The camp administrator is rude and cruel; the persons responsible for propaganda lie; the doctor has no conscience. But all this is trivial in comparison with the corrupting power of the criminal world. In spite of everything, the authorities are still human beings, and the human element in them does survive. The criminals are not human.
The influence of their morality on camp life is boundless and many-sided. The camps are in every way schools of the negative. No one will ever receive anything useful or necessary from them – neither the convict himself, nor his superiors, nor the guard, nor the inadvertent witnesses (engineers, geologists, doctors), nor the camp administrators, nor their subordinates.
Every minute of camp life is a poisoned minute.
There is much there that a man should not know, should not see, and if he does see it, it is better for him to die.
There a convict learns to hate work. He does not and cannot learn anything else. He learns flattery, lying, petty acts and major villainies. He becomes totally engrossed in himself.
When he returns to ‘freedom’, he sees that he has not only failed to grow during his years in camp but his interests have narrowed, become impoverished and crude. Moral barriers have somehow been pushed aside.
It is possible to commit base acts – and live.
It is possible to lie – and live.
It is possible to give a promise and not fulfill that promise – and live.
It is possible to drink up a friend’s money.
It is possible to beg for charity – and live! Yes, even this is possible!
A person who has committed a base act doesn’t die.
In camp a human being learns sloth, deception, and viciousness. In ‘mourning his fate’, he blames the entire world.
He rates his own suffering too highly, forgetting that everyone has his own grief. He has forgotten empathy for another’s sorrow; he simply does not understand it and does not desire to understand it.
Skepticism is by no means the worst aspect of the camp heritage. There a human being learns to hate. He is afraid; he is a coward. He fears repetitions of his own fate. He fears betrayal, he fears his neighbors, he fears everything that a human being should not fear. He is morally crushed. His concepts of morality have changed without his having noticed this change.
A camp supervisor learns to wield limitless power over the prisoners, he learns to view himself as a god, as the only authorized representative of power, as a man of a ‘superior race’.
What will the guard tell his fiancée about his work in the Far North – the guard who often held human lives in his hands and who often killed people who stepped outside the ‘forbidden zone’? Will he tell her how he used his rifle butt to beat hungry old men who could not walk?
The young peasant who has become a prisoner sees that in this hell only the criminals live comparatively well, that they are important, that the all-powerful camp administrators fear them. The criminals always have clothes and food, and they support each other.
The young peasant cannot but be struck by this. It begins to seem to him that the criminals possess the truth of camp life, that only by imitating them will he tread the path that will save his life. He sees, moreover, that there are people who can live even on the very bottom of existence. And the peasant begins to imitate the conduct of the criminals. He agrees with their every word, is ready to carry out all their errands, speaks of them with fear and reverence. He is anxious to adorn his speech with their slang; no member of either sex, convict or civilian, who has been to Kolyma has failed to carry away from Kolyma the peculiar slang of the criminals.
These words are a poison that seeps into the soul. It is this mastery of the criminal dialect itself that marks the beginning of the non-criminal’s intimacy with the criminal world.
The intellectual convict is crushed by the camp. Everything he valued is ground into the dust while civilization and culture drop from him within weeks. The method of persuasion in a quarrel is the fist or a stick. The way to induce someone to do something is by means of a rifle butt, a punch in the teeth.
The intellectual becomes a coward, and his own brain provides a ‘justification’ of his own actions. He can persuade himself of anything, attach himself to either side in a quarrel. The intellectual sees in the criminal world ‘teachers of life’, fighters for the ‘people’s rights’. A blow can transform an intellectual into the obedient servant of a petty crook. Physical force becomes moral force.
The intellectual is permanently terrified. His spirit is broken, and he takes this frightened and broken spirit with him back into civilian life.
Engineers, geologists, and doctors who have come to Kolyma to do contract work for Far Northern Construction are quickly corrupted. The sources of this corruption are many: a desire for money, rationalizations that the ‘taiga is the law’, cheap and convenient slave labor, a narrowing of cultural interests. No one who has worked in the camps ever returns to the mainland. He would be worthless there, for he has grown accustomed to a ‘rich’, carefree life. It is this very depravity that is described in works of literature as ‘the call of the North’.
The criminal world, the habitual criminals whose tastes and habits are reflected in the total life-pattern of Kolyma, are mainly responsible for this corruption of the human soul.
Women in the Criminal World
Aglaya Demidova was brought to the hospital with false documents. Neither her case history nor her convict passport was forged. No, these were in order. But the folder containing her papers was new and yellow – testimony of a recent sentencing. She arrived under the same name that she had used when she had been brought to the hospital two years earlier. Nothing in her situation had changed except her sentence. Two years ago her folder had been dark blue, and the sentence had been ten years.
A three-digit number had been added to the short list of two-digit figures listed in the column headed ‘Article of Criminal Code’. It was her medical documents that were forged – the history of the illness, the laboratory tests, the diagnosis. They were forged by people who occupied official posts and who had at their disposal rubber stamps and their own good (or bad – who cares?) names. The head of medical services at the mine spent many truly inspired hours inventing a false case history.
The diagnosis of tuberculosis followed logically from the cleverly invented daily records. It was all there – the thick sheaf of temperature charts filled out to mimic typical tubercular curves and the forms testifying to impossible lab tests with threatening prognoses. It was the work of a doctor who, as if taking a medical examination, had been asked to describe the progress of a tubercular condition which had reached the point where immediate hospitalization was essential.
The work might have been done out of a sporting urge – just to show the central hospital that people back at the mines also knew their jobs. It was pleasant to remember, in the correct order, everything you had once learned at medical school. Of course, you never thought you would have occasion to apply your knowledge in such an unusual, ‘artistic’ fashion. The main thing was that Demidova be accepted at the hospital – no matter what. The hospital could not refuse, had no right to refuse, this kind of patient, even if the doctors had a thousand doubts.
Suspicions cropped up right away, and Demidova sat alone in the hospital’s enormous reception room while the question of her admission was discussed in local ‘higher circles’. True, she was alone only in the Chestertonian sense of the word. The attendant and the orderlies didn’t count, nor did the two guards who were never more than a step away from her. A third guard was off picking his way through the thickets of the hospital bureaucracy.