Never on any account take more than a half-hour to consume your ration. Every bite of bread should be chewed thoroughly, to enable the stomach to digest it as easily as possible so that it give up to one’s organism a maximum amount of energy . . . if you always split your ration and put aside a part of it for the evening, you are finished. Eat it all at one sitting; if, on the other hand, you gobble it down too quickly, as famished people often do in normal circumstances, you will also shorten your days . . . 148
Zeks were not the only inhabitants of the Soviet Union who became obsessed with bread and the many ways to eat it, however. To this day, a Russian acquaintance of mine will not eat brown bread of any kind, because, as a child during the war in Kazakhstan, he ate nothing else. And Susanna Pechora, a prisoner in Minlag in the 1950s, once overheard a conversation about camp bread between two Russian peasant women, also prisoners—women who had known what life was like without camp bread:
One of them was holding a piece of bread and stroking it. “Oh my khlebushka” [a nickname, “little bread,” such as one might give to a child], she said, gratefully, “they give you to us every day.” The other said, “We could dry it, and send it to the children, they are hungry after all. But I don’t think they’d allow us to send it . . .”149
After that, Pechora told me, she thought twice before complaining about the lack of food in the camps.
Chapter11
WORK IN THE CAMPS
Those who are sick, no good,
Too weak for mining
Are lowered down, sent
To the camp below
To fell the trees of Kolyma.
It’s very simple when
Written down on paper. But I cannot forget
The chain of sleds upon the snow
And people, harnessed.
Straining their sunken chests, they pull the carts.
They either stop to rest
Or falter on steep slopes . . .
The heavy weight rolls down
And any moment
It will trip them . . .
Who has not seen a horse that stumbles?
But we, we have seen people in a harness . . .
—Elena Vladimirova, “Kolyma”1
RABOCHAYA ZONA: THE WORK ZONE
Work was the central function of most Soviet camps. It was the main occupation of prisoners, and the main preoccupation of the administration. Daily life was organized around work, and the prisoners’ well-being depended upon how successfully they worked. Nevertheless, it is difficult to generalize about what camp work was like: the image of the prisoner in the snowstorm, digging gold or coal with a pickax, is only a stereotype. There were many such prisoners—millions, as the figures for the camps of Kolyma and Vorkuta make clear—but there were also, we now know, camps in central Moscow where prisoners designed airplanes, camps in central Russia where prisoners built and ran nuclear power plants, fishing camps on the Pacific coast, collective farm camps in southern Uzbekistan. The archives of the Gulag in Moscow are chock-full of photographs of prisoners with their camels.2
