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Yet Shalamov was not entirely wrong either in his cynical description of the hygiene system. For even if they were instructed to take bathing seriously, it often happened that local camp administrators merely observed the rituals of delousing and bathing, without appearing to care much about the result. Either there was not enough coal to keep the disinfection apparatus hot enough; or those in charge could not be bothered to do it properly; or there were no soap rations issued for months on end; or the rations were stolen. At the Dizelny lagpunkt in Kolyma, on bath days they “gave every prisoner a small sliver of soap and a large mug of warm water. They poured five or six of these mugs into a tub, and that sufficed for everyone, for the washing and rinsing of five or six people.” At the Sopka lagpunkt , “water was brought there, like other freight, along the narrow railway and narrow road. In the winter they got it from snow, although there wasn’t much snow there, the wind blew it away . . . Workers came back from the mine covered in dust, and there were no sinks to wash in.” ¹⁰¹

Frequently, guards were bored by the process of bathing the prisoners, and allowed them only a few minutes in the baths, for formality’s sake. ¹⁰² At a Siblag lagpunkt in 1941, an outraged inspector found that “prisoners have not bathed for two months,” thanks to the sheer disinterest of the guards.¹⁰³ And in the worst camps, open neglect of the prisoners’ humanity did indeed make bathing a torture. Many describe the awfulness of bathing, but none quite so well as, again, Shalamov, who devotes an entire short story to the horrors of the baths of Kolyma. Despite their exhaustion, prisoners would have to wait for hours to take their turn: “Bathhouse sessions are arranged either before or after work. After many hours of work in the cold (and it’s no easier in the summer) when all thoughts and hopes are concentrated on the desire to reach one’s bunk and food so as to fall asleep as soon as possible, the bath-house delay is almost unendurable.”

First, the zeks would stand in lines, outside in the cold; then they would be herded into crowded dressing rooms, built for fifteen people and containing up to a hundred. All the while they knew that their barracks were being cleaned and searched. Their meager possessions, including crockery and footrags, were being tossed into the snow:

It is characteristic of man, be he beggar or Nobel laureate, that he quickly acquires petty things. The same is true of the convict. He is, after all, a working man and needs a needle and material for patches, and an extra bowl perhaps. All this is cast out and then re-accumulated after each bathhouse day, unless it is buried somewhere deep in the snow.

Once inside the baths themselves, there was often so little water that it was impossible to get clean. Prisoners were given “a wooden basin with not very hot water . . . there is no extra water and no one can buy any.” Nor were the bathhouses heated: “The feeling of cold is increased by a thousand drafts from under the doors, from the cracks. The baths were not fully heated; they had cracks in the walls.” Inside, there is also “constant uproar accompanied by smoke, crowding, and shouting; there’s even a common turn of speech: ‘to shout as in the bathhouse.’” ¹⁰⁴

Thomas Sgovio also describes this hellish scene, writing that prisoners in Kolyma sometimes had to be beaten in order to make them go to the baths: