STOLOVAYA: THE DINNING HALL

. . . . But one aspect of camp lie remains consistent from camp to camp, from year to year, from memoir to memoir: the description of the ‘balanda,’ the soup that prisoners were served once or sometimes twice a day.

Universally, for prisoners agree that the taste of the daily or twice daily half-liter of prison soup was revolting: its consistent was watery, and it contents were suspect. Galina Levinson wrote that it was made “from spoiled cabbage and potatoes, sometimes with a piece of pig fat, sometimes with herring heads. Barbara Armons remembered soup made from “fish and animal lungs and a few potatoes.” Leonid Sitko described the soup as “never having any meat in it at all.”

Another person remembered soup made from dog meat, which one of his co-workers, a Frenchman, could not eat: “a man from Western countries is not always able to cross psychological barrier, even when he is starving,” he concluded. Even Lazar Kogn, the bost of Dmitlag, once complained that “Some cooks act as if they were not preparing Soviet meals, but rather pig slops. Thanks to his attitude, the food they prepare is unsuitable, and often tasteless and bland”

Hunger was a powerful motivator nevertheless. The soup might have been inedible under normal circumstances, but in the camps, where most people were always hungry, prisoners are ate it with relish. Nor was their hunger accidental: prisoners were kept hungry, because regulation of prisoners’ food after regulation of prisoners’ time and living space, the camp administration’s most important tool of control.

For that reason, the distribution of food to prisoners in camps grew into quite an alaborate science. The exact norms for particular categories of prisoners and camp workers were set in Moscow, and frequently changed. . . . Page 206/207

. . . Prisoners sought out jobs which gave them access to food -- cooking, dishwashing, work in storage warehouses -- in order to be able to steal. Evgeniya Ginzburg was once ‘saved’ by a job washing dishes in the men’s dining hall. Not only was she able to eat ‘real meat broth and excellent dumplings fried in sunflower-seed oil,’ but she also found that other prisoners stood in awe of her. Speaking to her, one man’s voice trembled, “from a mixture of acute envy and humble adoration of anyone who coupled such an exalted position in life -- ‘where the food is!” ~ Page 212