Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [103]
The code was not in widespread use at all times. By 1949, Zayara Vesyolaya “could find no one who knew the ‘prison alphabet’” in Butyrka, and thought at first that the tradition must have died out. She later decided she was wrong, both because others told her they had used it at that time, and because a guard once burst into her cell when he heard a knocking sound, demanding to know the origins. 46 There were other variations. The Russian writer and poet, Anatoly Zhigulin, claims to have invented a code, also based on the alphabet, which he and a group of his friends (they were all arrested at once) used to communicate during the investigation of their case.47
In certain places and at certain times, prisoners’ methods of self-organization took more elaborate forms. One in particular is described by Varlam Shalamov in his short story “Committees for the Poor,” and also mentioned by others.48 Its origins lay in an unfair rule: at one point, during the late 1930s, the authorities suddenly decided that prisoners undergoing interrogation were to receive no packages from their relatives whatsoever, on the grounds that even “two French rolls, five apples and a pair of old pants were enough to transmit any text into the prison.” Only money could be sent, and that only in round numbers, so that the sums could not be used to spell out “messages.” Yet not all prisoners’ families had money to send. Some were too poor, some too far away, while others may even have played a part in denouncing their relatives in the first place. That meant that although some prisoners had access once a week to the prison commissary— to butter, cheese, sausage, tobacco, white bread, cigarettes—others had to subsist on the poor prison diet, and, more important, would have felt “out of place at the general holiday” that was “commissary day.”
To solve this problem, the prisoners of Butyrka resurrected a phrase from the early days of the Revolution, and organized “Committees of the Poor.” Each prisoner donated 10 percent of his money to the committee. In turn, the committee purchased food items for prisoners who had none. This system went on for some years, until the authorities decided to eliminate the committees by promising some prisoners “rewards” of various kinds for refusing to participate. The cells fought back, however, and ostracized the refusers. And who, asks Shalamov, “would risk placing himself in opposition to the entire group, to people who are with you twenty-four hours a day, where only sleep can save you from the hostile glare of your fellow inmates?”
Curiously, this short story is one of the few in Shalamov’s extensive repertoire to end on a positive note: “Unlike the ‘free’ world ‘outside,’ or the camps, society in prison is always united. In the committees this society found a way to make a positive statement as to the right of every man to live his own life.”49
This most pessimistic of writers had found, in this one organized form of prisoner solidarity, a shred of hope. The trauma of the transports, and the horror of the first bewildering days in the camps, soon shattered it.
Chapter 9
TRANSPORT, ARRIVAL, SELECTION
I remember Vanino port
And the clamor of the gloomy ship
As we walked along the gangway
Into the cold, murky hold.
The zeks suffered from the rolling of the surf
The deep sea howled all around them—
And in front of them lay Magadan
The capital of the land of Kolyma.
Not cries, but pitiful moans
Emerged from every breast
As they said