The Great Terror полностью

More depended on the work rates than the work itself. A clever boss who knows his business really sweats over these work rates. That’s where the ration comes from. If a job hasn’t been done, make it look like it had. If the rates were low on a job, try to hike ‘em up. You had to have brains for this and a lot of pull with the fellows who kept the work sheets. And they didn’t do it for nothing.

But come to think of it, who were these rates for? For the people who ran the camps. They made thousands on the deal and got bonuses on top for the officers. Like old Volkovoy, with that whip of his. And all you got out of it was six ounces of bread in the evening. Your life depended on them.¹⁷⁵

On one occasion, the gang boss gets “better rates.” This means that “they’d have good bread rations for five days. Well, maybe four. The higher-ups always cheat on one day out of five.”¹⁷⁶

As to the quality of the food, the convicts in Solzhenitsyn’s book discuss the film Battleship Potemkin. The maggots on the meat which cause the mutiny are thought to be unrealistically large, and this is explained as necessary from the film point of view. Then comes the comment: “If they brought that kind of meat to the camp, I can tell you, and put it in the cauldron instead of the rotten fish we get, I bet we’d …’¹⁷⁷

He describes a meal:

The gruel didn’t change from one day to the next. It depended on what vegetables they’d stored for the winter. The year before they’d only stocked up with salted carrots, so there was nothing but carrots in the gruel from September to June. And now it was cabbage. The camp was best fed in June, when they ran out of vegetables and started using groats instead. The worst time was July, when they put shredded nettles in the cauldron.

The fish was mostly bones. The flesh was boiled off except for bits on the tails and the heads. Not leaving a single scale or speck of flesh on the skeleton, Shukhov crunched and sucked the bones and spat them out on the table. He didn’t leave anything—not even the gills or tail. He ate the eyes too when they were still in place, but when they’d come off and were floating around in the bowl on their own he didn’t eat them. The others laughed at him for this.

… The second course was a mush made from magara. It was one solid lump, and Shukhov broke it off in pieces. When it was hot—never mind when it was cold—it had no taste and didn’t fill you. It was nothing but grass that looked like millet. They’d gotten the bright idea of serving it instead of groats. It came from the Chinese, they said. They got ten ounces of it and that was that. It wasn’t the real thing, but it passed for mush.¹⁷⁸

The ration, and the whole estimate of norms, depended on all sorts of factors. First, the ideas of the officials in determining the piecework. For some types of work, it was on occasion set far above the possible—for example, in building the Kotlas–Vorkuta railway. It was impossible to do more than about 30 percent of the quota, so the ration, for this extremely hard work, was down to 400 grams.¹⁷⁹ On the extension down to Khalmer-Yu, average expectation of life was about three months.¹⁸⁰

Again, the goodness or badness of the year’s harvest immediately affected rations. The bad harvest of 1936 produced an appalling level of mortality from starvation in the camps in 1937.

Trouble was caused by the desire to eat anything at all. Rubbish boxes from the kitchens might be attacked by gangs. When these, in one camp, were thrown into the cesspool by the latrines, “even there the gangs waded after them.”¹⁸¹ When grass came up, every blade might be put in a tin and boiled and eaten. Grass eating was most common among intellectuals. Its long-term effects were deadly. Others tried to satisfy their appetites with boiling salt water, also ineffective.¹⁸²

Even in Solzhenitsyn’s penal camp, there are convicts who have served in worse places—a lumber camp where work went on until midnight if necessary to fill the quotas, and the basic ration was six ounces less.¹⁸³ In the area of the far north, to the east of the Urals, there seem to have been a number of camps of particularly rigorous regime, which are described as of “complete isolation.” Only a few rumors about them have emerged, as no one seems in any circumstances to have been released. The death rate is said to have been very high. Novaya Zemlya had an extremely bad reputation—with few, if any, returning.