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The Vagrants. Strangest of all the groups in the camps are the blatnye, the criminals, who take the best bunks, get the best food. "They belonged," wrote Dr. Scholmer, "to a tightly knit organization with rigid laws of its own which is to be found in every camp in Vorkuta. The organization is made up to a large extent of former besprizornye, the vagrant children who have been characteristic of the Soviet Union. I never once saw one so much as lay hands on a shovel. His companions would murder him if he did. The camp authorities put them officially into brigades, but it is more than any brigadier's life is worth to try and get any work out of them. Fights are nearly always settled with knife and hatchet. Every year a large batch of more than a thousand blatnye is shipped off to the camps on the island of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean. From these camps there is no return."
At Vorkuta, each camp is surrounded by a twelve-foot-high barbed-wire fence. Inside the fence is a prohibited zone within which the guards in the towers shoot at sight. There are powerful arc lamps every 10 or 15 yards along the wire and during the long hours of winter darkness the prohibited zone is as bright as day. Beyond the camp is the tundra, where guards sit in camouflaged dugouts scanning the undulating landscape with field glasses, and slow-flying biplanes circle looking for suspicious movement. The Komi receive a reward for every escaped prisoner they hand over to the police. Yet prisoners still try to escape. When caught they are beaten to within an inch of their lives, sometimes stripped of their clothes and sent to solitary confinement in the bor, a prison within the prison, but with a difference: it is unheated.
There are compensations—of a kind. In the vast Soviet prison system, Vorkuta is classified as a "polar camp," which means that prisoners get better food. The daily ration includes 800 grams of bread and two warm dishes, usually oatmeal, thick soup or beans with fat. There is meat twice weekly, fish four times. Movies, usually Russian, are shown three times a month. Pravda is pasted on the wall.
After Stalin. On the camp loudspeakers, Vorkuta learned of Stalin's historic stroke. The religious knelt to pray. Others sang joyously. "A 'political expectation' spread through Vorkuta," says Konrad Michailowski, onetime major in the German 16th tank division, who arrived in the camp in 1950. "Everyone thought that Malenkov, whom they called 'Uncle Zhorka,' would change things. Things didn't change and Vorkuta became ripe for trouble."
On the wall-Pravda, the prisoners read of the insurrection in East Germany. Resistance was so open that on July 22, 1953 Vorkuta Commander General Derevyanko made a speech in one troublesome barracks. A Lithuanian interrupted: "I am sick of just working, working until I drop dead in the pit or the tundra sucks me up." Said Derevyanko: "You do not need freedom in order to live. As a citizen you are only on file [an expression frequently used in Soviet bureaucracy], but as a worker you live." The prisoners made a slogan of the general's words, shouted: "A man who is filed away can no longer work." When the order was given to go to work, 3,000 prisoners in the camp laughed.