Most Arctic arrangements were probably close to these two. The ration outside the Arctic proper was rather lower, typically
over 100%
750–1,000 grams
100%
600–650 grams
50–100%
400–475 grams
penal (under 50%)
300–400 grams
167
These rations may be compared with those of a camp system more familiar to Western readers—that of one of the Japanese P.O.W. camps on the River Kwai (Tha Makham). There, prisoners got a daily ration norm of 700 grams of rice, 600 of vegetables, 100 of meat, 20 of sugar, 20 of salt, and 5 of oil—for a total of 3,400 calories, but, as in Russia, very deficient in vitamins.168 (Even in the 1980s in the USSR, the camp norm was of 2,400 calories only, mainly based on 700 grams of black bread.)
We can make certain other comparisons. In the Ukrainian cities in the famine period of the 1930s, the bread ration was 800 grams for industrial workers, 600 for manual workers, 400 for office employees. In the siege of Leningrad, in 1941 to 1942, about one-third to one-half of the population remaining in the city died of hunger, mostly during the first winter. The rations in the worst period were
October 1941
the basic ration was down to 400 grams of bread a day for workers and 200 grams for dependents
Late November 1941
250 grams for workers and 125 for dependents
Late December 1941
up to 350 grams for workers and 200 for dependents
169
At Leningrad, there were small additional rations of meat and sugar; lumber workers got a supplementary ration above the norm; and a truly major difference is that in camps the prisoners never got their full ration, and if there was a bad or inedible portion of the original bulk ration, that was the part that went to them. Solzhenitsyn describes what happens to the groat issue:
Shukhov had had thousands of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he’d never had a chance to weigh a single one of them on a scale … he and every other prisoner had known a long time that the people who cut up and issued your bread wouldn’t last long if they gave you honest rations. Every ration was short. The only question was—by how much?170
The reason was obvious:
When they left in the morning, the cook got an issue of groats from the big kitchen in the camp. It worked out to about two ounces a head—about two pounds for each gang. That is, a little over twenty pounds for everybody working on the site. The cook didn’t carry that stuff himself on the two-mile march from the camp. He had a trusty who carried it for him. He thought it was better to slip an extra portion of the stuff to a trusty at the expense of the prisoners’ bellies rather than to break his own back. Then there was water and firewood to carry and the stove to light. The cook didn’t do that either. He had other prisoners and “goners” to do it. And they got their cut too. It’s easy to give away things that don’t belong to you.
All the cook did was put groats and salt in the cauldron, and if there was any fat he split it between the cauldron and himself. (The good fat never got as far as the prisoners. Only the bad stuff went in the cauldron….) Then his only job was to stir the mush when it was nearly ready. The sanitary inspector didn’t even do that much. He just sat and watched. When the mush was ready, the cook gave him some right away and he could eat all he wanted. And so could the cook. Then one of the gang bosses—they took turns, a different one every day—came to taste it and see if it was good enough for the men to eat. He got a double portion too.
After this, the whistle went off. Now the other gang bosses came and the cook handed them their bowls through a kind of hatch in the wall. The bowls had this watery mush in them. And you didn’t ask how much of the ration they’d really put in it. You’d get hell if you opened your mouth.171
And so it was with everything: “They stole all the way down the line—out here on the site, in the camp, and in the stores too.”172
The system was made more effective yet, in the lumber camps in particular, by turning it into a “brigade,” a gang, matter, with collective responsibility for inadequate work:
You might ask why a prisoner worked so hard for ten years in a camp. Why didn’t they say to hell with it and drag their feet all day long till the night, which was theirs?
But it wasn’t so simple…. It was like this—either you all got something extra or you all starved. (“You’re not pulling your weight, you swine, and I’ve got to go hungry because of you. So work, you bastard!”)
So when a really tough job came along, like now, you couldn’t sit on your hands. Like it or not, you had to get a move on. Either they made the place warm within two hours or they’d all be fucking well dead.173
The brigade leader, himself a prisoner, worked out with a foreman, “the team surveyor,” the amount of work done by his brigade. Other camp officials then estimated the production compared with the “daily norm.” Their decisions were then sent to the food department for rationing according to the output.174
