The reason was obvious:
When they left in the morning, the cook got an issue of groats from the big kitchen in the camp. It worked out to about two ounces a head—about two pounds for each gang. That is, a little over twenty pounds for everybody working on the site. The cook didn’t carry that stuff himself on the two-mile march from the camp. He had a trusty who carried it for him. He thought it was better to slip an extra portion of the stuff to a trusty at the expense of the prisoners’ bellies rather than to break his own back. Then there was water and firewood to carry and the stove to light. The cook didn’t do that either. He had other prisoners and “goners” to do it. And they got their cut too. It’s easy to give away things that don’t belong to you.
All the cook did was put groats and salt in the cauldron, and if there was any fat he split it between the cauldron and himself. (The good fat never got as far as the prisoners. Only the bad stuff went in the cauldron….) Then his only job was to stir the mush when it was nearly ready. The sanitary inspector didn’t even do that much. He just sat and watched. When the mush was ready, the cook gave him some right away and he could eat all he wanted. And so could the cook. Then one of the gang bosses—they took turns, a different one every day—came to taste it and see if it was good enough for the men to eat. He got a double portion too.
After this, the whistle went off. Now the other gang bosses came and the cook handed them their bowls through a kind of hatch in the wall. The bowls had this watery mush in them. And you didn’t ask how much of the ration they’d really put in it. You’d get hell if you opened your mouth.171
And so it was with everything: “They stole all the way down the line—out here on the site, in the camp, and in the stores too.”172
The system was made more effective yet, in the lumber camps in particular, by turning it into a “brigade,” a gang, matter, with collective responsibility for inadequate work:
You might ask why a prisoner worked so hard for ten years in a camp. Why didn’t they say to hell with it and drag their feet all day long till the night, which was theirs?
But it wasn’t so simple…. It was like this—either you all got something extra or you all starved. (“You’re not pulling your weight, you swine, and I’ve got to go hungry because of you. So work, you bastard!”)
So when a really tough job came along, like now, you couldn’t sit on your hands. Like it or not, you had to get a move on. Either they made the place warm within two hours or they’d all be fucking well dead.173
The brigade leader, himself a prisoner, worked out with a foreman, “the team surveyor,” the amount of work done by his brigade. Other camp officials then estimated the production compared with the “daily norm.” Their decisions were then sent to the food department for rationing according to the output.174
More depended on the work rates than the work itself. A clever boss who knows his business really sweats over these work rates. That’s where the ration comes from. If a job hasn’t been done, make it look like it had. If the rates were low on a job, try to hike ‘em up. You had to have brains for this and a lot of pull with the fellows who kept the work sheets. And they didn’t do it for nothing.
But come to think of it, who were these rates for? For the people who ran the camps. They made thousands on the deal and got bonuses on top for the officers. Like old Volkovoy, with that whip of his. And all you got out of it was six ounces of bread in the evening. Your life depended on them.175
On one occasion, the gang boss gets “better rates.” This means that “they’d have good bread rations for five days. Well, maybe four. The higher-ups always cheat on one day out of five.”176
As to the quality of the food, the convicts in Solzhenitsyn’s book discuss the film Battleship Potemkin. The maggots on the meat which cause the mutiny are thought to be unrealistically large, and this is explained as necessary from the film point of view. Then comes the comment: “If they brought that kind of meat to the camp, I can tell you, and put it in the cauldron instead of the rotten fish we get, I bet we’d …’177
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The gruel didn’t change from one day to the next. It depended on what vegetables they’d stored for the winter. The year before they’d only stocked up with salted carrots, so there was nothing but carrots in the gruel from September to June. And now it was cabbage. The camp was best fed in June, when they ran out of vegetables and started using groats instead. The worst time was July, when they put shredded nettles in the cauldron.
The fish was mostly bones. The flesh was boiled off except for bits on the tails and the heads. Not leaving a single scale or speck of flesh on the skeleton, Shukhov crunched and sucked the bones and spat them out on the table. He didn’t leave anything—not even the gills or tail. He ate the eyes too when they were still in place, but when they’d come off and were floating around in the bowl on their own he didn’t eat them. The others laughed at him for this.
… The second course was a mush made from magara. It was one solid lump, and Shukhov broke it off in pieces. When it was hot—never mind when it was cold—it had no taste and didn’t fill you. It was nothing but grass that looked like millet. They’d gotten the bright idea of serving it instead of groats. It came from the Chinese, they said. They got ten ounces of it and that was that. It wasn’t the real thing, but it passed for mush.178
The ration, and the whole estimate of norms, depended on all sorts of factors. First, the ideas of the officials in determining the piecework. For some types of work, it was on occasion set far above the possible—for example, in building the Kotlas–Vorkuta railway. It was impossible to do more than about 30 percent of the quota, so the ration, for this extremely hard work, was down to 400 grams.179 On the extension down to Khalmer-Yu, average expectation of life was about three months.180
Again, the goodness or badness of the year’s harvest immediately affected rations. The bad harvest of 1936 produced an appalling level of mortality from starvation in the camps in 1937.
Trouble was caused by the desire to eat anything at all. Rubbish boxes from the kitchens might be attacked by gangs. When these, in one camp, were thrown into the cesspool by the latrines, “even there the gangs waded after them.”181 When grass came up, every blade might be put in a tin and boiled and eaten. Grass eating was most common among intellectuals. Its long-term effects were deadly. Others tried to satisfy their appetites with boiling salt water, also ineffective.182
Even in Solzhenitsyn’s penal camp, there are convicts who have served in worse places—a lumber camp where work went on until midnight if necessary to fill the quotas, and the basic ration was six ounces less.183 In the area of the far north, to the east of the Urals, there seem to have been a number of camps of particularly rigorous regime, which are described as of “complete isolation.” Only a few rumors about them have emerged, as no one seems in any circumstances to have been released. The death rate is said to have been very high. Novaya Zemlya had an extremely bad reputation—with few, if any, returning.
Special punitive camps are often reported. After the introduction of a new and harsher regime of katorga in the early 1940s, those so sentenced were deprived of blankets and mattresses for the first three years and otherwise subjected to harder labor, longer hours, and worse conditions.184 Sometimes, as in the Dzhido camp, offending prisoners were put in chains for the remainder of their sentences.185 For women, the Stalinogorsk camp was particularly severe: inmates worked in iron and coal mines. The second Alekseyevka camp, in the Kargopol group, a particularly bad one listed as a disciplinary camp but in fact full of foreign prisoners who had had no time to commit offenses in other camps, had a large number of Polish Jews who had escaped from the Nazi persecution and died like flies. They hated the Soviet regime more bitterly and passionately than anyone in the camps.186