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This level was called the “kolkhoz sector,” and it was to this level that the thieves forced the kolkhozniki— various aged intellectuals and priests, that is, and even some of their own, who had broken the theives’ moral code. On to them fell not only things from the upper and lower bunks: the thieves also poured slops, water, yesterday’s soup. And the kolkhoz sector had to tolerate all of this, for if they complained they would receive even more filth . . . people became sick, suffocated, lost consciousness, went crazy, died of typhus, dysentery, killed themselves. ⁸⁵

Prisoners, even political prisoners, could nevertheless better their circumstances. While working as a feldsher, Karol Colonna-Czosnowski, a Polish political prisoner, was picked out of an extremely crowded barrack by Grisha, the criminal “boss” of the camp: “He gave a majestic kick to one of his courtiers who took it for an order to make room for me and promptly abandoned his seat. I was embarrassed and protested that I would rather not sit so near the fire, but this was not in conformity with my host’s wishes, as I discovered when one of Grisha’s followers gave me a mighty push.” When he had regained his balance, he found himself sitting on the couch at Grisha’s feet: “This was, apparently, where he wanted me to remain . . .”⁸⁶ Colonna-Czosnowski did not argue. Even for a few hours, where one sat, or laid one’s head, mattered intensely.

BANYA: THE BATHHOUSE

Dirt, crowding, and poor hygiene led to a plague of bedbugs and lice. In the 1930s, a “humorous” cartoon in Perekovka, the newspaper of the Moscow–Volga Canal, featured a zek being handed new clothes. Beneath was the caption, “They give you ‘clean’ clothes, but they are full of lice.” Another was captioned “And while you sleep in the barracks, the bedbugs bite like black crabs.”⁸⁷ Nor did the problem lessen over the years. One Polish prisoner records that, during the war, his camp acquaintance became obsessed with them: “As a biologist, he was interested in how many lice could subsist on a certain space. Counting them on his shirt he found sixty, and an hour later another sixty.”⁸⁸

By the 1940s, the Gulag’s masters had long recognized the lethal danger of louse-borne typhus and, officially, conducted a constant battle against parasites. Baths were supposedly mandatory every ten days. All clothing was supposed to be boiled in disinfection units, both on entering the camp and then at regular intervals, to destroy all vermin.⁸⁹ As we have seen, camp barbers shaved the entire bodies of both men and women on entry into the camps, and their heads regularly thereafter. Soap, albeit tiny amounts of it, was regularly included in lists of products to be distributed to prisoners: in 1944, for example, this amounted to 200 grams per month, per prisoner. Women, prisoners’ children, and prisoners in hospitals were allotted an extra 50 grams, juveniles received an extra 100 grams, and prisoners working at “especially dirty jobs” received an extra 200 grams. These tiny slivers were meant both for personal hygiene and for the washing of linen and clothes.⁹⁰ (Soap did not become any less scarce, inside or outside the camps. As late as 1991, Soviet coal miners went on strike because, among other things, they had no soap.)

Nevertheless, not everyone was convinced of the efficacy of the camp’s delousing procedures. In practice, wrote one prisoner, “the baths seemed to increase the lice’s sexual vigor.”⁹¹ Varlam Shalamov went further: “Not only was the delousing absolutely useless, no lice are killed by this disinfection chamber. It’s only a formality and the apparatus has been created for the purpose of tormenting the convict still more.”⁹²