Gulag

by Anne Applebaum

  Then, after it was all over, the same humiliating process of handing out clothes began all over again, wrote Shalamov, ever-obsessive on the issue of underwear: “Having washed themselves, the men gather at the window far in advance of the actual distribution of underwear. Over and over again they discuss in detail the underwear they received last time, the underwear received five years ago in Bamlag . . .”106

  Inevitably, the right to bathe in relative comfort also became intimately intertwined with the system of privilege. In Temlag, for example, those employed in particular jobs had the right to bathe more often.107 The very job of bathhouse worker, which implied both proximity to clean water and the right to allow or deny others such proximity, was usually one of the most sought-after jobs in the camp. In the end, despite the strictest, severest, and most drastic orders from Moscow, prisoners’ comfort, hygiene, and health were completely dependent on local whims and circumstances.

  Thus was another aspect of ordinary life turned inside out, turned from a simple pleasure into what Shalamov calls “a negative event, a burden in the convict’s life . . . a testimony of that shift of values which is the main quality that the camp instills in its inmates ...” 108

  STOLOVAYA: THE DINING HALL

  The vast Gulag literature contains many varied descriptions of camps, and reflects the experiences of a wide range of personalities. But one aspect of camp life remains consistent from camp to camp, from year to year, from memoir to memoir: the descriptions of the balanda, the soup that prisoners were served once or sometimes twice a day.

  Universally, former prisoners agree that the taste of the daily or twice-daily half-liter of prison soup was revolting; its consistency was watery, and its contents were suspect. Galina Levinson wrote that it was made “from spoiled cabbage and potatoes, sometimes with a piece of pig fat, sometimes with herring heads.”109 Barbara Armonas remembered soup made from “fish or animal lungs and a few potatoes.”110 Leonid Sitko described the soup as “never having any meat in it at all.”111

  Another prisoner remembered soup made from dog meat, which one of his co-workers, a Frenchman, could not eat: “a man from Western countries is not always able to cross a psychological barrier, even when he is starving,” he concluded.112 Even Lazar Kogan, the boss of Dmitlag, once complained that “Some cooks act as if they were not preparing Soviet meals, but rather pig slops. Thanks to this attitude, the food they prepare is unsuitable, and often tasteless and bland.”113

  Hunger was a powerful motivator nevertheless: the soup might have been inedible under normal circumstances, but in the camps, where most people were always hungry, prisoners ate it with relish. Nor was their hunger accidental: prisoners were kept hungry, because regulation of prisoners’ food was, after regulation of prisoners’ time and living space, the camp administration’s most important tool of control.

  For that reason, the distribution of food to prisoners in camps grew into quite an elaborate science. The exact norms for particular categories of prisoners and camp workers were set in Moscow, and frequently changed. The Gulag administration constantly fine-tuned its figures, calculating and recalculating the minimum quantity of food necessary for prisoners to continue working. New orders listing ration levels were issued to camp commanders with great frequency. These ultimately became long, complex documents, written in heavy, bureaucratic language.

  Typical, for example, was the Gulag administration’s order on rations, issued on October 30, 1944. The orders stipulated one “guaranteed” or basic norm for most prisoners: 550 grams of bread per day, 8 grams of sugar, and a collection of other products theoretically intended for use in the balanda, the midday soup, and in the kasha, or “porridge,” served for breakfast; and supper: 75 grams of buckwheat or noodles, 15 grams of meat or meat products, 55 grams of fish or fish products, 10 grams of fat, 500 grams of potato or vegetable, 15 grams of salt, and 2 grams of “surrogate tea.”

  To this list of products, some notes were appended. Camp commanders were instructed to lower the bread ration of those prisoners meeting only 75 percent of the norm by 50 grams, and for those meeting only 50 percent of the norm by 100 grams. Those overfulfilling the plan, on the other hand, received an extra 50 grams of buckwheat, 25 grams of meat, and 25 grams of fish, among other things.114

  By comparison, camp guards in 1942—a much hungrier year throughout the USSR—were meant to receive 700 grams of bread, nearly a kilo of fresh vegetables, and 75 grams of meat, with special supplements for those living high above sea level.115 Prisoners working in the sharashki during the war were even better fed, receiving, in theory, 800 grams of bread and 50 grams of meat as opposed to the 15 granted to normal prisoners. In addition, they received fifteen cigarettes per day, and matches. 116 Pregnant women, juvenile prisoners, prisoners of war, free workers, and children resident in camp nurseries received slightly better rations. 117

  Some camps experimented with even finer tuning. In July 1933, Dmitlag issued an order listing different rations for prisoners who fulfilled up to 79 percent of the norm; 80 to 89 percent of the norm; 90 to 99 percent of the norm; 100 to 109 percent of the norm; 110 to 124 percent of the norm; and 125 percent and higher.118

  As one might imagine, the need to distribute these precise amounts of food to the right people in the right quantities—quantities which sometimes varied daily—required a vast bureaucracy, and many camps found it difficult to cope. They had to keep whole files full of instructions on hand, enumerating which prisoners in which situations were to receive what. Even the smallest lagpunkts kept copious records, listing the daily normfulfillments of each prisoner, and the amount of food due as a result. In the small lagpunkt of Kedrovyi Shor, for example—a collective farm division of Intlag—there were, in 1943, at least thirteen different food norms. The camp accountant—probably a prisoner—had to determine which norm each of the camp’s 1,000 inmates should receive. On long sheets of paper, he first drew out lines by hand, in pencil, and then added the names and numbers, in pen, covering page after page after page with his calculations. 119

  In larger camps, the bureaucracy was even worse. The Gulag’s former chief accountant, A. S. Narinsky, has described how the administrators of one camp, engaged in building one of the far northern railway lines, hit on the idea of distributing food tickets to prisoners, in order to ensure that they received the correct rations every day. But even getting hold of tickets was difficult in a system plagued by chronic paper shortages. Unable to find a better solution, they decided to use bus tickets, which took three days to arrive. This problem “constantly threatened to disorganize the entire feeding system.”120

  Transporting food in winter to distant lagpunkts was also a problem, particularly for those camps without their own bakeries. “Even bread which was still warm,” writes Narinsky, “when transported in a goods car for 400 kilometers in 50 degrees of frost became so frozen that it was unusable not only for human consumption, but even for fuel.”121 Despite the distribution of complex instructions for storing the scant vegetables and potatoes in the north during the winter, large quantities froze and became inedible. In the summer, by contrast, meat and fish went bad, and other foods spoiled. Badly managed warehouses burned to the ground, or filled with rats.122

  Many camps founded their own kolkhoz, or collective farm, or dairy lagpunkts, but these too often worked badly. One report on a camp kolkhoz listed, among its other problems, the lack of technically trained personnel, the lack of spare parts for the tractor, the lack of a barn for the dairy cattle, and the lack of preparation for the harvest season. 123

  As a result, prisoners were almost always vitamin deficient, even when they were not actually starving, a problem the camp officials took more or less seriously. In the absence of actual vitamin tablets, many forced prisoners to drink khvoya, a foul-tasting brew made out of pine needles and of dubious efficacy.124 By way of comparison, the norms for “officers of the armed forces” expressly stipulated vitamin C and dried fruit to compensate for the l
ack of vitamins in the regular rations. Generals and admirals were, in addition, officially able to receive cheese, caviar, canned fish, and eggs.125

  Even the very process of handing out soup, with or without vitamins, could be difficult in the cold of a far northern winter, particularly if it was being served at noon, at the work site. In 1939, a Kolyma doctor actually filed a formal complaint to the camp boss, pointing out that prisoners were being made to eat their food outdoors, and that it froze while it was being eaten.126 Overcrowding was a problem for food distribution too: one prisoner remembered that in the lagpunkt adjacent to the Maldyak mine in Magadan, there was one serving window for more than 700 people. 127

  Food distribution could also be disrupted by events outside the camps: during the Second World War, for example, it often ceased altogether. The worst years were 1942 and 1943, when much of the western USSR was occupied by German troops, and much of the rest of the country was preoccupied fighting them. Hunger was rife across the country—and the Gulag was not a high priority. Vladimir Petrov, a prisoner in Kolyma, recalls a period of five days without any food deliveries in his camp: “real famine set in at the mine. Five thousand men did not have a piece of bread.”

  Cutlery and crockery were constantly lacking too. Petrov, again, writes that “soup still warm when received would become covered with ice during the period of time one man would wait for a spoon from another who had finished with one. This probably explained why the majority of the men preferred to eat without spoons.”128 Another prisoner believed that she had remained alive because she “traded bread for a half-liter enamel bowl . . . If you have your own bowl, you get the first portions—and the fat is all on the top. The others have to wait until your bowl is free. You eat, then give it to another, who gives it to another . . .”129

  In the Camp Kitchen: prisoners lining up for soup—a drawing by Ivan Sykahnov, Temirtau, 1935–1937

  Other prisoners made their own bowls and cutlery out of wood. The small museum housed in the headquarters of the Memorial Society in Moscow displays a number of these strangely moving items.130 As ever, the central Gulag administration was fully aware of these shortages, and occasionally tried to do something about them: the authorities at one point complimented one camp for making clever use of its leftover tin cans for precisely this purpose.131 But even when crockery and cutlery existed, there was often no way to clean it: one Dmitlag order “categorically” forbade camp cooks from distributing food in dirty dishes.132

  For all of these reasons, the food ration regulations issued in Moscow— already calculated to the minimum level required for survival—are not a reliable guide to what prisoners actually ate. Nor do we need to rely solely on prisoners’ memoirs to know that Soviet camp inmates were very hungry. The Gulag itself conducted periodic inspections of its camps, and kept records of what prisoners were actually eating, as opposed to what they were supposed to be eating. Again, the surreal gap between the neat lists of food rations drawn up in Moscow and the inspectors’ reports is startling.

  The investigation of the camp at Volgostroi in 1942, for example, noted that at one lagpunkt, there were eighty cases of pellagra, a disease of malnutrition: “people are dying of starvation,” the report noted bluntly. At Siblag, a large camp in western Siberia, a Soviet deputy prosecutor found that in the first quarter of 1941, food norms had been “systematically violated: meat, fish, and fats are distributed extremely rarely . . . sugar is not distributed at all.” In the Sverdlovsk region in 1942, the food in camps contained “no fats, no fish or meat, and often no vegetables.” In Vyatlag in 1942, “the food in July was poor, nearly inedible, and lacking in vitamins. This is because of the lack of fats, meat, fish, potatoes . . . all of the food is based on flour and grain products.”133

  Some prisoners, it seems, were deprived of food because the camp had not received the right deliveries. This was a permanent problem: in Kedrovyi Shor, the lagpunkt accountants kept a list of all food products which could be substituted for those that prisoners should have received but did not. These included not only cheese for milk, but also dried crackers for bread, wild mushrooms for meat, and wild berries for sugar.134 It was hardly surprising that, as a result, the prisoners’ diet looked quite different from how it did on paper in Moscow. An inspection of Birlag in 1940 determined that “the entire lunch for working zeks consists of water, plus 130 grams of grain, and that the second course is black bread, about 100 grams. For breakfast and supper they reheat the same sort of soup.” In conversation with the camp cook, the inspector was also told that the “theoretical norms are never fulfilled,” that there were no deliveries of fish, meat, vegetables, or fats. The camp, concluded the report, “doesn’t have money to buy food products or clothing . . . and without money not one supply organization wants to cooperate.” More than 500 cases of scurvy were reported as a result.135

  Just as frequently, however, food arrived in a camp only to be stolen immediately. Thieving took place at just about every level. Usually, food was stolen while it was being prepared, by those working in the kitchen or food storage facilities. For that reason, prisoners sought out jobs which gave them access to food—cooking, dishwashing, work in storage warehouses— in order to be able to steal. Evgeniya Ginzburg was once “saved” by a job washing dishes in the men’s dining hall. Not only was she able to eat “real meat broth and excellent dumplings fried in sunflower-seed oil,” but she also found that other prisoners stood in awe of her. Speaking to her, one man’s voice trembled, “from a mixture of acute envy and humble adoration of anyone who occupied such an exalted position in life—‘where the food is!’”136

  Even jobs harvesting crops on camp farms or peeling potatoes were very desirable, and prisoners paid bribes to obtain them, simply to be in a position to steal food. Later in her camp career, Ginzburg also worked tending the chickens that would be eaten by the camp bosses. She and her co-worker took full advantage of the situation: “we smothered the camp semolina with cod-liver oil that we ‘borrowed’ from the chickens. We boiled up oatmeal jelly. We also had three eggs daily between us—one in the soup, and one each to be eaten raw as a special gastronomic treat. (We took no more because we dared not lower the egg productivity index, by which our work was judged.)”137

  Theft also took place on a much grander scale, particularly in the camp towns of the far north, where food shortages among free workers and camp guards as well as prisoners made it worth everybody’s while to steal. Every camp filed reports every year of lost property. Those of the Kedrovyi Shor lagpunkt show losses of goods and money of more than 20,000 rubles for the fourth quarter of 1944 alone.138

  On a national scale, the numbers went much higher. A prosecutors’ office report for 1947, for example, lists many cases of theft, among them one in Vyatlag, where twelve people, including the head of the camp warehouse, helped themselves to 170,000 rubles worth of food products and vegetables. Another report of that year calculated that in thirty-four camps investigated in the second quarter of 1946 alone, a total of 70,000 kilograms of bread had been stolen, along with 132,000 kilograms of potatoes and 17,000 kilograms of meat. The inspector writing the report concluded that “The complicated system of feeding prisoners creates the conditions for the easy theft of bread and other products.” He also blamed the “system of feeding free workers with ration cards,” as well as the internal camp inspection teams, whose members were thoroughly corrupt too. 139

  In some cases the inspection system did make an impact: some camps, fearing trouble, made an effort to fulfill the letter if not the spirit of the law. One camp inmate, for example, received a half-glass of sugar at the end of each month, which he ate raw. This was how his camp’s boss ensured he received the amount stipulated by the Moscow bureaucracy. He and his fellow prisoners celebrated the occasion as “sugar day.”140

  In the end, not everybody starved. For even if most food products disappeared before they made it into the soup, one staple food was usually available: bread. Like soup, t
he bread of the Gulag has been described many times. Sometimes it is remembered as badly baked: one prisoner remembered it being so hard it “resembled a brick,” and so small it could be eaten “in two bites.”141 Another wrote that it was “literally ‘black’ bread because the bran left in it colored the bread black and made the texture coarse.” He also noted that it was baked with a great deal of water, so that it was “wet and weighed heavy, so that in actual fact we received less than our allotted 700 grams.” 142

  Others recalled that prisoners fought over the drier, less watery ends of the loaves.143 In Varlam Shalamov’s short story “Cherry Brandy,” a fictive description of the death of Osip Mandelstam, the poet’s approaching death is signaled by his loss of interest in such matters: “He no longer watched for the heel of the loaf or cried when he didn’t get it. He didn’t stuff the bread into his mouth with trembling fingers.” 144

  In the hungrier camps, in the hungrier years, bread took on an almost sacred status, and a special etiquette grew up around its consumption. While camp thieves stole almost everything else with impunity, for example, the theft of bread was considered particularly heinous and unforgivable. Vladimir Petrov found on his long train journey to Kolyma that “thieving was permitted and could be applied to anything within the thief’s capacity and luck, but there was one exception—bread. Bread was sacred and inviolable, regardless of any distinctions in the population of the car.” Petrov had in fact been chosen as the starosta of the car, and in that capacity was charged with beating up a petty thief who had stolen bread. He duly did so.145 Thomas Sgovio also wrote that the unwritten law of the camp criminals in Kolyma was: “Steal anything—excepting the holy bread portion.” He too had “seen more than one prisoner beaten to death for violating the sacred tradition.”146 Similarly, Kazimierz Zarod remembered that