Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [151]
Our brigade is friendly
Our duty calls
Our building site waits
The Front needs our work.80
One can attempt to come up with explanations for this enormous effort. Perhaps the Cultural-Educational Department functioned, within the Gulag bureaucracy, as the ultimate scapegoat: if the plan was not being fulfilled, it was not poor organization or malnutrition that were to blame, not stupidly cruel work policies or the lack of felt boots—but insufficient propaganda. Perhaps the system’s rigid bureaucracy was at fault: once the center had decreed there must be propaganda, everyone tried to fulfill the order without ever questioning its absurdity. Perhaps the Moscow leadership was so isolated from the camps that they really did believe that 444 political information sessions and 762 political speeches would make starving men and women work harder—although given the material also available to them in camp inspection reports, this seems unlikely.
Or perhaps there is no good explanation. Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident who was later a prisoner himself, shrugged when I asked him about it. This paradox, he said, was what made the Gulag unique: “In our camps, you were expected not only to be a slave laborer, but to sing and smile while you worked as well. They didn’t just want to oppress us: they wanted us to thank them for it.”81
Chapter 12
PUNISHMENT AND REWARD
He who has not been there will get his turn. He who has been there will never forget it.
—Soviet proverb about prisons1
SHIZO: PUNISHMENT CELLS
Very few soviet concentration camps have survived intact into the present, even in ruined form. Nevertheless, it is a curious fact that quite a number of shtrafnye izolyhateri—“punishment isolaters,” or (using the inevitable acronym) SHIZO—are still standing. Nothing remains of lagpunkt No. 7 Ukhtpechlag—except its punishment block, now the workshop of an Armenian car mechanic. He has left the barred windows intact, hoping, he says, that “Solzhenitsyn will buy my building.” Nothing remains of the farming lagpunkt at Aizherom, Lokchimlag—except, again, its punishment block, now converted into a house inhabited by several families. One of the elderly women who lives there praises the solidity of one of the doors. It still has a large “Judas hole” in its center, through which guards once peered at the prisoners, and shoved them rations of bread.
The longevity of punishment blocks testifies to the sturdiness of their construction. Often the only brick building in a wooden camp, the isolator was the zona within the zona. Within its walls ruled the rezhim within the rezhim. “A gloomy stone building,” is how one prisoner described the isolator in his camp: “external gates, internal gates, armed sentry posts all around.”2
By the 1940s, Moscow had issued elaborate instructions, describing both the construction of punishment blocks and the rules for those condemned to live within them. Each lagpunkt—or group of lagpunkts , in the case of the smaller ones—had a punishment block, normally just outside the zona, or, if within it, “surrounded by an impenetrable fence,” at some distance from the other camp buildings. According to one prisoner, this stricture may not have been necessary, since many prisoners tried to avoid the lagpunkt punishment cell by “walking round it at a distance, not even looking in the direction of those grey stone walls, pierced by openings which seemed to breathe out a cold dark emptiness.” 3
Each camp complex was also meant to have a central punishment block near its headquarters, be it Magadan or Vorkuta or Norilsk. The central block was in fact often a very large prison which, the rules stated, “should be set up in the place which is farthest away from populated regions and from transport routes, should be well-guarded, and guaranteed strict isolation. The guards should consist of only the most trusted, disciplined, and experienced riflemen, selected from among the free workers.” These central