Prisoners’ rights were virtually limited to making written protests and complaints. The result: “Either there was nothing or it was rejected.”68 Such applicants made a prisoner unpopular with the authorities.
In the penal camps proper, however, there was considerable freedom of speech:
Somebody in the room was yelling: “You think that old bastard in Moscow with the moustache is going to have mercy on you? He wouldn’t give a damn about his own brother, never mind slobs like you!”
The great thing about a penal camp was you had a hell of a lot of freedom. Back in Ust-Izhma if you said they couldn’t get matches “outside” they put you in the can and slapped on another ten years. But here you could yell your head off about anything you liked and the squealers didn’t even bother to tell on you. The security fellows couldn’t care less.
The only trouble was you didn’t have much time to talk about anything.69
Almost every account quotes cases of people who remained devoted to “the Party and the Government” and attributed their arrest to error.70 These bored and annoyed the other prisoners considerably. In some cases, though not in all, they turned informer. There were, in any case, a number of these by common NKVD practice. Informers who were recognized as such were always killed sooner or later. If the NKVD had been unable to extricate them in time, it made no complaint about their deaths. Herling gives an account of a revenge taken on a notorious former NKVD interrogator who was recognized in the camp, and when badly beaten up, but not killed, complained to the guards, who did nothing to save him so that he was finally killed a month later after endless persecution and attempts to appeal.
BEHIND THE WIRE
Reveille is usually reported as at 5:00 A.M.—a hammer pounding on a rail outside camp headquarters. Anyone caught a few minutes late getting up could be sentenced on the spot to a few days in the isolator. In the winter, it would still be dark. Searchlights would be “crisscrossing over the compound from the watchtowers at the far corners.”71 Apart from the guards and the barbed wire, most camps also relied on dogs, their long chains fastened by a ring to a wire running from watchtower to watchtower. The noise of the ring screeching along the wire was a continual background.72
The prisoners’ first thought, all day, was of food, and it is now that the breakfast, the best meal of the day, was served. (We will consider food, the center of the entire norm system and the key to Stalin’s plans for efficient slave labor, later.)
Then they were assembled and marched off to work, in gangs of twenty or thirty. The order (known to prisoners as “the prayer”)73 would be given:
Your attention, prisoners! You will keep strict column order on the line of march! You will not straggle or bunch up. You will not change places from one rank of five to another. You will not talk or look around to either side, and you will keep your arms behind you! A step to right or left will be considered an attempt to escape, and the escort will open fire without warning! First rank, forward march!74
Apart from sleeping, the prisoners’ time was their own only for ten minutes at breakfast, five minutes at the noon break, and another five minutes at supper.75 They lost so much sleep that they fell asleep instantly if they found a warm spot, and on the Sundays they got off, which was not every Sunday, they slept as much as they could.76
The shoe situation varied. “There’d been times when they’d gone around all winter without any felt boots at all, times when they hadn’t even seen ordinary boots, but only shoes made of birch bark or shoes of the ‘Chelyabinsk Tractor Factory model’” (that is, made of strips of tires that left marks of the treads behind them).77
Clothes were usually carefully patched and repaired: “rags tied around them with all their bits of string and their faces wrapped in rags from chin to eyes to protect them from the cold….”78
Ulcers are reported as common, through filthy clothes. Clothing was cleaned and disinfected occasionally, and baths were also provided. Solzhenitsyn implies that in the penal camp he describes, a bath was available about every two weeks.79 But often there was “no soap for either bathing or laundry.”80
To go sick for the odd day was possible with a minor complaint. But to be recognized as sick and put on a sick diet was usually fatal. In any case, even a man feeling ill might not be allowed to go sick, as there was a quota: “He was allowed to excuse only two men in the morning, and he’d already excused them.”81 As a rule, the infirmary took in only those who were plainly dying—“and not all of them,” a Soviet woman writer recalls.82
In one camp, still under construction, a sick inspection is described:
The naryadchik and the lekpom [medical assistant], armed with clubs, enter the pit. The chief asks the first man he sees why he does not come out. ‘I am sick,’ is the answer. The lekpom feels his pulse and pronounces him all right. Then blows shower upon the man and he is kicked out into the open. ‘Why don’t you go to work?’ the chief asks the next man. ‘I am sick,’ is the stubborn answer. The day before, this prisoner went to the lekpom and gave him his last dirty louse-infected shirt. The lekpom feels his pulse and finds high fever. He is released from work. A third man replies that he has neither clothes nor shoes. ‘Take the clothes and shoes from the sick one,’ the chief rules sententiously. The sick one refuses, whereupon his things are taken off him by force.83
The veteran convicts in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich have learned that it is necessary to march as slowly as possible to the morning job, otherwise they get hot too early, and “won’t last long.”84 And in fact, those who survived the first months became fantastically skilled in the arts of survival. At the same time, customs useful to them became thoroughly established and traditional. For example, Solzhenitsyn describes the prisoners’ habit of picking up odd scraps of wood on the building site and marching back with them.85 This was illegal, but the guards did nothing about it until they reached camp again. They then ordered them to throw down the wood, as they, too, needed extra fuel and were unable to carry any in addition to their submachine guns. But only a certain amount of the wood was dropped. At the next checkpoint, the warders repeated the order. Again, only a certain amount of wood was dropped, and the prisoners reached the quarters with a portion of their original gleanings. It was necessary, and in the interests of both guards and warders, that the prisoners be able to get away with some wood; otherwise they would have no incentive to bother to carry it in, and guards and warders would not have got their share. But no overt arrangement had ever been made. The agreement was wholly unspoken. We see, in such things, the development of the rules and traditions of a whole new social order, in microcosm.
A genuine caste feeling seems to have been arising, with the prisoner beginning to be regarded as actually an inferior being, just as in ancient times. The sentiment gradually spread that “mere contact” with the prisoners was “an insult to a free man.” “It is considered inadmissible for a non-prisoner to eat the same food as a prisoner, to sleep under the same roof, or have any friendly relations with him.” Things reached the stage where the head of a camp admonished the man in charge of the disinfestation chamber for allowing a shirt belonging to a free mechanic employed in the power plant to be put in with the prisoners’ clothes for delousing.86 As a recent Soviet article puts it, a camp commandant did not regard the prisoners as human.87