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Almost every account quotes cases of people who remained devoted to “the Party and the Government” and attributed their arrest to error.⁷⁰ These bored and annoyed the other prisoners considerably. In some cases, though not in all, they turned informer. There were, in any case, a number of these by common NKVD practice. Informers who were recognized as such were always killed sooner or later. If the NKVD had been unable to extricate them in time, it made no complaint about their deaths. Herling gives an account of a revenge taken on a notorious former NKVD interrogator who was recognized in the camp, and when badly beaten up, but not killed, complained to the guards, who did nothing to save him so that he was finally killed a month later after endless persecution and attempts to appeal.

BEHIND THE WIRE

Reveille is usually reported as at 5:00 A.M.—a hammer pounding on a rail outside camp headquarters. Anyone caught a few minutes late getting up could be sentenced on the spot to a few days in the isolator. In the winter, it would still be dark. Searchlights would be “crisscrossing over the compound from the watchtowers at the far corners.”⁷¹ Apart from the guards and the barbed wire, most camps also relied on dogs, their long chains fastened by a ring to a wire running from watchtower to watchtower. The noise of the ring screeching along the wire was a continual background.⁷²

The prisoners’ first thought, all day, was of food, and it is now that the breakfast, the best meal of the day, was served. (We will consider food, the center of the entire norm system and the key to Stalin’s plans for efficient slave labor, later.)

Then they were assembled and marched off to work, in gangs of twenty or thirty. The order (known to prisoners as “the prayer”)⁷³ would be given:

Your attention, prisoners! You will keep strict column order on the line of march! You will not straggle or bunch up. You will not change places from one rank of five to another. You will not talk or look around to either side, and you will keep your arms behind you! A step to right or left will be considered an attempt to escape, and the escort will open fire without warning! First rank, forward march!⁷⁴

Apart from sleeping, the prisoners’ time was their own only for ten minutes at breakfast, five minutes at the noon break, and another five minutes at supper.⁷⁵ They lost so much sleep that they fell asleep instantly if they found a warm spot, and on the Sundays they got off, which was not every Sunday, they slept as much as they could.⁷⁶

The shoe situation varied. “There’d been times when they’d gone around all winter without any felt boots at all, times when they hadn’t even seen ordinary boots, but only shoes made of birch bark or shoes of the ‘Chelyabinsk Tractor Factory model’” (that is, made of strips of tires that left marks of the treads behind them).⁷⁷

Clothes were usually carefully patched and repaired: “rags tied around them with all their bits of string and their faces wrapped in rags from chin to eyes to protect them from the cold….”⁷⁸

Ulcers are reported as common, through filthy clothes. Clothing was cleaned and disinfected occasionally, and baths were also provided. Solzhenitsyn implies that in the penal camp he describes, a bath was available about every two weeks.⁷⁹ But often there was “no soap for either bathing or laundry.”⁸⁰

To go sick for the odd day was possible with a minor complaint. But to be recognized as sick and put on a sick diet was usually fatal. In any case, even a man feeling ill might not be allowed to go sick, as there was a quota: “He was allowed to excuse only two men in the morning, and he’d already excused them.”⁸¹ As a rule, the infirmary took in only those who were plainly dying—“and not all of them,” a Soviet woman writer recalls.⁸²

In one camp, still under construction, a sick inspection is described:

The naryadchik and the lekpom [medical assistant], armed with clubs, enter the pit. The chief asks the first man he sees why he does not come out. ‘I am sick,’ is the answer. The lekpom feels his pulse and pronounces him all right. Then blows shower upon the man and he is kicked out into the open. ‘Why don’t you go to work?’ the chief asks the next man. ‘I am sick,’ is the stubborn answer. The day before, this prisoner went to the lekpom and gave him his last dirty louse-infected shirt. The lekpom feels his pulse and finds high fever. He is released from work. A third man replies that he has neither clothes nor shoes. ‘Take the clothes and shoes from the sick one,’ the chief rules sententiously. The sick one refuses, whereupon his things are taken off him by force.⁸³