Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [322]
The 1960s were the beginning of the plague of tuberculosis in Russian prisons, a scourge which continues today. Fedorov described the situation like this: “If there were eighty people in a barrack, then fifteen had tuberculosis. No one tried to cure them, there was just one kind of tablet, for headaches, whatever. The doctors were some kind of SS men, they never talked to you, didn’t look at you, you were nobody.”41
To worsen matters, many of the thieves were now addicted to chifir, an extremely strong form of tea that produced a narcotic high. Others went to greater lengths than ever to get hold of alcohol. Those who worked outside the camp, as some did, developed a special method of smuggling it back in, past the guards:
A condom is hermetically attached to a long piece of thin plastic tubing. The zek then swallows it, leaving one end of the tube in his mouth. To avoid swallowing by accident, he wedges it in the gap between two teeth: there are not likely to be any zeks in existence with a full set of 32 teeth. Then, with the help of a syringe, up to three litres of spirit are pumped into the condom via the plastic tubing—and the zek goes back to his zone. If the bonding has been badly done, or if the condom happens to burst in the zek’s stomach, that means certain and painful death. Despite it, they run the risk: three litres of spirit makes seven litres of vodka. When the “hero” returns to the zone . . . he is hung headdown from a beam under the barrack roof and the end of the plastic tubing is held over a dish until every drop has been retrieved. Then the empty condom is hauled out . . .
The practice of self-mutilation was equally widespread, except that now it took even more extreme forms. Once, in a prison cell, Marchenko watched two thieves swallow first the handles of their spoon, and then, after stamping on them to make them flat, the bowls of the spoons as well. After that, they broke a pane of glass and began swallowing pieces of it, before the warders managed to drag them away.42 Edward Kuznetsov, condemned for having taken part in an infamous attempt to highjack an aircraft at Leningrad’s Smolny airport, described dozens of methods of selfmutiliation:
I have seen convicts swallow huge numbers of nails and barbed wire; I have seen them swallow mercury thermometers, pewter tureens (after first breaking them up into “edible” proportions), chess pieces, dominoes, needles, ground glass, spoons, knives and many other similar objects. I have seen convicts sew up their mouths and eyes with thread or wire, sew rows of buttons to their bodies; or nail their testicles to the bed . . . I have seen convicts cut open the skin on their arms and legs and peel it off as if it were a stocking; or cut out lumps of flesh (from their stomach or their legs), roast them and eat them; or let the blood drip from a slit vein into a tureen, crumble bread crumbs into it, and then gulp it down like a bowl of soup; or cover themselves with paper and set fire to themselves; or cut off their fingers, or their nose, or ears, or penis . . .
Kuznetsov wrote that the convicts did such things to themselves not in protest, but for no particular reason at all, or just “to get into the hospital where the nurses swing their hips, where you get your hospital ration and you’re not forced to work, where you can get drugs, diets, postcards.” Many of the mutilators were masochists as well, “in a permanent state of depression from one blood-letting to the next.”43
Indisputably, the relationships between the criminals and the political prisoners had changed greatly since Stalin’s time too. Criminals did sometimes torment