Camp lesbians are first mentioned in relation to the end of the 1930s. For example, E. Olitskaia writes that when her group of former tiurzachkas (female prisoners) arrived at Kolyma,
we were initially shocked by those women who stood out like sore thumbs — ‘it’. Nasty, revoltingly shameless creatures. Magadan had fewer of them. They were normally sent out to the far-away camps. Defiant faces, hair cropped like men’s, padded jackets hanging off their shoulders... They had lovers, mistresses among inmates. They strutted around the camp in pairs, embracing, flaunting their love. Wardens, just like the vast majority of inmates, hated ‘it’. Camp women anxiously kept their distance.
G. Aleksandrov paints a colourful portrait of such an ‘it’ in the previously cited novel ‘I bring to the colonies of rejects...’:
Inka Vasek was sitting on the top bunk with her legs drawn close. She was rocking back and forth with her eyes closed and was humming something sad and unclear without opening her mouth. A woman, a mere adolescent and naked to her waist, was lying near her with her head on the boards. ‘Vow to love Vasek’ was tattooed on her left breast with blue ink, and her right breast, firm and tanned, vowed to love Iurok.
‘Sing something, Klavka!’ ordered Inka Vasek.
‘Sing what, Inka?’ asked Klavka timidly, covering her vowes with her hands.
Instead of answering, Inka Vasek swung her arm and punched Klavka in the face.
‘What’s that for?’ whimpered Klavka, wiping blood off her wounded face.
‘For “Inka”!’ explained Inka Vasek. ‘What’s inked on your left jug?’
‘Vow... to love... Vasek...’ answered Klavka, choking on tears.
‘And you called me “Inka”! I’m not some kinda slag! A man! Vasek!’
‘I forgot,’ babbled scared Klavka.
‘You’ll remember! Screeched so much last month getting inked, but now everyone knows who you love! Me! Vasek!’ Inka Vasek proudly pointed to her plump chest. ‘I despise men! I was young, tried kissing me... Kissed like I’m a broad, I kissed him like he’s a slag. I look like a broad, but I’m really a man! I love young bints!’
Not only does Inka Vasek speak about herself in the masculine gender, but so do her campmates. One of them tells Vasek: ‘You’re the right kinda man.’ Nevertheless, Vasek sometimes falls into the feminine gender:
‘What a minx!’ said Vasek admiringly, salaciously licking her lips. ‘I’d snatch that one. I’d give her alcohol! I’d get her such inks! I called her, but she pays me no mind, fucking bitch.’
The way Vasek treats her objects of attention is clear from her plans regarding that same campmate (the ‘minx’):
‘Will I love her! She’ll squeak like a mouse! I’ll get her inks tomorrow. On her back, a cat and a mouse. When she bends over, it’s like the cat is chasing and the mouse is running to its burrow. And huge letters across her belly: ‘vow to love Vasek’. I’ll put ‘Vasek’ on her forehead and her cheeks,’ Inka’s fantasy ran wild.
Her prospective victim, Rita, had indeed met Vasek before this without realising she was looking at a kobel, an active lesbian.
Rita glanced at ‘Vasek’. Though she was a bit frightened, she noticed that the Vesek woman was dressed in a new military shirt tucked into deep-blue trousers. A wool hat crisscrossed with a narrow red stripe covered her head and calfskin boots polished to shine were on her feet.
In response to Rita’s question, her campmate ‘tersely and brusquely’ tells her that Vasek is a lesbian:
‘Who’re lesbians?’ asked the woman.
‘In Ancient Greece, more than two and a half thousand years ago, on the Lesbos island, there were women who loved other women.’
‘Truly loved?’
‘What kind of true love could those freaks have? Gossipers say that the Sappho poetess was heading those creatures. A bald-faced lie. Sappho had a husband and children, and, most importantly, she wrote pure poems about love. Vasek, she is called something else, is drawn to women...’
‘Kobel?’ Rita shuddered.
‘Where did you learn that word?’
‘I heard it... also in the lock-up,’ confessed Rita after a pause.
‘You heard it, now forget it!’
In the second tome of camp memoirs of E. Ginzburg, there appears a ‘disgusting little bug-eyed toad of a lesbian Zoika. Three so-called ‘kobels’ around her. They look like hermaphrodites, with short-cropped hair, hoarse voices, and men’s names: Edik, Sashok, and some other one...’
M. Demin writes in his ‘Blatnoi’ book:
Those kobels were stern, pushy, and aggressive. The whole camp feared them. They drank vodka, took drugs, played cards. They also mercilessly exploited their lovers, gutless and browbeaten kovyrialkas.
Ordinarily, each of those kobels kept several of such mistresses: took them one by one and kept a tight rein on his harem. However, there were also cases of, so to say, monogamous love. Strange alliances, strange weddings sometimes happened in women’s barracks.
Just such a wedding was happening in a barrack I once happened to visit. Everything was as it should be: somebody was singing, somebody was dancing. And, in the midst of this universal celebration, next to the full table, a young lesbian was sobbing.
The ‘groom’ next to her, with short-cropped hair and dressed in a colourful shirt, gave me a grim and anxious look. (I really have no clue which gender fits here, masculine or feminine? The former does not fit very well... The latter does not either. Still, more he than she.) He obviously viewed me as his enemy, a potential rival! All the time I was there, I felt his relentless, sticky gaze.
The above quotations speak about the 1930s and the 1940s. Here is what M. Ulanovskaia recollects about a camp in the early 1950s:
I was friends with another German woman, Ursula, in the 40th group. My other friends and acquaintances looked at this friendship with worry. Lena gloomily stated that her compatriot was a ‘Schwein’. The thing was, a woman like Ursula had many names in a camp, from the mocking ‘it’ to the merciless ‘kobel’. The literary and scientific term ‘lesbian’ was not popular. Such women oftentimes wore trousers and cut their hair in an attempt to look like men. There were especially many of them among criminals, slightly less among Germans, and there were a few among our intelligentsia as well. Ukrainians and, of course, believers were less susceptible to all kinds of moral rot. Some of them were sustained by their ideology, and peasants were completely impervious to all kinds of camp disease: snitching, thieving, cohabiting with wardens, and, of course, lesbianism.
Instances of exalted friendship sometimes happened among believers. But, apparently, their ‘sublimation’ was so strong that it kept these friendships from crossing any boundaries.
Criminals were the most ostentatious. This phenomenon is documented in their folklore. A common proverb: ‘once you try a finger, you won’t want a man’. But, it is also said that women touched by this vice are cured of it once they move into a normal environment. I remember a song sung by one criminal:
Hey, thank you, Stalin,
For making me a madam:
I’m a cow, and I’m a bull,
I’m a woman, and a man, too.
I remember one young criminal impassionately telling us during excavations: ‘I was young back then. Did not live with men, only women.’
Nevertheless, even they, the completely hopeless, were capable of acts of great selflessness for the sake of this ‘friendship’. They could make a ‘mastyrka’, a fake injury, to avoid an unavoidable separation in a camp. I remember a funny little criminal Zaitseva who avoided transfer with the help of a chemical pencil lead and proudly strutted around the camp with black eyes. Another criminal died after letting soap into her vein.
Among the intelligentsia everything was, naturally, concealed, veiled, and ambiguous. Very rarely did people admit to such a vice, but it sometimes happened. I was told by Tamara who was from a Russian emigre family and in love with a beautiful Estonian Wanda: ‘I’ve been married twice, but I’d only want a kid from Wanda.’
The notes of Iu. Voznesenskaia, ‘White camomile’, dedicated to women’s camp in the 1970s, say about lesbianism that ‘older women sneakily and venomously infect younger women with this vice’. Voznesenskaia talks about camp lesbian Tatiana:
Older inmates in the juvenile colony taught Tatiana all there was to know about ‘women’s love’. ‘At first, like all newcomers, I was ‘working from below’, so I could also deal with men later,’ explained Tatiana to us. ‘ And many don’t want it ‘from below’ after a man. “Once you try a finger, you won’t want a man.”’ Saying this, she was glancing conspiratorily at her partner, Galina. Galina, not one bit ashamed, nodded affirmatively. ‘After the colony, I was curious: what’s it like with a man? I met Seriozha soon after. And, can you believe it, girls: me, such a slut, turned out a virgin! My Seriozha got so happy he married me right then and there. I taught him some things, so I was okay with him, he would be the man and the kobel too. And, oh, did the other women love him!’
The aforementioned Galina was
a young girl who has gone through fire and water while free and now is studying ‘women’s love’, that is, lesbianism, under the mentorship of Tatiana. They occupied the bottom bunk just for this reason, as it was darker and allowed to hang up laundered bedsheets to hide from wardens’ eyes. Tatiana herself was an ‘oboiudchitsa’ and could take part in sexual affairs both as a man and as a woman, becoming once ‘kobel’ then ‘kovyrialka’. Similarly, she would pick flowers of pleasure with wardens and convicts on duty alike whenever she could without any standards. But, she prepared Galina for the ‘kobel’ role and assured us that it was not without success: ‘That’ll be the main kobel here! There’ll be no escape from women!’
On 31st of October, 1973, we taped an interview with a twenty-year-old informant who had just left a women’s camp where she was for a crime (let’s call her ‘Lena’). According to her claims, about 80% of prisoners took part in ‘women’s love’ (there were more ‘kovyrialkas’, that is, passive lesbians, than active lesbians). Answering the question about campmates’ opinions of ‘kovyrialkas’, she said: ‘Generally speaking, they’re despised behind their backs, of course, but they’re pampered in public, others launder for them, cook for them, do everything for them.’
COMPILER: Ah, so they enjoy a privileged status, in a way?
‘LENA’: Yep, yep.
COMPILER: They avoid doing things others must do?
‘LENA’: Yes, of course.
COMPILER: Give me an example.
‘LENA’: Well, how would I put it... Well, say, I have to be on duty... Others will take that duty... If I have to be on duty at night, my other half will do it... Oatmeal for breakfast, dinner, or supper, I won’t eat it. She’ll eat it herself, but I’ll still get butter, eggs, milk, all of it... She’ll get it for me any way possible... Laundry, don’t even know what that is... Ironing... Making the bed, also don’t even know, she does absolutely everything. She even tailors for me. Does my quota, too.
According to the informant, there is ‘absolutely’ no difference between men and women in the elderly ‘kobels’. ‘In their figure, in the forms even [there is nothing womenly]... Man’s hands, face, man’s wrinkles, man’s features, even shaped that way... Hair put away thusly, always men’s haircuts... Cannot tell, you just cannot tell them from men, you’ll never think that’s a woman... Even their voices are manly, even their voice is like a man’s. That is among the elderly.’ When it comes to ‘kovyrialkas’, ‘usually kovyrialkas paint their lips... And put on a kerchief [like a woman], tie bows, big ones. Kobels have some too: they tie their kerchiefs differently. They don’t tie them like a woman would, but make a kind of hat out out it, tying it at the top of the head...’
‘We despise those who act as a kobel and a kovyrialka at once: sometimes one month it’s one way, differently another,’ Lena told us. She mentions that more people swear in the women’s camp than in the men’s, but the worst offence is to call somebody a ‘kovyrialka’: camp lesbians ‘fight horribly but make up right away’, ‘there are two halves, living together for a long time, but when they’re arguing, it’s horrible to witness, but the worst insult is to call her a “kovyrialka”, even though she is one’, ‘that love is nothing like with men, try to look at somebody else and you’ll be hit, sometimes poisoned’. Another curse, the informant tells us: ‘I do you like I do Klava Ivanova (or any other third person, regardless of whether the claimant lives with said person)’.
Both prisoners and administration call lesbian love ‘pederasty’ (obviously, by analogy with the vice of the men’s camp): ‘Well, say, somebody got sick,’ says the informant, ‘goes to the doctor, and the doctor tells them... The person has a fever but the doctor says: “This is due to pederasty,” due to cohabiting, see, so she does not grant them leave from duty. Every sickness will always be explained this way.
