Gulag

By 3:30 a.m. we were supposed to be in the middle of the square, standing in ranks of five, waiting to be counted. The guards often made mistakes, and then there had to be a second count. On a morning when it was snowing this was a long, cold agonizing process. If the guards were wide awake and concentrating, the count usually took about thirty minutes, but if they miscounted, we could stand for anything up to an hour.²⁹

While this was happening, some camps took countermeasures to “raise the prisoners’ spirits.” Here is Frid again: “Our razvod took place to the accompaniment of an accordion player. A prisoner, freed from all other work obligations, played cheerful melodies ...” ³⁰ Zarod also records the bizarre phenomenon of the morning band, composed of prisoner musicians, both professional and amateur:

Each morning, the “band” stood near the gate playing military-style music and we were exhorted to march out “strongly and happily” to our day’s work. Having played until the end of the column had passed through the gate, the musicians abandoned their instruments and, tacking themselves on to the end of the column, joined the workers walking into the forest.³¹

From there, prisoners were marched to work. The guards shouted out the daily command—“A step to the right, or a step to the left, will be considered an attempt to escape—The convoy will fire without warning— March!”—and the prisoners marched, still five abreast, to the workplace. If it was a great distance, they would be accompanied by guards and dogs. The procedure for the evening’s return to camp was much the same. After an hour for supper, again prisoners were lined up in rows. And again, the guards counted (if the prisoners were lucky) and re-counted (if they were not). Moscow’s instructions allotted more time for the evening count— thirty to forty minutes—presumably on the grounds that an escape from camp was more likely to have taken place from the work site. ³² Then another siren sounded, and it was time to sleep.

These rules and timetables were not written in stone. On the contrary, the regime changed over time, generally growing harsher. Jacques Rossi has written that “the main trait of the Soviet penitentiary regime is its systematic intensification, gradual introduction of unadulterated, arbitrary sadism into the status of the law,” and there is something to this. ³³ Throughout the 1940s, the regime grew tighter, workdays grew longer, rest days became less frequent. In 1931, the prisoners of the Vaigach Expedition, a part of the Ukhtinskaya Expedition, worked six-hour days, in three shifts. Workers in the Kolyma region in the early 1930s also worked normal hours, fewer in winter and more in summer.³⁴ Within the decade, however, the working day had doubled in length. By the late 1930s, women at Elinor Olitskaya’s sewing factory worked “twelve hours in an unventilated hall,” and the Kolyma workday had also been lengthened to twelve hours. ³⁵ Later still, Olitskaya worked on a construction brigade: fourteen- to sixteen-hour days, with fiveminute breaks at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., and a one-hour lunch break at noon.³⁶

Nor was she alone. In 1940, the Gulag’s working day was officially extended to eleven hours, although even this was often violated.³⁷ In March 1942, the Moscow Gulag administration mailed a furious letter to all camp commanders, reminding them of the rule that “prisoners must be allowed to sleep no less than eight hours.” Many camp commanders had ignored this rule, the letter explained, and had allowed their prisoners as little as four or five hours of sleep every night. As a result, the Gulag complained, “prisoners are losing their ability to work, they are becoming ‘weak workers’ and invalids.”³⁸