The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Of course, no transit prison is the equal of another. But which is better and which worse is something that can’t be settled in an argument. If three or four zeks get together, each of them feels bound to praise his “own.” Let us listen for a while to such a discussion: “Well, even if the Ivanovo Transit Prison isn’t one of the more famous, my friends, just ask anybody imprisoned there in the winter of 1937–1938. The prison was unheated—and the prisoners not only didn’t freeze to death, but on the upper bunks they lay there undressed. And they knocked out all the windowpanes so as not to suffocate. Instead of the twenty men Cell 21 was supposed to contain, there were three hundred and twenty-three! There was water underneath the bunks, and boards were laid in the water and people lay on those boards. That was right where the frost poured in from the broken windows. It was like Arctic night down under the bunks. There was no light down there either because it was cut off by the people lying on the bunks above and standing in the aisle. It was impossible to walk through the aisle to the latrine tank, and people crawled along the edges of the bunks. They didn’t distribute rations to individuals but to units of ten. If one of the ten died, the others shoved his corpse under the bunks and kept it there until it started to stink. They got the corpse’s ration. And all that could have been endured, but the turnkeys seemed to have been oiled with turpentine—and they kept driving th...