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To compensate, the prisoners at her new camp tried as best they could to “trick the bosses, to wriggle out of work, to do as little as possible.” With their relative enthusiasm for work, the newly arrived prisoners from Temlag found themselves pariahs. “From the point of view of the older inhabitants, we were fools, or something like strike-breakers. They all hated us immediately.”²⁷ Soon, of course, the women from Temlag adopted the techniques of work-avoidance already mastered by everyone else. Thus did the system itself create tufta, and not vice versa.

Sometimes, prisoners thought up methods of tufta on their own. One Polish woman worked in a Kolyma fish-processing plant where the only people who fulfilled the impossible norms were those who cheated. The Stakhanovites were simply the “cleverest cheaters”: rather than packing all of the herring, they would put a few pieces into a jar and toss the rest out, doing it “so cleverly that the foreman would never notice.” ²⁸ While helping to build a camp bathhouse, Valery Frid was shown a similar trick: how to hide cracks in the building with moss instead of filling them with concrete. He had only one regret about this labor-saving device: “What if I would one day come to wash myself in that bath? After all, the moss would dry out, and then the cold wind would blow through the cracks.”²⁹

Evgeniya Ginzburg has also described how she and her erstwhile logging partner, Galya, finally managed to fulfill their impossible tree-felling norm. Noticing that one of their colleagues always managed to reach the norm, “despite working on her own with a one-handed saw,” they asked her how she did it:

As we pressed her further, she looked around furtively and then explained:

“This forest is full of piles of timber cut by previous work gangs. No one ever counted how many there are.”

“Yes, but anyone can see that they’re not freshly cut . . .”

“The only reason you can see it is that the cross sections are dark in color. If you saw off a small section at each end, it looks as if it has just been cut. Then you stack them up in another place, and there’s your ‘norm.’”

This trick, which we christened “freshening up the sandwiches,” saved our lives for the time being . . . I may add that we did not feel the slightest compunction . . .³⁰

Thomas Sgovio also spent time in a Kolyma tree-felling brigade which, quite simply, did nothing at all:

During the first part of January, my partner Levin and I did not fell a single tree. Neither did any of the others in the lumber brigade. There were many log-piles in the forest. We selected one or two, cleaned off the snow and sat down by the fire. There was even no need to clean off the snow, because not once during the first month did the brigadier, foreman, or overseer come to check our work output.³¹

Others used connections and relationships to find their way around impossible work assignments. One prisoner in Kargopollag paid another—the payment took the form of a chunk of lard—to teach him how to cut trees more efficiently, thereby enabling him to fulfill the norm, and even to rest in the afternoons.³² Another prisoner assigned to pan for gold in Kolyma paid a bribe to be given an easier job, standing on a slag heap instead of standing in the water.³³