After it becomes official that Tyurin, Ivan's gang boss, has successfully bribed the officials into letting Gang 104 keep their former work assignment, Ivan has his prison uniform number repainted. The uniform numbers are mentioned over and over; together with the animal terminology which is applied to the prisoners, the numbers serve to emphasize the dehumanizing conditions in the camp. The counting and recounting of the prisoners before they leave the camp is on a literal level — that is, it is standard precautionary procedure. On a symbolic level, however, the counting and recounting signify the existence of the prisoners not as human beings, but as digits.
The cigarette butt episode continues and reinforces the theme of Ivan's code. Ivan wants the cigarette as badly as Fetyukov does, but he does not demean himself, as the latter does. Fetyukov literally drools and begs for the butt. Caesar Markovich, an upper-class intellectual who feels no great allegiance to any of his fellow prisoners, finally gives Ivan the cigarette butt, but he does so because he dislikes Fetyukov more than he likes Ivan. Ivan, however, is pleased to have bested the scrounger. It is a vindication for the code which he learned from his former gang boss, Kuzyomin.
The frisking episode demonstrates the senseless, cruel camp rules. To make the prisoners take off extra underclothing in the freezing cold is absurd since it diminishes their effectiveness at work.
Captain Buynovsky is a former Navy officer who has only recently been sent to this "special" camp. He is still used to giving commands and has not understood that survival in a prison camp is not possible by insisting on "rules and regulations." His protest that Lieutenant Volkovoy's frisking orders are a violation of the Soviet Criminal Code is sincere but nonsensical in view of the provisions of that same Criminal Code which sent him to this camp in the first place. Volkovoy (his name means "wolf" in Russian) can tolerate an appeal to legality, but he cannot stand being accused of being a "bad" Communist.
