Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [142]
Camp authorities were supposed to make some concessions to the cold. According to the rules, prisoners in certain northern camps received extra rations. But these, according to documents of 1944, could amount to as little as 50 extra grams of bread a day—a few bites—which was hardly enough to compensate for extreme cold.35 Theoretically, when it was too cold, or when a storm was pending, prisoners were not meant to work at all. Vladimir Petrov claimed that during the Berzin regime in Kolyma, prisoners had stopped working when temperatures reached 60 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. In the winter of 1938–39, after Berzin had been deposed, temperatures had to fall to 60 degrees below zero before work stopped. Even this rule was not always adhered to, writes Petrov, since the only person at the gold field who had a thermometer was the camp commander. As a result, “only three days during the winter of 1938–39 were declared nonworking days because of low temperatures, as against fifteen days during the winter of 1937–38.”36
Another memoirist, Kazimierz Zarod, recorded that the cutoff temperature in his camp during the Second World War was 49 degrees below zero, and recalled one occasion when his logging brigade was told to return to camp during the day, because the thermometer had reached minus 53: “How briskly we collected our equipment, formed ourselves into a column and began our journey back to camp.”37 Bardach recalls that in Kolyma in the war years, the rule was minus 50 degrees, “although the wind chill was never taken into account.”38
But weather was not the only obstacle to norm-fulfillment. In many camps, norms really were set impossibly high. In part this was a side effect of the logic of Soviet central planning, which decreed that enterprises had to increase their output every year. Elinor Olitskaya remembered her fellow inmates struggling to fulfill the norms in a camp sewing factory, wanting to keep their warm, indoor jobs. But because they did fulfill them, the camp administration kept raising them, as a result of which they became unattainable. 39
Norms also grew tougher because prisoners and norm-setters alike lied, overestimating how much work had been and would be done. As a result, norms sometimes became astronomical over time. Alexander Weissberg recalled that even for the supposedly easier jobs, the norms seemed incredible: “Everyone seemed to be faced with a virtually impossible task. The two men in charge of the laundry had to wash the clothes of 800 men in ten days.” 40
Not that overfulfilling the norm necessarily brought the expected advantages. Antoni Ekart recalled an incident when ice on the river near his camp broke, and a flood threatened: “Several brigades of the strongest prisoners, including all the ‘shock’ men, worked like mad for two days, practically without a break. For what they had done they received one herring for every two men and a packet of makhorka [rough tobacco] for every four.” 41
In such conditions—with long working days, few days off, and little rest during the day—accidents were frequent. In the early 1950s, a group of inexperienced women prisoners were ordered to put out a brushfire near Ozerlag. On that occasion alone, recalled one of them, “several people burned to death.”42 Exhaustion and the weather often proved a lethal combination, as Alexander Dolgun testifies:
Cold, numbed fingers could not hold on to handles and levers and timbers and crates, and there were