Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [147]
Isaak Filshtinskii also notes, with a great deal of irony, that some prisoners became adept at twisting this policy to their own advantage. One, a former chauffeur, claimed that he knew how to construct a mechanism that would allow cars to run on oxygen. Excited by the prospect of discovering a really important “rationalization,” the camp bosses gave him a laboratory in which to work on the idea: “I can’t say whether they believed him or not. They were simply fulfilling instructions of the Gulag. In every camp, there should be people working as rationalizers and inventors . . . and who knows, maybe Vdovin would find something, and then they would all get the Stalin prize!” Vdovin’s bluff was called, finally, when he returned one day from his lab with a giant construction made of scrap metal, the purpose of which he was incapable of explaining.67
As in the outside world, the camps also continued to hold “socialist competitions,” work contests in which prisoners were meant to compete against one another, the better to raise output. They also honored the camp shock-workers, for their alleged ability to triple and quadruple the norms. I’ve described the first such campaigns in Chapter 4, which began in the 1930s, but they continued—with markedly less enthusiasm and markedly more absurd hyperbole—into the 1940s. Prisoners who participated could win many different sorts of awards. Some received bigger rations or better living conditions. Others received more intangible prizes. In 1942, for example, a reward for good performance could include a knizhka otlichnika , a booklet awarded to those who attained the status of “excellent” workers. This contained a little calendar, with space for putting in daily percentages of norms fulfilled; a blank space for writing in suggestions for “rationalizations”; a list of the rights of the booklet holder (to receive the best place in the barracks, to get the best uniforms, the unlimited right to receive parcels, etc.); and a quote from Stalin: “The hardworking person feels himself a free citizen of his country, a social activist of a sort. And if he works hard, and gives society that which he can give, he is a hero of labor.”68
Not everybody would have taken such a prize terribly seriously. Antoni Ekart, a Polish prisoner, also described one such work campaign:
A plywood Board of Honor was put up on which were posted the results of the Socialist Workers’ Contests when announced. Sometimes a crude portrait of the leading “shock” man was exhibited, giving details of the records achieved. Almost unbelievable figures, showing outputs of five hundred percent or even one thousand percent of the normal, were shown. This referred to the digging up of the ground with spades. Even the most backward prisoner could understand that to excavate five to ten times more than the standard was impossible . . . 69
But the KVCh instructors were also ultimately responsible for convincing “refusers” that it was in their interest to work, not to sit in punishment cells, or to attempt to get by on small rations. Clearly, not many took their lectures seriously: there were too many other ways to persuade prisoners to work. But a few did, much to the delight of the Gulag’s bosses in Moscow. In fact, they took this function terribly seriously, and even held periodic conferences of KVCh instructors, designed to discuss such questions as “What are the basic motives of those who refuse to work?” and “What are the practical results of eliminating the prisoners’ day off?”
At one such meeting, held during the Second World War, the organizers compared notes. One acknowledged that some “shirkers” could not work because they