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Even on their rare days off, it sometimes happened that prisoners were forced to do maintenance work within the camp, cleaning barracks, cleaning toilets, clearing snow in the winter.⁴⁹ All of which makes one order, issued by Lazar Kogan, the commander of Dmitlag, particularly poignant. Disturbed by the many reports of camp horses collapsing of exhaustion, Kogan began by noting that: “The growing number of cases of illness and collapse of horses has several causes, including the overloading of horses, the difficult conditions of the roads, and the absence of full and complete rest time for horses to recover their strength.”

He then continued, issuing new instructions:

The workday of camp horses must not exceed ten hours, not counting the obligatory two-hour break for rest and food.

On average, horses must not walk more than 32 kilometers per day.

Horses must be allowed a regular rest day, every eighth day, and the rest on that day must be complete.⁵⁰

Of the prisoners’ need for a regular rest day every eighth day, there is, alas, no mention.

BARAKI: LIVING SPACE

Most prisoners in most camps lived in barracks. Rare was the camp, however, whose barracks were constructed before the prisoners arrived. Those prisoners who had the bad luck to be sent to build a new camp lived in tents, or in nothing at all. As one prisoners’ song put it;

We drove quickly and fast across tundra When suddenly, the train came to a halt. Around us, only forest and mud— And here we will build the canal.⁵¹

Ivan Sulimov, a prisoner in Vorkuta in the 1930s, was dumped, along with a party of inmates, on “a flat square of land in the polar tundra,” and told to set up tents, build a bonfire, and begin construction of a “fence of stone slabs, surrounded by barbed wire” as well as barracks. ⁵² Janusz Sieminski, a Polish prisoner in Kolyma after the war, was also once part of a team that constructed a new lagpunkt “from zero,” in the depths of winter. At night, prisoners slept on the ground. Many died, particularly those who lost the battle to sleep near the fire. ⁵³ Prisoners arriving in the Prikaspysky camp in Azerbaijan in December 1940 also slept, in the words of an annoyed NKVD inspector, “beneath the open sky on damp ground.”⁵⁴ Nor were such situations necessarily temporary. As late as 1955, prisoners in some camps were still living in tents.⁵⁵

If and when the prisoners did build barracks, they were invariably extremely simple buildings, made of wood. Moscow dictated their design and, as a result, descriptions of them are rather repetitive: prisoner after prisoner describes long, rectangular, wooden buildings, the walls unplastered, the cracks stopped up with mud, the inside space filled with rows and rows of equally poorly made bunk beds. Sometimes there was a crude table, sometimes not. Sometimes there were benches to sit on, sometimes not.⁵⁶ In Kolyma, and in other regions where wood was scarce, the prisoners built barracks, equally cheaply and hastily, of stone. Where insulation was not available, older methods were used. Photographs of the barracks in Vorkuta, taken in the winter of 1945, make them look almost invisible: their roofs had been built at sharp angles, but very low to the ground, so the snow accumulating around them would help insulate them from cold.⁵⁷

In the Barracks: inmates listening to a prisoner musician—a drawing by Benjamin Mkrtchyan, Ivdel, 1953

Often, barracks were not proper buildings at all, but rather zemlyanki, or “earth dugouts.” A. P. Evstonichev lived in one in Karelia, in the early 1940s:

A zemlyanka—it was a space cleaned of snow, with the upper layer of earth removed. The walls and roof were made of round, rough logs. The whole structure was covered with another layer of earth and snow. The entrance to the dugout was decked out with a canvas door . . . in one corner stood a barrel of water. In the middle stood a metal stove, complete with a metal pipe leading out through the roof, and a barrel of kerosene.⁵⁸