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.”
Guarding Each Other
Gulag inmates were forced to be complicit in their own repression. Prisoners were constantly being watched, but not only by the guards. Prisoners were watching each other. Some prisoners worked as informants—telling camp authorities the secrets of their fellow inmates in exchange for better rations or to get a privileged job in the barracks or the kitchen. Others turned informer in order to avoid punishment or the revelation of some secret that a camp official was using as blackmail. To this day, the Gulag camp surveillance system remains shrouded in secrecy, the only section of the central Gulag archive still marked "top secret."
One official recalled to author Adam Hochschild: "People were carefully selected for this purpose, worthy people. They were reliable. They signed special papers, they were taught how to handle weapons. They were positioned at the watchtowers and they were guarding…themselves!"