Gulag

But even when there was no catastrophe, prisoners suffered from the secrecy, which mandated forced confinement. The guards threw their food down into the hold, and they were left to scramble for it. They received their water in buckets, lowered down from the deck. Both food and water were therefore in short supply—as was air. Elinor Olitskaya, the Anarchist, remembered that people began to vomit immediately on embarking.⁴⁸ Descending into the hold, Evgeniya Ginzburg became instantly ill as well: “If I remained on my feet it was only because there was no room to fall.” Once inside the hold, “It was impossible to move, our legs grew numb, hunger and the sea air made us dizzy, and all of us were seasick . . . packed tightly in our hundreds we could hardly breathe; we sat or lay on the dirty floor or on one another, spreading out our legs to make room for the person in front.”⁴⁹

Once past the Japanese coast, prisoners were sometimes allowed up onto the deck in order to use the ship’s few toilets, which were hardly adequate for thousands of prisoners. Memoirists variously recall waiting “2 hours,” “7 or 8 hours,” and “all day” for these toilets.⁵⁰ Sgovio described them:

A box-like makeshift contraption of boards was attached to the side of the ship . . . it was rather tricky to climb from the deck of the rolling ship over the railing, and into the box. The older prisoners and those who had never been at sea were afraid to enter. A prod from the guard and the necessity to relieve themselves finally made them overcome their reluctance. A long line was on the stairway day and night throughout the voyage. Only two men at a time were allowed in the box.⁵¹

Yet the physical torments of life on the ships were surpassed by the tortures invented by the prisoners themselves—or rather the criminal element among them. This was particularly true in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when the criminal influence in the camp system was at its height and the political and criminal prisoners were mixed indiscriminately. Some politicals had already encountered criminals on the trains. Aino Kuusinen remembered that “the worst feature of the journey were the juveniles [young criminals] who were given the upper berths and perpetrated all kinds of indecencies—spitting, uttering obscene abuse and even urinating on the adult prisoners.” ⁵²

On the boats, the situation was worse. Elinor Lipper, who made the journey to Kolyma in the late 1930s, described how the politicals “lay squeezed together on the tarred floor of the hold because the criminals had taken possession of the plank platform. If one of us dared to raise her head, she was greeted by a rain of fish heads and entrails from above. When any of the seasick criminals threw up, the vomit came straight down upon us.” ⁵³

Polish and Baltic prisoners, who had better clothes and more valuable possessions than their Soviet counterparts, were a particular target. On one occasion, a group of criminal prisoners turned out the ship lights and attacked a group of Polish prisoners, killing some and robbing the rest. “Those of the Poles who were there and remained alive,” wrote one survivor, “would know for the rest of their lives that they had been in hell.”⁵⁴

The consequences of the mixing of male and female prisoners could be far worse even than the mixing of criminals and politicals. Technically, this was forbidden: men and women were kept separately on the boats. In practice, guards could be bribed to let men into the women’s hold, with drastic consequences. The “Kolyma tram”—the shipboard gang rapes—were discussed throughout the camp system. Elena Glink, a survivor, described them: