Gulag Voices is a volume in the Annals of Communism series edited by Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum. Applebaum warns that the stories should not be taken as a complete cross section of experiences in the Gulag, which is an acronym for the Soviet term, “Main Camp Administration,” because all the writers were literate and survived. Most of the prisoners in the camps were not literate, and did not survive. There are estimates that as many as 25 million people or 15% of the population of the Soviet Union faced imprisonment and slave labor in the Gulag. The memoirs describe the brutality of life in the camps, and the treatment of the prisoners as work animals often results in them losing their humanity. However, there are sprinklings of humanity and kindness amongst the horror. The review will be split into three parts; this part will be about daily life, the second will be about women in the camps (the most brutal of the descriptions), and the final review will be about how people used their relatively good fortune, cleverness, religion, or strength of character to survive. 
 
Kazimier Zarod was a Polish civil servant and army reservist who fled from Warsaw to eastern Poland after the German invasion. He was arrested when the Soviet Union invaded Poland, and was sent to a Siberian forestry camp. There were 108,000 Poles sent to the Gulag and 292,000 were sent to “exile camps.” The Soviet Union concluded a temporary truce with Poland after being invaded by Germany. Stalin allowed a Polish army to be formed, and Zarod marched out of Russia with what was called “Ander’s Army.” He travelled to Tehran, Bombay, Cape Town, and Britain where he joined the Royal Air Force Bomber Command. He provided descriptions of daily life in the prison camp. The black rye bread that was the main diet was allocated based on the amount of work performed, and many were able to earn 75 percent or 800 grams of bread early in their captivity. The allocation shrank as the men weakened, and stealing another’s bread brought a death sentence. The work details began at 5:30 after the morning soup was served. Work continued until 6:00 P.M. and ranks formed at 9:00 to be counted and perhaps recounted if the numbers weren’t correct.

Anatoly Zhigulin became famous for his poetry after his imprisonment. He describes how some were arrested for telling a joke about Stalin or listening to a joke about Stalin. Zhigulin and his friends went further by forming cells to publish anti-Stalinist leaflets. Zhigulin realized he was going to starve to death when he became too weak to earn a decent allocation of bread. Malnutrition “was not on the official list of recognized illnesses,” so he made himself sick by drinking icy water and deep-breathing forty-below air to earn several days of rest in the hospital. He also described how his crew boss, Sergei Zakharchenco, had a knack for laying out roadbeds that required little digging. The crew then would meet their allocation of digging by mixing snow and branches with the dirt. However, he faced starvation again, and committed “Samorub,” which was cutting yourself with your ax. He carefully planned the cut to make it look accidental, because it was considered sabotage if it was intentional. He aimed at the gap beside the big toe, made certain the guard was watching, and chopped through his boot. It earned him a couple of months off.

Perhaps the most startling part of Zhigulin’s story is titled “The Hunt,” which he writes was common throughout the Gulag. Guards were given promotions, home leave, a bonus, and a medal for preventing escapes. The guards, perverted by their absolute power, would pick a victim and order him to do some task outside the marked perimeter. The prisoner would be shot after stepping over the line. One of Zhigulin’s guards ordered a prisoner to cut down a tree outside the line, but the previously mentioned boss Zakharchenko overheard and ordered everyone to lie down and not follow the order. The guard was sent to the brig. One touching story describes Zuiguilin walking a railroad track carrying a sledge hammer. He fantasized that the hammer was a rifle, Siberia was burning, and the work crew was a platoon led by Sergei Zakharchenko. “And we were going to free our comrades.” I’m certain he would have followed Zakharchenko into hell, and was disappointed when Zarkharchenko’s voice brought him back to reality.

Gustav Herling was a published journalist and critic at twenty-one in 1940, and was arrested in eastern Poland while trying to escape over the border. He was discharged two years later with “Ander’s Army” and followed it through Persia and Palestine. He stayed in Italy after the war and returned to Poland after the collapse of the Communist regime. Herling describes “dom svidaniy,” or “the house of meetings” where prisoners were allowed to spend up to three days with relatives. Each prisoner was theoretically allowed one visitor a year, but most had to wait for three to five years. The prisoner had to have a certificate of good behavior and meet the “full norm” of work for a year to be eligible. A relative was required to submit a letter requesting a visit, and many relatives disowned people in the camp for fear of coming under suspicion themselves. The visits were often crushing to the prisoners, because it was common for wives to request the meeting to ask for release from marriage and to settle the fate of children. Relatives were required to sign a release that they would not disclose any of what they saw at the camps under threat of severe punishment up to and including death. The prisoners were cleaned up, given clean clothing, and issued three days worth of bread and soup tickets in advance to make them look better during the visit. Prisoners leaving for work assignments passing the house of meetings often noted people peering out a crack in the curtain. “We usually slowed down and dragged our feet in an exaggerated manner, as if to show…what life behind barbed wire had brought us.” “Unbridled sexual depravity was the norm…,” but the visit from a wife was often less than sexually gratifying because on toll on virility from heavy labor and malnutrition. Failure wasn’t the result in all cases. There was joy when one prisoner heard from his wife that he had conceived a child during her visit.

Lev Kopelev was an idealistic Communist despite witnessing the confiscation of grain from Ukrainian peasants in 1931 that led to a mass famine. He finally became disillusioned after witnessing mass rapes and murders when the Soviets invaded East Prussia. He was arrested and sentenced to nine years, part of which was served in a camp hospital of a “sharasha,” or prison for scientists. One remarkable fact discussed was that the prisoners were sometimes given rations of coagulated blood, which was supposed to be good for pellagra. However many refused to eat “…the dark-brown clots,” because “…it stank too much of carrion.” Much of his story is about the informers in the camps, and two Baptists who retained their faith and optimism about others despite the brutal conditions. Some of the prisoner’s, including a priest and two nuns, organized an Easter celebration where meat and potatoes were served along with some alcohol. One woman insisted that a know informer named Stepan be invited in hopes of showing him the error of his ways. Stepan went to the camp authorities to report the celebration, and only intervention by the doctors prevented the woman who organized the celebration from receiving a harsher punishment other than the reassignment to a less desirable post. Informers were often dealt with by other prisoners, and an influential doctor saw to it that Stepan was transferred to a logging crew. It wasn’t long before he was brought to the hospital with broken legs and back after a tree fell on him.

Lev Razgon was a successful journalist who worked his way into the Soviet elite and married the daughter of one of the founders of the Cheka, the earliest Soviet secret police. He and his wife were arrested during one of Stalin’s massive purges, his wife died in a transit prison, and he spent eighteen years in the Gulag. His story is about the jailers, and it is a remarkable story. He describes his first jailer, Ivan Zaliva, who he describes as ‘…a man of astounding ignorance and rare stupidity. In these respects he stood out among camp bosses, and they were not a profession known for exceptional wit and education.” What set Ivan Zaliva apart was that he did not steal and he actually looked sad when someone was taken naked to a punitive outpost in subzero weather when they couldn’t or wouldn’t work. The camp administrators at first liked Zaliva, because he always quickly accepted new prisoners. He was able to do that, because of the high death rate. Teams of up to ten Chinese workers were used to lift and carry trees that had been felled to save the horses, because Zaliva was proud of the horses and saw to it that they were given plenty of oats while prisoners were starving. Razgon admired the “good-hearted, honest, and hardworking” Chinese. He watched in admiration as one was sitting on his heels and sewing his fur coat with the only illumination being a lighted splinter in his mouth. Within three months all of them were dead with the exception of one man who worked in the kitchen.

The prisoners didn’t hate Zaliva despite the death of thousands of fellow prisoners from malnutrition because they judged their “jailers on how easily they could be hoodwinked. The stupidity, ignorance, and cowardice of Zaliva offered considerable opportunities.” The prisoners were able to steal the oats that were supposed to be fed to the horses after they told Zaliva the horses carried “infectious anemia,” and Zalvia never went near the horses again. He originally used only criminals to do camp administration, because he didn’t trust those convicted on political charges. However, the “politicals” were the only ones with the intelligence to perform as work managers, quartermasters, medical personnel, engineers, planners etc. Once in those positions the politicals took over the camp. Production began to fall below quotas and Zaliva was demoted, and the new jailer who had been a peasant understood that the camp had to “…look after the livestock” (the important part of that word being “live”) if they wanted production.

There were huge changes when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The bosses immediately issued “…an idiotically pointless burst of warnings and preventative measures.” The jailers forgot the need to feed their livestock, and there were severe cut to prisoner’s rations. Pellagra began sweet through the prisoners. (Pellagra is caused by deficiencies of niacin and tryptophan, an essential amino acid. The disease is described by the four D’s–diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia, and death.) The only workers remaining by the spring of 1942 were people cutting firewood and burying the dead. The Soviets noticed that there wasn’t any wood being cut, and they needed wood for making all manner of military equipment and the cellulose to make gunpowder. Prisoners who felled timber began to be fed as much as free workers and they were allowed to receive food parcels. However, Colonel Tarasiuk became the camp boss, and he was described as being much like the Roman slave owners. “The idea that his slaves were human beings never worried or concerned him.” He drove the criminals out of all positions linked with food and replaced them with political prisoners. He also shifted food from administrative workers to timber cutters. He then sentenced those suffering from pellagra to death by cutting their rations. “All 246 died within a month.” Tarasiuk lived in luxury amidst the squalor, but he also assured that the jailers did not steal from the prisoners and provided them mattresses and sheets. After Razgon was freed, he spent most of the last of his money to buy a sausage and small bottle of vodka to celebrate with his wife when he read that Tarasiuk had died.

Anatoly Marchenko, who was convicted of treason for trying to cross the border with Iran, wrote My Testimony. That publication released in the 1960s shocked Soviets who had believed the labor camps had closed. The camps had many fewer prisoners, but were equally brutal. Marchenko spent long stretches in “the cooler” where prisoners received little food and suffered though cold with little clothing and an intentionally uncomfortable cell. Prisoners didn’t intercede when another decided to “…slit his veins or swallow barbed wire, or sprinkle ground glass in his eyes…” Those who took a hunger strike as the way out were forcibly fed overly hot soup.

K. Petrus was a pseudonym for the author of Prisoners of Communism, which was published in 1996 by a publishing house linked to the Russian Orthodox Church. Petrus tells the story of a deeply religious person dealing with the conditions of the Gulag. Part of his memoir was selected because it describes what happens when a prisoner’s release. It was common that they either had no living relatives, or the relatives had disowned them. Many remained on the edges of the camps and were employed as “free workers.” Many of them remained even after Stalin’s death when some of the camps were closed. “They and their descendants still form an important part of the population of Russia’s northern cities.” There are some incredible acts of humanity that occurred during his travels. A stranger handed him the pouch that he hadn’t known had fallen from his pocket, and it contained what little money he had. Petrus dedicated much of his early freedom travelling to the ten addresses he had memorized to give news to families about imprisoned relatives, and rejected payment for delivering the messages. He saw a woman dragging a heavy suitcase, and carried it to the train station. He didn’t answer directly when asked where he was from, refused payment, and bowed. The woman exclaimed, “I’ve never met anyone so strange. You come from another world–you turn down money when you surely need it.”