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In the years since this topic became the subject of debate, controversy has also surrounded the question of how hard prisoners did or did not work, and how much effort they did or did not put into evading work. Ever since the 1962 publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich opened up a more or less public debate about the subject of the camps, the broader community of survivors, polemicists, and camp historians has had notable difficulty in coming to a unanimous agreement about the morality of camp work. For much of Solzhenitsyn’s groundbreaking novella was indeed dedicated to its hero’s attempts to avoid work. During the course of Ivan Denisovich’s day, he approaches a doctor, hoping for sick leave; fantasizes about becoming ill for a few weeks; gazes up at the camp thermometer, hoping it will prove too cold to go to the workplace; speaks admirably of brigade leaders who can “make it look as if the work’s done, whether it is or not”; feels relieved when his brigade leader gets a “good rate for the job,” despite the fact that “half the day was gone and they’d done nothing”; steals wood chips from the workplace to light the barracks fire; and steals extra gruel at dinnertime. “Work,” thinks Ivan at one point, “is what horses die of.” He tries to avoid it.

In the years that followed the book’s publication, this portrait of a typical zek was disputed by other survivors, both for ideological and personal reasons. On the one hand, those who believed in the Soviet system—and therefore also believed that the “work” of the camps was valuable and necessary—found Denisovich’s “laziness” offensive. Many of the “alternative,” more “pro-Soviet” accounts of camp life, published in the official Soviet press in the wake of Ivan Denisovich, even focused explicitly on the dedication to work shown by those who, despite the unfairness of their arrests, remained true believers. The Soviet writer (and lifelong informer) Boris Dyakov described an engineer employed on a Gulag construction project near Perm. The engineer had been so engrossed in the job, he told Dyakov’s narrator, that he forgot he was a prisoner: “For a while I enjoyed my work so much I forgot what I had become.” So conscientious was the engineer in Dyakov’s story that he even secretly sent a letter to a local newspaper, complaining about the poor organization of the camp’s transport and supply systems. Although admonished by the camp commander for this indiscretion—it was unheard of for a prisoner’s name to appear in the newspaper—the engineer, as Dyakov tells it, remained pleased that “after the article, things improved a little.”¹⁶

The views of those who ran the camps were even more extreme. Anonymously, a former camp administrator told me quite angrily that all of the stories of camp inmates living badly were simply untrue. Those who worked well lived extremely well, she said, much better than the general public: they could even purchase condensed milk—my italics—which ordinary people could not. “It was only those who refused to work, they lived badly,” she told me.¹⁷ Such views were generally not voiced in public, but there were some exceptions. Anna Zakharova, the wife of an NKVD officer, whose letter to Izvestiya circulated in the Russian underground press in the 1960s, was sharply critical of Solzhenitsyn. Zakharova wrote that she was “angered to the depths of my soul” by Ivan Denisovich:

We can see why the hero of this story, having such an attitude to the Soviet people, hopes for nothing but the sick bay in order somehow to get out of redeeming his guilt, the wrong he did to his motherland, through toil . . . And why exactly should a person try to avoid physical labor and show scorn for it? After all, for us labor is the foundation of the Soviet system, and it is only in labor that man becomes cognizant of his true powers. ¹⁸