Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [139]
Most of the time, prisoners were not meant to suffer—or perhaps it is more accurate to say that no one cared if they did or not. Far more important was that they fit into a camp production plan and fulfill a work norm. A norm could be anything: a certain number of cubic meters of wood to be cut down, of ditches to be dug, of coal to be hauled. And these norms were taken deadly seriously. Camps were covered with posters exhorting prisoners to fulfill their norms. The entire “cultural-educational” apparatus of the camps was devoted to the same message. The dining halls or central square of some camps featured enormous chalkboards, listing each brigade and its latest norm-fulfillment.17
Norms were calculated with great care and scientific reasoning by the norm-setter (normirovshik), whose job was thought to require great skill. Jacques Rossi records, for example, that those shoveling snow were assigned different norms depending upon whether the snow was freshly fallen snow, light snow, lightly packed snow, packed snow (requiring pressure from the foot on the shovel), heavily packed snow, or frozen snow (requiring work with picks). Even after all of that, “a series of coefficients account for the distance and height of the shoveled snow, and so forth.”18
But although theoretically scientific, the process of establishing norms for work, and of determining who had achieved them, was fraught with corruption, irregularity, and incongruity. To begin with, prisoners were usually assigned norms that corresponded with those assigned to free workers: they were meant to achieve the same as professional foresters or miners. By and large, however, prisoners were not professional foresters or miners, and often had little idea what they were meant to be doing. Nor, after long terms in jail and harrowing journeys in unheated cattle cars, were they even in average physical condition.
The more inexperienced and exhausted the prisoner, the more he would suffer. Evgeniya Ginzburg wrote a classic description of two women, both intellectuals unaccustomed to hard labor, both weakened by years in prison, trying to cut down trees:
For three days, Galya and I struggled to achieve the impossible. Poor trees, how they must have suffered at being mangled by our inexpert hands. Half-dead ourselves, and completely unskilled, we were in no condition to tackle them. The axe would slip and send showers of chips in our faces. We sawed feverishly, jerkily, mentally accusing each other of clumsiness—we knew we could not afford the luxury of a quarrel. Time and again the saw got stuck. But the most terrifying moment was when the tree was at last on the point of falling, only we didn’t know which way. Once Galya got hit on the head, but the medical orderly refused even to put iodine on the cut, saying, “Aha! That’s an old trick! Trying to get exempted on the first day, are you?”
At the end of the day, the brigadier declared Evgeniya and Galya had achieved 18 percent of the norm, and “paid” them for their poor showing: “Receiving the scrap of bread which corresponded to our performance, we were led out next day literally staggering from weakness to our place of work.” Meanwhile, the brigadier kept repeating that he “did not intend to throw away precious food on traitors who could not fulfill their norm.”19
In the camps of the far north—particularly the camps of the Kolyma region, as well as Vorkuta