Gulag

One former inmate, a prisoner for fourteen months in Vilnius after the Soviet occupation of the city—it had previously been under Polish rule— described in 1939, in testimony presented to the Polish government-in-exile, how the elements of the previous Polish prison regime had slowly broken down. One by one, prisoners lost their “privileges”—the right to read and write letters, to use the prison library, to have paper and pencils, to receive parcels. New regulations, of the sort common to most Soviet prisons, were brought in: lights in the cells had to be kept on all night, and windows were blocked with sheets of tin. Unexpectedly, the latter created an opportunity for communication between cells: “I opened the window, and, putting my head against the bars, spoke to my neighbors. Even if the sentry in the courtyard heard my conversation, he could not make out where the voice came from as, thanks to the tin sheet, it was impossible to detect an open window.”⁴¹

Perhaps the most elaborate form of forbidden communication, however, was the prisoners’ Morse code, tapped on the walls of cells, or on the prison plumbing. The code had been devised in the Czarist era—Varlam Shalamov attributes it to one of the Decembrists.⁴² Elinor Olitskaya had learned it from her Social Revolutionary colleagues long before she was imprisoned in 1924.⁴³ In fact, the Russian revolutionary Vera Figner had described the code in her memoirs, which is where Evgeniya Ginzburg had read about it. While under investigation, she remembered enough of the code to use it to communicate with a neighboring cell.⁴⁴ The code was relatively straightforward: letters of the Russian alphabet were laid out in five rows of six letters:

Each letter was then designated by a pair of taps, the first signifying the row, the second the position in the row:

Even those who had not read about the code or learned it from others sometimes figured it out, as there were standard methods of teaching it. Those who knew it would sometimes tap out the alphabet, over and over again, together with one or two simple questions, in the hope that the unseen person on the other side of the wall would catch on. That was how Alexander Dolgun learned the code in Lefortovo, memorizing it with the help of matches. When he was finally able to “talk” to the man in the next cell, and understood that the man was asking him “Who are you?” he felt “a rush of pure love for a man who has been asking me for three months who I am.”⁴⁵

The code was not in widespread use at all times. By 1949, Zayara Vesyolaya “could find no one who knew the ‘prison alphabet’” in Butyrka, and thought at first that the tradition must have died out. She later decided she was wrong, both because others told her they had used it at that time, and because a guard once burst into her cell when he heard a knocking sound, demanding to know the origins. ⁴⁶ There were other variations. The Russian writer and poet, Anatoly Zhigulin, claims to have invented a code, also based on the alphabet, which he and a group of his friends (they were all arrested at once) used to communicate during the investigation of their case.⁴⁷

In certain places and at certain times, prisoners’ methods of self-organization took more elaborate forms. One in particular is described by Varlam Shalamov in his short story “Committees for the Poor,” and also mentioned by others.⁴⁸ Its origins lay in an unfair rule: at one point, during the late 1930s, the authorities suddenly decided that prisoners undergoing interrogation were to receive no packages from their relatives whatsoever, on the grounds that even “two French rolls, five apples and a pair of old pants were enough to transmit any text into the prison.” Only money could be sent, and that only in round numbers, so that the sums could not be used to spell out “messages.” Yet not all prisoners’ families had money to send. Some were too poor, some too far away, while others may even have played a part in denouncing their relatives in the first place. That meant that although some prisoners had access once a week to the prison commissary— to butter, cheese, sausage, tobacco, white bread, cigarettes—others had to subsist on the poor prison diet, and, more important, would have felt “out of place at the general holiday” that was “commissary day.”