Prisoner: John Noble
“Early in June, I was eating my cabbage soup in the stolovaya [cafeteria] when the nevalney, my barracks master, rushed in excitedly. ‘Americanitz, the camp commander is looking for you. You have orders to proceed to Moscow.’ I looked up at him and laughed in my soup. A few minutes later, a friend came in with the same news. I rushed nervously to the Administration Building and stood at attention before MVD Lieutenant Antrashkevich. ‘You are to leave for Moscow at 7 A.M.,’ he said. ‘As far as I know, you’re going home.’ I heard him, but the words didn’t sink in. I wouldn’t let them. The thought was wild. Why should I be released? There was no general amnesty. I had so lost touch with the world that Vorkuta and its regulations were the only reality I understood. But I prayed, just in case.”
Out of the Camp
Survivors
Millions of people did survive the Gulag. Whether among the 20–40 percent of the camp population released on a yearly basis throughout the Stalin era, or among the 2–3 million who went home after Stalin died, perhaps as many as 16 million who entered the Gulag came out alive.
But the Gulag even destroyed the lives of those who survived it. Families were torn apart when spouses were pressured to divorce their “enemy” relatives. Children were taken away from prisoner mothers, often never to be reunited again. The Gulag exacted a physical and psychological toll from which many would never recover.
Upon release from the Gulag, many inmates were denied permission to return to their former homes and were forced either to live in remote exile or to live no fewer than one hundred kilometers from the Soviet Union’s largest cities. With a notation of their imprisonment in their official identity documents, former Gulag inmates were discriminated against in employment and access to housing. Government officials, fellow citizens, and even former friends treated them as pariahs, greeting them with suspicion at best, hatred at worst.