Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [118]
“Every camp is its own world, a separate city, a separate country,” wrote the Soviet actress Tatyana Okunevskaya—and every camp had its own character.3 Life in one of the mass industrial camps of the far north was very different from life on an agricultural farm camp in southern Russia. 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. Life in a camp headed by a relatively liberal boss was not the same as life in a camp led by a sadist. Lagpunkts also ranged widely in size, from several thousand to several dozen prisoners, as well as in longevity. Some lasted from the 1920s to the 1980s, when they still functioned as criminal prisons. Others, such as those set up to build the roads and railways across Siberia, lasted only as long as a single summer.
Nevertheless, on the eve of the war, certain elements of life and of work were common to the vast majority of camps. 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. Instead, the same inert bureaucracy that would eventually lay its dead hand on virtually every aspect of life in the Soviet Union slowly took over the Gulag as well.
Striking, in this regard, are the differences between the sketchy and somewhat vague rules and regulations for the camps issued in 1930, and the more detailed rules issued in 1939, after Beria had taken control. This difference seems to reflect a changing relationship between the organs of central control—the Moscow Gulag administration itself—and the commanders of camps in the regions. During the Gulag’s first, experimental decade, the order papers did not attempt to dictate what camps should look like, and barely touched on the behavior of prisoners. They sketched out a general scheme, and left local commanders to fill in the blanks.
By contrast, the later orders were very specific and very detailed indeed, dictating virtually every aspect of camp life, from the method of construction of barracks to the prisoners’ daily regime, in line with the Gulag’s new sense of purpose.4 From 1939, it seems that Beria—with, presumably, Stalin behind him—no longer explicitly intended the Gulag camps to be death camps, as some of them had been, in effect, in 1937 and 1938. Which is not to say, however, that their administrators were any more concerned with preserving human life, let alone respecting human dignity. From 1939 on, Moscow’s central concerns were economic: prisoners were to be slotted into the camp’s production plan like cogs in a machine.
Toward this end, the rules emanating from Moscow dictated strict control over the prisoners, to be obtained through the manipulation of their living conditions. In principle—as noted—the camp classified every zek according to his sentence, his profession, and his trudosposobnost , or “work capacity.” In principle, the camp assigned every zek a job, and a set of norms to fulfill. In principle, the camp allotted every zek the basic necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter, living space—according to how well, or how badly, he fulfilled these norms. In principle, every aspect of camp life was designed to improve production figures: even the camp “cultural-educational” departments existed largely because the Gulag bosses believed they might convince prisoners to work harder. In principle, inspection teams existed in order to make sure that all of these aspects of camp life worked harmoniously. In principle, every zek, even, had the right to complain—to the camp boss, to Moscow, to Stalin—if the camps were not operating according to