Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [124]
Nor were many breaks usually granted during the day, as one wartime prisoner, assigned to work in a textile factory, later explained:
At six we had to be in the factory. At ten we had a five-minute break to smoke a cigarette, for which purpose we had to run to a cellar about two hundred yards away, the only place on the factory premises where this was permitted. Infringement of this regulation was punishable with two extra years’ imprisonment. At one o’clock came a half-hour break for lunch. Small earthenware bowl in hand, one had to dash frantically to the canteen, stand in a long queue, receive some disgusting soya beans which disagreed with most people—and at all costs be back at the factory when the engines started working. After that, without leaving our places, we sat till seven in the evening.44
The number of days off work was also mandated by law. Ordinary prisoners were allowed to have one a week, and those assigned to stricter regimes two per month. But these rules also varied in practice. As early as 1933, the Gulag administration in Moscow sent out an order reminding camp commanders of the importance of prisoners’ rest days, many of which were being canceled in the mad rush to fulfill the plan.45 A decade later, hardly anything had changed. During the war, Kazimierz Zarod was given one day off out of ten.46 Another recalled having one a month.47 Gustav Herling remembered free days being even scarcer:
According to regulations, prisoners were entitled to one whole day’s rest every ten days’ work. But in practice, it transpired that even a monthly day off threatened to lower the camp’s production output, and it had therefore become customary to announce ceremoniously the reward of a rest day whenever the camp had surpassed its production plan for the one particular quarter . . . Naturally we had no opportunity to inspect the output figures or the production plan, so that this convention was a fiction which in fact put us entirely at the mercy of the camp authorities.48
Even on their rare days off, it sometimes happened that prisoners were forced to do maintenance work within the camp, cleaning barracks, cleaning toilets, clearing snow in the winter.49 All of which makes one order, issued by Lazar Kogan, the commander of Dmitlag, particularly poignant. Disturbed by the many reports of camp horses collapsing of exhaustion, Kogan began by noting that: “The growing number of cases of illness and collapse of horses has several causes, including the overloading of horses, the difficult conditions of the roads, and the absence of full and complete rest time for horses to recover their strength.”
He then continued, issuing new instructions:
The workday of camp horses must not exceed ten hours, not counting the obligatory two-hour break for rest and food.
On average, horses must not walk more than 32 kilometers per day.
Horses must be allowed a regular rest day, every eighth day, and the rest on that day must be complete.50
Of the prisoners’ need for a regular rest day every eighth day, there is, alas, no mention.
BARAKI: LIVING SPACE
Most prisoners in most camps lived in barracks. Rare was the camp, however, whose barracks were constructed before the prisoners arrived. Those prisoners who had the bad luck to be sent to build a new camp lived in tents, or in nothing at all. As one prisoners’ song put it;
We drove quickly and fast across tundra When suddenly, the train came to a halt. Around us, only forest and mud— And here we will build the canal.51
Ivan Sulimov, a prisoner in Vorkuta in the 1930s, was dumped, along with a party of inmates, on “a flat square of land in the polar tundra,” and told to set up tents, build a bonfire, and begin construction of a “fence of stone slabs, surrounded by barbed wire” as well as barracks. 52 Janusz Sieminski, a Polish prisoner in Kolyma after the war, was also once part of a team that constructed a new lagpunkt “from zero,” in the depths of winter. At night, prisoners slept on the ground. Many died, particularly those who lost the battle to sleep