Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The GULag Archipelago Volume 1 - An Experiment in Literary Investigation

V. A. Korneyeva traveled from Moscow in a compartment that held thirty women —most of them withered old women, exiled for their religious beliefs (on arrival all these women, except two, were immediately put in the hospital). Nobody died in the compartment because several of the prisoners were young, well-developed, good-looking girls, arrested “for going out with foreigners.” These girls took it upon themselves to shame the convoy: “You ought to be ashamed to transport them this way! These are your own mothers!” It probably wasn’t so much their moral argument as their attractive appearance which produced a reaction in the convoy guards, and they did move several of the old women out—to the punishment cell. But the punishment cell in a Stolypin car is no punishment; it is a blessing. Of five prisoner compartments, four are used as general cells, and the fifth is set aside and divided in two halves—two narrow half-compartments with one lower and one upper berth, like those the conductors have. These punishment cells serve to isolate prisoners; three or four travel in them at a time, and this gives both comfort and space.

No, it is not intentionally to torture them with thirst that the exhausted and overcrowded prisoners are fed not soup but salt herring or dry smoked Caspian carp for the whole of their trip in the Stolypin car. (This was exactly how it was in all the years, the thirties and the fifties, winter and summer, in Siberia and the Ukraine, and it isn’t even necessary to cite examples.) It was not to torture them with thirst—but just you tell me what these ragamuffins were to be fed anyway while being moved around. They were not supposed to get hot meals in prisoner-transport railroad cars. (True, there was a kitchen in one of the Stolypin car compartments, but that was only for the convoy.) You couldn’t just give the prisoners raw grits, and you couldn’t give them raw codfish either, nor could you give them canned meat because they might stuff themselves. Herring was just the thing, with a piece of bread—and what else did they need?

Go ahead, take your half a herring while they are handing it out, and be glad you got it. If you’re smart, you aren’t going to eat that herring; just be patient, wait, hide it in your pocket,

and you can eat it at the next transit point where there is water to be had. It’s worse when they issue you wet Sea of Azov anchovies, covered with coarse salt. You can’t keep them in your pocket; so scoop them up in the flaps of your pea jacket, or in your handkerchief, in the palm of your hand—and eat them. They divide up these Azov anchovies on somebody’s pea jacket, whereas the convoy guards dump the dried carp right on the floor of the compartment, and it is divided up on the benches, on the prisoners’ knees. [283]

But once they’ve given you a fish, they aren’t going to hold back on the bread, and maybe they’ll even throw in a bit of sugar. Things are much worse when the convoy comes over and announces: “We aren’t going to be feeding you today; nothing was issued for you.” And it could very well be that nothing was actually issued: someone in one or another prison accounting office made a mistake in the figures. And it could also be that it was issued but that the convoy was short on rations—after all, they aren’t exactly overfed either—and so they decided to snag a bit of your bread for themselves; and in that case to hand over half a herring by itself would seem suspicious.

And, of course, it is not for the purpose of intentionally torturing the prisoner that after his herring he is given neither hot water (and he never gets that here in any case) nor even plain, unboiled water. One has to understand the situation: The convoy staff is limited; some of them have to be on watch in the corridor; some are on duty on the platform; at the stations they clamber all over the car, under it, on top of it, to make sure that there aren’t any holes in it. Others are kept busy cleaning guns, and then, of course, there has to be time for political indoctrination and their catechism on the articles of war. And the third shift is sleeping. They insist on their full eight hours—for, after all, the war is over. And then, to go carry water in pails—it has to be hauled a long way, too, and it’s insulting: why should a Soviet soldier have to carry water like a donkey for enemies of the people? And there are also times when they spend half a day hauling the Stolypin cars way out from the station in order to reshuffle or recouple the cars (it will be farther away from prying eyes), and the result is that you can’t get water even for your own Red Army mess. True, there is one way out. You can go dip up some water from the locomotive tender. It’s yellow and murky, with some lubricating grease mixed in with it. But the zeks will drink it willingly. It doesn’t really matter that much anyway, since it isn’t as if they could see what they are drinking in the semidarkness of their compartment. They don’t have their own window, and there isn’t any light bulb there either, and what light they get comes from the corridor. And there’s another thing too: it takes a long time to dole out that water. The zeks don’t have their own mugs. Whoever did have one has had it taken away from him—so what it adds up to is that they have to be given the two government issue mugs to drink out of, and while they are drinking up you have to keep standing there and standing, and dipping it out and dipping it out some more and handing it to them. (Yes, and then, too, the prisoners argue about who’s to drink first; they want the healthy prisoners to drink first, and only then those with tuberculosis, and last of all those with syphilis! Just as if it wasn’t going to begin all over again in the next cell: first the healthy ones…)

But the convoy could have borne with all that, hauled the water, and doled it out, if only those pigs, after slurping up the water, didn’t ask to go to the toilet. So here’s the way it all works out: if you don’t give them water for a day, then they don’t ask to go to the toilet. Give them water once, and they go to the toilet once; take pity on them and give them water twice—and they go to the toilet twice. So it’s pure and simple common sense: just don’t give them anything to drink.

And it isn’t that one is stingy about taking them to the toilet because one wants to be stingy about the use of the toilet itself, but because taking prisoners to the toilet is a responsible—even, one might say, a combat—operation: it takes a long, long time for one private first class and two privates. Two guards have to be stationed, one next to the toilet door, the other in the corridor on the opposite side (so that no one tries to escape in that direction), while the private first class has to push open and then shut the door to the compartment, first to admit the returning prisoner, and then to allow the next one out. The statutes permit letting out only one at a time, so that they don’t try to escape and so that they can’t start a rebellion. Therefore, the way it works out is that the one prisoner who has been let out to go to the toilet is holding up 30 others in his own compartment and 120 in the whole car, not to mention the convoy detail! And so the command resounds: “Come on there, come on! Get a move on, get a move on!” The private first class and the soldiers keep hurrying him all the way there and back and he hurries so fast that he stumbles, and it’s as though they think he is going to steal that shithole from the state. (In 1949, traveling in a Stolypin car between Moscow and Kuibyshev, the one-legged German Schultz, having understood the Russian hurry-up by this time, jumped to the toilet and back on his one leg while the convoy kept laughing and ordering him to go faster. During one such trip, one of the convoy guards pushed him when he reached the platform at the end of the corridor, and Schultz fell down on the floor in front of the toilet. The convoy guard went into a rage and began to beat him, while Schultz, who couldn’t get up because of the blows raining down on him, crawled and crept into the dirty toilet. The rest of the convoy roared with laughter.) [284]