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The fascination of the norm was not the exclusive privilege of the free men who imposed it, but also the dominating instinct of the slaves who worked to it. In those brigades where the work was done by teams of men working together, the most conscientious and fervent foremen were the prisoners themselves, for there the norm was reckoned collectively by dividing the total output by the number of workers. Any feeling of mutual friendliness was completely abolished in favor of a race for percentages. An unqualified prisoner who found himself assigned to a coordinated team of experienced workers could not expect to have any consideration shown to him; after a short struggle he was forced to give up and transfer to a team in which he in his turn frequently had to watch over weaker comrades. There was in all this something inhuman, mercilessly breaking the only natural bond between prisoners—their solidarity in face of their persecutors.²⁴

But hard work sometimes backfired. Lev Razgon described peasants who killed themselves trying to overfulfill the norm, earning themselves a “big ration,” 1.5 kilos of bread: “It may have been raw and badly baked, but it was real bread. For peasants who had lived in semi-starvation for years this appeared an enormous quantity, even without any cooked food.” Yet even this “enormous quantity” of food did not make up for the energy expended in doing the forestry work. The forest worker was thus condemned, Razgon wrote: “quite literally, he would starve to death while eating one and a half kilos of bread a day.”²⁵ Varlam Shalamov has also described the “myth of the big ration,” and Solzhenitsyn wrote that “the big ration is the one that kills. In one season of hauling timber the strongest slogger would end up a hopeless last-legger himself.”²⁶

Nevertheless, the vast majority of memoirists (backed up, to a degree, by archival evidence) do indeed speak of avoiding work. Yet their primary motive was not usually mere sloth, or even the desire to “show scorn” for the Soviet system: their primary motive was survival. Having been given poor clothing and insufficient food, having been ordered to work in extreme weather with broken machinery, many realized that avoiding work would save their lives.

The unpublished memoir of Zinaida Usova, one of the wives arrested in 1938, illustrates beautifully how prisoners came to this conclusion. Usova was first placed in Temlag, a camp which mostly contained women like herself, the wives of leading Party members and army bigwigs who had been shot. With a relatively easygoing camp boss and reasonable work schedule, everyone in Temlag worked enthusiastically. Not only were most still “loyal Soviet citizens,” convinced that their arrests had been part of a giant mistake, but they also believed that by working hard they would earn an early release. Usova herself “went to sleep and woke up with thoughts of work, thinking through my designs. One of them was even taken into production.”

Later, however, Usova and a group of other wives moved to another camp, one which also contained criminals. There she found herself working in a furniture factory. Her new camp had much higher, much stricter norms—the “unreasonable” norms spoken of by so many other prisoners. This system, wrote Usova, “made people into slaves, with the psychology of slaves.” Only those who completed the whole norm received the full bread ration of 700 grams. Those who could not, or who were unable to work at all, got 300, barely enough to live on.