My cell was so low that I could touch the ceiling with my hand . . . it was impossible to sit on the upper bunk without bending one’s back against the ceiling, and the lower one could only be entered with the movement of a diver, head first, and left by pushing one’s body away from the wood, like a swimmer in a sandbank. The distance between the edge of the bunk and the bucket by the door was less than half a normal step. 9
Camp commanders could also decide whether to allow a prisoner to wear clothes in the cell—many were kept in their underwear—and whether or not to send him to work. If he did not work, then he would be kept in all day in the cold with no exercise. If he did work, then he would be very hungry. Nadezhda Ulyanovskaya was kept on punishment rations for a month, yet made to work. “I constantly wanted to eat,” she wrote. “I began talking only about food.”10 Because of these often unexpected twists to the punishment regime, prisoners dreaded being sent to the cells. “Prisoners there wept like children, promising good behavior only to get out,” wrote Herling.11
Within the larger camp complexes, there were different sorts of torment: not just punishment cells, but punishment barracks and even entire punishment lagpunkts. Dmitlag, the camp which built the Moscow–Volga Canal, set up a “strict-regime lagpunkt” in 1933 for “work-refusers, escapers, thieves, and so on.” To ensure security, the camp bosses dictated that the new lagpunkt should have two layers of barbed wire surrounding it instead of one; that extra convoy guards should lead prisoners to work; and that prisoners should do hard physical labor on work sites from which it was difficult to escape.12
At about the same time, Dalstroi set up a punishment lagpunkt , which became, by the late 1930s, one of the most notorious in the Gulag: Serpantinnaya—or Serpantinka—located in the hills far to the north of Magadan. Carefully placed in order to receive very little sunlight, colder and darker than the rest of the camps in the valley (which were already cold and dark for much of the year), Dalstroi’s punishment camp was more heavily fortified than other lagpunkts, and also served as an execution site in 1937 and 1938. Its very name was used to frighten prisoners, who equated a sentence to Serpantinka with a sentence to death.13 One of the very few survivors of Serpantinka described the barracks as “so overcrowded that prisoners took turns sitting on the floor while everyone else remained standing. In the mornings, the door would open, and the names of ten or twelve prisoners would be called. No one would answer. The first people that came to hand were then dragged out and shot.”14
In fact, little is known of Serpantinka, largely because so few people emerged to describe it. Even less is known about punishment lagpunkts set up in other camps, such as Iskitim, for example, the punishment lagpunkt of the Siblag complex, which was built around a limestone quarry. Prisoners worked there without machines or equipment, digging limestone by hand. Sooner or later, the dust killed many of them, through lung disease and other respiratory ailments.15 Anna Larina, Bukharin’s young wife, was briefly incarcerated there. Most of Iskitim’s other prisoners—and Iskitim’s dead—remain anonymous.16
They have not, however, been forgotten altogether. So powerfully did the suffering of the prisoners there work on the imagination of the local people of Iskitim that, many decades later, the appearance of a new freshwater spring on a hill just outside the former camp was greeted as a miracle. Because the gully below the spring was, according to local legend, the site of mass prisoner executions, they believed the sacred water was God’s way of remembering them. On a still, freezing day at the end of the Siberian winter, with a meter of snow still covering the ground, I watched parties of the faithful trooping up the hill to the spring, filling their plastic cups and bottles with the clean water, sipping it reverently—and occasionally glancing, solemnly, into the gully below.
POCHTOVYI YASHCHIK: POST OFFICE BOX
