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Tufta could also be organized higher up the administrative hierarchy, through careful negotiations between brigadiers and norm-setters, the camp functionaries whose job it was to determine how much a brigade should or should not be able to achieve in one day. Norm-setters, like brigadiers, were very prone to favoritism and bribery—as well as to whim. In Kolyma in the late 1930s, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg found herself appointed brigadier, head of a women’s ditch-digging brigade composed mostly of political prisoners, all weakened by long jail sentences. When, after three days’ work, they had completed just 3 percent of the norm, she went to the norm-setter and begged for an easier assignment. Upon hearing that the weak brigade was mostly composed of former Party members, his face darkened.

“Oh yes, former members of the Party, are they? Now, if you’d been prostitutes, I’d have been happy to let you wash windows and do three times the norm. When those Party members in 1929 decided to punish me for being a kulak, threw me and my six children out of our home, I said to them, ‘What’ve the children ever done?’ and they told me, ‘That’s the Soviet law.’ So there you are, you can stick to your Soviet law and dig nine cubic meters of mud a day.”³⁸

Norm-setters were also aware of the need to conserve the workforce at certain times—if, for example, the camp had been criticized for its high mortality rates, or when the camp was one of those in the far north which could only get replacement workers once a season. In such circumstances, they might indeed lower the norm, or turn a blind eye when it was not fulfilled. This practice was known in the camps as “norm-stretching,” and to call it widespread is an understatement.³⁹ One prisoner worked in a mine which required prisoners to dig 5.5 tons of coal every day, an impossible task. Sensibly, the mine’s chief engineer—a free worker—asked around to find out how many prisoners ought to be fulfilling the norm every day, and simply told his norm-setters to make their decisions about how much had actually been done on that basis, rotating the shock-worker distinction among all of the prisoners so that they all got more or less the same amount of food.⁴⁰

Bribery also worked higher up the hierarchy, sometimes through an entire chain of people. Alexander Klein was in a camp in the late 1940s, at a time when small salaries were introduced to inspire zeks to work harder:

Having received his earned money (it wasn’t much) the worker gave a bribe to the brigadier. This was obligatory: the brigadier then had to give a bribe to the foreman and the norm-setter, who determined what norm had been fulfilled by the brigade . . . aside from this, the foreman and the brigadiers had to give bribes to the naryadshchik, the work-assigner. The cooks also paid bribes to the chief cook, and the bathhouse workers to the director of the bathhouse.

On average, wrote Klein, he gave away half of his “salary.” The consequences for those who did not could be dire. Those inmates who failed to pay up were automatically put down as having achieved a lower percentage of the norm, and therefore received less food. Brigadiers who did not want to pay suffered worse. One, wrote Klein, was murdered in his bed. His head was bashed in with a rock—and those sleeping around him did not even wake up.⁴¹