The prison ration (unlike the camp ration) has probably had its calories, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates measured on the basis of theoretical calculations and experimental norms. These calculations are probably based on “scientific” works; scientists like working on such projects. It is equally likely that the Moscow pretrial prison administration’s supervision of food preparation and provision of the number of calories a living consumer requires are sufficiently well organized. And, very likely, the test samples in Butyrki prison are not the cynical gesture that they are in the camps. An old prison doctor, looking for the place in the certificate where he had to put his signature to confirm the food distribution, might ask the cook to give him a bit more of the lentils, the dish with the most calories. The doctor would joke that the prisoners had no cause for complaint, as he, the doctor, enjoyed his bowl of lentils—though the doctor was given his test dish of today’s lentils on a proper plate.
Nobody complained about the food in Butyrki prison. That wasn’t because the food was good. A pretrial detainee is not, after all, interested in food. Even the most disliked prison dish, boiled beans, which was made here to taste astoundingly bad, beans that acquired the nickname of “gulp-it-down course,” never gave rise to any complaints.
The sausages, butter, sugar, cheese, and fresh white bread from the shop were delicacies. Naturally, everyone liked to have them with tea, not the institutional boiled water with some raspberry cordial but real tea made in a mug with boiled water from an enormous copper kettle the size of a bucket: this was a kettle made in tsarist times, which political prisoners of the People’s Will may have used.
The shop was, of course, a festive event in the cell’s life. Being banned from the shop was a serious punishment, and it always led to arguments and quarrels; such deprivations were taken very badly by the prisoners. If the corridor guard thought there was too much noise, or if there was an argument with the chief guard on duty, such things could be considered insubordination and the punishment for that was deprivation of the prisoners’ next shop day.
The dreams of eighty men squeezed into a cell meant to house twenty were shattered. This was a severe punishment.
For prisoners who had no money, deprivation of the shop day ought to have meant nothing. But this was not how it was.
Once the food was brought in, evening tea began. Each person had bought whatever they wanted. But those who had no money felt like strangers at this general feast. They alone were left out of the raised spirits that resulted on shop day.
Of course, they were all offered something to eat or drink. But you could have a mug of tea with someone else’s sugar and someone else’s white bread, and smoke somebody else’s cigarette, one or two of them, without the slightest feeling of home comforts that you would have if you had bought them with your own money. Someone with no money becomes so tactful that he is afraid of eating more than he should.
The prison’s ingenious collective brain found a way of alleviating the awkward position of its penniless comrades and of sparing their pride by giving everyone who had no money a quasi-official right to use the shop. Such a prisoner could spend his own money quite independently and buy whatever he wanted.
But where did this money come from?
This was where a famous term of temporary military communism was reborn, a term that comes from the first years of the revolution. The term is “poorcoms,” committees for the poor. Some unknown person let this term drop in the prison cell, and by some miracle it caught on, took root, and started creeping from cell to cell, by someone tapping the walls or hiding a note under a bench in the bathhouse, or by even simpler means, when someone was transferred to another prison.
Butyrki prison is famous for its exemplary orderliness: an enormous prison built to hold twelve thousand, where there is a continuous, twenty-four-hour flow of a transient population. Every day prisoners are taken by regular buses to and from Lubyanka for interrogation, or to confrontations, or to court for trial, or to other prisons.
The prison’s internal administration can put prisoners who have committed “cell” crimes in the Pugachiov, northern or southern towers where there are special punishment cells. There is also a solitary confinement block with cells where you can’t lie down and have to sleep in a sitting position.
Every day a fifth of the cell’s population is taken off somewhere—to be photographed according to all the rules, full-face and profile, with a number attached to the screen that the prisoner sits by; or to “play the piano,” a compulsory finger-printing procedure that for some reason has never been considered demeaning; or to be interrogated, in the interrogation block, reached through the gigantic prison’s endless corridors, where at every turn your guard jangles his key against his brass buckle to warn anyone there that a “secret prisoner” is coming. The guard won’t let his prisoner proceed until he hears someone clap their hands (in Lubyanka a clap of the hands is the response to a click of the fingers rather than to a jangling of keys).
The movement is ceaseless and uninterrupted: the entrance doors are never closed for long, and there has never been an incident when two men involved in the same case end up in the same cell.
Once a prisoner has crossed the threshold of the prison, should he leave it if only for a second, his journey having been suddenly canceled, he is not allowed to return without having all his things disinfected. This is the rule, the sanitary law. People who are frequently taken to be interrogated at Lubyanka find that their clothes rapidly fall apart. Your outer garments in prison wear out far faster in any case than they do outside, because you sleep in them, toss and turn on the sheets of wood placed over the bunks. These boards, combined with the frequent violent “louse killings” by steaming, quickly destroy the clothes of every pretrial prisoner.
However strict the control, the “warden thinks about his keys less than the prisoner thinks about escaping,” as the author of The Charterhouse of Parma put it.
The poorcoms were an elemental phenomenon, prisoners’ self-defense, like a mutual assistance society, all because someone recalled those committees of the poor. Who knows: perhaps the author who gave an old term new meaning had personally taken part in the real committees of the poor in the Russian countryside during the first years of the revolution. Mutual assistance committees are what the prison poorcoms really were.
The organization of poorcoms was no more than the simplest kind of mutual assistance. When ordering from the shop, everyone ordering groceries for themselves had to assign ten percent to the poorcom. The total sum was divided between all those in the cell who had no money, and each of them had the right to his own grocery order from the shop.
A cell holding seventy to eighty men would always have seven or eight penniless prisoners. More often than not, money would arrive and a debtor would try to pay back what his cellmates had given him, but this was optional. His only obligation was take his turn to set aside the same ten percent, once he was able to.
Every beneficiary of a poorcom got ten to twelve rubles to spend in the shop, thus spending almost the same amount as those who did have money. Poorcoms didn’t expect thanks; they were seen as a prisoner’s right, as an unassailable prison custom.
It took a long time, perhaps years, for the prison administration to become aware of this organization, perhaps because it failed to pay attention to the loyal information given by the snitches in the cell and by the prison’s secret informants. It is hard to believe that the poorcoms were not mentioned in denunciations. Simply, the Butyrki administration was reluctant to repeat its deplorable experience of losing the battle against the notorious matches game.
All games are forbidden in prison. Chess pieces, made from bread chewed by everyone in the cell, were immediately confiscated and destroyed if the guard’s vigilant eye spotted them when he looked through the spy hole. In prison the very expression “vigilant eye” took on its real, perfectly literal sense: this was the observant eye of the guard, framed by the spy hole.
Card games are played in cells where there are common criminals, but in Butyrki there were no cards, and no games except for matches.
Matches is a game for two.
There are fifty matches in a box. The game needs thirty matches to play, and these matches are put in the lid, which is then placed vertically, on its end. The lid is shaken, then lifted, and the matches spill over the table.
The player who goes first picks up a match with two fingers and, using it as a lever, throws or pushes aside all the matches he can remove from the pile without disturbing the others. If he makes a match collide with another one, he loses his turn. The second player continues until he too makes a mistake.
Matches is just the most ordinary children’s game of pickup sticks, merely adapted by a prisoner’s ingenious mind to a prison cell.
The whole prison was carried away to the point of mania, playing matches from breakfast to lunch, from lunch to dinner.
Matches champions emerged, and sets of special quality matches, shiny from continuous use, came into use. These matches were never struck when lighting cigarettes.
This game saved the prisoners a lot of nervous energy and gave their troubled souls a measure of peace.
The administration was unable to stop this game or to forbid it. After all, matches were allowed. They were even issued, one at a time, and on sale in the shop.
The block commandants tried to break the matchboxes, but the game could be played without the box.
In its battle against a game of pickup sticks the administration was shamefully beaten: none of the steps it took led to any sensible outcome. The whole prison went on playing matches.
For the same reason, for fear of a shameful defeat, the administration turned a blind eye to the poorcoms as well. They had no wish to engage in an inglorious battle.
But unfortunately the rumors of the poorcoms went higher and higher, further and further until it reached the Institution itself, which then issued a dreaded decree: abolish the poorcoms, whose very name sounded like a challenge, some kind of appeal to revolutionary consciences.
There were countless moral lectures read out when the cells were checked. Countless incriminating pieces of paper were seized after an unannounced search with coded totals of expenditure and buying orders. Countless cell elders spent time in the Police and Pugachiov towers with their solitary confinement cells and punishment wards.
Nothing worked. The poorcoms existed despite all the warnings and sanctions.
It was in fact a violation very hard to check up on. In any case, a block commandant, a guard, after working for a long time in a prison, takes a rather different view of prisoners than his high-up superior, and there are times when he inwardly sides with the prisoner against his superiors. That doesn’t mean he will help a prisoner. No, he just turns a blind eye whenever possible to minor infractions, he doesn’t see what he doesn’t have to see, he is less of a faultfinder. Especially if he is getting on in years. For a prisoner the best officer is someone who is no longer young but still low-ranking. The combination of these two qualities almost ensures that you get a relatively decent human being. If the officer also drinks, so much the better. Such people are not careerists: a guard’s career in a prison, and even more so in a camp, is made with prisoners’ blood.
The Institution, however, demanded that the poorcoms be abolished, and the prison administration made futile efforts to achieve this.
There was an attempt to “explode” the poorcoms internally: that was, of course, the most cunning decision. Poorcoms were an illegal organization and any prisoner could refuse to set aside money, if he was being compelled to do so. A prisoner who didn’t want to pay such “taxes,” who refused to support the poorcoms could protest and, once he had refused, his protest would immediately be supported by the prison administration. What else would you expect? Collectively the prisoners were not a state that could impose taxes, therefore the poorcoms were extortion, a racket, robbery.
There’s no dispute that any prisoner could refuse to set aside money. “I won’t, so there! It’s my money and nobody has the right to touch it, etc.” If anyone made a declaration like that, then nothing was deducted and they got everything they had ordered in full.
But who would risk making such a declaration? Who would risk opposing the whole cell collective, people who are with you twenty-four hours a day, comrades from whose unfriendly, hostile looks only sleep would save you? Everyone in prison instinctively looks to his neighbor for moral support: to risk being boycotted is too frightening. That would be more frightening than the threats of your interrogator, even if no physical means of changing your mind were used.
A prison boycott is a weapon of nerve warfare. God forbid anyone should have to undergo his comrades’ intense contempt.
But if an antisocial citizen is too thick-skinned and stubborn, then the cell elder has a weapon that is more hurtful and more effective.
Nobody (except interrogators, who occasionally find this necessary for “progressing the case”) has the right to deprive a prisoner of his rations, so even the stubborn resister will get his bowl of soup, his portion of porridge, and his bread.
Food is distributed by the server as the cell elder indicates (that is one of his functions). The bunks along the cell walls are separated by a passage running from the door to the window.
A cell has four corners, and food is distributed from each corner in turn, each day a different corner. This alternation is necessary to prevent the prisoners’ heightened sensitivity being disturbed by some trivial thing such as the tops of root vegetables or bits of crust in the Butyrki gruel, so that everyone has an equal chance of getting soup of the same thickness and temperature . . . nothing in a prison is unimportant.
When the food is handed out the cell elder gives the command to start and adds, “Feed X (whoever it is) last,” naming the person who refuses to acknowledge the poorcoms.
Such an unbearably demeaning humiliation can be inflicted four times a day in Butyrki, since tea is given in the morning and the evening, and soup is given for lunch and porridge for dinner.
When bread is issued, this pressure can be exerted for a fifth time.
It is risky to call on the block commandant to sort out such problems, since the whole cell will give evidence against the stubborn individual. In such cases the rule is to lie collectively, so that the block commandant won’t find out the truth.
But a selfish, mean egotist is a determined man. He also thinks that he is the only innocent person to have been arrested and that all the others in the cell are criminals. He is pretty thick-skinned and stubborn. He finds it easy to put up with a boycott from his cellmates: the tricks that intellectuals get up to won’t make him lose his patience and resolve. The time-honored method of persuasion, a “dark beating” (where the victim is covered with a blanket so he can’t identify his attackers), might have been effective. But there are no dark beatings in Butyrki. The egoist is on the verge of celebrating victory, since the boycott doesn’t have the expected effect.
But the cell elder and the other cellmates have one other effective measure available to them. Every day, at the evening roll call, when one shift of guards ends, the block commandant taking over the shift is required to put a question to the prisoners: “Are there any complaints?”
The cell elder then steps forward and demands that the man boycotted for his stubbornness be transferred to another cell. He doesn’t have to offer any reasons for this transfer: he only has to demand it. In at most twenty-four hours, often earlier, the transfer is certain to be carried out, and this public warnin
g relieves the cell elder of any responsibility for maintaining discipline in the cell.
If he isn’t transferred, the stubborn man can be beaten up or, you never know, killed. A prisoner’s soul is unfathomable; such happenings lead to the block commandant having to give unpleasant and repeated explanations to his superiors.
If there is an investigation into this prison murder, it will immediately be revealed that the block commandant had been warned. So it’s better to do things nicely: move the man to another cell and give in to that sort of demand.
If a man arrives in another cell as the result of a transfer, instead of coming from “outside,” things can get unpleasant. Suspicions will always be aroused, his new cellmates will be on the lookout in case he is a snitch. “Fine if he’s been transferred to us only because he’s refused to take part in the poorcom,” the new cell elder will think. “But suppose it’s something worse?” The elder will try and find out the reason for the transfer by leaving a note at the bottom of the rubbish bin in the washrooms, or by tapping the walls either by the Decembrist Bestuzhev’s system [27] or in Morse code.
Until the cell elder receives a reply, the newcomer has no hope of getting any sympathy or trust from his new companions. After many days, when the reason for the transfer has been ascertained and passions have died down, even then the new cell, too, will have its own poorcom and its own deductions.
Everything then starts again—or it may not, since the obstinate newcomer may have learned from his experience and may behave differently in the new cell. His stubbornness will have been broken.
When parcels of food and other things were accepted and when use of the prison shop was practically unrestricted, there were no poorcoms in the pretrial cells at Butyrki.
Poorcoms arose in the second half of the 1930s as a curious form of “personal initiative” on the part of prisoners under investigation. It was a way in which a person with no rights could assert himself. This was a tiny area where the human community, united as it always is in a prison, unlike the free world or the camps, despite a total absence of rights, finds a point to which it can apply its spiritual strength to assert and insist on the age-old human right to live as one wishes. This spiritual strength is a counterforce to all prison and pretrial rules of every kind and it triumphs over them.
Kolyma Stories Page 36