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Other, less ideological objections have also come from ordinary zeks. V. K. Yasnyi, a prisoner for five years in the early 1940s, wrote in his memoirs that “We tried to work honestly, and not for fear of losing rations, or ending up in the isolator . . . hard work, and that was what it was in our brigade, helped you forget, helped chase away anxious thoughts.”¹⁹ Nadezhda Ulyanovskaya, who was imprisoned along with her mother, wrote that her mother worked hard “in order to prove that Jews and intelligentsia work no worse than others.” (“I worked because I was forced to do so,” she writes of herself, however. “I fear that on this point, I did not hold up the honor of the Jewish people.”) ²⁰

Prisoners who had worked enthusiastically on behalf of the Soviet regime all of their lives did not quickly change either. Alexander Borin, a political prisoner and aviation engineer, was assigned to a Gulag metalworking plant. In his memoirs, he proudly describes the technical innovations he made there, mostly worked out in his spare time.²¹ Alla Shister, another political arrested in the late 1930s, told me in an interview that “I always worked as if I were free. This is my personality trait, I cannot work badly. If a hole has to be dug, I’ll keep on digging until it is finished.” After two years on general work, Shister became a brigade leader, because, she said, “They saw that I work not like a prisoner works, but with all of my strength.” In that capacity, she then made every attempt to inspire those beneath her, although admittedly not by firing them up with love of the Soviet state. This is how she described her first encounter with the men who were to work for her:

I came to the quarry where they were digging. The guards offered to accompany me, but I said that was unnecessary, and I went alone. It was midnight. I came up to the team, and told them, “I need to fulfill the plan, bricks are needed at the front.”

They said, “Alla Borisovna, we don’t care about the plan for bricks, give us our bread ration.”

I said, “You’ll get the ration, if you fulfill the plan.”

They said, “We’ll throw you in a hole now, dig you under and no one will find you.”

I stood there quietly, and said, “You won’t dig me under. I promise you that if today, by twelve noon, you fulfill the norm, I’ll bring you some tobacco.” Tobacco there was worth more than gold or diamonds . . .

Shister had, she said, simply saved her own allotted tobacco rations, as she herself did not smoke, and happily handed them over to her charges. ²²

There were also those, of course, who recognized the material advantage to be gained in doing work. Some prisoners tried, simply, to do what was expected of them: to beat the norm, to attain the status of shock-worker, to receive better rations. Vladimir Petrov arrived at a Kolyma lagpunkt and immediately perceived that the inhabitants of the “Stakhanovite tent,” who worked harder than the other prisoners, possessed all of the attributes that the dokhodyagi did not:

They were incomparably cleaner. Even in the extremely harsh conditions of their life in camp they had managed to wash their faces every day, and when they could not get water they had used snow. They were better dressed, too . . . [and] more self-possessed. They did not crowd about the stoves, but sat on their bunks either doing something or talking about their affairs. Even from the outside their tent looked different.

Petrov begged to join their brigade, whose members received 1 kilo of bread every day. Once in, however, he could not keep up with the pace of work. He was expelled from the brigade, which could tolerate no weakness. ²³ Nor was his experience atypical, as Herling wrote: