JOURNEYS Mennonite Stories of Faith and Survival in Stalins Russia, John B. Toews, 1998

o “market themselves” for their own advantage. Whenever possi¬ ble they did not allow the system to intimidate them. Berg was ABRAM 99 such a person. Endowed with a special survival instinct he recog¬ nized and played his advantage whenever possible. Within the Gulag the virtues of passivity and gentleness did not guarantee a future. In such a world staying alive meant confronting plots and conspiracies head on. Rare victories called for celebration. When Berg averted northern exile and possible death at the hands of the local tyrant the prisoners commemorated the episode with a few spirits, an onion and bread on one occasion and with fried fish and sour milk on another. This same episode highlights a second operational force in camp life — that of goodness amid the prevailing evil. There was Schvidkich the camp guard who stood for righteousness and in¬ tegrity. A residual humanity existed within the system, capable of informal organization and direct action. Political prisoners fre¬ quently cared for each other with small gifts of extra food, nursing care, survival instructions to incoming novices or reassignment of duty for the weak and exhausted. As Gulags went Berg was rather fortunate. Karlag, as the larger complex was known, was a Moscow NKVD controlled project aimed at industrial and agricultural expansion. Since it was ulti¬ mately concerned with productivity the regime of the camp, while severe, focused on the conservation rather than the destruction of human beings. It held, as Abram expressed it, the pride of Rus¬ sia's intelligentsia. It was to be a sure system striving to obtain the maximum benefit from available resources, yet was completely dependent on its human agents. This usually translated into bet¬ ter working and living conditions for prisoners like Berg. On the other hand it was still a prison regime which could not protect individuals from the paranoic Third Section of the secret police. It often targeted individuals who because of their leadership abili¬ ties came to the notice of sadistic directors. 101 Island in the Steppe The Experiences of Prisoner No. 119,715 My Life from 1919 to 1936 M y earliest memories are the following: measles; the kick of a pony; my father sold a young bull to some Germans who came to the village; my father and the local teacher dis¬ cussed my entry into our four class of our village school, where I commenced study in the fall of 1919. On November 6-7, 1919 our village was attacked by a band of Makhnovzi. Twenty people were murdered including my fa¬ ther. My mother and I were eyewitnesses to the murder. Mother and we six children fled from the village which was plundered and partially set ablaze. During 1920 we experienced the civil war between Reds and Whites. The staff of the Thirtieth Red Army Division from Irkutsk stayed at our house. I recall that the leader of the political division gave my mother some honey. One of