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At the time of its publication, Solzhenitsyn’s description of the camp trusties was controversial—and it still is. Like his description of inmate work habits, it also sparked a running debate in the world of camp survivors and historians, one which continues to this day. Virtually all of the classic, most widely read memoirists were trusties at one time or another: Evgeniya Ginzburg, Lev Razgon, Varlam Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn. It may well be, as some claim, that the majority of all prisoners who survived long sentences were trusties at some point in their camp career. I once met a survivor who recounted to me a reunion of old camp friends he had once attended. The group had taken to reminiscing, and were laughing at old camp stories, when one of them looked around the room and realized what it was that held them together, what made it possible for them to laugh at the past instead of crying: “All of us had been pridurki.”

There is no doubt that many people survived because they were able to get indoor trusty jobs, thereby escaping the horrors of general work. But did this always amount to active collaboration with the camp regime? Solzhenitsyn felt that it did. Even those trusties who were not informers could, he alleged, still be described as collaborators. “What trusty position,” he asked, “did not in fact involve playing up to the bosses and participating in the general system of compulsion?”

Sometimes the collaboration was indirect, Solzhenitsyn explained, but damaging nonetheless. The “work trusties”—the norm-setters, bookkeepers, engineers—did not actually torture people, but they all participated in a system that forced prisoners to work to their deaths. The same was true of “compound trusties”: typists ran off orders for the camp command. Every bread-cutter who was able to steal an extra loaf for himself might be said to be depriving a zek working in the forest of his full portion, wrote Solzhenitsyn: “Who short-weighed Ivan Denisovich’s bread? Who stole his sugar by dampening it with water? Who kept fats, meat or good cereals from the common pot?”⁶⁰

Others felt the same way. One ex-zek wrote that she had deliberately remained assigned to general work for nine years in order to avoid being caught up in the corrupt relationships which were needed to stay in a trusty job.⁶¹ Dmitri Panin (who, as I’ve written, knew Solzhenitsyn in the camps and features in his novel The First Circle) also confessed that he was greatly embarrassed by the two weeks he had held a soft job in the camp kitchen: “Even worse was the realization that I was stealing food from other prisoners. I tried to gain comfort from the thought that when a man has been reduced to the condition I was in then, he doesn’t fret over niceties; but it did not lighten my sense of wrongdoing, and when they kicked me out of the kitchen, I was actually glad.”⁶²

Bitterly opposed to Solzhenitsyn—as many others were and are—was Lev Razgon, a writer who became, in the 1990s, almost as great an authority on the Gulag inside Russia. While in the camps, Razgon had been a norm-setter, one of the top trusty jobs. Razgon argued that for him, and for many others, choosing to become a trusty was simply a matter of choosing to live. Particularly during the war years, “it was impossible to survive if you were felling timber.” Only peasants survived: “those who knew how to sharpen and set instruments, and those given familiar agricultural work to do who could make up their diet with filched potato, radish, or any other kind of vegetable.”⁶³

Razgon did not believe that it was immoral to choose life, nor that those who did so were “no better than the people who arrested them.” He also disputed Solzhenitsyn’s venal portrait of the trusties. Once they were in more comfortable jobs, many trusties routinely helped other prisoners:

It was not that they were indifferent to the Ivan Denisoviches who went out to fell timber or that they felt estranged from them. Simply, they could not help those who did not know how to do anything other than physical work. And even among the latter they sought and found people with the most unexpected skills: those who knew how to make shaft-bows and barrels were sent to the outpost where skis were produced; those who could weave baskets began to fashion basketwork armchairs, chairs and sofas for the bosses. ⁶⁴