The Gulag’s bosses in Moscow were well aware of the horrors of prisoner boat travel. A report by the prosecutors’ office inspectorate in Norilsk in 1943 complained that prisoners who arrived by boat—they came up the Yenisei River on barges—were “frequently in poor physical condition . . . of the 14,125 prisoners who arrived in Norilsk in 1943, about 500 were hospitalized in Dudinka [the Norilsk port] on the first or second day after their arrival; up to 1,000 were temporarily unable to work, as they had been deprived of food.”62
Despite all of the bluster, the transport system changed very little over time. Orders were sent out, complaints were made. Yet on December 24, 1944, a convoy arrived at Komsomolsk station in the far east in what even the deputy prosecutor of the Gulag system thought was an execrable condition. His official account of the fate of “echelon SK 950,” a train composed of fifty-one wagons, must stand as some kind of low point, even in the nightmarish history of Gulag transport:
The prisoners arrived in unheated wagons which had not been prepared for prisoner transport. In each wagon, there were between 10–12 bunks, on which no more than 18 people could fit, yet there were up to 48 people in each wagon. The wagons were not supplied with enough cannisters for water, as a result of which there were interruptions in water supply, sometimes for whole days and nights. The prisoners were given frozen bread, and for 10 days got none at all. The prisoners arrived dressed in summer uniforms, dirty, covered in lice, with obvious signs of frostbite . . . the sick prisoners had been rolled onto the wagon floors, without medical help, and had died there and then. Corpses were kept in the wagons for long periods . . .
Of the 1,402 people sent on echelon SK 950, 1,291 arrived: 53 had died en route, 66 had been left in hospitals along the way. On arrival, a further 335 were hospitalized with third- or fourth-degree frostbite, pneumonia, and other diseases. The convoy had, it seemed, traveled for sixty days, twenty-four of which they had spent not moving, sitting on side tracks “due to poor organization.” Yet in this extreme case, the leader of the echelon—one Comrade Khabarov—received nothing more than a “censure with warnings.” 63
Many survivors of similar transports have tried to explain this grotesque mistreatment of prisoners at the hands of young, inexperienced convoy guards, who were far from being the trained killers deployed in the prison system. Nina Gagen-Torn speculated that “it wasn’t evidence of evil, just the complete indifference of the convoy. They didn’t look at us as people. We were living cargo.”64 Antoni Ekart, a Pole arrested after the Soviet invasion of 1939, also thought that the lack of water was not deliberately to torture us but because the escort had to put in extra work to bring it and would not do so without an order. The commander of the escort was not at all interested in this matter and the guards were unwilling to escort the prisoners several times a day to the wells or water taps at stations owing to the risk of escape. 65
Yet some prisoners reported more than indifference: “In the morning, the boss of the convoy came into the corridor . . . he stood with his face to the window, his back to us, and shouted insults, swear words: ‘I’m bored of you!’”66
Boredom—or, rather, boredom mixed with anger at having to carry out such a degrading job—was also Solzhenitsyn’s explanation for this otherwise inexplicable phenomenon. He even tried to think himself into the minds of the convoy guards. Here they were, so busy and understaffed, and then to have “to go carry water in pails—it has to be hauled a long way, too, and it’s insulting: why should a Soviet soldier have to carry water like a donkey for enemies of the people?” Worse, he went on,
It takes a long time to dole out that water. The zeks don’t have their own mugs. Whoever did have one has had it taken away from him—so what it adds up to is that they have to be given the two government issue mugs to drink out of, and while they are drinking up you have to keep standing there and standing, and dipping it out and dipping it out some more and handing it to them . . .
But the convoy could have borne with all that, hauled the water, and doled it out, if only those pigs, after slurping up the water, didn’t ask to go to the toilet. So here’s the way it works out: if you don’t give them water for a day, then they don’t ask to go to the toilet. Give them water once, and they go to the toilet once; take pity on them and give them water twice—and they go to the toilet twice. So it’s pure and simple common sense: just don’t give them anything to drink.67
Whatever their motivation—indifference, boredom, anger, injured pride—the effect on the prisoners was devastating. As a rule, they arrived at their camps not only disoriented and degraded by their experience of prison and interrogation, but physically depleted—and ripe for the next stage of their journey into the Gulag system: entry into the camp.
If it was not dark, if they were not ill, and if they were interested enough to look up, the first thing the prisoners saw on arrival was their camp’s gate. More often than not, the gate displayed a slogan. On the entrance into one of the Kolyma lagpunkts “hung a plywood rainbow with a banner draped over it which read: ‘Labor in the USSR is a Matter of Honesty, Glory, Valor and Heroism!’”68 Barbara Armonas was welcomed to a labor colony in the suburbs of Irkutsk with the banner: “With Just Work I Will Pay My Debt to the Fatherland.”69 Arriving in Solovetsky in 1933—it had by then become a high-security prison—another prisoner saw a sign reading: “With an Iron Fist, We Will Lead Humanity to Happiness!”70 Yuri Chirkov, arrested at age fourteen, was also confronted with a sign at Solovetsky which read “Through Labor—Freedom!”—a slogan which is about as uncomfortably close as it is possible to get to the slogan that hung over the gates of Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei—“Work Makes You Free.”71
Like the arrival in prison, the arrival of a new étap in camp was also attended by rituals: prison inmates, exhausted by transport, now had to be turned into working zeks. “On arrival at the camp,” remembered Karol Colonna-Czosnowski, a Polish prisoner,
[w]e spent a long time being counted . . . That particular evening there seemed no end to it. Innumerable times we had to form five abreast and each row was told to advance three paces which several worried-looking NKVD officials would call aloud, “odin, dva, tri . . .” and laboriously write down each number on to their large clipboards. Presumably the number of those alive, added to the numbers of those who had been shot en route, did not produce the expected total.72
Following the count both men and women were taken to the baths and shaved—over their entire bodies. This procedure, carried out under official orders for the sake of hygiene73—it was assumed, usually correctly, that prisoners arriving from Soviet jails would be covered with lice—nevertheless had an important ritual significance as well. Women describe it with particular horror and distaste, and no wonder. Often, they had to remove their clothes and then wait naked, under the full gaze of male soldiers, for their turn to be shaved. “For the first time,” recalled Elinor Olitskaya, who was a participant in this ceremony on her arrival in Kolyma, “I heard wails of protest: Women remain women . . .”74 Olga Adamova-Sliozberg had suffered the same experience in a transit prison:
We undressed and handed over our clothes for treatment and were about to go upstairs to the washroom when we realized that the staircase was lined from top to bottom with guards. Blushing, we hung our heads and huddled together. Then I looked up, and my eyes met those of the officer in charge. He gave me a sullen look. “Come on, come on,” he shouted. “Get a move on!”
I suddenly felt relieved and the situation even seemed quite comic.
“To hell with them,” I thought. “They’re no more men to me than Vaska the bull who frightened me when I was a child.” 75
Once the prisoners were washed and shaved, the second step in the process of turning men and women into anonymous zeks was the distribution of clothing. The rules changed, from era to era as well as from camp to camp, as to whether or not prisoners were allowed to wear their own clothes. The decision seems, in practice, to have been left to the whim of loca
l camp officials: “In one lagpunkt you could wear your own clothes, in another not,” remembered Galina Smirnova, a prisoner in Ozerlag in the early 1950s.76 It did not always matter: by the time they reached the camp, many prisoners’ own clothes were in rags, if they had not been stolen.
Those without clothes had to wear the camp-issue uniforms, which were invariably old, ripped, ill-made, and ill-fitting. To some, particularly women, it sometimes seemed as if the clothes they were given were part of a deliberate attempt to humiliate them. Anna Andreeva, wife of the writer and spiritualist Danil Andreev, was at first sent to a camp where prisoners were allowed to wear their own clothes. Later, in 1948, she was moved into a camp where they were not. She found the change truly offensive: “They had deprived us of everything, they deprived us of our names, of everything that is part of a person’s personality, and dressed us, I can’t even describe it, in a shapeless dress . . .”77
No effort was made to ensure that sizes matched the prisoners. “Each of us received long underwear,” wrote Janusz Bardach, as well as “a black tunic, quilted pants, a long quilted outer jacket, a felt hat with ear-flaps, rubber-soled boots, and fleece-lined mittens. These items were handed out indiscriminately, and it was up to us to find the right sizes. Everything I was given was much too big, and I spent hours trading for a better fit.”78
Equally scathing about camp fashions, another female prisoner wrote that they were given “short padded coats, padded stockings up to our knees, and birch-bark shoes. We looked like uncanny monsters. We had scarcely anything of our own left. Everything had been sold to the convict women, or, more correctly, exchanged for bread. Silk stockings and scarves elicited such admiration that we were obliged to sell them. It would have been too dangerous to refuse.”79
Because the ripped clothes seemed designed to rob them of dignity, many prisoners would later go to great lengths to improve them. One woman prisoner recalled that she did not care, at first, about the “very old and ruined” clothes she was given. Later, though, she began to sew up the holes, make pockets, and improve the clothes, “as other women did,” thus making herself feel less degraded.80 In general, women who were able to sew or to quilt were able to earn extra bread rations, so coveted were even the slightest improvements to the standard uniform: the ability to distinguish oneself, to look slightly better than others, would become, as we shall see, associated with higher rank, better health, greater privilege. Varlam Shalamov well understood the significance of these minor changes:
In camp there is “individual” and “common” underwear; such are the verbal pearls found in official speech. “Individual” underwear is newer and somewhat better and is reserved for “trusties,” convict foremen, and other privileged persons . . . “common” underwear is underwear for anyone. It’s handed out in the bathhouse right after bathing in exchange for dirty underwear, which is gathered and counted separately beforehand. There’s no opportunity to select anything according to size. Clean underwear is a pure lottery, and I felt a strange and terrible pity at seeing adult men cry over the injustice of receiving worn-out clean underwear in exchange for dirty good underwear. Nothing can take the mind of a human being off the unpleasantnesses that comprise life . . .81
Still, the shock of being washed, shaved, and dressed as zeks was only the first stage in a long initiation. Immediately afterward, the prisoners underwent one of the most critical procedures in their lives as inmates: selection— and segregation into categories of worker. This selection process would affect everything from a prisoner’s status in camp, to the type of barrack he lived in, to the type of work he would be assigned to do. All of which might, in turn, determine whether he would live or die.
I have not, it must be noted, found any memoirs describing “selections” of the sort that took place in German death camps. That is, I have not read of regular selections which ended in weak prisoners being taken aside and shot. Such atrocities surely took place—one Solovetsky memoirist claims to have survived one such occasion82—but the usual practice, at least by the end of the 1930s and the early 1940s, was different. Weak prisoners were not murdered upon arrival in some of the farther-flung camps, but rather given a period of “quarantine,” both to ensure that any illnesses they were carrying would not spread, and to allow them to “fatten up,” to recover their health after long months in prison and terrible journeys. Camp bosses appear to have taken this practice seriously, and prisoners concur.83
Alexander Weissberg, for example, was given good food and allowed to rest before he was sent to the mines.84 After a long transport to Ukhtizhemlag, Jerzy Gliksman—the Polish socialist who had once so enjoyed the performance of Pogodin’s Aristokraty in Moscow—was given a three-day rest, during which he and his fellow new arrivals were treated as “guests.”85 Pyotr Yakir, the son of the Soviet general, was put in quarantine for fourteen days at Sevurallag. 86 Evgeniya Ginzburg remembered her first few days in Magadan, the main city of Kolyma, as a “whirl of pain, blackouts of memory, and a dark abyss of unconsciousness.” She, like others, had been taken directly off the SS Dzhurma and placed in a hospital, where after two months she fully recovered her health. Some were skeptical. “A lamb for the slaughter,” said Liza Sheveleva, another prisoner. “Whom are you recovering for, may I ask? As soon as you get out of here, you’ll go straight on to forced labor, and in a week you’ll be the same sort of corpse that you were on board the Dzhurma . . .”87
Once recovered, if they had been allowed to do so, and once dressed, if they had been allowed new clothes, the selection and segregation began in earnest. In principle, this was a heavily regulated process. As early as 1930, the Gulag issued very strict, complicated orders on the classification of prisoners. Theoretically, prisoners’ work assignments were meant to reflect two sets of criteria: their “social origin” and sentence, and their health. In these early days, prisoners were put into three categories: “working-class” prisoners, not convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes, with sentences not longer than five years; “working-class” prisoners, not convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes, with sentences above five years; and those sentenced to counter-revolutionary crimes.
Each of these three categories of workers was then assigned one of three categories of prison regime: privileged, light, and “first-order,” or heavy. Then they were meant to be examined by a medical commission, which determined whether they were able to carry out heavy work or light work. After taking into account all of these criteria, the camp administration would then assign each prisoner a job. According to how well they fulfilled the norms of that particular job, each prisoner would then be assigned one of four levels of food rations: basic, working, “reinforced,” or “punishment.”88 All of these categories would change many times. Beria’s orders of 1939, for example, divided prisoners into “heavy-work-capable,” “light-work-capable,” and “invalid” categories (sometimes called groups A, B, and C), the numbers of which were regularly monitored by the central administration in Moscow, which heavily disapproved of camps which had too many “invalid” prisoners.89
The process was far from orderly. It had both formal aspects—imposed by the camp commanders—and informal aspects, as prisoners made adjustments and bargained among themselves. For most, their first experience of the camp classification process was relatively crude. George Bien, a young Hungarian picked up in Budapest at the end of the Second World War, compared the selection process he went through in 1946 to a slave market:
Everyone was ordered to the courtyard and told to strip. When your name was called you appeared before a medical team for a health inspection. The exam consisted of pulling the skin of your buttocks to determine the amount of muscle. They determined your condition of strength by the muscle content, and if you passed you were accepted and your documents were put in a separate pile. This was done by women in white coats, and they had little choice from this group of living dead. They chose the younger prisoners, regardless of muscle.90
Jerzy Gliksm
an also used the expression “slave market” to describe the segregation process that took place in Kotlas, the transit camp that supplied prisoners to the camps north of Arkhangelsk. There, guards awoke prisoners during the night and told them to assemble, with all of their belongings, on the following morning. Every prisoner was forced to attend, even the seriously ill. Then, all were marched out of the camp, into the forest. An hour later, they arrived at a large clearing, where they were formed into columns, sixteen men abreast:
All day long I noticed unknown officials, both uniformed and in civilian clothes, wandering among the prisoners, ordering some to remove their fufaykas[jackets], feeling their arms, their legs, looking over the palms, commanding others to bend over. Sometimes they would order a prisoner to open his mouth and peered at his teeth, like horse traders at a county fair . . . some were looking for engineers and experienced locksmiths or lathe operators; others might require construction carpenters; and all were always in need of physically strong men for work as lumberjacks, in agriculture, in coal-mining, and in the oil wells.
The most important consideration of those doing the inspecting, Gliksman realized, was “not to let themselves be duped into inadvertently acquiring cripples, invalids, or the sick—in short, persons who were good only for eating up bread for nothing. This was the reason that special agents were dispatched from time to time to select the proper prisoner material.” 91
Right from the start, it was also clear that rules were there to be broken. Nina Gagen-Torn went through a particularly humiliating selection at the Temnikovsky camp in 1947, which nevertheless had a positive result. Upon arriving in the camp, her convoy was immediately sent to the showers, their clothes put in the disinfection chamber. They were then marched into a room, still dripping wet and naked: there was to be “a health inspection,” they were told. “Doctors” were going to examine them, and so they did— along with the camp production manager and guards:
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