Everything for the Motherland
The Song of the NKVD Warriors
The Song of the Chekists
The Song of the Distant Frontier Post
The March of the Border Guards64
There were also some lighter numbers such as “Let’s Smoke” and “Song of the Dnieper,” the latter celebrating a river at least, and not a secret police institution. The theatrical repetroire included some Chekhov plays as well. Nevertheless, the bulk of the artistic efforts were meant, at least in theory, for the prisoners’ enlightenment, not their entertainment. As one 1940 order from Moscow declared, “Every performance must educate the prisoners, teaching them greater consciousness of labor.” 65 As we shall see, the prisoners learned to use the performances to help them survive, as well.
But “self-taught creative activity” was not the Cultural-Educational Department’s only concern—nor was it the only path to a lighter workload. The KVCh was also responsible for collecting suggestions as to how to improve or “rationalize” the prisoners’ work, a task which it took grimly seriously. In its semi-annual report to Moscow, one camp in Nizhne-Amursk claimed, without irony, to have achieved 302 rationalizations, of which 157 were put into practice, thereby saving 812,332 rubles.66
Isaak Filshtinskii also notes, with a great deal of irony, that some prisoners became adept at twisting this policy to their own advantage. One, a former chauffeur, claimed that he knew how to construct a mechanism that would allow cars to run on oxygen. Excited by the prospect of discovering a really important “rationalization,” the camp bosses gave him a laboratory in which to work on the idea: “I can’t say whether they believed him or not. They were simply fulfilling instructions of the Gulag. In every camp, there should be people working as rationalizers and inventors . . . and who knows, maybe Vdovin would find something, and then they would all get the Stalin prize!” Vdovin’s bluff was called, finally, when he returned one day from his lab with a giant construction made of scrap metal, the purpose of which he was incapable of explaining.67
As in the outside world, the camps also continued to hold “socialist competitions,” work contests in which prisoners were meant to compete against one another, the better to raise output. They also honored the camp shock-workers, for their alleged ability to triple and quadruple the norms. I’ve described the first such campaigns in Chapter 4, which began in the 1930s, but they continued—with markedly less enthusiasm and markedly more absurd hyperbole—into the 1940s. Prisoners who participated could win many different sorts of awards. Some received bigger rations or better living conditions. Others received more intangible prizes. In 1942, for example, a reward for good performance could include a
Not everybody would have taken such a prize terribly seriously. Antoni Ekart, a Polish prisoner, also described one such work campaign:
