Gulag

Violations continued, particularly as production demands accelerated during the war years. In September 1942, after the German invasion, the Gulag’s administration officially extended the working day for prisoners building airport facilities to twelve hours, with a one-hour break for lunch. The pattern was the same all over the USSR. Working days of sixteen hours were recorded in Vyatlag during the war.³⁹ Working days of twelve hours were recorded in Vorkuta in the summer of 1943, although these were reduced—probably because of the high rates of death and illness—to ten hours again in March 1944.⁴⁰ Sergei Bondarevsky, a prisoner in a wartime sharashka, one of the special laboratories for inmate scientists, also remembered working eleven-hour days, with breaks. On a typical day, he worked from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m., from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m., and then again from 8 p.m. until 10 p.m.⁴¹

In any case, the rules were often broken. One zek, assigned to a brigade, panning gold in Kolyma, had to sift through 150 wheelbarrows a day. Those who had not finished that amount by the end of the workday simply remained until they had—sometimes as late as midnight. Afterward they would go home, eat their soup, and be up at 5 a.m. to start work again. ⁴² The Norilsk camp administration applied a similar principle in the late 1940s, where another prisoner worked digging foundations for new buildings in the permafrost: “At the end of twelve hours they would winch you out of the hole, but only if you had completed your work. If you hadn’t, you were just left there.”⁴³

Nor were many breaks usually granted during the day, as one wartime prisoner, assigned to work in a textile factory, later explained:

At six we had to be in the factory. At ten we had a five-minute break to smoke a cigarette, for which purpose we had to run to a cellar about two hundred yards away, the only place on the factory premises where this was permitted. Infringement of this regulation was punishable with two extra years’ imprisonment. At one o’clock came a half-hour break for lunch. Small earthenware bowl in hand, one had to dash frantically to the canteen, stand in a long queue, receive some disgusting soya beans which disagreed with most people—and at all costs be back at the factory when the engines started working. After that, without leaving our places, we sat till seven in the evening.⁴⁴

The number of days off work was also mandated by law. Ordinary prisoners were allowed to have one a week, and those assigned to stricter regimes two per month. But these rules also varied in practice. As early as 1933, the Gulag administration in Moscow sent out an order reminding camp commanders of the importance of prisoners’ rest days, many of which were being canceled in the mad rush to fulfill the plan.⁴⁵ A decade later, hardly anything had changed. During the war, Kazimierz Zarod was given one day off out of ten.⁴⁶ Another recalled having one a month.⁴⁷ Gustav Herling remembered free days being even scarcer:

According to regulations, prisoners were entitled to one whole day’s rest every ten days’ work. But in practice, it transpired that even a monthly day off threatened to lower the camp’s production output, and it had therefore become customary to announce ceremoniously the reward of a rest day whenever the camp had surpassed its production plan for the one particular quarter . . . Naturally we had no opportunity to inspect the output figures or the production plan, so that this convention was a fiction which in fact put us entirely at the mercy of the camp authorities.⁴⁸