Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [217]
More frequently, tufta was organized at the level of work brigades, for brigadiers were able to disguise how much individual prisoners had worked. One ex-zek described how his brigadier allowed him to declare that he had fulfilled 60 percent of the norm, when in fact he could barely do anything at all.34 Yet another prisoner wrote of how his brigadier negotiated with the camp authorities to have his brigade’s norms lowered, as all of his workers were dying off.35 Still other brigadiers took bribes, as Yuri Zorin, who was himself a brigadier, acknowledged: “There, in the camps, there are camp laws which may not be understood by those who live outside the zone,” was how he delicately put it.36 Leonid Trus recalled that his Norilsk brigadiers simply “decided which of his workers deserved better food and pay than others,” without any regard to what they had actually achieved. Bribery, and clan loyalties, determined a prisoner’s “output.”
From the zek’s point of view, the best brigadiers were those who were capable of organizing tufta on a grand scale. Working in a quarry in the northern Urals in the late 1940s, Leonid Finkelstein found himself in a brigade whose leader had worked out a highly complex system of cheating. In the mornings, the team would go down into the canyon. The guards would stay up on the rim, where they spent the day sitting around bonfires to keep warm. Ivan, the brigadier leader, would then organize the tufta:
We knew precisely which parts of the bottom of the canyon are visible from up there, and that was our swindle . . . in the visible part of the bottom, we were cutting very hard at the stone wall. We were working and it was a great deal of noise—the guards could both see and hear us work. Then, Ivan would walk along the row . . . and say, “One to the left”—and we would each make one step to the left. It was never noticed by the guards.
So we would step, one to the left, one to the left, until the last one would step into the invisible zone—we knew where it was, there was a chalk strip on the ground. Once we were in the invisible zone, we would relax, sit on the ground, take an ax and hit the ground next to us, in a relaxed way, just to produce the noise. Then someone else would join, someone else, and so on. Then Ivan would say—“You: to the right!”—and the man would go and join the cycle again. None of us ever worked even half the shift.
Finkelstein was also told, by other prisoners, of the techniques used elsewhere to build a canal. There, tufta was different, but no less sophisticated: “The main thing was to show that the gang has fulfilled its norm.” Workers were asked to dig, but to leave untouched “a little post, a pile, showing what height you dug on the shift, how deep you dug.” Although norms were very heavy, “There were artists, real artists, who managed to extend this post, its height. It is unbelievable, it was cut out of earth, so it would be immediately visible if somebody tampered with it, and yet it was tampered with in a most artistic way. Then, of course the whole gang gets the Stakhanovite dinner.” 37
Such special talents were not always necessary. At one point, Leonid Trus was assigned to unload goods wagons: “We would simply write that we had carried the goods farther than had actually been the case, say 300 meters, instead of 10 meters.” For that, they were given better food rations. “Tufta was constant,” he said of Norilsk; “without it there would have been nothing at all.”
Tufta could also be organized higher up the administrative hierarchy, through careful negotiations between brigadiers and norm-setters, the camp functionaries