Great Escapes from the Gulag

(2 of 3)

The first acts of rebellion in the camps were made possible by a miscalculation of Stalin in 1948. Desirous of worsening thelot of political prisoners, he established the Special Camps described in Solzhenitsyn's novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For the first time, vast numbers of politicals (incorrigible "enemies of the people") were segregated from common criminals (redeemable "class allies"). Once free from the scourge of the murderers and thieves who terrorized them, the politicals gradually gained courage.

At the same time, the prewar prisoner population of 15 million was swollen by the arrival of millions of young Red Army veterans. Most were survivors of the Nazi P.O.W. camps whom Stalin had dispatched to the Gulag for the crime of having been captured. Though Solzhenitsyn had never been taken, he belonged to this new breed of camp rebels; a much decorated artillery captain, he had been arrested at the front for having written letters critical of Stalin. Leadership of the resistance movement was provided by prisoners from the western Ukraine, former guerrilla fighters who had alternately fought the Nazis and the Soviets in a desperate effort to gain their independence.

In most camps, resistance began with the killing of informers. First, there were strange accidents: a log would roll off a pile and cast a stoolie into the river. Then came apparent suicides. Finally, teams of masked men entered the barracks to stab informers with primitive knives. "This was a new period, a heady and spine-tingling period," Solzhenitsyn recalls. "Retribution was at hand—not in the next world, not before the court of history, but retribution live and palpable, raising a knife over you in the light of dawn. It was like a fairy tale: the ground is soft and warm under the feet of honest men, but under the feet of traitors it prickles and burns."

Gulag III's most riveting chapters describe the great escapes. Invariably, each ingenious attempt brought pride to the camp—even when the severed head and right arm (for fingerprints) of the escapee were brought back by the police and army units that had scoured desert, tundra and taiga for him. Those who survived capture were likely to try again, like the legendary Estonian Georgi Tenno. Between his ultimately unsuccessful breakouts, prisoners would wonderingly ask Tenno, "What do you expect to find on the outside?" His reply: "Freedom, of course! A whole day in the taiga without chains—that's what I call freedom!"

In 1952 Solzhenitsyn participated in one of the first prisoner strikes at Ekibastuz. In 1953 the death of Stalin, followed by the fall of the mighty emperor of Gulag, Lavrenji Beria, set off mutinies on many islands of the Archipelago. In Kengir, near Ekibastuz, 8,000 men and women prisoners liberated the camp for 40 days. Though ultimately crushed by Soviet tanks, this and other uprisings aroused hopes among prisoners that resistance to the regime would spread out side the camps. Instead, change was ordered from above. In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev set out to disband most of the slave labor camps and release millions of prisoners. Solzhenitsyn hardly mentions this fateful event, stressing instead the legal, institutional and spiritual heritage of Stalinism in the present.