Gulag

All day long I noticed unknown officials, both uniformed and in civilian clothes, wandering among the prisoners, ordering some to remove their fufaykas[jackets], feeling their arms, their legs, looking over the palms, commanding others to bend over. Sometimes they would order a prisoner to open his mouth and peered at his teeth, like horse traders at a county fair . . . some were looking for engineers and experienced locksmiths or lathe operators; others might require construction carpenters; and all were always in need of physically strong men for work as lumberjacks, in agriculture, in coal-mining, and in the oil wells.

The most important consideration of those doing the inspecting, Gliksman realized, was “not to let themselves be duped into inadvertently acquiring cripples, invalids, or the sick—in short, persons who were good only for eating up bread for nothing. This was the reason that special agents were dispatched from time to time to select the proper prisoner material.” ⁹¹

Right from the start, it was also clear that rules were there to be broken. Nina Gagen-Torn went through a particularly humiliating selection at the Temnikovsky camp in 1947, which nevertheless had a positive result. Upon arriving in the camp, her convoy was immediately sent to the showers, their clothes put in the disinfection chamber. They were then marched into a room, still dripping wet and naked: there was to be “a health inspection,” they were told. “Doctors” were going to examine them, and so they did— along with the camp production manager and guards:

The major walked along the line, quickly examining the bodies. He was choosing goods—to production, to the sewing factory! To the collective farm! To the zone! To the hospital! The production manager wrote down the surnames.

But when he heard her surname, the Major looked at her and asked,

—“What relation are you to Professor Gagen-Torn?”

—“Daughter.”

—“Put her in the hospital, she has scabies, she has red marks on her stomach.”

As she did not have red marks on her stomach, Gagen-Torn assumed, correctly as it turned out, that the man had once known and admired her father, and was saving her, at least temporarily, from hard work.⁹²

Prisoners’ behavior in the first few days of their camp life, during and after this selection process, could have a profound effect on their fate. During his three-day period of rest upon arrival at Kargopollag, for example, the Polish novelist Gustav Herling took stock of his situation and “sold my high officer’s boots for 900 grams of bread to an urka [a criminal prisoner] from the railway porters’ brigade.” In recompense, the criminal prisoner used his connections in the camp administration to help Herling secure a job as a porter at the food supply center. This was hard work, Herling was told, but at least he would be able to steal extra rations—as proved to be the case. And right away he was granted a “privilege.” The camp commander told him to report at the camp store to draw out a bushlat [a long-sleeved jerkin lined with wadding], a cap with ear-flaps, wadded trousers, waterproof gloves made of sailcloth, and valenki [felt boots] of best quality, i.e., new or worn only a little—a full set of clothing such as is usually issued only to the best “Stakhanovite” brigades of prisoners. ⁹³

Wheeling and dealing took other forms as well. Upon arriving at Ukhtizhemlag, Gliksman immediately realized that the “specialist” title he had been handed in the Kotlas transit camp—he was classified as a trained economist—had no meaning in the concentration camp itself. Meanwhile, he noticed that during the first few days in the camp, his savvier Russian acquaintances did not bother with official formalities: