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Even among those who avoided the cells, all the deficiency diseases were rife. Solzhenitsyn’s hero, who had lost teeth from scurvy in the Ust-Izhma camp in Pechora “at a time when he thought he was on his last legs,”¹⁰⁶ was lucky enough to recover. With scurvy, wounds opened and abscesses suppurated. Pellagra was equally common. Pneumonia, usually fatal, was a normal hazard. And the direct effects of undernourishment, “swelling of the feet and face, and, in its final and lethal stage, swelling of the abdomen,” were constantly to be seen.¹⁰⁷ In the farming camps, epidemics of brucellosis are reported.¹⁰⁸ In the northern camps, gangrene, resulting in amputation, was frequent.¹⁰⁹ Tuberculosis was often the immediate cause of death. After about two years, women prisoners tended to develop a continuous hemorrhage of the womb.”¹¹⁰

It later became routine, when a corpse was taken to the morgue, “to crack his skull with a big wooden mallet to make sure.”¹¹¹

Escapes were occasionally made, but very seldom with any success. They were acts of desperation; but, of course, there was enough desperation to produce them. In the Pechora area, the NKVD offered a reward of eleven pounds of wheat to anyone turning in an escaped prisoner. In the early 1930s, escaped prisoners in other regions were sometimes sheltered by the peasantry, but this was very seldom true among the terrorized kolkhozniks of the Purge period. There were, nevertheless, rare successes. Gypsies, in particular, sometimes reached encampments of their own race where its solidarity saved them from discovery. And odd individuals, like the Spanish Communist general El Campesino, made completely successful escapes.

Recaptured prisoners were always brutally manhandled, and almost invariably shot.

For any escape on the march to the camps from the railheads, the guards were charged with complicity and sentenced to two or three years, which they continued to serve as guards but without pay. This made them extremely vigilant. In the camps, too, “if anybody got out it was hell on the guards and they kept on the go without food or sleep. It made ‘em so mad they often didn’t bring the fellow back alive.”¹¹²

One consequence of this vigilance was continual counting of prisoners:

The lieutenant stood still and watched. He’d come outside to double-check the count. That was the routine when they left the camp.

The men meant more to a guard than gold. If there was one man missing on the other side of the wire, he’d soon be taking his place.…¹¹³

They counted you twice on the way out—once with the gates still shut, so they knew if they could open them, and then a second time, when you were going through the gates. And if they thought there was something wrong, they did a recount outside.”¹¹⁴

This is one of several interesting parallels with Dostoevsky’s account of forced labor in the 1840s, in The House of the Dead:

The prisoners are lined up, counted and called over at dawn, midday and nightfall, and sometimes more often during the day, depending on the suspicions of the guards and their ability to count. The guards often made mistakes, counted wrongly, went away and then came back again. Eventually the wretched guards would succeed in arriving at the right figure and lock up the hut.

In a general comparison between this century and the last, we note that in Dostoevsky’s time prisoners had considerably more freedom of action inside the camp, and were not under such strict guard outside either, though Dostoevsky mentions that his convicts are serving “incomparably” the worst of the three types of hard labor. With the exception that in Dostoevsky’s camp the main sanction is frightful floggings, which sometimes result in death, rather than the “isolators,” the life of the convict was on the whole preferable in his descriptions to those of Solzhenitsyn and the others. Each convict has his own box with a lock and key. Prisoners keep domestic animals. They do not work on Sundays or feast days, or even on their own name days. Jews and Moslems have parallel privileges. The food is greatly superior, and prisoners on the sick list go into town to buy “tobacco, tea, beef; on Christmas Day, suckling-pig, even goose.” They even have enough bread to spare for the horse of the water carrier.

The convicts in The House of the Dead are all, indeed, really guilty of one or another offense—often murder, like the hero Goryanchikov—though there are about a dozen political prisoners out of thirty.