Gulag

There is a huge column of prisoners, you are counted, re-counted, recounted. The train is there . . . then there is the travel order: “On your knees!” During loading, it was a sensitive time, someone could start running. So they make sure that everybody is kneeling. But you better not get up, because at that point they are trigger-happy. Then they count, they put people onto the car, and lock them up. Then the train never moves—you just stand there for hours on end—then suddenly “We’re off!” and you start going.¹¹

From the outside, the train cars often looked perfectly ordinary—except that they were better protected than most. Edward Buca, who had been arrested in Poland, surveyed his carriage with the careful eye of a man who hoped to escape. He recalled that “each wagon was wound with several strands of barbed wire, there were wooden platforms outside for the guards, electric lights had been installed at the top and bottom of each wagon, and their small windows were protected by thick iron bars.” Later, Buca checked beneath the wagon to see if there were iron spikes along the bottom too. There were.¹² Finkelstein also remembered that “every morning you hear this hammering—the guards have wooden hammers, and they always hammer up the trains, to make sure that nobody tried to break out, to make a hole.”¹³

Very rarely, exceptional arrangements were made for special prisoners. Anna Larina, the wife of the Soviet leader Nikolai Bukharin, did not travel with other prisoners, but was instead placed in the guards’ compartment of the train.¹⁴ But the vast majority of prisoners and exiles traveled together, in one of two types of train. The first were the Stolypinki , or “Stolypin wagons” (named, ironically, after one of the more vigorous, reforming Czarist prime ministers of the early twentieth century, who is alleged to have introduced them). These were ordinary carriages that had been refitted for prisoners. They could be linked together in an enormous transport, or attached, one or two at a time, to ordinary trains. One former passenger described them:

A Stolypinka resembles an ordinary Russian third-class carriage except that it has a great many iron bars and grillwork. The windows are, of course, barred. The individual compartments are separated by steel netting instead of walls, like cages, and a long iron fence separates the compartments from the corridor. This arrangement enables the guards constantly to keep an eye on all prisoners in the car.¹⁵

The Stolypin wagons were also very, very crowded:

On each of the two top bunks two men lay head by foot. On the two middle ones were seven with their heads towards the door and one crosswise at their feet. Under each of the two bottom bunks there was one man, with fourteen more perched upon the bunks and on the bundles of belongings jammed in the floor space between the bunks and door. At night all those at the lower level somehow managed to lie down alongside one another.¹⁶