A Day in the Life of Yuli Daniel

The struggle against cold in the camp is waged in a unique way: they took away all our belongings, sweater, jacket and so on. Solitary confinement is not just cold, it's dog cold, because they give you a blanket only at night. The rest of the time you get only bare boards and a cement floor. Among the crimes punishable by solitary confinement: not waking up when they bang on the bars, not standing up before an officer, brewing coffee or toasting bread, not going to political lectures, growing a few blades of dill in your area and refusing to trample on them, or not fulfilling your norm.

THAT cry of controlled anger comes from Soviet Writer Yuli Daniel, who is serving the fourth year of a five-year sentence at hard labor for "slandering the Soviet state" in his short stories that were published abroad. Daniel is in a labor camp at Potma in the Volga basin, along with Fellow Writer Aleksandr Ginzburg, whose crime was compiling a record of the February 1966 trial of Daniel and Writer Andrei Sinyavsky (who is serving his seven-year sentence in another part of the same camp, also for "slandering the state").

The persecutions of camp life have not quenched the spirit of Daniel and Ginzburg. Now, along with four other prisoners, they have written an open letter to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, urging "corrective legislation" to change the regulations in camps like Potma, where, according to official designation, "especially dangerous political prisoners" are held. Last week their letter was being circulated widely in Moscow.

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"Our food is tasteless, monotonous and contains hardly any vitamins," the letter said. "Although we cannot really speak of constant hunger"—the maximum daily ration is 2,413 calories, mostly starch—"constant vitamin hunger is an indisputable fact. It is no accident that in the camps so many people suffer from stomach ailments." Food parcels are forbidden, the men said, and even in the kiosks, where they can buy five rubles' worth of goods a month, "buying green vegetables or other produce containing vitamins is impossible. Any one of us at any minute can be deprived of the right to buy anything at the kiosk, or be put in solitary confinement, where the rations may be reduced to 1,300 calories."

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"The camp administration can arbitrarily curtail the time of meetings" with relatives, and "a considerable number of our letters and the letters sent to us disappear without a trace. We cannot write about our situation; such letters always disappear." Thus, the prisoners add, the lawmakers of the Supreme Soviet "will understand how difficult it is for us to defend what remains of our miserable rights."

At compulsory political meetings, the prisoners are given a "beginner's course of political literacy, repeated from year to year," and conducted by "half-educated officers mechanically reading what is written or repeating it in their own words. A question that the officer cannot answer (and these are in the majority) may be regarded as 'provocative' and the person who asked it is punished in one way or another. If you express your own view you risk a new trial and sentence.