Читаем Gulag полностью

In fact, after 1939, when Beria replaced Yezhov—and simultaneously set about trying to make the Gulag profitable—the rules were never clear one way or another. Beria’s instructions of August 1939, while explicitly forbidding camp commanders to make use of political prisoners in any administrative capacity whatsoever, did, in fact, make exceptions. Qualified doctors were to be used in their professional capacity and, under special circumstances, so were prisoners sentenced according to some of the “lesser” crimes of Article 58—Sections 7, 10, 12, and 14, which included “Anti-Soviet Agitation” (telling anti-regime jokes, for example) and “anti-Soviet propaganda.” Those sentenced for “terrorism” or “betrayal of the motherland,” on the other hand, were theoretically not to be employed as anything except hard laborers.⁵² When the war broke out, even this command was reversed. Stalin and Molotov sent out a special circular allowing Dalstroi, “in view of the exceptional situation,” to “conclude individual agreements for a particular time period with engineers, technicians, and administrative workers who have been sent to work in Kolyma.”⁵³

Nevertheless camp administrators who had too many politicals in high-ranking jobs still risked censure, and a degree of ambivalence always remained. According to both Solzhenitsyn and Razgon, it sometimes therefore happened that political prisoners were given “good” indoor jobs, accounting and bookkeeping—but only temporarily. Once every year, when the inspection teams from Moscow were due to arrive, they were fired again. Razgon developed a theory about this procedure:

A good camp boss would wait for the commission to arrive, let the commission do its work, remove anyone who had to be removed. It was not a time-consuming process and anyone not removed would remain for a long time—for a year, until the next December, or for a half-year at least. A less capable camp boss, a more foolish one, would remove such persons in advance so as to report that everything was in order. The worst camp boss, those who had the least experience, would conscientiously carry out the orders of their superiors and not permit persons condemned under Article 58 to work with any instrument other than the pick and the wheelbarrow, the saw and the axe. Such camp bosses were the least successful. Such camp bosses were quickly fired.⁵⁴

In practice, the rules were often simply nonsensical. As a political prisoner in Kargopollag, Filshtinskii was strictly forbidden from taking a prisoners’ course in forestry technology. However, he was allowed to read the course books, and once he had passed the exam, studying on his own, he was allowed to work as a forestry specialist as well.⁵⁵ Meanwhile, V. K. Yasnyi, also a political prisoner in the late 1940s, worked as an engineer in Vorkuta without causing any controversy at all.⁵⁶ In the postwar years, as the stronger national groups began to make an impact in the camp, the reign of the criminals was frequently supplanted by that of the better-organized prisoners, often Ukrainians and Balts. Those in better jobs—the foreman and supervisors—could and did look after their own, and distributed other plum posts to political prisoners who happened to be their countrymen.