The first two parts of the review of Anne Applebaum’s collection of writings by survivors of the Soviet slave complex were about daily life and women in the Gulag, which Applebaum writes is an acronym for the Soviet term “Main Camp Administration.” (Wikipedia says it is “Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies.”) The people who wrote the memoirs were remarkable because they were literate and they survived. A large number of the estimated 25 million people who were sentenced to the concentration camps, labor camps, exile villages, criminal and political camps, and prisons did not survive. One writer observed only a few people in the slave camps would survive the first few months of imprisonment. There was mention of an unfunny joke that the first few years were the hardest. This part of the review is about how people used cleverness and religious faith to survive.

Dimitry S. Likhachev was an intellectual who was imprisoned after he was accused of counter-revolutionary activities. He and fellow literature club members saluted one another in ancient Greek, which was interpreted to mean he was an enemy of the state. He was arrested after an acquaintance visited him and asked whether his library had anything anti-Soviet after looking at a copy of Henry Ford’s The International Jew, describes Jews as “vicious capitalists and Bolsheviks.” He describes his initial imprisonment and some of the people in detail. One person in his cell had been the head of the Petrograd Boy Scouts. He mentions that a favorite game of the “warders” was to sweep a rat back and forth with brooms as it attempted escape until the rat died of exhaustion. He writes about the irony that he was arrested for meeting once weekly for intellectual discussions to be thrown in with people who had similar discussions continually while in prison. Likhachev was released after four years and became “…Russia’s best-known literary historian, critic, and scholar.”

Alexander Dolgun was an American born in the Bronx who moved with to the Soviet Union with his family when his father accepted a job with the Moscow Automotive Works. The family tried to return to America, but they were not permitted to do so. Alexander found a job as a clerk in the U.S. embassy, had enjoyed “borrowing” embassy cars, and would often sneak into embassy parties. The Soviets decided he must be a spy and kidnapped him. He was interrogated for months while being sleep-deprived to the point of hallucinations. He was later beaten for continuing to deny he knew any of the people in the pictures they constantly showed him. His hair began to fall out, and he convinced his jailers he would die if they didn’t give him the hat he had been wearing when he was taken. He “conditioned” the guards by sitting with the hat low enough to cover his eyes and moving an arm or hand when he heard the peephole open. He continued the practice until he was able to get an hour or two of uninterrupted sleep with the hat pulled low enough to cover his eyes. He communicated with another prisoner by tapping on the wall or a pipe, made a needle from a dried fish bone, and sewed replacement buttons made of hard dried bread on his clothes. Dolgun was released after eight years, was ignored by the U.S. embassy, but made it back to America 15 years later through the efforts of a sister who had escaped by marrying a British diplomat.

Anatoly Zhigulin became famous for his poetry after his imprisonment; his main body of work, “Black Stones” wasn’t published until Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms. He tells how some were arrested for telling a joke about Stalin or listening to a joke about Stalin. Zhigulin and his friends were more active than that; they printed and distributed anti-Stalinist leaflets. That doesn’t sound too intelligent, but Zhigulin’s story of how he learned to survive does portray intelligence. He realized he was going to starve to death when he became too weak to do the work required 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. That gave him 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 required amount 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.

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 sentence is served and he was released. Many 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,” and stayed even after Stalin’s death and some of the camps were closed. “They and their descendants still form an important part of the population of Russia’s northern cities.” Petrus and a guard departed in a horse-drawn sleigh the morning of his release. They had to push to make the first shelter by nightfall to gain protection from a possible wolf attack. 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.”