Gulag Voices by Anne Applebaum Read Free Book Online Page A

square, standing in ranks of fives, waiting to be counted. The guards often made mistakes, and then there had to be a second count. On a morning when it was snowing this was a long, cold, agonizing process. If the guards were wide awake and concentrating, the count usually took about thirty minutes, but if they miscounted, we could stand for anything up to an hour.
    The guards having satisfied themselves that the right number of bodies was present on the square, the brigadier (foreman) was dispatched to collect the bread for the day. From the beginning we were split into working parties of thirty men—a “brigade”—each brigade having its foreman, or brigadier. He was nominally responsible for the group of thirty men. His duties included the distribution of the day’s ration of bread, supervision of the group, and allocation of work in the forest. At night, the day’s work done, he reported to the office with the figures of work accomplished by each man during the day. These returns handed in every evening by the brigadier were the difference between life and death for prisoners. The amount of work done determined the amount of bread each prisoner received on the following day. A hundred percent return—a physical impossibility for most men (although there were those who managed to bribe the brigadier with tobacco or other smuggled delicacies, to juggle the figures, a very risky business as if caught the brigadier stood to lose his privileged position)—earned 900 grams of bread (about 2 lbs). On average, at least in the early months of captivity while they still remained fairly healthy, men could accomplish 75 percent and earned 800 grams [28 ounces] of bread; 50 percent, 700 grams [25 ounces], under 50 percent, 300 grams [101⁄2 ounces]. Made of rye which had not been thoroughly cleaned, it was literally “black” bread because the bran left in it colored the bread black and made its texture coarse. The source of life, it was carefully hoarded through the day. A little with the breakfast soup, a few bites during the short break at dinnertime (midday), more with the soup in the evening to stave off the pangs of hunger in the freezing night.
    If a prisoner stole clothes, tobacco, or almost anything else and was discovered, he could expect a beating from his fellow prisoners, but the unwritten law of the camp—and I have heard from men from other camps that it was the same everywhere—was that a prisoner caught stealing another’s bread earned a death sentence! It might not happen straight away, but by some means or other he would be killed—an “accident” was not difficult to arrange in the forest.
    There was one other duty the brigadier had each day, and that was to decide who should be the duty man ( dnyevalny ). This was a job much coveted as it meant staying in the camp all day to tend the fire in the barrack, sweeping the dirt floor, filling the water buckets, and various other simple jobs. The job of dnyevalny was supposed to be allocated on a rota system, but in practice the brigadier was instructed to pick the dnyevalny for the day from the men in his group who were not strong, or ill and therefore weak. Over the months an element of bribery entered into it, and men fought tooth and nail about who should be chosen.
    Having received our ration of bread each morning from the brigadier we joined a queue outside the cookhouse, this time for soup. There was a relatively large dining hall with rough wooden tables and benches next door to the cookhouse, which accommodated about three hundred men at a time, and sometimes if there was room I ate my breakfast as well as my evening meal there, but more often than not I carried my soup tin back to the barrack hut and ate there, sitting on my bunk.
    Distributing food and the eating of it with so many men took quite a long time and it was usually about 5:30 A.M. when we were ready for work. The really old and seriously ill were allocated jobs inside the camp. They