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The starving also experienced stomach problems, dizziness, and grotesque swelling of the legs. Thomas Sgovio, who came to the brink of starvation before recovering, woke up one morning to discover that one of his legs was “purple, twice the size of the other leg. It itched. There were blotches all over it.” Soon, “the blotches turned into huge boils. Blood and pus trickled from them. When I pressed a finger into the purple flesh—an indentation remained for a long time.” When Sgovio found his legs could not fit into his boots, he was told to slit the boots.⁵

In the final stages of starvation, the dokhodyagi took on a bizarre and inhuman appearance, becoming the physical fulfillment of the dehumanizing rhetoric used by the state: in their dying days, enemies of the people ceased, in other words, to be people at all. They became demented, often ranting and raving for hours. Their skin was loose and dry. Their eyes had a strange gleam. They ate anything they could get their hands on—birds, dogs, garbage. They moved slowly, and could not control their bowels or their bladders, as a result of which they emitted a terrible odor. Tamara Petkevich describes the first time she saw them:

There behind the barbed wire was a row of creatures, distantly reminiscent of human beings . . . there were ten of them, skeletons of various sizes covered with brown, parchment-like skin, all stripped to the waist, with shaved heads and pendulous withered breasts. Their only clothing was some pathetic dirty underpants, and their shinbones projected from concave circles of emptiness. Women! Hunger, heat and hard toil had transformed them into dried specimens that still, unaccountably, clung to the last vestiges of life.⁶

Varlam Shalamov has also left an unforgettable poetic description of the dokhodyagi, invoking their similarity to one another, their loss of identifying, humanizing characteristics, and their anonymity, which was part of the horror they inspired:

I raise my glass to a road in the forest

To those who fall on their way

To those who can’t drag themselves farther

But are forced to drag on

To their bluish hard lips

To their identical faces

To their torn, frost-covered coats

To their hands without gloves

To the water they sip, from an old tin can

To the scurvy which sticks to their teeth.

To the teeth of fattened gray dogs

Which awake them in the morning

To the sullen sun,

Which regards them without interest

To the snow-white tombstones,

The work of clever snowstorms

To the ration of raw, sticky bread

Swallowed quickly

To the pale, too-high sky

To the Ayan-Yuryakh river!⁷

But the term dokhodyaga, as it was used in the Soviet camps, did not merely describe a physical state. The “goners,” as Sgovio has explained, were not just ill: they were prisoners who had reached a level of starvation so intense that they no longer looked after themselves. This deterioration usually progressed in stages, as prisoners stopped washing themselves, stopped controlling their bowels, stopped having normal human reactions to insults—until they became, quite literally, insane with hunger. Sgovio was deeply shocked the first time he met someone in this state, an American communist named Eisenstein, a man who had been an acquaintance in Moscow: