Prisoners are not worked to death through slave labour any more. Sometimes there’s even the opposite problem of camps with no work at all. In these places, prisoners become stupefied, like animals, and lose all their social skills (if they had them in the first place). Nowadays, no one is punished for not working, but attempts at escaping are punished very harshly.
The camp bosses can no longer kill a prisoner out of hand, as they used to in the past. Beating and torture can and does happen, but killing is prohibited. Doing so would require a massive amount of paperwork. This ban on killing, of course, gets broken just like any other ban, but the situation is very different from when camp officials had the unfettered right to kill their prisoners.
The living conditions are hard, but they are no longer murderous. For example, in winter they try to stop the temperature inside the barracks dropping below zero and they supply water, albeit cold, so prisoners can wash themselves and their clothes. It is ‘trifles’ such as these that make the difference between life and death.
But other things in the gulag have remained very much the same. In the camps, a prisoner is not a person; he is an animal, even though his value to his owner has increased significantly since the Stalin years. You can’t kill him, but you can, and should, beat him. You can’t starve him, but neither do you have to worry about the quality of his food. Neither do you need to worry about ethical considerations in the way you treat a prisoner: you can and should lie, deceive, play prisoners off one against the other and routinely show contempt. As always, there are exceptions. There are officials who wouldn’t allow themselves to bully prisoners and there are prisoners who wouldn’t allow themselves to be bullied. But it was like that in the old gulag, too. Back then, a prisoner’s life was at stake, while now it’s ‘merely’ his health and his chances of early release.
Health remains a ‘second tier’ priority in Russia and the quality of healthcare in society as a whole leaves much to be desired, so you can imagine how much worse it is in the camps. Personally, I was lucky on the two occasions when I needed healthcare. The first time I went under the knife, I had a military surgeon with a steady hand. The second time, when I needed to be sewn up after I was stabbed, by good luck the man who was listed as a dentist turned out to be a facial surgeon and now, thanks to him, the scar on my face is not noticeable. But my experience is the exception. More typical is the experience of a prisoner I knew who was viciously beaten. He was taken to a medical unit, which was just the other side of the fence from our hut, so in the evening I shouted through the barbed wire to ask how he was. Someone shouted back that he was not doing well and would probably die. The paramedics had applied first aid, but no one did anything else for him and now he was lying on his back, unconscious. I told the administration that if the man died, I wouldn’t keep silent about it. An hour later, a doctor came from town. The telephone in the medical unit was not working, so the whole camp watched as the doctor had to run first to the control room and then wait for an ambulance to move him. We held our breath. He had a ruptured spleen and by the time he was put on the operating table he had lost more than two litres of blood from internal bleeding, but the prisoner was saved.
Today’s gulag is survivable, although a person’s place in the world of the camps depends on the individual. You mustn’t allow yourself to be afraid. The result of doing that is a terrible life, and I am not exaggerating when I say that it can seem a fate worse than death. As for death, people do die inside, although not in alarming numbers.
The camps have their advantages over prison. You get to see the sun and you receive visits. You can have a family visit four times a year, each time for three days, and you spend it in a room that feels a bit like a provincial hotel. In prison, the only visits are by intercom, through glass and bars. In the camps, you get to see your mother, your wife or your daughter, and you can touch them, kiss them, hug them. Such bliss. The time flies by in an instant.
On the other hand, prison can destroy families. Only one in 20 prisoners get regular visits. Wives leave their husbands; children forget their parents. Within five years, most people have lost their support network. Outside the gates is a desert awaiting them, which is why returns are so common. Whoever created and perpetuated this system – their reasons are beyond me. Perhaps it’s not done out of malice, simply through inertia, but the consequences are awful. A whole host of discarded people. Millions of families and lives destroyed. There needs to be a humane alternative that keeps hope alive. Everyone knows this, yet nothing changes.
For those inside the camps, there is the problem of the opposite sex. It is hardest for young prisoners aged between 18 and 35, especially those who have come from a camp for minors and have no real experience of a regular sex life. Those who are older don’t suffer quite as much from its absence, possibly because of the stressful situation they are in. Inside, you can talk about these things quite calmly. Family is another matter. Family issues are a minefield that you tread on at your peril; talking about them can unleash the cruellest thoughts, depression, even suicide.
By and large, I didn’t suffer from obsessive thoughts and memories or the sort of depression that afflicted many other prisoners. I can remember a few nights, though, when I couldn’t sleep. This was especially true in the first year of my imprisonment when radio and TV channels were talking every day about my company being wrecked. All the lies and propaganda weighed on me. I had techniques to keep my mind under control. For example, I would start mentally writing a letter or building a house. I took pleasure in slowly ‘furnishing’ the room with imaginary furniture and appliances. I discovered that the best way to release the tension was by putting my thoughts on paper. I started writing theoretical speeches and letters and complaints. None of it was for public consumption. When you’re getting things off your chest, it isn’t for other people to read. And when you reread it much later, the writing may not be very good or coherent, but I have got into the habit of putting my thoughts on paper and I’ve become quite proficient at it. As a schoolkid who didn’t like writing and usually asked my favourite girl friends to write my essays for me, this is an achievement.
I also took pleasure in practical things. Household chores are not a problem for me. Until I was 30, I did my own housework and washed my laundry, even when there was no hot water. Prison isn’t home, but these skills help; and your relatives support you by sending you things that are allowed. The biggest problem is that you’re not allowed to have a computer, so there’s a lack of access to information. Not only up-to-the-minute information, but useful information in general. There’s a limit on how many books you can take into prison, so having a lawyer coming in from time to time is invaluable.
Another skill that helped me in jail was the ability to concentrate on a task and block out unnecessary thoughts. For the full working day, eight hours or more, I made myself think in a disciplined manner about concrete, practical problems that I could actually do something about, and not to dwell on those I was powerless to tackle. I used to take short breaks and relax by thinking about something pleasant. And at the end of my working day, I switched off my brain by thinking positively about my family and friends. I liked to remember and daydream about seeing them again.
In some ways, prison is like a magnifying glass for observing social processes that are going on outside. When living standards fell sharply in Russia after 1998, prisoners were literally eating grass. Cases of dysentery were reputedly in the thousands. In my time in prison, I was struck by the number of illiterate young people I met, 20-year-olds completely unable to read or write. Then I was a witness to the shift in the population of Moscow’s notorious Matrosskaya Tishina prison, when the usual deviants and street criminals were replaced en masse by people whose property had been stolen from them by raiders in uniform. I saw these people forced to sign documents giving up the right to their property and come out with or without sentences. And I saw crooked law enforcement officers who were sent to prison when conflicts broke out between agencies. In jail, despite all the limitations, much of what happens outside is plain to see.