Fermer. After an hour for supper, again prisoners were lined up in rows. If someone were missing, everyone would have to wait, while they searched for the shirker.27. I was embarrassed and protested that I would rather not sit so near the fire, but this was not in conformity with my host’s wishes, as I discovered when one of Grisha’s followers gave me a mighty push.” When he had regained his balance, he found himself sitting on the couch at Grisha’s feet: “This was, apparently, where he wanted me to remain . And again, the guards counted (if the prisoners were lucky) and re-counted (if they were not). . Even in these photographs, taken for propaganda purposes, therezhim prisoners have no mattresses, and are shown sharing blankets.79, In some camps, the etiquette surrounding sleeping arrangements became quite elaborate. Which is not to say, however, that their administrators were any more concerned with preserving human life, let alone respecting human dignity. But in practice, it transpired that even a monthly day off threatened to lower the camp’s production output, and it had therefore become customary to announce ceremoniously the reward of a rest day whenever the camp had surpassed its production plan for the one particular quarter . People are not machines, the camps were not clean, well-functioning factories, and the system never worked the way it was supposed to. . (We took no more because we dared not lower the egg productivity index, by which our work was judged. He is, after all, a working man and needs a needle and material for patches, and an extra bowl perhaps. . I … ACCORDING TO THE most accurate count to date, there were, between 1929 and 1953, 476 camp complexes in the realm of the Gulag.2 But this number is misleading. On a typical day, he worked from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m., from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m., and then again from 8 p.m. until 10 p.m.41, In any case, the rules were often broken. These ultimately became long, complex documents, written in heavy, bureaucratic language. Higher-ranking prisoners—brigade leaders, norm-setters, and others—were often permitted to sleep in smaller barracks, with fewer people. The water is poured off. “In order to insure better surveillance,” no organic or irregular shapes were permitted.6 Within this square or rectangle, there was not much to interest the eye. Grass was boiled and used as a staple in the gulags and Chinese prisons as well as other internment camps over the centuries despite being largely indigestible fiber. ... war, a delegation of starving peasants comes to the Smolny, wanting to … By definition, the most fundamental tool at the disposal of the camp administrators was control over the space in which prisoners lived: this was the zona , or “prison zone.” By law, a zona was laid out in either a square or a rectangle. The climate still varied from lagpunkt to lagpunkt, but the huge fluctuations in national policy that had characterized the 1930s had come to a halt. Whatever scraps they collected, they boiled into watery porridge. As you took their clothes off, lice fell off them in handfuls. Lv 6. Valery Frid, a scriptwriter for Soviet films and the author of an unusually lively memoir, has described the scene: The brigades would organize themselves in front of the gate. In July 1933, Dmitlag issued an order listing different rations for prisoners who fulfilled up to 79 percent of the norm; 80 to 89 percent of the norm; 90 to 99 percent of the norm; 100 to 109 percent of the norm; 110 to 124 percent of the norm; and 125 percent and higher.118, As one might imagine, the need to distribute these precise amounts of food to the right people in the right quantities—quantities which sometimes varied daily—required a vast bureaucracy, and many camps found it difficult to cope. Five thousand men did not have a piece of bread.”, Cutlery and crockery were constantly lacking too. Then tears of greeting, Mean tears of captivity . At ten we had a five-minute break to smoke a cigarette, for which purpose we had to run to a cellar about two hundred yards away, the only place on the factory premises where this was permitted. Again, the surreal gap between the neat lists of food rations drawn up in Moscow and the inspectors’ reports is startling. After all, “we were still surrounded by the trappings of civilization—outside the walls of the prison there was a large town.” In the camp, however, he found himself milling freely about among a “strange assortment of men . Seven to fifteen rows of barbed wire are stretched horizontally between the posts, which are about 6 meters (18 feet) apart. 7) The earth covering the bodies in the burial pits is often still moving ( and … 97. Even the smallest lagpunkts kept copious records, listing the daily normfulfillments of each prisoner, and the amount of food due as a result. The prisoners are, if not exactly smiling for the photographers, then at least reading newspapers and looking well-fed. Many describe the awfulness of bathing, but none quite so well as, again, Shalamov, who devotes an entire short story to the horrors of the baths of Kolyma. For breakfast and supper they reheat the same sort of soup.” In conversation with the camp cook, the inspector was also told that the “theoretical norms are never fulfilled,” that there were no deliveries of fish, meat, vegetables, or fats. In the summer, by contrast, meat and fish went bad, and other foods spoiled. A prosecutors’ office report for 1947, for example, lists many cases of theft, among them one in Vyatlag, where twelve people, including the head of the camp warehouse, helped themselves to 170,000 rubles worth of food products and vegetables. Only when prisoners believed their lives were in danger, did they sometimes turn to the guards in the vakhta. .”25. Thus was another aspect of ordinary life turned inside out, turned from a simple pleasure into what Shalamov calls “a negative event, a burden in the convict’s life . In September 1942, after the German invasion, the Gulag’s administration officially extended the working day for prisoners building airport facilities to twelve hours, with a one-hour break for lunch. We were forbidden to urinate anywhere on camp grounds other than the outhouses or on the pole with a white rag tied to the top. Life in any camp during the most intensive period of the Second World War, when one in four zeks died every year, was quite different from life in the early 1950s, when death rates were nearly the same as in the rest of the country. Most prisoners in most camps lived in barracks. Despite their exhaustion, prisoners would have to wait for hours to take their turn: “Bathhouse sessions are arranged either before or after work. then, when it was finally our turn to enter the washing room, we picked up a wooden tub, received a cup of hot water, a cup of cold water, and a small piece of black, evil-smelling soap ... 105, Then, after it was all over, the same humiliating process of handing out clothes began all over again, wrote Shalamov, ever-obsessive on the issue of underwear: “Having washed themselves, the men gather at the window far in advance of the actual distribution of underwear. Retour. [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies] To: E. Pluribus Unum. They scavenged, begged, plucking grass for food and pitted gang wars over tossed chicken bones. But if you want to find out if it tastes better boiled, you'll just have to try it and see. In such ways you try to prolong the business of eating by three hours or more. As the days went by I was filled by a sort of panic which slowly turned into desperation. In December, 1942, they had announced the creation in Smolensk of a “Russian Committee” -which … A Russian national, Evgenii Voronkin (30), has heard State Prosecutor I Nyoman Triarta Kurniawan demand eight years in prison at his online trial underway in Denpasar for possession of the modest quantity of 1.19 grams of marijuana. Because these communal beds were considered unhygienic, camp inspectors constantly inveighed against them too. Other readers will always be interested in your opinion of the books you've read. Ordinary prisoners were allowed to have one a week, and those assigned to stricter regimes two per month. . If you hadn’t, you were just left there.”43. (In Russian: "Прокурор добавит!") In most camps, armed guards observed the prisoners from high wooden watchtowers. One report on a camp kolkhoz listed, among its other problems, the lack of technically trained personnel, the lack of spare parts for the tractor, the lack of a barn for the dairy cattle, and the lack of preparation for the harvest season. The whole structure was covered with another layer of earth and snow. Wheat grass, lemon grass, etc... Actually lemon grass is used in salads and … They sketched out a general scheme, and left local commanders to fill in the blanks. .”129, In the Camp Kitchen: prisoners lining up for soup—a drawing by Ivan Sykahnov, Temirtau, 1935–1937, Other prisoners made their own bowls and cutlery out of wood. "Is it hard to be in the gulag?" The apparatus was not created for the purpose of tormenting convicts—as I say, the Gulag’s central administration in Moscow really did write very strict directives, instructing camp commanders to do battle against parasites, and countless inspection reports inveigh against their failure to do so. To begin with, the Soviet system classified prisoners as konvoinyi or beskonvoinyi—“guarded” or “unguarded”—and the small minority of unguarded prisoners were allowed to cross over the boundary without being watched, to run errands for the guards, to work during the day on an unguarded bit of railway, even to live in private apartments outside the zona. The barracks of the otlichniki—the “excellent ones” or “shock-workers”—have single beds with mattresses and blankets, wooden floors, and pictures on the walls. . As late as 1950, Isaak Filshtinsky, an Arabic specialist arrested in 1948, was still sleeping beneath his coat in Kargopollag, with spare rags for pillows.66, The 1948 directive also called for all earthen floors in barracks to be replaced by wooden floors. There were, at various times, light-regime camps for invalids, ordinary-regime camps, special-regime camps, and punishment-regime camps. With a chronic glower of hunger, they trolled the streets in gangs like rats. The procedure for the evening’s return to camp was much the same. One camp inmate, for example, received a half-glass of sugar at the end of each month, which he ate raw. .”149. all feelings of normality were suspended. 52 Janusz Sieminski, a Polish prisoner in Kolyma after the war, was also once part of a team that constructed a new lagpunkt “from zero,” in the depths of winter. As a result, the Gulag complained, “prisoners are losing their ability to work, they are becoming ‘weak workers’ and invalids.”38, Violations continued, particularly as production demands accelerated during the war years. Whatever scraps they collected, they boiled into watery porridge. Camp commanders were instructed to lower the bread ration of those prisoners meeting only 75 percent of the norm by 50 grams, and for those meeting only 50 percent of the norm by 100 grams. Gram of Grass = 8 Years in a Bali Gulag? Space was at such a premium that the possession of space, and of privacy, were considered great privileges, accorded only to those who ranked among the camp’s aristocracy. The beds had linen and pillows, the light was turned off at night, and there was a private shower.84 Prisoners who lived in these special quarters knew, of course, that they could easily be taken away, which enhanced their interest in working hard. Feb 23, 2017 - Explore Bette O'Coin's board "Sweet grass baskets and the Gullah" on Pinterest. For even if most food products disappeared before they made it into the soup, one staple food was usually available: bread. The one to distribute thermos flasks and exhortations to fill them with boiled water probably saved millions of lives from an early and unnecessary death. All clothing was supposed to be boiled in disinfection units, both on entering the camp and then at regular intervals, to destroy all vermin.89 As we have seen, camp barbers shaved the entire bodies of both men and women on entry into the camps, and their heads regularly thereafter. . . As discussed in Chapter 4, their traces still line the prisoner-built roads of the far north today, as well as the riverbanks near the older sections of the city of Vorkuta. The exact norms for particular categories of prisoners and camp workers were set in Moscow, and frequently changed. Until the late 1940s, when the big national groups—the Ukrainians, Balts, Chechens, Poles—grew stronger, the best-organized prisoners were usually the convicted criminals, as we shall see. . One prisoner wrote that in the morning the parasha was “impossible to carry, so it was dragged along across the slippery floor. Eat it all at one sitting; if, on the other hand, you gobble it down too quickly, as famished people often do in normal circumstances, you will also shorten your days . They were almost always terribly overcrowded, even after the chaos of the late 1930s had subsided. One set of rules written in 1939 reminded camp commanders that “all prisoners, without exception, are forbidden to live outside the zone in villages, private apartments, or houses belonging to the camp.” Theoretically, camps needed to get special permission even to let inmates live in a guarded accommodation, if it was outside the zona.14 In practice, these rules were frequently disregarded. ... they explained to the locals that the pigs had to be fattened in stages with chopped grass and bits of boiled potato, and flour only sprinkled on the feed. In those barracks in the special camps where the doors were closed at night and the windows barred, the stench made it “almost impossible to breathe.” 73, The air quality was not improved by the absence of toilets. After that, Pechora told me, she thought twice before complaining about the lack of food in the camps. Anyone caught violating the decree would be sentenced to ten nights in the penal cell . Zeks were not the only inhabitants of the Soviet Union who became obsessed with bread and the many ways to eat it, however. We breathed the moist sea air, felt the August drizzle on our faces, sat on the damp grass and let the earth run through our fingers. Second, they look completely different from you. An inspection report of twenty-three camps, written in 1948, noted angrily that in most of them “prisoners have no more than one to one and a half meters of living space per person,” and even that was in an unsanitary condition: “prisoners do not have their own places to sleep, or their own sheets and blankets.” 60 Sometimes there was even less space than that. . There is eatable grass. But this is tantamount to suicide! A prisoner would walk through the first gate, then stop in the small space in between to be searched or checked. . Four of them died in the Gulag as late as 1984-5, right before the era of glasnost/perestroika. In his 1939 regulations, Beria ordered all camp commanders to line their fences with a no-man’s-land, a strip of earth no less than 5 meters (15 feet) wide.10 Guards regularly raked the no-man’s-land in summer and deliberately left it covered with snow in winter, in order that the footprints of escaping prisoners might always be visible. When the snow melted in late spring, there would be a terrible stench . To save the bread risked loss or theft of the precious quarter-loaf. 37 In March 1942, the Moscow Gulag administration mailed a furious letter to all camp commanders, reminding them of the rule that “prisoners must be allowed to sleep no less than eight hours.” Many camp … And Susanna Pechora, a prisoner in Minlag in the 1950s, once overheard a conversation about camp bread between two Russian peasant women, also prisoners—women who had known what life was like without camp bread: One of them was holding a piece of bread and stroking it. A Blog From The Street. The crowded bunks and the lack of space could also be lethal, particularly in camps that worked on a twenty-four-hour schedule. Where insulation was not available, older methods were used. This "thawing" took place in private kitchens, where music and art flourished, too. Those who slept on the lower bunks had less clout. 1 billion fine for Voronkin’s violation of the National Anti-narcotic Law. As a rule, they therefore slept in the top bunks, where there was better air and more space, clubbing and kicking those who objected. . Adam Taylor. For that reason, prisoners sought out jobs which gave them access to food—cooking, dishwashing, work in storage warehouses— in order to be able to steal. Within the compound, which was fenced with barbed wire, we could walk around freely, gaze at the sky and the faraway hills, go up to the stunted trees and stroke them with our hands. The Lithuanians had built a little … The dogs, managed by special dog-handlers among the guards, were trained to bark at approaching prisoners and to follow the scent and chase anyone attempting escape. . 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