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Just as there were good guards and bad guards, Razgon argued, so too were there good trusties and bad trusties, people who helped other people, people who harmed them. And in the end, they were no more secure than the people who came below them on the hierarchy. If they were not being worked to death, they knew that they soon could be. At any moment, a distant camp boss could order a transfer to take them away to another camp, to another job, to another, deadlier fate.

SANCHAST: HOSPITALS AND DOCTORS

Of the many absurdities found in camp life, perhaps the strangest was also one of the most mundane: the camp doctor. Every lagpunkt had one. If there were not enough trained doctors, then at the very least the lagpunkt would have a nurse or a feldsher, a medical assistant who may or may not have had medical training. Like guardian angels, medical personnel had the power to pluck inmates out of the cold, to deposit them in clean camp hospitals, where they might be fed and nursed back to life. Everyone else—the guards, the camp commander, the brigadiers—constantly told the zeks to work harder. The doctor alone was not obligated to do so. “Only the doctor,” wrote Varlam Shalamov, “has the authority to save the convict from going out into the white winter fog to the icy stone face of the mine for many hours a day.”⁶⁵

Some inmates were quite literally saved thanks to a few words from a medical man. Burning with fever, reduced to a skeleton, tortured by hunger, one doctor diagnosed Lev Kopelev with pellagra, a bowel infection, and a bad cold. “I’m sending you to the hospital,” she declared. It was not an easy journey from the lagpunkt to the camp central hospital, the sanchast. Kopelev gave up all of his property—on the grounds that all camp belongings must stay in the camp—marched through “deep, icy puddles” and crowded into a cattle car with other sick and dying prisoners. The journey was hellish. But when he awoke in his new surroundings, he found his life transformed:

In a blissful half-sleep, I sat in a bright, clean hospital room, on a bunk covered with an unbelievably clean sheet . . . The doctor was a small, round-faced man, whose grey moustache and thick eyeglasses added to his air of kindness and concern. “In Moscow,” he asked, “did you know a literary critic named Motylova?”

“Tamara Lazarevna Motylova? Of course!”

“She’s my niece.”

Uncle Borya, as I came to know him, looked at the thermometer. “Oho! Have him washed,” he told his assistant. “Have his clothes boiled. Get him into bed.”

Upon awaking again, Kopelev discovered he had been brought six pieces of bread: “Three pieces of black bread and—miraculous sight! Three pieces of white bread! I ate them greedily, my eyes filled with tears.” Better still, he was given anti-pellagra rations: turnips and carrots, as well as yeast and mustard to spread on bread. He was for the first time allowed to receive parcels and money from home, and was thus able to buy boiled potatoes, milk, and makhorka, the cheapest form of tobacco. Having been, it seemed, condemned to a living death, he realized he was now destined to be saved.⁶⁶

This was a common experience. “Paradise” is what Evgeniya Ginzburg called the hospital where she worked in Kolyma.⁶⁷ “We felt like kings,” wrote Thomas Sgovio of the “recovery barracks” in the Srednikan lagpunkt, where he received a “fresh, sweet roll in the morning.”⁶⁸ Others write with remembered awe of the clean sheets, of the kindness of nurses, of the lengths to which doctors went to save their patients. One prisoner tells the story of a doctor who, risking his own position, illegally left the camp to procure necessary medications. ⁶⁹ Tatyana Okunevskaya wrote that her doctor “brought the dead back to life.”⁷⁰ Vadim Aleksandrovich, who was himself a camp doctor, remembered that “The doctor and his assistant in the camps are, if not gods, then demi-gods. Upon them hangs the possibility of a few days’ freedom from killing work, even the possibility of being sent to a sanatorium.”⁷¹