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Solzhenitsyn felt the same:

In their consciousness there was no demarcation line between what was permissible and what was not permissible, and no concept of good and evil. For them, everything that they desired was good and everything that hindered them was bad. They acquired their brazen and insolent manner of behavior because it was the most advantageous form of conduct in the camp . . .¹¹²

A Dutch prisoner, Johan Wigmans, also writes of the young people who “probably did not really mind having to live in these camps. Officially they were supposed to work, but in practice that was the last thing they ever did. At the same time they had the benefit of regular means and ample opportunity of learning from their cronies.”¹¹³

There were exceptions. Alexander Klein tells the story of two thirteen-year-old boys, arrested as partisans, who had received twenty-year camp sentences. The two remained ten years in the camps, managing to stick together by declaring hunger strikes when anyone separated them. Because of their age, people took pity on them, gave them easy work and extra food. Both managed to enroll in camp technical courses, becoming competent engineers before being let out in one of the amnesties that followed Stalin’s death. If it had not been for the camps, wrote Klein, “who would have helped half-literate country boys become educated people, good specialists?”¹¹⁴

Nevertheless, when, in the late 1990s, I began to look around for memoirs of people who had been juvenile prisoners, I found it very difficult to find any. With the exception of Yakir’s, Kmiecik’s, and a handful of others collected by the Memorial Society and other organizations, there are very few.¹¹⁵ Yet there had been tens of thousands of such children, and many should still have been alive. I even suggested to a Russian friend that we advertise in a newspaper, in an attempt to find a few such survivors to interview. “Don’t,” she advised me. “We all know what such people became.” Decades of propaganda, of posters draped across orphanage walls, thanking Stalin “for our happy childhood,” failed to convince the Soviet people that the children of the camps, the children of the streets, and the children of the orphanages had ever become anything but full-fledged members of the Soviet Union’s large and all-embracing criminal class.

Chapter 16

THE DYING

What does it mean—exhaustion?What does it mean—fatigue? Every movement is terrifying,Every movement of your painful arms and legsTerrible hunger—Raving over bread“Bread, bread,” the heart beats.Far away in the gloomy sky, The indifferent sun turns.Your breath is a thin whistle It’s minus fifty degreesWhat does it mean—dying?The mountains look on, and remain silent.

—Nina Gagen-Torn, Memoria¹

THROUGHOUT THE GULAG’S EXISTENCE, the prisoners always reserved a place at the very bottom of the camp hierarchy for the dying—or rather, for the living dead. A whole sub-dialect of camp slang was invented to describe them. Sometimes, the dying were called fitili, or “wicks,” as in the wick of a candle, soon to be blown out. They were also known as gavnoedy “shit-eaters” or pomoechniki “slop-swillers.” Most often they were called dokhodyagi, from the Russian verb dokhodit, “to reach” or “to attain,” a word usually translated as “goners.” Jacques Rossi, in his Gulag Handbook, claims the expression was a sarcastic one: the dying were at last “reaching socialism.”² Others, more prosaically, say the expression meant they were reaching not socialism, but the end of their lives.

Put simply, the dokhodyagi were starving to death, and they suffered from the diseases of starvation and vitamin deficiency: scurvy, pellagra, various forms of diarrhea. In the early stages, these diseases manifested themselves in the form of loosened teeth and skin sores, symptoms which sometimes even afflicted the camp guards.³ In later stages, prisoners would lose their ability to see in the dark. Gustav Herling remembered “the sight of the night-blind, walking slowly through the zone in the early mornings and evenings, their hands fluttering in front of them.”⁴