Gulag

In minute letters, I write out my latest poem on four centimetre-wide strips of cigarette paper . . . These strips of cigarette paper are then tightly rolled into a small tube (less than the thickness of your finger) sealed and made moisture proof by a method of our own devising, and handed on when a suitable opportunity presents itself.³¹

However they did it—by concealment, bribery, or flattery—the information that the Chronicle managed to extract from the camps remains significant today. At the time of the writing of this book, post-Stalinist MVD and KGB files remain largely closed to researchers. Thanks to the Chronicle, however, to other samizdat and human rights publications, and to the many, many memoirs which describe the camps of the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s, it is nevertheless possible to reconstruct a consistent picture of what life in the Soviet camps was like in the years after Stalin.

“Today’s camps for political prisoners are just as horrific as in Stalin’s time. A few things are better, a few things are worse . . .”

So began Anatoly Marchenko’s memoir of his years in prison, a document which, when it first began to circulate in Moscow in the late 1960s, deeply shocked the city’s intelligentsia, who believed the Soviet labor camps had closed for good. The working-class son of illiterate parents, Marchenko’s first prison conviction was for hooliganism. His second conviction was for treason: he had tried to escape the Soviet Union by crossing the border into Iran. He was condemned to serve his political term in Dubravlag, Mordovia, one of two notorious, strict-regime political camps.

Many elements of Marchenko’s prison experience would have been familiar to people used to hearing stories of Stalin’s camps. Just like his predecessors, Marchenko rode to Mordovia in a Stolypin wagon. Just like his predecessors, he received a loaf of bread, 1.5 ounces of sugar, and a salted herring to last him the trip. Just like his predecessors, he found that his access to water depended upon which soldier was in charge of the train: “If he’s a good one he’ll bring you two or three kettles, but if he can’t be bothered to fetch and carry for you, then you can sit there until you die of thirst.” ³²

Upon arriving in camp, Marchenko found the same generalized hunger, if not the starvation, that there would have been in the past. His daily food norm contained 2,400 calories: 25 ounces of bread, 1 pound of usually rotten vegetables, 3 ounces of usually spoiled cod, 2 ounces of meat. By contrast, the dogs guarding the prisoners got a pound of meat. As in the past, not all of Marchenko’s ration actually ended up in his food, and there were few extras. “During the six years in camp and jail I had bread with butter twice, when I received visits. I also ate two cucumbers—one in 1964 and another in 1966. Not once did I eat a tomato or an apple.” ³³

Work still mattered to some extent, although it was a different type of work. Marchenko worked as a loader and as a carpenter. Leonid Sitko, also in Dubravlag at this time, built furniture.³⁴ Prisoners in the Mordovian women’s camps worked in factories, often with sewing machines. ³⁵ The prisoners in the other set of political camps, near the city of Perm, in the foothills of the Urals, also worked with wood. Those confined to isolation cells, as many were by the 1980s, sewed gloves or uniforms. ³⁶

Over time, Marchenko also found that conditions slowly deteriorated. By the mid-1960s, there were at least three categories of prisoner: privileged, ordinary, and strict regime. Very soon, strict-regime prisoners—which included all of the most “serious” political dissidents—were once again wearing black cotton uniforms instead of their own clothes. Although they could receive unlimited letters, as well as printed materials—if they were of Soviet origin—they could send only two letters per months. If they were on strict regime, they could receive no food or cigarettes.