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A prisoner who had been in Moscow’s Butyrka Prison in 1933 says that while in that year there had already been 72 men in a 24-man cell, there were no fewer than 140 in November 1937.⁶⁹ In a woman’s cell supposed to hold 25, 110 women were crowded. Planks covered the entire floor and the few beds, apart from a small part of the central gangway, a table and two large latrine buckets. It was impossible for the prisoners to lie on their backs, and when lying on their sides, if one wanted to turn over, it could only be done by negotiating with the prisoners on either side to do it all together.⁷⁰ The cell in which Pugachev had been held alone before his execution was now occupied by sixty-five people.⁷¹

Most of our descriptions of prisons are those in Moscow, Leningrad, or the Ukrainian capital. The impression given is scarcely a favorable one: in the Shpalenv, a four-man cell held up to forty.⁷² But conditions seem to have been a good deal better there than in the provincial jails. Several accounts remark on prisoners from Chelyabinsk or Sverdlovsk, on arrival in the packed cells of the Butyrka, exclaiming that the place seemed a holiday camp compared with their previous experiences.⁷³ A civilian official describes being shown around Pervouralsk jail: “the stench struck me like a physical blow.”⁷⁴ Where the overflow was too great, as in some of the Siberian towns, vast pits were sometimes dug and roofed over, and the prisoners simply herded in. By the autumn of 1937, a Kharkov prison built for about 800 held about 12,000.⁷⁵ In Novosibirsk, about 270 men were crammed into a forty-square-meter ce11.⁷⁶

In the most crowded cells, conditions were literally lethal. In a letter in a recent issue of a Soviet newspaper, a survivor describes an 8-man cell in Zhitomir prison into which 160 men had been crowded. They had to stand up, pressed tightly against one another. “Five or six died every day”; the bodies “continued to stand up because there was no room to fall down.”⁷⁷

Overcrowding was treated differently in Moscow than in the provinces. In Moscow, space was gained by having the prisoners sleep under the beds and on boards between the beds. By this means, it was possible to accommodate up to three men to the square yard. In provincial prisons, beds and boards were taken out to make room for more inmates. In some, as we have seen, people slept in rows, lying on their sides; but when cells were even more crowded, half the occupants had to stand while the other half slept, packed, on the floor.⁷⁸

Each cell elected its starosta, or cell leader, who was responsible for keeping order, allocating sleeping places, and so forth. The new prisoner was put next to the reeking slop bucket, or parasha, getting better places as his seniority increased.

In the morning, a short time was given for ablution and excretion. For example, 110 women in one cell were allowed forty minutes with five lavatories and ten water taps.⁷⁹

In prisons in the big cities, at least before they became too crowded, prisoners were taken to the baths every ten days. Sufficient soap was issued. Clothing was regularly disinfected. In most of the provincial prisons, however, conditions were already filthy.

During the “Yezhovshchina,” the usual daily ration was 500 to 600 grams of black bread, 20 grams of sugar, and thin cabbage soup twice a day. In some prisons, there was also a tablespoonful of groats and hot water three times a day.

In the Butyrka, alternate days saw cabbage soup and fish soup, about a pound of black bread, and a meal of lentils, barley, or groats in the evening. This is described by a woman prisoner as being worse than what she was managing on in town after losing her husband and her son, but, even so, good in comparison with what she was to get in the camps.⁸⁰ These rations were usually delivered regularly and fully. Prison diet seems to have been calculated to be just enough to keep a more or less motionless prisoner alive.

It was unhealthy fare. But the general conditions were more unhealthy. Prisoners showed a peculiar grayish blue tinge from long confinement without light or air.⁸¹ The main diseases resulting were dysentery, scurvy, scabies, pneumonia, and heart attack. Gingivitis was universal.⁸²

But the prison administration was held strictly responsible for the actual life of every prisoner. This was taken to such paradoxical lengths that “in the same cell you would find prisoners suffering severely from the effects of interrogation about which nobody bothered, while every conceivable medicine for the prevention and cure of colds, coughs and headaches were regularly distributed.”⁸³ And great precautions were taken against suicide.