Gulag полностью

Tufta also affected the keeping of statistics at all levels of camp life. Camp commanders and camp accountants frequently changed numbers to benefit themselves, according to the dozens of reports of larceny kept in the files of the inspectorate. Anyone with even a remote connection to a camp stole food, money, whatever there was to steal: in 1942, the sister of the former boss of the railways division of the camps in Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, was accused of having “unlawfully removed some food products,” and being involved in speculation. At one lagpunkt in 1941, the camp commander and the chief accountant “used their professional status” to set up a false bank account, enabling them to milk the camp accounts. The commander stole 25,000 rubles, the accountant 18,000, a fortune in Soviet terms. But the sums were not always large either: a thick file on Siblag, containing prosecutors’ reports from 1942 to 1944, includes, among other things, a long series of letters reflecting a bitter dispute over a camp employee who supposedly stole two iron bowls, one enamel teapot, one blanket, one mattress, two sheets, two pillows, and two pillowcases. ⁴²

From theft, it was hardly a great moral leap to telling fibs about production statistics. If tufta began at the brigade level, and was compounded at the lagpunkt level, by the time the accountants at the larger camps were calculating total production statistics, the numbers were already very far from reality—and would, as we shall see, give very misleading ideas about the camps’ real productivity, which was in all probability extremely low.

In truth, it is almost impossible to know what to make of Gulag production figures, given the degree of lying and cheating that went on. For that reason, I am always mystified by the Gulag’s carefully detailed annual reports, such as the one produced in March 1940. More than 124 pages, this striking document describes the production figures for dozens of camps, carefully listing each one by specialty: the forestry camps, the factory camps, the mines, the collective farms. The report is accompanied by extensive charts and calculations, and many different sorts of figures. In conclusion, the report’s author confidently declared that the total value of Gulag production in 1940 was 2,659.5 million rubles—a figure which must, under the circumstances, be considered completely meaningless.⁴³

PRIDURKI: COOPERATION AND COLLABORATION

Tufta was not the only method that prisoners used to bridge the gap between the impossible norms expected of them and the impossible rations they were allotted. Nor was it the only tool the authorities used to meet their own impossible production targets. There were other ways of persuading prisoners to cooperate, as Isaak Filshtinskii brilliantly and memorably describes in the first chapter of his memoirs, My shagaem pod konvoem (We March UnderConvoy Guard).

Filshtinskii begins his story on one of his first days in Kargopollag, the logging and construction camp which lay to the north of Arkhangelsk. Newly arrived himself, he met another newcomer, a young woman. She was part of a female contingent that had been temporarily attached to his brigade. Noticing her “timid, frightened appearance” and her ragged camp clothes, he moved closer to her in the line of prisoners. Yes, she said, answering his query, “I arrived yesterday on a transport from prison.” They began to talk. She had what Filshtinskii described as “for that era, a rather banal personal history.” She was an artist, twenty-six years old. She was married, with a three-year-old son. She had been arrested because she had “said something or other to an artist friend, and the friend had informed.” Because her father had also been arrested in 1937, she had been quickly convicted of promoting anti-Soviet propaganda.

As they talked, the woman, still looking around with a frightened gaze, held on to Filshtinskii’s arm. Such contacts were forbidden, but fortunately the guards did not notice. As they arrived at the work site the men and women were divided, but on the way home the young artist found Filshtinskii again. For the next week and a half, they walked to and from the forest together, she telling him of her homesickness, of the husband who had abandoned her, of the child she might not see again. Then the women’s brigade was separated from the men’s brigade for good, and Filshtinskii lost track of his friend.