PRISON SURVIVAL

...How much longer," she asks, "will those camps stand upon the soil of my country...

...The instinctive act of altruism replenishes the strength of both...

...Their nobility is inspired by the old women, or babushki, who used to be a fixture of the camps for simply living according to their reading of the Bible, dispensing with identity papers and giving religious instruction in defiance of the law...

...Not because your tormentors have not earned it...

...This time the prisoner she helped reciprocates, using strips of soggy bread to caulk the windows and protect Irina from the freezing wind...

...Their lesson: "You must not, under any circumstances, allow yourself to hate...

...Their treatment improves...

...Each had to depend on "forms of social bonding and interchange, on collective resistance, on keeping dignity and moral sense active," he wrote...

...Ironically, when the exiled revolutionaries came to power, in the Soviet era, they no longer permitted the politicals to be set apart from ordinary convicts...

...One young soldier agrees to smuggle out a letter to Ratushinskaya's husband—and "we exchanged a smile with our eyes only...

...Because for decades your strength has lain only in the fear you generated...

...In one moving scene, a work detail is summoned from the larger camp to lay waste the vegetable patch the women have lovingly tended...

...The work supervisor winks at infractions of the rules because the women not only make their allotted pairs of gloves but take pride in turning them out with the best possible quality...

...Grey Is the Color of Hope is an impressionistic story, as one might expect from a poet...

...But Ratushinskaya's band is also following the tradition of Russian political prisoners, from Dostoevski's day on, who saw themselves as keepers of their country's conscience...

...The current Soviet line is to deny that the camps hold anyone except "ordinary" prisoners...

...The community of these women is incredibly selfless...

...However, Ratushinskaya believes "there are still hundreds of political prisoners" alongside the four million convicts in labor camps, prisons, and psychiatric institutions...

...Since the authorities forbade her to write verse, she takes up the challenge of eluding the censors by memorizing her latest poem, scratching revisions of it on a bar of soap, finally inscribing it on tissue paper that can be waterproofed and palmed to a visitor...

...The author never describes the dissident actions or the trial in 1983 that led to her sentence of seven years in camp and five of internal exile...

...The lines she intersperses with her prose here are not particularly memorable...

...Thus, a refusal to wear identification tags on their uniforms becomes a matter of honor, even though it exposes them to the threat of shivering in the freezing SHIZO...

...The guards react in unpredictable ways...

...Soon it is Ratushinskaya's turn to need help, as she lies freezing in the SHIZO (punishment cell) for celebrating "Political Prisoners Day," October 30, with a hunger strike...

...As she tells the authorities, "Every generation contains more and more of us, those who are not afraid of you, and we shall be your downfall...

...The regular zeks (convicts) watch in awe as the politicals stand by stoically, suffering yet another indignity but confident that life would in time triumph over destruction...

...The unwritten code of the small zone is much more demanding, in its own way, than the regulations of the camp...

...Instead, she recreates the microcosm of the "small zone"—a miniprison in a camp of some 3,000—where a half dozen women "politicals" shared their scraps of food, their few meager belongings, and their dreams, to emerge spiritually intact after one of Mikhail Gorbachev's amnesties...

...It forms a sisterhood that is able to succor its weakest member physically and psychologically...

...Such spontaneous actions mean the difference between surviving and perishing...

...How can I sleep while they exist...

...Poetry occupies a special place in Russian culture, so she finds herself celebrated as a kind of poet laureate of the camp, crowned with a wreath of basil leaves fished from the stew...

...when embedded in an ethic of honesty and dignity, they also salvage the prisoners' self-respect...

...In short, "the survivor owes his life to his comrades...

...The color of hope...

...Now we have Irina Ratushinskaya's intriguing account of her three-and-a-half years in Soviet labor camps "of strict regime" as further indication that Des Pres was on the right track...

...Ratushinskaya's identity as a zek is bound up with the poetry she began to write after graduating in physics and teaching at the Odessa Pedagogical Institute...

...The women's bearing makes them unique...

...A typical incident finds Ratushinskaya almost unconscious after a prolonged hunger strike protesting the administration's failure to provide a comrade with medical care...

...The women exercise tremendous self-control...

...But they adamantly refuse to obey any order that would reinforce the camp's hierarchical system or indicate deference to their wardens...

...A sadistic female warder continually harasses the prisoners, so they ostracize her, driving her frantic with their silence until she begs for a transfer...

...Harvey Fireside (Harvey Fireside teaches politics at Ithaca College...

...Eventually, the Gorbachev regime yields to this pressure and releases them...

...In this collective, the women agree to fulfill work quotas by manufacturing workers' gloves from dawn to dusk, for they have deemed that "a clean and worthwhile task...

...Petitions addressed to the Soviet authorities disappear into a black hole, but those directed to Western organizations such as Amnesty International engender campaigns to free the prisoners...

...Yet, as she becomes dimly aware that a cellmate is groaning in agony, she responds: "Somehow—I don't know how—I was across the cell and kneeling beside her, cradling her in my arms, whispering words of comfort, trying to transmit something of my own life force into her...

...But if you allow hatred to take root, it will flourish and spread during your years in camp, driving out everything else, and ultimately corrode and warp your soul...

...They refuse to leave their high moral ground by cursing their torturers or by taking revenge on an occasional comrade who snaps under the pressure, breaking a strike or even becoming an informer...

...however, they clearly helped her distill the essence of her life in prison...

...The more a prisoner shared with his fellows, the more they sustained him in return...

...She places her faith not in political reforms that continue to cloak a castelike system ultimately resting on the backs of the zeks, but in the germinative force of dissenters...

...When the late Terrence Des Pres surveyed the experiences of survivors of Nazi and Soviet concentration camps, he came to a paradoxical conclusion: Survival was not a matter of individual toughness but of an ability to give to others...

...She and her comrades also join in statements of protest at the violations of human rights they have witnessed...

...This gritty faith is reflected in the zek uniform she still treasures: "grey, my very own grey color...

...He has written widely on human rights...

...Before long, they have unearthed some old rootlets and collected new seeds—sometimes hidden under tape on their relatives' letters—to start their secret garden anew...

...Her poems connect Ratushinskaya to the outside world, as many of the verses originating in prison end up being published in the West...