Worse, this freedom of movement could easily and quickly turn to anarchy. Guards and camp authorities were plentiful enough inside the lagpunktduring the day, but they often disappeared completely at night. One or two would remain within the vakhta, but the rest withdrew to the other side of the fence. Only when prisoners believed their lives were in danger, did they sometimes turn to the guards in the vakhta. One memoirist recalls that in the aftermath of a brawl between political and criminal prisoners— a common phenomenon of the postwar period, as we shall see—the criminal losers “ran to the vakhta ,” begging for help. They were sent away on a transport to another lagpunkt the following day, as the camp administration preferred to avoid mass murder.23 Another woman, feeling herself in danger of rape and possibly murder at the hands of a criminal prisoner, “turned herself in” to the vakhta, and asked to be placed in the camp punishment cell for the night for protection.24
The vakhta was not a reliable zone of safety, however. The guards residing within the guardhouse did not necessarily react to prisoners’ requests. Informed of some outrage committed by one group of prisoners against the other, they were just as likely to laugh. There are records, in both official documents and memoirs, of armed guards ignoring or laughing off cases of murder, torture, and rape among prisoners. Describing a gang rape that took place at one of the Kargopollag lagpunkts at night, Gustav Herling writes that the victim “let out a short, throaty cry, full of tears and muffled by her skirt. A sleepy voice called from the watch-tower: ‘Come, come boys, what are you doing? Have you no shame?’ The eight men pulled the girl behind the latrines, and continued . . .”25
In theory, the rules were strict: the prisoners were to stay inside the zona. In practice, the rules were broken. And behavior that did not technically violate the rules, no matter how violent or harmful, was not necessarily punished.
REZHIM: RULES FOR LIVING
The zona controlled the prisoners’ movement in space.26 But it was the rezhim—or “regime,” as it is usually translated into English—that controlled their time. Put simply, the regime was the set of rules and procedures according to which the camp operated. If barbed wire limited a zek’s freedom of movement to the zona, a series of orders and sirens regulated the hours he spent there.
The regime differed in its severity from lagpunkt to lagpunkt, both according to shifting priorities and according to the type of prisoner being held in a particular camp. There were, at various times, light-regime camps for invalids, ordinary-regime camps, special-regime camps, and punishment-regime camps. But the basic system remained the same. The regime determined when and how the prisoner should wake; how he should be marched to work; when and how he should receive food; when and for how long he should sleep.
In most camps, the prisoner’s day officially began with the razvod: the procedure of organizing the prisoners into brigades and then marching them to work. A siren or other signal would awake them. A second siren warned them that breakfast was finished, and work was to begin. Prisoners then lined up in front of the camp gates for the morning count. Valery Frid, a scriptwriter for Soviet films and the author of an unusually lively memoir, has described the scene:
The brigades would organize themselves in front of the gate. The work-assigner would hold a narrow, smoothly planed signboard: on it would be written the number of the brigades, the number of workers (there were paper shortages, and the numbers could be scraped off the signboard with glass and rewritten the following day). The convoy guard and the work-assigner would check whether everyone was in place, and if they were— they would be taken off to work. If someone were missing, everyone would have to wait, while they searched for the shirker.27
According to instructions from Moscow, this wait was not meant to last more than fifteen minutes.28 Of course, as Kazimierz Zarod writes, it often lasted much longer, bad weather notwithstanding:
By 3:30 a.m. we were supposed to be in the middle of the square, standing in ranks of five, waiting to be counted. The guards often made mistakes, and then there had to be a second count. On a morning when it was snowing this was a long, cold agonizing process. If the guards were wide awake and concentrating, the count usually took about thirty minutes, but if they miscounted, we could stand for anything up to an hour.29
While this was happening, some camps took countermeasures to “raise the prisoners’ spirits.” Here is Frid again: “Our razvod took place to the accompaniment of an accordion player. A prisoner, freed from all other work obligations, played cheerful melodies ...” 30 Zarod also records the bizarre phenomenon of the morning band, composed of prisoner musicians, both professional and amateur:
Each morning, the “band” stood near the gate playing military-style music and we were exhorted to march out “strongly and happily” to our day’s work. Having played until the end of the column had passed through the gate, the musicians abandoned their instruments and, tacking themselves on to the end of the column, joined the workers walking into the forest.31
From there, prisoners were marched to work. The guards shouted out the daily command—“A step to the right, or a step to the left, will be considered an attempt to escape—The convoy will fire without warning— March!”—and the prisoners marched, still five abreast, to the workplace. If it was a great distance, they would be accompanied by guards and dogs. The procedure for the evening’s return to camp was much the same. After an hour for supper, again prisoners were lined up in rows. And again, the guards counted (if the prisoners were lucky) and re-counted (if they were not). Moscow’s instructions allotted more time for the evening count— thirty to forty minutes—presumably on the grounds that an escape from camp was more likely to have taken place from the work site. 32 Then another siren sounded, and it was time to sleep.
These rules and timetables were not written in stone. On the contrary, the regime changed over time, generally growing harsher. Jacques Rossi has written that “the main trait of the Soviet penitentiary regime is its systematic intensification, gradual introduction of unadulterated, arbitrary sadism into the status of the law,” and there is something to this. 33 Throughout the 1940s, the regime grew tighter, workdays grew longer, rest days became less frequent. In 1931, the prisoners of the Vaigach Expedition, a part of the Ukhtinskaya Expedition, worked six-hour days, in three shifts. Workers in the Kolyma region in the early 1930s also worked normal hours, fewer in winter and more in summer.34 Within the decade, however, the working day had doubled in length. By the late 1930s, women at Elinor Olitskaya’s sewing factory worked “twelve hours in an unventilated hall,” and the Kolyma workday had also been lengthened to twelve hours. 35 Later still, Olitskaya worked on a construction brigade: fourteen- to sixteen-hour days, with fiveminute breaks at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., and a one-hour lunch break at noon.36
Nor was she alone. In 1940, the Gulag’s working day was officially extended to eleven hours, although even this was often violated.37 In March 1942, the Moscow Gulag administration mailed a furious letter to all camp commanders, reminding them of the rule that “prisoners must be allowed to sleep no less than eight hours.” Many camp commanders had ignored this rule, the letter explained, and had allowed their prisoners as little as four or five hours of sleep every night. As a result, the Gulag complained, “prisoners are losing their ability to work, they are becoming ‘weak workers’ and invalids.”38
Violations continued, particularly as production demands accelerated during the war years. In September 1942, after the German invasion, the Gulag’s administration officially extended the working day for prisoners building airport facilities to twelve hours, with a one-hour break for lunch. The pattern was the same all over the USSR. Working days of sixteen hours were recorded in Vyatlag during the war.39 Working days of twelve hours were recorded in Vorkuta in the summer of 1943, although these were reduced—probably because of the high rates of death and illness—to ten hours again in March 1944.40 Sergei Bondarevsky, a prisoner in a wartime sharashka, one of the special laboratories fo
r inmate scientists, also remembered working eleven-hour days, with breaks. On a typical day, he worked from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m., from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m., and then again from 8 p.m. until 10 p.m.41
In any case, the rules were often broken. One zek, assigned to a brigade, panning gold in Kolyma, had to sift through 150 wheelbarrows a day. Those who had not finished that amount by the end of the workday simply remained until they had—sometimes as late as midnight. Afterward they would go home, eat their soup, and be up at 5 a.m. to start work again. 42 The Norilsk camp administration applied a similar principle in the late 1940s, where another prisoner worked digging foundations for new buildings in the permafrost: “At the end of twelve hours they would winch you out of the hole, but only if you had completed your work. If you hadn’t, you were just left there.”43
Nor were many breaks usually granted during the day, as one wartime prisoner, assigned to work in a textile factory, later explained:
At six we had to be in the factory. At ten we had a five-minute break to smoke a cigarette, for which purpose we had to run to a cellar about two hundred yards away, the only place on the factory premises where this was permitted. Infringement of this regulation was punishable with two extra years’ imprisonment. At one o’clock came a half-hour break for lunch. Small earthenware bowl in hand, one had to dash frantically to the canteen, stand in a long queue, receive some disgusting soya beans which disagreed with most people—and at all costs be back at the factory when the engines started working. After that, without leaving our places, we sat till seven in the evening.44
The number of days off work was also mandated by law. Ordinary prisoners were allowed to have one a week, and those assigned to stricter regimes two per month. But these rules also varied in practice. As early as 1933, the Gulag administration in Moscow sent out an order reminding camp commanders of the importance of prisoners’ rest days, many of which were being canceled in the mad rush to fulfill the plan.45 A decade later, hardly anything had changed. During the war, Kazimierz Zarod was given one day off out of ten.46 Another recalled having one a month.47 Gustav Herling remembered free days being even scarcer:
According to regulations, prisoners were entitled to one whole day’s rest every ten days’ work. But in practice, it transpired that even a monthly day off threatened to lower the camp’s production output, and it had therefore become customary to announce ceremoniously the reward of a rest day whenever the camp had surpassed its production plan for the one particular quarter . . . Naturally we had no opportunity to inspect the output figures or the production plan, so that this convention was a fiction which in fact put us entirely at the mercy of the camp authorities.48
Even on their rare days off, it sometimes happened that prisoners were forced to do maintenance work within the camp, cleaning barracks, cleaning toilets, clearing snow in the winter.49 All of which makes one order, issued by Lazar Kogan, the commander of Dmitlag, particularly poignant. Disturbed by the many reports of camp horses collapsing of exhaustion, Kogan began by noting that: “The growing number of cases of illness and collapse of horses has several causes, including the overloading of horses, the difficult conditions of the roads, and the absence of full and complete rest time for horses to recover their strength.”
He then continued, issuing new instructions:
The workday of camp horses must not exceed ten hours, not counting the obligatory two-hour break for rest and food.
On average, horses must not walk more than 32 kilometers per day.
Horses must be allowed a regular rest day, every eighth day, and the rest on that day must be complete.50
Of the prisoners’ need for a regular rest day every eighth day, there is, alas, no mention.
BARAKI: LIVING SPACE
Most prisoners in most camps lived in barracks. Rare was the camp, however, whose barracks were constructed before the prisoners arrived. Those prisoners who had the bad luck to be sent to build a new camp lived in tents, or in nothing at all. As one prisoners’ song put it;
We drove quickly and fast across tundra When suddenly, the train came to a halt. Around us, only forest and mud— And here we will build the canal.51
Ivan Sulimov, a prisoner in Vorkuta in the 1930s, was dumped, along with a party of inmates, on “a flat square of land in the polar tundra,” and told to set up tents, build a bonfire, and begin construction of a “fence of stone slabs, surrounded by barbed wire” as well as barracks. 52 Janusz Sieminski, a Polish prisoner in Kolyma after the war, was also once part of a team that constructed a new lagpunkt “from zero,” in the depths of winter. At night, prisoners slept on the ground. Many died, particularly those who lost the battle to sleep near the fire. 53 Prisoners arriving in the Prikaspysky camp in Azerbaijan in December 1940 also slept, in the words of an annoyed NKVD inspector, “beneath the open sky on damp ground.”54 Nor were such situations necessarily temporary. As late as 1955, prisoners in some camps were still living in tents.55
If and when the prisoners did build barracks, they were invariably extremely simple buildings, made of wood. Moscow dictated their design and, as a result, descriptions of them are rather repetitive: prisoner after prisoner describes long, rectangular, wooden buildings, the walls unplastered, the cracks stopped up with mud, the inside space filled with rows and rows of equally poorly made bunk beds. Sometimes there was a crude table, sometimes not. Sometimes there were benches to sit on, sometimes not.56 In Kolyma, and in other regions where wood was scarce, the prisoners built barracks, equally cheaply and hastily, of stone. Where insulation was not available, older methods were used. Photographs of the barracks in Vorkuta, taken in the winter of 1945, make them look almost invisible: their roofs had been built at sharp angles, but very low to the ground, so the snow accumulating around them would help insulate them from cold.57
In the Barracks: inmates listening to a prisoner musician—a drawing by Benjamin Mkrtchyan, Ivdel, 1953
Often, barracks were not proper buildings at all, but rather zemlyanki, or “earth dugouts.” A. P. Evstonichev lived in one in Karelia, in the early 1940s:
A zemlyanka—it was a space cleaned of snow, with the upper layer of earth removed. The walls and roof were made of round, rough logs. The whole structure was covered with another layer of earth and snow. The entrance to the dugout was decked out with a canvas door . . . in one corner stood a barrel of water. In the middle stood a metal stove, complete with a metal pipe leading out through the roof, and a barrel of kerosene.58
In the temporary lagpunkts constructed alongside the building sites of roads and railways, zemlyanki were ubiquitous. As discussed in Chapter 4, their traces still line the prisoner-built roads of the far north today, as well as the riverbanks near the older sections of the city of Vorkuta. Sometimes prisoners lived in tents as well. One memoir of the early days of Vorkutlag describes the construction, in the course of three days, of “fifteen tents with three-level bunk-beds” for 100 prisoners apiece, as well as a zona with four watchtowers and a barbed-wire fence.59
But the real barracks rarely lived up to the low standards that Moscow had set for them either. They were almost always terribly overcrowded, even after the chaos of the late 1930s had subsided. An inspection report of twenty-three camps, written in 1948, noted angrily that in most of them “prisoners have no more than one to one and a half meters of living space per person,” and even that was in an unsanitary condition: “prisoners do not have their own places to sleep, or their own sheets and blankets.” 60 Sometimes there was even less space than that. Margarete Buber-Neumann records that on her arrival in camp, there was actually no sleeping space at all within the barracks, and she was forced to spend the first few nights on the floor of the washroom.61
Ordinary prisoners were meant to be given beds known as vagonki , a name taken from the beds found on the wagons of passenger trains. These were double-decker bunks, with room for two inmates at each level, four inmates in all. In many camps, prisoners slept on the even less sophisticated sploshnye
nary. These were long wooden sleeping shelves, not even partitioned into separate bunks. Prisoners assigned to them simply lay down beside one another, in a long row. Because these communal beds were considered unhygienic, camp inspectors constantly inveighed against them too. In 1948, the central Gulag administration issued a directive demanding that they all be replaced by vagonki.62 Nevertheless, Anna Andreeva, a prisoner in Mordovia in the late 1940s and early 1950s, slept on sploshnye nary, and remembers that many prisoners still slept on the floor beneath them too.63
Bedding was also arbitrary, and varied greatly from camp to camp, despite further strict (and rather modest) rules issued in Moscow. Regulations stated that all prisoners should have a new towel every year, a pillowcase every four years, sheets every two years, and a blanket every five years.64 In practice, “a so-called straw mattress went with each prisoner’s bed,” wrote Elinor Lipper:
There was no straw in it and rarely hay, because there was not enough hay for the cattle; instead it contained wood shavings or extra clothes, if a prisoner still owned any extra clothes. In addition, there was a woolen blanket and pillowcase which you could stuff with whatever you had, for there were no pillows.65
Others had nothing at all. As late as 1950, Isaak Filshtinsky, an Arabic specialist arrested in 1948, was still sleeping beneath his coat in Kargopollag, with spare rags for pillows.66
The 1948 directive also called for all earthen floors in barracks to be replaced by wooden floors. But as late as the 1950s, Irena Arginskaya lived in a barrack whose floor could not be cleaned properly as it was made of clay.67 Even if floors were wooden, they could often not be cleaned properly for lack of brushes. Describing her experiences to a postwar commission, one Polish woman explained that in her camp, a group of prisoners were always put “on duty” at night, cleaning up the barracks and lavatories while others slept: “The mud on the barrack floor had to be scraped off with knives. The Russian women were frantic at our being unable to do it, and asked us how we had lived at home. It did not even occur to them that the dirtiest floor can be scrubbed with a brush.” 68
Gulag Page 27