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As Vasileeva saw it, the job of camp commander was extremely difficult: “It isn’t a joke, you are in charge of hundreds, thousands of prisoners, there were recidivists and murderers, those convicted of serious crimes, from them you could expect anything. That meant you have to be on guard the whole time.” Commanders, although under pressure to work as efficiently as possible, found themselves needing to solve all kinds of other problems as well:

The head of a building project, he was also the head of a camp, and spent at least 60 percent of his time not on the building works, making engineering decisions, and solving building problems, but dealing with the camp. Someone was ill, an epidemic might have broken out, or some kind of accident had happened which means someone has to be taken to the hospital, someone needs a car or a horse and cart.

Vasileeva also said that the “bosses” did not necessarily eat well in Moscow either, especially during the war. In the canteen at Gulag headquarters, there was cabbage, soup, and kasha: “I don’t remember meat, I never saw any.” During Stalin’s lifetime, employees of the Gulag in Moscow worked from nine o’clock in the morning until two or three o’clock the next morning every day. Vasileeva saw her child only on Sundays. After Stalin died, however, things improved. S. N. Kruglov, then the head of the NKVD, issued an order granting ordinary employees of the NKVD central administration a one-hour lunch break, and NKVD officers a two-hour lunch break. In 1963, Vasileeva and her husband also received a very large apartment in central Moscow, the same one she was living in when I met her in 1998. ³⁵

In Stalin’s lifetime, though, work in the Gulag was less well-rewarded, leaving the central camp administration to address the problem of the job’s essential unattractiveness in different ways. In 1930, when the system was still perceived as part of the economic expansion of the time, the OGPU conducted internal advertising campaigns, asking for enthusiasts to work in what were then the new camps of the far north:

The enthusiasm and energy of Chekists created and strengthened the Solovetsky camps, playing a large, positive role in the industrial and cultural development of the far northern European part of our country. The new camps, like Solovetsky, must play a reforming role in the economy and culture of the outer regions. For this responsibility . . . we need especially tough Chekists, volunteers desiring hard work . . .

The volunteers were offered, among other things, up to 50 percent extra pay, a two-month holiday every year, and a bonus, after three years, of three months’ salary and a three-month holiday. In addition, the top administrators would receive monthly ration packages for free, and access to “radio, sporting facilities, and cultural facilities.”³⁶

Later on, as any genuine enthusiasm disappeared altogether (if it had ever existed), the inducements became more systematic. Camps were ranked according to their distance and their harshness. The more distant and the more harsh, the more NKVD officers would be paid to work in them. Some made a point of organizing sporting and other activities for their employees. In addition, the NKVD built special sanitoriums by the Black Sea, in Sochi and Kislovodsk, so that the highest-ranking officers could spend their long vacations in comfort and warmth.³⁷

The central administration also created schools where Gulag officers could improve their qualifications and their rank. One, for example, established in Kharkov, taught courses not only in the obligatory “History of the Party” and “History of the NKVD,” but also criminal law, camp policies, administration, management, accounting, and military subjects. ³⁸ Those willing to work at Dalstroi, in distant Kolyma, could even have their children reclassified as “children of workers”: this qualified them for preferential acceptance at institutes of higher education, and proved a highly popular inducement.³⁹