The robust presence of the arts in the Gulag camps is a testament to the resourcefulness and resilience of prisoners there, many of whom derived material benefits and psychological comfort from their involvement in artistic projects.
The singers Vadim Kozin and Lidia Ruslanova, the actresses Valentina Tokarskaya and Zoya Fyodorova, and a host of other illustrious performers spent time in Gulag camps.
[7]) The commander at Ukhtizhimlag, a camp in Ukhta, organized what writer and prisoner Lev Razgon called “a real opera troupe” featuring a soprano from the Harbin operetta, a dancer from the Bolshoi Ballet, and a well-known viola-player.
[5] The Dalstroy industrial construction trust, whose operation was based mainly on labor camps in the Kolyma region centered around the city of Magadan, emerged as a cultural hub with the arrival of director Ivan Fedorovich Nikishov in 1939.
[5] Dalstroy developed a renowned theater troupe known as the Sevvostlag Club (Klub USVITL), which included many professional singers and dancers from among the local camps’ prisoners.
Soviet propaganda was encouraged, and a certain amount of pro-Soviet material did end up being performed, including plays like The Russian Question (which follows an American journalist whose bosses force him to slander the USSR).
The theater troupe at Veselaya performed Shkvarkin’s comedy A Stranger’s Child and Karatygin’s vaudeville Dear Uncle on Three Legs,[13] and Dimitri Panin’s memoir The Notebooks of Sologdin recounts the antics of a professional clown named Feigin.
In Unzhlag during the 1940s, performers were regularly employed to be nurses or clean the hospital;[5] at Dmitlag, members of the camp orchestra received special clothing, including officers’ boots.
[18] Sgovio recalls that all of the camp musicians slept in an unusually luxurious barrack and had “soft jobs—the cook, the barber, the bath manager, the accountants, etc.”[19] Inmates who had been famous artists prior to their arrest might receive even more preferential treatment: the well-known tenor Pechkovsky, for example, was housed separately from other workers and regularly dined with officials’ wives on delicacies like butter and hot port wine.
After a performance, singers in the renowned Ukhta opera troupe changed from their colorful costumes into plain uniforms and were ushered back to their quarters by guards who cursed and prodded them impatiently.
Razgon describes witnessing this process and being shocked to see the faces that had appeared “handsome, young, happy and elegant” in the operetta overcome by exhaustion and despair, “just like the rest of us.”[22] In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recalls how, at the larger theaters in Vorkuta, Norilsk, and Solikamsk, armed guards waited behind the scenes to escort performers whose acts had been well-received back to camp and to lead those who had not been so successful to the punishment block.
Just as actors saw participating in theater as a respite from the harsh conditions of the Gulag, performances afforded prisoner audiences a distraction from their plight and the moral support they needed to survive brutal workdays.
Sometimes musicians accompanied prisoners as they marched to work in the mornings;[15] at other camps, bands were reserved for special occasions, playing only for workers who met or exceeded their production quota.
The Cultural-Educational Department, or Kulturno-Vospitatelnaya Chast (KVCh), was an organization conceived with the ostensible goal of “re-educating” prisoners to help them adjust to the expectations, conditions, and purposes of the camps.
[29] The KVCh at each camp was headed by a free employee charged with selecting and supervising instructors, workers who usually enjoyed more comfortable treatment than other prisoners and were not required to participate in hard labor.
[31] The KVCh at Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's camp was slightly more active: it was responsible for, among other duties, producing three amateur theatrical performances each year and supplying materials for artists to decorate the compound.
[32] At other camps, the KVCh published newspapers,[33] hung propagandistic posters, organized lectures,[34] deployed brigades of prisoners to encourage other workers with pro-Soviet songs,[35] showed films, and sponsored various other “self-taught creative activities,” including sports and board games.
For others, the excitement of participation even in KVCh-supervised shows offered a welcome “reminder...that life despite everything still exists.”[40] Herling describes how prisoners who were already exempt from work for medical reasons would volunteer eagerly to help clean and decorate the “cultural” barrack before a concert.
[41] Originally intended to inspire prisoners to work harder, the KVCh became, for many, a much-needed source of moral support in the face of isolation, hunger, exhaustion, and dehumanizing labor conditions.
Among other tasks, they were assigned to paint number tags for inmates, communist slogans and placards for the camps, bulletins with updated work percentages of the brigades,[43] and portraits of Stalin.
[42] Using wire needles and ink made from the rubber of galoshes, burned to ash and mixed with water and sugar, Sgovio developed a technique for tattooing fellow inmates.
Cotton wool was transformed into wigs; medical gauze and fishing nets became lace; bast matting could be made to look like velvet; mess hall stools and canes could be combined to make fine furniture.
Oleg Ditmar, a colleague of Sgovio in the Mestprom art studio, worked in the Administration Hospital painting water-colors of patients as visual documentation to be sent to Moscow for case studies.
Sgovio tattooed several of the Vory with nude females, mermaids, text, and even, upon request, a large portrait of Lenin on the chest, so that the recipient "wouldn’t get shot by a firing squad.
[42] Although backbreaking labor, dehumanizing treatment, and vigilant officials made reading and writing spiritually and logistically difficult, Gulag life did, for many, involve some form of literature, whether written or oral.
They published cartoons; poetry and fiction, which often expressed prisoners’ loneliness and longing for their families and homes; and scholarly articles, which covered topics ranging from local architecture to island wildlife to fur farming.
[51] Karol Colonna-Czosnowski was paid with food and tobacco by members of a gang of camp thieves for telling stories of the famous American gangsters Al Capone and John Dillinger.
“They had taken my dress, my shoes and stockings, and my comb,” she recalled, “...but [poetry] it was not in their power to take away.”[56] Just as many actors and artists were condemned to exile, a number of writers spent time in the Gulags as well.
Circumstances in most camps made it difficult for these prisoners to continue writing: if the hard labor and brutal, dehumanizing conditions did not crush their creativity and motivation, the scarcity of materials like pen and paper posed logistical obstacles.
[63] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn initially took notes on his experiences, but after they were destroyed he memorized his text using a complicated mnemonic process that involved laying out a configuration of matchstick fragments and rearranging them as he recited each line to himself.