POCHTOVYI YASHCHIK: POST OFFICE BOX
The SHIZO was the ultimate punishment of the penal system. But the Gulag could also provide its inmates with rewards too: carrots as well as sticks. For along with a prisoner’s food, his ability to sleep, and his place of work, the camp also controlled his access to the outside world. Year in and year out, Gulag administrators in Moscow would send out instructions, dictating how many letters, packages, and money transfers prisoners could receive, as well as when and how relatives could visit them from the outside.
Like the instructions on punishment cells, rules governing outside contacts also fluctuated over time. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that, generally speaking, outside contacts grew more limited over time. The instructions outlining the prison regime of 1930, for example, state simply that prisoners are allowed to write and receive an unlimited number of letters and packages. Meetings with relatives are also allowed, with no particular restrictions, although the number of them—not stated in the instructions—would depend upon the good behavior of prisoners.17
By 1939, however, the instructions were far more detailed. They stated specifically that only those prisoners who fulfilled the production norm were allowed to meet with their relatives, and then only once every six months. Those who overfulfilled the norm were allowed one meeting per month. Packages also became more limited: prisoners were allowed only one per month, and prisoners convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes could receive a package only once every three months.18
Indeed, by 1939, a whole raft of rules governing the sending and receiving of letters had also sprung into existence. Some political prisoners could receive letters once a month, others only once every three months. Camp censors also explicitly forbade prisoners to write about certain subjects: they could not mention the number of prisoners in their camp, discuss details of the camp regime, name the camp guards, or say what sort of work the camp carried out. Letters which included such details were not only confiscated by camp censors but also carefully noted in the prisoner’s file—presumably because they were evidence of “spying.”19
All of these regulations were continually changed, amended, and adapted to circumstances. During the war years, for example, all limitations on the number of food parcels were lifted: camp authorities seem to have hoped, simply, that relatives would help feed the prisoners, a task the NKVD found extremely difficult at that time. After the war, on the other hand, prisoners in special disciplinary camps for violent criminals, as well as those in the special camps for political prisoners, saw their rights to contact with the outside world shrink once again. They were allowed to write only four times a year, and could receive letters only from close family members, meaning parents, sibling, spouses, and children.20
Precisely because the regulations were so varied and complicated, and because they changed with great frequency, contacts with the outside world were in reality left—once again—to the whim of the camp commanders. Letters and packages certainly never reached prisoners in punishment cells, punishment barracks, or punishment lagpunkts. Nor did they reach prisoners whom the camp authorities disliked, for whatever reason. Moreover, there were camps which were simply too isolated, and therefore did not receive any mail.21 There were camps so disorganized that they did not bother to distribute mail. Of one camp, a disgusted NKVD inspector wrote that “packages, letters, and money orders are not distributed to prisoners, but rather lie by the thousands in warehouses and outposts.”22 In many camps, letters were received months late, if at all. Many prisoners realized only years later how many of their letters and packages had gone missing. Whether stolen or lost, no one could say. Conversely, prisoners who had been strictly forbidden from receiving letters sometimes received them anyway, despite the best efforts of the camp administration.23
On the other hand, some camp censors not only did their duty and distributed letters, they even allowed some missives to pass unopened as well. Dmitri Bystroletov remembered one—a “young komsomolka,” a member of the young communist league—who gave prisoners their letters unopened and uncensored: “She risked not just a piece of bread, but freedom: for that, they would give her a ten-year sentence.”24
There were, of course, ways around both the censorship of letters and the restrictions on their numbers. Anna Rozina once received a letter from her husband which had been baked inside a cake: by the time it reached her, he had already been executed. She also saw letters sewn into the clothes of prisoners being freed from the camp, or smuggled to the outside world tucked into the soles of shoes.25 In one light-regime camp, Barbara Armonas smuggled letters via prisoners who worked unguarded outside the zona. 26
General Gorbatov also describes how he sent an uncensored letter to his wife from inside a transport train, using a method mentioned by many others. First, he bought a pencil stub from one of the criminal prisoners:
I gave the convict the tobacco, took the pencil from him and, as the train moved off again, wrote a letter on the cigarette paper, numbering each sheet. Next I made an envelope of the makhorka wrapper and stuck it down with moistened bread. So that my letter should not be carried by the wind into the bushes beside the railway, I weighted it with a crust of bread which I tied on with threads pulled from my towel. Between the envelope and the crust I slipped a ruble note and four cigarette papers each with the message: would the finder of this envelope please stick on a stamp and post it. I sidled up to the window of our truck just as we were going through a big station and let the letter drop...27
Not long afterward, his wife received it.
Some limitations on letter-writing were not mentioned in the instructions. It was all very well to be allowed to write, for example—but it was not always so easy to find something to write with or to write on, as Bystroletov remembered: “Paper in the camp is an object of great value, because it is badly needed by prisoners, but impossible to get: what does the cry ‘Today is a mail day! Hand in your letters!’ mean if there is nothing on which to write, if only a few lucky ones can write, and the rest must lie gloomily on their bunks?”28
One prisoner recalled trading bread in exchange for two pages ripped out of The Question of Leninism, a book by Stalin. He wrote a letter to his family between the lines.29 Even the camp administrators, in smaller lagpunkts, had to think up creative solutions. In Kedrovyi Shor, one camp accountant used old wallpaper for official documents. 30
The rules surrounding packages were even more complex. The instructions sent to every camp commander expressly stipulated that prisoners open all packages in the presence of a guard, who could then confiscate any forbidden item.31 In fact, the receipt of a package was often accompanied by an entire ceremony. First, the prisoner was alerted of his good fortune. Then, guards escorted him into the storeroom, where the prisoners’ personal belongings were kept under lock and key. After he opened the package, the guards would cut or pry open every single item—every onion, every sausage—to ensure that it did not contain secret messages, potential weapons, or money. If everything passed the inspection, the prisoner would then be allowed to take something from the package. The rest would be left in the warehouse, pending his next permitted visit. Prisoners who were being held in the SHIZO or who were otherwise in disgrace would, of course, be forbidden access to the food products sent to them from home.
There were variations on this system. One prisoner soon realized that if he left his packages in the storeroom, bits of them would quickly disappear, stolen by the guards. He therefore found a way to hang a bottle full of butter from his belt, hiding it in his trousers: “Warmed by my body, it was always liquid.” In the evening, he spread the butter on his bread.32 Dmitri Bystroletov was in a lagpunkt which did not have a storeroom at all, and had to be even more creative:
I worked then in the tundra, on a factory construction site, and lived in a workers’ barracks where it was impossible to leave anything, and impossible to take anything to the work site: the soldiers standing at the entrance to the camp wou
ld confiscate anything they found and eat it themselves, and anything left behind would be stolen and eaten by the dnevalni [the prisoner assigned to clean and guard the barracks]. Everything had to be eaten at once. I took a nail out of the barrack bunks, knocked two holes in a can of condensed milk, and underneath my blanket began to sip out of it. My exhaustion was so great, however, that I fell asleep, and the priceless liquid dripped uselessly on to the dirty straw mattress.33
There were also complicated moral issues surrounding packages, since not everybody received them. Should they be shared or not? And, if so, was it better to share only with friends, or with potential protectors? In prison, it had been possible to organize “Committees of the Poor,” but in camp this was impossible. Some gave to everybody, out of kindness or the desire to spread goodwill. Others gave only to small circles of friends. And sometimes, as one prisoner remembered, “it happened that one ate sweet biscuits in bed at night, as it was unpleasant to eat in front of others.” 34
During the hardest war years, in the most difficult northern camps, packages could determine the difference between life and death. One memoirist, the actor Georgy Zhenov, claims literally to have been saved by two packages. His mother mailed them from Leningrad in 1940, and he received them three years later, “at the most critical moment, when I, hungry, having lost all hope, was slowly dying of scurvy . . .”
At that time, Zhenov was working in the camp bathhouse in a Kolyma lagpunkt, being too weak to work in the forest. Upon hearing that he had received the two packages, he at first did not believe it. Then, convinced that it was true, he asked the chief bath attendant for permission to walk the 6 miles to the central camp administrative headquarters where the storeroom was located. After two and a half hours, he turned back: “I had with difficulty traveled a kilometer.” Then, seeing a group of camp bosses on a sleigh, “a fantastic thought crossed my mind: what if I asked to go with them?” They said yes—and what happened next was “as if in a dream.” Zhenov got on the sleigh, rode the 6 miles, got off the sleigh with great difficulty, helped by the NKVD bosses, entered the storeroom, claimed his three-year-old packages, and opened them up:
Everything that had been put into the package: sugar, sausage, lard, candy, onions, garlic, cookies, crackers, cigarettes, chocolate, along with the wrapping paper in which each thing had been packed, during the three years of following me from address to address, had become mixed up, as if in a washing machine, turning finally into one hard mass with the sweet smell of decay, mold, tobacco, and the perfume of candy . . .
I went to the table, took a knife to a piece of it, and in front of everyone, almost not chewing, hastily gulped, not distinguishing taste or smell, fearing, in a word, that someone would interrupt or take it away from me . . .35
DOM SVIDANII: THE HOUSE OF MEETINGS
Letters and packages did not, however, evoke the greatest emotion, or the greatest agony, among prisoners. Far more wrenching were a prisoner’s actual meetings with his relatives, usually a spouse or mother. Only prisoners who had both fulfilled the norm and obediently followed the rules of the camp were allowed such meetings: official documents openly described them as a reward for “good, conscientious, and high-tempo work.”36 And the promise of a visit from a relative was indeed an extremely powerful motivation for good behavior.
Not all prisoners were in a position to receive visitors, of course. For one, their families had to be mentally courageous enough to maintain contact with their “enemy” relative. The journey to Kolyma, Vorkuta, Norilsk, or Kazakhstan, even traveling as a free citizen, required physical bravery as well. Not only would a visitor have to suffer a long train journey to a distant, primitive city, but he would also then have to walk, or hitch a bumpy ride in the back of a truck, to the lagpunkt. After that, the visitor might have to wait for several days or longer, begging sneering camp commanders for permission to see their prisoner relative—permission which might well be refused, for no reason at all. Afterward, they faced another long journey home, by the same tedious route.
Leaving aside the physical hardships, the psychological strain of these meetings could be terrible too. The wives arriving to see their husbands, wrote Herling, “feel the boundless suffering of the prisoner, without fully understanding it, or being in any way able to help; the long years of separation have killed much of their feeling for their husbands . . . the camp, distant and barred off from the visitor, yet casts its shadowy menace upon them. They are not prisoners, but they are related to these enemies of the people...”37
Nor were wives alone in their mixed feelings. One prisoner tells the story of a woman who had brought her two-year-old daughter to see her father. Upon arrival, she told her to “go and kiss Daddy.” The girl ran up to the guard and kissed him on the neck.38 The daughter of the Soviet rocket scientist Sergei Korolev still remembers being taken to see her father while he was in a sharashka. She had been told he was away, fighting with the air force. Entering the prison, she was surprised at the small size of the prison yard. Where, she asked her mother, did Daddy’s plane land?39
In prisons—and in certain camps as well—such meetings were invariably brief, and usually took place in the presence of a guard, a rule which also created enormous strain. “I wanted to speak, to speak a great deal, to tell of everything that had happened that year,” remembered one prisoner of the single meeting he was granted with his mother. Not only was it hard to find words, but “if one did begin to speak, to describe something, the watchful guard would interrupt you: ‘Not allowed!’” 40
More tragic still is the story told by Bystroletov, who was granted a series of meetings with his wife in 1941—all with a guard present. She had come from Moscow to say goodbye: since his arrest, she had contracted tuberculosis, and was near death. Saying her final farewell, she reached up and touched him on the neck, which was technically not allowed. Visitors were forbidden physical contact with the prisoners. The guard roughly pushed her arm away, and she fell to the floor, coughing blood. Bystroletov writes that he “lost his head” and began beating the guard, who began to bleed. He was saved from dire punishment by the war, which broke out that same day: in the ensuing chaos, his attack on the guard was forgotten. He never saw his wife again.41
Guards were not always present, however. Indeed, in the larger lagpunkts, in the bigger camps, prisoners were sometimes allowed meetings of several days’ length, without guards present. By the 1940s, these meetings usually took place in a designated “House of Meetings”—Dom Svidanii—a building especially constructed for that purpose on the edge of the camp. Herling describes one:
The house itself, seen from the road which led to the camp from the village, made a pleasant impression. It was built of rough pine beams, the gaps filled in with oakum, the roof was laid with good tiling . . . The door outside the zone, which could be used only by the free visitors, was reached by a few solid wooden steps; cotton curtains hung in the windows, and long window-boxes planted with flowers stood by the window sills. Every room was furnished with two neatly made beds, a large table, two benches, a basin and a water-jug, a clothes-cupboard and an iron stove; there was even a lampshade over the electric-light bulb. What more could a prisoner, who had lived for years on a common bunk in a dirty barrack, desire of this model petit bourgeois dwelling? Our dreams of life at liberty were based on that room.42
And yet—those who had anxiously anticipated that “dream of liberty” often felt far worse when the meeting turned out badly, which it often did. Fearing they would remain behind barbed wire for life, some prisoners greeted their relatives by telling them not to come again. “You forget this place,” one told his brother, who had traveled for many days in freezing temperatures to meet him for twenty minutes: “It is more important to me that everything should be all right with you.” 43 Men meeting their wives for the first time in years suddenly found themselves beset with sexual anxiety, as Herling recalls:
Years of heavy labor and hunger had undermined their virility,
and now, before an intimate meeting with an almost strange woman, they felt, beside nervous excitement, helpless anger and despair. Several times I did hear men boasting of their prowess after a visit, but usually these matters were a cause for shame, and respected in silence by all prisoners . . . 44
Visiting wives had their own troubles to discuss. Usually, they had suffered a great deal from their husbands’ imprisonment. They could not find jobs, could not study, and often had to hide their marriages from inquisitive neighbors. Some arrived in order to announce their intention to divorce. In The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn recounts, with surprising sympathy, one such conversation, based on a real one he had with his own wife, Natasha. In the book, Nadya, the prisoner Gerasimovich’s wife, is on the verge of losing her job, her place in a student hostel, and the possibility of completing her thesis, all because her husband is a prisoner. Divorce, she knows, is the only way to “have a chance to live again”:
Nadya lowered her eyes. “I wanted to say—only you won’t take it to heart, will you?—you once said we ought to get divorced.” She said it very quietly . . .
Yes, there was a time when he had insisted on this. But now he was startled. Only at this moment did he notice that her wedding ring, which she had always worn, was not on her finger.
“Yes, of course,” he agreed, with every appearance of alacrity.
“Then you won’t be against it . . . if . . . I . . . have to . . . do it?” With a great effort she looked at him. Her eyes were very wide. The fine pinpoints of her grey pupils were alight with a plea for forgiveness and understanding. “It would be . . . pseudo,” she added, breathing the word rather than speaking it.45
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