Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [60]
On the first day, 295 people were buried. It was only on the fourth or fifth day after the convoy’s arrival on the island that the authorities sent a bit of flour by boat, really no more than a few pounds per person. Once they had received their meagre ration, people ran to the edge of the water and tried to mix some of the flour with water in their hats, their trousers or their jackets. Most of them just tried to eat it straight off, and some of them even choked to death. These tiny amounts of flour were the only food that the deportees received during the entire period of their stay on the island . . .
By August 20, three months later, the Party functionary went on to write, nearly 4,000 of the original 6,114 “settlers” were dead. The survivors had lived because they ate the flesh of those who had died. According to another inmate, who encountered some of these survivors in the Tomsk prison, they looked “like walking corpses,” and were all under arrest— accused of cannibalism.3
Even when the death toll was not quite so horrific, living conditions in many of the Gulag’s best-known early projects could be very nearly as intolerable. BAMlag, a camp organized around the construction of a railway line from Baikal to Amur, in the Russian far east—part of the Trans-Siberian Express railway system—was one notable example of how badly things could go wrong through simple lack of planning. Like the White Sea Canal, the railway construction was carried out in great haste, with no advance preparation whatsoever. The camp’s planners carried out the exploration of the terrain, the design of the railway, and the building of the railway simultaneously; construction began before the surveys were complete. Even so, surveyors were forced to make their report of the 2,000-kilometer track in under four months, without adequate shoes, clothing, and instruments. Existing maps were poor, as a result of which costly mistakes were made. According to one survivor, “two workers’ parties [each surveying a separate length of track] found they could not close ranks and finish work, because the two rivers along which they were walking came together only on maps, when in fact they were far apart.” 4
Convoys began arriving at the camp’s headquarters in the town of Svobodny (the name means “Freedom”) without any respite, as soon as the work had begun. Between January 1933 and January 1936 the numbers of prisoners rose from a few thousand to over 180,000. Many were already weak upon arrival, shoeless and badly clothed, suffering from scurvy, syphilis, dysentery, among them survivors of the famines that had swept the rural Soviet Union in the early 1930s. The camp was totally unprepared. One arriving convoy was put in cold, dark barracks upon arrival and given bread covered with dust. The BAMlag commanders were unable to deal with the chaos, as they admitted in reports they filed to Moscow, and were particularly ill-equipped to deal with weak prisoners. As a result, those too ill to work were simply put on disciplinary rations and left to starve. One convoy of twenty-nine people died within thirty-seven days of arrival.5 Before the railway was completed, tens of thousands of prisoners may well have died.
Similar stories were repeated across the country. On the Gulag railway construction site of Sevlag, northeast of Arkhangelsk, engineers determined in 1929 that the number of prisoners assigned to their project would have to be increased sixfold. Between April and October of that year, convoys of prisoners duly began to arrive—to find nothing. One prisoner remembered: “There were neither barracks, nor a village. There were tents, on the side, for the guards and for the equipment.