Authors: Anne Applebaum
He ordered the camp director to report on the condition of his “contingent,” as the prisoners were termed in all official documents. Breathless with nerves, our boss listed how many of our zeks were fit “for any work,” for “medium,” or for “light” work; how many were in the weak team and in the sickbay. How many of them worked in the forest, in the office, and doing other jobs around the compound.
Tarasiuk listened calmly and negligently to this report. Suddenly he interrupted, “How many bonus meals are handed out in the compound?”
A “bonus meal” meant a little runny porridge, which was poured onto a wooden platter and cooled to form something like a jelly. The administrative and technical staff got it as well as the tree fellers and all those service personnel who did piecework, such as the laundry workers and water carriers. After hearing the reply, Tarasiuk calmly said, “Cut it. Use it to increase the amount for those working in the forest.”
The head of General Supplies wanted to say something, but Tarasiuk almost imperceptibly flashed his eyes at the man, who swallowed his words and kept quiet.
“And who are those? What did you call them?” inquired Tarasiuk.
He was referring to the “convalescent team.” There were 246 of them in our camp. Our boss looked at Dr. Kogan, who was the acting head of Health and Sanitation. Still young, Kogan had been sent to work in the camps after being wounded at the front. He stood up and, not without some pride, said that these people had been “plucked from the grips of pellagra.” We could now be sure none of them would die … The following dialogue ensued:
Tarasiuk:
What are they getting?
Kogan:
They are all receiving the anti-pellagra ration established by the Gulag Health and Sanitation department (and he specified the quantity of proteins in calories).
Tarasiuk:
How many of them will go out to work in the forest, and when?
Kogan:
Well, none of them will ever go to work in the forest again, of course. But now they’ll survive, and it will be possible to use them for light work within the compound.
Tarasiuk:
Stop giving them any anti-pellagra rations. Write this down: these rations are to be given to those working in the forest. The other prisoners are to get the disability rations.
Kogan:
Comrade Colonel! Obviously I didn’t explain clearly. These people will only survive if they’re given a special ration. A disabled prisoner receives 400 grams [14 ounces] of bread. On that ration they’ll be dead in ten days. We can’t do that!
Tarasiuk looked at the upset doctor, and there was even a sign of interest on his face. “What’s the matter? Do your medical ethics prevent you from doing this?”
“Of course, they do …”
“Well, I don’t give a damn for your ethics!” said Tarasiuk calmly, and with no indication whatsoever of anger. “Have you written that down? Let’s move on …”
All 246 died within a month.
We had both clever and stupid, kind and cruel camp bosses. Tarasiuk was something quite different. He resembled in some ways the slave owners of classical times. The idea that his slaves were human beings never worried or concerned him. I said that his face recalled that of a Roman patrician. And he lived like a Roman who has been appointed governor of some barbarous newly conquered province. Vegetables and fruit and flowers quite alien to the North, were grown for him in special hothouses and orangeries. The best cabinetmakers were found to make his furniture. The most famous couturiers of the recent past dressed his capricious and willful wife. When he felt unwell he was not examined by some freely hired little doctor who had sold himself to the Gulag as a medical student. No, Tarasiuk was treated by professors who had headed the biggest Moscow clinics and were now serving their long sentences in the medical barracks of remote forest camps.
The Roman matrons, as we know, stripped naked in front of male slaves not because they were shameless but because they did not consider those slaves to be human beings. Tarasiuk, like these figures from antiquity, lacked any similar inhibitions. Moreover, he showed it not only in front of the zeks but also of the free workers, who, in origin and situation, hardly differed from the prisoners. Once he gathered all the norm-setters and economists together at headquarters in Vozhael for the latest “bawling out.” It was the middle of the war, when the ration of even the free workers could sustain a semi-starved existence only with difficulty. The meeting had gone on for a long time, and people were sitting exhausted and worn out from hunger. Suddenly well-dressed young waitresses in lace pinafores and with silk grips in their hair entered the room.
Tarasiuk was seated, as was the custom, in front of us behind a separate table. With professional speed and in silence the waitresses covered it with a spotlessly white cloth, stiff with starch. Then they laid out various-sized dishes in front of the colonel. Without interrupting the meeting Tarasiuk tucked a dazzling white napkin into the stiff collar of his uniform and uncovered the dishes. The delicious smell of some wildfowl prepared by his personal cook (formerly chef in a famous Saint Petersburg restaurant) wafted over the room. We felt faint. Indifferently Tarasiuk bolted the fowl, only interrupting this activity to roar imperiously at someone or cut another short with an intimidating glance of his clear, cold eyes. So little idea had he that those before him were in any respect his equals that he could have performed any physical function in front of us, if it proved more convenient for him. It would be difficult, moreover, to call him particularly vicious.
He encouraged zeks who worked well. Those who broke production records were allowed to take women to their barracks without fearing the warders. After doctors and tailors had visited him in his mansion the cook would take them out a slice of white bread spread with butter … An unbending order was maintained throughout Ustvymlag under which those who could cut timber lived well, and those who could not, irrespective of the reason, suffered. There was order. There was even a kind of justice, if one can use that word in this context. For the camp bosses were careful not to be tyrannous under Tarasiuk, and did not steal from the prisoners—they gave them what they were due. And this meant, we found out, that we should have mattresses and even sheets. They appeared from somewhere, and the prisoners slept in sheets. Truly, he was a just boss!
We hated none of the bosses like we hated Tarasiuk. Fortunately he was only with us for a short while. Once Ustvymlag was working properly again he was transferred to put another camp back on its feet.
* * *
When Rika
6
and I found ourselves free at last we lived in Stavropol. There we went hungry all the time and counted each kopeck. One day Rika gave me her last three rubles, and I went to Stalin Avenue to buy garlic sausage and bread. In the shop next door they sold newspapers which had come by the evening train. Usually I just read the copy of
Pravda
hung up in the showcase by the concert hall. My eyes lighted on
Izvestiya
, however, and a familiar surname in a black frame at the bottom of the last page made my heart almost stop. I bought the paper. “With deep sorrow the Chief Administration of the Timber Industry Camps announces that after a severe and protracted illness, the great organizer and award-bearer Colonel Tarasiuk …”
I went into the food shop and instead of sausage bought a 250-gram [9-ounce] bottle of vodka and some bread with the remaining thirty kopecks. When I reached home I held out the newspaper to Rika as she looked at my purchases with incomprehension. I watched as her tired and worn-out face lit up with an irrepressible triumph! We sat at the table, cut up the bread, and poured out the vodka. Rika did not drink as a rule, but now she didn’t even pretend to pour more into my glass. Sighing with relief that Tarasiuk had died, and probably in terrible pain (he must have suffered!), we drank all the vodka … He was dead and we … we were free. So there was Justice after all! Or a God? I don’t know what to call it. Anyway, that’s not important. The thing is, it exists.
1
. Prisoners who would not, or more likely could not, work.
2
. A fellow inmate.
3
. Prisoners sentenced under Article 58—that is, for political crimes.
4
. A camp in the Urals, evacuated during World War II.
5
. The folklore giant Viy, the chief of the gnomes, appears in a story by Nikolai Gogol.
6
. Rika Berg, Razgon’s second wife.
12
T
oday’s camps for political prisoners are just as horrific as in Stalin’s time. A few things are better, a few things are worse …” So began Anatoly Marchenko’s
My Testimony
. When it first began to circulate in Moscow in the late 1960s this memoir deeply shocked the city’s intelligentsia, most of whom had believed that the Soviet Union’s labor camps had closed for good.
Born in 1938, the working-class son of illiterate parents, Marchenko received his first prison conviction for hooliganism. He received his second conviction in 1961 for treason: he had tried to escape the Soviet Union by crossing the border into Iran. He was thus condemned to serve his second, political sentence in Dubrovlag, Morodovia, one of the harshest post-Stalinist political camps. He also spent time in Vladimir, another political prison noted for its punitive conditions.
Many elements of Marchenko’s prison experience would have seemed familiar to people who had heard stories of Stalin’s camps. The numbers were smaller: in the 1960s there were far fewer prisoners—tens of thousands rather than millions. Nevertheless, just like his Stalin-era predecessors, Marchenko rode to Mor0dovia in a crowded train wagon. Also like his predecessors, he received a loaf of bread, forty grams (one and a half ounces) of sugar, and a salted herring to last him the trip. Access to water depended on 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.”
At the camp, Marchenko found the same generalized hunger, if not the same level of starvation, there would have been in the past. His daily food rations consisted of 700 grams (25 ounces) of bread, 450 grams (1 pound) of usually rotten vegetables, 85 grams (3 ounces) of usually spoiled cod, and 55 grams (2 ounces) of meat. By contrast, the dogs guarding the prisoners received 450 grams of meat. By his second term, “strict-regime prisoners”—which included all the political dissidents—were required to wear numbers on their uniforms, just as they had done in the 1940s, which they considered a symbol of their dehumanization.
But there were new elements to prison life as well. By the 1960s, Soviet criminal culture had become even further degraded. The criminal gangs had split into factions and “families” for self-protection and adopted a violent culture of homosexual rape and domination. Many people who were mentally ill wound up being sent to political prisons. Marchenko describes them too.
The selection that follows is about another kind of camp experience, however: the punishment cell, or “cooler,” an institution present in the Stalin era and long afterward. Prisoners were sent to the cooler for defying camp regulations, for rudeness to the commandants, or sometimes for no particular reason. Though conditions varied from place to place and era to era, certain aspects were always the same: cold, lack of bedding, meager rations. Marchenko writes that by the time he had spent seven days in the cooler, he was “eager” to return to the relatively luxurious regime of the camp.
I had caught a chill in the Karaganda camps already and had received no treatment. Since then I had suffered from a chronic inflammation of both ears, which from time to time would become acute. This time it was also my ears that caused the trouble. My head was splitting in two; I had shooting pains in my ears; it was difficult to fall asleep at night and painful to open my mouth at meals. On top of that I had fits of nausea and dizziness.
I went to the camp medical post, although the old hands warned me that it was useless, that the ear specialist came once a year and summoned everyone who had complained of ear trouble during the past year to come to him at the same time. There were quite a few. “What’s wrong?” “My ears.” Without further ado the specialist would note it down in his notebook and write out a prescription for hydrogen peroxide. No further inquiries and no proper examination, and there was no chance of being excused from work—it was out of the question. Only if you turned out to have a high temperature would they consider excusing you from work for a few days.
I appealed to the doctor several times and each time heard only insulting assertions that since I didn’t have a temperature I must be well and therefore was simply trying to dodge work. And at the end of June, for failing to fulfill my norm, I was given seven days in the P.C., or punishment cell—in other words, the cooler. I found nothing surprising in this: given that I was failing to fulfill my daily norm, the cooler was inevitable. At first they call you up in front of your company officer to listen to a sermon about every con having to redeem his sin in the eyes of the people by honest labor.
“Why didn’t you fulfill your norm?” asks the officer when his homily is finished. This when he can see that the man in front of him can barely stand up. “Sick? How can you be when you’ve got no temperature! It’s very bad to pretend, to dissimulate, to try and dodge your work.” And just to make the point clear he gives you several days in the cooler.
Now what did the punishment cell look like in 1961? First there was an ordinary camp barrack block, divided into cells. The cells were various: some were for solitary, others for two people, five, or even twenty, and if necessary they would pack up to thirty or even forty in them. It was situated in a special regime camp about a quarter of a mile [half a kilometer] from Camp No. 10. A tiny exercise yard had been specially fenced off; it was pitted and trampled hard, and in it, even in summer, there was not a single blade of grass—the least shoot of green would be swallowed at once by the starving cons in the cooler.
The cells themselves were equipped with bare bunks consisting of thick planks—no mattresses or bedding were allowed. The bunks were short; you had to sleep bent double; when I tried to straighten out, my legs hung over the end. In the center of the bunk, running crosswise and holding the planks together, was a thick iron bar. Now what if this bar had been placed underneath the planks? Or set in a groove, if it had to be on top, so that it didn’t stick out? But no, this iron bar, two inches [five centimeters] wide and almost an inch [three centimeters] thick, was left sticking up in the very middle of the bunk, so that no matter how you lay it was bound to cut into your body, which had no protection from it.
The window was covered with stout iron bars, and the door had a peephole. In one corner stood the prisoner’s inseparable companion, the sloptank—a rusty vessel holding about twelve gallons [55 liters], with a lid linked to it by a stout chain. Attached to one side of the tank was a long iron rod threaded at the other end. This was passed through a special aperture in the wall and on the other side, in the corridor, the warder would screw a big nut onto it. In this way the sloptank was fixed immovably to the wall. During toilet break the nut would be unscrewed so that the cons could carry the tank out and empty it. This procedure took place daily in the morning. The rest of the time the sloptank stood in its appointed place, filling the cell with an unspeakable stench …
At 6:00
A.M.
came a knocking at all doors: “Wake up! Wake up for toilet break!” They started taking us to get washed. At last it was our cell’s turn. However, it was washing only in name. You had hardly had time to wet your hands when you were already being prodded from behind: “Hurry, hurry, you can get all the washing you want after you’ve been released!” Less than a minute is the regulation time for a con to wash in, and whoever fails to get washed has to rinse his face over the sloptank in the cell.
And so, back in our cell once more, we waited for breakfast—alas nothing but a name: a mug of hot water and a ration of bread—fourteen ounces [400 grams] for the whole day. For dinner they gave us a bowl of thin cabbage soup consisting of almost pure water, in which some leaves of stinking pickled cabbage had been boiled—though little enough even of that found its way into the bowl. I don’t think even cattle would have touched this soup of ours, but in the cooler the con not only drinks it straight from the side of the bowl, but even wipes the bowl with his bread and eagerly looks forward to supper. For supper we got a morsel of boiled cod the size of a matchbox, stale and slimy. Not a grain of sugar or fat is allowed to prisoners in the cooler.
I hate to think what we prisoners were driven to by starvation in the cooler. Return to camp was awaited with even greater eagerness than the end of your sentence. Even the normal camp hunger rations seemed an unimaginable feast in the cooler. I hate to think how I starved in there. And it is even more horrible to realize that now, even as I write this, my comrades are still being starved in punishment cells …
The time drags agonizingly between breakfast and dinner and between dinner and supper. No books, no newspapers, no letters, no chess. Inspection twice a day and after dinner a half-hour walk in the bare exercise yard behind barbed wire—that’s the extent of your entertainment. During inspections the warders take their time: the prisoners in each cell are counted and recounted and then checked with the number on the board. Then a meticulous examination of the cell is carried out. With big wooden mallets the warders sound out the walls, bunks, floor, and window bars to see whether any tunnels are being dug or any bars have been sawn through and whether the prisoners are planning to escape. They also check for any inscriptions on the walls. During the whole of this time the prisoners all have to stand with their caps off.…
During the thirty-minute exercise period you can also go to the latrines. If there are twenty of you in a cell, however, it is difficult to manage in time. There are two latrines; a line forms, and again you are chivvied: “Hurry, hurry, our time’s nearly up, what are you sitting around for!” If you don’t manage it, there’s always the sloptank back in the cell, and they never let you out to go to the latrines again, not even if you’re an old man or ill. Inside, during the day, the cell is stifling and stinks to high heaven. At night, even in summer, it is cold—the cell block is built of stone and the floor is cement: they are specially built that way so as to be as cold and damp as possible. There is no bedding and nothing to cover yourself with, except for your reefer jacket. This, like all your other warm clothes, is taken away when you are searched before being stuck in the cooler, but they give it back to you at night.
There is not the slightest chance of taking a morsel of food with you to the cooler, or even half a puff’s worth of cigarette butt or paper or the lead of a pencil—everything is taken away when you are searched. You yourself and the underwear, trousers, and jacket that you are forced to take off are all poked and prodded through and through.
From ten o’clock at night till six in the morning you lie huddled on your bare boards, with the iron bar digging into your side and a cold damp draft from the floor blowing through the cracks between them. And you long to fall asleep, so that sleeping, at least, you can forget the day’s torments and the fact that tomorrow will be just the same. But no, it won’t work. And you can’t get up and run about the cell: the warder will see you through the peephole. So you languish there, tossing and turning from side to side until it is almost light again; and no sooner do you doze off than: “Get up! Get up! Toilet break!”
Incarceration in the punishment cell is supposed to be limited to not more than fifteen days, but the officers can easily get round this rule. They let you out to go back to camp one evening and the next morning condemn you to another fifteen days. What for? A reason can always be found. You stood in your cell so as to block the peephole; picked up a cigarette butt during your exercise period (that one of your camp friends had tossed over the fence to you); answered a warder rudely … Yes, you can get a further fifteen days for absolutely nothing at all. Because if you really rebel and allow yourself to be provoked into making a protest, you get not simply fifteen days in the cooler but a new trial by decree.
In Kargal I was once kept in the cooler for forty-eight days, being let out each time only so that a new directive could be read to me ordering my “confinement to a punishment cell.” The writer Yuli Daniel
1
was once given two successive spells in the cooler at Dubrovlag Camp No. 11 for “swearing at a sentry”—this happened in 1966.
Some men can’t bear the inhuman conditions and the hunger and end up by mutilating themselves: they hope they will be taken to hospital and will escape, if only for a week, the bare boards and stinking cell, and will be given more human nourishment. While I was in the cooler, two of the cons acted as follows: they broke the handles off their spoons and swallowed them; then, after stamping on the bowls of the spoons to flatten them, they swallowed these too. But even this wasn’t enough—they broke the pane of glass in the windows and by the time the warders had managed to unlock the door each had succeeded in swallowing several pieces of glass. They were taken away and I never saw them again; I merely heard that they were operated on in the hospital at Camp No. 3.
When a con slits his veins or swallows barbed wire, or sprinkles ground glass in his eyes, his cellmates don’t usually intervene. Every man is free to dispose of himself and his life as best he can and in whatever way he wishes; every man has the right to put an end to his sufferings if he is unable to bear them any longer.
There is also usually one cell in the punishment block that is filled with people on hunger strike. One day, as a mark of protest, a con decides to go on hunger strike, so he writes out an official complaint (to the camp governor, the Central Committee, Khrushchev—it is all the same who to, it has absolutely no significance; it’s simply that a hunger strike “doesn’t count” without an official complaint, even if you starve to death anyway) and refuses to take any more food. 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 carried out in the camps even more brutally than in the remand prison—by the time you’ve been “force-fed” once or twice you are often minus your teeth. And what you are given is not the feeding mixture that I got at Ashkhabad, but the same old camp skilly, only even thinner, so that the pipe doesn’t get blocked. Furthermore the skilly you get in the cells is lukewarm, but in artificial feeding they try to make it as hot as possible, for they know that this is a sure way of ruining your stomach.