Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [102]
In the most overcrowded cells, the starosta’s main task was to greet new prisoners, and to ensure that everyone had a place to sleep. Almost universally, new prisoners were sent to sleep beside the parasha , the slop bucket, gradually progressing away from it and toward the window as they attained seniority. “No exceptions,” noted Elinor Lipper, “are made for sickness or age.”37 The starosta also resolved fights, and generally kept order in the cell, a task that was far from easy. Kazimierz Zarod, a Polish arrestee, recalled that, while serving as cell starosta, “the guards constantly threatened me with punishment if I did not keep the unruly element under some sort of control, particularly after 9 p.m.; when there was a ‘no talking’ rule after ‘Lights Out.’” Eventually, Zarod himself was put in a punishment cell for failing to keep control.38 It seems from other accounts, however, as if the decisions of the starosta were usually respected.
Without a doubt, the prisoners’ greatest ingenuity was applied to overcoming the most stringent rule: the strict prohibition of communication, both between cells and with the outside world. Despite the serious threat of punishment, prisoners left notes for other prisoners in toilets, or threw messages over walls. Leonid Finkelstein tried to throw a piece of meat, a tomato, and a piece of bread into another cell: “when we were taken to the loo, I tried to open the window and push the food through.” He was caught, and put in a punishment cell.39 Prisoners bribed guards to take messages, although they occasionally did so of their own accord. A warder at the Stravropol prison would occasionally transmit verbal communications from Lev Razgon to his wife.40
One former inmate, a prisoner for fourteen months in Vilnius after the Soviet occupation of the city—it had previously been under Polish rule— described in 1939, in testimony presented to the Polish government-in-exile, how the elements of the previous Polish prison regime had slowly broken down. One by one, prisoners lost their “privileges”—the right to read and write letters, to use the prison library, to have paper and pencils, to receive parcels. New regulations, of the sort common to most Soviet prisons, were brought in: lights in the cells had to be kept on all night, and windows were blocked with sheets of tin. Unexpectedly, the latter created an opportunity for communication between cells: “I opened the window, and, putting my head against the bars, spoke to my neighbors. Even if the sentry in the courtyard heard my conversation, he could not make out where the voice came from as, thanks to the tin sheet, it was impossible to detect an open window.”41
Perhaps the most elaborate form of forbidden communication, however, was the prisoners’ Morse code, tapped on the walls of cells, or on the prison plumbing. The code had been devised in the Czarist era—Varlam Shalamov attributes it to one of the Decembrists.42 Elinor Olitskaya had learned it from her Social Revolutionary colleagues long before she was imprisoned in 1924.43 In fact, the Russian revolutionary Vera Figner had described the code in her memoirs, which is where Evgeniya Ginzburg had read about it. While under investigation, she remembered enough of the code to use it to communicate with a neighboring cell.44 The code was relatively straightforward: letters of the Russian alphabet were laid out in five rows of six letters:
Each letter was then designated by a pair of taps, the first signifying the row, the second the position in the row:
Even those who had not read about the code or learned it from others sometimes