Gulag

Order was maintained—just as order is maintained in most prisons— through the rigid regulation of daily life. Zayara Vesyolaya, the daughter of a famous Russian writer and “enemy,” described in her memoirs a typical day in Lubyanka. It began with opravka, a trip to the toilets. “‘Prepare for the toilet!’ shouts the guard, and the women would silently line up, in pairs. Once in the toilets, they were given about ten minutes—not only to eliminate but also to wash themselves and whatever clothes they could. Opravka was then followed by breakfast: hot water, perhaps with something resembling tea or coffee mixed in, plus the daily bread ration, plus two or three pieces of sugar. Breakfast was followed by a visit from a guard, who took requests to see the doctor, and then by the ‘central activity of the day,’ a twenty-minute walk in a ‘small enclosed yard, walking single file in circles next to the wall.’” Only once was order broken. Although she was never told why, Vesyolaya was taken onto the Lubyanka roof one evening, after prisoners had already been told to sleep. As Lubyanka is in the center of Moscow, that meant she could see, if not the city, then at least the city lights—which might as well have belonged to another country.²⁶

Normally, however, the rest of the day was a repeat: lunch—prison soup, made of entrails or grain or rotten cabbage—and then the same soup for supper. There was another trip to the toilet in the evening. In between, prisoners whispered to one another, sat on their bunks, and sometimes read books. Vesyolaya recalls being allowed one book a week, but the rules varied from prison to prison, as did the quality of the prison libraries, which, as I say, were sometimes excellent. In some prisons, inmates were allowed to purchase food items from the “commissary” if their relatives had sent them money.

But there were other tortures besides boredom and bad food. All prisoners were forbidden to sleep during the day—not just those undergoing interrogation. Warders kept constant vigil, peeping through the “Judas hole,” the peephole into the cell, to ensure this rule was kept. Lyubov Bershadskaya recalls that although “we were woken at six, we were not allowed even to sit on the bed until eleven in the evening. We had either to walk, or to sit on the stool, not leaning against the wall.” ²⁷

Nights were no better. Sleep was made difficult, if not impossible, by the bright lights in the cells, which were never turned off, and by the rule forbidding prisoners to sleep with their hands under their blankets. Vesyolaya would start out trying to comply: “It was awkward and uncomfortable, and made it hard for me to fall asleep . . . as soon as I dozed off, however, I would instinctively pull the blanket up to my chin. The key would grate in the lock, and the guard would shake my bed: ‘Hands!’”²⁸ Buber-Neumann wrote that “until you got used to it, the night was worse than the day. Try to sleep at night under strong electric light—prisoners are not allowed to cover their faces—on bare planks without even a straw sack or a pillow, and perhaps without even a blanket, pressed against your fellow prisoners on either side.”

Perhaps the most effective tool for preventing prisoners from becoming too comfortable in their surroundings was the presence of informers—who were also to be found in all spheres of Soviet life. They would also play an important role in the camps, but in camps they would be easier to avoid. In prison, one could not walk away from them so easily, and they forced people to watch their words carefully. Buber-Neumann recalled that, with one exception, “I never heard a word of criticism of the Soviet regime from a Russian prisoner the whole time I was in Butyrka.”²⁹

Among the prisoners, the accepted wisdom was that there was at least one informer in every cell. When there were two people in a cell, both suspected the other. In larger cells the informer was often identified and shunned by the other inmates. When Olga Adamova-Sliozberg first arrived in Butyrka, she noticed a free sleeping space beside the window. She was welcome to sleep there, she was told, “but you won’t have the best of neighbors.” The woman sleeping with no one around her was, it emerged, an informer who spent all her time “writing statements denouncing everyone in the cell, so no one talks to her.”

Not all informers were so easily identified, and paranoia was so great that any unusual behavior could spark hostility. Adamova-Sliozberg herself assumed that one of her fellow inmates was certainly a spy, having seen the “foreign-looking sponge she washed with and the lacy underwear she wore.” Later, she came to look upon the woman as a friend. ³⁰ The writer Varlam Shalamov also wrote that being transferred within a prison, between cells, “is not a very pleasant experience. This always puts one’s new cellmates on their guard and causes them to suspect that the transferred prisoner is an informer.”³¹