Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [299]
Given that the authorities had cut off the camp’s electricity in the first days of the strike, this radio station was not just a piece of bravado, but a great technical achievement. First, the zeks put together a “hydroelectric” power station—using a water tap. A motor was converted into a generator, and enough electricity was made to power the camp telephone system, as well as the radio. The radio, in turn, was put together using parts from the camp’s portable film projectors.
Within days, the camp had news announcers and regular news programs, designed for the prisoners as well as the local population outside the camp, including the guards and soldiers. Camp stenographers recorded the text of one of the radio addresses, made after the uprising had lasted a month, when food supplies were beginning to run out. Directed at the soldiers who now stood on guard outside the camp, the stenograph made its way into the MVD files:
Comrade Soldiers! We are not afraid of you and we ask you not to come into our zona. Don’t shoot at us, don’t buckle under the will of the Beriaites. We are not afraid of them, just as we are not afraid of death. We would rather die of hunger in this camp, than give up to the Beriaite band. Don’t soil your hands with the same dirty blood which your officers have on their hands . . .36
Kuznetsov, meanwhile, organized the distribution of food, which was prepared and cooked by the camp women. Each prisoner received the same ration—there were no extra portions for pridurki—which slowly grew smaller, as the weeks went by and the stores decreased. Voluntary details also cleaned the barracks, washed clothes, and stood guard. One inmate remembered that “order and cleanliness” reigned in the dining hall, which had often been filthy and chaotic in the past. The camp baths worked as usual, as did the hospital, although the camp authorities refused to hand over necessary medicines and supplies.
Prisoners organized their own “entertainments” as well. According to one memoir, a Polish aristocrat named Count Bobrinski opened a “café” in the camp, where he served “coffee”: “He threw something in the water, boiled it, and prisoners in the middle of a hot day sipped this drink with satisfaction, laughing.” The count himself sat in the corner of the café, played his guitar, and sang old romantic songs.37 Other prisoners organized lecture series, as well as concerts. A group of self-motivated thespians rehearsed and performed a play. One of the religious sects, its male and female members reunited by the destruction of the walls, claimed that their prophet had predicted they would now all be taken to heaven, alive. For several days, they sat on their mattresses in the main square, in the center of the zona, waiting to be taken to heaven. Alas, nothing happened.
Large numbers of newlyweds also appeared, united by the many prisoner priests who had been arrested along with their Baltic or Ukrainian flocks. Among them were some of those who had been married while standing on opposite sides of the camp walls, and were now meeting face-to-face for the first time. But although men and women mingled freely, all descriptions of the strike agree that women were never molested, and certainly not attacked or raped, as they were so often in ordinary camps.
Songs were written, of course. Someone composed a Ukrainian hymn, which at times all 13,500 striking prisoners would sing at once. The refrain went like this:
We will not, we will not be slaves
We will not carry the yoke any longer . . .
Another verse spoke of:
Brothers in blood, of Vorkuta and Norilsk, of Kolyma and Kengir . . .
“It was a wonderful time,” remembered Irena Arginskaya, forty-five years later. “I had not before then, and have not since, felt such a sense of freedom as I did then.” Others felt more foreboding. Lyuba Bershadskaya recalls that we “did everything