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Nothing in their past history necessarily indicated what path they would take, for both Gulag administrators and ordinary camp guards came from as many different ethnic and social backgrounds as did the prisoners. Indeed, when asked to describe the character of their guards, Gulag survivors almost always reply that they varied enormously. I put that question to Galina Smirnova, who remembered that “they were, like everyone, all different.” ⁶³ Anna Andreeva told me that “there were sick sadists, and there were completely normal, good people.” Andreeva also recalled the day, soon after Stalin’s death, when the chief accountant in her camp suddenly rushed into the accounting office where prisoners were working, cheered, hugged them, and shouted, “Take off your numbers, girls, they’re giving you back your own clothes!”⁶⁴

Irena Arginskaya also told me that her guards were not only “very different sorts of people,” but also people who changed over time. The conscript soldiers in particular acted “like beasts” when they were new on the job, as they had been pumped full of propaganda, but “after a time they began to understand—not all of them, but a large part—and they often changed.”⁶⁵

True, the authorities exerted some pressure on both guards and administrators, discouraging them from showing prisoners any kindness. The archive of the Gulag’s inspectorate records the case of Levin, the boss of the supply division for a section of Dmitlag in 1937, who was actively investigated for his lenience. His crime was to have allowed a prisoner to meet with his brother: normally, relatives within the prison system were kept far apart. Levin was also accused of being too friendly to zeks in general, and especially so to a group of zeks said to be Mensheviks. Levin—himself a former prisoner on the White Sea Canal—claimed, in return, that he had not known they were Mensheviks. Given that this was 1937, he was convicted anyway. ⁶⁶

Yet such strictures were not rigorously applied. Indeed, several top commanders actually became renowned for their kindness to prisoners. In Let History Judge, his denunciation of Stalinism, the dissident historian and publicist Roy Medvedev describes one camp commander, V. A. Kundush, who took seriously the demands for increased production during wartime. He placed the better-educated political prisoners in clerical jobs, and set about treating his prisoners well, even securing some of them early release. His enterprise received the “Red Banner for Management” during the war. But when the war ended, he too was arrested, perhaps for the very humanity that had transformed his production.⁶⁷ Lev Razgon describes an unusual transit prison in Georgievsk, which both he and his second wife, Rika, passed through:

The cells were not only swept but washed, both the floors and the bed boards. The food was so filling that the constant hunger of prisoners in transit disappeared. You could really get clean in the bath-house. There was even a special and fully equipped room (and this amazed Rika more than anything else) where the women could primp and perk...⁶⁸

And there were others. At one point during his camp career, Genrikh Gorchakov, a Russian Jew arrested in 1945, was assigned to an invalids’ camp within the Siblag complex. The camp had recently been taken over by a new commander, a former frontline officer who could not find any other work after the war. Taking his job seriously, the commander built new barracks, saw to it that prisoners had mattresses and even sheets, and reorganized the work system, completely transforming the camp.⁶⁹

Yet another ex-zek, Aleksei Pryadilov, arrested at sixteen, was sent to a farming camp in the Altai. There the camp boss “ran the camp like an economic organization, and behaved toward prisoners not as if they were criminals and enemies, whom it was necessary to ‘re-educate,’ but as though they were workers. He was convinced that there was no point in trying to get good work out of hungry people.”⁷⁰ Even Gulag inspectors sometimes uncovered good commanders. One visited Birlag in 1942, and found that “the prisoners of this factory worked excellently because their conditions were excellent.” Their barracks were clean, each prisoner had his or her own sheets and blankets, good clothes and shoes.⁷¹