Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [226]
Rozsas’s gratitude to Sister Dusya eventually translated itself into a love of the Russian language and Russian culture. When I met Rozsas in Budapest half a century after his release, he still spoke elegant, fluent Russian, still maintained contact with Russian friends, and proudly told me where to find the references to his story in The Gulag Archipelago and in the memoirs of Solzhenitsyn’s wife.73
Yet there was, as many also noticed, another paradox at work here. When a prisoner with mild scurvy was in the work brigade, no one was interested in his loose teeth or the boils on his legs. His complaints would bring derisive scorn from the guards, or worse. If he became a dokhodyaga dying on a camp bunk, he would be a figure of fun. But when his temperature finally reached the requisite level or his illness reached the critical moment—when he “qualified” as sick, in other words—the same dying man would immediately be given “scurvy rations” or “pellagra rations,” and would receive all the medical care that the Gulag could muster.
This paradox was built right into the system. From the beginning of the camps’ existence, sick prisoners had been treated differently. Invalid brigades were set up, for prisoners who could no longer do hard physical work, as early as January 1931.74 Later, there would be invalid barracks, and even whole invalid lagpunkts, devoted to nursing weak prisoners back to life. In 1933, Dmitlag organized “recovery lagpunkts ” designed to hold 3,600 prisoners.75 Official Gulag documents carefully describe the extra rations for hospitalized prisoners: a few meat products, real tea (as opposed to the surrogate offered to ordinary prisoners), onions to ward off scurvy, and, inexplicably, pepper and bay leaves. Even if, in practice, the extra food only amounted to “a bit of potatoes or dried green peas (only half-cooked to retain the vitamins) or sauerkraut” it was, compared to ordinary rations, real luxury.76
So bizarre did Gustav Herling find this contrast between the murderous conditions of camp life, and the efforts which camp doctors invested in reviving the prisoners whose health had been duly destroyed, he concluded that a “hospital cult” must exist in the Soviet Union:
There was something incomprehensible in the fact that the moment a prisoner left the hospital he became a prisoner again, but as long as he had been lying motionless in a clean bed all the rights of a human being, though always with the exception of freedom, had been accorded to him. For a man unaccustomed to the violent contrasts of Soviet life, camp hospitals seemed like churches which offer sanctuary from an all-powerful Inquisition. 77
George Bien, a Hungarian prisoner who was sent to a well-stocked hospital in Magadan, also found it hard to understand: “I asked myself why they were trying to save me when it had seemed that they only wanted my tortured death—but logic had left a long time ago.”78
Certainly the Gulag bosses in Moscow took the problems posed by the large numbers of invalid “work-incapable” prisoners very seriously. Although their existence was hardly new, the problem became acute after Stalin and Beria’s 1939 decision to eliminate the policy of “conditional early release” for invalids: suddenly, the ill could no longer be easily shucked off the work rolls. This, if nothing else, would have forced camp commanders to turn their attention to camp hospitals. One inspector did a precise calculation of the time and money lost to illness: “From October of 1940, to the first half of March 1941, there were 3,472 cases of frostbite, thanks to which 42,334 working days were lost. Two thousand four hundred prisoners became too weak to work.” Another inspector reported that in that same year, of 2,398 prisoners in the labor camps in the Crimea, 860 had only a limited ability to work, and 273 could not work at all. Some were in hospital beds, some, for lack of beds, were being kept in