Chapter 52 Chapter 21 The World Around the Camp

A piece of rotten meat is not only stinky on the surface, but also surrounded by a stinky molecular cloud.So every island of the archipelago creates and maintains around itself a fetid country.This area is wider than the archipelago itself. It is an intermediary area and a transmission area between the small camps of each island and the large camps of the whole country. All the most contagious things in relation to man and man, manners, opinions, and language, produced in the archipelago, in accordance with the universal laws of penetration of plant and animal tissues in the world, seep first into this transfer zone, and then spread to the whole country.It was in this transmission zone that those elements of camp thought and culture worthy of entry into national culture were automatically tested and selected.Do not be surprised when the language of the labor camps is heard in the corridors of the new building of Moscow University, when a self-sufficient woman in the capital expresses exactly the same views as the prisoners on the essence of life: this is through The teleportation area, reached here through the world around the camp.

While the authorities are trying (maybe not trying) to reform the minds of the prisoners through slogans, culture and education, mail inspection departments, and special operations agents, the prisoners are more quickly reforming the minds of the whole country through the camp world.The worldview of the thieves conquered the archipelago first, moved outward without difficulty, and occupied the blank all-Soviet intellectual market that lacked a more powerful ideology.The cruelty of the labor camp, the cruelty of human relations, the armor of indifference to the heart, the hostility to any kind of honest labor-all these easily conquered the world around the camp, and then in the whole world outside the prison. deeply reflected.

This is how the archipelago took its revenge on the Soviet Union that caused it. No act of cruelty will pass in vain without leaving us with consequences. We go for the cheap and always end up paying a high price. To list these districts, small towns, new villages - is almost tantamount to repeating the geography of the archipelago.No labor camp can exist by itself, there must be a settlement of free men near it.Sometimes this new village exists for several years along with a temporary logging camp, and then disappears together with the camp.Sometimes it takes root here, gets a name, a village soviet, a railway branch -- and it stays forever.Sometimes these new villages developed into famous cities, such as Magadan, Dudinka, Igarka, Demiltau, Balkhash, Jezkazgan, Angren, Teshet, Bratsk, Soviet Ports and the like, these new villages are not just festering on the wild frontier, but growing directly on the body of Russia, beside the mines of Donets and Tula, near the peat quarries, on the labor camps nearby.Sometimes entire districts, such as Tansayev, are infected and belong to the world around the camp.When a labor camp is injected into the body of a big city, or even Moscow itself - the world around the camp exists, but not in the form of new villages, but in the form of those who disperse from the camp every night by trolleybus and bus. To those individuals who come out and gather here again every morning. (In this case, the outward spread of the infectious disease is faster.)

There are also small towns like Giselle (on the Perm mine branch); they existed long before any archipelago existed, but were later surrounded by a large number of labor camps - thus becoming The capital of the archipelago.Over such a city hangs the air of the surrounding labor camps.The streets are full of labor camp officers walking or riding in cars, and groups of guard soldiers, just like the occupation army; the labor camp administration is the main organ of the city; the telephone network does not belong to the city, but to the labor camps; The bus lines run all the way from the city center to the labor camps; all the residents depend on the labor camps for food.

The largest of these provincial capitals in the archipelago is Karaganda.The city was built by and populated by exiles and ex-convicts.Therefore, it is impossible for an old prisoner to walk a certain distance in the street without meeting a few acquaintances.There are several labor camp administrations in the city.Labor camps are scattered around the city like sand on the seashore. What kind of people live in the world around the camp? 1.The original local people (or there may be no such people); 2.3. Militarized guards;Labor camp officers and their families; 4. Guards with their families (the guards, unlike the guards, always live at home, even if they are serving in the military); 5.Former prisoners (released from the camp or nearby labor camps); 6.Restricted people of all kinds - "semi-dictatorships", with "unclean" IDs (like ex-convicts, they live here not of their own free will, but because of spells affixed to them: even if not as The exiles were specified as if they had to live in this place, but they would have been treated worse in terms of work and residence anywhere else, perhaps not allowed to live there at all.); 7 production administrators.These are some high-ranking figures, and there are only a few people in a huge new village (sometimes there may be no such people); 8.Then there are the so-called "free people" in the narrow sense, that is, employees.It's all bum bums--all sorts of goofy, dead-end, rich-seeking folks.You must know that in these remote and dead territories, the work can be done three times worse than in the suzerain country, and the wages can be four times higher than there: arctic subsidies, remote subsidies, hardship subsidies, and theft of prisoners fruits of labor.In addition, many are recruited, under contract, and receive travel expenses.Anyone who knows how to mine gold from production reports is Clonetec.People with fake diplomas are desperately trying to drill here, and adventurers, hooligans, and profiteers come here one after another.It is very beneficial for people who need to use other people's minds for free to come here (prisoner geologists conduct field surveys, sort out data, and make conclusions for half-bottle geologists, and then he only needs to go to the suzerain country for Ph.D. dissertation defense).All sorts of down-and-out characters, as well as the average down-and-out alcoholic, have been thrown by fate into this place.Some of the people who come here are because of family breakdown or to avoid paying alimony.There are sometimes some middle school graduates who did not get a good place when they were assigned jobs.But they have been striving to return to the civilized world since the first day they arrived. Whoever fails to achieve their goal in one year will definitely achieve it in two years.Among the free folk there was another class altogether: those who had grown old, had lived for decades in the world beside the camp, and had grown so used to its air that they no longer needed another, sweeter world.If their camp is closed, or if the superiors don't pay them the wages they demand -- they leave here, but it must be transferred to another same camp area, and they can't live a different life.Vasily Aksendievich Frolov was such a man.He was a big drinker, a charlatan, a "famous foundry master," and I could say a great deal about him here if I hadn't already described him.He didn't have any diplomas, and he drank all his skills long ago, but he never received less than 5,000 (before Khrushchev) rubles a month.

The word "freeman" in its broadest sense refers to any free person, that is, a citizen of the Soviet Union who has not been imprisoned or has been released, and thus should also refer to any citizen of the surrounding world.But the word is more often used in the archipelago in a narrower sense: freedman - this is a freedman who works in a production area with the convicts.Therefore, the first, fifth, and sixth types of people who go to work there are also called free people. Freedmen were hired as builders, foremen, foremen, warehouse managers, quorum officers.Some positions, if prisoners are used, are difficult to guard, and they are also employed: drivers, coachmen, delivery men, tractor drivers, digger drivers, scraper drivers, line electricians, night shift boiler workers.

These second-class freemen are people who do ordinary hard work like prisoners.They can easily make friends with us immediately, and they are willing to do everything prohibited by the labor camp system and criminal law: they happily put letters for prisoners into the postbox of free men in the new village; Clothes are sold on the free market.Keep the money from the sale and bring something to the prisoners to satisfy their hunger; engage in theft activities on the construction site with the prisoners; bring or transport the soju into the production area (when the door is searched tightly -- put the tar-sealed vial in the car's gas tank).

If it was discovered by the gate guards there, no one would report to the superiors; the guards and soldiers of the Communist Youth League thought that it would be better to drink the seized soju by themselves. Wherever a convict's workload can be charged to a freeman's account (and foreman and foreman will not dislike having it charged to their own account), they will.You know, the workload on the prisoner's account is useless, and they will not pay, only a bread ration.Therefore, in the era after the abolition of the rationing system, it is more reasonable to fill out a daily work report for the prisoner, as long as there are no major problems, and then credit the work he has completed to the account of the free man.After receiving this money, the freeman can eat and drink for himself, and he can also give some food to his prisoners.

The great benefits of working in the world around the camps were also seen among the freedmen in the Moscow labor camps.At our Kaluga checkpoint in 1946 there were two freelance bricklayers, a plasterer, and a painter.They are people on our construction site, but they hardly do any work.Because the work does not pay them a big price: there are no additional wages, and the work area is measured: thirty-two kopeks for one square meter of plastering.And it is absolutely impossible to calculate a square at fifty kopeks or to double the square meter of a house.But first, our freedmen can carry cement, paint, drying oil, glass from the construction site; second, eight hours of work during the day, rest well, and go all out in the main work at night and on Sunday - heresy Private work, rely on it to make enough money.For plastering the same one thousand meters of wall, the plasterer gets not thirty-two kopecks from private hands, but ten rubles.That's two hundred rubles for one night!

Didn't Prokhorov say: "Money—now it's double-layered." Which Westerner can understand what "double-layered money" is?During the war, a turner received 800 rubles a month after deductions, while a kilogram of bread on the market cost 140 rubles.This means that in addition to the bread rations, he can't even earn money to buy six kilograms of bread-that is to say, he can't bring back two hundred grams of bread for the whole family every day!However, he was able to live... The government paid the workers unrealistic wages unreasonably and asked them to find the source of the "second layer of money".The man who pays our plasterers the insanely high wages for his night work is himself getting his "second layer" somewhere and somewhere.This is how the socialist system triumphed, but only on paper.The vitality of the original system was very tenacious and flexible. Neither the curse nor the prosecuting of the chief prosecutor made it die.

Therefore, the relationship between prisoners and freedmen cannot generally be said to be hostile, but friendly.In addition, these hopeless, half-drunk, half-awake, homeless and unemployed people are more likely to feel the pain of others, and can listen to the disasters of prisoners and their unjust imprisonment.The eyes of an unbiased man are open to things which officers, wardens, and guards close because of their duties. The relationship between the prisoner and the foreman and foreman is more complicated.These "production commanders" were placed in the position of suppressing and driving the prisoners.But they are also responsible for the process of production itself, which cannot always be carried on in direct hostilities with the prisoners: not everything can be achieved with sticks and starvation, some things have to be done well. Talk to each other and find out the hobbies and tempers of your subordinates.Only those foremen who have a good relationship with the operation monitor and the best prisoner masters can go well.The foremen themselves are often not only drunkards, not only weakened by the frequent use of slave labor, which has damaged their health, but also ignorant, ignorant or vague about the production work they are engaged in, so they rely more on With the homework monitor. How interestingly the fates of the Russians are sometimes intertwined!Before a program, Fyodor Ivanovich Muravlev, the foreman of carpentry, came to us drunk, and he told Sinebrukhov, the foreman of painters, who had been squatting for more than nine years -- A skilled craftsman, a serious and resolute young man -- spoke his mind: "What? You're in prison just because you're the son of a rich peasant? Your father kept plowing the land and buying cattle, thinking he could be taken to the underworld. Where is he now? Died in exile? Put you in too? No, My dad was smarter than him: he drank everything from a young age, left an empty house, and didn't even hand over a single hen to the collective farm. Because he was poor - he immediately became a production leader. I now Like him, drink all day long and have nothing to worry about." It turned out that he was right: Sikhambrukhov went on to exile after his sentence, and Muravlev became the chairman of the local trade union committee for the project. Of course, he, the chairman and foreman of the local committee of the trade union, was a figure whom the site director Buslov could not figure out how to get rid of (impossible to get rid of: these people were hired by the cadre section, not the site director. The cadre section often Pick some bums and fools).For all materials and salary funds, the site director is responsible for his own wallet, and Muravlyov is sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes out of honesty (he is not a bad-hearted person at all, and the work squad leaders have deliberately paid for this). Flatter him), squander the fund, sign some ill-conceived worksheets (filled out by the assignment monitor himself), accept poor quality handovers, and then have to tear them down and redo them.Buslov was willing to replace the foreman with a prisoner engineer who was wielding a pickaxe, but the Cadre Section would not allow this out of vigilance. "Okay, now tell me: what's the length of the girders you're currently working on?" Muravlev sighed deeply: "I can't tell you exactly..." The more Muravlyov drank, the more he spoke with the site director.At this moment The site director decided to use written methods to break him down.He spared his time and began to All his orders were in writing (copies were fixed in files).These commands naturally Yes there is no enforcement, and a dire case is piling up.But the local council Xi didn't panic either.He found half a crumpled exercise book and spent half an hour Shi Shi worked hard and crookedly wrote these few lines: "This is to report to you that all the machinery in the carpentry is defective or broken. Totally unusable. " The site supervisor already belongs to another level of production leadership.For the prisoners, he is the eternal oppressor and eternal enemy.The construction site director is no longer limited to the operation monitors; he makes friends and does not make deals with them.He often calls back their weekday slips, debunking They falsify grades (according to his level of ingenuity) and can pass labor reform at any time The battalion leader punishes the monitor and any prisoner: The labor reform is getting longer... Comrade Lieutenant: Zozuli, the leader prisoner of the concrete work, and Orachevs, the foreman prisoner The prefabricated slab cast by base casting exceeds the specified thickness, resulting in waste of concrete.for Therefore, please give the above two people the most severe punishment (preferably in confinement, but Labor needs to be brought out every day). At the same time, I would like to report to you that Alexeyev, the head of the prisoner operation team, When you talk to me about the workload record in the daily work report, the foreman Tuma Comrade Erkin insulted him by calling him a donkey.I think the criminal Lekseyev's behavior undermining the prestige of the leadership of the free employees is extremely bad even dangerous.Please take the most resolute measures until the escort is released from the camp. Site Director Buslov Buslov himself often called this Tumarkin a donkey at the right moment, but It is the prisoner's work squad leader who should be escorted out of the camp because of his own social status. Buslov sent a few notes like this to the camp chief every day.He believed that the highest stimulus to production was punishment in the labor camps.Buslov was one of those production chiefs who had mastered the Gulag system and adapted to its modus operandi.This is what he said at the meeting: "I have long-term experience working with prisoners. They threatened to brick me to death, and I am not afraid." But he regretted that the Gulag was getting worse with each generation.People who came to the labor camps after the war and Europe were less respectful. "But working in 1937, you know, it was a pleasure. For example, when a freelancer came in, the prisoners had to stand up." The place is very expert.He never spared their physical strength or their bellies, not to mention their self-esteem.The long-nosed, long-legged man, wearing a pair of American yellow leather shoes donated to needy Soviet citizens through the United Nations Relief Agency, stalked the floors of the building under construction all day long.Because he knew that if he didn't do this, those lazy and dirty creatures called "criminals" would sit, lie, keep warm, find lice and even have sex in every corner and corner of the building, and put in ten short hours of work. The most stressful moments of the day are ignored.The homework monitors gathered in the quota office and filled in the false numbers on the daily work sheet. Of all the foremen, he trusted to a certain extent only one man, Fyodor Vasilyevich Gorshkov.It was a thin old man with a white beard and a fork.He is proficient in the business of building construction, and also familiar with his own and related work.And the main feature that makes him unusual among the free folk is that he genuinely cares about the outcome of the construction: not from a wallet perspective, like Buslov (will the boss fine or reward? Swear or praise?) , but from the bottom of his heart, as if he was building the building for himself and wanted to build it better.He was also careful about his drinking, never forgetting his project.But he also has a big shortcoming: he can't cooperate with the islands, and he's not used to making the prisoners tremble forever.He also likes to walk around the construction site, looking around with his own eyesight.However, he does not scurry around like Buslov, who does not catch fakers by surprise, but likes to hang out with carpenters on beams, with bricklayers on built walls, and with bricklayers. The plasterers sat by the bucket and chatted.Sometimes the prisoners eat a few pieces of candy, which is a rare thing here.There is a kind of work that he will never give up when he grows old--pulling glass.He always had a diamond knife in his pocket.As soon as someone pulled the glass in front of him, he immediately began to yell that it was not done right, and pushed the glassman aside to do it himself.Buslov went to Sochi for a month, represented by Fedor Vasilyevich.But he categorically refused to sit in his office, and remained in the big room of the foremen. All winter Gorshkov wore an old Russian coat with a waist.The collar is all worn out, but the cloth cover is in good condition.It was said of his tight-waisted coat that Gorshkov had not changed it for thirty-two years, and before that his father had worn it for many years on holidays.Going on, I learned that his father, Vasily Gorshkov, was an official foreman.Thus it became clear why Fedor Vasilyevich was so fond of stone, wood, glass and paint - he grew up on construction sites.Although foremen were called "officials" then, they are not called so now - but it is now that they are really officials, and then they were - artisans. Fedor? Vasilyevich still praises the old order: "What is the site manager now? He doesn't dare take a kopeck. Back then, the contractor came to the workers on Saturdays: Hey, boys, do you want to talk about business before you go to the bathhouse or later? People say: later, later Well, uncle! Well, I'll give you money for the bath, and after washing, go to the tavern of such and such. The boys came out of the bathhouse and came in gangs. And the man has prepared the soju, snacks and samovars, and in the tavern Waiting...like this, why don't you do a good job on Monday?" Today everything has a name, and everything is clearly explained to us: this is called the blood and sweat system, which is a devoid of conscience, exploiting people's low-level instincts; the value of the wine and snacks drunk is lower than the next Worship wrings out of workers. But the ration bread, the uncooked bread thrown by indifferent hands through the window of the bread-cutter--was it worth something more? The above-mentioned eight types of free residents are squeezed side by side in the small space next to the labor camp: from the labor camp to the forest, from the labor camp to the swamp, from the labor camp to the mine, in a palm-sized area.People of several different classes, ranks, classes all had to cram into this fetid little new village, they all called each other comrades, they all sent their children to the same school. They are "comrades" like this: like saints on the clouds, floating above all the others are two or three local bigwigs, in Ekbastuz the trust manager "Black Shock" and the chief engineer Kara Shock "(You can't think of such a surname on purpose!).Below are the camp commanders, escort captains, trust officers, camp officers, escort officers, in some places the labor supply chief, and in some places the school principal (but not the teachers).There are distinct levels and strict boundaries.The more the above-mentioned boundaries are observed, the more meticulous they are, and the more important it is for a woman to go to another woman to eat sunflower seeds (because they are not duchesses or countesses, so they are more cautious) Be careful not to lower your status!).Alas, to live in such a narrow world, far away from other noble families who live in the comfort and spaciousness of the city, can only be to blame!Everyone here knows you, and you lower your status by just going to the cinema to see a movie.You certainly don't go to the store to buy things in person (not to mention the best and freshest stuff they send to your home).It seems inappropriate to even raise a piglet by yourself: it would be demeaning for someone's wife to feed the pig herself! (That's why we need female servants from labor camps.) In some wards of Xincun Hospital, it is not easy to separate from those wretches and poor ghosts, and to lie alone with decent patients. .And have to send my little one to sit at the same desk with God knows who's kid. But further down, these lines quickly lose their clarity and meaning, and there are few troublemakers left to maintain them.All kinds of characters after waiting inevitably mix with each other and meet frequently, you buy and sell, run to stand in line together, quarrel over the New Year's fir tree gift from the union, sit together in a mess in the movie theater-whether they are real Soviets Still not worthy of the title. The spiritual center of these new villages was the main "teahouse" housed in a decaying shed.Rows of trucks were parked near it.Singing, belching, and staggering out of it, drunks scattered across the village; in the same puddles and mud there was a second spiritual center—the "club."There, melon seed husks were spit all over the floor, big leather boots were trampled with mud everywhere, pasted were last year's posters that were dragged deep by flies, there was a loudspeaker hanging on the top of the door that was buzzing all day long, and profanity at the dance was everywhere. Er, after the movie ended, there was a group fight with a knife.The local custom is - "don't go out at night", and the surest way to take a girl to a dance is to hand in a horseshoe inside the glove. (Girls here aren't easy to mess with, though. Some of them can beat the crap out of seven lads all by themselves.) This club is a sickness in the minds of officers.It is of course quite impossible for officers to go to a ball in such a hut with such a class of people.Those who came here were the guard soldiers who took the leave.But the trouble was that young, childless officers' wives also came here obsessively, and without their husbands.The result would be dancing with the soldiers!The privates took over the waist of the officer's wife tonight, do you still want their absolute obedience tomorrow?Doesn't this mean sitting on an equal footing with military officers?No army can last like this!The officers were powerless to keep their wives from dancing, so they did everything they could to ban enlisted men from balls (let any filthy freeman hug his wife!).But in this way, the strict system of political education for soldiers - we are all happy and equal citizens of the Soviet state, and our enemies are all behind barbed wire! -- will inevitably be damaged. In the camp world, there are many such complex and tense relationships and many contradictions among the eight types of personnel.Loyal Soviet citizens who are usually mixed with the dictatorship and "semi-dictatorship" personnel never miss the opportunity to reprimand them and make them know their identity, especially when it comes to the allocation of houses in the newly built barracks .With the uniforms of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the guards also considered themselves to be superior to ordinary free men.In addition, there must have been some women who were looked down upon for rescuing the suffering of single men.There are also some women who are eager to find a regular man. Whenever they hear that prisoners are going to be released, they go to the gate of the labor camp, grab the sleeve of the man they don't know, and say, "Come with me! I have a place to live. Keeps you warm. I'll buy you a suit! Oh, where else can you go? They'll catch you in!" The surveillance system of the security department also exists in the new village. It has its own "godfather" and its own eyeliner. They are busy all day long asking: who will bring the prisoner's letter out and deliver it?Who sells camp clothes behind the corner of the barracks? The sense of the rule of law and the sense of "my barracks is my castle" among the residents of the camp world is naturally worse than that of other places in the Soviet Union.Some people's ID cards are "dirty", others have no ID cards at all, the third type of people have been reformed through labor, and the fourth type of people are "anti-belonging".All these independent and freed citizens are more obedient to the commands of a man with a rifle, and more docile to a man with a pistol than the prisoner.They never meet such people with their proud heads raised and proclaiming, "You have no right to do this!" This sense of the unlimited power of bayonet and uniform soared so securely over the immensity of the archipelago that encompassed the entire subworld, and so contagiously contagious to every man who stepped into the country that even a man with a small A free woman (Pu-china) whose daughter was visiting her husband in a labor camp on the Krasnoyarsk line plane heard the first request from the Ministry of Internal Affairs on the plane and let them search her body randomly. And let them strip the little girl naked.After that, the little girl cried whenever she saw the blue hoop hats. ) But if someone now says that there is no place more deplorable than the outskirts of such a labor camp, and that the world around the camp is a dirty sewer, our answer will be: everyone is different. For example, Kolodeznikov, a Yakutian, was sentenced to three years in prison for driving someone else's reindeer into the Shuijia Forest.According to a far-reaching immigration policy, he was sent from his hometown of Kolyma to Leningrad to serve his sentence.After serving his sentence, he also visited Leningrad and brought home brightly colored cloth. But for many years later, he always complained frequently to the villagers and the prisoners sent from Leningrad: "Oh, you're so stuffy over there! Oh, not so good!  …"