The regulation clothing allotted to prisoners gave them little protection from the weather. In 1943, for example, the central Gulag administration ordered that prisoners were to receive, among other things, one summer shirt (to last two seasons), a pair of summer trousers (to last two seasons), one padded-cotton winter jacket (to last two years), padded winter trousers (to last eighteen months), felt boots (to last two years), and underwear, intended for nine months.28 In practice, there were never enough even of these paltry items. An inspection of twenty-three camps in 1948 reported that the supply of “clothes, underclothes, and shoes is unsatisfactory.” That appears to have been an understatement. In a camp at Krasnoyarsk, less than half of the prisoners had shoes. In Norilsk, in the far north, only 75 percent had warm boots, and only 86 percent had warm clothes. In Vorkuta, also in the far north, only 25 to 30 percent of prisoners had underclothes, while only 48 percent had warm boots.29
In the absence of shoes, prisoners improvised. They made boots out of birch bark, scraps of fabric, old rubber tires. At best, these contraptions were clumsy and difficult to walk in, particularly in deep snow. At worst, they leaked, virtually guaranteeing frostbite.30 Elinor Lipper described her homemade boots, which in her camp were nicknamed “Che-Te-Ze,” the abbreviation for the Chelyabinsk Tire Factory:
Another prisoner describes a similar improvisation: “The sides were open so that the toes were exposed from the sides. The cloth to wrap up the feet could not be secured tightly, meaning that toes were thereby exposed to frost.” As a result of wearing these shoes, he did indeed get frostbite— which, he reckoned, saved his life, as he was no longer able to work.32
Different prisoners had different theories about how to cope with the cold. To recover from the frost at the end of the day, for example, some prisoners would rush into the barracks after work and crowd around the stove, so close that their clothes would sometimes burst into flames: “The repulsive smell of burning rags would come up and bite into your nostrils.” 33 Others thought this unwise. Isaak Filshtinskii was told by more experienced inmates that crowding around the stove or the camp fire was dangerous, as the sudden change of temperature brought on pneumonia: “The human organism is so constructed so that no matter how cold it is, the body adjusts and gets used to it. I always followed this sage rule in camp and I never caught cold.”34
Camp authorities were supposed to make some concessions to the cold. According to the rules, prisoners in certain northern camps received extra rations. But these, according to documents of 1944, could amount to as little as 50 extra grams of bread a day—a few bites—which was hardly enough to compensate for extreme cold.35 Theoretically, when it was too cold, or when a storm was pending, prisoners were not meant to work at all. Vladimir Petrov claimed that during the Berzin regime in Kolyma, prisoners had stopped working when temperatures reached 60 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. In the winter of 1938–39, after Berzin had been deposed, temperatures had to fall to 60 degrees below zero before work stopped. Even this rule was not always adhered to, writes Petrov, since the only person at the gold field who had a thermometer was the camp commander. As a result, “only three days during the winter of 1938–39 were declared nonworking days because of low temperatures, as against fifteen days during the winter of 1937–38.”36
