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Disguise was used as well. Varlam Shalamov tells the story of a prisoner who escaped and managed to spend two years in freedom, wandering through Siberia, pretending to be a geologist. At one point, regional authorities, proud to have such an expert in their midst, asked him very respectfully to give a lecture. “Krivoshei smiled, quoted Shakespeare in English, sketched something on the blackboard, and ran through dozens of foreign names.” He was caught, in the end, because he sent money to his wife.⁵⁰ His story might possibly be apocryphal—but the archives do record similar tales. In one such episode, a Kolyma prisoner stole some documents, smuggled himself onto a plane, and flew to Yakutsk. There he was found, comfortably installed in a hotel, with 200 grams of gold in his pocket.⁵¹

Not all escapes involved clever flights of fancy. Many—probably the majority—criminal escapes involved violence. Runaways attacked, shot, and suffocated armed guards, as well as free workers and local residents. ⁵² They did not spare their fellow inmates either. One of the standard methods of criminal escape involved cannibalism. Pairs of criminals would agree in advance to escape along with a third man (the “meat”), who was destined to become the sustenance for the other two on their journey. Buca also describes the trial of a professional thief and murderer, who, along with a colleague, escaped with the camp cook, their “walking supply”:

They weren’t the first to get this idea. When you have a huge community of people who dream of nothing but escape, it is inevitable that every possible means of doing so will be discussed. A “walking supply” is, in fact, a fat prisoner. If you have to, you can kill him and eat him. And until you need him, he is carrying the “food” himself.

The two men did as planned—they killed and ate the cook—but they had not bargained on the length of the journey. They began to get hungry again:

Both knew in their hearts that the first to fall asleep would be killed by the other. So both pretended they weren’t tired and spent the night telling stories, each watching the other closely. Their old friendship made it impossible for either to make an open attack on the other, or to confess their mutual suspicions.

Finally, one fell asleep. The other slit his throat. He was caught, Buca claims, two days later, with pieces of raw flesh still in his sack. ⁵³

Although there is no way of knowing how often this type of escape occurred, there are enough similar stories, told by a wide enough range of prisoners, from camps from the early 1930s to the late 1940s, to be certain that they did take place, at least from time to time. ⁵⁴ Thomas Sgovio heard the death sentence pronounced on two such escapees—they had taken a boy prisoner, and salted his flesh after murdering him—when he was in Kolyma.⁵⁵ Vatslav Dvorzhetsky was told a similar story in Karelia, in the mid-1930s.⁵⁶

There are also to be found, in the oral tradition of the Gulag, some truly extraordinary tales of escape and of escapees—many, again, quite possibly apocryphal. Solzhenitsyn relates the saga of Georgy Tenno, an Estonian political who escaped from camps over and over again, on one occasion traveling 300 miles by horse, boat, bicycle, very nearly making it to the central Siberian city of Omsk. While some of Tenno’s stories are probably true—he later befriended another Gulag survivor and memoirist, Alexander Dolgun, whom he also introduced to Solzhenitsyn—some of his other, more spectacular tales of escape are harder to verify.⁵⁷ One English anthology contains the story of an Estonian, a preacher, who managed to escape from a camp, forge papers, and walk over the border to Afghanistan with his companions. The same anthology tells of a Spanish prisoner who escaped by pretending to be dead after an earthquake wrecked his camp. Later, he says, he slipped over the border to Iran.⁵⁸