But the job itself was a lot less all right than I had hoped. Of course it was much better than lifting heavy blocks of stone. But the norm for a nut tapper is 185 nuts a day. They are big nuts, over an inch thick. You wind the tap into them by hand, cutting through the heavy blank. It takes several cuts, starting with a coarse tap and finishing with a fine one. This means that, working nonstop with about ten or eleven actual working hours at the vise, if you could stand that, which nobody could, you would have to turn out a nut about every three minutes. It takes all the strength a weakened man can muster just to turn the tap. The first day on the job I made thirty-five nuts. The second day fifty nuts. I broke a tap at least twice an hour at first. I got blisters on my hands. My arms and back ached all night. And most seriously I was getting tired out. Although I was still grabbing time in the meal break to turn out a couple of spoons, and still able to buy extra bread and oil with the products of my foundry, I was just not strong enough to begin with. For too long the only exercise my muscles had experienced was flinching against blows. I had no tone in my back and shoulders and arms. I began to worry that this job would defeat me, and although I tried desperately to meet the norm, because Zyuzin had carried me for the first few days well beyond even his considerable capacity for tufta, I never made more than 130 nuts, and 120 was more usual. If I could have got it up to 150 there would have been some way to justify keeping me at the job, but I knew I could never make it.
So I stopped spoon-making for a few days and used my lunch breaks to see what I could find out about softer jobs. Arc welding looked easiest. You just put on the face mask and the gloves and made seams in the metal. Nobody seemed to mind if you picked up their tools and fooled around during lunch, so I gave it a try to see if it was tricky. I made a few seams on scraps of steel, and they looked okay to me. After all, I had no standards to judge the work by. I practiced as much as I could to see if I could consistently keep from either getting the electrode stuck by working too close, or losing the arc by working too loose. It began to come after a while and I let Zyuzin know that arc welding really was one of my skills, no fooling this time. Zyuzin just looked suspicious and said there was a line-up for arc-welding jobs. This confirmed my guess that it was a soft job. I told him to put my name on the list. I said, “By the way, I see you need a drill press operator. That I can certainly do. I had lots of experience in Moscow.” I lied.
So I got on the drill press. I connected it up incorrectly the first morning. The electrical cables got tangled in the drill mechanism and I shorted out the whole shop. Zyuzin sent me back to threading nuts, but I kept haunting the arc welders whenever I could, partly to learn more about their craft, and partly to steal bits of their grounding cable, which had excellent aluminum wire in it for my spoons.
If it had not been for Zyuzin’s skill in tufta, I might have died in the DOZ. That must sound an exaggeration, but this is how it works. If you made your norm you were given a basic ration, known as 100 per cent, and this was sufficient to keep you going. If you dropped below your norm, you got a lower ration. With lower rations you would be too weak to maintain whatever percentage of the norm you had been achieving, and so your ration would be lowered again. Finally it would be reduced to the starvation ration. At that point, without some supplementary food, a prisoner would simply starve to death. I had supplementary food, but I feared that I would get so weak that I would have no energy left for making spoons, and besides the market was uncertain. But somehow Zyuzin managed to walk the tightrope very well. He kept me and all his brigades at least at the base rations by satisfying the MVD that his norms were being met when they were not, juggling books, keeping from being caught, keeping his brigade loyal to him so that no one would be tempted to turn informer. All of us would watch out for informers and see that they were stopped before they had done their work.
Informers were usually killed. There was a prisoners’ committee called the People’s Council of Justice, a sort of special soviet that undertook on behalf of the camp as a whole to execute these destructive people. The commonplace saying in camp was, “The stool pigeon walks with an ax at his back,” and it was not just a figure of speech. The standard practice until mid-1953 was for a nominee of the Council simply to walk up to the condemned man in the yard, say quickly and quietly, “The People’s Council has condemned you to death,” and stab him before he knew what was happening. Professional criminals preferred beheading to simple stabbing. I met a man who had been serving a short sentence for robbery and had lost a big bet at blackjack. His payoff was that he had to behead the camp commandant. He never hesitated. Found the man in the yard and stepped up behind him with a knife and did the job. Why he was not shot I do not understand. Why he ended up in our camp is clear: killing an M’D is a political offense. When a professional was assigned executioner by the People’s Council, consistent with the ethic of audacity among the coloreds, he would sometimes take the severed head immediately to the nearest guard and say, “Here! I got the dirty stool pigeon. He’s one of yours!” Then he would hand over the head and stoically take his three months in hard punishment. If it was winter that would likely be, the end of him.
In 1953 we were made to sign a document we jokingly called “the peace treaty.” This was simply a declaration that any prisoner known to have killed another prisoner would be summarily shot without trial. When that was promulgated, the execution of informers went underground. One technique was to arrange to have the electric wires cut in the barracks. Almost as soon as the lights went out, there would be a scream that died off into a rasping breath and silence, or sometimes the muted sounds of a man struggling whose mouth has been stopped with an arm in a padded jacket and whose limbs are pinioned. Once a hoarse whisper reached my ears from a nearby bunk: “Ivan Sergeiyevich Rostov, you are condemned to death by order of the People’s Council,” and then some unpleasant gurgling sounds. After that I heard the soft padding of bare feet as the unknown executioner or executioners slipped back to their bunks. This all took seconds from the time the light died. And seconds later cursing guards would be in the place with torches or lanterns, rousing someone to build up the fire while the wires were fixed. They would go around flinging off blankets until they found a blue strangled face or a pool of blood and a gaping throat. One man in my barracks was executed with drills from the quarry.
This sort of thing confirmed what the guards had been taught to believe about us, that we were killers and enemies of the people. In the evening, after the constant desert daytime winds had died down, voices carried with a strange rising and falling strength. And I remember that often, sitting on the toilet in the evening silence, I could hear the guards handing over the watch in the towers around the camp. They had their own prayer: “Sentry number forty-one. Post number three. For the defense of the Soviet Union. Guarding terrorists, spies, murderers, and enemies of the people. Sentry forty-one delivers the post.”
Then the reply: “Sentry number nineteen. Post number three. For the defense of the Soviet Union. Guarding terrorists, spies, murderers, and enemies of the people. Sentry nineteen accepts the post.”
They called it out in a loud clear voice. The ritual never varied.
At the work site the guards often came in and walked around the shop or the welding yard or wherever we were working. They looked at us as if we were exhibits in a zoo. They were rotated from post to post frequently, and from camp to camp, to ensure that they formed no friendships with the prisoners. It would have been bad for morale if the guards discovered that we were human beings and that most of us were serving our sentences for modest offenses or for no offense at all. Solzhenitsyn, who was in a camp in Ekibastuz, recounts a conversation between a guard and a prisoner.
“What is your sentence?”
“Twenty-five years.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. I did nothing at all.”
“You are lying, prisoner; the sentence for nothing at all is ten years.”
To an
outsider this seems like a joke; it was not a joke. The guards believed that the correct sentence for people such as u, when we had done nothing at all, was ten years. They were wrong, of course. Twenty-five, five, and five was more common.
After a while I told Zyuzin I simply could not manage the nut threading. It was a matter of physical endurance. If I had started strong I would have been all right. As it was I was falling behind by 70 per cent and I knew that, ingenious as Zyuzin was, 1 would be giving him trouble if it got much lower than that, and it had to get lower because I was getting weaker.
Zyuzin agreed. He made me a locksmith. The norm was four locks a day, but nobody could ever manage more than two and nobody made trouble about it. There was no problem of physical strength. It was just a time-consuming job, though not very difficult. We had a pattern to follow. We cut out simple keys. We made a simple, flat sheet-metal box, drilled it, and set in springs and other parts we had cut from the patterns. The blacksmith shop made the springs and I think we made everything else. They were crude locks for desk drawers, and one key would open all the locks. I soon got the hang of it and turned out my two locks a day, until the sheet-metal supply dried up. I went to Zyuzin.
“No more sheet metal. What’ll I do?”
“Use your ingenuity.”
“Can’t make locks out of ingenuity.”
“Look. There is metal around. If the gauge you need isn’t delivered, find out where you can get some and get it. Only don’t tell me about it. All I want to know about is finished locks that work.”
“You mean steal it?”
“I don’t want to know anything about it. Don’t steal it. Just get it wherever you can get it and don’t get caught.”
I stole it from the stove works. They were making wood-burning stoves with a sheet metal that was just about exactly what we needed. Here’s a good example of how tufta can work beautifully if your nerves are good: Once the stove makers had completed a stove, it was written down in their norm sheets, and they were through with it. Stoves were picked up for delivery by civilian drivers once a week or so. There was no difficulty juggling inventories at this stage because everyone stole stoves, including the MVD. So I just stole a whole stove, knowing that the man who made it would not be penalized, and probably no one else would either. The hardest part of my career as a locksmith was stealing stoves, and the hardest part of that was the physical work of carrying them. I hammered out the rivets, flattened the bent sheets, cut them for the lock box, and kept on making two locks a day. One stove would last me about two weeks.
Then I got a brainstorm. I remembered some of the things my father had told me about techniques of mass production. I went to the brigadier. I said, “Zyuzin, how long could you go? A week? Two weeks? Without having to measure my output?”
He said, “What are you getting at?”
I said, “Suppose I produced you three locks a day, but you wouldn’t see any finished locks for three weeks?”.
“But nobody’s ever made three locks a day. Two and a half is about the best possible.”
“I think I can make three. Can you wait three weeks to do your count?”
“Go ahead,” he said. “I think I can fix it.”
I started a production-line system. First I made a pattern and hammered out boxes, only boxes, until I had sixty of them. That took me a week. Then I started on the inside parts for sixty locks. That took me nearly two weeks. Keys one day.
Latches—the next. And so on. But then it took only one day to assemble sixty locks from all these parts. I took them to Zyuzin in triumph. His reaction was disappointing. He just took the locks and noted the number. All he said was, “Okay, keep it up.” He looked worried about something and distracted.
I said, “What’s wrong? What’s bothering you?”
“Oh, no problem really. Some son of a bitch is stealing stoves and the supply room is mad as hell. Must be one of. those civilian drivers.”
Now I had more energy; there was nothing physically demanding about lock-making except lugging those stoves around. I began to take off at lunch again to make spoons. Zyuzin caught me stealing ground cables for the aluminum, but he was tolerant about it when he found out that it was going into spoons, and I helped him feel better by letting him have part of every liter of cooking oil Kuznetsov passed out to me in the dispensary.
The lock assignment was completed a few weeks later. Zyuzin said he reckoned I’d have to go back to threading nuts; there still was no opening in arc welding. I had seen a lot of the blacksmith shop when I went to pick up my springs, and I thought the smith himself had a pretty good touch. His assistant had to wield a heavy hammer, but he mostly held onto things with a pair of tongs, or did fine work with a small hammer, and I had watched a lot and got the idea I could handle that pretty easily, so I asked Zyuzin, What about the blacksmith shop?
He looked surprised. “Are you sure?” he said. “Sure; I know all about it.”
His face showed what he thought of that statement. He was getting to know me pretty well. But he was still friendly and tolerant and so—he sent me to the blacksmith shop. “There’s always a demand for apprentices,” he said.
It was terrible. I was assigned to an old Estonian blacksmith named Arnold.
Arnold was small and wiry and very competent. I was supposed to help him cut metal. I wielded the hammer, of course, and could hardly lift it. He held the chisel. I had a knack of somehow striking the chisel in a way that would cause the handle to break off and the hot blade to fly through the window.
Arnold was shocked. “How the hell did you do that! That never happened before!”
I went to get the chisel. It had smashed through the glass window and disappeared in a snowdrift outside. Then Arnold sent me to the supply room for a new handle. I brought the turned wooden handle back to the forge. The blacksmith heated up the chisel, thrust the handle into the enlarged socket and immediately dunked it in a barrel of water to shrink it onto the handle.
Then he set up for another try. The bar of hot metal was laid on the anvil and the blacksmith seized the chisel and signaled me to strike. I could hardly lift the big hammer, that was the trouble. I just could not hold it straight. It came down at an angle. There was a sound something between a shot and a breaking guitar string, and the chisel disappeared. We both looked around. There were no new panes of glass broken. It was not on the floor anywhere. Finally, knowing it was crazy, I went out and looked in the snowbank. There was the chisel, right where it had been before, and it must have gone through the already broken windowpane. Arnold said, “How can anyone so sloppy be so accurate?” We tried again, and for a while I managed to hit straight on. The next day I broke a couple of handles, and the next day a couple more. They quite often went through the same window. The other men in the forge began to call me Dead-eye Dolgun. Arnold the blacksmith was too kindly to complain. He was the kind of man who hated to cause trouble for anyone, but he looked increasingly pained each time I shot a chisel out the window. The one who did complain was the supply-room man. We were exhausting his supply of chisel handles and he was going to face trouble when he asked the administration for new ones.
Three years on the job and he had never given out a chisel handle. I broke thirty in two weeks. One day, coming back from the supply room with a fresh handle, I saw a commotion out in the arc welders’ yard. The door opened and they carried in a dead guy with burns up the sleeve of his padded jacket. He had electrocuted himself. I dropped the handle and ran to Zyuzin. I forgot all about my kindly Estonian boss. I guess he just stood there and wondered what hole his apprentice had fallen into and whether he had fallen m the same hole before several times. I pleaded with Zyuzin to give me the dead arc welder’s job. Zyuzin tried to get himself off the hook. He called the chief engineer, a civilian. The man said, “Can you do a figure-eight bead?”
“Sure, easy.”
“Can you make a double seam on two pieces of rail?”
“What do you take me for?” I sai
d indignantly. “This is baby stuff!”
“All right, come and show me,” the engineer said.
We went outside. I was completely confident. I had been practicing. He gave me a mask and a machine and pointed out the two bits of rail I was to weld. “Call me when it’s done and I’ll see if you’re any good,” he said, and went inside.
I thought, This will be a cinch!
Then I remembered the poor guy they had just carried out, and told myself to be careful, to take every precaution. I looked at all the eleven other arc welders to see if there was anything I had not noticed before. They were all looking at me. Suddenly I felt very embarrassed, so I pulled on my gloves and shoved the mask down over my face. I couldn’t see a thing. I pulled the mask up again and got the rails together and set the electrode as close to them as I dared and then pulled the mask down and moved the electrode in to start the arc. Immediately I got it too close and it stuck. I wrenched it loose. I started again and made the beginnings of a bead, but I was overcautious now and the arc kept going out.
I was sweating inside the mask. I lifted it for a moment and looked around.
The other arc welders were still looking at me. I pulled the mask down again. Steady, Alex. This can be very important.
Sweat kept getting in my eyes. I would lift the mask to wipe it away, catch the amused looks from the other guys, shrivel up with embarrassment some more, and try again.
It took me nearly an hour to make those two seams.
I called Zyuzin and he called the engineer. It was lunch break now, and the other welders had gone. The engineer picked up a sledge hammer to see if he could break open my weld. Suddenly he put the hammer down again without using it. He bent over and examined the weld more closely. Then he swung his boot six inches and gave it a light kick. It fell apart.
I was mortified.
An American in the Gulag Page 31
