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There was even a standard procedure for prisoners who attempted to fake paralysis, according to Elinor Lipper. The patient was put on an operating table and given a slight anesthetic. When he awoke, the doctors would place him on his feet. Inevitably, when they called his name, he would take a few steps before remembering to collapse to the floor.¹¹⁶ Dmitri Bystroletov also witnessed a woman cured of “deafness” by her own mother. The administration, suspicious of the woman’s claim to be hard of hearing, invited the mother to visit her imprisoned daughter, but refused to let her in the barracks. Instead, she was made to stay outside the gates, where she stood, calling her daughter’s name. Naturally, the daughter responded.¹¹⁷

But there were also doctors who helped patients find methods of self-mutilation. Alexander Dolgun, although very weak and suffering from uncontrollable diarrhea, did not have a fever high enough to merit being excused from work. Nevertheless, when he told the camp doctor, an educated Latvian, that he was American, the man brightened. “I’ve been dying to find someone to talk English with,” he said—and showed Dolgun how to infect his own cut. This produced an enormous purple boil on his arm, enough to impress the MVD guards inspecting the hospital with the seriousness of his illness.¹¹⁸

Once again, ordinary morality was reversed. In the free world, no doctor who deliberately made his patients ill would be considered a good man. In the camps, however, such a doctor was revered as a saint.

“ORDINARY VIRTUES”

Not all of the strategies for survival in the camps necessarily derived from the system itself. Nor did they all involve collaboration, cruelty, or selfmutiliation. If some prisoners—perhaps the vast majority of prisoners— managed to stay alive through manipulating the rules of the camp to their advantage, there were also some who built upon what Tzvetan Todorov, in his book on concentration camp morality, has called the “ordinary virtues”: caring and friendship, dignity, and the life of the mind.¹¹⁹

Caring took many forms. There were prisoners, as we’ve seen, who built their own survival networks. Members of the ethnic groups which dominated some of the camps in the late 1940s—Ukrainians, Balts, Poles—created whole systems of mutual assistance. Others built up independent networks of acquaintances over years in the camps. Still others simply made one or two extremely close friends. Perhaps the best known of these Gulag friendships was that between Ariadna Efron, the daughter of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, and her friend Ada Federolf. They exerted enormous efforts in order to remain together, both in camps and in exile, and later published their memoirs together in one volume. At one point in her half of the story, Federolf told of how they were reunited after a long separation when Efron was put on a different transport:

It was already summer. The first days after we arrived were horrible. They took us out to exercise once a day—the heat was intolerable. Then suddenly a new transport from Ryazan and—Alya. I gasped with happiness, pulled her on to the upper bunks, closer to the fresh air . . . There it is, prisoners’ happiness, the happiness of simply meeting a person.¹²⁰

Others agreed. “It is very important to have a friend, a trusted face, who will not leave if you are in trouble,” wrote Zoya Marchenko. ¹²¹ “It was impossible to survive alone. People organized themselves into groups of two or three,” wrote another prisoner.¹²² Dmitri Panin also attributes his ability to withstand the attacks of criminals to the self-defense pact he made with a group of other prisoners.¹²³ There were limits, of course. Janusz Bardach wrote of his best camp friend that “neither one of us ever asked the other for food, nor did we offer it. We both knew that this sanctum could not be violated if we were to remain friends.”¹²⁴