Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [156]
One prisoner recalled trading bread in exchange for two pages ripped out of The Question of Leninism, a book by Stalin. He wrote a letter to his family between the lines.29 Even the camp administrators, in smaller lagpunkts, had to think up creative solutions. In Kedrovyi Shor, one camp accountant used old wallpaper for official documents. 30
The rules surrounding packages were even more complex. The instructions sent to every camp commander expressly stipulated that prisoners open all packages in the presence of a guard, who could then confiscate any forbidden item.31 In fact, the receipt of a package was often accompanied by an entire ceremony. First, the prisoner was alerted of his good fortune. Then, guards escorted him into the storeroom, where the prisoners’ personal belongings were kept under lock and key. After he opened the package, the guards would cut or pry open every single item—every onion, every sausage—to ensure that it did not contain secret messages, potential weapons, or money. If everything passed the inspection, the prisoner would then be allowed to take something from the package. The rest would be left in the warehouse, pending his next permitted visit. Prisoners who were being held in the SHIZO or who were otherwise in disgrace would, of course, be forbidden access to the food products sent to them from home.
There were variations on this system. One prisoner soon realized that if he left his packages in the storeroom, bits of them would quickly disappear, stolen by the guards. He therefore found a way to hang a bottle full of butter from his belt, hiding it in his trousers: “Warmed by my body, it was always liquid.” In the evening, he spread the butter on his bread.32 Dmitri Bystroletov was in a lagpunkt which did not have a storeroom at all, and had to be even more creative:
I worked then in the tundra, on a factory construction site, and lived in a workers’ barracks where it was impossible to leave anything, and impossible to take anything to the work site: the soldiers standing at the entrance to the camp would confiscate anything they found and eat it themselves, and anything left behind would be stolen and eaten by the dnevalni [the prisoner assigned to clean and guard the barracks]. Everything had to be eaten at once. I took a nail out of the barrack bunks, knocked two holes in a can of condensed milk, and underneath my blanket began to sip out of it. My exhaustion was so great, however, that I fell asleep, and the priceless liquid dripped uselessly on to the dirty straw mattress.33
There were also complicated moral issues surrounding packages, since not everybody received them. Should they be shared or not? And, if so, was it better to share only with friends, or with potential protectors? In prison, it had been possible to organize “Committees of the Poor,” but in camp this was impossible. Some gave to everybody, out of kindness or the desire to spread goodwill. Others gave only to small circles of friends. And sometimes, as one prisoner remembered, “it happened that one ate sweet biscuits in bed at night, as it was unpleasant to eat in front of others.” 34
During the hardest war years, in the most difficult northern camps, packages could determine the difference between life and death. One memoirist, the actor Georgy Zhenov, claims literally to have been saved by two packages. His mother mailed them from Leningrad in 1940, and he received them three years later, “at the most critical moment, when I, hungry, having lost all hope, was slowly dying of scurvy . . .”
At that time, Zhenov was working in the camp bathhouse in a Kolyma lagpunkt, being too weak to work in the forest. Upon hearing that he had received the two packages, he at first did not believe it. Then, convinced that it was true, he asked the chief bath attendant for permission to walk the 6 miles to the central camp administrative headquarters where the storeroom was located. After two and a half hours, he turned back: “I had with difficulty