Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [125]
If and when the prisoners did build barracks, they were invariably extremely simple buildings, made of wood. Moscow dictated their design and, as a result, descriptions of them are rather repetitive: prisoner after prisoner describes long, rectangular, wooden buildings, the walls unplastered, the cracks stopped up with mud, the inside space filled with rows and rows of equally poorly made bunk beds. Sometimes there was a crude table, sometimes not. Sometimes there were benches to sit on, sometimes not.56 In Kolyma, and in other regions where wood was scarce, the prisoners built barracks, equally cheaply and hastily, of stone. Where insulation was not available, older methods were used. Photographs of the barracks in Vorkuta, taken in the winter of 1945, make them look almost invisible: their roofs had been built at sharp angles, but very low to the ground, so the snow accumulating around them would help insulate them from cold.57
In the Barracks: inmates listening to a prisoner musician—a drawing by Benjamin Mkrtchyan, Ivdel, 1953
Often, barracks were not proper buildings at all, but rather zemlyanki, or “earth dugouts.” A. P. Evstonichev lived in one in Karelia, in the early 1940s:
A zemlyanka—it was a space cleaned of snow, with the upper layer of earth removed. The walls and roof were made of round, rough logs. The whole structure was covered with another layer of earth and snow. The entrance to the dugout was decked out with a canvas door . . . in one corner stood a barrel of water. In the middle stood a metal stove, complete with a metal pipe leading out through the roof, and a barrel of kerosene.58
In the temporary lagpunkts constructed alongside the building sites of roads and railways, zemlyanki were ubiquitous. As discussed in Chapter 4, their traces still line the prisoner-built roads of the far north today, as well as the riverbanks near the older sections of the city of Vorkuta. Sometimes prisoners lived in tents as well. One memoir of the early days of Vorkutlag describes the construction, in the course of three days, of “fifteen tents with three-level bunk-beds” for 100 prisoners apiece, as well as a zona with four watchtowers and a barbed-wire fence.59
But the real barracks rarely lived up to the low standards that Moscow had set for them either. They were almost always terribly overcrowded, even after the chaos of the late 1930s had subsided. An inspection report of twenty-three camps, written in 1948, noted angrily that in most of them “prisoners have no more than one to one and a half meters of living space per person,” and even that was in an unsanitary condition: “prisoners do not have their own places to sleep, or their own sheets and blankets.” 60 Sometimes there was even less space than that. Margarete Buber-Neumann records that on her arrival in camp, there was actually no sleeping space at all within the barracks, and she was forced to spend the first few nights on the floor of the washroom.61
Ordinary prisoners were meant to be given beds known as vagonki , a name taken from the beds found on the wagons of passenger trains. These were double-decker bunks, with room for two inmates at each level, four inmates in all. In many camps, prisoners slept on the even less sophisticated sploshnye nary. These were long wooden sleeping shelves, not even partitioned into separate bunks. Prisoners assigned to them simply lay down beside one another, in a long row. Because these communal beds were considered unhygienic, camp inspectors constantly inveighed against them too. In 1948, the central Gulag administration issued a directive demanding that they all be replaced by vagonki.62 Nevertheless, Anna Andreeva, a prisoner in Mordovia in the late 1940s and early 1950s, slept on sploshnye nary, and remembers