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The money and benefits were certainly enough to attract some employees at the lowest levels too. Many simply saw the Gulag as the best of all possible bad options. In Stalin’s Soviet Union—a country of war, famine, starvation—employment as a prison guard or warder could signify an immeasurable social advance. Susanna Pechora, a prisoner in the early 1950s, recalled meeting one female warder who was working in a camp because it was the only way to escape from the dire poverty of the collective farm where she had been born: “she fed her seven brothers and sisters on her camp salary.”⁴⁰ Another memoirist tells the story of Maria Ivanova, a young woman who came voluntarily to work in a camp in 1948. Hoping to escape life on a collective farm, and hoping even more to find a husband, Maria Ivanova instead became the mistress of a series of officials of ever-declining rank. She wound up living with her two illegitimate children and her mother in a single room.⁴¹

But even the prospects of high salaries, long vacations, and social advance were still not always enough to bring workers into the system, particularly at the lower levels. At times of great demand, Soviet labor boards would simply send workers where they were needed, not even necessarily telling them where they were going. One former Gulag nurse, Zoya Eremenko, was sent straight from nursing school to work on what she had been told would be a construction site. When she arrived, she discovered that it was a prison camp, Krasnoyarsk-26. “We were surprised, frightened, but when we got to know the place, we found that ‘there,’ the people were the same and the medical work was the same as what we had been led to expect from our studies,” she recalled.⁴²

Particularly tragic were the cases of those forced to work in the camps after the Second World War. Thousands of ex–Red Army soldiers who had fought their way across Germany, as well as civilians who had lived “abroad” during the war, as deportees or refugees, were effectively arrested upon crossing the border back into the Soviet Union, and confined to “filtration camps,” where they were carefully cross-examined. Those who were not arrested were sometimes immediately sent to work in the prison guard service. By the beginning of 1946, there were 31,000 such people, and in some camps they accounted for up to 80 percent of the guard service.⁴³ Nor could they easily leave. Many had been deprived of their documents—passports, residence permits, military service certificates. Without them, they were unable to leave the camps, let alone search for new jobs. Between 300 and 400 every year committed suicide. One who attempted to do so, explained why: “I’ve been in the service for a very long time now, and I still have not been given a residence permit, and nearly every day a policeman comes round with an order to vacate the apartment, and this leads to quarrels in my family every single day.” ⁴⁴

Others simply degenerated. Karlo Stajner, a Yugoslav communist and a prisoner in Norilsk during and after the war, remembered such guards as being “notably different from those who hadn’t fought in the war”:

There were definite signs of demoralization, for one. You could see it in their willingness to be bribed by the female prisoners or to become clients of the prettier ones, or to allow criminals to leave the brigade in order to break into some apartment, and share the loot with them later. They weren’t afraid of the severe punishments they would be subject to if their superiors found out about these misdeeds.⁴⁵

A very, very few protested. The archives record, for example, the case of one unwilling recruit, Danilyuk, who categorically refused to serve in the armed guards service, on the grounds that “I don’t want to serve in the organs of the Ministry of Internal Affairs at all.” Danilyuk kept up this stance despite what the archives call “processing sessions,” undoubtedly long periods of browbeating, perhaps actual beatings. He was, in the end, released from service. At least in his case, consistent and persistent refusal to work for the Gulag found its reward.⁴⁶