Gulag (35 page)

Even jobs harvesting crops on camp farms or peeling potatoes were very desirable, and prisoners paid bribes to obtain them, simply to be in a position to steal food. Later in her camp career, Ginzburg also worked tending the chickens that would be eaten by the camp bosses. She and her co-worker took full advantage of the situation: “we smothered the camp semolina with cod-liver oil that we ‘borrowed’ from the chickens. We boiled up oatmeal jelly. We also had three eggs daily between us—one in the soup, and one each to be eaten raw as a special gastronomic treat. (We took no more because we dared not lower the egg productivity index, by which our work was judged.)”
¹³⁷

Theft also took place on a much grander scale, particularly in the camp towns of the far north, where food shortages among free workers and camp guards as well as prisoners made it worth everybody’s while to steal. Every camp filed reports every year of lost property. Those of the Kedrovyi Shor
lagpunkt
show losses of goods and money of more than 20,000 rubles for the fourth quarter of 1944 alone.
¹³⁸

On a national scale, the numbers went much higher. A prosecutors’ office report for 1947, for example, lists many cases of theft, among them one in Vyatlag, where twelve people, including the head of the camp warehouse, helped themselves to 170,000 rubles worth of food products and vegetables. Another report of that year calculated that in thirty-four camps investigated in the second quarter of 1946 alone, a total of 70,000 kilograms of bread had been stolen, along with 132,000 kilograms of potatoes and 17,000 kilograms of meat. The inspector writing the report concluded that “The complicated system of feeding prisoners creates the conditions for the easy theft of bread and other products.” He also blamed the “system of feeding free workers with ration cards,” as well as the internal camp inspection teams, whose members were thoroughly corrupt too.
¹³⁹

In some cases the inspection system did make an impact: some camps, fearing trouble, made an effort to fulfill the letter if not the spirit of the law. One camp inmate, for example, received a half-glass of sugar at the end of each month, which he ate raw. This was how his camp’s boss ensured he received the amount stipulated by the Moscow bureaucracy. He and his fellow prisoners celebrated the occasion as “sugar day.”
¹⁴⁰

In the end, not everybody starved. For even if most food products disappeared before they made it into the soup, one staple food was usually available: bread. Like soup, the bread of the Gulag has been described many times. Sometimes it is remembered as badly baked: one prisoner remembered it being so hard it “resembled a brick,” and so small it could be eaten “in two bites.”
¹⁴¹
Another wrote that it was “literally ‘black’ bread because the bran left in it colored the bread black and made the texture coarse.” He also noted that it was baked with a great deal of water, so that it was “wet and weighed heavy, so that in actual fact we received less than our allotted 700 grams.”
¹⁴²

Others recalled that prisoners fought over the drier, less watery ends of the loaves.
¹⁴³
In Varlam Shalamov’s short story “Cherry Brandy,” a fictive description of the death of Osip Mandelstam, the poet’s approaching death is signaled by his loss of interest in such matters: “He no longer watched for the heel of the loaf or cried when he didn’t get it. He didn’t stuff the bread into his mouth with trembling fingers.”
¹⁴⁴

In the hungrier camps, in the hungrier years, bread took on an almost sacred status, and a special etiquette grew up around its consumption. While camp thieves stole almost everything else with impunity, for example, the theft of bread was considered particularly heinous and unforgivable. Vladimir Petrov found on his long train journey to Kolyma that “thieving was permitted and could be applied to anything within the thief’s capacity and luck, but there was one exception—bread. Bread was sacred and inviolable, regardless of any distinctions in the population of the car.” Petrov had in fact been chosen as the
starosta
of the car, and in that capacity was charged with beating up a petty thief who had stolen bread. He duly did so.
¹⁴⁵
Thomas Sgovio also wrote that the unwritten law of the camp criminals in Kolyma was: “Steal anything—excepting the holy bread portion.” He too had “seen more than one prisoner beaten to death for violating the sacred tradition.”
¹⁴⁶
Similarly, Kazimierz Zarod remembered that

If a prisoner stole clothes, tobacco, or almost anything else and was discovered, he could expect a beating from his fellow prisoners, but the unwritten law of the camp—and I have heard from men from other camps that it was the same everywhere—was that a prisoner caught stealing another’s bread earned a death sentence.
¹⁴⁷

In his memoirs, Dmitri Panin, a close friend of Solzhenitsyn’s, described exactly how such a death sentence might be carried out: “An offender caught in the act of stealing bread would be tossed in the air by other prisoners and allowed to crash to the ground; this was repeated several times, damaging his kidneys. Then they would heave him out of the barracks like so much carrion.”

Panin, like many other camp survivors who lived through the hungry war years, also wrote eloquently about the individual rituals with which some prisoners ate their bread. If prisoners received bread only once a day, in the morning, they faced an agonizing decision: eat it all at once, or save some until the afternoon. To save the bread risked loss or theft of the precious quarter-loaf. On the other hand, a piece of bread was something to look forward to during the day. Panin’s caution against the latter approach must stand as a unique testimony to the science of avoiding hunger:

When you get your ration you have an overwhelming desire to stretch out the pleasure of eating it, cutting your bread up evenly into tiny pieces, rolling the crumbs into little balls. From sticks and strings you improvise a pair of scales and weigh every piece. In such ways you try to prolong the business of eating by three hours or more. But this is tantamount to suicide!

Never on any account take more than a half-hour to consume your ration. Every bite of bread should be chewed thoroughly, to enable the stomach to digest it as easily as possible so that it give up to one’s organism a maximum amount of energy . . . if you always split your ration and put aside a part of it for the evening, you are finished. Eat it all at one sitting; if, on the other hand, you gobble it down too quickly, as famished people often do in normal circumstances, you will also shorten your days . . .
¹⁴⁸

Zeks
were not the only inhabitants of the Soviet Union who became obsessed with bread and the many ways to eat it, however. To this day, a Russian acquaintance of mine will not eat brown bread of any kind, because, as a child during the war in Kazakhstan, he ate nothing else. And Susanna Pechora, a prisoner in Minlag in the 1950s, once overheard a conversation about camp bread between two Russian peasant women, also prisoners—women who had known what life was like
without
camp bread:

One of them was holding a piece of bread and stroking it. “Oh my
khlebushka
” [a nickname, “little bread,” such as one might give to a child], she said, gratefully, “they give you to us every day.” The other said, “We could dry it, and send it to the children, they are hungry after all. But I don’t think they’d allow us to send it . . .”
¹⁴⁹

After that, Pechora told me, she thought twice before complaining about the lack of food in the camps.

RABOCHAYA ZONA: THE WORK ZONE

Work was the central function of most Soviet camps. It was the main occupation of prisoners, and the main preoccupation of the administration. Daily life was organized around work, and the prisoners’ well-being depended upon how successfully they worked. Nevertheless, it is difficult to generalize about what camp work was like: the image of the prisoner in the snowstorm, digging gold or coal with a pickax, is only a stereotype. There were many such prisoners—millions, as the figures for the camps of Kolyma and Vorkuta make clear—but there were also, we now know, camps in central Moscow where prisoners designed airplanes, camps in central Russia where prisoners built and ran nuclear power plants, fishing camps on the Pacific coast, collective farm camps in southern Uzbekistan. The archives of the Gulag in Moscow are chock-full of photographs of prisoners with their camels.
²

Without a doubt, the range of economic activity within the Gulag was as wide as the range of economic activity within the USSR itself. A glance through the
Guide to the System of Corrective-Labor Camps in the USSR
, the most comprehensive listing of camps to date, reveals the existence of camps organized around gold mines, coal mines, nickel mines; highway and railway construction; arms factories, chemical factories, metal-processing plants, electricity plants; the building of airports, apartment blocks, sewage systems; the digging of peat, the cutting of trees, and the canning of fish.
³
The Gulag administrators themselves preserved a photo album solely dedicated to the goods that inmates produced. Among other things, there are pictures of mines, missiles, and other army equipment; car parts, door locks, buttons; logs floating down rivers; wooden furniture, including chairs, cabinets, telephone boxes, and barrels; shoes, baskets, and textiles (with samples attached); rugs, leather, fur hats, sheepskin coats; glass cups, lamps, and jars; soap and candles; even toys—wooden tanks, tiny windmills, and mechanical rabbits playing drums.
⁴

Work varied within individual camps as well as between them. True, many prisoners in forestry camps did nothing but fell trees. Prisoners with sentences of three years or less worked in “corrective-labor colonies,” light-regime camps which were usually organized around a single factory or occupation. Larger Gulag camps, by contrast, might contain a number of industries: mines, a brick factory, and a power plant, as well as housing or road construction sites. In such camps, prisoners unloaded the daily goods trains, drove trucks, picked vegetables, worked in kitchens, hospitals, and children’s nurseries. Unofficially, prisoners also worked as servants, nannies, and tailors for the camp commanders, guards, and their wives.

Prisoners with long sentences often held down a wide variety of jobs, changing work frequently as their luck rose and fell. In her nearly two-decade camp career, Evgeniya Ginzburg worked cutting trees, digging ditches, cleaning the camp guest house, washing dishes, tending chickens, doing laundry for camp commanders’ wives, and caring for prisoners’ children. Finally, she became a nurse.
⁵
During the eleven years he spent in camps, another political prisoner, Leonid Sitko, worked as a welder, as a stonemason in a quarry, as a construction worker on a building brigade, as a porter in a railway depot, as a miner in a coal mine, and as a carpenter in a furniture factory, making tables and bookshelves.
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But although jobs could be as varied within the camp system as they were in the outside world, working prisoners usually broke down into two categories: those assigned to
obshchya raboty—
“general work”—and the
pridurki
, a word usually translated into English as “trusties.” The latter had, as we shall see, the status of a separate caste. General work, the lot of the vast majority of prisoners, was precisely what it sounds like: unskilled, physically demanding hard labor. “The first camp winter of 1949–50 was especially difficult for me,” wrote Isaak Filshtinsky. “I didn’t have a profession which could be put to use in the camps, and I was forced to go from place to place, doing various kinds of general work, to saw, to carry, to pull, to push, and so on—to go, in other words, wherever it came into the head of the work-assigner to send me.”
⁷

With the exception of those who had been lucky in the very first round of work assignments—usually those who were building engineers or members of other useful camp professions, or else had already established themselves as informers—the majority of
zeks
were assigned to general work as a matter of course after their week or so in quarantine had ended. They were also assigned to a brigade: a group of anywhere from four to 400
zeks
, who not only worked together, but also ate together and generally slept in the same barracks. Each brigade was led by a brigadier, a trusted, high-status prisoner who was responsible for doling out jobs, overseeing the work—and ensuring that the team met the production norm.

The importance of the brigadier, whose status lay somewhere between that of prisoner and that of administrator, was not lost on camp authorities. In 1933, the boss of Dmitlag sent an order to all of his subordinates, reminding them of the need to “find among our shock-workers the capable people who are so necessary to our work,” since “the brigadier is the most important, most significant person on the construction site.”
⁸

Grave Digging
: a drawing by Benjamin Mkrtchyan, Ivdel, 1953

From the individual prisoner’s point of view, his relationship with the brigadier was more than merely important: it could determine his quality of life—even whether he lived or died, as one prisoner wrote:

The life of a person depends very much on his brigade and his brigadier, given that you spend all your days and nights in their company. At work, in the dining hall, and in your bunks—always the same faces. The brigade members can either work all together, in groups, or individually. They can help you survive, or help destroy you. Either sympathy and help, or hostility and indifference. The role of the brigadier is no less important. It also matters who he is, what he thinks his tasks and obligations are: to serve the bosses at your cost and his own benefit, to treat his brigade members like underlings, servants and lackeys—or to be your comrade in ill-fortune and to do everything possible to make life easier for the members of the brigade.
⁹

Some brigadiers did indeed threaten and intimidate their workforce. On his first day in the Karaganda mines, Alexander Weissberg fainted from hunger and exhaustion: “with the roars of a maddened bull the brigadier now turned on me, flinging every ounce of his powerful body on to me, kicking and punching and finally dealing me such a blow on the head that I fell to the ground, half-stunned, covered in bruises and with blood streaming down my face...”
¹⁰

In other cases, the brigadier allowed the brigade itself to function as an organized peer group, putting pressure on prisoners to work harder even if they were otherwise inclined. In the novel
A Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich
, Solzhenitsyn’s hero at one point muses that a camp brigade “isn’t like a work gang outside, where Ivan Ivanovich and Pyotr Petrovich each get a wage of his own. In the camps things are arranged so that the
zek
is kept up to the mark not by his bosses but by the others in his gang. Either everybody gets a bonus or else they all die together.”
¹¹

Vernon Kress, another Kolyma prisoner, was beaten and shouted at by his brigade comrades for being unable to keep up, and was ultimately forced into a “weak” brigade, none of whose members ever received the full ration.
¹²
Yuri Zorin also had the experience of being part of a genuinely hardworking brigade, composed mostly of Lithuanians who would not tolerate shirkers in their ranks: “You can’t imagine how willingly and well they worked . . . if they thought you worked badly, you got kicked out of the Lithuanian brigade.”
¹³

If you had the bad luck to end up in a “bad” brigade, and you could not bribe or squirm your way out, you could starve. M. B. Mindlin, later one of the founders of the Memorial Society, was once assigned to a Kolyma brigade composed mostly of Georgians and led by a Georgian brigadier. He quickly realized not only that the brigade members were as afraid of their brigadier as they were of the camp guards, but also that as the “only Jew in a brigade of Georgians,” he would be shown no special favors. One day he worked particularly hard, in an attempt to be awarded the highest level of rations, 1,200 grams of bread. The brigadier refused to recognize this, however, and marked him down as deserving only 700 grams. With the aid of a bribe, Mindlin switched brigades, and found a completely different atmosphere: the new brigadier actually cared about his underlings, and even allowed him a few days of lighter work in the beginning, in order to get his strength back: “Everyone who got into his brigade considered himself lucky, and was saved from death.” Later, he himself became a brigadier, and took it upon himself to dole out bribes, in order to ensure that all the members of his brigade got the best possible deal from the camp cooks, bread-cutters, and other important people.
¹⁴

The brigadier’s attitude mattered because, for the most part, general work was not intended to be phoney or meaningless. Whereas in German camps, work was often designed, according to one prominent scholar, to be “principally a means of torture and abuse,” Soviet prisoners were meant to be fulfilling some aspect of the camp’s production plan.
¹⁵
True, there were exceptions to this rule. At times, stupid or sadistic guards would actually set prisoners pointless tasks. Susanna Pechora recalled being assigned to carry buckets of clay back and forth, “totally pointless work.” One of the “bosses” in charge of her work site specifically told her, “I don’t need your work, I need your suffering,” a phrase which would have been familiar to the prisoners of Solovetsky in the 1920s.
¹⁶
By the 1940s, as we shall see, there also arose a system of punishment camps, whose purpose was not primarily economic but punitive. Even within them, however, prisoners were expected to produce something.

Most of the time, prisoners were not meant to suffer—or perhaps it is more accurate to say that no one cared if they did or not. Far more important was that they fit into a camp production plan and fulfill a work norm. A norm could be anything: a certain number of cubic meters of wood to be cut down, of ditches to be dug, of coal to be hauled. And these norms were taken deadly seriously. Camps were covered with posters exhorting prisoners to fulfill their norms. The entire “cultural-educational” apparatus of the camps was devoted to the same message. The dining halls or central square of some camps featured enormous chalkboards, listing each brigade and its latest norm-fulfillment.
¹⁷

Norms were calculated with great care and scientific reasoning by the norm-setter (normirovshik), whose job was thought to require great skill. Jacques Rossi records, for example, that those shoveling snow were assigned different norms depending upon whether the snow was freshly fallen snow, light snow, lightly packed snow, packed snow (requiring pressure from the foot on the shovel), heavily packed snow, or frozen snow (requiring work with picks). Even after all of that, “a series of coefficients account for the distance and height of the shoveled snow, and so forth.”
¹⁸

But although theoretically scientific, the process of establishing norms for work, and of determining who had achieved them, was fraught with corruption, irregularity, and incongruity. To begin with, prisoners were usually assigned norms that corresponded with those assigned to free workers: they were meant to achieve the same as professional foresters or miners. By and large, however, prisoners were not professional foresters or miners, and often had little idea what they were meant to be doing. Nor, after long terms in jail and harrowing journeys in unheated cattle cars, were they even in average physical condition.

The more inexperienced and exhausted the prisoner, the more he would suffer. Evgeniya Ginzburg wrote a classic description of two women, both intellectuals unaccustomed to hard labor, both weakened by years in prison, trying to cut down trees:

For three days, Galya and I struggled to achieve the impossible. Poor trees, how they must have suffered at being mangled by our inexpert hands. Half-dead ourselves, and completely unskilled, we were in no condition to tackle them. The axe would slip and send showers of chips in our faces. We sawed feverishly, jerkily, mentally accusing each other of clumsiness—we knew we could not afford the luxury of a quarrel. Time and again the saw got stuck. But the most terrifying moment was when the tree was at last on the point of falling, only we didn’t know which way. Once Galya got hit on the head, but the medical orderly refused even to put iodine on the cut, saying, “Aha! That’s an old trick! Trying to get exempted on the first day, are you?”

At the end of the day, the brigadier declared Evgeniya and Galya had achieved 18 percent of the norm, and “paid” them for their poor showing: “Receiving the scrap of bread which corresponded to our performance, we were led out next day literally staggering from weakness to our place of work.” Meanwhile, the brigadier kept repeating that he “did not intend to throw away precious food on traitors who could not fulfill their norm.”
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