Gulag (55 page)

This trick, which we christened “freshening up the sandwiches,” saved our lives for the time being . . . I may add that we did not feel the slightest compunction . . .
³⁰

Thomas Sgovio also spent time in a Kolyma tree-felling brigade which, quite simply, did nothing at all:

During the first part of January, my partner Levin and I did not fell a single tree. Neither did any of the others in the lumber brigade. There were many log-piles in the forest. We selected one or two, cleaned off the snow and sat down by the fire. There was even no need to clean off the snow, because not once during the first month did the brigadier, foreman, or overseer come to check our work output.
³¹

Others used connections and relationships to find their way around impossible work assignments. One prisoner in Kargopollag paid another—the payment took the form of a chunk of lard—to teach him how to cut trees more efficiently, thereby enabling him to fulfill the norm, and even to rest in the afternoons.
³²
Another prisoner assigned to pan for gold in Kolyma paid a bribe to be given an easier job, standing on a slag heap instead of standing in the water.
³³

More frequently,
tufta
was organized at the level of work brigades, for brigadiers were able to disguise how much individual prisoners had worked. One ex
-zek
described how his brigadier allowed him to declare that he had fulfilled 60 percent of the norm, when in fact he could barely do anything at all.
³⁴
Yet another prisoner wrote of how his brigadier negotiated with the camp authorities to have his brigade’s norms lowered, as all of his workers were dying off.
³⁵
Still other brigadiers took bribes, as Yuri Zorin, who was himself a brigadier, acknowledged: “There, in the camps, there are camp laws which may not be understood by those who live outside the zone,” was how he delicately put it.
³⁶
Leonid Trus recalled that his Norilsk brigadiers simply “decided which of his workers deserved better food and pay than others,” without any regard to what they had actually achieved. Bribery, and clan loyalties, determined a prisoner’s “output.”

From the
zek
’s point of view, the best brigadiers were those who were capable of organizing
tufta
on a grand scale. Working in a quarry in the northern Urals in the late 1940s, Leonid Finkelstein found himself in a brigade whose leader had worked out a highly complex system of cheating. In the mornings, the team would go down into the canyon. The guards would stay up on the rim, where they spent the day sitting around bonfires to keep warm. Ivan, the brigadier leader, would then organize the
tufta
:

We knew precisely which parts of the bottom of the canyon are visible from up there, and that was our swindle . . . in the visible part of the bottom, we were cutting very hard at the stone wall. We were working and it was a great deal of noise—the guards could both see and hear us work. Then, Ivan would walk along the row . . . and say, “One to the left”—and we would each make one step to the left. It was never noticed by the guards.

So we would step, one to the left, one to the left, until the last one would step into the invisible zone—we knew where it was, there was a chalk strip on the ground. Once we were in the invisible zone, we would relax, sit on the ground, take an ax and hit the ground next to us, in a relaxed way, just to produce the noise. Then someone else would join, someone else, and so on. Then Ivan would say—“You: to the right!”—and the man would go and join the cycle again. None of us ever worked even half the shift.

Finkelstein was also told, by other prisoners, of the techniques used elsewhere to build a canal. There,
tufta
was different, but no less sophisticated: “The main thing was to show that the gang has fulfilled its norm.” Workers were asked to dig, but to leave untouched “a little post, a pile, showing what height you dug on the shift, how deep you dug.” Although norms were very heavy, “There were artists, real artists, who managed to extend this post, its height. It is unbelievable, it was cut out of earth, so it would be immediately visible if somebody tampered with it, and yet it was tampered with in a most artistic way. Then, of course the whole gang gets the Stakhanovite dinner.”
³⁷

Such special talents were not always necessary. At one point, Leonid Trus was assigned to unload goods wagons: “We would simply write that we had carried the goods farther than had actually been the case, say 300 meters, instead of 10 meters.” For that, they were given better food rations. “
Tufta
was constant,” he said of Norilsk; “without it there would have been nothing at all.”

Tufta
could also be organized higher up the administrative hierarchy, through careful negotiations between brigadiers and norm-setters, the camp functionaries whose job it was to determine how much a brigade should or should not be able to achieve in one day. Norm-setters, like brigadiers, were very prone to favoritism and bribery—as well as to whim. In Kolyma in the late 1930s, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg found herself appointed brigadier, head of a women’s ditch-digging brigade composed mostly of political prisoners, all weakened by long jail sentences. When, after three days’ work, they had completed just 3 percent of the norm, she went to the norm-setter and begged for an easier assignment. Upon hearing that the weak brigade was mostly composed of former Party members, his face darkened.

“Oh yes, former members of the Party, are they? Now, if you’d been prostitutes, I’d have been happy to let you wash windows and do three times the norm. When those Party members in 1929 decided to punish me for being a
kulak
, threw me and my six children out of our home, I said to them, ‘What’ve the children ever done?’ and they told me, ‘That’s the Soviet law.’ So there you are, you can stick to your Soviet law and dig nine cubic meters of mud a day.”
³⁸

Norm-setters were also aware of the need to conserve the workforce at certain times—if, for example, the camp had been criticized for its high mortality rates, or when the camp was one of those in the far north which could only get replacement workers once a season. In such circumstances, they might indeed lower the norm, or turn a blind eye when it was not fulfilled. This practice was known in the camps as “norm-stretching,” and to call it widespread is an understatement.
³⁹
One prisoner worked in a mine which required prisoners to dig 5.5 tons of coal every day, an impossible task. Sensibly, the mine’s chief engineer—a free worker—asked around to find out how many prisoners ought to be fulfilling the norm every day, and simply told his norm-setters to make their decisions about how much had actually been done on that basis, rotating the shock-worker distinction among all of the prisoners so that they all got more or less the same amount of food.
⁴⁰

Bribery also worked higher up the hierarchy, sometimes through an entire chain of people. Alexander Klein was in a camp in the late 1940s, at a time when small salaries were introduced to inspire
zeks
to work harder:

Having received his earned money (it wasn’t much) the worker gave a bribe to the brigadier. This was obligatory: the brigadier then had to give a bribe to the foreman and the norm-setter, who determined what norm had been fulfilled by the brigade . . . aside from this, the foreman and the brigadiers had to give bribes to the
naryadshchik
, the work-assigner. The cooks also paid bribes to the chief cook, and the bathhouse workers to the director of the bathhouse.

On average, wrote Klein, he gave away half of his “salary.” The consequences for those who did not could be dire. Those inmates who failed to pay up were automatically put down as having achieved a lower percentage of the norm, and therefore received less food. Brigadiers who did not want to pay suffered worse. One, wrote Klein, was murdered in his bed. His head was bashed in with a rock—and those sleeping around him did not even wake up.
⁴¹

Tufta
also affected the keeping of statistics at all levels of camp life. Camp commanders and camp accountants frequently changed numbers to benefit themselves, according to the dozens of reports of larceny kept in the files of the inspectorate. Anyone with even a remote connection to a camp stole food, money, whatever there was to steal: in 1942, the sister of the former boss of the railways division of the camps in Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, was accused of having “unlawfully removed some food products,” and being involved in speculation. At one
lagpunkt
in 1941, the camp commander and the chief accountant “used their professional status” to set up a false bank account, enabling them to milk the camp accounts. The commander stole 25,000 rubles, the accountant 18,000, a fortune in Soviet terms. But the sums were not always large either: a thick file on Siblag, containing prosecutors’ reports from 1942 to 1944, includes, among other things, a long series of letters reflecting a bitter dispute over a camp employee who supposedly stole two iron bowls, one enamel teapot, one blanket, one mattress, two sheets, two pillows, and two pillowcases.
⁴²

From theft, it was hardly a great moral leap to telling fibs about production statistics. If
tufta
began at the brigade level, and was compounded at the
lagpunkt
level, by the time the accountants at the larger camps were calculating total production statistics, the numbers were already very far from reality—and would, as we shall see, give very misleading ideas about the camps’ real productivity, which was in all probability extremely low.

In truth, it is almost impossible to know what to make of Gulag production figures, given the degree of lying and cheating that went on. For that reason, I am always mystified by the Gulag’s carefully detailed annual reports, such as the one produced in March 1940. More than 124 pages, this striking document describes the production figures for dozens of camps, carefully listing each one by specialty: the forestry camps, the factory camps, the mines, the collective farms. The report is accompanied by extensive charts and calculations, and many different sorts of figures. In conclusion, the report’s author confidently declared that the total value of Gulag production in 1940 was 2,659.5 million rubles—a figure which must, under the circumstances, be considered completely meaningless.
⁴³

PRIDURKI: COOPERATION AND COLLABORATION

Tufta
was not the only method that prisoners used to bridge the gap between the impossible norms expected of them and the impossible rations they were allotted. Nor was it the only tool the authorities used to meet their own impossible production targets. There were other ways of persuading prisoners to cooperate, as Isaak Filshtinskii brilliantly and memorably describes in the first chapter of his memoirs,
My shagaem pod konvoem
(
We March Under
Convoy Guard
).

Filshtinskii begins his story on one of his first days in Kargopollag, the logging and construction camp which lay to the north of Arkhangelsk. Newly arrived himself, he met another newcomer, a young woman. She was part of a female contingent that had been temporarily attached to his brigade. Noticing her “timid, frightened appearance” and her ragged camp clothes, he moved closer to her in the line of prisoners. Yes, she said, answering his query, “I arrived yesterday on a transport from prison.” They began to talk. She had what Filshtinskii described as “for that era, a rather banal personal history.” She was an artist, twenty-six years old. She was married, with a three-year-old son. She had been arrested because she had “said something or other to an artist friend, and the friend had informed.” Because her father had also been arrested in 1937, she had been quickly convicted of promoting anti-Soviet propaganda.

As they talked, the woman, still looking around with a frightened gaze, held on to Filshtinskii’s arm. Such contacts were forbidden, but fortunately the guards did not notice. As they arrived at the work site the men and women were divided, but on the way home the young artist found Filshtinskii again. For the next week and a half, they walked to and from the forest together, she telling him of her homesickness, of the husband who had abandoned her, of the child she might not see again. Then the women’s brigade was separated from the men’s brigade for good, and Filshtinskii lost track of his friend.

Three years passed. It was a hot day—a rarity in the far north—when Filshtinskii caught sight of the woman again. This time she was dressed in a “new jacket, perfectly fitting her size and figure.” Instead of the average prisoner’s tattered cap she wore a beret. Instead of prisoners’ worn boots she wore shoes. Her face had grown fatter, her looks more vulgar. When she opened her mouth, she spoke in the foulest slang, her language “testifying to long and durable links with the criminal world of the camp.” Catching sight of Filshtinskii, a look of horror came over her face. She turned and walked away, “almost running.”

By the time Filshtinskii encountered her for the third and final time, the woman was dressed in what seemed to him to be “the latest in city fashions.” She was sitting behind a boss’s desk, and was no longer a prisoner at all. She was also now married to Major L., a camp administrator famous for his cruelty. She addressed Filshtinskii rudely, and was no longer embarrassed to speak to him. The metamorphosis was complete: she had changed from prisoner to collaborator, and then from collaborator to camp boss. She had adopted first the language of the criminal world, then its dress and its habits. Through that route she had, finally, attained the privileged status of the camp authorities. Filshtinskii felt he had “nothing more to say to her”— although, as he left the room, he turned to look at her again. Their eyes met for an instant, and he thought he perceived in hers a flash of “limitless melancholy” and a hint of tears.
⁴⁴

The fate of Filshtinskii’s acquaintance is one that readers familiar with other camp systems will recognize. In describing the Nazi camps, the German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky wrote that “absolute power is a structure, not a possession.” By this, he meant that power in the German camps was not a simple matter of one person controlling the lives of others. Instead, “by making a small number of victims into its accomplices, the regime blurred the boundary between personnel and inmates.”
⁴⁵
Although the brutality that reigned in the Gulag was different, in its organization and its effects, Nazi and Soviet camps were similar in this respect: the Soviet regime also made such use of prisoners, tempting some into collaboration with the repressive system, raising them above the others, and granting them privileges which allowed them, in turn, to help the authorities exert their power. It is no accident that Filshtinskii concentrated, in his story, on the ever-improving wardrobe of his female acquaintance: in the camps, where everything was in chronic shortage, tiny improvements in clothing or food or living conditions were enough to persuade prisoners to cooperate, to strive for advancement. Those prisoners who succeeded were the
pridurki
, or “trusties.” And once they attained that status, their lives in the camps improved in a myriad of small ways.

Solzhenitsyn, who returns to the subject of trusties again and again, describes their obsession with small privileges and favors in
The Gulag
Archipelago
:

Because of the human race’s customary narrow-minded attachment to caste, it very soon became inconvenient for trusties to sleep in the same barracks as ordinary sloggers, on the same multiple bunks, or even, for that matter, on any multiple bunk at all, or anywhere else except a bed, or to eat at the same table, to undress in the same bath, or to put on the same underwear in which the sloggers had sweated and which they had torn . . .

Although recognizing that “all classifications in this world lack sharp boundaries,” Solzhenitsyn did his best to describe the trusties’ hierarchy. On the lowest rung, he explained, were the “work trusties”: the prisoner engineers, designers, mechanics, and geologists. Ranked just above them were the prisoner foremen, planners, norm-setters, construction superintendents, technicians. Both of these groups had to line up and be counted in the morning, and marched to work under convoy. On the other hand, they did not do physical work and were therefore not “utterly exhausted” at the end of the day; this made them more privileged than prisoners on general work.

“Compound trusties” were more privileged still. These were prisoners who never left the
zona
during the day. According to Solzhenitsyn,

A worker in the camp workshops lived much more easily and better than the slogger out on general work: he did not have to go out for line-up, and this meant he could rise and breakfast much later; he did not have to march under convoy to the work site and back; there were fewer severities, less cold, less strength spent; also, his workday ended earlier; either his work was in a warm place or else a place to warm up was always handy . . . “Tailor” in camp sounds and means something like “Assistant Professor” out in freedom.
⁴⁶

The lowest in the compound trusty hierarchy actually did physical work: bathhouse attendants, laundresses, dishwashers, stokers, and orderlies, as well as those who worked in the camp workshops, repairing clothes, shoes, and machinery. Ranked above these indoor workers were the “genuine” compound trusties, who did no physical work at all: the cooks, bread-cutters, clerks, doctors, nurses, medical assistants, barbers, senior orderlies, work-assigners, accountants. In some camps, there were even prisoners employed as official food-tasters.
⁴⁷
This latter group, writes Solzhenitsyn, were “Not only well-fed, clad in clean clothes, and exempt from lifting heavy weights and from crooks in their backs, but they had great power over what was most needed by a human being, and consequently power over people.”
⁴⁸
These were the trusties who had the power to decide what sort of work ordinary prisoners were to do, how much food they were going to receive, and whether they would receive medical treatment or not—whether, in short, they would live or die.

Unlike the privileged prisoners in the Nazi camps, the trusties of the Soviet camps did not have to belong to a particular racial category. In theory, anybody could rise to the status of trusty—just as anybody could become a prison guard—and there was a great deal of fluctuation between the two groups. Although in principle ordinary prisoners could become trusties, and in principle trusties could be demoted to the ranks of ordinary prisoners, there were complicated rules governing this process.

These rules differed greatly from camp to camp and from era to era, although there do seem to be a few conventions that held more or less true over time. Most important, it was easier to become a trusty if a prisoner was classified as a “socially close” criminal prisoner, and not a “socially dangerous” political. Because the twisted moral hierarchy of the Soviet camp system decreed the “socially close”—not just the professional criminals, but the ordinary thieves, swindlers, murderers, and rapists—more capable of being reformed into good Soviet citizens, they were automatically more likely to receive trusty status. And in a certain sense, the thieves, who had no fear of using brutality, made ideal trusties. “Everywhere and at all times,” wrote one political bitterly, “these convicts enjoyed almost unlimited confidence of the prison and camp administration, and were appointed to such soft jobs as working in offices, prison stores, canteens, bath-houses, barber shops and so on.”
⁴⁹
As I’ve said, this was particularly the case during the late 1930s and throughout the war, the years when criminal gangs ruled supreme in the Soviet camps. Even afterward—Filshtinskii was writing of the late 1940s— the “culture” of the trusties was hardly distinguishable from the culture of the professional criminals.

But the criminal trusties also presented a problem for the camp authorities. They were not “enemies”—but they were not educated either. In many cases they were not even literate, and did not want to become literate: even when camps set up literacy classes, criminals often did not bother to go to them.
⁵⁰
That left camp bosses with no choice, wrote Lev Razgon, except to employ the politicals: “The plan exerted an implacable pressure of its own which tolerated no excuses. Under its influence even the most zealous camp bosses who expressed the greatest hatred for the counter-revolutionary prisoners were obliged to put political prisoners to work.”
⁵¹

In fact, after 1939, when Beria replaced Yezhov—and simultaneously set about trying to make the Gulag profitable—the rules were never clear one way or another. Beria’s instructions of August 1939, while explicitly forbidding camp commanders to make use of political prisoners in any administrative capacity whatsoever, did, in fact, make exceptions. Qualified doctors were to be used in their professional capacity and, under special circumstances, so were prisoners sentenced according to some of the “lesser” crimes of Article 58—Sections 7, 10, 12, and 14, which included “Anti-Soviet Agitation” (telling anti-regime jokes, for example) and “anti-Soviet propaganda.” Those sentenced for “terrorism” or “betrayal of the motherland,” on the other hand, were theoretically not to be employed as anything except hard laborers.
⁵²
When the war broke out, even this command was reversed. Stalin and Molotov sent out a special circular allowing Dalstroi, “in view of the exceptional situation,” to “conclude individual agreements for a particular time period with engineers, technicians, and administrative workers who have been sent to work in Kolyma.”
⁵³

Nevertheless camp administrators who had too many politicals in high-ranking jobs still risked censure, and a degree of ambivalence always remained. According to both Solzhenitsyn and Razgon, it sometimes therefore happened that political prisoners were given “good” indoor jobs, accounting and bookkeeping—but only temporarily. Once every year, when the inspection teams from Moscow were due to arrive, they were fired again. Razgon developed a theory about this procedure:

A good camp boss would wait for the commission to arrive, let the commission do its work, remove anyone who had to be removed. It was not a time-consuming process and anyone not removed would remain for a long time—for a year, until the next December, or for a half-year at least. A less capable camp boss, a more foolish one, would remove such persons in advance so as to report that everything was in order. The worst camp boss, those who had the least experience, would conscientiously carry out the orders of their superiors and not permit persons condemned under Article 58 to work with any instrument other than the pick and the wheelbarrow, the saw and the axe. Such camp bosses were the least successful. Such camp bosses were quickly fired.
⁵⁴

In practice, the rules were often simply nonsensical. As a political prisoner in Kargopollag, Filshtinskii was strictly forbidden from taking a prisoners’ course in forestry technology. However, he was allowed to read the course books, and once he had passed the exam, studying on his own, he was allowed to work as a forestry specialist as well.
⁵⁵
Meanwhile, V. K. Yasnyi, also a political prisoner in the late 1940s, worked as an engineer in Vorkuta without causing any controversy at all.
⁵⁶
In the postwar years, as the stronger national groups began to make an impact in the camp, the reign of the criminals was frequently supplanted by that of the better-organized prisoners, often Ukrainians and Balts. Those in better jobs—the foreman and supervisors—could and did look after their own, and distributed other plum posts to political prisoners who happened to be their countrymen.

At no point did prisoners have full power to distribute trusty jobs, however. The camp administration had the ultimate say over who would become a trusty, and most camp commanders were inclined to give the cushier trusty jobs to those willing to collaborate more openly—in other words, to inform. Alas, it is difficult to say how many informers the system employed. Although the Russian state archives have opened up the rest of the Gulag administration archive, they have left closed the documents on the “Third Division,” the camp division responsible for informers. The Russian historian Viktor Berdinskikh, in his book on Vyatlag, cites some figures without naming a source: “In the 1920s, the leadership of the OGPU set itself the task of having no less than 25 percent informers among camp prisoners. In the 1930s and 1940s, this planned number was lowered to 10 percent.” But Berdinskikh also agrees that a real assessment of the numbers is “complicated” without better access to archives.
⁵⁷