Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [152]
On the face of it, the existence of punishment cells appears to contradict the general economic principles upon which the Gulag was founded. To maintain special buildings and extra guards was expensive. To keep prisoners away from work was wasteful. Yet from the camp administration’s point of view, the cells were not a form of supplementary torture, but rather an integral part of the vast effort to make prisoners work harder. Along with reduced food norms, the punishment regime was designed to frighten otkazchiki— those who refused to work—as well as to punish those caught committing a camp crime, such as murder, or attempting escape.
Because these two types of crimes tended to be committed by different types of prisoners, the punishment cells had, in some camps, a peculiar atmosphere. On the one hand, they were full of professional thieves, who were more likely to be murderers and escapees. Over time, however, another category of prisoner also began to fill up the punishment cells: the male religious prisoners, as well as the monashki, the religious “nuns,” who also refused on principle to work for the Soviet Satan. Aino Kuusinen, for example, was in a Potma lagpunkt whose commander built a special punishment barracks for a group of deeply religious women who “refused to work in the fields and spent their time praying aloud and singing hymns.” The women were not fed with the other prisoners, but instead received punishment rations in their own barracks. Armed guards escorted them twice daily to the latrine: “From time to time the commandant would visit their quarters with a whip, and the hut resounded with shrieks of pain: the women were usually stripped before being beaten, but no cruelty could dissuade them from their habits of praying and fasting.” They were eventually taken away. Kuusinen believed they had been shot.5
Other sorts of chronic “refusers” found their way into punishment cells as well. Indeed, the very existence of the cells presented prisoners with a choice. They could either work—or they could sit for a few days in the cells, getting by on short rations, suffering from the cold and the discomfort, but not exhausting themselves in the forests. Lev Razgon recounts the story of Count Tyszkiewicz, a Polish aristocrat who, finding himself in a Siberian logging camp, worked out that he would not survive on the rations supplied and simply refused to work. He reckoned he would thereby save his strength, even if he received only the punishment ration.
Every morning before the prisoners were marched out of the camp to work and the columns of zeks were lined up in the yard, two warders would fetch Tyszkiewicz from the punishment cell. Grey stubble covered his face and shaven head, and he was dressed in the remnants of an old overcoat and puttees. The camp security officer would begin his daily educational exercise, “Well you f——g Count, you stupid f——g f—k, are you going to work or not?”
“No, sir, I cannot work,” the count would reply in an iron-firm voice.
“Oh so you can’t, you f—k!” The security officer would publicly explain to the count what he thought of him and of his close and distant relations, and what he would do to him in the very near future. This daily spectacle was a source of general satisfaction to the camp’s other inmates.6
But although Razgon tells the story with humor, there were high risks to such a strategy, for the punishment regime was not designed to be pleasant. Officially, the daily punishment rations for prisoners who had failed to fulfill the norm consisted of 300 grams of “black rye bread,” 5 grams of flour, 25 grams