Gulag (54 page)

TUFTA: PRETENDING TO WORK

To write a straightforward description of
tufta—
a word which translates, very imprecisely, as “swindling the boss”—is not an easy task. For one, such practices were so deeply ingrained in the Soviet system that it is hardly fair to describe them as if they were somehow unique to the Gulag.
¹⁴
Nor were they unique to the USSR. The communist-era proverb, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work,” could once be heard in most of the languages of the old Warsaw Pact.

More to the point,
tufta
permeated virtually every aspect of work—work assignments, work organization, work accounting—and affected virtually every member of the camp community, from the Gulag bosses in Moscow, to the lowliest camp guards, to the most downtrodden prisoners. This was true from the very beginning of the Gulag until the very end. One much-repeated prisoners’ rhyme dated from the days of the White Sea Canal:

Bez tufty i ammonala
Ne postroili by kanala.
Without
tufta
and dynamite
They would never have built the canal.
¹⁵

In the years since this topic became the subject of debate, controversy has also surrounded the question of how hard prisoners did or did not work, and how much effort they did or did not put into evading work. Ever since the 1962 publication of Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
opened up a more or less public debate about the subject of the camps, the broader community of survivors, polemicists, and camp historians has had notable difficulty in coming to a unanimous agreement about the morality of camp work. For much of Solzhenitsyn’s groundbreaking novella was indeed dedicated to its hero’s attempts to avoid work. During the course of Ivan Denisovich’s day, he approaches a doctor, hoping for sick leave; fantasizes about becoming ill for a few weeks; gazes up at the camp thermometer, hoping it will prove too cold to go to the workplace; speaks admirably of brigade leaders who can “make it look as if the work’s done, whether it is or not”; feels relieved when his brigade leader gets a “good rate for the job,” despite the fact that “half the day was gone and they’d done nothing”; steals wood chips from the workplace to light the barracks fire; and steals extra gruel at dinnertime. “Work,” thinks Ivan at one point, “is what horses die of.” He tries to avoid it.

In the years that followed the book’s publication, this portrait of a typical
zek
was disputed by other survivors, both for ideological and personal reasons. On the one hand, those who believed in the Soviet system—and therefore also believed that the “work” of the camps was valuable and necessary—found Denisovich’s “laziness” offensive. Many of the “alternative,” more “pro-Soviet” accounts of camp life, published in the official Soviet press in the wake of
Ivan Denisovich
, even focused explicitly on the dedication to work shown by those who, despite the unfairness of their arrests, remained true believers. The Soviet writer (and lifelong informer) Boris Dyakov described an engineer employed on a Gulag construction project near Perm. The engineer had been so engrossed in the job, he told Dyakov’s narrator, that he forgot he was a prisoner: “For a while I enjoyed my work so much I forgot what I had become.” So conscientious was the engineer in Dyakov’s story that he even secretly sent a letter to a local newspaper, complaining about the poor organization of the camp’s transport and supply systems. Although admonished by the camp commander for this indiscretion—it was unheard of for a prisoner’s name to appear in the newspaper—the engineer, as Dyakov tells it, remained pleased that “after the article, things improved a little.”
¹⁶

The views of those who ran the camps were even more extreme. Anonymously, a former camp administrator told me quite angrily that all of the stories of camp inmates living badly were simply untrue. Those who worked well lived extremely well, she said, much better than the general public: they could even purchase
condensed milk—
my italics—which ordinary people could not. “It was only those who refused to work, they lived badly,” she told me.
¹⁷
Such views were generally not voiced in public, but there were some exceptions. Anna Zakharova, the wife of an NKVD officer, whose letter to
Izvestiya
circulated in the Russian underground press in the 1960s, was sharply critical of Solzhenitsyn. Zakharova wrote that she was “angered to the depths of my soul” by
Ivan Denisovich:

We can see why the hero of this story, having such an attitude to the Soviet people, hopes for nothing but the sick bay in order somehow to get out of redeeming his guilt, the wrong he did to his motherland, through toil . . . And why exactly should a person try to avoid physical labor and show scorn for it? After all, for us labor is the foundation of the Soviet system, and it is only in labor that man becomes cognizant of his true powers.
¹⁸

Other, less ideological objections have also come from ordinary
zeks.
V. K. Yasnyi, a prisoner for five years in the early 1940s, wrote in his memoirs that “We tried to work honestly, and not for fear of losing rations, or ending up in the isolator . . . hard work, and that was what it was in our brigade, helped you forget, helped chase away anxious thoughts.”
¹⁹
Nadezhda Ulyanovskaya, who was imprisoned along with her mother, wrote that her mother worked hard “in order to prove that Jews and intelligentsia work no worse than others.” (“I worked because I was forced to do so,” she writes of herself, however. “I fear that on this point, I did not hold up the honor of the Jewish people.”)
²⁰

Prisoners who had worked enthusiastically on behalf of the Soviet regime all of their lives did not quickly change either. Alexander Borin, a political prisoner and aviation engineer, was assigned to a Gulag metalworking plant. In his memoirs, he proudly describes the technical innovations he made there, mostly worked out in his spare time.
²¹
Alla Shister, another political arrested in the late 1930s, told me in an interview that “I always worked as if I were free. This is my personality trait, I cannot work badly. If a hole has to be dug, I’ll keep on digging until it is finished.” After two years on general work, Shister became a brigade leader, because, she said, “They saw that I work not like a prisoner works, but with all of my strength.” In that capacity, she then made every attempt to inspire those beneath her, although admittedly not by firing them up with love of the Soviet state. This is how she described her first encounter with the men who were to work for her:

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.’”