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Not all Gulag survivors’ stories ended so well, of course, which one would not necessarily be able to tell from reading memoirs. Obviously, people who did not survive did not write. Those who were mentally or physically damaged by their camp experiences did not write either. Nor did those who had survived by doing things of which they were later ashamed write very often either—or, if they did, they did not necessarily tell the whole story. There are very, very few memoirs of informers—or of people who will confess to having been informers—and very few survivors who will admit to harming or killing fellow prisoners in order to stay alive.

In the Fifth Year of the Camp (Survivors): prisoners’ faces, transformed over time— a drawing by Aleksei Merekov, a prisoner, place and date unknown

For these reasons, some survivors question whether written memoirs have any validity at all. Yuri Zorin, an elderly and not very forthcoming survivor whom I interviewed in his home city, Arkhangelsk, waved away a question I asked him about philosophies of survival. There weren’t any, he said. Although it might seem, from their memoirs, as if prisoners “discussed everything, thought about everything,” it was not like that, he told me: “The whole task was to live through the next day, to stay alive, not to get sick, to work less, to eat more. And that was why philosophical discussions, as a rule, were not held . . . We were saved by youth, health, physical strength, because there we lived by Darwin’s laws, the survival of the fittest.” ³

The whole subject of who survived—and why they survived—must therefore be approached very carefully. In this matter, there are no archival documents to rely upon, and there is no real “evidence.” We have to take the word of those who were willing to describe their experiences, either on paper or for an interviewer. Any one of them might have had reason to conceal aspects of their biographies from their readers.

With that caveat, it is still possible to identify patterns within the several hundred memoirs which have been published or placed in archives. For there were strategies for survival, and they were well-known at the time, although they varied a great deal, depending on a prisoner’s particular circumstances. Surviving a labor colony in western Russia in the mid-1930s or even late 1940s, when most of the work was factory work and the food was regular if not plentiful, probably did not require any special mental adjustments. Surviving one of the far northern camps—Kolyma, Vorkuta, Norilsk—during the hungry war years, on the other hand, often required huge reserves of talent and willpower, or else an enormous capacity for evil, qualities that the prisoners, had they remained in freedom, might never have discovered within themselves.

Without a doubt, many such prisoners survived because they found ways to raise themselves above the other prisoners, to distinguish themselves from the swarming mass of starving zeks. Dozens of camp sayings and proverbs reflect the debilitating moral effects of this desperate competition. “You can die today—I’ll die tomorrow,” was one of them. “Man is wolf to man”—the phrase Janusz Bardach used as the title of his memoir—was another.

Many ex-zeks speak of the struggle for survival as cruel, and many, like Zorin, speak of it as Darwinian. “The camp was a great test of our moral strength, of our everyday morality, and 99 percent of us failed it,” wrote Shalamov.⁴ “After only three weeks most of the prisoners were broken men, interested in nothing but eating. They behaved like animals, disliked and suspected everyone else, seeing in yesterday’s friend a competitor in the struggle for survival,” wrote Edward Buca.⁵

Elinor Olitskaya, with her background in the pre-revolutionary social democratic movement, was particularly horrified by what she perceived as the amorality of the camps: while inmates in prisons had often cooperated, the strong helping the weak, in the Soviet camps every prisoner “lived for herself,” doing down the others in order to attain a slightly higher status on the camp hierarchy.⁶ Galina Usakova described how she felt her personality had changed in the camps: “I was a well-behaved girl, well brought up, from a family of intelligentsia. But with these characteristics you won’t survive, you have to harden yourself, you learn to lie, to be hypocritical in various ways.”⁷

Gustav Herling elaborated further, describing how it is that the new prisoner slowly learns to live “without pity”: