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If escapes from the camp were impossible in the folk memory of most survivors, rebellion was unthinkable. The caricature of the downtrodden, defeated, and dehumanized zek, desperate to collaborate with the authorities, incapable even of thinking ill of the Soviet regime—let alone organizing against it—appears in many memoirs, not least those of two of the Russian survivor community’s greatest literary figures: Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov. And it may well be that, throughout much of the Gulag’s history, this image was not far off the mark. The system of internal spying and informers did make prisoners suspicious of one another. The grinding inevitability of the work and the dominance of the thieves-in-law did make it difficult for other prisoners to think of organized opposition. The humiliating experience of interrogation, prison, and deportation had robbed many of the will to live, let alone the will to oppose the authorities. Herling, who organized a hunger strike with a group of other Polish prisoners, describes the reaction of his Russian friends:

They were excited and fascinated by the very fact that we had dared to lift a hand against the unalterable law of slavery, which had never before been disturbed by one gesture of rebellion. On the other hand, there was the instinctive fear, which they had retained from their former lives, that they might be involved in something dangerous, perhaps a case threatened by a war tribunal. Who was to know whether the hearings would not reveal the “rebel’s” conversations in the barracks immediately after committing the offense?⁶¹

Once again, however, archives tell a different story, revealing the existence of many minor camp protests and work stoppages. Criminal bosses in particular seemed to have conducted frequent, brief, apolitical workplace strikes if they wanted something from the camp authorities, who treated such incidents as nothing more than an annoyance. Particularly in the late 1930s and early 1940s, professional criminals’ privileged position would have made them less afraid of punishment, and would have given them more opportunities to organize these minor rebellions.⁶²

Spontaneous criminal protests sometimes also occurred on the long train rides to the east, when there was no water available and no food except salted herring. To force the guards to give them water, the criminal prisoners would agree to “set up a cry and clamor together,” creating a noise that the guards hated, as one prisoner remembered: “Once, the Roman legion wept at the sound of the ancient Germans’ shriek, it was so terrifying. The same terror was felt by the sadists of the Gulag ...” ⁶³ This tradition lasted through the 1980s, when, as the poet and dissident Irina Ratushinskaya recalled, prisoners on a transport, if dissatisfied with their treatment, would carry the protest one step further:

“Hey, fellas! Start ’er rocking!” comes a male voice.

The prisoners bodily start to rock the carriage. All together, in unison, throwing themselves first against one wall of their enclosures, then against the opposite one. The carriage is so packed that the results can be felt immediately. In this manner, the carriage can be tipped off the tracks, derailing the whole train.⁶⁴

Overcrowding and poor food could also produce protests of a sort best described as semi-organized outbreaks of hysteria. A witness described one such scene, lead by a group of female criminals: