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

Punishments I 415
had by this time ~ mastered and adopted by following the
path of experiment. In them it was not loneliness but the collective
that drove you mad, and on top of that those"who were being
punished had to bend their backs: .
• Strict Regimen Companies ("RUR's"), which were subsequently
replaced by
.• Strict Regimen Barracks ("BUR's"), which were.Penaity
Work Briptes, and
• Strict Regimen Camp Compounds (''ZUR's''), penalty
. compounds. .
And sometime later and somehow unnoticed they added-not
punisbment cells, oh, nol but-
,
• Penalty Isolators-"ShIzo's"
For if you didn't intimidate the prisoner, if there was no further
punisbment you could apply-how could he be cOmpelled to
submit to the regimen?
And where could you put the captured fugitives?
Whlit was the ShIzo given for? For whatever they felt like:
You didn't please your chief; you didn't say hello the way you
should have; you didn't get up on time; you didn't go to bed
on tjme; you were late for roll can; you took the wrong path;
you were wrongly dressed; you smoked where it was fox:l>idden;
y()u'kept extra things in your barracks-take a day, three, five.
You failed, to fuIfill the work norm, you were caught with a broad
-take five, ~even, .or ten. And for work shirkers there was ,even
fifteen days. And even though, according. to the law (what law?),
fifteen days was the m~mum in penalty cells (though according
to the Corrective Labor Code of 1933 even that was impennissible!),
this accordion could be stretched out to a whole year.
In 193-2 in Dmitlag (this is something Averbakh wri~es .about'
-black oD?4Jjte!) . they used to give one year of ShIzo for sel/­
mutilatitm! AJ1,d if one bears in mind _ that they used to refuse
_ treatment u.. ~h cases,' then this meant they used to put a ~ok,
wounded J*SOn in a punishment cell to rot-for a whole yearl
What was required of a ShIzo? It had to be: (a) cold; (b)
damp; (c) da..rk; (d) for starvation. Therefore there was no heat.
416 I THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
(Lipai: not even when the temperature outside was 22 degrees
below zero F~nheit.) They did not replace missing glass panes
in the winter. They allowed the walls to get damp. (Or else they
put the penalty-block cellar in moist ground.) ,The windows were
microscopic or else there were none at all (more usual). They
fed a "Stalin" ration of ten and a half ounces a day and issued a
"hot" meal, consisting of thin gruel, only on the third, sixth, and
ninth days of your impriSonment there. But at Vorkuta-Vom
they gave only seven ounc~ of bread, and a piece.of raw fish in
place of a hot dish on the third day. This is the framework in
. which one has to imagine all the penalty cells.
It is very naive to think that a penalty cell has .of necessity to
be like a cell-with a" roof, door, and lock. Not at all! At
Kuranakh-Sala, at a temperature of minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit,
the punishmeilt cell was a sodden frame of logs. (The free physician
Andreyev said: "I, as a physician, declare it possible to put
a prisoner in that kind of punishment cell.") Let us leap the entire
Archipelago: at that same Vorkuta-Vom in 1937, the punishment
cell for work shirkers was a log frame without a roof. And in
addition there was a plain hole in the ground. Arnold Rappoport
lived in a hole like that (to get shelter from the"rain they uSed to
pull some kind of rag over themselves), like Diogenes in a barrel.
Here is how they were fed: The jailer came out of the gatehouse
hut with the bread rations and called to the men inside the log
frame: "Come out and get your rations!" But no sooner did they
stick their heads out of the log frame than the guard on the watchtower
aimed. his rifle: "Stop. I'll shoot!" And the jailer acted
astonished: "What, you don't want your bread? Well, then, I'll
leave." And he simply hurled the br* and fish down into the pit
in the rain-soaked clay.
In the Mariinsk Camp (as in many others, of course) there
was snow on the walls of the punishment cell--;:'"and in such-andsuch
a punishment cell the prisoners were not allowed to keep
their camp clotlies on but were forced to undress to their underwear.
Every half-hour the jailer would let down the food shelf
in the door and advise I. V. Shved: "Hey, you won't last, you'll
die! You would do better to go out loggingl" And Shved decided
he was right, that he would have the sheet pulled over his face
more quickly if he stayed! He went out into the woods. Out of
twelve and a half years·in the camps Shved spent a total of 148