Gulag (33 page)

Sometimes, special living conditions were arranged for invalids. The actress Tatyana Okunevsksaya managed to get sent to an invalid’s camp in Lithuania, where “the barracks were long, with many windows, light, clean, and no upper bunks above your head.”
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The prisoners sent to work on Beria’s
sharashki—
the “special bureaus” for talented engineers and technicians—received the best sleeping quarters of all. In Bolshevo, a
sharashka
just outside of Moscow, barracks were “large, light, clean and heated by dutch ovens” rather than metal stoves. The beds had linen and pillows, the light was turned off at night, and there was a private shower.
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Prisoners who lived in these special quarters knew, of course, that they could easily be taken away, which enhanced their interest in working hard.

Informally, there was often another hierarchy at work within barracks as well. In most barracks, the critical decisions about who slept where were taken by those groups in the camps that were the strongest and most united. Until the late 1940s, when the big national groups—the Ukrainians, Balts, Chechens, Poles—grew stronger, the best-organized prisoners were usually the convicted criminals, as we shall see. As a rule, they therefore slept in the top bunks, where there was better air and more space, clubbing and kicking those who objected. Those who slept on the lower bunks had less clout. Those who slept on the floor—the lowest-ranking prisoners in the camp— suffered most, remembered one prisoner:

This level was called the “
kolkhoz
sector,” and it was to this level that the thieves forced the
kolkhozniki—
various aged intellectuals and priests, that is, and even some of their own, who had broken the theives’ moral code. On to them fell not only things from the upper and lower bunks: the thieves also poured slops, water, yesterday’s soup. And the
kolkhoz
sector had to tolerate all of this, for if they complained they would receive even more filth . . . people became sick, suffocated, lost consciousness, went crazy, died of typhus, dysentery, killed themselves.
⁸⁵

Prisoners, even political prisoners, could nevertheless better their circumstances. While working as a
feldsher
, Karol Colonna-Czosnowski, a Polish political prisoner, was picked out of an extremely crowded barrack by Grisha, the criminal “boss” of the camp: “He gave a majestic kick to one of his courtiers who took it for an order to make room for me and promptly abandoned his seat. I was embarrassed and protested that I would rather not sit so near the fire, but this was not in conformity with my host’s wishes, as I discovered when one of Grisha’s followers gave me a mighty push.” When he had regained his balance, he found himself sitting on the couch at Grisha’s feet: “This was, apparently, where he wanted me to remain . . .”
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Colonna-Czosnowski did not argue. Even for a few hours, where one sat, or laid one’s head, mattered intensely.

BANYA: THE BATHHOUSE

Dirt, crowding, and poor hygiene led to a plague of bedbugs and lice. In the 1930s, a “humorous” cartoon in
Perekovka
, the newspaper of the Moscow–Volga Canal, featured a
zek
being handed new clothes. Beneath was the caption, “They give you ‘clean’ clothes, but they are full of lice.” Another was captioned “And while you sleep in the barracks, the bedbugs bite like black crabs.”
⁸⁷
Nor did the problem lessen over the years. One Polish prisoner records that, during the war, his camp acquaintance became obsessed with them: “As a biologist, he was interested in how many lice could subsist on a certain space. Counting them on his shirt he found sixty, and an hour later another sixty.”
⁸⁸

By the 1940s, the Gulag’s masters had long recognized the lethal danger of louse-borne typhus and, officially, conducted a constant battle against parasites. Baths were supposedly mandatory every ten days. All clothing was supposed to be boiled in disinfection units, both on entering the camp and then at regular intervals, to destroy all vermin.
⁸⁹
As we have seen, camp barbers shaved the entire bodies of both men and women on entry into the camps, and their heads regularly thereafter. Soap, albeit tiny amounts of it, was regularly included in lists of products to be distributed to prisoners: in 1944, for example, this amounted to 200 grams per month, per prisoner. Women, prisoners’ children, and prisoners in hospitals were allotted an extra 50 grams, juveniles received an extra 100 grams, and prisoners working at “especially dirty jobs” received an extra 200 grams. These tiny slivers were meant both for personal hygiene and for the washing of linen and clothes.
⁹⁰
(Soap did not become any less scarce, inside or outside the camps. As late as 1991, Soviet coal miners went on strike because, among other things, they had no soap.)

Nevertheless, not everyone was convinced of the efficacy of the camp’s delousing procedures. In practice, wrote one prisoner, “the baths seemed to increase the lice’s sexual vigor.”
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Varlam Shalamov went further: “Not only was the delousing absolutely useless, no lice are killed by this disinfection chamber. It’s only a formality and the apparatus has been created for the purpose of tormenting the convict still more.”
⁹²

Technically, Shalamov was wrong. The apparatus was not created for the purpose of tormenting convicts—as I say, the Gulag’s central administration in Moscow really did write very strict directives, instructing camp commanders to do battle against parasites, and countless inspection reports inveigh against their failure to do so. A 1933 account of the conditions in Dmitlag angrily complains about the women’s barracks, which were “dirty, lacking sheets and blankets; the women complain of a massive quantity of bedbugs, which the Sanitation Division is not fighting against.”
⁹³
A 1940 investigation into the conditions at one group of northern camps furiously described “lice in the barracks, and bedbugs, which have a negative impact on the prisoners’ ability to rest” at one
lagpunkt
, while the Novosibirsk corrective labor camp had “100 percent lice infection among prisoners . . . as a result of poor sanitary conditions, there is a high level of skin diseases and stomach ailments . . . from this it is clear that the unsanitary conditions of the camp are very, very costly.”

Meanwhile, typhus had broken out twice at another
lagpunkt
, while in others, prisoners were “black with dirt,” the report continued with great agitation.
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Complaints about lice, and angry orders to eliminate them, figure year in and year out in the inspection reports submitted by Gulag prosectors.
⁹⁵
After one typhus epidemic at Temlag in 1937, both the head of the
lagpunkt
and the deputy of the camp medical department were fired, accused of “criminal negligence and inactivity,” and put on trial.
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Reward was used as well as punishment: in 1933, the inhabitants of one prisoners’ barrack in Dmitlag received holidays from work as a prize for having cleared all of their beds of bedbugs.
⁹⁷

Prisoners’ refusal to bathe was also taken very seriously. Irena Arginskaya, who was in a special camp for politicals at Kengir in the early 1950s, recalled a particular women’s religious sect in the camp which refused, for reasons known only to itself, to bathe:

One day I had remained in the barracks because I was ill, and had been let off work. A guard came in, however, and told us that all of the sick prisoners would have to help wash the “nuns.” The scene was as follows: a wagon pulled up to their section of the barracks, and we had to carry them out and put them on the wagon. They protested, kicked us and hit us, and so on. But when we finally got them on the wagon they lay quietly, and didn’t try to escape. Then we pulled the wagon to the baths, where we took them off and carried them inside, undressed them—and then understood why the camp administration couldn’t allow them not to bathe. As you took their clothes off, lice fell off them in handfuls. Then we put them under water, and washed them. Meanwhile, their clothes were boiled to kill the lice ...
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Arginskaya also remembers that “in principle it was possible to go to the baths as much as you wanted” in Kengir, where there were no restrictions on water. Similarly, Leonid Sitko, a former prisoner of war in Germany, reckoned that Soviet camps had fewer lice than German camps. He spent time in both Steplag and Minlag, where “you could bathe as much as you wanted . . . you could even wash your clothes.”
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Certain factories and work sites had their own showers, as Isaak Filshtinsky found in Kargopollag, where prisoners could use them during the day, even though other prisoners suffered from lack of water.
¹⁰⁰

Yet Shalamov was not entirely wrong either in his cynical description of the hygiene system. For even if they were instructed to take bathing seriously, it often happened that local camp administrators merely observed the rituals of delousing and bathing, without appearing to care much about the result. Either there was not enough coal to keep the disinfection apparatus hot enough; or those in charge could not be bothered to do it properly; or there were no soap rations issued for months on end; or the rations were stolen. At the Dizelny
lagpunkt
in Kolyma, on bath days they “gave every prisoner a small sliver of soap and a large mug of warm water. They poured five or six of these mugs into a tub, and that sufficed for everyone, for the washing and rinsing of five or six people.” At the Sopka
lagpunkt
, “water was brought there, like other freight, along the narrow railway and narrow road. In the winter they got it from snow, although there wasn’t much snow there, the wind blew it away . . . Workers came back from the mine covered in dust, and there were no sinks to wash in.”
¹⁰¹

Frequently, guards were bored by the process of bathing the prisoners, and allowed them only a few minutes in the baths, for formality’s sake.
¹⁰²
At a Siblag
lagpunkt
in 1941, an outraged inspector found that “prisoners have not bathed for two months,” thanks to the sheer disinterest of the guards.
¹⁰³
And in the worst camps, open neglect of the prisoners’ humanity did indeed make bathing a torture. Many describe the awfulness of bathing, but none quite so well as, again, Shalamov, who devotes an entire short story to the horrors of the baths of Kolyma. Despite their exhaustion, prisoners would have to wait for hours to take their turn: “Bathhouse sessions are arranged either before or after work. After many hours of work in the cold (and it’s no easier in the summer) when all thoughts and hopes are concentrated on the desire to reach one’s bunk and food so as to fall asleep as soon as possible, the bath-house delay is almost unendurable.”

First, the
zeks
would stand in lines, outside in the cold; then they would be herded into crowded dressing rooms, built for fifteen people and containing up to a hundred. All the while they knew that their barracks were being cleaned and searched. Their meager possessions, including crockery and footrags, were being tossed into the snow:

It is characteristic of man, be he beggar or Nobel laureate, that he quickly acquires petty things. The same is true of the convict. He is, after all, a working man and needs a needle and material for patches, and an extra bowl perhaps. All this is cast out and then re-accumulated after each bathhouse day, unless it is buried somewhere deep in the snow.

Once inside the baths themselves, there was often so little water that it was impossible to get clean. Prisoners were given “a wooden basin with not very hot water . . . there is no extra water and no one can buy any.” Nor were the bathhouses heated: “The feeling of cold is increased by a thousand drafts from under the doors, from the cracks. The baths were not fully heated; they had cracks in the walls.” Inside, there is also “constant uproar accompanied by smoke, crowding, and shouting; there’s even a common turn of speech: ‘to shout as in the bathhouse.’”
¹⁰⁴

Thomas Sgovio also describes this hellish scene, writing that prisoners in Kolyma sometimes had to be beaten in order to make them go to the baths:

The waiting outside in the frost for those inside to come out—then came the changing room where it was cold—the compulsory disinfections and fumigating process where we tossed our rags in a heap—you never got your own back—the fighting and swearing, “you son-of-a-bitch that’s my jacket”—selecting the damp, collective underwear filled with lice eggs in the seams—the shaving of hairs on the body by the Camp Barber . . . then, when it was finally our turn to enter the washing room, we picked up a wooden tub, received a cup of hot water, a cup of cold water, and a small piece of black, evil-smelling soap ...
¹⁰⁵

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