Prisoner: Lev Kopelev
“In prison we used to be afraid of informers and talked about them in whispers. Here in the camp we spoke of them out loud. The lowest of all the minions of the mighty state, as helpless and humiliated as the rest of us, and often as falsely accused and as unfairly sentenced, they were nevertheless the indispensable cogs of the cruel punitive machine. They served for the sake of the little handouts the machine threw their way, and they served out of fear.”
Among the Criminals
Membership in a criminal gang did not guarantee safety. Gangs operated with their own internal code of conduct, their “thieves’ law,” and punishment for its violation was quick and lethal. Michael Solomon recalled one incident: “Sashka got up from his bunk. He was a young lad, bony, with hollow cheeks and watery blue eyes. Like all of us, his head was shaven. At 23 he had been jailed several times, and now, as a habitual criminal he had been sent to work in the mines of Kolyma. In the Arctic camps, Sashka, like all of those of his kind, refused to work and managed to live from what he stole from the kitchen or from the poor meals of his fellow inmates. He didn’t earn much as he had to share the ’fats‘ and the sugar with the senior thieves. Now he faced judgment for the worst offense in the criminal world: ‘selling’ his brother thieves to the camp administration. For such a crime of betrayal there was only one punishment—death.”
After the Second World War, a pitched battle broke out between criminal gangs—the so-called “bitches’ war.” Members of criminal gangs who had supported the Soviet war effort were accused of breaking the thieves’ law, of becoming “bitches.” The resultant conflict between the “bitches” and the “thieves” was protracted and violent through the late 1940s and early 1950s.