Gulag

[w]e spent a long time being counted . . . That particular evening there seemed no end to it. Innumerable times we had to form five abreast and each row was told to advance three paces which several worried-looking NKVD officials would call aloud, “odin, dva, tri . . .” and laboriously write down each number on to their large clipboards. Presumably the number of those alive, added to the numbers of those who had been shot en route, did not produce the expected total.⁷²

Following the count both men and women were taken to the baths and shaved—over their entire bodies. This procedure, carried out under official orders for the sake of hygiene⁷³—it was assumed, usually correctly, that prisoners arriving from Soviet jails would be covered with lice—nevertheless had an important ritual significance as well. Women describe it with particular horror and distaste, and no wonder. Often, they had to remove their clothes and then wait naked, under the full gaze of male soldiers, for their turn to be shaved. “For the first time,” recalled Elinor Olitskaya, who was a participant in this ceremony on her arrival in Kolyma, “I heard wails of protest: Women remain women . . .”⁷⁴ Olga Adamova-Sliozberg had suffered the same experience in a transit prison:

We undressed and handed over our clothes for treatment and were about to go upstairs to the washroom when we realized that the staircase was lined from top to bottom with guards. Blushing, we hung our heads and huddled together. Then I looked up, and my eyes met those of the officer in charge. He gave me a sullen look. “Come on, come on,” he shouted. “Get a move on!”

I suddenly felt relieved and the situation even seemed quite comic.

“To hell with them,” I thought. “They’re no more men to me than Vaska the bull who frightened me when I was a child.” ⁷⁵

Once the prisoners were washed and shaved, the second step in the process of turning men and women into anonymous zeks was the distribution of clothing. The rules changed, from era to era as well as from camp to camp, as to whether or not prisoners were allowed to wear their own clothes. The decision seems, in practice, to have been left to the whim of local camp officials: “In one lagpunkt you could wear your own clothes, in another not,” remembered Galina Smirnova, a prisoner in Ozerlag in the early 1950s.⁷⁶ It did not always matter: by the time they reached the camp, many prisoners’ own clothes were in rags, if they had not been stolen.

Those without clothes had to wear the camp-issue uniforms, which were invariably old, ripped, ill-made, and ill-fitting. To some, particularly women, it sometimes seemed as if the clothes they were given were part of a deliberate attempt to humiliate them. Anna Andreeva, wife of the writer and spiritualist Danil Andreev, was at first sent to a camp where prisoners were allowed to wear their own clothes. Later, in 1948, she was moved into a camp where they were not. She found the change truly offensive: “They had deprived us of everything, they deprived us of our names, of everything that is part of a person’s personality, and dressed us, I can’t even describe it, in a shapeless dress . . .”⁷⁷

No effort was made to ensure that sizes matched the prisoners. “Each of us received long underwear,” wrote Janusz Bardach, as well as “a black tunic, quilted pants, a long quilted outer jacket, a felt hat with ear-flaps, rubber-soled boots, and fleece-lined mittens. These items were handed out indiscriminately, and it was up to us to find the right sizes. Everything I was given was much too big, and I spent hours trading for a better fit.”⁷⁸