The Great Terror полностью

In exactly the same way, a Pole describes being marched, in rags, to a spot on the frozen tundra where there was no more than a sign: “Camp Point No. 228.” The prisoners dug pits to live in and covered them with branches and earth. The food was simply raw rye flour, kneaded with water.⁵²

Another prisoner describes being marched to a temporary camp which would not hold, however squeezed, more than one-fifth of the prisoners. The others were left out in the mud for several days. They began to light fires made of bits of parts of the barracks, and were charged and beaten up by the guards. Twice a day, they had one-third of a liter of soup, and once a day about half a kilo of bread.⁵³

On entry into an established camp, prisoners were allotted their categories for work. This might be done by a quick examination of the prisoners’ legs.⁵⁴ A certificate of “first-class” health was required for the heaviest tasks. (A Soviet writer describes one being issued to a political four hours before her death from scurvy.)⁵⁵ Then they were marched to the barracks, where, typically, “two hundred men slept in fifty bug-ridden bunks,” on boards or mattresses “full of heavy and hard-packed sawdust.”⁵⁶

Crowding was intense. The former director of a Kemerovo works describes negotiating with the NKVD for 2,000 slave laborers.⁵⁷ The trouble was not the number, but how to accommodate them in the existing camps in the area. The officials concerned were shown around a camp which appeared to be packed solid, but the commandant agreed with his superior that yet another layer of bunks could be put in.

There would be a stove, though not adequate to warm one of the Arctic huts “because the orderlies only brought in ten pounds of coal dust for each stove, and you didn’t get much warmth from that.”⁵⁸ In a corner would be the twenty-gallon latrine tank which prisoner orderlies carried off to empty daily—“light work for people on the sick list!”⁵⁹

The company, apart from the complement of urkas who in a nonpenal camp would be lording it in the corridors, were of a varied lot of “politicals.” There would be saboteurs—specialists and engineers. At first they mostly had technical jobs, but, as the mass purges grew in scope, so many engineers and specialists flooded the camps that the chance of appointment to a technical position which had previously saved so many of them became proportionately rare.

There were certain special categories. In Kotlas, there was a whole group of men of eighty years and older who had been sentenced in Daghestan as part of the “liquidation of feudal remnants.”⁶⁰ And about 3,000 Moscow homosexuals were in camp at the “Third Watershed,” on the Baltic–White Sea Canal.⁶¹ But usually the intake was mixed.

An account of the Dzhezkazgan camp in a Moscow article of the Khrushchev period mentions a former Ambassador to China, a soloist from the Bolshoi Opera, an illiterate peasant, an Air Force genera1.⁶² Common were soldiers, intellectuals, and especially Ukrainian and other nationalists, on the one hand, and members of religious sects, on the other. Solzhenitsyn points out that the Baptists were in the camps simply for praying. For this (at the time he writes of), “they all got twenty-five years, because that was how it was now—twenty-five years for everybody.”⁶³ There are many reports of sectarians being beaten or sent to the isolator cells for refusal to work on Sundays.⁶⁴ A priest, beaten blind, was noted in 1937.⁶⁵

As in all times of trouble and oppression, the millenarian sects flourished. In the great slave empires of the past, similar voices had always spoken for the oppressed and hopeless. Now they sometimes preached that the horrors of the present were a special trial, and that from the Russian people, degraded and demoralized, a “race of saints” would arise.⁶⁶ Even twenty years later, in Vorkuta, we are told that there was more religious organization (and sharper national feeling) among the minority groups still settled there after their camp experiences than in other districts⁶⁷

Prisoners’ rights were virtually limited to making written protests and complaints. The result: “Either there was nothing or it was rejected.”⁶⁸ Such applicants made a prisoner unpopular with the authorities.

In the penal camps proper, however, there was considerable freedom of speech:

Somebody in the room was yelling: “You think that old bastard in Moscow with the moustache is going to have mercy on you? He wouldn’t give a damn about his own brother, never mind slobs like you!”

The great thing about a penal camp was you had a hell of a lot of freedom. Back in Ust-Izhma if you said they couldn’t get matches “outside” they put you in the can and slapped on another ten years. But here you could yell your head off about anything you liked and the squealers didn’t even bother to tell on you. The security fellows couldn’t care less.

The only trouble was you didn’t have much time to talk about anything.⁶⁹