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Three years passed. It was a hot day—a rarity in the far north—when Filshtinskii caught sight of the woman again. This time she was dressed in a “new jacket, perfectly fitting her size and figure.” Instead of the average prisoner’s tattered cap she wore a beret. Instead of prisoners’ worn boots she wore shoes. Her face had grown fatter, her looks more vulgar. When she opened her mouth, she spoke in the foulest slang, her language “testifying to long and durable links with the criminal world of the camp.” Catching sight of Filshtinskii, a look of horror came over her face. She turned and walked away, “almost running.”

By the time Filshtinskii encountered her for the third and final time, the woman was dressed in what seemed to him to be “the latest in city fashions.” She was sitting behind a boss’s desk, and was no longer a prisoner at all. She was also now married to Major L., a camp administrator famous for his cruelty. She addressed Filshtinskii rudely, and was no longer embarrassed to speak to him. The metamorphosis was complete: she had changed from prisoner to collaborator, and then from collaborator to camp boss. She had adopted first the language of the criminal world, then its dress and its habits. Through that route she had, finally, attained the privileged status of the camp authorities. Filshtinskii felt he had “nothing more to say to her”— although, as he left the room, he turned to look at her again. Their eyes met for an instant, and he thought he perceived in hers a flash of “limitless melancholy” and a hint of tears.⁴⁴

The fate of Filshtinskii’s acquaintance is one that readers familiar with other camp systems will recognize. In describing the Nazi camps, the German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky wrote that “absolute power is a structure, not a possession.” By this, he meant that power in the German camps was not a simple matter of one person controlling the lives of others. Instead, “by making a small number of victims into its accomplices, the regime blurred the boundary between personnel and inmates.” ⁴⁵ Although the brutality that reigned in the Gulag was different, in its organization and its effects, Nazi and Soviet camps were similar in this respect: the Soviet regime also made such use of prisoners, tempting some into collaboration with the repressive system, raising them above the others, and granting them privileges which allowed them, in turn, to help the authorities exert their power. It is no accident that Filshtinskii concentrated, in his story, on the ever-improving wardrobe of his female acquaintance: in the camps, where everything was in chronic shortage, tiny improvements in clothing or food or living conditions were enough to persuade prisoners to cooperate, to strive for advancement. Those prisoners who succeeded were the pridurki, or “trusties.” And once they attained that status, their lives in the camps improved in a myriad of small ways.

Solzhenitsyn, who returns to the subject of trusties again and again, describes their obsession with small privileges and favors in The Gulag Archipelago:

Because of the human race’s customary narrow-minded attachment to caste, it very soon became inconvenient for trusties to sleep in the same barracks as ordinary sloggers, on the same multiple bunks, or even, for that matter, on any multiple bunk at all, or anywhere else except a bed, or to eat at the same table, to undress in the same bath, or to put on the same underwear in which the sloggers had sweated and which they had torn . . .

Although recognizing that “all classifications in this world lack sharp boundaries,” Solzhenitsyn did his best to describe the trusties’ hierarchy. On the lowest rung, he explained, were the “work trusties”: the prisoner engineers, designers, mechanics, and geologists. Ranked just above them were the prisoner foremen, planners, norm-setters, construction superintendents, technicians. Both of these groups had to line up and be counted in the morning, and marched to work under convoy. On the other hand, they did not do physical work and were therefore not “utterly exhausted” at the end of the day; this made them more privileged than prisoners on general work.

“Compound trusties” were more privileged still. These were prisoners who never left the zona during the day. According to Solzhenitsyn,