Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [128]
Informally, there was often another hierarchy at work within barracks as well. In most barracks, the critical decisions about who slept where were taken by those groups in the camps that were the strongest and most united. Until the late 1940s, when the big national groups—the Ukrainians, Balts, Chechens, Poles—grew stronger, the best-organized prisoners were usually the convicted criminals, as we shall see. As a rule, they therefore slept in the top bunks, where there was better air and more space, clubbing and kicking those who objected. Those who slept on the lower bunks had less clout. Those who slept on the floor—the lowest-ranking prisoners in the camp— suffered most, remembered one prisoner:
This level was called the “kolkhoz sector,” and it was to this level that the thieves forced the kolkhozniki— various aged intellectuals and priests, that is, and even some of their own, who had broken the theives’ moral code. On to them fell not only things from the upper and lower bunks: the thieves also poured slops, water, yesterday’s soup. And the kolkhoz sector had to tolerate all of this, for if they complained they would receive even more filth . . . people became sick, suffocated, lost consciousness, went crazy, died of typhus, dysentery, killed themselves. 85
Prisoners, even political prisoners, could nevertheless better their circumstances. While working as a feldsher, Karol Colonna-Czosnowski, a Polish political prisoner, was picked out of an extremely crowded barrack by Grisha, the criminal “boss” of the camp: “He gave a majestic kick to one of his courtiers who took it for an order to make room for me and promptly abandoned his seat. I was embarrassed and protested that I would rather not sit so near the fire, but this was not in conformity with my host’s wishes, as I discovered when one of Grisha’s followers gave me a mighty push.” When he had regained his balance, he found himself sitting on the couch at Grisha’s feet: “This was, apparently, where he wanted me to remain . . .”86 Colonna-Czosnowski did not argue. Even for a few hours, where one sat, or laid one’s head, mattered intensely.
BANYA: THE BATHHOUSE
Dirt, crowding, and poor hygiene led to a plague of bedbugs and lice. In the 1930s, a “humorous” cartoon in Perekovka, the newspaper of the Moscow–Volga Canal, featured a zek being handed new clothes. Beneath was the caption, “They give you ‘clean’ clothes, but they are full of lice.” Another was captioned “And while you sleep in the barracks, the bedbugs bite like black crabs.”87 Nor did the problem lessen over the years. One Polish prisoner records that, during the war, his camp acquaintance became obsessed with them: “As a biologist, he was interested in how many lice could subsist on a certain space. Counting them on his shirt he found sixty, and an hour later another sixty.”88
By the 1940s, the Gulag’s masters had long recognized the lethal danger of louse-borne typhus and, officially, conducted a constant battle against parasites. Baths were supposedly mandatory every ten days. All clothing was supposed to be boiled in disinfection units, both on entering the camp and then at regular intervals, to destroy all vermin.89 As we have seen, camp barbers shaved the entire bodies of both men and women on entry into the camps, and their heads regularly thereafter. Soap, albeit tiny amounts of it, was regularly included in lists of products to be distributed to prisoners: in 1944, for example, this amounted to 200 grams per month, per prisoner. Women, prisoners’ children, and prisoners in hospitals were allotted an extra 50 grams, juveniles