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The waiting outside in the frost for those inside to come out—then came the changing room where it was cold—the compulsory disinfections and fumigating process where we tossed our rags in a heap—you never got your own back—the fighting and swearing, “you son-of-a-bitch that’s my jacket”—selecting the damp, collective underwear filled with lice eggs in the seams—the shaving of hairs on the body by the Camp Barber . . . then, when it was finally our turn to enter the washing room, we picked up a wooden tub, received a cup of hot water, a cup of cold water, and a small piece of black, evil-smelling soap ... ¹⁰⁵

Then, after it was all over, the same humiliating process of handing out clothes began all over again, wrote Shalamov, ever-obsessive on the issue of underwear: “Having washed themselves, the men gather at the window far in advance of the actual distribution of underwear. Over and over again they discuss in detail the underwear they received last time, the underwear received five years ago in Bamlag . . .”¹⁰⁶

Inevitably, the right to bathe in relative comfort also became intimately intertwined with the system of privilege. In Temlag, for example, those employed in particular jobs had the right to bathe more often.¹⁰⁷ The very job of bathhouse worker, which implied both proximity to clean water and the right to allow or deny others such proximity, was usually one of the most sought-after jobs in the camp. In the end, despite the strictest, severest, and most drastic orders from Moscow, prisoners’ comfort, hygiene, and health were completely dependent on local whims and circumstances.

Thus was another aspect of ordinary life turned inside out, turned from a simple pleasure into what Shalamov calls “a negative event, a burden in the convict’s life . . . a testimony of that shift of values which is the main quality that the camp instills in its inmates ...” ¹⁰⁸

STOLOVAYA: THE DINING HALL

The vast Gulag literature contains many varied descriptions of camps, and reflects the experiences of a wide range of personalities. But one aspect of camp life remains consistent from camp to camp, from year to year, from memoir to memoir: the descriptions of the balanda, the soup that prisoners were served once or sometimes twice a day.

Universally, former prisoners agree that the taste of the daily or twice-daily half-liter of prison soup was revolting; its consistency was watery, and its contents were suspect. Galina Levinson wrote that it was made “from spoiled cabbage and potatoes, sometimes with a piece of pig fat, sometimes with herring heads.”¹⁰⁹ Barbara Armonas remembered soup made from “fish or animal lungs and a few potatoes.”¹¹⁰ Leonid Sitko described the soup as “never having any meat in it at all.”¹¹¹

Another prisoner remembered soup made from dog meat, which one of his co-workers, a Frenchman, could not eat: “a man from Western countries is not always able to cross a psychological barrier, even when he is starving,” he concluded.¹¹² Even Lazar Kogan, the boss of Dmitlag, once complained that “Some cooks act as if they were not preparing Soviet meals, but rather pig slops. Thanks to this attitude, the food they prepare is unsuitable, and often tasteless and bland.”¹¹³

Hunger was a powerful motivator nevertheless: the soup might have been inedible under normal circumstances, but in the camps, where most people were always hungry, prisoners ate it with relish. Nor was their hunger accidental: prisoners were kept hungry, because regulation of prisoners’ food was, after regulation of prisoners’ time and living space, the camp administration’s most important tool of control.

For that reason, the distribution of food to prisoners in camps grew into quite an elaborate science. The exact norms for particular categories of prisoners and camp workers were set in Moscow, and frequently changed. The Gulag administration constantly fine-tuned its figures, calculating and recalculating the minimum quantity of food necessary for prisoners to continue working. New orders listing ration levels were issued to camp commanders with great frequency. These ultimately became long, complex documents, written in heavy, bureaucratic language.