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A Dying Zek: a portrait by Sergei Reikhenberg, Magadan, date unknown

Even when deaths were recorded, the records were not always honest. One way or another, camp commanders made sure that doctors writing out prisoner death certificates did not write “starvation” as the primary cause of death. The surgeon Isaac Vogelfanger was, for example, explicitly ordered to write “failure of the heart muscle” no matter what the real cause of a prisoner’s death.²⁶ This could backfire: in one camp, the doctors listed so many cases of “heart attack” that the inspectorate became suspicious. The prosecutors forced the doctors to dig up the corpses, establishing that they had, in fact, died of pellagra. ²⁷ Not all such chaos was deliberate: in another camp, the records were in such disarray that an inspector complained that “the dead are counted as living prisoners, escapees as imprisoned and vice versa.” ²⁸

Prisoners were often kept deliberately ignorant of the facts of death as well. Although death could not be hidden altogether—one prisoner spoke of corpses lying “in a pile by the fence until the thaw” ²⁹—it could be shrouded in other ways. In many camps, corpses were removed at night, and taken to secret locations. It was only by accident that Edward Buca, forced to stay working late to meet his norm, saw what happened to corpses at Vorkuta:

After they had been stacked like timber in an open-sided shed until enough had accumulated for a mass burial in the camp cemetery, they were loaded, naked, on to sledges, heads on the outside, feet inside. Each body bore a wooden tag, a birka, tied to the big toe of the right foot, bearing its name and number. Before each sledge left the camp gate, the nadziratel, an NKVD officer, took a pickaxe and smashed in each head. This was to ensure that no one got out alive. Once outside the camp, the bodies were dumped into a transeya, one of several broad ditches dug during summer for this purpose. But as the number of dead mounted, the procedure for making certain they were really dead changed. Instead of smashing heads with a pickaxe, the guards used a szompol, a thick wire with a sharpened point, which they stuck into each body. Apparently this was easier than swinging the pick.³⁰

Mass burials may have also been kept secret because they too were technically forbidden—which is not to say they were uncommon. Former camp sites all over Russia contain evidence of what were clearly mass graves, and from time to time, the graves even re-emerge: the far northern permafrost not only preserves bodies, sometimes in eerily pristine condition, but it also shifts and moves with the annual freezes and thaws, as Varlam Shalamov writes: “The north resisted with all its strength this work of man, not accepting the corpses into its bowels . . . the earth opened, bearing its subterranean storerooms, for they contained not only gold and lead, tungsten and uranium, but also undecaying human bodies.”³¹

Nevertheless, they were not supposed to be there and in 1946, the Gulag administration sent out an order to all camp commanders, instructing them to bury corpses separately, in funeral linen, and in graves which were no less than 1.5 meters deep. The location of the bodies was also meant to be marked not with a name, but with a number. Only the camp’s record-keepers were supposed to know who was buried where.³²

All of which sounds very civilized—except that another order gave camps permission to remove the dead prisoners’ gold teeth. These removals were meant to take place under the aegis of a commission, containing representatives of the camp medical services, the camp administration, and the camp financial department. The gold was then supposed to be taken to the nearest state bank. It is hard to imagine, however, that such commissions met very frequently. The more straightforward theft of gold teeth was simply too easy to carry out, too easy to hide, in a world where there were too many corpses. ³³

For there were too many corpses—and this, finally, was the terrifying thing about a prison death, as Herling wrote: