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Heating and light were often equally primitive, but again this varied greatly from camp to camp. One prisoner remembered the barracks being virtually dark: “the electric lamps shone yellow-white, barely noticeable, and the kerosene lamps smoked and smelled rancid.”⁶⁹ Others complained of the opposite problem, that the lights were usually on all night. ⁷⁰ Some prisoners in the camps of the Vorkuta region had no problem with heat, since they could bring lumps of coal home from the mines, but Susanna Pechora, in a lagpunkt near the coal mines of Inta, remembered that inside the barracks it was “so cold in the winter that your hair freezes to the bed, the drinking water freezes in the cup.”⁷¹ There was no running water in her barracks either, just water brought into the barracks in buckets by the dezhurnaya—an older woman, no longer capable of heavier work—who cleaned and looked after the barracks during the day.⁷²

Worse, a “terrible heavy smell” pervaded the barracks, thanks to the huge quantities of dirty and mildewed clothes drying along the edge of the bunks, the tables, anywhere it was possible to hang something. In those barracks in the special camps where the doors were closed at night and the windows barred, the stench made it “almost impossible to breathe.” ⁷³

The air quality was not improved by the absence of toilets. In camps where prisoners were locked into their barracks at night, zeks had to make use of a parasha, or “bucket,” just as in prison. One prisoner wrote that in the morning the parasha was “impossible to carry, so it was dragged along across the slippery floor. The contents invariably spilled out.”⁷⁴ Another, Galina Smirnova, arrested in the early 1950s, remembered that “if it was something serious, you waited until morning, otherwise there was a terrible stench.”⁷⁵

Otherwise, toilets were outhouses, and outhouses were outside the barracks, often some distance away, which was a serious hardship in the winter cold. “There were wooden outdoor toilets,” said Smirnova of another camp, “even when it was 30 or 40 degrees below zero.”⁷⁶ Thomas Sgovio wrote of the consequences:

Outside, in front of each barrack, they stuck a wooden pole and froze it to the ground. Another decree! We were forbidden to urinate anywhere on camp grounds other than the outhouses or on the pole with a white rag tied to the top. Anyone caught violating the decree would be sentenced to ten nights in the penal cell . . . The decree was issued because at night there were prisoners who, unwilling to walk the long distance to the outhouses, urinated instead all over the well-beaten snow paths. The grounds were littered with yellow spots. When the snow melted in late spring, there would be a terrible stench . . . twice a month we chopped the frozen pyramids and carted the frozen pieces out of the zone ...⁷⁷

But filth and overcrowding were not merely aesthetic problems, or matters of relatively minor discomfort. The crowded bunks and the lack of space could also be lethal, particularly in camps that worked on a twenty-four-hour schedule. In one such camp, where the prisoners worked three separate shifts, day and night, one memoirist wrote that “people were asleep in the barracks at any time of the day. Fighting to be able to sleep was a fight for life. Arguing over sleep, people swore at one another, fought one another, even killed one another. The radio in the barracks was on at full strength at all times, and was much hated.”⁷⁸