Читаем Gulag полностью

In the end, though, the system did reward its luckiest and most loyal members, some of whom received far more than a mere social advance or better rations: those who delivered large quantities of gold or timber to the state with their prisoner laborers would, eventually, receive their rewards. And while the average logging lagpunkt was never a nice place to live, even for those running it, the headquarters of some of the bigger camps did over time became very comfortable indeed.

By the 1940s, the cities that stood at the center of the larger camp complexes—Magadan, Vorkuta, Norilsk, Ukhta—were large, bustling places, with shops, theaters, and parks. The opportunities for living the good life had increased enormously since the Gulag’s pioneering early days. Top commanders in the bigger camps got higher salaries, better bonuses, and longer vacations than those in the ordinary working world. They had better access to food and to consumer goods that were in short supply elsewhere. “Life in Norilsk was better than anywhere else in the Soviet Union,” remembered Andrei Cheburkin, a foreman in Norilsk and later a local bureaucrat:

In the first place, all the bosses had maids, prisoner maids. Then the food was amazing. There were all sorts of fish. You could go and catch it in the lakes. And if in the rest of the Union there were ration cards, here we lived virtually without cards. Meat. Butter. If you wanted champagne you had to take a crab as well, there were so many. Caviar . . . barrels of the stuff lay around. I’m talking about bosses, of course. I am not talking about the workers. But then the workers were prisoners . . .

The pay was good . . . say you were a brigadier, you’d get 6,000–8,000 rubles. In central Russia you would get no more than 1,200. I came to Norilsk to work as a work supervisor in a special directorate of the NKVD, which was looking for uranium. I was given a supervisor’s salary: 2,100 rubles I received from the first, and then each six months I got a 10 percent rise, about five times more than they got in normal civilian life.⁴⁷

Cheburkin’s first point—“all the bosses had maids”—was a key one, for it applied, in fact, not just to the bosses but to everyone. Technically, the use of prisoners as domestics was forbidden. But it was very widespread, as the authorities well knew, and despite frequent attempts to stop the practice, it continued.⁴⁸ In Vorkuta, Konstantin Rokossovsky, a Red Army officer who later became a general, then a marshall, then Defense Minister of Stalinist Poland, worked as a servant to a “loutish warder named Buchko, his duties consisting of fetching the man’s meals, tidying and heating his cottage and so forth.”⁴⁹ In Magadan, Evgeniya Ginzburg worked, for a time, as a laundress for the wife of a camp administrator.⁵⁰

Thomas Sgovio also worked as a personal orderly to a senior camp guard in Kolyma, preparing his food and trying to procure alcohol for him. The man came to trust him. “Thomas, my boy,” he would say, “remember one thing. Take care of my Party membership card. Whenever I’m drunk— see that I don’t lose it. You’re my servant—and if I ever lose it, I’ll have to shoot you like a dog . . . and I don’t want to do that.” ⁵¹