THE GULAG

ARCHIPELAGO

1918-1956

Our eager hopes, our leaping expectations, were soon crushed. The wind of change was blowing only in drafty corridors in the transit prisons. Here, behind the tall fences of the Special Camps, its breath did not reach us. And although there were only political prisoners in these camps, no mutinous leaflets hung on posts.

They say that at Minlag the blacksmiths refused to forge bars for hut windows. All glory to those as yet nameless heroes! They were real people. They were put in the camp jail, and the bars for Minlag were forged at Kotlas. No one supported the smiths.

The Special Camps began with that uncomplaining, indeed eager submission to which prisoners had been trained by three generations of Corrective Labor Camps.

Prisoners brought in from the Polar North had no cause to be grateful for the Kazakh sunshine. At Novorudnoye station they jumped down from the red boxcars onto ground no less red. This was the famous Dzhezkazgan copper, and the lungs of those who mined it never held out more than four months. There and then the warders joyfully demonstrated their new weapon on the first prisoners to step out of line: handcuffs, which had not been used in the Corrective Labor Camps, gleaming nickel handcuffs, which went into mass production in the Soviet Union to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the October Revolution. (Somewhere there was a factory in which workers with graying mustaches, the model proletarians of Soviet literature, were making them unless we suppose that Stalin and Beria did it themselves?) These handcuffs were remarkable in that they could be clamped on very tight.

Serrated metal plates were let into them, so that when a camp guard banged a man's handcuffed wrists against his knee, more of the teeth would slip into the lock, causing the prisoner greater pain. In this way the handcuffs became an instrument of torture instead of a mere device to inhibit activity: they crushed the wrists, causing constant acute pain, and prisoners were kept like that for hours, always with their hands behind their backs, palms outward. The warders also perfected the practice of trapping four fingers in the handcuffs, which caused acute pain in the finger joints.

In Berlag the handcuffs were used religiously: for every trifle, even for failure to take off your cap to a warder, they put on the handcuffs (hands behind the back) and stood you by the guardhouse. The hands became swollen and numb, and grown men wept: "I won't do it again, sir! Please take the cuffs off!" (Wondrous were the ways of Berlag: not only did prisoners enter the mess hall on command, they lined up at the tables on command, sat down on command, lowered their spoons into the gruel on command, rose and left the room on command.)

It was easy enough for someone to scribble the order: "Establish Special Camps! Submit draft regulations by such and such a date!" But somewhere hard-working penologists (and psychologists, and connoisseurs of camp life) had to think out the details: How could screws already galling be made yet tighter? How could burdens already backbreaking be made yet heavier? How could the lives of Gulag's denizens, already far from easy, be made harder yet? Transferred from Corrective Labor Camps to Special Camps, these animals must be aware at once of their strictness and harshness but obviously someone must first devise a detailed program!

Naturally, the security measures were strengthened. In all Special Camps the perimeter was reinforced, additional strands of barbed wire were strung up, and coils of barbed wire were scattered about the camp's fringe area. On the path by which prisoners went to work, machine guns were set up in readiness at all main crossroads and turnings, and gunners crouched behind them.

Every Camp Division had its stone jailhouse its Disciplinary Barracks (BUR). [] Anyone put in the Disciplinary Barracks invariably had his padded jacket taken from him: torture by cold was an important feature of the BUR. But every hut was just as much a jail, since all windows were barred, and latrine buckets were brought in for the night so that all doors could be locked. Moreover, there were one or two Disciplinary Barracks in each camp area, with intensified security, each a separate camplet within the camp; these were locked as soon as the prisoners got in from work on the model of the earlier katorga. (They were BUR's really, but we called them "rezhimki.")

Then again, they quite blatantly borrowed from the Nazis a practice which had proved valuable to them the substitution of a number for the prisoner's name, his "I," his human individuality, so that the difference between one man and another was a digit more or less in an otherwise identical row of figures. This measure, too, could be a great hardship, provided it was implemented consistently and fully. This they tried to do. Every new recruit, when he "played the piano" in the Special Section (i.e., had his fingerprints taken, as was the practice in ordinary prisons, but not in Corrective Labor Camps), had to hang around his neck a board suspended from a rope. His number Shch 262 will do as an example was set up on the board (in Ozerlag by now there were even numbers beginning with yery: the alphabet was too short!) and in this guise he had his picture taken by the Special Section's photographer. (All those photographs are still preserved somewhere! One of these days we shall see them!)

They took the board from around the prisoner's neck (he wasn't a dog, after all) and gave him instead four (or in some camps three) white patches measuring 8 centimeters by 15. These he had to sew onto his clothes, usually on the back, the breast, above the peak of his cap, and on one leg or arm (Plate No. 2) but the regulations varied slightly from camp to camp. Quilted clothing was deliberately damaged in stipulated places before the patches were sewn on: in the camp workshops a separate team of tailors was detailed to damage new clothing: squares of fabric were cut out to expose the wadding underneath. This was done so that prisoners trying to escape could not unpick their number patches and pass as free workmen. In some other camps it was simpler still: the number was burned into the garments with bleaching fluid.

Warders were ordered to address prisoners by their numbers only, and to ignore and forget their names. It would have been pretty unpleasant if they had kept it up but they couldn't. Russians aren't Germans. Even in the first year warders occasionally slipped up and called people by their names, and as time went by they did it more often. To make things easier for the warders, a plywood shingle was nailed onto each bunk, at every level, with the occupant's number on it. Thus the warder could call out the sleeper's number even when he could not see it on his garments, and if a man was missing the warder would know at once who was breaking the rules. Another useful field of activity opened up for warders: they could quietly turn the key in the lock and tiptoe into the hut before getting-up time, to take the numbers of those who had risen too soon, or they could burst into the hut exactly on time and take the numbers of those who were not yet up. In both cases you could be summarily awarded a spell in the hole, but in the Special Camp it was usually thought better to demand a