I came to the quarry where they were digging. The guards offered to accompany me, but I said that was unnecessary, and I went alone. It was midnight. I came up to the team, and told them, “I need to fulfill the plan, bricks are needed at the front.”
They said, “Alla Borisovna, we don’t care about the plan for bricks, give us our bread ration.”
I said, “You’ll get the ration, if you fulfill the plan.”
They said, “We’ll throw you in a hole now, dig you under and no one will find you.”
I stood there quietly, and said, “You won’t dig me under. I promise you that if today, by twelve noon, you fulfill the norm, I’ll bring you some tobacco.” Tobacco there was worth more than gold or diamonds . . .
Shister had, she said, simply saved her own allotted tobacco rations, as she herself did not smoke, and happily handed them over to her charges. 22
There were also those, of course, who recognized the material advantage to be gained in doing work. Some prisoners tried, simply, to do what was expected of them: to beat the norm, to attain the status of shock-worker, to receive better rations. Vladimir Petrov arrived at a Kolyma lagpunkt and immediately perceived that the inhabitants of the “Stakhanovite tent,” who worked harder than the other prisoners, possessed all of the attributes that the dokhodyagi did not:
They were incomparably cleaner. Even in the extremely harsh conditions of their life in camp they had managed to wash their faces every day, and when they could not get water they had used snow. They were better dressed, too . . . [and] more self-possessed. They did not crowd about the stoves, but sat on their bunks either doing something or talking about their affairs. Even from the outside their tent looked different.
Petrov begged to join their brigade, whose members received 1 kilo of bread every day. Once in, however, he could not keep up with the pace of work. He was expelled from the brigade, which could tolerate no weakness. 23 Nor was his experience atypical, as Herling wrote:
The fascination of the norm was not the exclusive privilege of the free men who imposed it, but also the dominating instinct of the slaves who worked to it. In those brigades where the work was done by teams of men working together, the most conscientious and fervent foremen were the prisoners themselves, for there the norm was reckoned collectively by dividing the total output by the number of workers. Any feeling of mutual friendliness was completely abolished in favor of a race for percentages. An unqualified prisoner who found himself assigned to a coordinated team of experienced workers could not expect to have any consideration shown to him; after a short struggle he was forced to give up and transfer to a team in which he in his turn frequently had to watch over weaker comrades. There was in all this something inhuman, mercilessly breaking the only natural bond between prisoners—their solidarity in face of their persecutors.24
But hard work sometimes backfired. Lev Razgon described peasants who killed themselves trying to overfulfill the norm, earning themselves a “big ration,” 1.5 kilos of bread: “It may have been raw and badly baked, but it was real bread. For peasants who had lived in semi-starvation for years this appeared an enormous quantity, even without any cooked food.” Yet even this “enormous quantity” of food did not make up for the energy expended in doing the forestry work. The forest worker was thus condemned, Razgon wrote: “quite literally, he would starve to death while eating one and a half kilos of bread a day.”25 Varlam Shalamov has also described the “myth of the big ration,” and Solzhenitsyn wrote that “the big ration is the one that kills. In one season of hauling timber the strongest slogger would end up a hopeless last-legger himself.”26
Nevertheless, the vast majority of memoirists (backed up, to a degree, by archival evidence) do indeed speak of avoiding work. Yet their primary motive was not usually mere sloth, or even the desire to “show scorn” for the Soviet system: their primary motive was survival. Having been given poor clothing and insufficient food, having been ordered to work in extreme weather with broken machinery, many realized that avoiding work would save their lives.
The unpublished memoir of Zinaida Usova, one of the wives arrested in 1938, illustrates beautifully how prisoners came to this conclusion. Usova was first placed in Temlag, a camp which mostly contained women like herself, the wives of leading Party members and army bigwigs who had been shot. With a relatively easygoing camp boss and reasonable work schedule, everyone in Temlag worked enthusiastically. Not only were most still “loyal Soviet citizens,” convinced that their arrests had been part of a giant mistake, but they also believed that by working hard they would earn an early release. Usova herself “went to sleep and woke up with thoughts of work, thinking through my designs. One of them was even taken into production.”
Later, however, Usova and a group of other wives moved to another camp, one which also contained criminals. There she found herself working in a furniture factory. Her new camp had much higher, much stricter norms—the “unreasonable” norms spoken of by so many other prisoners. This system, wrote Usova, “made people into slaves, with the psychology of slaves.” Only those who completed the whole norm received the full bread ration of 700 grams. Those who could not, or who were unable to work at all, got 300, barely enough to live on.
To compensate, the prisoners at her new camp tried as best they could to “trick the bosses, to wriggle out of work, to do as little as possible.” With their relative enthusiasm for work, the newly arrived prisoners from Temlag found themselves pariahs. “From the point of view of the older inhabitants, we were fools, or something like strike-breakers. They all hated us immediately.”27 Soon, of course, the women from Temlag adopted the techniques of work-avoidance already mastered by everyone else. Thus did the system itself create tufta, and not vice versa.
Sometimes, prisoners thought up methods of tufta on their own. One Polish woman worked in a Kolyma fish-processing plant where the only people who fulfilled the impossible norms were those who cheated. The Stakhanovites were simply the “cleverest cheaters”: rather than packing all of the herring, they would put a few pieces into a jar and toss the rest out, doing it “so cleverly that the foreman would never notice.” 28 While helping to build a camp bathhouse, Valery Frid was shown a similar trick: how to hide cracks in the building with moss instead of filling them with concrete. He had only one regret about this labor-saving device: “What if I would one day come to wash myself in that bath? After all, the moss would dry out, and then the cold wind would blow through the cracks.”29
Evgeniya Ginzburg has also described how she and her erstwhile logging partner, Galya, finally managed to fulfill their impossible tree-felling norm. Noticing that one of their colleagues always managed to reach the norm, “despite working on her own with a one-handed saw,” they asked her how she did it:
As we pressed her further, she looked around furtively and then explained:
“This forest is full of piles of timber cut by previous work gangs. No one ever counted how many there are.”
“Yes, but anyone can see that they’re not freshly cut . . .”
“The only reason you can see it is that the cross sections are dark in color. If you saw off a small section at each end, it looks as if it has just been cut. Then you stack them up in another place, and there’s your ‘norm.’”
This trick, which we christened “freshening up the sandwiches,” saved our lives for the time being . . . I may add that we did not feel the slightest compunction . . .30
Thomas Sgovio also spent time in a Kolyma tree-felling brigade which, quite simply, did nothing at all:
During the first part of January, my partner Levin and I did not fell a single tree. Neither did any of the others in the lumber brigade. There were many log-piles in the forest. We selected one or two, cleaned off the snow and sat down by the fire. There was even no need to clean off the snow, because not once during the first month did the brigadier, foreman, or overseer come to check our work output.31
Others used connections and relationshi
ps to find their way around impossible work assignments. One prisoner in Kargopollag paid another—the payment took the form of a chunk of lard—to teach him how to cut trees more efficiently, thereby enabling him to fulfill the norm, and even to rest in the afternoons.32 Another prisoner assigned to pan for gold in Kolyma paid a bribe to be given an easier job, standing on a slag heap instead of standing in the water.33
More frequently, tufta was organized at the level of work brigades, for brigadiers were able to disguise how much individual prisoners had worked. One ex-zek described how his brigadier allowed him to declare that he had fulfilled 60 percent of the norm, when in fact he could barely do anything at all.34 Yet another prisoner wrote of how his brigadier negotiated with the camp authorities to have his brigade’s norms lowered, as all of his workers were dying off.35 Still other brigadiers took bribes, as Yuri Zorin, who was himself a brigadier, acknowledged: “There, in the camps, there are camp laws which may not be understood by those who live outside the zone,” was how he delicately put it.36 Leonid Trus recalled that his Norilsk brigadiers simply “decided which of his workers deserved better food and pay than others,” without any regard to what they had actually achieved. Bribery, and clan loyalties, determined a prisoner’s “output.”
From the zek’s point of view, the best brigadiers were those who were capable of organizing tufta on a grand scale. Working in a quarry in the northern Urals in the late 1940s, Leonid Finkelstein found himself in a brigade whose leader had worked out a highly complex system of cheating. In the mornings, the team would go down into the canyon. The guards would stay up on the rim, where they spent the day sitting around bonfires to keep warm. Ivan, the brigadier leader, would then organize the tufta:
We knew precisely which parts of the bottom of the canyon are visible from up there, and that was our swindle . . . in the visible part of the bottom, we were cutting very hard at the stone wall. We were working and it was a great deal of noise—the guards could both see and hear us work. Then, Ivan would walk along the row . . . and say, “One to the left”—and we would each make one step to the left. It was never noticed by the guards.
So we would step, one to the left, one to the left, until the last one would step into the invisible zone—we knew where it was, there was a chalk strip on the ground. Once we were in the invisible zone, we would relax, sit on the ground, take an ax and hit the ground next to us, in a relaxed way, just to produce the noise. Then someone else would join, someone else, and so on. Then Ivan would say—“You: to the right!”—and the man would go and join the cycle again. None of us ever worked even half the shift.
Finkelstein was also told, by other prisoners, of the techniques used elsewhere to build a canal. There, tufta was different, but no less sophisticated: “The main thing was to show that the gang has fulfilled its norm.” Workers were asked to dig, but to leave untouched “a little post, a pile, showing what height you dug on the shift, how deep you dug.” Although norms were very heavy, “There were artists, real artists, who managed to extend this post, its height. It is unbelievable, it was cut out of earth, so it would be immediately visible if somebody tampered with it, and yet it was tampered with in a most artistic way. Then, of course the whole gang gets the Stakhanovite dinner.” 37
Such special talents were not always necessary. At one point, Leonid Trus was assigned to unload goods wagons: “We would simply write that we had carried the goods farther than had actually been the case, say 300 meters, instead of 10 meters.” For that, they were given better food rations. “Tufta was constant,” he said of Norilsk; “without it there would have been nothing at all.”
Tufta could also be organized higher up the administrative hierarchy, through careful negotiations between brigadiers and norm-setters, the camp functionaries whose job it was to determine how much a brigade should or should not be able to achieve in one day. Norm-setters, like brigadiers, were very prone to favoritism and bribery—as well as to whim. In Kolyma in the late 1930s, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg found herself appointed brigadier, head of a women’s ditch-digging brigade composed mostly of political prisoners, all weakened by long jail sentences. When, after three days’ work, they had completed just 3 percent of the norm, she went to the norm-setter and begged for an easier assignment. Upon hearing that the weak brigade was mostly composed of former Party members, his face darkened.
“Oh yes, former members of the Party, are they? Now, if you’d been prostitutes, I’d have been happy to let you wash windows and do three times the norm. When those Party members in 1929 decided to punish me for being a kulak, threw me and my six children out of our home, I said to them, ‘What’ve the children ever done?’ and they told me, ‘That’s the Soviet law.’ So there you are, you can stick to your Soviet law and dig nine cubic meters of mud a day.”38
Norm-setters were also aware of the need to conserve the workforce at certain times—if, for example, the camp had been criticized for its high mortality rates, or when the camp was one of those in the far north which could only get replacement workers once a season. In such circumstances, they might indeed lower the norm, or turn a blind eye when it was not fulfilled. This practice was known in the camps as “norm-stretching,” and to call it widespread is an understatement.39 One prisoner worked in a mine which required prisoners to dig 5.5 tons of coal every day, an impossible task. Sensibly, the mine’s chief engineer—a free worker—asked around to find out how many prisoners ought to be fulfilling the norm every day, and simply told his norm-setters to make their decisions about how much had actually been done on that basis, rotating the shock-worker distinction among all of the prisoners so that they all got more or less the same amount of food.40
Bribery also worked higher up the hierarchy, sometimes through an entire chain of people. Alexander Klein was in a camp in the late 1940s, at a time when small salaries were introduced to inspire zeks to work harder:
Having received his earned money (it wasn’t much) the worker gave a bribe to the brigadier. This was obligatory: the brigadier then had to give a bribe to the foreman and the norm-setter, who determined what norm had been fulfilled by the brigade . . . aside from this, the foreman and the brigadiers had to give bribes to the naryadshchik, the work-assigner. The cooks also paid bribes to the chief cook, and the bathhouse workers to the director of the bathhouse.
On average, wrote Klein, he gave away half of his “salary.” The consequences for those who did not could be dire. Those inmates who failed to pay up were automatically put down as having achieved a lower percentage of the norm, and therefore received less food. Brigadiers who did not want to pay suffered worse. One, wrote Klein, was murdered in his bed. His head was bashed in with a rock—and those sleeping around him did not even wake up.41
Tufta also affected the keeping of statistics at all levels of camp life. Camp commanders and camp accountants frequently changed numbers to benefit themselves, according to the dozens of reports of larceny kept in the files of the inspectorate. Anyone with even a remote connection to a camp stole food, money, whatever there was to steal: in 1942, the sister of the former boss of the railways division of the camps in Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, was accused of having “unlawfully removed some food products,” and being involved in speculation. At one lagpunkt in 1941, the camp commander and the chief accountant “used their professional status” to set up a false bank account, enabling them to milk the camp accounts. The commander stole 25,000 rubles, the accountant 18,000, a fortune in Soviet terms. But the sums were not always large either: a thick file on Siblag, containing prosecutors’ reports from 1942 to 1944, includes, among other things, a long series of letters reflecting a bitter dispute over a camp employee who supposedly stole two iron bowls, one enamel teapot, one blanket, one mattress, two sheets, two pillows, and two pillowcases. 42
From theft, it was hardly a great moral leap to telling fibs about production statistics. If tufta began at the brigade level, and was compounded at the lagpunkt level, by the time the accountants at the
larger camps were calculating total production statistics, the numbers were already very far from reality—and would, as we shall see, give very misleading ideas about the camps’ real productivity, which was in all probability extremely low.
In truth, it is almost impossible to know what to make of Gulag production figures, given the degree of lying and cheating that went on. For that reason, I am always mystified by the Gulag’s carefully detailed annual reports, such as the one produced in March 1940. More than 124 pages, this striking document describes the production figures for dozens of camps, carefully listing each one by specialty: the forestry camps, the factory camps, the mines, the collective farms. The report is accompanied by extensive charts and calculations, and many different sorts of figures. In conclusion, the report’s author confidently declared that the total value of Gulag production in 1940 was 2,659.5 million rubles—a figure which must, under the circumstances, be considered completely meaningless.43
PRIDURKI: COOPERATION AND COLLABORATION
Tufta was not the only method that prisoners used to bridge the gap between the impossible norms expected of them and the impossible rations they were allotted. Nor was it the only tool the authorities used to meet their own impossible production targets. There were other ways of persuading prisoners to cooperate, as Isaak Filshtinskii brilliantly and memorably describes in the first chapter of his memoirs, My shagaem pod konvoem (We March Under Convoy Guard).
Gulag Page 47