Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [126]
Bedding was also arbitrary, and varied greatly from camp to camp, despite further strict (and rather modest) rules issued in Moscow. Regulations stated that all prisoners should have a new towel every year, a pillowcase every four years, sheets every two years, and a blanket every five years.64 In practice, “a so-called straw mattress went with each prisoner’s bed,” wrote Elinor Lipper:
There was no straw in it and rarely hay, because there was not enough hay for the cattle; instead it contained wood shavings or extra clothes, if a prisoner still owned any extra clothes. In addition, there was a woolen blanket and pillowcase which you could stuff with whatever you had, for there were no pillows.65
Others had nothing at all. As late as 1950, Isaak Filshtinsky, an Arabic specialist arrested in 1948, was still sleeping beneath his coat in Kargopollag, with spare rags for pillows.66
The 1948 directive also called for all earthen floors in barracks to be replaced by wooden floors. But as late as the 1950s, Irena Arginskaya lived in a barrack whose floor could not be cleaned properly as it was made of clay.67 Even if floors were wooden, they could often not be cleaned properly for lack of brushes. Describing her experiences to a postwar commission, one Polish woman explained that in her camp, a group of prisoners were always put “on duty” at night, cleaning up the barracks and lavatories while others slept: “The mud on the barrack floor had to be scraped off with knives. The Russian women were frantic at our being unable to do it, and asked us how we had lived at home. It did not even occur to them that the dirtiest floor can be scrubbed with a brush.” 68
Heating and light were often equally primitive, but again this varied greatly from camp to camp. One prisoner remembered the barracks being virtually dark: “the electric lamps shone yellow-white, barely noticeable, and the kerosene lamps smoked and smelled rancid.”69 Others complained of the opposite problem, that the lights were usually on all night. 70 Some prisoners in the camps of the Vorkuta region had no problem with heat, since they could bring lumps of coal home from the mines, but Susanna Pechora, in a lagpunkt near the coal mines of Inta, remembered that inside the barracks it was “so cold in the winter that your hair freezes to the bed, the drinking water freezes in the cup.”71 There was no running water in her barracks either, just water brought into the barracks in buckets by the dezhurnaya—an older woman, no longer capable of heavier work—who cleaned and looked after the barracks during the day.72
Worse, a “terrible heavy smell” pervaded the barracks, thanks to the huge quantities of dirty and mildewed clothes drying along the edge of the bunks, the tables, anywhere it was possible to hang something. In those barracks in the special camps where the doors were closed at night and the windows barred, the stench made it “almost impossible to breathe.” 73
The air quality was not improved by the absence of toilets. In camps where prisoners were locked into their barracks at night, zeks had to make use of a parasha, or “bucket,” just as in prison. One prisoner wrote that in the morning the parasha was “impossible to carry, so it was dragged along across the slippery floor. The contents invariably spilled out.”74 Another, Galina Smirnova, arrested in the early 1950s, remembered that “if it was something serious, you waited until morning, otherwise there was a terrible stench.”75
Otherwise, toilets were outhouses, and outhouses were outside the barracks, often some distance away, which was a serious hardship in the winter cold. “There were wooden outdoor toilets,” said Smirnova of another camp, “even when it was 30 or 40 degrees below zero.”76 Thomas Sgovio wrote of the consequences:
Outside, in front of each barrack, they stuck a wooden pole and froze it to the ground. Another decree! We were forbidden to urinate anywhere on camp grounds other than the outhouses or on the pole with a white rag tied