Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [122]
In theory, the rules were strict: the prisoners were to stay inside the zona. In practice, the rules were broken. And behavior that did not technically violate the rules, no matter how violent or harmful, was not necessarily punished.
REZHIM: RULES FOR LIVING
The zona controlled the prisoners’ movement in space.26 But it was the rezhim—or “regime,” as it is usually translated into English—that controlled their time. Put simply, the regime was the set of rules and procedures according to which the camp operated. If barbed wire limited a zek’s freedom of movement to the zona, a series of orders and sirens regulated the hours he spent there.
The regime differed in its severity from lagpunkt to lagpunkt, both according to shifting priorities and according to the type of prisoner being held in a particular camp. There were, at various times, light-regime camps for invalids, ordinary-regime camps, special-regime camps, and punishment-regime camps. But the basic system remained the same. The regime determined when and how the prisoner should wake; how he should be marched to work; when and how he should receive food; when and for how long he should sleep.
In most camps, the prisoner’s day officially began with the razvod: the procedure of organizing the prisoners into brigades and then marching them to work. A siren or other signal would awake them. A second siren warned them that breakfast was finished, and work was to begin. Prisoners then lined up in front of the camp gates for the morning count. Valery Frid, a scriptwriter for Soviet films and the author of an unusually lively memoir, has described the scene:
The brigades would organize themselves in front of the gate. The work-assigner would hold a narrow, smoothly planed signboard: on it would be written the number of the brigades, the number of workers (there were paper shortages, and the numbers could be scraped off the signboard with glass and rewritten the following day). The convoy guard and the work-assigner would check whether everyone was in place, and if they were— they would be taken off to work. If someone were missing, everyone would have to wait, while they searched for the shirker.27
According to instructions from Moscow, this wait was not meant to last more than fifteen minutes.28 Of course, as Kazimierz Zarod writes, it often lasted much longer, bad weather notwithstanding:
By 3:30 a.m. we were supposed to be in the middle of the square, standing in ranks of five, waiting to be counted. The guards often made mistakes, and then there had to be a second count. On a morning when it was snowing this was a long, cold agonizing process. If the guards were wide awake and concentrating, the count usually took about thirty minutes, but if they miscounted, we could stand for anything up to an hour.29
While this was happening, some camps took countermeasures to “raise the prisoners’ spirits.” Here is Frid again: “Our razvod took place to the accompaniment of an accordion player. A prisoner, freed from all other work obligations, played cheerful melodies ...” 30 Zarod also records the bizarre phenomenon of the morning band, composed of prisoner musicians, both professional and amateur:
Each morning, the “band” stood near the gate playing military-style music and we were exhorted to march out “strongly and happily” to our day’s work. Having played until the end of the column had passed through the gate, the musicians abandoned their instruments and, tacking themselves on to the end of the column, joined the workers walking into the forest.31
From there, prisoners were