Gulags: Bread and codes

Far Outliers has put together a fascinating series of posts about the Soviet Gulags.  Most revealing of the depravity of the prison camps is this discussion of the "almost sacred status" of bread:

While camp thieves stole almost everything else with impunity, for example, the theft of bread was considered particularly heinous and unforgivable. Vladimir Petrov found on his long train journey to Kolyma that "thieving was permitted and could be applied to anything within the thiefs capacity and luck, but there was one exception–bread. Bread was sacred and inviolable, regardless of any distinctions in the population of the car." Petrov had in fact been chosen as the starosta [leader] of the car, and in that capacity was charged with beating up a petty thief who had stolen bread. He duly did so. Thomas Sgovio [an American] also wrote that the unwritten law of the camp criminals in Kolyma was: "Steal anything–excepting the holy bread portion." He too had "seen more than one prisoner beaten to death for violating the sacred tradition." […]

In his memoirs, Dmitri Panin, a close friend of Solzhenitsyn’s, described exactly how such a death sentence might be carried out: "An offender caught in the act of stealing bread would be tossed in the air by other prisoners and allowed to crash to the ground; this was repeated several times, damaging his kidneys. Then they would heave him out of the barracks like so much carrion."

Also worth checkng out is this post about the tapping code that allowed Gulag prisoners in solitary confinement to communicate:

Alexander Dolgun learned the code in Lefortovo, memorizing it with the help of matches. When he was finally able to "talk" to the man in the next cell, and understood that the man was asking him "Who are you?" he felt "a rush of pure love for a man who has been asking me for three months who I am."

Thankfully, nothing exists today in Russia on the scale (both physical size and depravity) of the Gulag, but there are still plenty of prisons throughout Russia where conditions would be considered appalling by the standards of many in Europe.

UPDATE:  A Step Out of Time notes that a pair of Estonians who were imprisoned in the Gulags have published a letter to world leaders asking them not to attend the celebration of the end of World War 2 in Moscow until Russia makes amends for crimes it committed during and after the war.

UPDATE 2:  In the comments, Tim Newman notes that I’ve forgotten to credit Anne Applebaum.  The excerpts above come from her excellent book Gulag: A History.

Tagged as: History