Authors: Anne Applebaum
1
. In Russian,
bytovichki.
2
. Article 58 was the legal statute under which political prisoners were convicted.
3
. Glinka was the student from Leningrad.
4
. A form of strong tea with narcotic properties.
5
. A cheap brand of cigarette named after the White Sea Canal, a Gulag camp in the 1930s.
6
. “The Central Prison.”
7
. Political commissar of a military unit.
4.
I
n the photograph which precedes the introduction to his memoir,
Inside Stalin’s Prisons,
Kazimierz Zarod is walking down a prosperous Warsaw boulevard dressed in a wool coat, wool scarf, and hat. Young and handsome, he strides beside an equally young and handsome woman, also wearing a wool coat, hers with a fur collar. Twenty-six years old when the war broke out, Zarod was a Polish civil servant and an army reservist. Along with many others, he fled from Warsaw to eastern Poland after the Germans invaded the country on September 1, 1939. He was then trapped there on September 17, when the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east. Arrested as a “refugee” in what was no longer Poland but had been named “Soviet West Ukraine,” Zarod was considered highly suspicious because of his fluent Russian (his family had lived in Russia before the Revolution). After his interrogation, Zarod was sent to a Siberian forestry camp, which he knew only as “Labor Corrective Camp No. 21.”
The story of Zarod’s arrest was in some ways typical: between the Soviets’ invasion of Poland in 1939 and the Germans’ invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, more than 400,000 Poles were arrested, of which some 108,000 were sent directly to the Gulag (the rest went to exile villages). The story of Zarod’s release was not unusual either: in 1941, following the German invasion, the Soviet Union and Poland concluded a temporary truce, and Stalin agreed to allow a Polish army to be formed on Soviet territory under the command of General Władysław Anders. Zarod marched out of Russia with what came to be called Anders’s Army. Traveling via Tehran, Bombay (Mumbai), and Cape Town, he wound up in Britain, where he joined the Royal Air Force Bomber Command. After the war he stayed in England, married an Englishwoman, and taught Polish and Russian to two generations of British soldiers. He published his memoirs in 1990, after his retirement.
Zarod was not a literary writer, and his book contains few rhetorical flourishes. Nevertheless, it is extraordinarily useful precisely because he focuses on things that “better” writers often ignored: what prisoners ate, where they lived, where they worked. In the selection that follows, Zarod describes, in his straightforward manner, a typical prisoner’s day.
A Day in Labor Corrective Camp No. 21
At 3:00
A.M.
each morning reveille was beaten out on a triangle. Dressing was unnecessary as we slept in our clothes for warmth. Tumbling off the hard wooden shelf on which I had spent the night, I joined the queue which was forming near the water bucket in one corner of the hut. By this time we had all acquired soup containers—a round tin with two holes punched near the top through which string or a narrow piece of material or wire was threaded—and, filling the container, I splashed my face with a few handfuls, keeping the rest to drink, as water was scarce. We had no towels; a piece of rag or one’s coat sleeve had to suffice. Soap was a great luxury, the piece we were issued with once a month being so small that we kept it to use in the evenings when we returned from work, really dirty.
By 3:30
A.M.
we were supposed to be in the middle of the square, standing in ranks of fives, waiting to be counted. The guards often made mistakes, and then there had to be a second count. On a morning when it was snowing this was a long, cold, agonizing process. If the guards were wide awake and concentrating, the count usually took about thirty minutes, but if they miscounted, we could stand for anything up to an hour.
The guards having satisfied themselves that the right number of bodies was present on the square, the brigadier (foreman) was dispatched to collect the bread for the day. From the beginning we were split into working parties of thirty men—a “brigade”—each brigade having its foreman, or brigadier. He was nominally responsible for the group of thirty men. His duties included the distribution of the day’s ration of bread, supervision of the group, and allocation of work in the forest. At night, the day’s work done, he reported to the office with the figures of work accomplished by each man during the day. These returns handed in every evening by the brigadier were the difference between life and death for prisoners. The amount of work done determined the amount of bread each prisoner received on the following day. A hundred percent return—a physical impossibility for most men (although there were those who managed to bribe the brigadier with tobacco or other smuggled delicacies, to juggle the figures, a very risky business as if caught the brigadier stood to lose his privileged position)—earned 900 grams of bread (about 2 lbs). On average, at least in the early months of captivity while they still remained fairly healthy, men could accomplish 75 percent and earned 800 grams [28 ounces] of bread; 50 percent, 700 grams [25 ounces], under 50 percent, 300 grams [101⁄2 ounces]. Made of rye which had not been thoroughly cleaned, it was literally “black” bread because the bran left in it colored the bread black and made its texture coarse. The source of life, it was carefully hoarded through the day. A little with the breakfast soup, a few bites during the short break at dinnertime (midday), more with the soup in the evening to stave off the pangs of hunger in the freezing night.
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! It might not happen straight away, but by some means or other he would be killed—an “accident” was not difficult to arrange in the forest.
There was one other duty the brigadier had each day, and that was to decide who should be the duty man (
dnyevalny
). This was a job much coveted as it meant staying in the camp all day to tend the fire in the barrack, sweeping the dirt floor, filling the water buckets, and various other simple jobs. The job of dnyevalny was supposed to be allocated on a rota system, but in practice the brigadier was instructed to pick the dnyevalny for the day from the men in his group who were not strong, or ill and therefore weak. Over the months an element of bribery entered into it, and men fought tooth and nail about who should be chosen.
Having received our ration of bread each morning from the brigadier we joined a queue outside the cookhouse, this time for soup. There was a relatively large dining hall with rough wooden tables and benches next door to the cookhouse, which accommodated about three hundred men at a time, and sometimes if there was room I ate my breakfast as well as my evening meal there, but more often than not I carried my soup tin back to the barrack hut and ate there, sitting on my bunk.
Distributing food and the eating of it with so many men took quite a long time and it was usually about 5:30
A.M.
when we were ready for work. The really old and seriously ill were allocated jobs inside the camp. They worked in the cookhouse, the ration store, sauna; stoked the central heating plant; acted as barbers, hospital orderlies, administration personnel, bookkeepers, accountants, clerks, copy-typists (there were only two typewriters in the camp to cope with the immense amount of paperwork), cleaners, sweepers, transport workers, etc. A small party of prisoners was dispatched twice a week, heavily guarded, to the nearest village, Syemyonovka, about seventeen kilometers [ten and a half miles] distant. It was the last “station” where food was deposited for collection by men from a few camps in the area. Traveling in horse-drawn carts, these prisoners collected barrels of salt fish, black bread, and vegetables, and, for the use of the soldiers and such civilian personnel as were in the camp, white bread, cereals, oil, margarine, flour, sugar, tea, coffee and condensed milk, etc.
For the rest of us, day after day, labor in the forest. Our departure each morning was bizarre. Among so many prisoners there were represented all the professions, and very soon after our arrival the commandant had organized a “band” of musicians. Some were professionals, others amateur, but together they made quite good music. Each morning the “band” stood near the gate playing military-style music, and we were exhorted to march out “strongly and happily” to our day’s work. Having played until the end of the column had passed through the gate, the musicians abandoned their instruments and, tacking themselves onto the end of the column, joined the workers walking into the forest.
When we arrived at whatever site was being worked, the first task for two of the men was to build a fire for the guards. We worked, cutting as many trees down as possible, trimming and stacking the wood in the prescribed way. Work continued until midday, when if we were lucky in our guard and he was one of the kinder and more humane ones, he would arrange for small parties to take a break in turn, which meant that we could get nearer the fire while we rested and ate our bread. Work continued through the afternoon and early evening, until at 6:00
P.M.
the guard took out his whistle and blew it.
All the tools we used were potential weapons, and the guards were very much aware of this, as were we. As the ranks of men fell into formation to begin the long walk back to the camp each night, the guards walked up and down the line reminding us that any attempt to break ranks would earn a bullet.
Carrying the heavy saws and choppers, ropes slung over shoulders, we straggled rather than marched back toward camp, where all the forestry equipment was stored for the night in large huts outside the gates. The equipment put away safely for the night, we entered the camp and were allowed one hour in which to wash, rest, and collect our evening soup. At 9:00
P.M.
we once more stood in ranks of five on the barrack square while the guards counted (if we were lucky) and re-counted (if we were not); and so, finally, merciful sleep.
5.
T
hough his childhood was marked by war and his adolescence by arrest and incarceration, Anatoly Zhigulin retained a powerful nostalgia for an older, simpler, holier Russia throughout his life. He was born in 1930 in a small Russian village, and an idyllic image of what Russia had been—and should be—permeated the poetry for which he became famous after his return from the camps in 1954. At times that nostalgia also seeps into
Black Stones,
the memoir he wrote of the five years he spent in the Gulag.
Though Zhigulin’s poetry was officially published during the Soviet period,
Black Stones
appeared only in the late 1980s following the introduction of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms. The book became a best seller in Russia not only because of Zhigulin’s portrayal of his Gulag experience but also because he described a forgotten generation of teenagers, young men and women who came of age in the late 1940s. Inspired by a burst of postwar idealism, some had formed sincere but amateurish political groups. As a result, these young half-rebels were arrested for “anti-Stalinist activities.”
To be arrested for crimes against the state was not unusual at that time, of course: anyone who allegedly told a joke about Stalin, or even listened to a joke about Stalin, could be sent to the Gulag. But Zhigulin and his friends, like similar groups scattered around Russia, really had engaged in what might be called anti-Stalinist activities. These were the efforts of schoolchildren: often they did nothing more than form cells and write leaflets, copying the tactics of the Bolsheviks they were reading about in history classes. The bravery of these protodissidents, at a time when few adults dared talk about anything political, was notable nevertheless.
Zhigulin’s memoir is also famous for its account of the camps in the period following World War II, when the prisoners had become savvier and better organized than their prewar counterparts. Many of them were former Red Army soldiers or partisans, who were more than capable of coming up with ways to avoid death through overwork and starvation. Zhigulin himself worked in many parts of the Gulag, including the uranium mines of Kolyma. What interested him most, however, were the people he met and the methods they used to cope with the bizarre conditions in which they found themselves. In the selection printed here he discusses some of the ways in which prisoners manipulated their situation in order to survive: by feigning illness, seeking transfers to “easier” camps, cheating on work norms. He also reflects on the phenomenon of soldiers shooting at prisoners in order to collect rewards for “preventing escapes” and describes a few “rare” moments of joy. Zhigulin was one of those writers who understood that life went on inside the camps and that prisoners had a wide range of experiences, not merely suffering.
ANGINA
In spite of the relatively light work, I was on my last legs. So once, after a hot twelve-kilometer [seven-and-a-half-mile] sprint to our log site, I went to the water barrel. I broke the thick layer of ice with a wooden ladle and drank my fill of water so cold that it numbed my teeth and throat. Then I took a few deep breaths of that forty-below air. By evening my throat hurt terribly; it was painful to swallow; I felt feverish. After waiting for a long time in the long line for the doctor, I was admitted to our small, five-bed infirmary. What the doctor found was a monstrous case of follicular angina and a temperature of 40-plus [over 104]. That very long line had consisted mostly of prisoners suffering from malnutrition, who of course should also have been admitted as inpatients. But malnutrition was not on the official list of recognized illnesses; otherwise the camp administrators would have had to hospitalize two or three hundred people at a time.
But I, aside from being dystrophic, was obviously and seriously ill. Oh, those wonderful ten or twenty days in the hospital! Food for the patients was prepared separately and resembled the real thing. The soup consisted of more than just potatoes; there was cabbage too, and some greens. I just lay there; I could rest. It was clean, warm, cozy. And every day, several times a day, I retreated to the relatively warm toilet and knocked the ice off the windowpanes: I sucked on the bigger pieces to keep my angina going. There were no antibiotics; all that we had was streptocid.
1
Prisoners could not stay in the infirmary more than ten days, and on the thirteenth day I was discharged and sent back to the barracks with a three-day leave from work.
LAYING TRACK IN WINTER
I was assigned to the track-laying crew after my bout with angina. Digging ditches, building roadbeds. First, however, came the survey work. Breaking down the curves and all that. I worked at practically every job on that crew. The worst part was digging the ditches because there was no way to manipulate the work norms. All you could do to conserve your strength was look for lighter work or some other way to meet quotas: shovel snow, clear trees, light fires to melt the permafrost, do pickax work; you could pad the distance dirt had to be hauled by wheelbarrow. But meeting the “dirt quota” per person was impossible. What were we to do? People were growing weaker by the day, people were dying. They had to be saved. Meanwhile, the free workers and the camp administrators were demanding full volume—X amount of dirt dug, X amount of fill. Write it up however you like—just give us the dirt. Easy to measure and to check.
Our crew boss, Sergei Zakharchenko, was a savvy man. A sapper. He’d landed in camp severely contused after blowing up a bridge to stop an enemy advance—hadn’t managed to get far enough away from his own charge. He understood that the process of saving people began with plotting the route; Zakharchenko had a knack for laying out roadbeds that required almost no digging.
Coming up with the fill was no problem. We had lookouts standing watch at both ends of the work zone; they would send a signal (a certain number of knocks on the rails) when the bosses were on their way. We’d pile it high. On either side of the roadbed we would clear off the snow and dig up one layer of soil. Everything looked fine—wheelbarrows standing there full of clay. Then we’d toss on some snow. Pack it down. Toss in branches, toss in the needles from the tops of the trees. Then more and more snow. We’d pile it high. Some more dirt on top. Half a meter [twenty inches]. Tamp it down. Hard? Hard! It’s below zero. The snow, the needles, the branches, the dirt all frozen into a solid monolith. The ties and the rails laid on top. When would our little dodge come to light? Maybe eight or ten months from now, and by that time we’ll be gone. We’ll be working on another branch line in another place.
But meanwhile, people will have been saved, people will have been fed. Other convicts will do penance for our sins (our shoddy work), will have to dump more dirt, more gravel; but they won’t bother to dig the snow, the pine needles, the branches out of the railbed. They’ll just fill in the sinkholes where the railbed has shifted. Shifting is a normal thing in winter. It’s even anticipated, planned for. And meanwhile, where will we be? By then, probably, in Kolyma. At least that’s where many of us ended up.
But as spring came on, so did mass starvation. That’s when I resolved on one last desperate act.
“SAMORUB”
This was the term we coined for taking an ax to ourselves to get out of work. The penalty for this was severe—
samorub
2
equaled sabotage. As it happened, at the time I was out working on repairs to a skid road; I was wearing winter foot cloths and boots. The road lay over a bog that was thawing and sucking down the road, despite the freezing weather. I was shaping new ties to replace the rotted ones. The usual routine. The new ties lay alongside the old ones, parallel to the rails. Across from me, on the other side of the tracks, sat a soldier with an automatic, warming himself at the campfire. I forget his name, but we were from the same part of the country. He’d been born somewhere around Sagunov, not far from Podgorny.
We chatted about where we’d grown up; he shared some tobacco. The sun was shining. Our little fire burned bright and smokeless. I was slowly dressing the log, swinging the ax back and forth between it and my left foot. Just a bit more to the left and so much for my foot. I was aiming for the gap between my big toe and second toe. This would be hard to pull off. I had to calculate the force of the swing so that the cut wouldn’t be too deep. I kept chopping, gradually moving my foot closer and closer (never looking at the soldier or looking around). A few more weak chops and finally (for better or worse) the ax blade bit hard into my boot just up by that toe. It truly hurt and naturally I yelped, dropped the ax, and started swearing a blue streak.
My soldier saw the whole thing, and in his mind it was purely an accident, a bad swing. Blood was oozing fairly thickly out of the gash in my boot. I couldn’t walk, and four of my fellow convicts carried me back to the yard as my countryman with the automatic strode alongside. When the report reached the commander, the guard said yes, I’d been working along just fine. No samorub—pure accident. The wound in my foot was wide, but not very deep. The doctor put in four stitches, inserted a drainage tube, and issued me a pair of crutches.
“OK, you’re done. You’ve got a couple of months off—lucky man.”
The wound took a long time to heal because I was constantly stripping off the bandage and sprinkling all sorts of crap into the cut—obviously when the doctor wasn’t looking. I lolled around the yard on crutches for a good two months during the worst time of the year.
THE HUNT
This cannibalistic sport was especially popular with the guard details and sentries at Camp No. 031. But it flourished everywhere throughout the Gulag given the right conditions: small groups of convicts out in the woods, in the field; automatic weapons; close range; someone easy to shoot.
There was a system of incentives for guards who prevented or interrupted escapes. Shoot a runner—get a new stripe on your uniform, home leave, a bonus, a medal. No doubt biology was at work here as well—the aggression that comes naturally to young males. Moreover, hatred for the prisoners was inculcated in them from the start. The prisoners were
vlasovtsy,
3
they were S.S., they were traitors and spies. Guards were perverted both by the absolute power they were given and by the weapons they so longed to use. Convicts were generally shot down either by very young soldiers or by hardened sadists and murderers.… One of the convoy detail would pick a victim and begin to stalk him. The guard would wheedle, persuade, try to lure the victim over the line. Unless a smart and savvy crew boss had warned the victim ahead of time, the deception worked. The soldier would say, “Hey! You! Go get me that little log to sit on!”
“But sir, it’s off limits!”
“Not a problem. You have my permission. Move, go!”
The prisoner steps over the line. One quick burst of fire, and he’s dead. Typical. Banal.
Sometimes the guards and sentries would actually order their victims to step over the line, or just shove or chase them out, the better to shoot them. A guard was authorized to order a convict to cross the cordon. He was also authorized to mow that same man down.
A person can sense when he’s about to be shot. There’s a certain feeling in the air. I sensed it several times during my stay at No. 031. Once was when Sergei Zakharchenko’s repair crew was sent out to a work site. The guards drove in stakes topped by little white planks to mark off the perimeter: up the tracks, down the tracks, on both sides of the roadbed. Anything outside those stakes was off limits. One soldier suddenly barked, “Hey, you, go cut down that little tree over there. It’s in my way, I can’t see the track line.”
Zakharchenko overheard and thundered out, “Zhigulin! Not a step outside! He’ll kill you! Everybody down! Lie down on the ties! Do
not
follow the guards’ orders! Stay down! Wait for the brass!”
There were five guards in the detail. The man in charge, their sergeant major, caught on right away, and didn’t challenge Zakharchenko. He pulled out his revolver, fired a few shots into the air, then called in his superiors. The officers came, took away the guard’s automatic, and sent him off to the brig. But that sort of happy ending was rare.
RARE JOYS
With the arrival of the new commandant, life in No. 031 became easier. I began receiving parcels from home. Sergei Zakharchenko brought me back into his crew. There were about twelve or fifteen men in the brigade, the railroad maintenance crew, “Maintenance” for short. That spring was short, and then it was summer.
Sometimes people ask me whether there were ever any good times in the camps, ever a good mood.
Of course there were. The soul always seeks joy, yearns for it. Not all our bright days or bright months had to do with receiving letters or packages or the like. There were good, even joyful moments that had nothing to do with material comforts. Of course there was an indirect connection, a natural one.
My best time in the camps came at the start of my second year, when I was part of Sergei Zakharchenko’s crew.
We would march out of the gates early in the morning. We weren’t the first out, though. The felling and skidding crews left first. They had farther to go and backbreaking work to do in a single day. Not like us. We weren’t in any hurry.
So finally, when the crowd at the guardhouse dispersed, big Lomakin, the dispatcher, would boom: “Maintenance! Zakharchenko! Move out!”
He would usually throw in a few unprintable phrases—no insult intended. Just for the sake of form. We walked through the gates, where we were met by our usual guard detail. The soldier who had pegged me for shooting was long gone. After spending some time in solitary in the brig, he’d been transferred to a mental hospital. The underboss and his rosy-cheeked helper, both western Ukrainians, picked up our tools—sledgehammers, wrenches, axes, saws—and we were on our way. Ahead of us, behind us, alongside us, walked our four guards (sometimes five), peacefully puffing on their little cigars. Zakharchenko was good at dealing with them; they respected him and therefore us.