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Still, there were some distinctions among the Russian inmates—distinctions based on ideology rather than ethnicity. Nina Gagen-Torn wrote that the “definite majority of women in the camps understood their fate and their suffering as an accidental misfortune, not trying to look for reasons.” For those, however, who “found for themselves some kind of explanation for what was happening, and believed in it, things were easier.”⁸⁸ Chief among those who had an explanation were the communists; those prisoners, that is, who continued to maintain their innocence, continued to profess loyalty to the Soviet Union, and continued to believe, against all of the evidence, that everyone else was a genuine enemy and should be avoided. Anna Andreeva remembered the communists searching one another out: “They found one another and clung together, they were clean, Soviet people, and thought everyone else were criminals.”⁸⁹ Susanna Pechora described seeing them upon arrival in Minlag in the early 1950s, “sitting in a corner and telling one another, ‘We are honest Soviet people, hurrah for Stalin, we aren’t guilty and our state will free us from the company of all these enemies.’”⁹⁰

Both Pechora and Irena Arginskaya, a prisoner in Kengir at the same time, recall that most of the members of this group belonged to the class of high-ranking Party members arrested in 1937 and 1938. They were mostly older; Arginskaya remembered that they were often grouped in the invalid camps, which still contained many people arrested in that earlier era. Anna Larina, the wife of the Soviet leader Nikolai Bukharin, was one of those arrested at this time who remained faithful to the Revolution at first. While still in prison, she wrote a poem commemorating the anniversary of the October Revolution:

Yet, though behind iron bars I stay, Feeling the anguish of the damned Still I celebrate this day Together with my happy land.

Today I have a new belief I will enter life again, And stride again with my Komsomol Side by side across Red Square!

Later, Larina came to regard this poem “as the ravings of a lunatic.” But at the time, she recited it to the imprisoned wives of the Old Bolsheviks, and “they were moved to tears and applause.” ⁹¹

Solzhenitsyn dedicated a chapter of The Gulag Archipelago to the communists, whom he referred to, not very charitably, as “Goodthinkers.” He marveled at their ability to explain away even their own arrest, torture, and incarceration as, alternately, “the very cunning work of foreign intelligence services” or “wrecking on an enormous scale” or “a plot by the local NKVD” or “treason.” Some came up with an even more magisterial explanation: “These repressions are a historical necessity for the development of our society.” ⁹²

Later, a few of these loyalists also wrote memoirs, willingly published by the Soviet regime. Boris Dyakov’s novella, A Story of Survival, was published in 1964 in the journal Oktyabr, for example, with the following introduction: “The strength of Dyakov’s story lies in the fact that it is about genuine Soviet people, about authentic communists. In difficult conditions, they never lost their humanity, they were true to their Party ideals, they were devoted to the Motherland.” One of Dyakov’s heroes, Todorsky, describes how he helps an NKVD lieutenant write a speech on the history of the Party. On another occasion, he tells the camp security officer, Major Yakovlev, that despite his unfair conviction, he believes himself to be a true communist: “I am guilty of no crime against Soviet authority. Therefore I was, and I remain, a communist.” The major advises him to keep quiet about it: “Why shout about it? You think everyone in the camp loves communists?”⁹³

Indeed they did not: open communists were often suspected of working, secretly or otherwise, for the camp authorities. Writing about Dyakov, Solzhenitsyn noted that his memoir appeared to leave some things out. “In exchange for what?” he asks, did security officer Sokovikov agree to secretly post Dyakov’s letters for him, bypassing the camp censor. “That kind of friendship—whence came it? ”⁹⁴ In fact, archives now show that Dyakov had been a secret police agent all of his life—code-named “Woodpecker”—and that he had continued to work as an informer in the camps.⁹⁵