those with families were in particularly poor condition, as they often did not have apartments and were forced to live in barracks.³³

Those who wanted to leave did not find it easy, even at the higher levels. The NKVD archives contain a plaintive letter from the prosecutor of Norilsk, begging to be removed from work in the “Arctic zone,” on the grounds of ill health and overwork: “If it isn’t possible to move me to a prosecutor’s job in another corrective-labor camp, then I would like to be put in a territorial job or else removed from the procuracy altogether.” In response, he was offered a transfer to Krasnoyarsk, which he turned down, as the conditions there—Krasnoyarsk lies to the south of Norilsk, but is still in northern Siberia—were almost the same.³⁴

Since the death of Stalin, former camp officials have often defended their past livelihoods by describing the difficulties and hardships of the work. When I met her, Olga Vasileeva, a former inspector of camps for the road-building division of the Gulag, regaled me with tales of the hard life of a Gulag employee. During our conversation—held at her unusually spacious Moscow apartment, the gift of a grateful Party—Vasileeva told me that once, when visiting a distant camp, she was invited to sleep in the home of a camp commander, in his son’s bed. At night she became hot and itchy. Thinking perhaps she was ill, she switched on the light: “His gray soldier’s blanket was alive, swarming with lice. It wasn’t only prisoners who had lice, the bosses had them too.” As a rule, when she returned home from an inspection trip, she would remove all of her clothes before entering the front door, to avoid bringing parasites into her house.