Very few soviet concentration camps have survived intact into the present, even in ruined form. Nevertheless, it is a curious fact that quite a number of shtrafnye izolyhateri—“punishment isolaters,” or (using the inevitable acronym) SHIZO—are still standing. Nothing remains of lagpunkt No. 7 Ukhtpechlag—except its punishment block, now the workshop of an Armenian car mechanic. He has left the barred windows intact, hoping, he says, that “Solzhenitsyn will buy my building.” Nothing remains of the farming lagpunkt at Aizherom, Lokchimlag—except, again, its punishment block, now converted into a house inhabited by several families. One of the elderly women who lives there praises the solidity of one of the doors. It still has a large “Judas hole” in its center, through which guards once peered at the prisoners, and shoved them rations of bread.
The longevity of punishment blocks testifies to the sturdiness of their construction. Often the only brick building in a wooden camp, the isolator was the zona within the zona. Within its walls ruled the rezhim within the rezhim. “A gloomy stone building,” is how one prisoner described the isolator in his camp: “external gates, internal gates, armed sentry posts all around.”2
By the 1940s, Moscow had issued elaborate instructions, describing both the construction of punishment blocks and the rules for those condemned to live within them. Each lagpunkt—or group of lagpunkts , in the case of the smaller ones—had a punishment block, normally just outside the zona, or, if within it, “surrounded by an impenetrable fence,” at some distance from the other camp buildings. According to one prisoner, this stricture may not have been necessary, since many prisoners tried to avoid the lagpunkt punishment cell by “walking round it at a distance, not even looking in the direction of those grey stone walls, pierced by openings which seemed to breathe out a cold dark emptiness.” 3
Each camp complex was also meant to have a central punishment block near its headquarters, be it Magadan or Vorkuta or Norilsk. The central block was in fact often a very large prison which, the rules stated, “should be set up in the place which is farthest away from populated regions and from transport routes, should be well-guarded, and guaranteed strict isolation. The guards should consist of only the most trusted, disciplined, and experienced riflemen, selected from among the free workers.” These central prisons contained both communal cells and solitary cells. The latter were to be housed in a separate, special building, and were reserved for the “particularly malicious elements.” Prisoners kept in isolation were not taken out to work. In addition, they were forbidden any sort of exercise, tobacco, paper, and matches. This was on top of the “ordinary” restrictions applying to those being kept in the group cells: no letters, no packages, no meetings with relatives.4
On the face of it, the existence of punishment cells appears to contradict the general economic principles upon which the Gulag was founded. To maintain special buildings and extra guards was expensive. To keep prisoners away from work was wasteful. Yet from the camp administration’s point of view, the cells were not a form of supplementary torture, but rather an integral part of the vast effort to make prisoners work harder. Along with reduced food norms, the punishment regime was designed to frighten otkazchiki— those who refused to work—as well as to punish those caught committing a camp crime, such as murder, or attempting escape.
Because these two types of crimes tended to be committed by different types of prisoners, the punishment cells had, in some camps, a peculiar atmosphere. On the one hand, they were full of professional thieves, who were more likely to be murderers and escapees. Over time, however, another category of prisoner also began to fill up the punishment cells: the male religious prisoners, as well as the monashki, the religious “nuns,” who also refused on principle to work for the Soviet Satan. Aino Kuusinen, for example, was in a Potma lagpunkt whose commander built a special punishment barracks for a group of deeply religious women who “refused to work in the fields and spent their time praying aloud and singing hymns.” The women were not fed with the other prisoners, but instead received punishment rations in their own barracks. Armed guards escorted them twice daily to the latrine: “From time to time the commandant would visit their quarters with a whip, and the hut resounded with shrieks of pain: the women were usually stripped before being beaten, but no cruelty could dissuade them from their habits of praying and fasting.” They were eventually taken away. Kuusinen believed they had been shot.5
