Decent prisoners did what they could do for them. But the demoralization of their physical deterioration was intense. A man wrote of them, “I suppose there is no more horrifying sight for the normal man than a few hundred filthy, diseased-looking, shabby women. The deep-rooted romanticism of the male is outraged.”40 And they felt this keenly. All accounts agree that even the debilitating work and diet did not damp down their sexual feelings, as it did in the case of men. Hysteria was common from this cause.
A French peasant woman, divorced from a Russian and unable to leave the country, got an eight-year sentence as the wife of a traitor in November 1937. She describes being marched twenty-five miles and then left standing in the freezing rain outside the barbed wire for two hours while the camp officers were being shown a film.41
In the labor camps, there were seldom tractors or horses, and sleds of wood were pulled by the prisoners. If the team was made up of men, five were harnessed; if of women, seven.42 A Polish journalist who served in the Pechora camps reports seeing several hundred women carrying heavy logs, and later rails for the railway .43
In 1937, a special camp, in the Potmalag complex, was set up which contained about 7,000 wives and sisters of enemies of the people. Some, transferred to Segeta on the Kirovsk railway, are said to have been amnestied in 1945.44 But most were sent to a new camp, “ALZHIR,” in the Karaganda complex. Prisoners there included wives of many enemies of the people—like those of Ryutin, Svanidze, Pyatnitsky, and Krestinsky—and sisters of Gamarnik, Tukhachevsky, and others.
Women who had been arrested included the pregnant. The wife of a Comintern official, an invalid with curvature of the spine, was arrested in the seventh month of pregnancy, and gave birth in the Butyrka. On the transit train, having no milk at all, she filtered the fish “soup” through her stockings to feed the baby. Their further fate is not stated.45
Children were also conceived and born in the camps. The mothers were allowed to feed them, but the babies were kept separately. “After a year they were removed to unknown destinations. It was explained to the mothers, ‘You have broken the regulations. Connections with men are not permitted. Therefore the children are ours, not yours. They belong to the Security Organs, and we will bring them up.’” One estimate in a Soviet paper is that the “children of the NKVD” numbered 500,000 to 1 million.”46 There was a children’s “special camp” near Akmolinsk, which later became an ordinary camp. About 400 children lived in barracks, in two or three levels of bunks. Later they were allowed to work, tending a herd of 250 cattle, and sewing.47 A sad account of those in Bamlag’s “children’s
SETTING UP CAMP
In general, the great expansion of the Yezhov period was marked by the setting up of new camps. For example, in the Archangel area, the Kargopol “camp,” consisting of a number of smaller camps in a radius of about thirty-five miles, containing in 1940 about 30,000 prisoners, was founded in 1936 by 600 prisoners who were simply put out of the train in the middle of the forest and who built their own barracks and fences. The death rate had been very heavy. The Polish and German Communist prisoners had died first, followed by the national minorities from Asia.50
Pasternak, certainly drawing on the experiences of friends who had suffered, described in
We got off the train.—A snow desert. Forest in the distance. Guards with rifle muzzles pointing at us, wolf-dogs. At about the same time other groups were brought up. We were spread out and formed into a big polygon all over the field, facing outward so that we shouldn’t see each other. Then we were ordered down on our knees, and told to keep looking straight ahead in front on pain of death. Then the roll-call, an endless, humiliating business going on for hours and hours, and all the time we were on our knees. Then we got up and the other groups were marched off in different directions, all except ours. We were told: “Here you are. This is your camp.”—An empty snow-field with a post in the middle and a notice on it saying: “Gulag 92 Y.N.90”—that’s all there was….
First we broke saplings with our bare hands in the frost to get wood to build our huts with. And in the end, believe it or not, we built our own camp. We put up our prison and our stockade and our punishment cells and our watch towers, all with our own hands. And then we began our jobs as lumberjacks.51
