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In response, the OGPU instituted tighter controls. At about this time, the local population were actively recruited to help: one OGPU order called for the creation of a 16- to 19-mile belt around each camp, within which the local population would “actively fight escapes.” Those in charge of trains and boats in the vicinity of camps were also enlisted. An order was issued forbidding guards to take prisoners out of their cells after sundown.²⁷ Local officials begged for more resources, and especially for more guards to prevent escapes.²⁸ New laws mandated extra prison sentences for escapees. Guards knew that if they shot a prisoner in the course of an escape, they might even be rewarded.²⁹

Nevertheless, the numbers did not fall so quickly. In 1930s Kolyma, group escapes were more common than they became later. Criminal prisoners, camping out in the forests, would organize themselves into bands, steal weapons, and even attack local residents, geological parties, and native villages. After no less than twenty-two such incidents, a special camp division was set up for 1,500 “especially dangerous elements”—prisoners likely to escape—in 1936.³⁰ Later, in January 1938, at the height of the Great Terror, one of the deputy chiefs of the NKVD sent out a circular to all the camps across the Soviet Union, noting that “despite a series of orders on conducting a decisive war against prisoners’ escapes from camps . . . serious improvements in this matter have yet to be made.” ³¹

In the early days of the Second World War, the number of escapes rose sharply again, thanks to opportunities created by the evacuation of camps in the western part of the country, and the general chaos.³² In July 1941, fifteen prisoners escaped from Pechorlag, one of the more remote camps in the Komi Republic. In August of that same year, eight former sailors, led by a former senior lieutenant of the Northern Fleet, managed to get away from a distant outpost of Vorkuta itself.³³

The numbers did start to go down later in the war, but they never vanished altogether. In 1947, when escapes reached their postwar height, 10,440 prisoners attempted escape, of whom only 2,894 were caught.³⁴ This is, perhaps, a small percentage of the millions who were in the camps at the time, but it nevertheless suggests that escapes were not as impossible as some remember. It may even be that their frequency helps to explain the harshening of camp regimes, and the higher levels of security, which characterized life in the Gulag during the last half-decade of its existence.

Generally, memoirists agree that the overwhelming majority of would-be runaways were professional criminals. Criminal slang reflects this, even referring to the coming of spring as the arrival of the “green prosecutor” (as in “Vasya was released by the green prosecutor”) since spring was when summer escapes were most often contemplated: “A trip through the taiga is possible only during the summer, when it is possible to eat grass, mushrooms, berries, roots, or pancakes baked from moss flour, to catch fieldmice, chipmunks, squirrels, jays, rabbits ...” ³⁵ In the very far north, the optimum time to escape was the winter, which criminals there referred to as the “white prosecutor”: only then would the swamps and mud of the tundra be passable.³⁶

In fact, professional criminals were more successful at escaping because once they had gone “under the wire” they stood a far better chance of surviving. If they made it to a major city, they could melt into the local criminal world, forge documents, and find hiding places. With few aspirations to return to the “free” world, criminals also escaped simply for the fun of it, just to be “out” for a little while. If they were caught, and managed to survive, what was another ten-year sentence to someone who already had two twenty-five-year sentences, or more? One ex-zek remembers a woman criminal who escaped merely to have a rendezvous with a man. She returned “filled with delight,” although she was immediately sentenced to the punishment cell.³⁷

Political prisoners escaped much less often. Not only did they lack the network and the expertise, but they were also pursued with greater fervor. Tchernavin—who gave these issues much thought before escaping himself—explained the difference: