Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [155]
Precisely because the regulations were so varied and complicated, and because they changed with great frequency, contacts with the outside world were in reality left—once again—to the whim of the camp commanders. Letters and packages certainly never reached prisoners in punishment cells, punishment barracks, or punishment lagpunkts. Nor did they reach prisoners whom the camp authorities disliked, for whatever reason. Moreover, there were camps which were simply too isolated, and therefore did not receive any mail.21 There were camps so disorganized that they did not bother to distribute mail. Of one camp, a disgusted NKVD inspector wrote that “packages, letters, and money orders are not distributed to prisoners, but rather lie by the thousands in warehouses and outposts.”22 In many camps, letters were received months late, if at all. Many prisoners realized only years later how many of their letters and packages had gone missing. Whether stolen or lost, no one could say. Conversely, prisoners who had been strictly forbidden from receiving letters sometimes received them anyway, despite the best efforts of the camp administration.23
On the other hand, some camp censors not only did their duty and distributed letters, they even allowed some missives to pass unopened as well. Dmitri Bystroletov remembered one—a “young komsomolka,” a member of the young communist league—who gave prisoners their letters unopened and uncensored: “She risked not just a piece of bread, but freedom: for that, they would give her a ten-year sentence.”24
There were, of course, ways around both the censorship of letters and the restrictions on their numbers. Anna Rozina once received a letter from her husband which had been baked inside a cake: by the time it reached her, he had already been executed. She also saw letters sewn into the clothes of prisoners being freed from the camp, or smuggled to the outside world tucked into the soles of shoes.25 In one light-regime camp, Barbara Armonas smuggled letters via prisoners who worked unguarded outside the zona. 26
General Gorbatov also describes how he sent an uncensored letter to his wife from inside a transport train, using a method mentioned by many others. First, he bought a pencil stub from one of the criminal prisoners:
I gave the convict the tobacco, took the pencil from him and, as the train moved off again, wrote a letter on the cigarette paper, numbering each sheet. Next I made an envelope of the makhorka wrapper and stuck it down with moistened bread. So that my letter should not be carried by the wind into the bushes beside the railway, I weighted it with a crust of bread which I tied on with threads pulled from my towel. Between the envelope and the crust I slipped a ruble note and four cigarette papers each with the message: would the finder of this envelope please stick on a stamp and post it. I sidled up to the window of our truck just as we were going through a big station and let the letter drop...27
Not long afterward, his wife received it.
Some limitations on letter-writing were not mentioned in the instructions. It was all very well to be allowed to write, for example—but it was not always so easy to find something to write with or to write on, as Bystroletov remembered: “Paper in the camp is an object of great value, because it is badly needed by prisoners, but impossible to get: what does the cry ‘Today is a mail day! Hand in your letters!’ mean if there is nothing on which to write, if only