Gulag

by Anne Applebaum

  The method employed was as follows. A man from the KVCh, a professional agitator with the mentality of a six-year-old child, would address the prisoners on the nobility of putting all their effort into work. He would tell them that noble people are patriots, that all patriots love Soviet Russia, the best country in the world for the working man, that Soviet citizens are proud to belong to such a country, etc. etc. for two solid hours—all this to an audience whose very skins bore witness to the absurdity and the hypocrisy of such statements. But the speaker is not upset by the cool reception and keeps on speaking. Finally he promises to all “shock” workers better pay, increased rations and improved conditions. The effect on those who are undergoing the discipline of hunger may be imagined.75

  A Polish deportee had the same reaction to a propaganda lecture he attended in a Siberian camp.

  For hours and hours the lecturer went on, trying to prove that God did not exist, that He was nothing but some bourgeois invention. We should consider ourselves lucky to have found ourselves among the Soviets, the most perfect country in the world. Here in the camp we should learn how to work and at last become decent people. From time to time he attempted to give us some education: so he told us that the “earth is round” and he was absolutely convinced we knew nothing about it, and that we were also ignorant of such things as for instance that Crete is “peninsular,” or that Roosevelt was some foreign minister. He imparted such truths as these with unshakeable confidence in our complete lack of knowledge, for how could we, brought up in a bourgeois state, expect to have the advantage of even the most elementary education . . . he stressed the point with satisfaction that we could not even dream of regaining our freedom, that Poland would never rise again . . .

  Alas for the poor lecturer, continued the Pole; his work was for naught: “The more he held forth about it, the more we rebelled inwardly, hoping against hope. Faces became set with determination.”76

  Another Pole, Gustav Herling, described his camp’s cultural activities as a “vestigial reminder of the regulations drawn up in Moscow in the days when the camps really were intended to be corrective, educational institutions. Gogol would have appreciated this blind obedience to an official fiction despite the general practice of the camp—it was like the education of ‘dead souls.’”77

  These views are not unique: they are found in the vast majority of memoirs, most of which either fail to mention the KVCh, or deride it. For that reason, it is difficult, when writing about the function of propaganda in the camps, to know how to rate its importance to the central administration. On the one hand, it can be reasonably argued (and many do) that camp propaganda, like all Soviet propaganda, was pure farce, that no one believed it, that it was produced by the camp administration purely in order to fool the prisoners in a rather juvenile and transparent manner.

  On the other hand, if the propaganda, the posters, and the political indoctrination sessions were completely farcical—and if no one believed in them at all—then why was so much real time and real money wasted on them? Within the records of the Gulag administration alone, there are hundreds and hundreds of documents testifying to the intensive work of the Cultural-Educational Department. In the first quarter of 1943, for example, at the height of the war, frantic telegrams were sent back and forth from the camps to Moscow, as camp commanders desperately tried to procure musical instruments for their prisoners. Meanwhile, the camps held a contest on the theme “The Great Motherland War of the Soviet People Against the German Fascist Occupiers”: fifty camp painters and eight sculptors participated. At this time of national labor shortages, the central organs also recommended that every camp employ a librarian, a film technician to show propaganda movies, and a kultorganizator, a prisoner assistant to the cultural instructor, who would help conduct the “battle” for cleanliness, raise the cultural level of prisoners, organize artistic activity—and help teach the prisoners to “correctly understand questions of contemporary politics.”78

  The camp cultural instructors also filed semi-annual or quarterly reports on their work, often listing their achievements in great detail. The KVCh instructor of Vosturallag, at the time a camp for 13,000 prisoners, sent one such report, for example, also in 1943. The twenty-one-page report begins with the admission that, in the first half of 1943, the camp’s industrial plan was “not fulfilled.” In the second half of that year, however, steps were taken. The Cultural-Educational Department had helped to “mobilize prisoners to fulfill and overfulfill the production tasks set by comrade Stalin,” to “return prisoners to health and prepare for winter,” and to “liquidate insufficiencies in cultural-educational work.”79 The camp KVCh chief then went on to list the methods he deployed. He notes grandly that in the second half of that year, 762 political speeches were given, attended by 70,000 prisoners (presumably, many attended more than once). At the same time, the KVCh held 444 political information sessions, attended by 82,400 prisoners; it printed 5,046 “wall newspapers,” read by 350,000 people; it put on 232 concerts and plays, showed 69 films, and organized 38 theatrical groups. One of the latter even wrote a song, proudly quoted in the report:

  Our brigade is friendly

  Our duty calls

  Our building site waits

  The Front needs our work.80

  One can attempt to come up with explanations for this enormous effort. Perhaps the Cultural-Educational Department functioned, within the Gulag bureaucracy, as the ultimate scapegoat: if the plan was not being fulfilled, it was not poor organization or malnutrition that were to blame, not stupidly cruel work policies or the lack of felt boots—but insufficient propaganda. Perhaps the system’s rigid bureaucracy was at fault: once the center had decreed there must be propaganda, everyone tried to fulfill the order without ever questioning its absurdity. Perhaps the Moscow leadership was so isolated from the camps that they really did believe that 444 political information sessions and 762 political speeches would make starving men and women work harder—although given the material also available to them in camp inspection reports, this seems unlikely.

  Or perhaps there is no good explanation. Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident who was later a prisoner himself, shrugged when I asked him about it. This paradox, he said, was what made the Gulag unique: “In our camps, you were expected not only to be a slave laborer, but to sing and smile while you worked as well. They didn’t just want to oppress us: they wanted us to thank them for it.”81

  Chapter 12

  PUNISHMENT AND REWARD

  He who has not been there will get his turn. He who has been there will never forget it.

  —Soviet proverb about prisons1

  SHIZO: PUNISHMENT CELLS

  Very few soviet concentration camps have survived intact into the present, even in ruined form. Nevertheless, it is a curious fact that quite a number of shtrafnye izolyhateri—“punishment isolaters,” or (using the inevitable acronym) SHIZO—are still standing. Nothing remains of lagpunkt No. 7 Ukhtpechlag—except its punishment block, now the workshop of an Armenian car mechanic. He has left the barred windows intact, hoping, he says, that “Solzhenitsyn will buy my building.” Nothing remains of the farming lagpunkt at Aizherom, Lokchimlag—except, again, its punishment block, now converted into a house inhabited by several families. One of the elderly women who lives there praises the solidity of one of the doors. It still has a large “Judas hole” in its center, through which guards once peered at the prisoners, and shoved them rations of bread.

  The longevity of punishment blocks testifies to the sturdiness of their construction. Often the only brick building in a wooden camp, the isolator was the zona within the zona. Within its walls ruled the rezhim within the rezhim. “A gloomy stone building,” is how one prisoner described the isolator in his camp: “external gates, internal gates, armed sentry posts all around.”2

  By the 1940s, Moscow had issued elaborate instructions, describing both the construction of punishment blocks and the rules for those condemned to live within th
em. Each lagpunkt—or group of lagpunkts , in the case of the smaller ones—had a punishment block, normally just outside the zona, or, if within it, “surrounded by an impenetrable fence,” at some distance from the other camp buildings. According to one prisoner, this stricture may not have been necessary, since many prisoners tried to avoid the lagpunkt punishment cell by “walking round it at a distance, not even looking in the direction of those grey stone walls, pierced by openings which seemed to breathe out a cold dark emptiness.” 3

  Each camp complex was also meant to have a central punishment block near its headquarters, be it Magadan or Vorkuta or Norilsk. The central block was in fact often a very large prison which, the rules stated, “should be set up in the place which is farthest away from populated regions and from transport routes, should be well-guarded, and guaranteed strict isolation. The guards should consist of only the most trusted, disciplined, and experienced riflemen, selected from among the free workers.” These central prisons contained both communal cells and solitary cells. The latter were to be housed in a separate, special building, and were reserved for the “particularly malicious elements.” Prisoners kept in isolation were not taken out to work. In addition, they were forbidden any sort of exercise, tobacco, paper, and matches. This was on top of the “ordinary” restrictions applying to those being kept in the group cells: no letters, no packages, no meetings with relatives.4

  On the face of it, the existence of punishment cells appears to contradict the general economic principles upon which the Gulag was founded. To maintain special buildings and extra guards was expensive. To keep prisoners away from work was wasteful. Yet from the camp administration’s point of view, the cells were not a form of supplementary torture, but rather an integral part of the vast effort to make prisoners work harder. Along with reduced food norms, the punishment regime was designed to frighten otkazchiki— those who refused to work—as well as to punish those caught committing a camp crime, such as murder, or attempting escape.

  Because these two types of crimes tended to be committed by different types of prisoners, the punishment cells had, in some camps, a peculiar atmosphere. On the one hand, they were full of professional thieves, who were more likely to be murderers and escapees. Over time, however, another category of prisoner also began to fill up the punishment cells: the male religious prisoners, as well as the monashki, the religious “nuns,” who also refused on principle to work for the Soviet Satan. Aino Kuusinen, for example, was in a Potma lagpunkt whose commander built a special punishment barracks for a group of deeply religious women who “refused to work in the fields and spent their time praying aloud and singing hymns.” The women were not fed with the other prisoners, but instead received punishment rations in their own barracks. Armed guards escorted them twice daily to the latrine: “From time to time the commandant would visit their quarters with a whip, and the hut resounded with shrieks of pain: the women were usually stripped before being beaten, but no cruelty could dissuade them from their habits of praying and fasting.” They were eventually taken away. Kuusinen believed they had been shot.5

  Other sorts of chronic “refusers” found their way into punishment cells as well. Indeed, the very existence of the cells presented prisoners with a choice. They could either work—or they could sit for a few days in the cells, getting by on short rations, suffering from the cold and the discomfort, but not exhausting themselves in the forests. Lev Razgon recounts the story of Count Tyszkiewicz, a Polish aristocrat who, finding himself in a Siberian logging camp, worked out that he would not survive on the rations supplied and simply refused to work. He reckoned he would thereby save his strength, even if he received only the punishment ration.

  Every morning before the prisoners were marched out of the camp to work and the columns of zeks were lined up in the yard, two warders would fetch Tyszkiewicz from the punishment cell. Grey stubble covered his face and shaven head, and he was dressed in the remnants of an old overcoat and puttees. The camp security officer would begin his daily educational exercise, “Well you f——g Count, you stupid f——g f—k, are you going to work or not?”

  “No, sir, I cannot work,” the count would reply in an iron-firm voice.

  “Oh so you can’t, you f—k!” The security officer would publicly explain to the count what he thought of him and of his close and distant relations, and what he would do to him in the very near future. This daily spectacle was a source of general satisfaction to the camp’s other inmates.6

  But although Razgon tells the story with humor, there were high risks to such a strategy, for the punishment regime was not designed to be pleasant. Officially, the daily punishment rations for prisoners who had failed to fulfill the norm consisted of 300 grams of “black rye bread,” 5 grams of flour, 25 grams of buckwheat or macaroni, 27 grams of meat, and 170 grams of potato. Although these are tiny amounts of food, those resident in punishment cells received even less: 300 grams of “black rye bread” a day, with hot water, and “hot liquid food”—soup, that is—only once every three days.7

  For most prisoners, though, the greatest unpleasantness of the punishment regime lay not in its physical hardship—the isolated building, the poor food—but in the extra torments added at the whim of the local camp command. The communal bunks might, for example, be replaced by a simple bench. Or the bread might be baked using unprocessed wheat. Or the “hot liquid food” might be very thin indeed. Janusz Bardach was put in a punishment cell whose floor was covered with water, and whose walls were wet and moldy:

  My underwear and undershirt were already damp, and I was shivering. My neck and shoulders got stiff and cramped. The soggy raw wood was decaying, especially on the edges of the bench . . . the bench was so narrow I could not lie on my back, and when I lay on my side, my legs hung over the edge; I had to keep them bent all the time. It was difficult to decide which side to lie on—on one side my face was pressed up against the slimy wall; on the other, my back became damp.8

  Damp was common, as was cold. Although the rules stated that the temperature in punishment cells should not be lower than 60 degrees Fahrenheit, the heating was often neglected. Gustav Herling remembered that in his punishment isolator “the windows in the small cells had neither glass nor even a board over them, so that the temperature was never higher than outside.” He describes other ways in which the cells were designed for discomfort:

  My cell was so low that I could touch the ceiling with my hand . . . it was impossible to sit on the upper bunk without bending one’s back against the ceiling, and the lower one could only be entered with the movement of a diver, head first, and left by pushing one’s body away from the wood, like a swimmer in a sandbank. The distance between the edge of the bunk and the bucket by the door was less than half a normal step. 9

  Camp commanders could also decide whether to allow a prisoner to wear clothes in the cell—many were kept in their underwear—and whether or not to send him to work. If he did not work, then he would be kept in all day in the cold with no exercise. If he did work, then he would be very hungry. Nadezhda Ulyanovskaya was kept on punishment rations for a month, yet made to work. “I constantly wanted to eat,” she wrote. “I began talking only about food.”10 Because of these often unexpected twists to the punishment regime, prisoners dreaded being sent to the cells. “Prisoners there wept like children, promising good behavior only to get out,” wrote Herling.11

  Within the larger camp complexes, there were different sorts of torment: not just punishment cells, but punishment barracks and even entire punishment lagpunkts. Dmitlag, the camp which built the Moscow–Volga Canal, set up a “strict-regime lagpunkt” in 1933 for “work-refusers, escapers, thieves, and so on.” To ensure security, the camp bosses dictated that the new lagpunkt should have two layers of barbed wire surrounding it instead of one; that extra convoy guards should lead prisoners to work; and that prisoners should do hard physical labor on work sites from which it was difficult to escape.12

  At about the same tim
e, Dalstroi set up a punishment lagpunkt , which became, by the late 1930s, one of the most notorious in the Gulag: Serpantinnaya—or Serpantinka—located in the hills far to the north of Magadan. Carefully placed in order to receive very little sunlight, colder and darker than the rest of the camps in the valley (which were already cold and dark for much of the year), Dalstroi’s punishment camp was more heavily fortified than other lagpunkts, and also served as an execution site in 1937 and 1938. Its very name was used to frighten prisoners, who equated a sentence to Serpantinka with a sentence to death.13 One of the very few survivors of Serpantinka described the barracks as “so overcrowded that prisoners took turns sitting on the floor while everyone else remained standing. In the mornings, the door would open, and the names of ten or twelve prisoners would be called. No one would answer. The first people that came to hand were then dragged out and shot.”14

  In fact, little is known of Serpantinka, largely because so few people emerged to describe it. Even less is known about punishment lagpunkts set up in other camps, such as Iskitim, for example, the punishment lagpunkt of the Siblag complex, which was built around a limestone quarry. Prisoners worked there without machines or equipment, digging limestone by hand. Sooner or later, the dust killed many of them, through lung disease and other respiratory ailments.15 Anna Larina, Bukharin’s young wife, was briefly incarcerated there. Most of Iskitim’s other prisoners—and Iskitim’s dead—remain anonymous.16

  They have not, however, been forgotten altogether. So powerfully did the suffering of the prisoners there work on the imagination of the local people of Iskitim that, many decades later, the appearance of a new freshwater spring on a hill just outside the former camp was greeted as a miracle. Because the gully below the spring was, according to local legend, the site of mass prisoner executions, they believed the sacred water was God’s way of remembering them. On a still, freezing day at the end of the Siberian winter, with a meter of snow still covering the ground, I watched parties of the faithful trooping up the hill to the spring, filling their plastic cups and bottles with the clean water, sipping it reverently—and occasionally glancing, solemnly, into the gully below.