No guarantees, of course.
§ Your best chance to escape is before you get
to the Lubyanka. You’re healthy and you’ve got no walls and fewer guards than
you ever will again.
§ Lie to your interrogators. Remember nothing at
all. If you build them a story you’ll get tripped up in the details.
§ Sign absolutely nothing that they give to you.
§ Don’t trust the thieves.
§ Spend what time you have in the transit prison
sleeping. You’ll be thankful for it after a tour on general labor.
§ If you want to survive your ten-ruble note
then do whatever you can not to get out on general labor.
§ The thieves are going to get all the trustee
positions.
§ It’s not the short ration, but the long ration
that kills you. (The bonus ration is given to shock-workers who overfulfill the
norm. You spend more calories earning it than you get from eating it.)
§ Don’t bother petitioning Stalin to release
you. He wants you right where you are.
§ Don’t believe the rumors of a general amnesty
either.
§ Gorky won’t tell the world about your prison
conditions. Gorky depends on praising the state to maintain his livelihood.
§ Gorky will end his days in the camps anyway.
§ Tukhta: A word for the difference between the
work you do and the work you tell your commissar you do.
§ If you get your Tukhta past the commissar then
he’s going to be invested in maintaining the illusion to his bosses. He doesn’t want
to end up behind the wire.
§ When the godfather recruits you to inform on
your comrades laugh in his face.
§ Knife stoolies.
§ To escape requires constant observation,
meticulous planning, and a willingness to immediately seize whatever chances
fortune throws your way.
§ Study up on geography now; you’ll be thankful
when you’re trying to cross the Kazakh steppes.
§ When you’re dying of thirst in the desert it doesn’t help
to stab your comrade to death to drink his blood to survive a little longer. He’s also
badly dehydrated and won’t bleed much at all.
§ Lie to the commissars. Tell them what they
want to hear.
§ When they let you out they aren’t actually
letting you out. They’ll arrest you again and slap another tenner on
you.
As a rule, it’s better not to live in a
country that maintains a gulag.
The part about “Stalin…wants
you right where you are” reminds me of a book about Cuba published in the early
1970s. Many Cubans, faced daily with corruption and inefficient officials said,
“If only Fidel knew this sort of thing is going on.” Those Cubans would not
have believed it if told, “Fidel does know. He set up the system.”
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