Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [115]
In camp there is “individual” and “common” underwear; such are the verbal pearls found in official speech. “Individual” underwear is newer and somewhat better and is reserved for “trusties,” convict foremen, and other privileged persons . . . “common” underwear is underwear for anyone. It’s handed out in the bathhouse right after bathing in exchange for dirty underwear, which is gathered and counted separately beforehand. There’s no opportunity to select anything according to size. Clean underwear is a pure lottery, and I felt a strange and terrible pity at seeing adult men cry over the injustice of receiving worn-out clean underwear in exchange for dirty good underwear. Nothing can take the mind of a human being off the unpleasantnesses that comprise life . . .81
Still, the shock of being washed, shaved, and dressed as zeks was only the first stage in a long initiation. Immediately afterward, the prisoners underwent one of the most critical procedures in their lives as inmates: selection— and segregation into categories of worker. This selection process would affect everything from a prisoner’s status in camp, to the type of barrack he lived in, to the type of work he would be assigned to do. All of which might, in turn, determine whether he would live or die.
I have not, it must be noted, found any memoirs describing “selections” of the sort that took place in German death camps. That is, I have not read of regular selections which ended in weak prisoners being taken aside and shot. Such atrocities surely took place—one Solovetsky memoirist claims to have survived one such occasion82—but the usual practice, at least by the end of the 1930s and the early 1940s, was different. Weak prisoners were not murdered upon arrival in some of the farther-flung camps, but rather given a period of “quarantine,” both to ensure that any illnesses they were carrying would not spread, and to allow them to “fatten up,” to recover their health after long months in prison and terrible journeys. Camp bosses appear to have taken this practice seriously, and prisoners concur.83
Alexander Weissberg, for example, was given good food and allowed to rest before he was sent to the mines.84 After a long transport to Ukhtizhemlag, Jerzy Gliksman—the Polish socialist who had once so enjoyed the performance of Pogodin’s Aristokraty in Moscow—was given a three-day rest, during which he and his fellow new arrivals were treated as “guests.”85 Pyotr Yakir, the son of the Soviet general, was put in quarantine for fourteen days at Sevurallag. 86 Evgeniya Ginzburg remembered her first few days in Magadan, the main city of Kolyma, as a “whirl of pain, blackouts of memory, and a dark abyss of unconsciousness.” She, like others, had been taken directly off the SS Dzhurma and placed in a hospital, where after two months she fully recovered her health. Some were skeptical. “A lamb for the slaughter,” said Liza Sheveleva, another prisoner. “Whom are you recovering for, may I ask? As soon as you get out of here, you’ll go straight on to forced labor, and in a week you’ll be the same sort of corpse that you were on board the Dzhurma . . .”87
Once recovered, if they had been allowed to do so, and once dressed, if they had been allowed new clothes, the selection and segregation began in earnest. In principle, this was a heavily regulated process. As early as 1930, the Gulag issued very strict, complicated orders on the classification of prisoners. Theoretically, prisoners’ work assignments were meant to reflect two sets of criteria: their “social origin” and sentence, and their health. In these early days, prisoners were put into three categories: “working-class” prisoners, not convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes, with sentences not longer than five years; “working-class