Prisoner: Vladimir Tchernavin
As Tchernavin began to formulate a plan to escape, he met a peasant who gave him some potentially valuable information. “’Believe me, my dear man, those guards have everything. They make kasha every day and eat it with butter. Their cabbage soup is made with meat, and there’s so much bread they can’t eat it up. And what easy work they have! A beat of 15 kilometers and they patrol it in pairs. When two return two others start out. Mostly they lie around and listen to the radio. They don’t like to go in the woods. They’re afraid. It is said that there are escaped convicts there who will lie in wait for them and kill them.’ ‘Do they take the dogs with them?’ ‘No, I never saw them taking dogs. Perhaps the dogs are not trained.’ And so I accidentally learned the location of a new frontier post in a region important to me.”
Introduction
Guards played an integral role in the Gulag system. Soviet authorities indoctrinated them with propaganda emphasizing that they battled evil enemies of the state and were encouraged to treat prisoners brutally to prevent their escape. Guards endured only slightly better working conditions than prisoners in the brutal cold of Siberia.
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Movie Transcription
Every day, Gulag guards announced the march to work: “A step to the left or a step to the right is considered an attempt to escape. We will shoot without warning.” Sadistic guard behavior toward inmates was a hallmark of Gulag life. Blatant murder of prisoners could be covered up with two simple words “attempted escape.”
Soviet authorities constantly sought to prevent any sympathy from the guards for their prisoners. Guards were constantly reminded that they were the steel in the state’s sword battling the evil prisoners—enemies bent on destroying the glorious society being built in the Soviet Union. Propaganda hammered home the supposed perversions and dangers of these anti-Soviet, virtually sub-human prisoners. Conditions in the camps did little to belie the characterizations of the propaganda, especially if Gulag authorities could keep guards from getting to know prisoners on a personal level.
Working conditions for the guards reinforced the propaganda. While Gulag guards certainly had it easier than the prisoners, serving on a prisoners’ convoy in the harsh environments of Siberia was a difficult job. No amount of clothing completely protected a person in a Kolyma winter, and in these freezing temperatures, Gulag guards were required to maintain high vigilance. For they could be severely punished…could even become Gulag prisoners themselves, if an escape happened under their watch.
The entire Gulag apparatus was set up with incentives that heavily punished guards for prisoner escapes but rarely found fault with guard violence against prisoners—and often even rewarded violence against prisoners under the guise of preventing escapes. In such circumstances, guard brutality was unsurprising. Yet somehow, amidst all of this, signs of humanity, of guards taking pity on the prisoners, were surprisingly common.