Prisoner: Lev Kopelev
Kopelev was released in January 1947 but after a short freedom was told that his case was to be retried. A few months later he was arrested again. He did have an opportunity to defend himself at his trial but was sentenced to three more years in corrective labor camps with an additional two years loss of civil rights. This sentence was voided as being too lenient. He was re-tried and sentenced to ten years in the camps and then five years loss of civil rights. “I came to understand that my fate was just because I did deserve to be punished – for the many years I had zealously participated in plundering the peasants, worshiping Stalin, lying and deceiving myself in the name of historical necessity. Gradually I lost my awe for those ideas which, in ‘capturing the masses,’ can become ruinous to whole peoples.” After Stalin’s death, Kopelev was finally released from the Gulag.
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.