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Gulag

The only group that surpassed the communists in their absolute faith were the Orthodox believers, as well as the members of the various Russian Protestant religious sects who were also subject to political persecution: Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Russian variations thereof. They were a particularly strong presence in the women’s camps, where they were colloquially known as monashki, or “nuns.” In the late 1940s, in the women’s camp in Mordovia, Anna Andreeva remembered that “the majority of the prisoners were believers,” who organized themselves so that “on holidays the Catholics would work for the Orthodox and vice versa.”⁹⁶

As previously noted, some of these sects refused to cooperate in any way with the Soviet Satan, and would neither work nor sign any official documents. Gagen-Torn describes one religious woman who was released on grounds of illness, but refused to leave the camps. “I don’t recognize your authority,” she told the guard who offered to give her the necessary documents and send her home. “Your power is illegitimate, the Anti-Christ appears on your passports . . . If I go free, you’ll arrest me again. There isn’t any reason to leave.”⁹⁷Aino Kuusinen was in a camp with a group of women prisoners who refused to wear numbered clothing, as a result of which “the numbers were stamped on their bare flesh instead,” and they were forced to attend morning and evening roll-calls stark naked.⁹⁸

Solzhenitsyn tells the story, repeated in various forms by others, of a group of religious sectarians who were brought to Solovetsky in 1930. They rejected anything that came from the “Anti-Christ,” refusing to handle Soviet passports or money. As punishment, they were sent to a small island in the Solovetsky archipelago, where they were told they would receive food only if they agreed to sign for it. They refused. Within two months they had all starved to death. The next boat to the island, remembered one eyewitness, “found only corpses which had been picked by the birds.”⁹⁹

Even those sectarians who did work did not necessarily mix with other prisoners, and sometimes refused to speak to them at all. They would huddle together in one barrack, keeping absolutely silent, or else singing their prayers and their religious songs at the appointed times:

I sat behind the prison bars Remembering how Christ Humbly and mildly carried his heavy Cross With penitence, to Golgotha.¹⁰⁰

The more extreme believers tended to inspire mixed feelings on the part of other prisoners. Arginskaya, a decidedly secular prisoner, jokingly remembered that “we all loathed them,” particularly those who, for religious reasons, refused to bathe.¹⁰¹Gagen-Torn remembered other prisoners complaining about those who refused to work: “We work and they don’t! And they take bread too! ”¹⁰²

Yet in one sense, those men or women who arrived at a new camp and immediately joined a clan or a religious sect were lucky. For those who belonged to them, the criminal gangs, the more militant national groups, the true communists, and the religious sects provided instant communities, networks of support, and companionship. Most political prisoners, on the other hand, and most “ordinary” criminals—the vast majority of the Gulag’s inhabitants—did not fit in so easily with one or another of these groups. They found it more difficult to know how to live life in the camp, more difficult to cope with camp morality and the camp hierarchy. Without a strong network of contacts they would have to learn the rules of advancement by themselves.

1 Vasily Zhurid; Aleksandr Petlosy; Grigori Maifet; Arnold Karro; Valentina Orlova (top to bottom, left to right)

2a Prisoners arriving at Kem, the Solovetsky transit camp

2b Women harvesting peat, Solovetsky, 1928

3a Maxim Gorky (center), wearing a cloth cap, coat and tie, visiting Solovetsky, 1929, with his son, daughter-in-law, and camp commanders. Sekirka church— the punishment cell—is in the background.

3b The Solovetsky monastery, as it appears today

3c Naftaly Frenkel

4a Prisoners breaking rocks, with handmade tools

4b “Everything was done by hand . . . We dug earth by hand, and carried it out in wheelbarrows, we dug through the hills by hand as well . . .”

5a “The best shock-workers”: this placard hung in a place of honor

5b Stalin and Yezhov, visiting the White Sea Canal to celebrate its completion

6a “We will eradicate Spies and Diversionists, Agents of the Trotskyite-Bukharinite Fascists!”—NKVD poster, 1937

6b Arrest of an Enemy in the Workplace—Soviet painting, 1937

7a Four camp commanders, Kolyma, 1950. The daughter of a prisoner has written “Killers!” across the photograph.

7b Armed guards, with dogs

8a Beside a grandmother’s grave

8b In central Asia