Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [119]
And yet—in practice, things were very different. People are not machines, the camps were not clean, well-functioning factories, and the system never worked the way it was supposed to. Guards were corrupt, administrators stole, and the prisoners developed ways of fighting or subverting the camps’ rules. Within the camps, prisoners were also able to form their own informal hierarchies which sometimes harmonized with, and sometimes conflicted with, the official hierarchy created by the camp administration. Despite regular visits from Moscow inspectors, often followed up by reprimands and angry letters from the center, few camps lived up to the theoretical model. Despite the apparent seriousness with which prisoners’ complaints were treated—whole commissions existed to examine them— they rarely resulted in actual change.5
This clash between what the Gulag administration in Moscow thought the camps were supposed to be, and what they actually were on the ground— the clash between the rules written on paper, and the procedures carried out in practice—was what gave life in the Gulag its peculiar, surreal flavor. In theory, the Gulag administration in Moscow dictated the smallest aspects of prisoners’ lives. In practice, every aspect of life was also affected by the prisoners’ relationships with those who controlled them, and with one another.
ZONA: WITHIN THE BARBED WIRE
By definition, the most fundamental tool at the disposal of the camp administrators was control over the space in which prisoners lived: this was the zona , or “prison zone.” By law, a zona was laid out in either a square or a rectangle. “In order to insure better surveillance,” no organic or irregular shapes were permitted.6 Within this square or rectangle, there was not much to interest the eye. Most of the buildings in a typical lagpunkt looked remarkably alike. Photographs of camp buildings once taken by Vorkuta administrators, and preserved in Moscow archives, show an array of primitive wooden buildings, otherwise indistinguishable except for the captions describing one as a “punishment cell,” another as a “dining hall.”7 There was usually a large open space in the center of the camp, near the gate, where the prisoners stood at attention twice a day to be counted. There were usually some guards’ barracks and administrators’ houses, also made of wood, just outside the main gate.
What distinguished the zona from any other workplace was, of course, the fence that surrounded it. Jacques Rossi, in The Gulag Handbook , wrote that the fence is usually built of wooden posts with one-third of their length in the ground. They range from 2.5 to 6 meters (7.5 to 18 feet) high, depending on local conditions. Seven to fifteen rows of barbed wire are stretched horizontally between the posts, which are about 6 meters (18 feet) apart. Two strands of wire are stretched diagonally between each pair of posts.8
If the camp or colony was located near or within a city, the barbed-wire fence was usually replaced by a wall or fence made of bricks or wood, so that no one approaching the site would be able to see in from the outside. These barriers were well-built: in Medvezhegorsk, for example, the headquarters of the White Sea Canal, a high wooden fence, built in the early 1930s to contain prisoners, was still standing when I visited the town in 1998.
To get through the fence, prisoners and guards alike had to travel through the vakhta, or “guardhouse.” During the day, the guards of the vakhta monitored all of those who entered and left the camp, checking the passes of free workers coming into the camps, and of the convoy guards escorting prisoners on their way out. In the camp at Perm-36, which has been restored to its original state, the vakhta contains a passage blocked by two gates. A prisoner would walk through the first gate, then stop in the small space in between to be searched or checked. Only then would he be allowed to walk through the second gate. It was much the same system as one finds at the entrance to a Sicilian bank.
But barbed wire and walls