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

Hand Over Your Second Skin Tool I 383
given. But here came the jailer and jerked you by the foot at
night. "Gather up your things!" Oh, how you didn't want to go!
People, people, I love you .••.
The camp interrogation prison. What kind of a prison will it
be and how can it possibly advance your confession if it isn't
worse than your own camp? All these prisons are invariably.cold.
H they aren't cold enough, then they keep you in the cells in just
your underwear. The famous Vorkuta Number Thirty (a term
borrowed by the zeks from the Chekists, who called it that bec;ause
of its telephone number, 30), a board barracks beyond
the Arctic Circle, was heated with coal dust when it was 40
degrees below zero outside, one washtubful a day, and not because
they lacked coal in Vorkuta, of course. And they tormented
them with more than that-they didn't issue them matches. And
for kindling there was one little chip the size of a pencil. (Incidentally,
escapees who had been caught were kept in this Number
Thirty stark naked. After two weeks anyone who had survived
was given_ summer clothes but no padded jacket. And there
were no mattresses and no blankets. Reader! Try it, just try to
sleep like that for one night! In the barracks it was approximately
40 above.) .
And that was how the prisoners were kept throughout the
several months of interrogation! Even before that, of course, they
had been worn down by many years of hunger and by slave labor.
And now, it was much easier to finish them off. What did they
feed them? As the Third Section instructed: in some places eleven
and a quarter ounces a day, and in some places ten and a half
ounces, and in Number Thirty seven ounces of bread, sticky as
clay, a piece little bigger than a matchbox, and once a day a
thin gruel.
But you still wouldn't get warmed up right away even if you
signed everything, if you admitted everything, if you surrendered,
and if you agreed to spend another ten years in this dearly beloved
Archipelago. Until your trial they moved you from Number
Thirty to the Vorkuta "interrogation tent"-no less famous. This
was a plain ordinary tent, yes, and full of holes to boot. It had no
floor. The floor was the Arctic earth. Inside it was seven by
twelve yards, and in the center was an iron barrel instead of a
stove. There were single-decker lattice bunks on one level and
those next to the stove were always occupied by the thieves.
384 I THB GULAG AllCHIPELAGO
The political plebeianS . . . had to sleep around the outside or
-on the ground~ You would lie there and see the stars above you.
And you would pray: "Oh,the sooner they try me the better! The
sooner they sentence me the better!" You awaited that trial as a
deliverance. (People will say: No person can live like that beyond
the Arctic Circle, unless he is fed chocolate and dressed in furs.
But in our country ..• he can!- Our Soviet man, our Archipelago
native ... c~l Arnold Rappoport spent many months like that­
'the Provincial Assizes kept delaying its journey from Naryan­
Mar.)
or here, for your delectation, is one more interrogation
prison-the penalty camp of OrotUkan in the Kolyma, 315 miles
from Magadan. It was the winter of 1937-1938. A wood and
canvas-settlement, in other words, tents with holes in them but
overlaid with rough boards. The newly arrived prisoner transport,
a bunch of new interrogation fodder, saw even before being led in
through the door: every tent in the settlement was su"ounded
with piles of frozen corpses on three out of four sides, except
where the door was. (And this was not to terrify. There was
simply no way out of it: people died, and snow was six feet deep,
and beneath it there was only permafrost.) And then came the '
torment of waiting. You had to wait in the tents until you were
transferred to the log prison for in~rogation. But they had
taken on too much and too many. They had herded in too many .
rabbits from the whole of the Kolyma, and the interrogators
couldn't cope with them, and-the majority of those brought here
were simply destined to die without even getting to their first
interrogation session. The tents were congested, there was no
room to stretch out. You lay there on the bunks and on the floor,
and you lay there for many weeks at a time. ("Do you really call
that congestion?" responds the Serpantinka. "Here they wait to
be shot-true, only for several days 1lt a tim~but standing the
whole time in a shed, so that when they give them a drink-that
is, throw pieces of ice over their heads from the doorway-it is
so crowded that it is impossible to stretch out a hand to catch
the pieces, and instead you have to try to catch them with your
mouth.") There were no baths, nor any outdoor exercise periods
in the fresh air. Bodies itched. Everyone scratched frantically,
and everyone kept on searching for lice in padded cotton britches,
padded jackets, shirts, underwear shorts, but they searched with-