The Gulag Archipelago Vol. 2 An Experiment in Literary Investigation - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Women in Camp I 229
In camp it was the opposite-=-everything was harder for the
women than for us men. Beginning with the camp filth. Having
already suffered from the dirt in the transit prisons and on the
prisoner transports themselves, the woman would -then find no
cleanliness in camp either. In the average camp, in the women's
work brigades, and also, it goes without saying, in the common
ban:acks, it was almost never possible for her to feel really clean,
.to get warm water (and sometimes there was no water at all:
in winter at Krivoshchekovo Camp No. 1 it was impossible to
wash anywhere in the whole place. The only water was frozen and
there was nowhere to thaw it). There was no lawful way.a
woman could lay hands on either cheesecloth or rags. No place
there, of course, to do laundry! .
A bath? Well! The initial arrival in camp began with a bath- .
i(one doesn't take into account the unloading of the zeIcs from
the" cattle car onto the snow, and the march across with one's
things on one's back surrounded by C01:"llY and dogs. 'In the
CIPDP bath the naked women were examined ~e merchandise.
Whether there was water in the bath or not, the inspection for
lice, the shaving of armpits and pubic hair, gave the barbers, by
no means the lowest-ranking aristocrats in the camp, the opportunity
to look over the new women. And : immediately after
that they would be inspected by the other trusties. This was a
tradition going right back to the Solovetsky Islands. Except that
. there, at the dawn of the Archipelago, a shyness stillexisted, not
typical of the natives-and they were inspected clot}ted,_ during
auxiliary work. But the Archipelago hardened, and the procedure
became more brazen. Fedot S. and his wife (it was their fate to
be united!) now recollect with amu.;_ment how the male trusties
stood on either side of a narrow corridor and passed the newly
arrived women through the corridor naked, hot all at once, but
one at a time. And -then the trusties decided among themselves
who got whom. (According to the statistics of the twenti~s there
was one woman serving time fr every six or seven men.! After
the decrees of the thirties and forties the proportion of women
- to men rose substantially-but still not sufficiently for women not
to be valued, particularly the attractive ones.) In certain camps a
polite procedure was preserved: The women were conducted to
I. Vysbinsky. op. cit •• p. 3S8.
230 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
their barracks-and then the well-fed, self-confident, and impudent
trusties entered the barracks, dressed in new padded
jackets (any clothing in camp which was not in tatters and soiled
seemed mad foppery). Slowly and deliberately they strolled between
the bunks and made their choices. They sat down and
chatted. They invited their choices to "visit" them. And they
were livmg, too, not in a common-barracks situation, but in
cabins occupied by several men. And there they had hot plates
and frying pans. And they had fried potatoes too! An unbelievable
dream! The first time, the chosen women were simply
feasted and given the chance to make comparisons and to· discover
the whole- spectrum of camp life. Impatient trusties demanded
"payment" right after the potatoes,w.hile those more
de~iartser escorted th~ir dates home and explained the future.
You'd better make your arrangements, make your arrangements,
inside _ the camp compound, darling, while it is being proposed
in a- gentlemanly way. There's cleanliness here, and laundry
facilities, and decent clothes and unfatiguing work-and it's all
yours.
And in this sense it is considered to have been "easier" for
women in camp. It was "easier" for women to preserve life itself.
And with that "sexual hatred" with which certain of the lastleggers
looked on those women in camp who had not descended
to pickings from the slops, it was natural to reason that it was
easier for women in camp, since they could get along on a
_lesser ration, and had a way to avoid starvation and remain alive. -
For the man crazed by hunger the entire world is overshadowed
by the wings of hunger, and nothing else in the -world is of any
importance.
And it is true there are women who by their own nature, out
in {reedom too, by and large, get together with men easily, without
-being choosy. Such -women, of course~ always had open to
them easy ways out. Personal characteristics do not get distributed
simply on the basis of the articles of the Criminal Code, yet we
are not likely to be in error if we say that the majority of women
among the 58's were not of this kind. For sOl!le of them, from
the beginning to the end, this step was less bearable than death.
Others would bridle, hesitate, be embarrassed (and they were
held back by shame before their girl friends too), and when they
had finally decided, when they had reconciled themselves-it
might be tOQ late, they might not find a camp taker any longer.