Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [98]
Butyrka prison, the oldest of the three, had been constructed in the eighteenth century, and was originally designed to be a palace, although it was quickly converted into a prison. Among its distinguished nineteenth-century inmates was Feliks Dzerzhinsky, along with other Polish and Russian revolutionaries. 8 Generally used to house prisoners who had finished interrogation and were awaiting transport, Butyrka was also crowded and dirty, but more relaxed. Garaseva records that whereas the Lubyanka guards forced prisoners to “exercise” by walking in a tight circle, “at Butyrka you could do what you wanted.” She, like others, also mentions the prison’s excellent library, whose collection had been formed by generations of prisoners, all of whom left their books behind when they were transferred away.9
Prisons also differed from era to era. During the early 1930s, large numbers of prisoners were sentenced to months or even years of isolation. One Russian prisoner, Boris Chetverikov, kept sane for sixteen months in solitary by washing his clothes, the floor, the walls—and by singing all the opera arias and songs that he knew.10 Alexander Dolgun was kept in solitary during his interrogation too, and managed to keep his head by walking: he counted the steps in his cells, worked out how many there were to a kilometer, and started “walking,” first across Moscow to the American Embassy—“I breathed in the clear, cold, imaginary air and hugged my coat around me”—then across Europe, and finally across the Atlantic, back home to the United States. 11
Evgeniya Ginzburg spent nearly two years in the Yaroslavl isolator, deep in central Russia, much of that time completely alone: “To this day, if I shut my eyes, I can see every bump and scratch on those walls, painted halfway up in the favorite prison colors, brownish-red and a dirty white above.” But eventually, even that “special” prison began to fill up, and she was given a cell mate. Ultimately, most of the tyurzeks, the “prison prisoners,” were moved to camps. As Ginzburg writes, “It was simply not practical to keep such multitudes in prison for ten or twenty years: it was inconsistent with the tempo of the age and with its economy.”12
In the 1940s, as the pace of arrests grew, it became far more difficult to isolate anyone, even new prisoners, even for a few hours. In 1947, Leonid Finkelstein was initially thrown into the prison vokzal (literally, “railway station”), a “huge, common cell where all the arrested are thrown in first, without any facilities. Then they are sorted out, gradually, sent to the baths, and then to the cells.”13 In fact, the experience of desperate overcrowding was far more common than that of solitary isolation. To choose a few random examples, the main Arkhangelsk city prison, which had a capacity of 740, held, in 1941, between 1,661 and 2,380 prisoners. The prison in Kotlas, in northern Russia, with a capacity of 300, held up to 460.14
Prisons in more distant provinces could be worse. In 1940, the prison of Stanislawwow, in newly occupied eastern Poland, contained 1,709 people, well above its capacity of 472, and possessed a mere 150 sets of sheets. 15 In February 1941, the prisons in the republic of Tartarstan, with a capacity for 2,710 prisoners, contained 6,353. In May 1942,