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No sooner had the fallen prisoner been stripped naked than he moved his head, raised his hand, and stated weakly but clearly, “It’s so cold.” But his head flopped back into the snow and a glazed look came over his eyes. The ring of scavengers turned away with whatever scraps they had, unaffected. In those few minutes after being stripped, he probably died of exposure.¹³

Starvation was not, however, the only way in which prisoners died. Many died at work, in the unsafe conditions of the mines and factories. Some, weakened by hunger, succumbed easily to other diseases and epidemics as well. I have mentioned the typhus epidemics already, but weak and hungry prisoners were susceptible to many other diseases. In Siblag, in the first quarter of 1941, for example, 8,029 people were hospitalized, 746 with tuberculosis, of which 109 died; 72 with pneumonia, of which 22 died; 36 with dysentery, of which 9 died; 177 with frostbite, of which 5 died; 302 with stomach ailments, of which 7 died; 210 who had accidents at work, of which 7 died; and 912 with circulation problems, of which 123 died.¹⁴

Although it is a curiously taboo subject, prisoners did also commit suicide. How many took this route it is difficult to say. There are no official statistics. Nor, strangely, is there much consensus among survivors about how many suicides there were. Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet, wrote that people in the camps did not commit suicide, so hard were they struggling to live, and her belief has been echoed by others.¹⁵ Evgeny Gnedin wrote that although he thought of killing himself in prison, and later in exile, during his eight years in camps, “the thought of suicide never came into my head. Every day was a fight for life: how, in such a battle, was it possible to think about leaving life? There was a goal—to get out of that suffering—and hope: to meet with the people one loved.”¹⁶

The historian Catherine Merridale puts forward a different theory. During her research, she met two Moscow-based psychologists who had studied or worked in the Gulag system. Like Mandelstam and Gnedin, they insisted that suicide and mental illness were rare: “They were surprised— and modestly offended” when she cited evidence to the contrary. She attributes this curious insistence to the “myth of stoicism” in Russia, but it may have other sources as well.¹⁷ The literary critic Tzvetan Todorov guesses that witnesses write of the strange absence of suicide because they want to emphasize the uniqueness of their experience. It was so awful no one even took the “normal” route of suicide: “the survivor aims above all to convey the otherness of the camps.” ¹⁸

In fact, the anecdotal evidence of suicide is great, and many memoirists remember them. One describes the suicide of a boy whose sexual favors were “won” by a criminal prisoner in a card game.¹⁹ Another tells of a suicide of a Soviet citizen of German origins, who left a note for Stalin: “My death is a conscious act of protest against the violence and lawlessness directed against us, Soviet Germans, by the organs of the NKVD.” ²⁰ One Kolyma survivor has written that in the 1930s, it became relatively common for prisoners to walk, quickly and purposefully, toward the “death zone,” the no-man’s-land beside the camp fence, and then to stand there, waiting to be shot.²¹

Evgeniya Ginzburg herself cut the rope from which her friend Polina Melnikova hung, and wrote admiringly of her: “She had asserted her rights to be a person by acting as she had, and she had made an efficient job of it.”²² Todorov again also writes that many survivors of both the Gulag and of the Nazi camps saw suicide as an opportunity to exercise free will: “By committing suicide, one alters the course of events—if only for the last time in one’s life—instead of simply reacting to them. Suicides of this kind are acts of defiance, not desperation.” ²³

To the camp administration, it was all the same how prisoners died. What mattered to most was keeping the death rates secret, or at least semi-secret: Lagpunkt commanders whose death rates were found to be “too high” risked punishment. Although the rules were irregularly enforced, and although some did advocate the view that more prisoners ought to die, commanders of some particularly lethal camps did occasionally lose their jobs.²⁴ This was why, as some ex-prisoners have described, doctors were known to physically conceal corpses from camp inspectors, and why in some camps it was common practice to release dying prisoners early. That way, they did not appear in the camp’s mortality statistics. ²⁵