Prisoner: Dimitri Panin
At Vyatlag. “Work in the shop was conducted in two shifts, each lasting twelve hours with a thirty-minute break. I wound up on the night shift. I was required to file the edges of wrench screws down to twenty-two and twenty-seven millimeters at a rate of seventy pieces a shift. Even by transforming myself into a robot, I could not manage more than fifty pieces a night. For my failure to meet the quota, they could have placed me on a penalty ration of three hundred grams of bread, but every day Boris brought me six hundred. After twenty days at this job, I realized that my strength would not last very long—I was beginning to ‘wear out’.”
Prisoner Labor Gang
Tufta
Prisoners who could not avoid general labor needed to learn how to cheat while in the forest or the mines. Officials required prisoners to fulfill a certain labor quota everyday—to mine a certain number of tons of coal, or cut a certain number of cubic feet of timber. They set quotas at levels impossible to fulfill given the climate and the poor food provisions, but survival often depended upon receiving that full ration of food. So, the prisoners invented numerous ingenious ways to cheat on their quotas, a practice referred to as tufta or tukhta.
Eugenia Ginzburg recalled tufta in the forests. “This forest is full of piles of timber cut by previous work gangs. No one ever counted how many there are…If you saw a small section at each end, it looks as if it had just been cut. Then you stack them up in another place, and there’s your norm…This trick, which we christened ‘freshening up the sandwiches,’ saved our lives for the time being…[W]e laid the foundation of our pile with trees we had really cut down ourselves, leaving a couple or so we had felled but not yet sawn up to create the impression that we were hard at it. Then we went to fetch some of the old logs, ‘freshening up’ their ends and stacking them up on our pile.”