Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [123]
These rules and timetables were not written in stone. On the contrary, the regime changed over time, generally growing harsher. Jacques Rossi has written that “the main trait of the Soviet penitentiary regime is its systematic intensification, gradual introduction of unadulterated, arbitrary sadism into the status of the law,” and there is something to this. 33 Throughout the 1940s, the regime grew tighter, workdays grew longer, rest days became less frequent. In 1931, the prisoners of the Vaigach Expedition, a part of the Ukhtinskaya Expedition, worked six-hour days, in three shifts. Workers in the Kolyma region in the early 1930s also worked normal hours, fewer in winter and more in summer.34 Within the decade, however, the working day had doubled in length. By the late 1930s, women at Elinor Olitskaya’s sewing factory worked “twelve hours in an unventilated hall,” and the Kolyma workday had also been lengthened to twelve hours. 35 Later still, Olitskaya worked on a construction brigade: fourteen- to sixteen-hour days, with fiveminute breaks at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., and a one-hour lunch break at noon.36
Nor was she alone. In 1940, the Gulag’s working day was officially extended to eleven hours, although even this was often violated.37 In March 1942, the Moscow Gulag administration mailed a furious letter to all camp commanders, reminding them of the rule that “prisoners must be allowed to sleep no less than eight hours.” Many camp commanders had ignored this rule, the letter explained, and had allowed their prisoners as little as four or five hours of sleep every night. As a result, the Gulag complained, “prisoners are losing their ability to work, they are becoming ‘weak workers’ and invalids.”38
Violations continued, particularly as production demands accelerated during the war years. In September 1942, after the German invasion, the Gulag’s administration officially extended the working day for prisoners building airport facilities to twelve hours, with a one-hour break for lunch. The pattern was the same all over the USSR. Working days of sixteen hours were recorded in Vyatlag during the war.39 Working days of twelve hours were recorded in Vorkuta in the summer of 1943, although these were reduced—probably because of the high rates of death and illness—to ten hours again in March 1944.40 Sergei Bondarevsky, a prisoner in a wartime sharashka, one of the special laboratories for inmate scientists, also remembered working eleven-hour days, with breaks. On a typical day, he worked from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m., from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m., and then again from 8 p.m. until 10 p.m.41
In any case, the rules were often broken. One zek, assigned to a brigade, panning gold in Kolyma, had to sift through 150 wheelbarrows a day. Those who had not finished that amount by the end of the workday simply remained until they had—sometimes as late as midnight. Afterward they would go home, eat their soup, and be up at 5 a.m. to start work again. 42 The Norilsk camp administration applied a similar principle in the late 1940s, where another prisoner worked digging foundations for new buildings in the permafrost: “At the end of twelve hours they would winch you out of the hole, but only if you had completed your work. If you hadn’t, you were just left