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Some of the other Far Eastern nationalities adapted more rapidly. A number of memoirists mention the tight organization of the Chinese— some of whom were “Soviet” ethnic Chinese born in the USSR, some of whom had been legal guest workers in the 1920s, and some of whom were unlucky people who had accidentally or whimsically walked over the very long Chinese–Soviet border. One prisoner recalled being told by a Chinaman that he, like many others, had been arrested because he had swum across the Amur River to the Soviet Union, attracted by the views on the other side: “The green and gold of the trees . . . the steppes looked so beautiful! And everyone who crossed the river from our area never came back. We thought this meant that life must be good over there, so we decided to cross. The minute we did we were arrested and charged under Article 58, Section 6, espionage. Ten years.”⁷²

In the camps, remembered Dmitri Panin, one of Solzhenitsyn’s camp companions, the Chinese “communicated only among themselves. By way of reply to any question of ours, they put on a look of incomprehension.” ⁷³ Karlo Stajner recalled that they were very good at procuring jobs for one another: “All over Europe, the Chinese are famous as jugglers, but in the camps they were employed in the laundry. I cannot remember seeing any non-Chinese laundry workers in any of the camps I passed through.” ⁷⁴

By far the most influential ethnic groups in the camps were those formed by the Balts and west Ukrainians who had been swept en masse into the camps during and after the war (see Chapter 20). Fewer in numbers, but also influential, were the Poles, particularly the anti-communist Polish partisans who also appeared in the camps in the late 1940s—as well as the Chechens, whom Solzhenitsyn described as “the one nation which would not give in, would not acquire the mental habits of submission,” and who stood out, in a number of ways, from the other Caucasians.⁷⁵ The strength of these particular ethnic groups was in their sheer numbers, and in their clear opposition to the Soviet Union, whose invasion of their respective countries they regarded as illegal. The postwar Poles, Balts, and Ukrainians also had military and partisan experience, and in some cases their partisan organizations were maintained in the camps. Just after the war, the general staff of UPA, the Ukrainian Rebel Army, one of several groups fighting for control of Ukraine at that time, issued a statement to all Ukrainians who had been deported into exile or sent to camps: “Wherever you are, in the mines, the forest or the camps, always remain what you have formerly been, remain true Ukrainian, and continue our fight.”

In the camps, ex-partisans self-consciously helped one another, and watched over newcomers. Adam Galinski, a Pole who had fought with the anti-Soviet Polish Home Army, both during and after the war, wrote that: “We took special care of the youth of the Home Army and kept up its morale, the highest in the degrading atmosphere of moral decline that prevailed among the different national groups imprisoned in Vorkuta.”⁷⁶

In later years, when they acquired more power to influence the running of the camps, Poles, Balts, and Ukrainians—like Georgians, Armenians, and Chechens—also formed their own national brigades, slept separately in national barracks, and organized celebrations of national holidays. At times, these powerful groups cooperated with one another. The Polish writer Alexander Wat wrote that Ukrainians and Poles, bitter wartime enemies whose partisan movements fought one another over every inch of western Ukraine, related to one another in Soviet prisons “with reserve but with incredible loyalty. ‘We are enemies, but not here.’”⁷⁷

At other times these ethnic groups competed, both with one another and with Russians. Lyudmila Khachatryan, herself arrested for falling in love with a Yugoslav soldier, remembered the Ukrainians in her camp refusing to work with the Russians.⁷⁸ The national resistance groups, wrote another observer, “are characterized on the one hand by hostility to the regime, on the other by hostility to the Russians.” Edward Buca remembered a more generalized hostility—“It was unusual for a prisoner to give any help to anyone of a different nationality” ⁷⁹—although Pavel Negretov, in Vorkuta at the same time as Buca, felt that most nationalities got along, except when they succumbed to the administration’s “provocations”: “they tried, through their informers . . . to get us to quarrel.”⁸⁰