Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [140]
The mosquitoes crawled up our sleeves, under our trousers. One’s face would blow up from the bites. At the work site, we were brought lunch, and it happened that as you were eating your soup, the mosquitoes would fill up the bowl like buckwheat porridge. They filled up your eyes, your nose and throat, and the taste of them was sweet, like blood. The more you moved and waved them away, the more they attacked. The best method was to ignore them, to dress lighter and instead of an anti-mosquito hat, to wear a wreath of grass or birch bark.20
Winters, of course, were very, very cold. Temperatures could fall to 30, 40, or 50 degrees below zero. Memoirists, poets, and novelists have all struggled to describe what it felt like to work in such frost. One wrote of it being so cold that “the simplest sudden motion of a hand in the air caused a notable swishing sound.”21 Another wrote that one Christmas Eve morning, he awoke to discover that he could not move his head.
My first waking thought was that it had somehow been tied to the planks of my bunk during the night, but as I tried to sit up, the piece of material I had tied around my head and over my ears before I went to sleep the night before had pulled away. Pulling myself up on one elbow, I tugged at the material and realized that it was frozen to the wooden plank. My breath and the breath of all the men in the hut hung in the air like smoke. 22
Yet another wrote that “It was dangerous to stop moving. During head count we jumped, ran in place, and slapped our bodies to keep warm. I perpetually kneaded my toes and curled my fingers into a fist . . . touching a metal tool with a bare hand could tear off the skin, and going to the bathroom was extremely dangerous. A bout of diarrhea could land you in the snow forever.” As a result, some prisoners simply soiled their trousers: “Working next to them was unpleasant, and back in the tent, when we began to warm up, the stench was unbearable. Those who had soiled themselves were often beaten and thrown out.”23
Certain general-work jobs, from the point of view of the weather, were worse than others. In the coal mines of the Arctic, one inmate remembered, the underground air was warmer, but freezing water was constantly dripping on the miners: “The miner becomes a sort of giant icicle, his organism begins to freeze for a long and stable period of time. After three or four months of such hellish work, prisoners begin to experience massive illnesses...” 24
Isaak Filshtinsky also wound up assigned to one of the most unpleasant winter jobs in Kargopollag, sorting logs on their way to be processed. It meant standing in water all day, and although the water was warm—it was pumped from the electrical plant—the air was not:
Because in that winter the Arkhangelsk region maintained a stable frost of forty, forty-five degrees below zero, a thick fog hung at all times over the sorting basin. It was at the same time very wet, and very cold . . . the work was not very difficult, but after thirty to forty minutes your entire body was permeated and enveloped by damp, your chin, lips, and eyelashes were covered in frost, and the frost had penetrated to your very bones, through the pathetic camp clothing.25
The worst winter jobs were in the forests. For not only was the taiga cold in winter, but it was also periodically swept by severe, unpredictable winter storms—called burany or purgai. Dmitri Bystroletov, a prisoner in Siblag, was caught in one:
In that instant, the wind began a wild and terrifying howl, forcing us down to the ground. The snow swirled