Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [129]
Nevertheless, not everyone was convinced of the efficacy of the camp’s delousing procedures. In practice, wrote one prisoner, “the baths seemed to increase the lice’s sexual vigor.”91 Varlam Shalamov went further: “Not only was the delousing absolutely useless, no lice are killed by this disinfection chamber. It’s only a formality and the apparatus has been created for the purpose of tormenting the convict still more.”92
Technically, Shalamov was wrong. The apparatus was not created for the purpose of tormenting convicts—as I say, the Gulag’s central administration in Moscow really did write very strict directives, instructing camp commanders to do battle against parasites, and countless inspection reports inveigh against their failure to do so. A 1933 account of the conditions in Dmitlag angrily complains about the women’s barracks, which were “dirty, lacking sheets and blankets; the women complain of a massive quantity of bedbugs, which the Sanitation Division is not fighting against.”93 A 1940 investigation into the conditions at one group of northern camps furiously described “lice in the barracks, and bedbugs, which have a negative impact on the prisoners’ ability to rest” at one lagpunkt, while the Novosibirsk corrective labor camp had “100 percent lice infection among prisoners . . . as a result of poor sanitary conditions, there is a high level of skin diseases and stomach ailments . . . from this it is clear that the unsanitary conditions of the camp are very, very costly.”
Meanwhile, typhus had broken out twice at another lagpunkt, while in others, prisoners were “black with dirt,” the report continued with great agitation.94 Complaints about lice, and angry orders to eliminate them, figure year in and year out in the inspection reports submitted by Gulag prosectors.95 After one typhus epidemic at Temlag in 1937, both the head of the lagpunkt and the deputy of the camp medical department were fired, accused of “criminal negligence and inactivity,” and put on trial.96 Reward was used as well as punishment: in 1933, the inhabitants of one prisoners’ barrack in Dmitlag received holidays from work as a prize for having cleared all of their beds of bedbugs. 97
Prisoners’ refusal to bathe was also taken very seriously. Irena Arginskaya, who was in a special camp for politicals at Kengir in the early 1950s, recalled a particular women’s religious sect in the camp which refused, for reasons known only to itself, to bathe:
One day I had remained in the barracks because I was ill, and had been let off work. A guard came in, however, and told us that all of the sick prisoners would have to help wash the “nuns.” The scene was as follows: a wagon pulled up to their section of the barracks, and we had to carry them out and put them on the wagon. They protested, kicked us and hit us, and so on. But when we finally got them on the wagon they lay quietly, and didn’t try to escape. Then we pulled the wagon to the baths, where we took them off and carried them inside, undressed them—and then understood why the camp administration couldn’t allow them not to bathe. As you took their clothes off, lice fell off them in handfuls. Then we put them under water, and washed them. Meanwhile, their clothes were boiled to kill the lice ...98
Arginskaya also remembers that “in principle it was possible to go to the baths as much as you wanted” in Kengir, where there were no restrictions on water. Similarly, Leonid Sitko, a former prisoner of war in Germany, reckoned that Soviet camps had fewer lice than German camps. He spent time in both Steplag and Minlag, where “you could bathe as much as you wanted . . . you could even wash your clothes.”99 Certain factories and work