The schedule of camp life one day Ivan Denisovich. Camp life in A. I. Solzhenitsyn's story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Labor Reward

The peasant and front-line soldier Ivan Denisovich Shukhov turned out to be a "state criminal", a "spy" and ended up in one of Stalin's camps, like millions of Soviet people who were convicted without guilt during the "cult of personality" and mass repressions. He left home on June 23, 1941, on the second day after the start of the war with Nazi Germany, “... in February of the forty-second year, on the North-Western [front], they surrounded their entire army, and they didn’t throw anything to eat from the planes, and there were no planes. They got to the point that they cut hooves from horses that had died, soaked that cornea in water and ate, ”that is, the command of the Red Army left its soldiers to die surrounded. Together with a group of fighters, Shukhov ended up in German captivity, fled from the Germans and miraculously reached his own. A careless story about how he was captured led him to a Soviet concentration camp, since the state security agencies indiscriminately considered all those who escaped from captivity to be spies and saboteurs.

The second part of Shukhov's memoirs and reflections during the long camp work and a short rest in the barracks refers to his life in the countryside. From the fact that his relatives do not send him food (in a letter to his wife he himself refused to send parcels), we understand that the people in the village are starving no less than in the camp. His wife writes to Shukhov that the collective farmers make a living painting fake carpets and selling them to the townspeople.

Leaving aside flashbacks and incidental details about life outside the barbed wire, the whole story takes exactly one day. In this short period of time, a panorama of camp life unfolds before us, a kind of “encyclopedia” of life in the camp.

Firstly, a whole gallery of social types and at the same time bright human characters: Caesar is a metropolitan intellectual, a former filmmaker, who, however, in the camp leads a "lordly" life compared to Shukhov: he receives food parcels, enjoys some benefits during work ; Kavtorang - repressed naval officer; an old convict who was still in tsarist prisons and hard labor (the old revolutionary guard, who did not find a common language with the policy of Bolshevism in the 30s); Estonians and Latvians - the so-called "bourgeois nationalists"; the Baptist Alyosha - the spokesman for the thoughts and way of life of a very heterogeneous religious Russia; Gopchik is a sixteen-year-old teenager whose fate shows that repression did not distinguish between children and adults. Yes, and Shukhov himself is a characteristic representative of the Russian peasantry with his special business acumen and organic way of thinking. Against the background of these people who suffered from repression, a figure of a different series emerges - the head of the regime, Volkov, who regulates the life of prisoners and, as it were, symbolizes the merciless communist regime.

Secondly, a detailed picture of camp life and work. Life in the camp remains life with its visible and invisible passions and subtlest experiences. They are mainly related to the problem of obtaining food. They feed little and badly with a terrible gruel with frozen cabbage and small fish. A kind of art of life in the camp is to get yourself an extra ration of bread and an extra bowl of gruel, and if you're lucky, some tobacco. For this, one has to go to the greatest tricks, currying favor with "authorities" like Caesar and others. At the same time, it is important to preserve one’s human dignity, not to become a “descended” beggar, like, for example, Fetyukov (however, there are few of them in the camp). This is important not even from lofty considerations, but out of necessity: a “descended” person loses the will to live and will surely die. Thus, the question of preserving the human image in oneself becomes a matter of survival. The second vital issue is the attitude towards forced labor. Prisoners, especially in winter, work in hunting, almost competing with each other and brigade with brigade, in order not to freeze and in a peculiar way "reduce" the time from bed to bed, from feeding to feeding. On this stimulus the terrible system of collective labor is built. But nevertheless, it does not completely destroy the natural joy of physical labor in people: the scene of building a house by a team where Shukhov works is one of the most inspired in the story. The ability to work “correctly” (not overstraining, but not shirking), as well as the ability to get yourself extra rations, is also a high art. As well as the ability to hide from the eyes of the guards a piece of a saw that turned up, from which the camp craftsmen make miniature knives to exchange for food, tobacco, warm clothes ... In relation to the guards, who constantly carry out "shmons", Shukhov and the rest of the prisoners are in the position of wild animals : they must be more cunning and dexterous than armed people who have the right to punish them and even shoot them for deviating from the camp regime. To deceive the guards and the camp authorities is also a high art.

That day, which the hero narrates about, was, in his own opinion, successful - “they didn’t put them in a punishment cell, they didn’t kick out the brigade to Sotsgorodok (work in a bare field in winter - ed.), At lunchtime he mowed down porridge (he got an extra portion - ed.), the brigadier closed the percentage well (the system for evaluating camp labor - ed.), Shukhov laid the wall cheerfully, didn’t get caught with a hacksaw, worked part-time with Caesar in the evening and bought tobacco. And I didn't get sick, I got over it. The day passed, nothing marred, almost happy. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty three such days in his term from bell to bell. Due to leap years, three extra days were added ... "

At the end of the story, a brief dictionary of thieves' expressions and specific camp terms and abbreviations that are found in the text is given.

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"One day of Ivan Denisovich" (1963)"

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The idea for the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" came to Alexander Solzhenitsyn during his imprisonment in a special regime camp in the winter of 1950-1951. He was able to realize it only in 1959. Since then, the book has been reprinted several times, after which it was withdrawn from sale and libraries. The story appeared in free access in the homeland only in 1990. The prototypes for the characters of the work were real-life people whom the author knew during his stay in the camps or at the front.

Shukhov's life in a special regime camp

The story begins with a wake-up signal in a special regime correctional camp. This signal was given by hitting the rail with a hammer. The main character - Ivan Shukhov never slept through the rise. Between him and the start of work, the prisoners had about an hour and a half of free time, during which they could try to earn extra money. Such a part-time job could be helping in the kitchen, sewing or cleaning the supply rooms. Shukhov was always happy to earn extra money, but that day he was not in good health. He lay and pondered whether he should go to the medical unit. In addition, the man was worried about rumors that they wanted to send their brigade to the construction of Sotsgorodok, instead of building workshops. And this work promised to be hard labor - in the cold without the possibility of heating, far from the barracks. The brigadier Shukhov went to settle this issue with the workmen, and, according to Shukhov's assumptions, took them a bribe in the form of fat.
Suddenly, the man's quilted jacket and pea jacket, with which he was covered, were roughly torn off. These were the hands of the overseer named Tatar. He immediately threatened Shukhov with three days of "conde with the withdrawal." In the local jargon, this meant three days in a punishment cell with a withdrawal to work. Shukhov began to pretend to ask for forgiveness from the warder, but he remained adamant and ordered the man to follow him. Shukhov dutifully hurried after the Tatar. It was terribly cold outside. The prisoner looked hopefully at a large thermometer hanging in the yard. According to the rules, at temperatures below forty-one degrees, they were not taken to work.

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Meanwhile, the men came to the guards' room. There, the Tatar magnanimously announced that he forgave Shukhov, but that he should wash the floor in this room. The man assumed such an outcome, but he began to thank the warden for mitigating the punishment and promised never to miss the rise again. Then he rushed to the well for water, thinking about how to wash the floor and not wet his felt boots, because he did not have a change of shoes. Once in his eight years in prison he was given excellent leather boots. Shukhov loved them very much and took good care of them, but the boots had to be handed over when felt boots were given in their place. For all the time of his imprisonment, he regretted nothing more than those boots.
After quickly washing the floor, the man rushed to the dining room. It was a very gloomy building filled with steam. Men sat in brigades at long tables, eating gruel and porridge. The rest crowded in the aisle, waiting for their turn.

Shukhov in the medical unit

There was a hierarchy in each brigade of prisoners. Shukhov was not the last man in his, so when he came from the dining room, a guy lower than his rank was sitting and guarding his breakfast. Balanda and porridge have already cooled down and become almost inedible. But Shukhov ate it all thoughtfully and slowly, he reflected that in the camp the prisoners only have personal time, which is ten minutes for breakfast and five minutes for lunch.
After breakfast, the man went to the medical unit, almost reaching it, he remembered that he had to go buy a self-garden from the Lithuanian who received the package. But after a little hesitation, he still chose the medical unit. Shukhov entered the building, which never ceased to amaze him with its whiteness and cleanliness. All offices were still closed. Paramedic Nikolai Vdovushkin sat at the post, and diligently wrote out words on sheets of paper.

Our hero noted that Kolya wrote something “left”, that is, not related to work, but immediately concluded that this did not concern him.

He complained to the paramedic that he was not feeling well, he gave him a thermometer, but warned that the outfits had already been distributed, and he had to complain about his health in the evening. Shukhov understood that he would not be able to stay in the medical unit. Vdovushkin continued to write. Few people knew that Nikolai became a paramedic only when he was in the zone. Prior to that, he was a student of a literary institute, and the local doctor Stepan Grigorovich hired him, in the hope that he would write here what he could not do in the wild. Shukhov never ceased to be amazed at the cleanliness and silence that reigned in the medical unit. He spent five whole minutes inactive. The thermometer showed thirty-seven and two. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov silently pulled on his hat and hurried to the barracks to join his 104th brigade before work.

Harsh everyday life of prisoners

Brigadier Tyurin was sincerely glad that Shukhov did not end up in the punishment cell. He gave him a ration, which consisted of bread and a pile of sugar sprinkled on top of it. The prisoner hurriedly licked off the sugar and sewed half of the given bread into the mattress. He hid the second part of the ration in the pocket of his quilted jacket. On a signal from the foreman, the men set off to work. Shukhov noticed with satisfaction that they were going to work in the same place, which means that Tyurin managed to reach an agreement. On the way, the prisoners were waiting for a "shmon". It was a procedure to find out if they were taking something forbidden outside the camp. Today, the process was led by Lieutenant Volkovoy, whom even the head of the camp was afraid of. Despite the cold, he forced the men to strip down to their shirts. Anyone who had extra clothes was confiscated. Shukhov's teammate Buinovsky, a former hero of the Soviet Union, was indignant at this behavior of his superiors. He accused the lieutenant of not being a Soviet person, for which he immediately received ten days of strict regime, but only upon returning from work.
After the raid, the convicts were lined up in fives, carefully counted and sent under escort to the cold steppe to work.

The frost was such that everyone wrapped their faces in rags and walked in silence, looking down at the ground. Ivan Denisovich, in order to distract himself from the hungry rumbling in his stomach, began to think about how he would soon write a letter home.

He was supposed to write two letters a year, and there was no need for more. He had not seen his relatives since the summer of forty-one, and now it was the fifty-first year. The man thought that now he has more in common with his bunk neighbors than with his relatives.

Wife's letters

In her rare letters, his wife wrote to Shukhov about the difficult collective farm life that only women pull. The men who returned from the war work on the side. Ivan Denisovich could not understand how one could not want to work on one's own land.

My wife said that many in their area are engaged in a fashionable profitable trade - painting carpets. The unfortunate woman hoped that her husband would also take up this business when he returned home, and this would help the family out of poverty.

In the working area

Meanwhile, the 104th brigade reached the working area, they were built again, counted and let into the territory. Everything there was dug up and dug up, boards and chips were scattered everywhere, traces of the foundation were visible, prefabricated houses stood. Brigadier Tyurin went to get an order for the brigade for the day. The men, taking the opportunity, ran into a large wooden building on the territory, a heating room. The place at the stove was occupied by the thirty-eighth brigade, which worked there. Shukhov and his comrades simply leaned against the wall. Ivan Denisovich could not resist the temptation and ate almost all the bread he had in store for dinner. About twenty minutes later the brigadier appeared, and he looked displeased. The brigade was sent to complete the building of the thermal power plant, left since autumn. Tyurin distributed the work. Shukhov and the Lettish Kildigs got the job of laying the walls, as they were the best craftsmen in the brigade. Ivan Denisovich was an excellent bricklayer, the Latvian was a carpenter. But first, it was necessary to insulate the building where the men had to work and build an oven. Shukhov and Kildigs went to the other end of the yard to fetch a roll of roofing paper. With this material they were going to close up holes in the windows. Tol had to be carried into the building of the thermal power plant secretly from the foreman and informers who monitored the plundering of building materials. The men placed the roll upright and, pressing it tightly with their bodies, carried it into the building. The work was in full swing harmoniously, each prisoner worked with the thought that the more the brigade did, each member of it would receive more rations. Tyurin was a strict but fair foreman, under his leadership everyone received a well-deserved piece of bread.

Closer to dinner, the stove was built, the windows were filled with roofing paper, and some of the workers even sat down to rest and warm their chilled hands by the hearth. The men began to tease Shukhov that he had almost one foot free. He was given a term of ten years. He has already served eight of them. Many comrades of Ivan Denisovich had to sit for another twenty-five years.

Memories of the past

Shukhov began to remember how it all happened to him. He sat for treason. In February 1942, their entire army in the North-West was surrounded. Ammunition and food ran out. So the Germans began to catch all of them in the forests. And Ivan Denisovich was caught. He stayed in captivity for a couple of days - five of them fled with their comrades. When they reached their own, the submachine gunner killed three of them with a rifle. Shukhov and his comrade survived, so they were immediately recorded as German spies. Then they beat me for a long time in counterintelligence, forced me to sign all the papers. If he hadn't signed, they would have been killed altogether. Ivan Denisovich managed to visit several camps already. The previous ones were not of a strict regime, but it was even harder to live there. At a logging site, for example, they were forced to finish their daily quota at night. So everything is not so bad here, Shukhov reasoned. To which one of his comrades Fetyukov objected that people were being slaughtered in this camp. So here it is clearly no better than in residential camps. Indeed, lately two informers and one poor hard worker were slaughtered in the camp, apparently confusing the sleeping place. Strange things began to happen.

Dinner of prisoners

Suddenly, the prisoners heard a whistle - a power train, which means it's time for dinner. Deputy foreman Pavlo called Shukhov and the youngest in the brigade, Gopchik, to take their places in the dining room.

The dining room at the factory was a roughly knocked together wooden building without a floor, divided into two parts. In one, the cook cooked porridge, in the other, the convicts dined. Fifty grams of cereals were allocated per prisoner per day. But there were a lot of privileged categories who got a double portion: foremen, office workers, sixes, a medical instructor who oversaw the preparation of food. As a result, the convicts got very small portions, barely covering the bottom of the bowls. Shukhov was lucky that day. Counting the number of servings for the brigade, the cook hesitated. Ivan Denisovich, who helped Pavel count the bowls, called the wrong number. The cook got confused, and miscalculated. As a result, the brigade got two extra portions. But only the foreman had to decide who would get them. Shukhov in his heart hoped that he. In the absence of Tyurin, who was in the office, Pavlo commanded. He gave one portion to Shukhov, and the other to Buinovsky, who had lost a lot in the last month.

After eating, Ivan Denisovich went to the office - carried porridge to another member of the brigade who worked there. It was a film director named Caesar, he was a Muscovite, a rich intellectual and never went to the outfits. Shukhov found him smoking a pipe and talking about art with some old man. Caesar took the porridge and continued the conversation. And Shukhov returned to the thermal power plant.

Memoirs of Tyurin

The brigadier was already there. He had knocked out good rations for his boys for the week and was in a cheerful mood. The usually silent Tyurin began to recall his former life. He remembered how he was expelled in the thirtieth year from the ranks of the Red Army because his father was a kulak. How he got home on the chaise longue, but he no longer found his father, how he managed to escape from his home at night with his little brother. He gave that boy to the thieves in a gang and never saw him again after that.

The convicts listened to him attentively with respect, but it was time to get to work. They started working even before the bell rang, because before lunch they were busy arranging their workplace, but they hadn’t done anything for the norm yet. Tyurin decided that Shukhov would lay one wall with a cinder block, and he enrolled the friendly deaf Senka Klevshin as his apprentice. They said that that Klevshin escaped from captivity three times, and even Buchenwald passed. The brigadier himself undertook to lay the second wall together with Kildigs. In the cold, the solution quickly solidified, so it was necessary to lay the cinder block quickly. The spirit of rivalry so captured the men that the rest of the team barely had time to bring them the solution.

This is how the 104th brigade began to work, which they barely managed to count at the gate, which is carried out at the end of the working day. Everyone was again lined up in fives and began to count with the gates closed. The second time they had to recalculate already with the open. There were supposed to be four hundred and sixty-three convicts at the facility. But after three recalculations, it turned out only four hundred and sixty-two. The convoy ordered everyone to line up in brigades. It turned out that there is not enough Moldavian from thirty-second. It was rumored that, unlike many other prisoners, he was a real spy. The foreman and assistant rushed to the object to look for the missing person, all the rest stood in the bitter cold, overwhelmed by anger at the Moldavian. It became clear that the evening was gone - nothing could be done on the territory before lights out. And there was still a long way to go to the barracks. But three figures appeared in the distance. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief - they found it.

It turns out that the missing man was hiding from the foreman and fell asleep on the scaffolding. The convicts began to vilify the Moldavian for what the world stands, but quickly calmed down, everyone already wanted to leave the industrial zone.

Hacksaw hidden in the sleeve

Just before the shmon on the watch, Ivan Denisovich agreed with the director Caesar that he would go and take a turn for him in the parcel room. Caesar was from the rich - he received parcels twice a month. Shukhov hoped that for his service the young man would give him something to eat or smoke. Just before the search, Shukhov, out of habit, examined all his pockets, although he was not going to carry anything forbidden today. Suddenly, in a pocket on his knee, he found a piece of a hacksaw, which he picked up in the snow at a construction site. He completely forgot about the find in his working fuse. And now it was a pity to throw a hacksaw. She could bring him a salary or ten days in a punishment cell, if found. At his own peril and risk, he hid the hacksaw in his mitten. And here Ivan Denisovich was lucky. The guard who was inspecting him was distracted. Before that, he managed to squeeze only one mitten, and did not finish the second. Happy Shukhov rushed to catch up with his people.

Dinner in the zone

Having passed through all the numerous gates, the convicts finally felt like "free people" - everyone rushed to do their own thing. Shukhov ran to the queue for parcels. He himself did not receive parcels - he forbade his wife to tear them away from the children. But still, his heart ached when a parcel came to one of the neighbors in the barracks. About ten minutes later, Caesar appeared and allowed Shukhov to eat his dinner, while he himself took his place in line.

Inspired, Ivan Denisovich rushed into the dining room.
There, after the ritual of searching for free trays and places at the tables, the 104th finally sat down to supper. The hot gruel pleasantly warmed the chilled bodies from the inside. Shukhov thought about what a good day it was - two portions at lunch, two in the evening. I didn’t eat the bread - I decided to hide it, I also took Caesar’s rations with me. And after dinner, he rushed to the seventh barracks, he himself lived in the ninth, to buy self-garden from a Latvian. Having carefully fished out two rubles from under the lining of his quilted jacket, Ivan Denisovich paid for the tobacco. After that, he hurriedly ran home. Caesar was already in the barracks. The dizzying smells of sausage and smoked fish wafted around his bunk. Shukhov did not stare at the gifts, but politely offered the director his ration of bread. But Caesar did not take the ration. Shukhov never dreamed of more. He crawled upstairs to his bunk to have time to hide the hacksaw before the evening formation. Caesar invited Buinovsky to tea, he felt sorry for the goner. They were sitting happily eating sandwiches when they came for the former hero. They did not forgive him for his morning trick - Captain Buinovsky went to the punishment cell for ten days. And then came the test. And Caesar did not have time to hand over his products to the storage room by the beginning of the check. Now he had two left to go out - either they would be taken away during the recount, or they would be kidnapped from the bed if he left. Shukhov felt sorry for the intellectual, so he whispered to him that Caesar was the last one to come out for the recount, and he would rush in the forefront, and they would guard the gifts one by one.

Labor Reward

Everything worked out for the best. The delicacies of the capital remained untouched. And Ivan Denisovich received for his labors several cigarettes, a couple of cookies and one circle of sausage. He shared the cookies with the Baptist Alyosha, who was his bunk neighbor, and ate the sausage himself. It was pleasant in Shukhov's mouth from the meat. Smiling, Ivan Denisovich thanked God for another day lived. Today, everything turned out well for him - the disease did not bring him down, he did not end up in the punishment cell, he got hold of soldering, managed to buy self-garden. It was a good day. And in total, Ivan Denisovich had three thousand six hundred and fifty three such days ...

SCHEDULE

The wake-up call, as most eyewitnesses report, was usually given at five in the morning by blows of a hammer on a piece of rail hanging in front of the supervisor's room. Any prisoner who, a few minutes after the wake-up call, was still in bed, could receive several days of a punishment cell on the spot. In winter it is still dark at this hour. Searchlights "strike across the zone crosswise from distant corner towers." In addition to barbed wire and watchtower guards, many camps also used dogs as guards. Their long chains ended in rings, and these rings slid along the wire stretched between the towers. The grinding of these rings on the wire is remembered by many ex-prisoners as a continuous background sound.

The first concern of the prisoners throughout the day was food. Breakfast was served in the morning, the most pleasant part of the daily ration (later we will take a closer look at the nutrition of prisoners - the central point of the entire system of norms and the key to Stalin's calculations for efficient slave labor).

Then came the divorce. Prisoners were taken out of the camp zone in brigades, usually twenty or thirty people each. There was a warning ("prayer") of the convoy:

“Attention, prisoners! In the course of the journey, observe the strict order of the column! Do not stretch, do not run, do not move from five to five, do not talk, do not look around, only keep your hands back! Step to the right, step to the left - it is considered an escape, the convoy opens fire without warning! Guide, step march!

“Apart from sleep, a camper lives for himself only in the morning for ten minutes at breakfast, and five at lunch, and five at dinner.” People were so sleep deprived that as soon as they found a warmer corner, they were immediately thrown into sleep. If Sunday was a free day (and not every Sunday was), then people slept as much as they could.

With shoes, as Solzhenitsyn testifies, the situation could change. “Sometimes, even without boots, they walked through the winter, it happened, and they didn’t see those boots, only bast shoes and ChTZ (made of rubber shoes, a car track).” Clothes were patched and repaired endlessly: "prisoners ... dressed in all their rags, girded with all the ropes, wrapped from chin to eyes with rags from the frost."

According to many recollections, sores on the body - the result of dirty clothes - were a common occurrence. Clothes were disinfected from time to time when the prisoners were taken to the bathhouse. In the camp where Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich was imprisoned, there was a bath about once every two weeks. But often there was no soap for washing and washing clothes.

It was possible to declare that you were not feeling well and get a day off from work. But if a prisoner was already recognized as sick and prescribed hospital food for him, this usually meant that such a person did not have long to live. However, the release for the day also depended not only on the state of health - there was also a quota: "But he was given the right to release only two people in the morning - and he had already released two." Evgenia Ginzburg recalls that the doctor gave exemption from work, "starting from 38 degrees and above."

In the book of Dalin and Nikolaevsky there is such a description of a medical examination in a camp under construction:

“The contractor and the lekpom, armed with sticks, enter the dugout. The boss asks the first person he meets why he doesn't come out. "I'm sick" is the answer. Lekpom tests the pulse and determines that the person is healthy. A hail of blows falls on the prisoner, he is thrown out. “Why don't you go to work?” he asks;

next. “Sick” is the same stubborn answer. The day before, this prisoner was at the lekpom and gave him his last lousy shirt. Now the lekpom counts the pulse and finds the high temperature. The man is released. The third prisoner replies that he has neither clothes nor shoes. “Take clothes and shoes from the patient,” the boss orders morally. The patient protests, and his belongings are taken by force.”

The old, experienced prisoner Ivan Shukhov in Solzhenitsyn's story knows that in the morning you have to go to work slowly: "Whoever runs fast will not live out that term in the camp - he will evaporate, fall down." In general, those prisoners who survived the first months of camp existence became unusually sophisticated in the difficult art of preserving life. At the same time, their methods and customs became a tradition and became part of everyday life. For example, Solzhenitsyn describes how the prisoners picked up wood chips at the construction site, made bundles and carried them to the camp. It was forbidden to carry firewood to the camp, but the guards did nothing until the column approached the camp itself. Here, the prisoners were ordered to throw firewood: the guards also needed additional fuel, and they could not carry firewood on their own, along with machine guns.

The prisoners threw bundles, but not all of them. When passing through the watch, a repeated order to throw fuel followed, and again only a part of the remaining firewood was dumped on the ground. In the end, the prisoners managed to smuggle some of their fuel production into the zone. This suited both sides - both the prisoners and the guards. After all, if firewood were taken clean at the entrance to the camp, then it would not make sense for the prisoners to collect it in the working area and carry it with them; they would stop doing it, and the guards would be left without additional fuel. However, there was no open agreement on this score. The agreement was quite unspoken.

Thus, in the microcosm, one can observe the formation of the rules and traditions of a new social order.

In those years, genuine caste prejudices also formed. Prisoners began to be considered people of the worst sort, as in ancient times. The opinion gradually spread that even simple contact with prisoners was something humiliating for a free man. It was considered unacceptable for a civilian to eat the same food as a prisoner, sleep with them under the same roof, or be on friendly terms with any of them. It went to extremes. There is a known case when the head of the camp reprimanded the operator of the camp sanitary checkpoint: how dared he let the shirt of a civilian power station mechanic go into the roast along with the things of the prisoners?

Freelancers in the Kolyma sometimes tried to help the prisoners they worked with. Free "doctors, engineers, geologists, as far as possible, tried to free their comrades in the profession from among the innocently convicted from driving a wheelbarrow and use them in their specialty." One geologist, certified as a "knight of the North", gave his life while trying to protect several prisoners from arbitrariness. Here is an exemplary dialogue of this person with his superiors:

Hurry up, comrade! People can die!

What are these people? - he chuckled (representative of the camp administration). - These are the enemies of the people!

There is a lot of evidence that the camp authorities, including sometimes doctors, considered the prisoners as their slaves. Even in detail, the sorting of prisoners upon arrival at the camp was reminiscent of illustrations in books about the slave trade. A certain Samsonov, the head of the Yartsevo camp department, used to dignify his presence with a medical examination of new arrivals and, with a satisfied smile, felt their biceps and shoulders, clapped on their backs. There was an opinion that the Soviet system of forced labor "is a step towards a new social stratification, including a layer of slaves" in the ancient, literal sense of the word. Subsequent events, however, took a different direction.

In the sensational article “Ivan Denisovich, his friends and enemies,” literary critic V. Lakshin wrote: “The entire system of imprisonment in the camps that Ivan Denisovich went through was designed to ruthlessly suppress, kill in a person any sense of right, legality, demonstrating and in big and small such impunity of arbitrariness, before which any impulse of noble indignation is powerless. The administration of the camp did not allow the prisoners to forget for a moment that they had no rights and the only judge over them was arbitrariness.”

In the forties, a prisoner in a hard labor camp was obliged “to take off his hat in five steps before the warder and put it on two steps later.” And here are the words of the head of the convoy after the missing prisoner was found as a result of repeated confused checks:

What-oh? - the nachkar yelled. - Plant it in the snow? I'll plant now. I will keep until the morning.

Nothing wise, and plant. How many times have they been planted? And they even put: “Lie down! Weapons for battle! It happened all the time, the prisoners know.

Literally all the memories of former prisoners contain information about the use of physical force by the guards. Refusal to work was punished in different ways: in the Far East by immediate execution, in other places by throwing a naked person into the snow until he surrendered, in most camps, “kondeem” - a punishment cell with 200 grams of bread a day. For repeated refusal, the most likely was the death penalty. Not only "sabotage", but also "anti-Soviet propaganda" could be punished by death.

The periodic tightening of camp discipline led to the mass distribution of punishments for the most insignificant offenses. The inmates' references to the internal regulations were seen as a repeated and malicious refusal to work. It is known that four hundred people were shot at the same time in Karaganda in 1937 on such a charge. There was a "riot" in the camp near Kemerovo. In reality, there was a protest against rotten food. Fourteen instigators of the strike - twelve men and two women - were shot in front of the line of prisoners, and then teams from all the barracks dug their graves.

In addition to these disciplinary executions, often openly announced in the camps to further intimidate the prisoners, there were many other kinds of murders. Orders came from Moscow to liquidate a certain number of former members of the opposition - and these orders were carried out after a cursory questioning of the intended victims. The interrogation did not concern camp life, but allegedly newly discovered circumstances of their main crime, after which it was reclassified as punishable by capital punishment. In some cases, for mass operations of this kind, specially authorized commissions were sent to the camps, at the disposal of which vast premises were temporarily transferred. The doomed were brought there for interrogation and subsequent executions. There is evidence of one such center in Vorkuta - it operated in the winter of 1937 at an abandoned brick factory, and about one thousand three hundred prisoners were killed there.

In most large camp areas, there were also special and top secret "central isolation cells" that served a whole group of camps each. There is evidence that in two years - 1937 and 1938 - about fifty thousand prisoners were transferred to the central detention center of Bamlag (the Baikal-Amur complex of camps) and destroyed there. The victims were tied with wire, loaded like firewood onto cars, taken to secluded places and shot.

The Hungarian communist writer Lengyel, a veteran prisoner of the Stalinist camps, describes one such extermination camp near Norilsk in his short story "Yellow Poppies". The closure of this camp was carried out as follows: first, all the remaining prisoners were shot, and then special teams of the NKVD arrived and shot the personnel and guards of the camp being closed. Because of the permafrost, it was impossible to bury the dead, and the corpses were made into natural-looking mounds, stacked in heaps and covered with soil brought by trucks. Even in the nearest camps, they didn’t know anything about it - and they didn’t even know when the prison hospital occupied the former death camp.

But even the usual punishment, served in the punishment cells that were available at each camp, could be fatal. Here is the description:

“They themselves laid the BUR, the 104th knows: the walls are stone, the floor is cement, there is no window, they heat the stove - only so that the ice from the wall melts and there is a puddle on the floor. Sleep - on bare boards, if you don’t shake your teeth, bread a day - three hundred grams, and gruel - only on the third, sixth and ninth days.

Ten days! Ten days of the local punishment cell, if you serve them strictly to the end, it means losing your health for life. Tuberculosis, and you won't get out of hospitals anymore.

And for fifteen days of strict who served - those are in the damp land.

But even among those who escaped the punishment cell, beriberi flourished. The hero of Solzhenitsyn, who lost his teeth from scurvy in the Pechora camp of Ust-Izhma, where he “got so far that he was completely carried away with bloody diarrhea,” turned out to be lucky and recovered. In general, wounds opened from scurvy, boils festered on the body.

Pellagra was just as common. The prisoners were constantly threatened by pneumonia - usually fatal. Often one could see signs of dystrophy - swelling of the legs and face, and at the last, fatal stage - bloating. Epidemics of brucellosis are noted in the testimonies of persons who were imprisoned in agricultural camps. In the northern camps, gangrene followed by amputation of limbs was a frequent occurrence. Tuberculosis was a frequent and immediate cause of death. After about two years of camp life, female prisoners developed persistent uterine bleeding.

Later, it became customary, when a corpse was brought to the mortuary, to "break the head with a large wooden mallet before taking it to the burial ground."

There were occasional escapes from the camps, but they were very rarely successful. These were acts of desperation; and, of course, the degree of human desperation was enough to push for anything. In the Pechora region, the NKVD gave out five kilos of white flour for capturing a fugitive prisoner. In the early thirties, peasants in different parts of the country still sheltered the fugitives, but during the years of general terror, the collective farmers, frightened to death, did this reluctantly and rarely. However, occasionally the escapes were successful. Especially the gypsies, if they managed to reach any gypsy camp. There was complete solidarity and secure shelter.

Successful escapes were also made by some prominent personalities, such as, for example, the Spanish communist, General of the Republican army El Campesino.

Prisoners caught escaping were always severely beaten and almost always shot.

For each escape of a prisoner from the column outside the camp, the guards were tried as accomplices and sentenced to two or three years, and they also served this term as guards, but without pay. This made the guards exceptionally wary and vigilant. In the camp itself, too, “if anyone fled, the life of the convoy ends, they are driven away without sleep and food. So sometimes they get angry -: they don’t take a fugitive alive.

As a result of this hypervigilance, prisoners were constantly counted and recounted.

“And the second watchman, the controller, stands silently at the other railings, only checks whether the account is correct.

And the lieutenant is standing, watching. This is from the camp.

Man is more valuable than gold. You won’t get one head behind the wire - you will add your own head there. ”

“They count twice when leaving: once with the gates closed, in order to know that it is possible to open the gate; the second time - passing through the open gate. And if it doesn’t seem like it yet, they count it outside the gates. ”

Here we meet one of several interesting parallels with Dostoevsky's story about the hard labor of the forties of the last century - with his Notes from the Dead House. Here is how Dostoevsky described a similar procedure:

“The verification was carried out by a non-commissioned officer with two soldiers. For this, the prisoners were sometimes lined up in the yard, and a guard officer would come. But more often this ceremony took place at home: they believed in the barracks. So it was now. Believers often made mistakes, cheated, left and returned again. Finally, the poor guards reached the desired number and locked the barracks.

Comparing the current century with the past, we see that in the time of Dostoevsky the prisoners had much greater freedom inside the camp. And outside of it, they were not under such severe guard, although Dostoevsky emphasizes that the prisoners of the house of the dead served incomparably the worst of the three varieties of hard labor. True, in Dostoevsky's prison the main punishment for internal offenses was not the isolation ward, but terrible rods, from which a person sometimes died; but with this exception, the life of the prisoners of the house of the dead was much more pleasant than that described by Solzhenitsyn and other authors of camp memoirs. In fact, each prisoner had a chest with a lock and a key; prisoners kept pets; they did not work on Sundays, on church holidays, and even on their name days. Jews and Muslims had parallel privileges. Dostoevsky's food for convicts was much, incomparably better, and sick convicts were allowed to go out into the city and buy tobacco, tea, beef, and at Christmas even suckling pigs and geese. They had so much bread that they even fed it to a water horse.

Meanwhile, the prisoners of the house of the dead were indeed criminals - often murderers, like the main character Goryanchikov - although out of thirty convicts in the barracks there were a dozen political ones.

Jails of the type described by Dostoevsky were liquidated in the fifties of the 19th century (the writer indicates that he is writing about past times). However, the prisoners of the Stalinist camps - not literary characters, but living people - could make other comparisons. For example, one Polish communist, before entering the Soviet camps, served two years in the Polish Wronki prison for political criminals. There, in a Polish prison, prisoners were locked up only at night, and during the day they were allowed to walk in the garden; they were allowed to receive any books from relatives and friends, correspondence was not limited, and a bath was supposed to take place once a week; finally, there were only five of them in a large chamber.