Gulag (31 page)
Chapter 10
LIFE IN THE CAMPS
The sound of a distant bell
Enters the cell with the dawn
I hear the bell calling out to me:
“Where are you? Where are you?”
“Here I am!” . . . Then tears of greeting,
Mean tears of captivity . . .
Not for God,
But for you, Russia.”
—Simeon Vilensky, 1948
1
ACCORDING TO THE most accurate count to date, there were, between 1929 and 1953, 476 camp complexes in the realm of the Gulag.
2
But this number is misleading. In practice, each one of these camp complexes contained dozens, or even hundreds, of smaller camp units. These smaller units
—lagpunkts—
have not yet been counted, and probably cannot be, since some were temporary, some were permanent, and some were technically parts of different camps at different times. Nor can very much be said about the customs and practices of the
lagpunkts
that is guaranteed to apply to every single one. Even during Beria’s reign over the system—which lasted, in effect, from 1939 until Stalin’s death in 1953—living and working conditions in the Gulag would continue to vary enormously, both from year to year and from place to place, even within the same camp complex.
“Every camp is its own world, a separate city, a separate country,” wrote the Soviet actress Tatyana Okunevskaya—and every camp had its own character.
3
Life in one of the mass industrial camps of the far north was very different from life on an agricultural farm camp in southern Russia. Life in any camp during the most intensive period of the Second World War, when one in four
zeks
died every year, was quite different from life in the early 1950s, when death rates were nearly the same as in the rest of the country. Life in a camp headed by a relatively liberal boss was not the same as life in a camp led by a sadist.
Lagpunkts
also ranged widely in size, from several thousand to several dozen prisoners, as well as in longevity. Some lasted from the 1920s to the 1980s, when they still functioned as criminal prisons. Others, such as those set up to build the roads and railways across Siberia, lasted only as long as a single summer.
Nevertheless, on the eve of the war, certain elements of life and of work were common to the vast majority of camps. The climate still varied from
lagpunkt
to
lagpunkt
, but the huge fluctuations in national policy that had characterized the 1930s had come to a halt. Instead, the same inert bureaucracy that would eventually lay its dead hand on virtually every aspect of life in the Soviet Union slowly took over the Gulag as well.
Striking, in this regard, are the differences between the sketchy and somewhat vague rules and regulations for the camps issued in 1930, and the more detailed rules issued in 1939, after Beria had taken control. This difference seems to reflect a changing relationship between the organs of central control—the Moscow Gulag administration itself—and the commanders of camps in the regions. During the Gulag’s first, experimental decade, the order papers did not attempt to dictate what camps should look like, and barely touched on the behavior of prisoners. They sketched out a general scheme, and left local commanders to fill in the blanks.
By contrast, the later orders were very specific and very detailed indeed, dictating virtually every aspect of camp life, from the method of construction of barracks to the prisoners’ daily regime, in line with the Gulag’s new sense of purpose.
4
From 1939, it seems that Beria—with, presumably, Stalin behind him—no longer explicitly intended the Gulag camps to be death camps, as some of them had been, in effect, in 1937 and 1938. Which is not to say, however, that their administrators were any more concerned with preserving human life, let alone respecting human dignity. From 1939 on, Moscow’s central concerns were economic: prisoners were to be slotted into the camp’s production plan like cogs in a machine.
Toward this end, the rules emanating from Moscow dictated strict control over the prisoners, to be obtained through the manipulation of their living conditions. In principle—as noted—the camp classified every
zek
according to his sentence, his profession, and his
trudosposobnost
, or “work capacity.” In principle, the camp assigned every
zek
a job, and a set of norms to fulfill. In principle, the camp allotted every
zek
the basic necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter, living space—according to how well, or how badly, he fulfilled these norms. In principle, every aspect of camp life was designed to improve production figures: even the camp “cultural-educational” departments existed largely because the Gulag bosses believed they might convince prisoners to work harder. In principle, inspection teams existed in order to make sure that all of these aspects of camp life worked harmoniously. In principle, every
zek
, even, had the right to complain—to the camp boss, to Moscow, to Stalin—if the camps were not operating according to the rules.
And yet—in practice, things were very different. People are not machines, the camps were not clean, well-functioning factories, and the system never worked the way it was supposed to. Guards were corrupt, administrators stole, and the prisoners developed ways of fighting or subverting the camps’ rules. Within the camps, prisoners were also able to form their own informal hierarchies which sometimes harmonized with, and sometimes conflicted with, the official hierarchy created by the camp administration. Despite regular visits from Moscow inspectors, often followed up by reprimands and angry letters from the center, few camps lived up to the theoretical model. Despite the apparent seriousness with which prisoners’ complaints were treated—whole commissions existed to examine them— they rarely resulted in actual change.
5
This clash between what the Gulag administration in Moscow thought the camps were supposed to be, and what they actually were on the ground— the clash between the rules written on paper, and the procedures carried out in practice—was what gave life in the Gulag its peculiar, surreal flavor. In theory, the Gulag administration in Moscow dictated the smallest aspects of prisoners’ lives. In practice, every aspect of life was also affected by the prisoners’ relationships with those who controlled them, and with one another.
ZONA: WITHIN THE BARBED WIRE
By definition, the most fundamental tool at the disposal of the camp administrators was control over the space in which prisoners lived: this was the
zona
, or “prison zone.” By law, a
zona
was laid out in either a square or a rectangle. “In order to insure better surveillance,” no organic or irregular shapes were permitted.
6
Within this square or rectangle, there was not much to interest the eye. Most of the buildings in a typical
lagpunkt
looked remarkably alike. Photographs of camp buildings once taken by Vorkuta administrators, and preserved in Moscow archives, show an array of primitive wooden buildings, otherwise indistinguishable except for the captions describing one as a “punishment cell,” another as a “dining hall.”
7
There was usually a large open space in the center of the camp, near the gate, where the prisoners stood at attention twice a day to be counted. There were usually some guards’ barracks and administrators’ houses, also made of wood, just outside the main gate.
What distinguished the
zona
from any other workplace was, of course, the fence that surrounded it. Jacques Rossi, in
The Gulag Handbook
, wrote that the fence is usually built of wooden posts with one-third of their length in the ground. They range from 2.5 to 6 meters (7.5 to 18 feet) high, depending on local conditions. Seven to fifteen rows of barbed wire are stretched horizontally between the posts, which are about 6 meters (18 feet) apart. Two strands of wire are stretched diagonally between each pair of posts.
8
If the camp or colony was located near or within a city, the barbed-wire fence was usually replaced by a wall or fence made of bricks or wood, so that no one approaching the site would be able to see in from the outside. These barriers were well-built: in Medvezhegorsk, for example, the headquarters of the White Sea Canal, a high wooden fence, built in the early 1930s to contain prisoners, was still standing when I visited the town in 1998.
To get through the fence, prisoners and guards alike had to travel through the
vakhta
, or “guardhouse.” During the day, the guards of the
vakhta
monitored all of those who entered and left the camp, checking the passes of free workers coming into the camps, and of the convoy guards escorting prisoners on their way out. In the camp at Perm-36, which has been restored to its original state, the
vakhta
contains a passage blocked by two gates. A prisoner would walk through the first gate, then stop in the small space in between to be searched or checked. Only then would he be allowed to walk through the second gate. It was much the same system as one finds at the entrance to a Sicilian bank.
But barbed wire and walls alone did not define the
zona
’s boundaries. In most camps, armed guards observed the prisoners from high wooden watchtowers. Sometimes dogs also circled the camp, attached by chains to a metal wire which had been stretched all the way around the
zona.
The dogs, managed by special dog-handlers among the guards, were trained to bark at approaching prisoners and to follow the scent and chase anyone attempting escape. Prisoners were thus held in by barriers of sight, smell, and sound, as well as by barbed wire and brick.
They were also held in by fear, which was sometimes enough to keep prisoners within a camp that had no fence at all. Margarete Buber-Neumann was kept in a low-security camp which allowed prisoners to “move freely up to within half a mile of the camp perimeter; after that the guards shot without ceremony.”
9
This was unusual: in most camps, the guards would shoot “without ceremony” much sooner than that. In his 1939 regulations, Beria ordered all camp commanders to line their fences with a no-man’s-land, a strip of earth no less than 5 meters (15 feet) wide.
10
Guards regularly raked the no-man’s-land in summer and deliberately left it covered with snow in winter, in order that the footprints of escaping prisoners might always be visible. The beginning of the no-man’s-land was also marked, sometimes by barbed wire, sometimes by signs reading “
zapretnaya
zona
,” “forbidden zone.” The no-man’s-land was sometimes called the “death zone,” since guards were permitted to shoot anyone who entered it.
11
And yet—the fences and walls and dogs and barricades that surrounded
lagpunkts
were not totally impenetrable. Whereas German concentration camps were completely self-contained—“sealed off totally, hermetically,” is how one expert puts it
12
—the Soviet system was in this sense different.
To begin with, the Soviet system classified prisoners as
konvoinyi
or
beskonvoinyi—
“guarded” or “unguarded”—and the small minority of unguarded prisoners were allowed to cross over the boundary without being watched, to run errands for the guards, to work during the day on an unguarded bit of railway, even to live in private apartments outside the
zona.
This latter privilege had been established early in the history of the camps, in the more chaotic years of the early 1930s.
13
Although it was explicitly forbidden several times after that, it persisted. One set of rules written in 1939 reminded camp commanders that “all prisoners, without exception, are forbidden to live outside the zone in villages, private apartments, or houses belonging to the camp.” Theoretically, camps needed to get special permission even to let inmates live in a guarded accommodation, if it was outside the zona.
14
In practice, these rules were frequently disregarded. Despite the edict of 1939, inspectors’ reports written long after that date list a wide variety of violations. In the city of Ordzhonikidze, one inspector complained, prisoners walked around the streets, went to bazaars, entered private apartments, drank, and stole. In one Leningrad prison colony, a prisoner had been given use of a horse, on which he escaped. In work colony No. 14 in Voronezh, an armed guard left thirty-eight prisoners standing on the street while he went into a shop.
15
The Moscow prosecutors’ office wrote a letter to another camp, near the Siberian city of Komsomolsk, accusing commanders of allowing no less than 1,763 prisoners to attain the status of “unguarded.” As a result, the prosecutors wrote angrily, “it is always possible to meet prisoners in any part of the town, in any institution, and in private apartments.”
16
They also accused another camp of letting 150 prisoners live in private apartments, a violation of the regime, which had led to “incidents of drunkenness, hooliganism, and even robbery of the local population.”
17
But within camps, prisoners were not deprived of all freedom of movement either. On the contrary, this is one of the quirks of the concentration camp, one of the ways in which it differs from a prison: when not working, and when not sleeping, most prisoners could walk in and out of the barracks at will. When not working, prisoners could also decide, within limits, how to spend their time. Only those prisoners subjected to the
katorga
regime, set up in 1943, or later those put in the “special regime camps,” created in 1948, were locked into their barracks at night, a circumstance they bitterly resented and later rebelled against.
18
Arriving in the camps from claustrophobic Soviet prisons, inmates were often surprised and relieved by this change. One
zek
said of his arrival in Ukhtpechlag: “Our mood was wonderful, once we got into the open air.”
19
Olga Adamova-Sliozberg remembered talking “from dawn to dusk about the advantages of camp over prison life” upon her arrival in Magadan:
The camp population (around a thousand women) seemed to us enormous: so many people, so many conversations to have, so many potential friends! Then there was nature. Within the compound, which was fenced with barbed wire, we could walk around freely, gaze at the sky and the faraway hills, go up to the stunted trees and stroke them with our hands. We breathed the moist sea air, felt the August drizzle on our faces, sat on the damp grass and let the earth run through our fingers. For four years we had lived without doing all this and discovered in doing so that it was essential to our being: without it you ceased to feel like a normal person.
20
Leonid Finkelstein concurs:
You were brought in, you got out of the prison van, and you are surprised by several things. First, that the prisoners are walking around, without guards—they were going somewhere on their duties, whatever. Second, they look completely different from you. The contrast was even greater felt when I was in the camp and they would deliver new prisoners. The new prisoners all have green faces—green faces because of the lack of fresh air, miserable food, and all that. The prisoners in the camps have more or less normal complexions. You find yourself among relatively free, relatively good-looking people.
21
Over time, the apparent “freedom” of this camp life usually palled. While in prison, wrote a Polish prisoner, Kazimierz Zarod, it was still possible to believe that a mistake had been made, that release would come soon. After all, “we were still surrounded by the trappings of civilization—outside the walls of the prison there was a large town.” In the camp, however, he found himself milling freely about among a “strange assortment of men . . . all feelings of normality were suspended. As the days went by I was filled by a sort of panic which slowly turned into desperation. I tried to push the feeling down, back into the depths of consciousness, but slowly it began to dawn on me that I was caught up in a cynical act of injustice from which there appeared to be no escape . . .”
22
Worse, this freedom of movement could easily and quickly turn to anarchy. Guards and camp authorities were plentiful enough inside the
lagpunkt
during the day, but they often disappeared completely at night. One or two would remain within the
vakhta
, but the rest withdrew to the other side of the fence. Only when prisoners believed their lives were in danger, did they sometimes turn to the guards in the
vakhta.
One memoirist recalls that in the aftermath of a brawl between political and criminal prisoners— a common phenomenon of the postwar period, as we shall see—the criminal losers “ran to the
vakhta
,” begging for help. They were sent away on a transport to another
lagpunkt
the following day, as the camp administration preferred to avoid mass murder.
23
Another woman, feeling herself in danger of rape and possibly murder at the hands of a criminal prisoner, “turned herself in” to the
vakhta
, and asked to be placed in the camp punishment cell for the night for protection.
24
The
vakhta
was not a reliable zone of safety, however. The guards residing within the guardhouse did not necessarily react to prisoners’ requests. Informed of some outrage committed by one group of prisoners against the other, they were just as likely to laugh. There are records, in both official documents and memoirs, of armed guards ignoring or laughing off cases of murder, torture, and rape among prisoners. Describing a gang rape that took place at one of the Kargopollag
lagpunkts
at night, Gustav Herling writes that the victim “let out a short, throaty cry, full of tears and muffled by her skirt. A sleepy voice called from the watch-tower: ‘Come, come boys, what are you doing? Have you no shame?’ The eight men pulled the girl behind the latrines, and continued . . .”
25
In theory, the rules were strict: the prisoners were to stay inside the
zona.
In practice, the rules were broken. And behavior that did not technically violate the rules, no matter how violent or harmful, was not necessarily punished.
