Gulag

But there was another, more important disadvantage. Inside the Stolypin wagons, guards could watch the prisoners at all times, and were therefore able to control what prisoners ate, to hear their conversations— and to decide when and where they would be able to relieve themselves. As a result, virtually every memoirist who describes the trains mentions the horrors associated with urination and defecation. Once, or sometimes twice a day, or sometimes not at all, the guards took prisoners to the toilet, or else stopped the train to let the passengers out: “The worst happens when, after a long haggle with the guards, we are allowed off the cars and everybody looks for a spot somewhere under the boxcar to relieve himself or herself, not worrying about the audience watching from all directions.” ¹⁷

However embarrassing such stops could be, the prisoners with stomach ailments or other medical problems were in a much worse position, as one remembered: “Prisoners who could not hold themselves would whimperingly foul their pants and often also the prisoners next to them. Even in the community of hardship, it was difficult for some prisoners not to hate the unfortunates who did this.”¹⁸

It was for that reason that some prisoners actually preferred the other form of prisoner transport, the cattle wagons. These were what they sound like: empty wagons, not necessarily fitted out for human beings, sometimes with a small stove in the center for heating, sometimes with bunks. Although more primitive than the Stolypin wagons, the cattle wagons were not divided into sections, and there was more room to move about. They also had “toilets”—holes in the floor of the wagon—alleviating the need to beg and plead with the guards.¹⁹

The open wagons had their special torments too, though. Sometimes, for example, the holes in the floor of the wagon became blocked. On Buca’s train, the hole froze over. “So what did we do? We pissed through a crack between the floor and the door and shat into a piece of cloth, making a small neat parcel and hoping that somewhere they would stop the train and open the door so that we could throw it out.”²⁰ On the trains full of deported exiles, in which men, women, and children were all thrown together, the holes in the floor caused different problems. One former deportee, exiled as the daughter of a kulak in the early 1930s, remembered people being “horribly embarrassed” at having to urinate in front of one another, and was thankful that she was able to do it “behind my mother’s skirts.” ²¹

Yet the real torment was not the crowding or the toilets or the embarrassment, but the lack of food—and especially the lack of water. Sometimes, depending on the route and the type of train, prisoners were served hot food during the trip. Sometimes they were not. Usually, a prisoner’s “dry rations” for a transport consisted of bread, which could be distributed either in small chunks of 300 grams a day, or else in larger quantities—2 kilograms or so— meant to last a thirty-four-day journey.

Along with the bread, prisoners were usually given salted fish—the effect of which was to make them extremely thirsty.²² Nevertheless, they were rarely given more than one mug of water per day, even in the summer. So prevalent was this practice that stories of the terrible thirst experienced by traveling prisoners appear again and again. “Once, for three days we didn’t get water, and on New Year’s Eve of 1939, somewhere near Lake Baikal, we had to lick the black icicles which hung from the train carriages,” wrote one ex-zek.²³ In a twenty-eight-day trip, another remembers being given water three times, with the train occasionally stopping “to take the corpses off.”²⁴

Even those who did receive that one cup a day were tormented. Evgeniya Ginzburg recalled the excruciating decision prisoners had to make: whether to drink their whole cup in the morning, or try to save it. “Those who took occasional sips and made it last all day never had a moment’s peace. They watched their mugs like hawks from morning until night.”²⁵ If, that is, they were lucky enough to have mugs: one prisoner remembered to the end of her life the tragic moment when her teapot, which she had managed to keep with her, was stolen. The teapot had held water without spilling, enabling her to sip throughout the day. Without it she had nothing to hold water in at all, and was tormented by thirst. ²⁶