Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [198]
At some level, the Gulag administration in Moscow must have known how terrible life in the camps was for children who lived in them. We know, at least, that the camp inspectors passed on the information: a 1949 report on the condition of women in the camps noted disapprovingly that of the 503,000 women then in the Gulag system, 9,300 were pregnant while another 23,790 had small children with them. “Taking into account the negative influence on the health and education of children,” the report argued for their mothers’ early release, as well as the early release of those women who had children at home, a total—when exceptions were made for recidivists and counter-revolutionary political prisoners—of about 70,000. 58
From time to time such amnesties were carried out. But few improvements were made in the lives of those children who remained. On the contrary, because they contributed nothing to the productivity of the camp, their health and well-being ranked very low on most camp commanders’ list of priorities, and they invariably lived in the poorest, coldest, oldest buildings. One inspector determined that the temperature in one camp children’s home never rose higher than 52 degrees Fahrenheit; another found a childrens’ home with peeling paint and no light at all, not even kerosene lamps.59 A 1933 report from Siblag said the camp lacked 800 pairs of children’s shoes, 700 children’s overcoats, and 900 sets of cutlery.60 Nor were those working in them necessarily qualified. On the contrary, nursery jobs were “trusty” jobs, and as such usually went to professional criminals. Joffe writes that “For hours on end, they would stand under the stairway with their ‘husbands,’ or they would simply leave, while the children, unfed and unattended, would get sick and begin dying.”61
Nor were mothers, whose pregnancies had already cost the camp a great deal, usually allowed to make up for this neglect—assuming that they cared to do so. They were made to return to work as soon as possible, and only grudgingly allowed time off from work to breast-feed. Usually, they would simply be released from work every four hours, given fifteen minutes with the child—still wearing their dirty work clothes—and then sent back again, meaning that the children went hungry. Sometimes they were not allowed even that. One camp inspector cited the case of a woman who arrived a few minutes late to nurse her baby, thanks to work obligations, and was refused access to him.62 In an interview, a former supervisor of a camp nursery told me—dismissively—that children who could not drink their fill in what she said was the half hour allowed, were given the rest out of a bottle by one of the nurses.
This same woman also confirmed prisoners’ descriptions of another form of cruelty: once breast-feeding ended, women were often forbidden any further contact with their child. In her camp, she said, she had personally forbidden all mothers to go on walks with their children, on the grounds that convict mothers would harm their children. She claimed to have seen one mother giving her child sugar mixed with tobacco to eat, in order to poison him. Another, she said, had deliberately taken off her child’s shoes in the snow. “I was responsible for the death rates of children in the camps,” she told me, explaining why she had taken steps to keep the mothers away. “These children were unnecessary to their mothers, and the mothers wanted to kill them.”63 This same logic might have led other camp commanders to forbid mothers from seeing their children. It is equally possible, however, that such rules were another product of the unthinking cruelty of the camp administration: it was inconvenient to arrange for mothers to see children, so the practice was banned.
The consequences of separating parents from children at such a young age were predictable. Infant epidemics were legion. Infant death rates were extremely high—so high that they were, as the inspectors’ reports also record, often deliberately covered up.64 But even those children who survived infancy