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Such conversations were not unique, nor apocryphal, as archives show. One inspector, reporting on the conditions of prisoners in Volgostroi during the war, complained that the camp’s administration was “exclusively interested in producing wood . . . and was not even slightly interested in the feeding or clothing of prisoners, sending them out to work without regard to physical fitness, never worrying about whether they were clothed, healthy, and fed.”⁹⁷ Accounts also record the following comment, made at a meeting of Vyatlag officers in January 1943. Speaking in the purely neutral language of statistics, Comrade Avrutsky made the following proposal: “We have 100 percent of our workforce, but we cannot fulfill our program, since Group B continues to grow. If the food which we gave to Group B were given to another contingent—then we wouldn’t have Group B at all, and we would fulfill the program . . .”⁹⁸ The phrase “Group B,” of course, referred to weaker prisoners, who would indeed cease to exist if they were not given any food.

If camp commanders had the luxury of making such decisions far removed from the people who would actually be affected, proximity did not necessarily make those lower down the hierarchy feel any more sympathy. One Polish prisoner, Kazimierz Zarod, was in a column of prisoners marching to a new camp site. Given virtually no food, prisoners began to weaken. Finally, one of them fell, and was unable to get up again. A guard raised a gun at him. A second guard threatened to shoot:

“For God’s sake,” I heard the man groan, “if you will only let me rest for a while I can catch up.”

“You walk, or die,” said the first guard . . .

I saw him lift his rifle and take aim—I could not believe that he would shoot. The men in the column behind me had by this time regrouped and my view of what was happening was obscured, but suddenly a shot rang out followed by a second, and I knew the man was dead.

But Zarod also records that not all of those who fell while marching were shot. If they were young, those too exhausted to walk farther were picked up and thrown onto a cart, where they “lay like sacks until they recovered . . . The reasoning, as far as I could see, being that the young would recover and have work left in them, while the old were not worth saving. Certainly those thrown like bundles of old clothes into the provisions carts were not there because of any humanitarian reason. The guards, although young men, had traveled this route before and were apparently devoid of any human feelings.”⁹⁹

Although there are no memoirs to document it, this attitude surely affected even those who occupied the posts at the very top of the camp system. Throughout the preceding chapters, I have been regularly quoting from reports found in the files of the Gulag inspectorate, a part of the Soviet prosecutors’ office. These reports, filed with great regularity and precision, are remarkable for their honesty. They refer to typhus epidemics, to food shortages, to clothing shortages. They report on camps where death rates are “too high.” They angrily accuse particular camp commanders of providing unsuitable living conditions for prisoners. They estimate numbers of “working days” lost to illness, accidents, death. Reading them, one can have no doubt that the Gulag bosses in Moscow knew—really and truly knew—what life was like in the camps: it is all there, in language no less frank than that used by Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov. ¹⁰⁰

Yet although changes were sometimes made, although commanders occasionally were sentenced, what is striking about the reports is their very repetitiveness: they call to mind the absurd culture of phony inspection so beautifully described by the nineteenth-century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. It is as if the forms were observed, the reports were filed, the ritual anger was expressed—and the real effects on human beings were ignored. Camp commanders were routinely reprimanded for failing to improve living standards, living standards continued to fail to improve, and there the discussion ended.

In the end, nobody forced guards to rescue the young and murder the old. Nobody forced camp commanders to kill off the sick. Nobody forced the Gulag bosses in Moscow to ignore the implications of inspectors’ reports. Yet such decisions were made openly, every day, by guards and administrators apparently convinced they had the right to make them.

Nor was the ideology of state slavery exclusive to the Gulag’s masters. Prisoners too were encouraged to cooperate—and some did.

Chapter 14

THE PRISONERS