Gulag (79 page)

Many elements of Marchenko’s prison experience would have been familiar to people used to hearing stories of Stalin’s camps. Just like his predecessors, Marchenko rode to Mordovia in a Stolypin wagon. Just like his predecessors, he received a loaf of bread, 1.5 ounces of sugar, and a salted herring to last him the trip. Just like his predecessors, he found that his access to water depended upon which soldier was in charge of the train: “If he’s a good one he’ll bring you two or three kettles, but if he can’t be bothered to fetch and carry for you, then you can sit there until you die of thirst.”
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Upon arriving in camp, Marchenko found the same generalized hunger, if not the starvation, that there would have been in the past. His daily food norm contained 2,400 calories: 25 ounces of bread, 1 pound of usually rotten vegetables, 3 ounces of usually spoiled cod, 2 ounces of meat. By contrast, the dogs guarding the prisoners got a pound of meat. As in the past, not all of Marchenko’s ration actually ended up in his food, and there were few extras. “During the six years in camp and jail I had bread with butter twice, when I received visits. I also ate two cucumbers—one in 1964 and another in 1966. Not once did I eat a tomato or an apple.”
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Work still mattered to some extent, although it was a different type of work. Marchenko worked as a loader and as a carpenter. Leonid Sitko, also in Dubravlag at this time, built furniture.
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Prisoners in the Mordovian women’s camps worked in factories, often with sewing machines.
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The prisoners in the other set of political camps, near the city of Perm, in the foothills of the Urals, also worked with wood. Those confined to isolation cells, as many were by the 1980s, sewed gloves or uniforms.
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Over time, Marchenko also found that conditions slowly deteriorated. By the mid-1960s, there were at least three categories of prisoner: privileged, ordinary, and strict regime. Very soon, strict-regime prisoners—which included all of the most “serious” political dissidents—were once again wearing black cotton uniforms instead of their own clothes. Although they could receive unlimited letters, as well as printed materials—if they were of Soviet origin—they could send only two letters per months. If they were on strict regime, they could receive no food or cigarettes.

Marchenko had served time both as an ordinary criminal and as a political prisoner, and his descriptions of the criminal world have a familiar ring. If anything, criminal culture had grown baser and degraded even further since Stalin’s death. In the wake of the thieves’ war of the late 1940s, the professional criminals had split into further factions. Zhenya Fedorov, a former prisoner arrested in 1967 for theft, describes several groups, not only “bitches” and “thieves” but also
svoyaki
, whom he explains were apprentice thieves, and “red caps,” thieves who followed their own law, probably the intellectual descendants of the “red caps” who emerged in the camps after the war. Other prisoners also grouped themselves into “families” for self-protection and other tasks: “When someone had to be murdered, ‘families’ would decide who would do it,” said Fedorov.
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The violent culture of homosexual rape and domination—evident earlier in some descriptions of conditions in juvenile prisons—also now played a far greater role in criminal life. Unwritten rules now divided criminal prisoners into two groups: those who played the “female” role, and those who played the “male” role. “The former were universally despised, while the latter went about like heroes, boasting of their masculine strength and their ‘conquests,’ not only to each other but to the guards,” wrote Marchenko.
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According to Fedorov, the authorities played along, keeping the “unclean” prisoners in separate cells. Anyone could wind up there: “if you lost at cards, you could be forced to ‘do it’ like a woman.”
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In the women’s camps, lesbianism was equally widespread, and sometimes no less violent. One political prisoner wrote later of a prisoner who had refused a visit from her husband and small child, so greatly did she fear reprisals from her prison lesbian lover.
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The 1960s were the beginning of the plague of tuberculosis in Russian prisons, a scourge which continues today. Fedorov described the situation like this: “If there were eighty people in a barrack, then fifteen had tuberculosis. No one tried to cure them, there was just one kind of tablet, for headaches, whatever. The doctors were some kind of SS men, they never talked to you, didn’t look at you, you were nobody.”
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To worsen matters, many of the thieves were now addicted to
chifir
, an extremely strong form of tea that produced a narcotic high. Others went to greater lengths than ever to get hold of alcohol. Those who worked outside the camp, as some did, developed a special method of smuggling it back in, past the guards:

A condom is hermetically attached to a long piece of thin plastic tubing. The
zek
then swallows it, leaving one end of the tube in his mouth. To avoid swallowing by accident, he wedges it in the gap between two teeth: there are not likely to be any
zeks
in existence with a full set of 32 teeth. Then, with the help of a syringe, up to three litres of spirit are pumped into the condom via the plastic tubing—and the
zek
goes back to his zone. If the bonding has been badly done, or if the condom happens to burst in the
zek
’s stomach, that means certain and painful death. Despite it, they run the risk: three litres of spirit makes seven litres of vodka. When the “hero” returns to the zone . . . he is hung headdown from a beam under the barrack roof and the end of the plastic tubing is held over a dish until every drop has been retrieved. Then the empty condom is hauled out . . .

The practice of self-mutilation was equally widespread, except that now it took even more extreme forms. Once, in a prison cell, Marchenko watched two thieves swallow first the handles of their spoon, and then, after stamping on them to make them flat, the bowls of the spoons as well. After that, they broke a pane of glass and began swallowing pieces of it, before the warders managed to drag them away.
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Edward Kuznetsov, condemned for having taken part in an infamous attempt to highjack an aircraft at Leningrad’s Smolny airport, described dozens of methods of selfmutiliation:

I have seen convicts swallow huge numbers of nails and barbed wire; I have seen them swallow mercury thermometers, pewter tureens (after first breaking them up into “edible” proportions), chess pieces, dominoes, needles, ground glass, spoons, knives and many other similar objects. I have seen convicts sew up their mouths and eyes with thread or wire, sew rows of buttons to their bodies; or nail their testicles to the bed . . . I have seen convicts cut open the skin on their arms and legs and peel it off as if it were a stocking; or cut out lumps of flesh (from their stomach or their legs), roast them and eat them; or let the blood drip from a slit vein into a tureen, crumble bread crumbs into it, and then gulp it down like a bowl of soup; or cover themselves with paper and set fire to themselves; or cut off their fingers, or their nose, or ears, or penis . . .

Kuznetsov wrote that the convicts did such things to themselves not in protest, but for no particular reason at all, or just “to get into the hospital where the nurses swing their hips, where you get your hospital ration and you’re not forced to work, where you can get drugs, diets, postcards.” Many of the mutilators were masochists as well, “in a permanent state of depression from one blood-letting to the next.”
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Indisputably, the relationships between the criminals and the political prisoners had changed greatly since Stalin’s time too. Criminals did sometimes torment or beat up politicals: the Ukrainian dissident Valentyn Moroz was incarcerated in a cell with criminals who kept him awake at night, and finally attacked him, cutting his stomach with a sharpened spoon.
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But there were also criminals who respected the politicals, if only for their resistance to the authorities, as Vladimir Bukovsky wrote: “They used to ask us to tell them what we were in jail for and what we wanted . . . the only thing they couldn’t believe was that we did all this for nothing, and not for money.”
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There were even criminals who aspired to join their ranks. Believing that the political prisons were “easier,” some professional thieves attempted to get political sentences. They would write a denunciation of Khrushchev or the Party, sprinkled with obscenities, or make “American flags” out of rags and wave them out of windows. By the late 1970s, it was very common to see criminals with slogans tattooed on their foreheads: “Communists drink the blood of the people,” “Slave of the Communist Party,” “Bolsheviks give me bread.”
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The change in the relationship between the new generation of politicals and the authorities was even more profound. In the post-Stalin era, the politicals were prisoners who knew why they were in prison, who expected to be in prison, and who had already decided how they would act in prison: with organized defiance. As early as February 1968, a group of prisoners in Potma—Yuli Daniel among them—went on a hunger strike. They demanded an easing of the prison regime; an end to compulsory labor; the removal of restrictions on correspondence; and, in an echo of the early 1920s, recognition of their special status as political prisoners.
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The authorities made concessions—and then slowly withdrew them. Nevertheless, the politicals’ demand to be kept separate from criminal prisoners would eventually be met, not least because the camp administrators wanted to keep this new generation of politicals, with their constant demands and their penchant for hunger strikes, as far away from ordinary criminals as possible.

These strikes were frequent and widespread, so much so that the
Chronicle
, from 1969 on, contains a record of almost constant protest. In that year, for example, prisoners went on strike to demand the reinstatement of concessions made a year earlier; to protest at being forbidden visits from relatives; to protest after one of their number was placed in a punishment cell; to protest after another was forbidden from receiving a parcel from relatives; to protest against the transfer of still others from camp to prison; and even to mark International Human Rights Day on December 10.
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Nor was 1969 an unusual year. Over the next decade, hunger strikes, work strikes, and other protests became a regular feature of life in both Mordovia and Perm.

Hunger strikes, which took the form of short, one-day protests, as well as agonizing, drawn-out bouts with the authorities, even developed a wearisome pattern, as Marchenko wrote:

For the first few days, no one takes a blind bit of notice. Then, after several days—sometimes as many as ten or twelve—they transfer you to a special cell set aside for such people, and start to feed you artificially, through a pipe. It is useless to resist, for whatever you do they twist your arms behind your back and handcuff you. This procedure is usually carried out in the camps even more brutally than in remand prison—by the time you’ve been force-fed once or twice you are often minus your teeth...
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By the mid-1970s, some of the “worst” politicals had been removed from Mordovia and Perm, and placed in special high-security prisons—most notably Vladimir, a central Russian prison of Czarist origins—where they occupied themselves almost exclusively with their struggle against the authorities. The game was dangerous, and it developed highly complex rules. The aim of the prisoners was to ease their conditions, and to score points, which could be reported, via the samizdat networks, to the West. The aim of the authorities was to break the prisoners: to get them to inform, to collaborate, and above all to publish public recantations of their views, which could appear in the Soviet press and be repeated abroad. Although their methods bore some resemblance to the torture carried out in the Stalinist interrogation cells of the past, they usually involved psychological pressure rather than physical pain. Natan Sharansky, one of the most active prison protesters of the late 1970s and early 1980s—now an Israeli politician—described the procedure:

They will invite you for a talk. You think nothing depends on you? On the contrary: they will explain that everything depends on you. Do you like tea, coffee, meat? Would you like to go with me to a restaurant? Why not? We’ll dress you in civilian clothes and we’ll go. If we see you’re on the road to rehabilitation, that you’re prepared to help us—what, you don’t want to squeal on your friends? But what does it mean to squeal? This Russian (or Jew, or Ukrainian, depending on the situation) who’s serving time with you, don’t you realize what kind of nationalist he is? Don’t you know how much he hates you Ukrainians (or Russians, or Jews)?
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As in the past, the authorities could grant or withdraw privileges, and exact punishments, usually a term in a punishment cell. They could regulate a prisoner’s living conditions by making minute but critical changes to the prisoner’s daily life, shifting him between ordinary and strict regimes— always, of course, in rigid accord with regulations. As Marchenko wrote, “The differences between these regimes might seem infinitesimal to someone who hasn’t experienced them on his own back, but for a prisoner it is enormous. On normal regime there’s a radio, on strict regime not; on normal regime you get an hour’s exercise a day, on strict regime half an hour, with nothing at all on Sundays.”
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By the end of the 1970s, the number of food norms had grown from a handful to eighteen, from 1A to 9B, each with a specific number of calories (from 2,200 to 900) and its own selection of foods. Prisoners would be assigned one or another according to minor changes in their behavior. The contents of the lowest food norm, 9B, given to prisoners in the punishment cells, consisted of a small piece of bread, a spoonful of kasha, and soup which theoretically contained 200 grams of potato and 200 grams of cabbage, but often did not.
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