Gulag

Alexander Weissberg, for example, was given good food and allowed to rest before he was sent to the mines.⁸⁴ After a long transport to Ukhtizhemlag, Jerzy Gliksman—the Polish socialist who had once so enjoyed the performance of Pogodin’s Aristokraty in Moscow—was given a three-day rest, during which he and his fellow new arrivals were treated as “guests.”⁸⁵ Pyotr Yakir, the son of the Soviet general, was put in quarantine for fourteen days at Sevurallag. ⁸⁶ Evgeniya Ginzburg remembered her first few days in Magadan, the main city of Kolyma, as a “whirl of pain, blackouts of memory, and a dark abyss of unconsciousness.” She, like others, had been taken directly off the SS Dzhurma and placed in a hospital, where after two months she fully recovered her health. Some were skeptical. “A lamb for the slaughter,” said Liza Sheveleva, another prisoner. “Whom are you recovering for, may I ask? As soon as you get out of here, you’ll go straight on to forced labor, and in a week you’ll be the same sort of corpse that you were on board the Dzhurma . . .”⁸⁷

Once recovered, if they had been allowed to do so, and once dressed, if they had been allowed new clothes, the selection and segregation began in earnest. In principle, this was a heavily regulated process. As early as 1930, the Gulag issued very strict, complicated orders on the classification of prisoners. Theoretically, prisoners’ work assignments were meant to reflect two sets of criteria: their “social origin” and sentence, and their health. In these early days, prisoners were put into three categories: “working-class” prisoners, not convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes, with sentences not longer than five years; “working-class” prisoners, not convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes, with sentences above five years; and those sentenced to counter-revolutionary crimes.

Each of these three categories of workers was then assigned one of three categories of prison regime: privileged, light, and “first-order,” or heavy. Then they were meant to be examined by a medical commission, which determined whether they were able to carry out heavy work or light work. After taking into account all of these criteria, the camp administration would then assign each prisoner a job. According to how well they fulfilled the norms of that particular job, each prisoner would then be assigned one of four levels of food rations: basic, working, “reinforced,” or “punishment.”⁸⁸ All of these categories would change many times. Beria’s orders of 1939, for example, divided prisoners into “heavy-work-capable,” “light-work-capable,” and “invalid” categories (sometimes called groups A, B, and C), the numbers of which were regularly monitored by the central administration in Moscow, which heavily disapproved of camps which had too many “invalid” prisoners.⁸⁹

The process was far from orderly. It had both formal aspects—imposed by the camp commanders—and informal aspects, as prisoners made adjustments and bargained among themselves. For most, their first experience of the camp classification process was relatively crude. George Bien, a young Hungarian picked up in Budapest at the end of the Second World War, compared the selection process he went through in 1946 to a slave market:

Everyone was ordered to the courtyard and told to strip. When your name was called you appeared before a medical team for a health inspection. The exam consisted of pulling the skin of your buttocks to determine the amount of muscle. They determined your condition of strength by the muscle content, and if you passed you were accepted and your documents were put in a separate pile. This was done by women in white coats, and they had little choice from this group of living dead. They chose the younger prisoners, regardless of muscle.⁹⁰

Jerzy Gliksman also used the expression “slave market” to describe the segregation process that took place in Kotlas, the transit camp that supplied prisoners to the camps north of Arkhangelsk. There, guards awoke prisoners during the night and told them to assemble, with all of their belongings, on the following morning. Every prisoner was forced to attend, even the seriously ill. Then, all were marched out of the camp, into the forest. An hour later, they arrived at a large clearing, where they were formed into columns, sixteen men abreast: