The Great Terror

11

IN THE LABOR CAMPS

No one who has not sat in prison knows what the State is like.

Tolstoy

The fate of the prisoner who had the good fortune to escape being taken to the execution cellars was to be dispatched to a Corrective Labor Camp.

The Corrective Labor Codex defines three types of camp:

Factory and agricultural colonies where “people deprived of freedom” are “trained and disciplined.” (Article 33)

Camps for mass work which includes those in “distant regions” for “class-dangerous elements” requiring “a more severe regime.” (Article 34)

Punitive camps for the “strict isolation” of those “previously detained in other colonies and showing persistent insubordination.” (Article 35)

The first category was mainly for very minor offenses against factory discipline, and for petty thieves. All sentenced under Article 58 or by the Special Board went initially to category two.

The labor camp was one of the pillars of Stalin’s whole system. Concealment of its nature from the West was one of his most extraordinary triumphs.

For the evidence on the camps was, by the late 1940s, overwhelming and detailed. Thousands of former inmates had reached the West, and their wholly consistent stories were supported by a good deal of documentation, such as the many labor-camp forms and letters reproduced in David J. DaIlin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky’s Forced Labour in Soviet Russia and, indeed, by the Corrective Labor Codex of the RSFSR, produced with much effect by the British delegation to the United Nations in 1949. Yet it was possible for Western intellectuals to disbelieve this material, and to join in Soviet-sponsored campaigns condemning all who revealed it as slanderers.

And, indeed, there had long been an alternative Soviet story. There were, it is true, corrective labor establishments of a highly beneficent type. Their operations could be seen in such works as Pogodin’s play The Aristocrats, which showed how prisoners were reclaimed at labor on the White Sea Canal and elsewhere. Pogodin represents bandits, thieves, and even “wrecker” engineers being reformed by labor. A regenerated engineer, now working enthusiastically at a project, has his old mother visit him. The kindly camp chief puts his car at her disposal, and she is delighted at her son’s healthy physical appearance. “How beautifully you have reeducated me,” a thief remarks, while another sings, “I am reborn, I want to live and sing.”

And much of the hostile evidence came from people who had been unjustly imprisoned in camps, and who had come to oppose the Stalin regime. They were, therefore, “anti-Soviet,” and purveyors of “anti-Soviet propaganda.” By this system, no evidence whatever of any facts unpalatable to Stalin could ever be admissible. As Bertrand Russell wrote of a labor-camp book:

The book ends with letters from eminent Communists saying that no such camps exist. Those who write these letters and those fellow-travellers who allow themselves to believe them share responsibility for the almost unbelievable horrors which are being inflicted upon millions of wretched men and women, slowly done to death by hard labour and starvation in the Arctic cold. Fellow-travellers who refuse to believe the evidence of books such as Mr Herling’s are necessarily people devoid of humanity, for if they had any humanity they would not merely dismiss the evidence, but would take some trouble to look into it.¹

As Russell truly remarks, it was “millions” who suffered. And here we have a point on which admissions only began to appear in the Soviet media in 1987 to 1989. While the publications in Khrushchev’s time of such books as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and of various memoirs by former camp inmates amounted to an acknowledgment that the long-disputed evidence produced in the West was accurate through and through, this applied to the nature of the camp system, not—or not explicitly—to its extent.

What many people of good will found hard to believe was less the existence of the system, in all its unpleasantness, than the numbers of prisoners alleged to be detained in them. When figures like 10 million were mentioned, it was an almost instinctive feeling that this did not accord with common sense, with normal experience. Nor, of course, did it. But, then, the reality of Stalin’s activities was often disbelieved because they seemed to be unbelievable. His whole style consisted of doing what had previously been thought morally or physically inconceivable.

Even so, it is difficult not to reject the larger figures out of hand as “obviously” exaggerated, and a very definite effort has to be made when we consider the evidence. This is multifarious, but inexact, and estimates have ranged from about 5 million upward. I am inclined to accept a figure of about 7 million purgees in the camps in 1938. This cannot, in any case, be very far wrong.

A detailed list of camp groups covering 35 clusters was given as early as 1937² (a cluster usually included about 200 camps of around 1,200 inmates each). In 1945, on the basis of reports from Poles allowed to leave under the Soviet–Polish treaty, a far more comprehensive account was given, together with a map, showing 38 administration clusters and groups (including 8 under Dalstroy—the “Far Eastern Construction Trust”).³ In 1948, Dallin and Nicolaevsky, on the basis of careful research, were able to list and describe the operations of 125 camps or camp clusters, mentioning that a number of others had been reported but not wholly confirmed.⁴

Like the other mechanisms from which Stalin constructed the Purge, the labor camps were no new invention.

With a few exceptions, our major accounts of labor-camp life come from intellectuals who were sent to them from 1935–1936 on. For the victims of the Yezhov terror included a higher proportion of urban, and of foreign, intellectuals than had the repressions of earlier years. As a result, we are inclined to think of the system as arising, or passing through an enormous quantitative or qualitative change, at the beginning of the Great Purge proper. There are, indeed, a few accounts by “intellectuals” from the earlier period—for example, Professor Tchernyavin—and these differ little from later ones. But on the whole, those who suffered in the first half of the 1930s were mainly peasants, who were less inclined to write books about their experiences—even though an equivalent proportion of them ended up in Western Europe as a result of the captures and migrations of the war.

There is one important exception. When Victor Kravchenko sued Les Lettres françaises in 1949 for having declared his book I Chose Freedom a fake, many otherwise unforthcoming refugees in the West sent in affidavits of experiences of theirs which confirmed his story, and a number of these were peasants who had been in camps from as early as 1930.

Their accounts⁵ (and earlier ones) make it clear that the system already existed in much the same form, if with fewer inmates, at this earlier stage. Brutalities are described, indeed, which for a time became less common in the mid-1930s. This probably signifies the automatic hostility of the NKVD cadres to those whom they were able to think of as a genuinely hostile class element—kulaks. At the same time, the tradition of the Russian vlast, of straightforward beating for the clods of peasants, compared with a certain restraint toward the intelligentsia who might have influential friends and relations, still prevailed. Later on, of course, the latter class became, if anything, the target of yet greater extremes of brutality. But up to 1936, preferential treatment of political prisoners could still be claimed even by imprisoned Trotskyites, a category later to be marked out for specially vicious treatment.

Camps seem to have been in existence as early as mid-1918, but the decrees legalizing them were passed in September 1918⁶ and April 1919.⁷ The first true death camp seems to have been at Kholmogori, near Archangel, in 1921. A list of sixty-five concentration camps administered in 1922 by the Main Administration of Forced Labor is given in the directory and address book All Russia of 1923.⁸ This Administration was merged in October 1922 with the Corrective Labor Section of the Commissariat of Justice, and the whole brought under the NKVD as the Main Administration of Places of Detention.

The first great camps were in the Solovetsky Monasteries in the far north. Here, in Tsarist times, the monks of the oldest tradition of isolation from the world had withstood a siege from 1668 to 1676, defending their faith in the Old Belief against the reformism of the time. When the camps were set up, some of the old monks were retained for a time to teach the convicts how to operate the fisheries. They were later liquidated for sabotage.⁹ At the Solovetsky camps, health conditions were very bad. Epidemics reduced the population from 14,000 to 8,000 in 1929 and 1930.¹⁰ In general, these were bad times in all the camps springing up around the White Sea. The average life span in them between 1929 and 1934 “did not exceed one or two years.”¹¹ This was almost always due to corruption and inefficiency among the jailers. The remedy was a conventional one. “The G.P.U. commission would come down from Moscow and shoot half the administration, after which convict life returned to its normal horror.”¹² The original Solovetsky “Camp of Special Designation” was changed in 1936 into a “Prison of Special Designation,” and in 1939 the surviving prisoners were transferred by sea to Norilsk and Dudinin.¹³

The statute on Corrective Labor Camps which governed the later period was adopted on 7 April 1930. The camps took their modern form at a time of vast expansion of the network.

The most careful estimates of the camp population over the pre-Yezhov period run as follows:

In 1928, 30,000.

In 1930, over 600,000.

In 1931 and 1932, a total of nearly 2 million in “places of detention” can be estimated from figures given for the allotment per prisoner of newspapers, and a Moscow scholar recently estimates that of “over” 15 million dekulakized in the collectivization of 1930 to 1932, 1 million of the males of working age were sent directly to labor camps.¹⁴

In 1933 to 1935, Western estimates run mainly at the 5 million level (70 percent of them peasants),¹⁵ and in 1935 to 1937, a little higher.¹⁶ But recent Soviet analysis suggests that (omitting deportees held in NKVD “Special Settlements”) the true figure may be lower, in the 2 to 4 million range. A Soviet textbook of the 1930s gives the maximum numbers at forced labor (katorga) in Tsarist times as 32,000, in 1912, and the maximum total of all prisoners as 183,949.¹⁷

TO THE CAMPS

This established system awaited the new intake. After sentence, the prisoners were crammed into Black Marias, of a type originally produced before the Revolution; they had then been designed for seven persons, but by narrowing the cellular partitions to a minimum, now took twenty-eight.¹⁸ Then, usually at night, they were loaded into the railway wagons taking them to their destination, either cattle wagons which had carried twelve horses or forty-eight men in the Tsarist wars and now held up to a hundred prisoners,¹⁹ or the specially made “Stolypin trucks,” named after the Tsarist Minister—though, as a Soviet writer says, “Why were these appalling narrow penal wagons called Stolypin trucks? They were of quite recent origin”—which often held twenty to thirty people in six-man compartments.²⁰ These journeys to the camps might last months. For example, one prisoner describes a forty-seven-day railway journey from Leningrad to Vladivostok.²¹ Such trips are sometimes described as worse than the camps themselves. The crowded goods wagons were practically unheated in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer. Inadequate food and drinking water and sanitary arrangements caused great suffering and a high death rate. A foreign Communist complains of spending six weeks in a ship’s hold, on “one of the widest rivers in the world,” with only seven fluid ounces of drinking water a day.²²

The train guards, from the so-called convoy troops of the NKVD, were particularly brutal and negligent. During transport to the camps, the NKVD’s regulation mania was not even formally observed when it came, for example, to rations. Sometimes there was nothing to drink the “tea” ration from. Often rations gradually got smaller and smaller, and the guards started failing to distribute them at all. Even the water to be provided was often forgotten for a day or two.²³ A Soviet woman writer complains of the suffering caused by the provision of only one mug of water a day for all purposes on the long run from Moscow to Vladivostok.²⁴

A Pole who collated the accounts of his countrymen deported in 1939 and 1940 remarks:

It seems almost impossible for any human being, when not experiencing any particular sensations of anger or vindictiveness and when not in danger of thereby being deprived of it himself, persistently to refuse to hand in a bucket of water to fifty or sixty human beings shut in under such conditions. It is a fact that these men did refuse to do so, and could keep up this attitude throughout journeys lasting four, five and six weeks. There were whole days of twenty-four hours when not a drop of anything to drink passed into the cars. There were periods even of thirty-six hours.²⁵

The writer adds that in examining “many hundreds”²⁶ of accounts, he has noted one case of a guard passing in an extra bucket, and five others of the doors being opened for ten minutes or so to relieve the fetor of the cars. Of the doctors or medical orderlies attached to each train, he found a few cases of “a little more than blank indifference” to particular children, and two records of decided kindness.²⁷ The brutalization Bukharin had noted in the Party had reached down and everywhere reinforced a more archiac brutality. These train journeys were highly debilitating. A Soviet writer, later rehabilitated, describes a party of men being marched from Vladivostok Transit Camp to the embarkation point for Magadan immediately after coming off the train, without food. After several had collapsed and died, the remainder refused to go on, whereupon the guards panicked, started kicking the corpses, and shot a number of others.²⁸

There is an interesting postwar account in the British Medical Journalfn1 of a medical examination of twenty-four women, former inhabitants of East Prussia, who had just excaped to western Germany after returning to the Eastern Zone from Soviet labor camps. On their way to the latter, they had been packed about eighty to a truck, and they lived on bread and a spoonful of sugar a day. But the worst deprivation was the lack of water. It was estimated that about 40 to 50 in one transport of 2,000 women died en route. In one of the camps described, it was estimated that about half the women died in the first eight or nine months, mostly from intestinal diseases.

It was usual for political prisoners to be robbed almost at once of their most valued possessions, such as warm clothing and good footwear, either on the journey or immediately on arrival at camp. This was done quite openly under the eyes of the guards. The old criminal underworld of Tsarist Russia, which since the Time of Troubles had developed as an extraordinary milieu with its own dialect and its own law, had been greatly reinforced, and its character much modified, by the tumults of the Civil War and the famine of the early 1920s. Already then, the bezprizorniye, the homeless orphan children assembling in gangs and living by their wits, had become a problem. Collectivization and other social experiments disrupted millions more families and provided large reinforcements to these now maturing criminals.

The percentage of “criminals” was around 10 to 15 percent, but the majority of these were of the petty embezzler type, rather than urkas proper, who were seldom more than around 5 percent of a camp total. In some camps, indeed, there were none or almost none—particularly the more severe camps like the one described in Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, where almost all prisoners were in under Article 58, as interpreted by the Special Board. In other camps, their rule, which led to the slow murder of many politicals at night in the barracks when guards did not dare to interfere, was the norm. By 1940, the NKVD was often more fully in control, permitting only, in mixed camps such as Kargopol, regular rape hunts. Even these were largely suppressed in 1941. But later, a considerable relapse seems to have taken place. And in no case was there any serious interference with ordinary robbery and beating up.

Soviet sources as long ago as the 1960s confirmed all this. General Gorbatov relates:

While we were in the Sea of Okhotsk misfortune befell me. Early in the morning, when I was lying half-awake as many of us did, two “trusties” came up to me and dragged away my boots which I was using as a pillow. One of them hit me hard on the chest and then on the head and said with a leer: “Look at him—sells me his boots days ago, pockets the cash, and then refuses to hand them over!”

Off they went with their loot, laughing for all they were worth and only stopping to beat me up again when, out of sheer despair, I followed them and asked for the boots back. The other “trusties” watched, roaring with laughter. “Let him have it!” “Quit yelling—they’re not your boots now.”

Only one of the political prisoners spoke up: “Look, what are you up to? How can he manage in bare feet?” One of the thieves took off his pumps and threw them at me.²⁹

Similar things happened to Gorbatov on several other occasions. Once, buying a tin of fish from a “trusty,” he had his money stolen, together with letters and photographs of his wife, by criminals who refused to return even the latter. (When he opened the tin, it was full of sand.)³⁰

He was surprised to see that the guards did nothing to discourage this sort of thing. At the Maldyak gold-field camp in the Magadan area, where he served his sentence, there were 400 politicals and 50 common criminals. The latter had all the privileges and in one way or another did the politicals out of much of their meager food ration:

Work at the goldfield was pretty killing, particularly so considering the bad food we were given. The “enemies of the people,” as a rule, were detailed for the heaviest jobs, the lighter work being given to the “trusties” or common criminals…. [I]t was they who were appointed foremen, cooks, orderlies, and tent seniors. Naturally enough the small amounts of fat released for the pot chiefly found their way into the bellies of the “trusties.” There were three types of rations: one for those who had not fulfilled their quota, another for those who had, and a third for those who had exceeded their quota. The latter automatically included the “trusties.” They did little enough work, but the tally clerks were of their persuasion and so they swindled, putting to their own and their mates’ credit the work that we had done. As a result the criminals fed well and the politicals went hungry.³¹

Outside the camps proper—that is, in the transit camps and stations—the criminals continued to be almost completely out of control. One of their customs was to gamble with one another for the clothes of some strange political; the loser then had to pull them off the victim and hand them over to the winner. This game was also played for prisoners’ lives. A Hungarian who was in Vorkuta in 1950 to 1951 reports it played by fifteen-year-old juvenile criminals, the loser then knifing the chosen victim. These young delinquents, usually aged from fourteen to sixteen, were seldom seen in the usual camps, being held in special centers. They were far more terrifying than any other element in Soviet society: their egos were completely unsocialized. Killing meant nothing at all to them. They formed the hard core of the “hooligan” youth element which still persists in the Soviet Union and, politically speaking, may be thought to form the potential storm troops, on one side or another, in any future upsets in the country.

Gorbatov mentions a criminal with fingers missing who explained to him that he had “lost” a political’s clothes to another criminal, and before he could steal them to hand them over, the political had been transferred. So he was at once tried for negligence by his mates and sentenced to the loss of his fingers. The criminal “prosecutor” demanded all five, but the “court” settled for three. “We also have our laws,” the victim commented.³² In another case, one who, in a mass rape aboard the convict ship Magadan, had taken a woman the leader of his band had marked down, had his eyes put out with a needle.³³ Another leader, also on a convict ship, had gambled his brigade’s bread ration away at cards. He was tried and cut to pieces.³⁴

In fact, the criminals (who had such names as “The Louse,” “Hitler,” and “The Knout”), known at the time of the Purges as urkas and later as blatniye, in the 1950s had come to call themselves “Those with the Law”—that is, their own code.

One of its provisions (though the urkas later split into two factions on the issue) was refusal to work. Since the urka groups had sanctions just as effective as any disposed of by the camp administration, nothing could usually be done about this. One commandant is reported given the urkas jobs in the camp which existed only on paper. As Gorbatov describes above, the criminals in effect had arrangements with the authorities to ensure that the politicals worked on their behalf as well as on their own.

WOMEN IN CAMPS

Women criminals, who formed a high percentage of all women in the camps, were in the main tough and shameless—though one prisoner mentions a woman of the criminal class who never took her knickers off even in the washroom: it was said that the tattooing on her belly was so indecent that “even she was a little embarrassed by it.”³⁵ The criminal women referred to themselves as “little violets” and sneered at the politicals as “little roses.” But they were somewhat restrained in their attitude towards nuns.³⁶

Women on the whole seem to have survived much better than men. For this reason, we have perhaps a disproportionate number of accounts of the camps from their hands. In fact, they seem to have numbered “less than ten per cent” of the total, and many of these were in the criminal group.³⁷ This was enough, all the same, to account for “the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north,” to which Pasternak refers in Doctor Zhivago.

In the mixed camps, noncriminal women were frequently mass-raped by urkas, or had to sell themselves for bread, or to get protection from camp officials. Those who did not were given the heaviest possible tasks until they gave in. A typical story from the Baltic–White Sea Canal camps is of a young woman who refused to give in to an official, who thereupon assigned her to a team of ordinary criminals who the same night blindfolded her, raped her, and pulled out several gold teeth from her mouth. There was no one to whom she could complain, for the camp chief himself was known to have raped several prisoners.³⁸

The guards were often brutal to them. A woman prisoner describes an attempt by a girl to evade work by hiding under the floorboards. She was attacked by the guard dogs and dragged out so violently by the guards that she was literally scalped. Serving five years for stealing potatoes, she was one of the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girls frequently reported in the camps.³⁹

Decent prisoners did what they could do for them. But the demoralization of their physical deterioration was intense. A man wrote of them, “I suppose there is no more horrifying sight for the normal man than a few hundred filthy, diseased-looking, shabby women. The deep-rooted romanticism of the male is outraged.”⁴⁰ And they felt this keenly. All accounts agree that even the debilitating work and diet did not damp down their sexual feelings, as it did in the case of men. Hysteria was common from this cause.

A French peasant woman, divorced from a Russian and unable to leave the country, got an eight-year sentence as the wife of a traitor in November 1937. She describes being marched twenty-five miles and then left standing in the freezing rain outside the barbed wire for two hours while the camp officers were being shown a film.⁴¹

In the labor camps, there were seldom tractors or horses, and sleds of wood were pulled by the prisoners. If the team was made up of men, five were harnessed; if of women, seven.⁴² A Polish journalist who served in the Pechora camps reports seeing several hundred women carrying heavy logs, and later rails for the railway .⁴³

In 1937, a special camp, in the Potmalag complex, was set up which contained about 7,000 wives and sisters of enemies of the people. Some, transferred to Segeta on the Kirovsk railway, are said to have been amnestied in 1945.⁴⁴ But most were sent to a new camp, “ALZHIR,” in the Karaganda complex. Prisoners there included wives of many enemies of the people—like those of Ryutin, Svanidze, Pyatnitsky, and Krestinsky—and sisters of Gamarnik, Tukhachevsky, and others.

Women who had been arrested included the pregnant. The wife of a Comintern official, an invalid with curvature of the spine, was arrested in the seventh month of pregnancy, and gave birth in the Butyrka. On the transit train, having no milk at all, she filtered the fish “soup” through her stockings to feed the baby. Their further fate is not stated.⁴⁵

Children were also conceived and born in the camps. The mothers were allowed to feed them, but the babies were kept separately. “After a year they were removed to unknown destinations. It was explained to the mothers, ‘You have broken the regulations. Connections with men are not permitted. Therefore the children are ours, not yours. They belong to the Security Organs, and we will bring them up.’” One estimate in a Soviet paper is that the “children of the NKVD” numbered 500,000 to 1 million.”⁴⁶ There was a children’s “special camp” near Akmolinsk, which later became an ordinary camp. About 400 children lived in barracks, in two or three levels of bunks. Later they were allowed to work, tending a herd of 250 cattle, and sewing.⁴⁷ A sad account of those in Bamlag’s “children’s kombinat” is given in a recent Soviet article, while in special children’s prisons in Ashkhabad, the fate of seven- or eight-year-olds was “hunger and cold, beatings, humiliations.”⁴⁸ In another such article, Lydia Chukovskaya tells of children born in the camps who at the age of five could not yet speak.⁴⁹

SETTING UP CAMP

In general, the great expansion of the Yezhov period was marked by the setting up of new camps. For example, in the Archangel area, the Kargopol “camp,” consisting of a number of smaller camps in a radius of about thirty-five miles, containing in 1940 about 30,000 prisoners, was founded in 1936 by 600 prisoners who were simply put out of the train in the middle of the forest and who built their own barracks and fences. The death rate had been very heavy. The Polish and German Communist prisoners had died first, followed by the national minorities from Asia.⁵⁰

Pasternak, certainly drawing on the experiences of friends who had suffered, described in Doctor Zhivago the setting up of a new camp:

We got off the train.—A snow desert. Forest in the distance. Guards with rifle muzzles pointing at us, wolf-dogs. At about the same time other groups were brought up. We were spread out and formed into a big polygon all over the field, facing outward so that we shouldn’t see each other. Then we were ordered down on our knees, and told to keep looking straight ahead in front on pain of death. Then the roll-call, an endless, humiliating business going on for hours and hours, and all the time we were on our knees. Then we got up and the other groups were marched off in different directions, all except ours. We were told: “Here you are. This is your camp.”—An empty snow-field with a post in the middle and a notice on it saying: “Gulag 92 Y.N.90”—that’s all there was….

First we broke saplings with our bare hands in the frost to get wood to build our huts with. And in the end, believe it or not, we built our own camp. We put up our prison and our stockade and our punishment cells and our watch towers, all with our own hands. And then we began our jobs as lumberjacks.⁵¹

In exactly the same way, a Pole describes being marched, in rags, to a spot on the frozen tundra where there was no more than a sign: “Camp Point No. 228.” The prisoners dug pits to live in and covered them with branches and earth. The food was simply raw rye flour, kneaded with water.⁵²

Another prisoner describes being marched to a temporary camp which would not hold, however squeezed, more than one-fifth of the prisoners. The others were left out in the mud for several days. They began to light fires made of bits of parts of the barracks, and were charged and beaten up by the guards. Twice a day, they had one-third of a liter of soup, and once a day about half a kilo of bread.⁵³

On entry into an established camp, prisoners were allotted their categories for work. This might be done by a quick examination of the prisoners’ legs.⁵⁴ A certificate of “first-class” health was required for the heaviest tasks. (A Soviet writer describes one being issued to a political four hours before her death from scurvy.)⁵⁵ Then they were marched to the barracks, where, typically, “two hundred men slept in fifty bug-ridden bunks,” on boards or mattresses “full of heavy and hard-packed sawdust.”⁵⁶

Crowding was intense. The former director of a Kemerovo works describes negotiating with the NKVD for 2,000 slave laborers.⁵⁷ The trouble was not the number, but how to accommodate them in the existing camps in the area. The officials concerned were shown around a camp which appeared to be packed solid, but the commandant agreed with his superior that yet another layer of bunks could be put in.

There would be a stove, though not adequate to warm one of the Arctic huts “because the orderlies only brought in ten pounds of coal dust for each stove, and you didn’t get much warmth from that.”⁵⁸ In a corner would be the twenty-gallon latrine tank which prisoner orderlies carried off to empty daily—“light work for people on the sick list!”⁵⁹

The company, apart from the complement of urkas who in a nonpenal camp would be lording it in the corridors, were of a varied lot of “politicals.” There would be saboteurs—specialists and engineers. At first they mostly had technical jobs, but, as the mass purges grew in scope, so many engineers and specialists flooded the camps that the chance of appointment to a technical position which had previously saved so many of them became proportionately rare.

There were certain special categories. In Kotlas, there was a whole group of men of eighty years and older who had been sentenced in Daghestan as part of the “liquidation of feudal remnants.”⁶⁰ And about 3,000 Moscow homosexuals were in camp at the “Third Watershed,” on the Baltic–White Sea Canal.⁶¹ But usually the intake was mixed.

An account of the Dzhezkazgan camp in a Moscow article of the Khrushchev period mentions a former Ambassador to China, a soloist from the Bolshoi Opera, an illiterate peasant, an Air Force genera1.⁶² Common were soldiers, intellectuals, and especially Ukrainian and other nationalists, on the one hand, and members of religious sects, on the other. Solzhenitsyn points out that the Baptists were in the camps simply for praying. For this (at the time he writes of), “they all got twenty-five years, because that was how it was now—twenty-five years for everybody.”⁶³ There are many reports of sectarians being beaten or sent to the isolator cells for refusal to work on Sundays.⁶⁴ A priest, beaten blind, was noted in 1937.⁶⁵

As in all times of trouble and oppression, the millenarian sects flourished. In the great slave empires of the past, similar voices had always spoken for the oppressed and hopeless. Now they sometimes preached that the horrors of the present were a special trial, and that from the Russian people, degraded and demoralized, a “race of saints” would arise.⁶⁶ Even twenty years later, in Vorkuta, we are told that there was more religious organization (and sharper national feeling) among the minority groups still settled there after their camp experiences than in other districts⁶⁷

Prisoners’ rights were virtually limited to making written protests and complaints. The result: “Either there was nothing or it was rejected.”⁶⁸ Such applicants made a prisoner unpopular with the authorities.

In the penal camps proper, however, there was considerable freedom of speech:

Somebody in the room was yelling: “You think that old bastard in Moscow with the moustache is going to have mercy on you? He wouldn’t give a damn about his own brother, never mind slobs like you!”

The great thing about a penal camp was you had a hell of a lot of freedom. Back in Ust-Izhma if you said they couldn’t get matches “outside” they put you in the can and slapped on another ten years. But here you could yell your head off about anything you liked and the squealers didn’t even bother to tell on you. The security fellows couldn’t care less.

The only trouble was you didn’t have much time to talk about anything.⁶⁹

Almost every account quotes cases of people who remained devoted to “the Party and the Government” and attributed their arrest to error.⁷⁰ These bored and annoyed the other prisoners considerably. In some cases, though not in all, they turned informer. There were, in any case, a number of these by common NKVD practice. Informers who were recognized as such were always killed sooner or later. If the NKVD had been unable to extricate them in time, it made no complaint about their deaths. Herling gives an account of a revenge taken on a notorious former NKVD interrogator who was recognized in the camp, and when badly beaten up, but not killed, complained to the guards, who did nothing to save him so that he was finally killed a month later after endless persecution and attempts to appeal.

BEHIND THE WIRE

Reveille is usually reported as at 5:00 A.M.—a hammer pounding on a rail outside camp headquarters. Anyone caught a few minutes late getting up could be sentenced on the spot to a few days in the isolator. In the winter, it would still be dark. Searchlights would be “crisscrossing over the compound from the watchtowers at the far corners.”⁷¹ Apart from the guards and the barbed wire, most camps also relied on dogs, their long chains fastened by a ring to a wire running from watchtower to watchtower. The noise of the ring screeching along the wire was a continual background.⁷²

The prisoners’ first thought, all day, was of food, and it is now that the breakfast, the best meal of the day, was served. (We will consider food, the center of the entire norm system and the key to Stalin’s plans for efficient slave labor, later.)

Then they were assembled and marched off to work, in gangs of twenty or thirty. The order (known to prisoners as “the prayer”)⁷³ would be given:

Your attention, prisoners! You will keep strict column order on the line of march! You will not straggle or bunch up. You will not change places from one rank of five to another. You will not talk or look around to either side, and you will keep your arms behind you! A step to right or left will be considered an attempt to escape, and the escort will open fire without warning! First rank, forward march!⁷⁴

Apart from sleeping, the prisoners’ time was their own only for ten minutes at breakfast, five minutes at the noon break, and another five minutes at supper.⁷⁵ They lost so much sleep that they fell asleep instantly if they found a warm spot, and on the Sundays they got off, which was not every Sunday, they slept as much as they could.⁷⁶

The shoe situation varied. “There’d been times when they’d gone around all winter without any felt boots at all, times when they hadn’t even seen ordinary boots, but only shoes made of birch bark or shoes of the ‘Chelyabinsk Tractor Factory model’” (that is, made of strips of tires that left marks of the treads behind them).⁷⁷

Clothes were usually carefully patched and repaired: “rags tied around them with all their bits of string and their faces wrapped in rags from chin to eyes to protect them from the cold….”⁷⁸

Ulcers are reported as common, through filthy clothes. Clothing was cleaned and disinfected occasionally, and baths were also provided. Solzhenitsyn implies that in the penal camp he describes, a bath was available about every two weeks.⁷⁹ But often there was “no soap for either bathing or laundry.”⁸⁰

To go sick for the odd day was possible with a minor complaint. But to be recognized as sick and put on a sick diet was usually fatal. In any case, even a man feeling ill might not be allowed to go sick, as there was a quota: “He was allowed to excuse only two men in the morning, and he’d already excused them.”⁸¹ As a rule, the infirmary took in only those who were plainly dying—“and not all of them,” a Soviet woman writer recalls.⁸²

In one camp, still under construction, a sick inspection is described:

The naryadchik and the lekpom [medical assistant], armed with clubs, enter the pit. The chief asks the first man he sees why he does not come out. ‘I am sick,’ is the answer. The lekpom feels his pulse and pronounces him all right. Then blows shower upon the man and he is kicked out into the open. ‘Why don’t you go to work?’ the chief asks the next man. ‘I am sick,’ is the stubborn answer. The day before, this prisoner went to the lekpom and gave him his last dirty louse-infected shirt. The lekpom feels his pulse and finds high fever. He is released from work. A third man replies that he has neither clothes nor shoes. ‘Take the clothes and shoes from the sick one,’ the chief rules sententiously. The sick one refuses, whereupon his things are taken off him by force.⁸³

The veteran convicts in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich have learned that it is necessary to march as slowly as possible to the morning job, otherwise they get hot too early, and “won’t last long.”⁸⁴ And in fact, those who survived the first months became fantastically skilled in the arts of survival. At the same time, customs useful to them became thoroughly established and traditional. For example, Solzhenitsyn describes the prisoners’ habit of picking up odd scraps of wood on the building site and marching back with them.⁸⁵ This was illegal, but the guards did nothing about it until they reached camp again. They then ordered them to throw down the wood, as they, too, needed extra fuel and were unable to carry any in addition to their submachine guns. But only a certain amount of the wood was dropped. At the next checkpoint, the warders repeated the order. Again, only a certain amount of wood was dropped, and the prisoners reached the quarters with a portion of their original gleanings. It was necessary, and in the interests of both guards and warders, that the prisoners be able to get away with some wood; otherwise they would have no incentive to bother to carry it in, and guards and warders would not have got their share. But no overt arrangement had ever been made. The agreement was wholly unspoken. We see, in such things, the development of the rules and traditions of a whole new social order, in microcosm.

A genuine caste feeling seems to have been arising, with the prisoner beginning to be regarded as actually an inferior being, just as in ancient times. The sentiment gradually spread that “mere contact” with the prisoners was “an insult to a free man.” “It is considered inadmissible for a non-prisoner to eat the same food as a prisoner, to sleep under the same roof, or have any friendly relations with him.” Things reached the stage where the head of a camp admonished the man in charge of the disinfestation chamber for allowing a shirt belonging to a free mechanic employed in the power plant to be put in with the prisoners’ clothes for delousing.⁸⁶ As a recent Soviet article puts it, a camp commandant did not regard the prisoners as human.⁸⁷

Free citizens in Kolyma sometimes tried to help prisoners they came in contact with. In particular, we are told, “doctors, engineers, geologists” would try to get their professional colleagues employed according to their capacities. A geologist now described as “a hero of the north” lost his own life owing to an attempt to defend some of the Kolyma inmates. One of his interventions is described:

“These people might die!”

“What people?” the representative of the camp administration smiled, “These are enemies of the people.”⁸⁸

As a camp official told a foreign prisoner, “We are not trying to bring down the mortality rate.”⁸⁹

A recent Soviet account tells of a commandant refusing the camp doctor’s insistence that convalescents not be sent to work in the forest on 400 grams of bread a day. The commandant answered, “I spit on your ethics!” and sent out the 246 men convalescing, who were all dead in a week.⁹⁰

There are many accounts of camp officials, and even doctors, who came to regard the prisoners as their personal serfs. This selection of slaves was sometimes similar even in detail to the illustrations of books about Negro slavery, as when the chief of a Yertsevo camp section, Samsonov, honored the medical examination with his presence, and with a smile of satisfaction felt the biceps, shoulders, and backs of the new arrivals.⁹¹ It has been maintained that the Soviet forced-labor system might be considered as “a stage on the way to a new social stratification which might have involved slavery”—that is, in the old-fashioned overt sense—though the trend was changed by later events.⁹²

A Soviet critic has remarked that

the whole system in the camps Ivan Denisovich passed through was calculated to choke and kill without mercy every feeling for justice and legality in man, demonstrating in general and in detail such impunity of despotism that any sort of noble or rebellious impulse was powerless before it. The camp administration did not allow the prisoners to forget for a single moment that they had no rights at all….⁹³

In the 1940s, “a prisoner had to take his cap off at a distance of five paces when he saw a warder, and keep it off till he was two paces past him.”⁹⁴ Solzhenitsyn tells of a muddled count, leading to recount after recount, and another time an extra count when a missing prisoner has been found:

“What’s all this about?” the chief escort screamed. “D’you want to sit on your asses in the snow? That’s where I’ll put you if you like and that’s where I’ll keep you till morning!” And he sure would. He wouldn’t think twice about it if he wanted. It’d happened plenty of times before and sometimes they had to go down on their knees with the guards pointing their guns at the ready.⁹⁵

Reports of physical violence are common.⁹⁶ Refusal to work seems to have been punished variously: in the Far Eastern area, by immediate shooting; elsewhere, by stripping the offender and standing him in the snow until he submitted or by solitary confinement on 200 grams of bread. For a second offense, death was usual. And in camp, not only “sabotage” but also “anti-Soviet propaganda” might be treated as a capital crime.⁹⁷

Occasional tightening of lax discipline in the camps led to the sudden infliction of penalties on a large scale. Appeals to the regulations were treated as repeated and willful refusal to work. In 1937, 400 prisoners were executed in a batch in Karaganda on such charges.⁹⁸ A “mutiny” is reported in a camp near Kemerovo near the end of 1938. It was, in fact, a strike against rotten food. Fourteen of the ringleaders, twelve men and two women, were shot in front of all the rest of the prisoners, and then details from each hut helped to dig the graves.⁹⁹

Apart from these executions for “disciplinary” reasons, often announced openly in the camps with the purpose of intimidating the occupants further, there were many killings of a different kind. Orders would come from Moscow for the liquidation of a given number of ex-oppositionists, and the quota would then be fulfilled by a cursory reinterrogation—not on activity in the camps, but on newly discovered circumstances in connection with the original offense, transforming it into a capital crime. For mass operations of this kind, special commissions were on occasion sent down, and given special powers and premises where the doomed men were transferred for investigation and death. For example, one such center was established in an abandoned brick factory in the Vorkuta area, where some 1,300 politicals are reported executed in the winter of 1937.¹⁰⁰

In most of the main camp areas, there seem also to have been established special and highly secret “Central Isolation Prisons” covering a given group of camps. To one such, in Bamlag, we are told that some 50,000 prisoners were “transferred” for execution in the two years 1937 and 1938. The victims were tied up with wire like logs, stacked in trucks, driven out to a selected area, and shot.¹⁰¹

The Hungarian Communist writer Lengyel, himself a camp veteran, describes one of these special extermination camps in the Norilsk area, as what is evidently intended as authentic background, in his story “The Yellow Poppies”: the camp is wound up first by the execution of the remaining prisoners, and then by special NKVD squads who move in and execute all the staff and guards. Owing to the permafrost, it is impossible to bury the bodies, and they are piled into veritable hills and covered with truckloads of earth, the whole matter remaining unknown even in neighboring camps, and even when the camp site itself is later reoccupied as a prison hospital.

Prisoners are also reported shot to check epidemics, as in December 1941 at Kozhva, where the victims are said to have included the Bulgarian Communist leader Danko Sapunov.¹⁰² There have also long been unofficial reports of barge-loads of prisoners no longer able to work, or otherwise superfluous, being sunk in the Arctic seas. One of the missing groups of Polish officers is believed to have been killed in this way, and we are also told that this is how the poet Narbut perished.¹⁰³ The Soviet press has lately confirmed the use of this method of liquidation—reporting, for example, that such was the fate of two leading Ukrainian intellectuals: the writer Hrihory Epik and the director Les Kurbas.¹⁰⁴

The routine punishment was the punitive “isolators” built in each camp, and quite deadly. At Solzhenitsyn’s,

the fellows from 104 had built the place themselves and they knew how it looked—stone walls, a concrete floor, and no window. There was a stove, but that was only enough to melt the ice off the walls and make puddles on the floor. You slept on bare boards and your teeth chattered all night. You got six ounces of bread a day and they only gave you hot gruel every third day.

Ten days! If you had ten days in the cells here and sat them out to the end, it meant you’d be a wreck for the rest of your life. You got T.B. and you’d never be out of hospitals as long as you lived.

And the fellows who did fifteen days were dead and buried.¹⁰⁵

Even among those who avoided the cells, all the deficiency diseases were rife. Solzhenitsyn’s hero, who had lost teeth from scurvy in the Ust-Izhma camp in Pechora “at a time when he thought he was on his last legs,”¹⁰⁶ was lucky enough to recover. With scurvy, wounds opened and abscesses suppurated. Pellagra was equally common. Pneumonia, usually fatal, was a normal hazard. And the direct effects of undernourishment, “swelling of the feet and face, and, in its final and lethal stage, swelling of the abdomen,” were constantly to be seen.¹⁰⁷ In the farming camps, epidemics of brucellosis are reported.¹⁰⁸ In the northern camps, gangrene, resulting in amputation, was frequent.¹⁰⁹ Tuberculosis was often the immediate cause of death. After about two years, women prisoners tended to develop a continuous hemorrhage of the womb.”¹¹⁰

It later became routine, when a corpse was taken to the morgue, “to crack his skull with a big wooden mallet to make sure.”¹¹¹

Escapes were occasionally made, but very seldom with any success. They were acts of desperation; but, of course, there was enough desperation to produce them. In the Pechora area, the NKVD offered a reward of eleven pounds of wheat to anyone turning in an escaped prisoner. In the early 1930s, escaped prisoners in other regions were sometimes sheltered by the peasantry, but this was very seldom true among the terrorized kolkhozniks of the Purge period. There were, nevertheless, rare successes. Gypsies, in particular, sometimes reached encampments of their own race where its solidarity saved them from discovery. And odd individuals, like the Spanish Communist general El Campesino, made completely successful escapes.

Recaptured prisoners were always brutally manhandled, and almost invariably shot.

For any escape on the march to the camps from the railheads, the guards were charged with complicity and sentenced to two or three years, which they continued to serve as guards but without pay. This made them extremely vigilant. In the camps, too, “if anybody got out it was hell on the guards and they kept on the go without food or sleep. It made ‘em so mad they often didn’t bring the fellow back alive.”¹¹²

One consequence of this vigilance was continual counting of prisoners:

The lieutenant stood still and watched. He’d come outside to double-check the count. That was the routine when they left the camp.

The men meant more to a guard than gold. If there was one man missing on the other side of the wire, he’d soon be taking his place.…¹¹³

They counted you twice on the way out—once with the gates still shut, so they knew if they could open them, and then a second time, when you were going through the gates. And if they thought there was something wrong, they did a recount outside.”¹¹⁴

This is one of several interesting parallels with Dostoevsky’s account of forced labor in the 1840s, in The House of the Dead:

The prisoners are lined up, counted and called over at dawn, midday and nightfall, and sometimes more often during the day, depending on the suspicions of the guards and their ability to count. The guards often made mistakes, counted wrongly, went away and then came back again. Eventually the wretched guards would succeed in arriving at the right figure and lock up the hut.

In a general comparison between this century and the last, we note that in Dostoevsky’s time prisoners had considerably more freedom of action inside the camp, and were not under such strict guard outside either, though Dostoevsky mentions that his convicts are serving “incomparably” the worst of the three types of hard labor. With the exception that in Dostoevsky’s camp the main sanction is frightful floggings, which sometimes result in death, rather than the “isolators,” the life of the convict was on the whole preferable in his descriptions to those of Solzhenitsyn and the others. Each convict has his own box with a lock and key. Prisoners keep domestic animals. They do not work on Sundays or feast days, or even on their own name days. Jews and Moslems have parallel privileges. The food is greatly superior, and prisoners on the sick list go into town to buy “tobacco, tea, beef; on Christmas Day, suckling-pig, even goose.” They even have enough bread to spare for the horse of the water carrier.

The convicts in The House of the Dead are all, indeed, really guilty of one or another offense—often murder, like the hero Goryanchikov—though there are about a dozen political prisoners out of thirty.

Dostoevsky’s type of camp was abolished in the 1850s. (He makes the point that he is “describing the past.”) But even nonliterary prisoners in Stalin’s camps were able to make other comparisons—for example, one prisoner was a Polish Communist who had served two years in Wronki jail in Poland for political offenses. In the Polish jail, the prisoners had been locked in only at night, by day they were allowed in the garden; they were allowed any books from outside, unlimited correspondence, and weekly baths; there were five of them in a large room.¹¹⁵

THE PENAL EMPIRE

In the vast empty spaces in the north and the Far East, areas as big as fair-sized countries came under complete NKVD control. There were many camps scattered through the Urals, in the Archangel area, and more especially in and around Karaganda and on the new railway being built from Turkestan to Siberia. But in these, the NKVD administered only comparatively small enclaves. Even in the huge Karlag complex around Karaganda, where there were about 100,000 prisoners, they were in camps scattered over an area the size of France among other settlements, mostly of deported “free” labor. (These so-called free exiles were men and women whose innocence was absolutely clear even to the examining judges. In some areas, they were often little more than vagabonds, sleeping under bridges, begging their bread, and seeking work or even arrest to save themselves from starvation.)¹¹⁶

The two biggest true colonies of the NKVD empire were the great stretch of northwestern Russia beyond Kotlas, comprising roughly what is shown on the map as the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and the even vaster area of the Far East centered on the gold fields of Kolyma. These regions had, before the NKVD took over, populations of a handful of Russians and a few thousand Arctic tribesmen. A decade later, they held between them something between 1.25 and 2 million prisoners. For these great areas we have accounts from both Soviet and émigré publications. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is set in the northeastern camps. General Gorbatov’s Years Off My Life covers his experiences in Kolyma. These and other Moscow-published works confirmed and complemented the large amount of material long available in the West.

The Soviet Arctic is a world of its own. The feeling of having been thrown out from normal life was accentuated by the physical phenomena. In winter, there is the extreme, extravagant cold; the short days in which a swollen, livid sun raises itself for a few hours above the horizon—or, in the Arctic proper, simply lightens the sky somewhat without appearing; the soundlessly flickering ion-stream of the aurora borealis. In summer, the long days; the mosquitoes; the slushy swamp of the melted surface, with its alien vegetation—bog cotton and dwarf willow a few inches high; and below it, hard as rock, the permafrost. South of this true tundra is the even wilder forest belt, the taiga, where the great complex of timber camps lay.

Most of the northern camps were separated from the country as a whole by vast stretches of empty land, sparsely inhabited by tribal hunters, the Chukchi, Yakut, Nentsi—the last being the Samoyeds, cannibals, from whom Ivan the Terrible had recruited his fiercest guards. Most of these were happy to turn in prisoners for a bounty, having in any case a general hostility to Russians.

KOLYMA

The largest camp area was that which came under Dalstroy, the Far Eastern Construction Trust. The exact boundaries of Dalstroy’s control have never been exactly determined, but it seems to have included all the territory beyond the Lena and north of the Aldan, at least as far east as the Gydan Range—a territory four times the size of France.

Its prison population was never as large as the Pechora region’s, being usually around 500,000. But the death rate was so high that more individual prisoners inhabited its camps at one time or another than any other region. Since it was supported by sea, and the number of ships, their capacity, and their average number of trips are known with reasonable accuracy, we can compute a probable minimum of 2 million dead.¹¹⁷

The main concentration of camps was in the Kolyma gold fields, based on Magadan, with its port of Nagayevo.¹¹⁸ Gold mining started on a big scale in the early 1930s. In 1935, a series of awards was announced in the gold-mining industry, with great publicity to all concerned. Most of those named were mentioned as working at Kolyma, under E. P. Berzin, the “Director.” High among the awards of Orders, a different decree was inserted—commuting the sentences and restoring the civil rights of five engineers in the gold industry for their services.

Berzin is described as comparatively reasonable about prisoners’ complaints.¹¹⁹ He, his wife, and his chief assistant, Filipov (who is said to have committed suicide in Magadan prison), were arrested, together with scores of others, in 1937, in Yezhov’s purge of the NKVD. There seems to have been some apprehension of resistance, and Berzin was promised awards and promotion, feted by the NKVD “delegation,” and only arrested on the airfield.¹²⁰

He was succeeded by K. A. Pavlov, who, through his deputy, Garanin, launched on a campaign of, even by NKVD standards, maniac terror, torture, and execution, with the shooting in 1938 of an estimated 26,000 men in a special camp, Serpantinka, set up for the purpose. Garanin was soon shot, and his successor, Vyshnevetsky, also lasted a very short time, receiving fifteen years for a disastrous expedition intended to open up new areas.

Pavlov himself was promoted to head Gulag, and was succeeded in Kolyma by Ivan Nikishov, described as “icily, mercilessly cruel.” He married an NKVD woman, Gridassova, who was put in charge of the women’s camp at Magadan. They lived in a comfortable country house forty-five miles northwest of Magadan, in their own hunting preserve.¹²¹

The slave route to Kolyma had its own Middle Passage, the trip to Magadan from Vladivostok by boat, with thousands of prisoners battened down under hatches. The trip took a week or more, and was much feared. An alternative route was tried to Ambarchik on the Arctic Ocean, at the mouth of the Kolyma—a 4,000-mile voyage through difficult seas, taking some two months. The first ship sent that way, the Dzhurma, was caught in the autumn ice, and when it arrived in Ambarchik the following year (1934), none of its 12,000 prisoners remained. This was at a time when the exploring ship Chelyushkin was caught in the ice and sank, and there was worldwide interest in the safety of its crew camped on the ice. American and other offers to try to rescue them by air were refused, and it has been suggested that the reason was that their camp was only a couple of hundred miles from the wintering place of the Dzhurma, which might have been stumbled upon by foreign fliers.¹²²

More usually, the shorter passage to Magadan, on the Dzhurma, the Indigirka, the Dalstroy, and other freighters, was the prisoners’ route. The ships, referred to by Andrei Sakharov as “death-ships of the Okhotsk Sea,”¹²³ were the scene of the worst of the urkas’ acts. It was on the Dzhurma that General Gorbatov lost his boots (see here). By 1939, the guards were not entering the prisoners’ hold, only waiting outside with raised guns when the prisoners were let out on deck in small groups to go to the latrine. As a result, the urkas had a freer hand than at any other time. There were always numbers of murders and rapes. In 1939, on the Dzhurma, the criminals managed to break through a wall and get at the provisions, after which they set the storeroom on fire. The fire was held in check, though it was still burning when the Dzhurma entered port. But there was no attempt to release the prisoners locked in the hold, and a great panic ensued when they realized that if it came to the point, they would be abandoned.¹²⁴ A similar tale—perhaps a version of the same event—is told by a Soviet writer. The ship took fire. Male prisoners tried to break out and were battened down in the hold. “When they went on rioting the crew hosed them down to keep them quiet. They then forgot about them. As the fire was still burning the water boiled and the wretched men died in it. For a long time afterwards the Dzhurma stank intolerably.”¹²⁵

On another occasion, several hundred young girls, sentenced for unauthorized absence from arms factories and so on, were in a compartment of the hold on their own. Again the urkas managed to break through and raped many of them, killing a few male prisoners who tried to protect them. This time, the combination of the rapes, the breakage, and the murders resulted in the arrest of the commander of the ship’s guard.¹²⁶

On arrival at Nagayevo, first “the sick were carried ashore on stretchers and left on the beach in tidy rows. The dead were also neatly stacked so that they could be counted and the number of death certificates would tally.”¹²⁷

The survivors found themselves in a strange land.

The Kolyma Basin alone is almost as big as the Ukraine. It is intensely cold: the temperature may go down to – 70°C.¹²⁸ Outside work for prisoners was compulsory until it reached – 50°C.¹²⁹ In spite of this, in 1938, fur was banned in the Dalstroy camps, and only wadding permitted; felt shoes were replaced by canvas. The rivers of the region are ice-bound for eight to nine months of the year. A camp rhyme ran:

Kolyma, wonderful planet,

Twelve months winter, the rest summer.

For about two months in winter, there is no sunrise at all. One calmly written account of the Kolyma camps has as a natural chapter heading: “Sickness, Self-mutilation, Suicide.”¹³⁰

Not, of course, that these were limited to Kolyma. But in Kolyma the death rate was particularly high, and the despair rate, too. Gorbatov, a strong man with great will power who had even resisted interrogation successfully, tells us that he barely survived less than a year in the gold camps. The death rate among the miners is estimated in fact at about 30 percent per annum,¹³¹ though it varied to some extent with location, type of work, and personality of commandant. A Kolyma prisoner comments that it is rarely possible to live on the camp ration for more than two years. By the fourth, at the very latest, the prisoner is incapable of work, and by the fifth year he can no longer be alive.¹³² In one of the Kolyma penal camps which had started a year with 3,000 inmates, 1,700 were dead by the end, and another 800 in hospital with dysentery.¹³³ In another—a regular camp—it is estimated that 2,000 out of 10,000 died in a year.¹³⁴ Of some 3,000 Poles, over a period of about fifteen months, about 60 percent were counted dead.¹³⁵ A Soviet article of 1988 says that “of every one hundred inmates of Kolyma, only two or three survived.”¹³⁶

In a camp there described in the Khrushchev-period press,¹³⁷ inmates did a twelve-hour day. The food ration for 100 percent norm was 800 grams of bread per day. Nonfulfillment of norms, through whatever cause, automatically entailed a reduction of the bread ration to 500 grams. This was just above starvation level; any further reduction to 300 grams (as a punitive measure) meant certain death. Work at the surface gold sites was performed in accordance with a strict division of labor. Two men had to start a bonfire, and this had to be done without matches, by the ancient method of striking sparks with flints. Another man had to fetch water from the frozen river and melt it. Next, the deeply frozen ground had to be softened, then excavated, and the sand passed through sieves in search of gold.

Three youths of about seventeen appeared in this camp. They looked younger than their age, perhaps because they were so thin as to be almost emaciated. After the death of the father of one of them, the son had found a collection of Lenin’s works, and in the last volume an envelope containing a copy of Lenin’s Testament. Not keeping it a secret, he and his closest associates were arrested on a charge of terrorism and counter-revolution, and sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labor. So there they all were—three boys and two girls in Kolyma and others of the youthful group dispersed in other prison camps.

There were several women’s camps in the Kolyma area. Eugenia Ginzburg (the mother of the writer Aksyonov), who became a nurse just in time to save her life, and survived to be rehabilitated, gives an account of the Elgen camp which makes it clear that it was a killer. She describes the impossibility of the tree-felling norm, the trade in sex, the using up of the “quota” of medical exemptions on the common criminals, and the sole methods of survival—“threats, intrigue and graft.” Women prisoners who had become illegally pregnant in illicit camp intercourse were among those sent to Elgen. They were allowed to try to feed their babies, but milk hardly came, owing to the rations and work, and after a few weeks usually ceased altogether, whereupon “the baby would have to fight for its life” on patent foods. As a result, “the turnover of ‘mothers,’ was very rapid.”¹³⁸ Even worse was the women’s disciplinary camp at Mylga where they worked in the gypsum quarries.¹³⁹

Gorbatov and others note NKVD officers saving old mates in the services or the Party by giving them easy jobs. This old-boys’ network was all very well for those with good connections. A Soviet source gives the other side of the picture. A commandant discovered his former general among the doomed dokhodyagi—“goners”—and gave him a post in the store. A Jew called Dodya Shmuller, who had been a trouble to the authorities through constantly demanding his rights under the regulations, was then in the punitive isolator on 300 grams of bread a day, and unlikely to survive. When he heard of the general being saved, he put in one last formal complaint, about his ration, but merely received a further spell in the isolator.¹⁴⁰

Another disciplinary case is of a team accused of concealing gold which they had dug up. Their quarters were thoroughly searched, but nothing was found. However, in order to “teach the men a lesson,” the whole team was sentenced to solitary confinement in a punitive section known as “Stalin’s Villa.” Only a few survived.¹⁴¹

For administration was even harsher than elsewhere, and more capricious too. One prisoner in Kolyma finished his sentence at the end of 1937 and was given a paper to sign stating that he had been notified of his liberation. However, he was not given any document to identify him as a free citizen, and could not leave the camp without one. He continued to work as a convict with the ambiguous status of “free prisoner.” He did not protest, as even so he was doing better than most people, who simply got a fresh sentence. At the end of 1939, he was finally given his certificate of liberation and allowed to choose a place of residence in European Russia apart from his home area.¹⁴²

By a circumstance unique in the history of the labor-camp zones, Magadan was visited in 1944 by the Vice President of the United States, Henry Wallace. With him, representing the Office of War Information, was Professor Owen Lattimore. They both wrote accounts of what they saw, which differ in various respects from the information we have from ex-prisoners.

Wallace found Magadan idyllic.¹⁴³ The horrible Nikishov, he noted approvingly, “gambolled about, enjoying the wonderful air.” He noted Gridassova’s maternal solicitude, and much admired the needlework which she showed him. The true story of the needlework¹⁴⁴” is that women prisoners capable of producing this were able to sell it for extra rations to the NKVD aristocracy’s wives to decorate their apartments. It was normally produced, that is, after a ten- or twelve-hour working day in conditions comparable with those adversely commented on by Thomas Hood in The Song of a Shirt. (In a similar way, Solzhenitsyn mentions three “artists”¹⁴⁵ in his camp, who gained certain privileges “as a reward for doing pictures free for the higher ups.”)

Lattimore condemned the hardness of the Tsarist system in Siberia.¹⁴⁶ But this had now, fortunately, passed. The Soviet opening up of the north was “ordeny,” being controlled by “a remarkable concern, the Dalstroy … which can be roughly compared to a combination of the Hudson Bay Company and the T.V.A.”

He was equally impressed with “Mr.” Nikishov and his wife. “Mr. Nikishov, the head of Dalstroy, had just been decorated with the Order of Hero of the Soviet Union for his extraordinary achievement. Both he and his wife have a trained and sensitive interest in art and music and a deep sense of civic responsibility.”

Lattimore approvingly quotes another member of his party on a local ballet troupe which provided “high-grade entertainment,” which, he adds, “just naturally seems to go with gold and so does high-powered executive ability.” Lattimore notes, too, that unlike the old gold rushes, with their “sin, gin and brawling,” Dalstroy concentrated on greenhouses where tomatoes, cucumbers, and even melons were grown to make sure that the hardy miners got enough vitamins. The tomatoes that Lattimore was so lyrical about were indeed grown in the area. A prisoner describes some under the charge of a bullying but efficient woman doctor at a prisoners’ hospital in the northern region of Kolyma. Most of the tomatoes went to officials and staff, but at least some reached the patients, which is remarked on as an extraordinary thing.¹⁴⁷

Nikishov had indeed shown some of the executive ability Lattimore attributes to him. For the reception had been very well organized. All prisoners in the area were kept in their huts. Watchtowers were demolished. Various other deceptions were undertaken. For example, Wallace was shown a farm, the best in the area; fake girl swineherds, who were in fact NKVD office staff, replaced the prisoners for the occasion. All the goods that could be scraped up in the neighborhood were put in the shop windows, and so on.¹⁴⁸

The party was actually taken to a gold mine in the Kolyma Valley. Lattimore prints a photograph of a group of husky men bearing little resemblance to accounts of the prisoners from current Soviet or other sources. It is captioned “They have to be strong to withstand winter’s rigors.”¹⁴⁹ The comment is a sound one, but when it came to real prisoners it worked out the other way: since they were not expected to withstand the winter’s rigors, it was unnecessary to keep them strong.

PECHORA

No other camp area had quite the reputation of Kolyma for isolation, cold, and death. But there were others which ran it close—in particular, the vast prison region at the northeastern corner of European Russia in the basin of the Pechora River. Even its name, though there is no river of Europe outside Russia larger than it, except only the Danube, is practically unknown in the West. Its basin is larger than the British Isles, or than New England, New York, and New Jersey. Here, between Kotlas, the gateway to the area, and the Vorkuta coal-mining district, lay the largest single concentration of forced labor in Russia, holding more than 1 million prisoners.

In Vorkuta, the temperature is below zero Celsius for two-thirds of the year, and for more than 100 days the khanovey, or “wind of winds,” blows across the tundra. The climate killed those from the southern parts of Russia very quickly; few would be alive after a year or two.¹⁵⁰ As has been seen, much of our evidence comes from this region.

The head of the Pechora camps in 1936 was NKVD Major Moroz, who is variously described as particularly cruel and as sensible enough to give good rations and good conditions in exchange for good work. He himself had briefly been a convict between high NKVD appointments. And he later disappeared. His assistant, Bogarov, a man of the most brutal and ferocious appearance, seems in fact to have been as humane as his post permitted, and to have been behind these improved conditions.

Moroz was succeeded by “a confirmed sadist,” Kashketin, of whom it was said that the only safety from him lay in his being ignorant of one’s existence. After a few months of his rule, there were 2,000 convicts in the isolators of a single camp group, of whom only 76 survived. Kashketin’s brutality availed him no more than Moroz’s humanity: he, too, disappeared with all his subordinates at the end of the Yezhov period.

Norilsk, on the Arctic Ocean, was developed as a metallurgical project. A recent article in lzvestiya tells us that though there was death on a large scale from “unbearable toil, dystrophy, scurvy, and catarrhal diseases,” there are about 2 million survivors of the “nightmare barracks” from the intake of the postwar years still alive today, a striking testimony to the number in the camps.¹⁵¹

And so it was, on a smaller but still vast scale, throughout the NKVD’s realm, from the White Sea to Sakhalin, from the great complexes of Karaganda to the virtually unrecorded “death camps” of the Taymyr and Novaya Zemlya, from (as Solzhenitsyn puts it) the Pole of Cold at Oy-Myakoi to the copper mines of Dzhezkazgan.

SLAVE ECONOMICS

The millions of slave laborers at the disposal of Gulag played an important economic role, and indeed became accepted as a normal component of the Soviet economy.

An ad hoc Committee of the United Nations appointed under resolutions by UNESCO and the ILO, and consisting of a prominent Indian lawyer, a former President of the Norwegian Supreme Court, and a former Peruvian Minister of Foreign Affairs, reported in 1953 in a sober document leaving no doubt of the “considerable significance” of forced labor in the Soviet Union.

State-owned slaves were common in the ancient world. For example, the Laurion silver mines were operated by Athens on that basis. The Romans, too, had their servi publici. The Head of the Department of War Engineering Armaments, RSFSR, wanting some hundreds of prisoners for urgent work during the war, was told by the NKVD official responsible that there was a shortage. “Malenkov and Voznesensky need workers, Voroshilov is calling for road builders.… What are we to do? The fact is we haven’t yet fulfilled our plans for imprisonment. Demand is greater than supply.”¹⁵²

We think of the lumber camps as typical. But the best estimate seems to be that (of the comparatively low camp population of early 1941) only about 400,000 were held at lumbering. The other main categories were

Mining

1,000,000

Agriculture

200,000

Hired out to various State enterprises

1,000,000

Construction and maintenance of camps and manufacture of camp necessities

600,000

General construction

3,500,000

¹⁵³

Even in the great lumbering area of the northwest, a high proportion of prisoners were building the Kotlas–Vorkuta railway. Many others were erecting (like Solzhenitsyn’s hero) various industrial and mining buildings.

It has often been pointed out that slave labor is economically inefficient. Karl Marx had the same view:

The lowest possible wage which the slave earns appears to be a constant, independent of his work in contrast to the free workers. The slave obtains the means necessary to his subsistence in natural form, which is fixed both in kind and in quantity, whereas the remuneration of the free worker is not independent of his own work.¹⁵⁴

Slavery thus owed part of its inefficiency to lack of incentives.

The same point is put by the Webbs, in a passage worth quoting at length as representing a certain way of looking at Soviet affairs common in the 1930s. They are criticizing Professor Tchernyavin’s first-hand account of the camps he served in:

It is to be regretted that this testimony—very naturally strongly biased—mixes up personal observation and experience of conditions that are, in all conscience, bad enough, with hearsay gossip unsupported by evidence, and with manifestly exaggerated statistical guesses incapable of verification. The account would have carried greater weight if it had been confined to the very serious conditions of which the author had personal knowledge. His naive belief that this and other penal settlements are now maintained and continuously supplied with thousands of deported manual workers and technicians, deliberately for the purpose of making, out of this forced labour, a net pecuniary profit to add to the State revenue, will be incredible by anyone acquainted with the economic results of the chain-gang, or of prison labour, in any country in the world.¹⁵⁵

It is quite true that the mass arrests remain basically a political phenomenon. The slave-labor motive can only have been secondary. The engineers and scientists, the doctors and lawyers, were not arrested simply to provide a corps of incompetent lumberjacks. As Weissberg says:

After twenty years of endless trouble and enormous expense the Soviet Government finally developed a working body of really capable physicists. And now what’s happened? Shubnikov, one of the leading low-temperature physicists in the country, is to help dig a canal in the Arctic. So is our first director, Professor Obremov, also a leading Soviet physicist and an expert on crystallography. Can’t you imagine what expensive navvies men like Shubnikov and Obremov are.¹⁵⁶

But once people were arrested, the extraction of their physical labor ensured at least some contribution to the economy, and (granted the initial irrationality of the whole Purge) there is nothing contrary to reason and common sense in Stalin’s typical decision to integrate them into his economic machine. To this extent, the Webbs are simply wrong as to Stalin’s motives.

Moreover, Stalin was well aware of Marx’s economic objection to slavery. And with his usual refusal to accept precedent, he sought to overcome it by the simple but untried method of not giving the slave a flat subsistence, but linking his rations to his output. In this way, it was thought, the lack of incentive Marx had pointed to was overcome.

It is quite true that the forced-labor projects were, anyhow, like much else in Stalin’s economy, often totally misconceived even on their own terms. During the great wave of arrests in 1947, a Soviet account tells us, Stalin remarked at a meeting of the Council of Ministers that the “Russian people had long dreamed of having a safe outlet to the Arctic Ocean from the Ob River.” Simply on the basis of this remark, decisions were taken to build a railway to Igarka. For more than four years, amid feet of snow, in temperatures down to –55°C in winter, and with swamps and mosquitoes in the summer, forced laborers toiled at this vast project, at more than eighty camp sites at intervals of 15 kilometers along the 1,300-kilometer stretch. The estimated cost, if it had ever been completed, was from 4 to 6 million rubles per kilometer. In the end, 850 kilometers of rail, and 450 of telegraph poles only, had been completed. After Stalin’s death, the line, the signals, the railway stations, the locomotives, and all that had been erected were abandoned to rust in the snow.¹⁵⁷

But this was an irrationality of the Soviet political and planning system itself. When it came to an ordinary operation, such as logging, it might seem that a method of providing very cheap labor had indeed been found.

Some prisoners made efforts on the spot to estimate the economic value of the camps. A friend of mine who was in a logging camp in the Vorkuta area worked for a time on the administrative side there (from 1950 to 1952) and says that the results were to a large degree faked or inflated, as in ordinary Soviet factories at that time. A great deal of the work which counted against norms was of a valueless nature, and although the prisoners themselves received the barest minimum of all necessities, the total cost of the camp, with guards, administration, and so forth, was much in excess of the value of its output. Antoni Ekart reports much the same of the Vorkuta mines¹⁵⁸—which, however, would probably have been uneconomic even if run by free labor because of the distances involved and the total production effected. And a careful study¹⁵⁹ makes the supposed savings due to forced labor over the whole economy at best marginal.

A Soviet account reinforces this view. The writer recalls a conversation in which one of the technicians on the job, himself a former prisoner, commented on the suggestion that the use of convict labor for construction projects was relatively cheap:

It merely seems so. After all the prisoners have somehow to be fed, shod, clothed, and guarded; special areas have to be constructed, provided with watchtowers for the guards—yes and for that matter the maintenance of the guards is a costly matter. Then also there is the physical training section and all the other “sections” which in fact only exist on paper … in fact a sizable establishment. Then there are those again who have to fetch the water for them, heat the baths and wash the floors. After all there are a lot of things that human beings need. There are also many duty officers and personnel, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the countless carpenters, clerks and other “scabs” as they are called in the camp! So that if one averages it out you must reckon one and a half ancillary persons for every one who actually works. The other main thing is that the guards cannot deploy the labor force as it ought to be: either one is not allowed to use the proper machinery, or else the foremen, not to mention the convicts themselves, simply have no time to stop and think about how to organize the labor force because of the consequent parades, inspections, and the rest of the to-ing and fro-ing.¹⁶⁰

The maintenance of the guards, it may be remarked, was also a military debit. Throughout the war period, the camps continued to be guarded by picked NKVD soldiers, in a proportion of about one guard to twenty inmates. The Soviet Government thus forfeited the use of certainly no fewer than 250,000 trained and healthy troops.

Even so, in certain circumstances, forced labor does seem to have paid: coal from Karaganda was sometimes noticeably cheaper than that from the Donets Basin.’¹⁶¹ Moreover, there are certain fields where free labor would be inordinately expensive, and where slave labor is probably economically preferable—for instance, in the mines and strategic roads of northeastern Siberia. In 1951, in the United States Congress, the immense labor cost of setting up an American air base in Greenland was disclosed. We can be sure that the equivalents in northern Siberia were completed far more cheaply with slave labor than they could have been with even Soviet free labor. That is to say, while it is true that the forced-labor system was not limitlessly expandable, it may have paid in certain fields.

In any case, to start examining the economics of the operation in an abstract way is clearly a mistake. A man killed by squeezing a year or two’s effort out of him is of more use than a man kept in prison. The camps were politically efficient. They effectively isolated masses of potential troublemakers, and were a great disincentive to any sort of anti-Stalinist activity, or even talk. Assuming that the political purging was necessary, the camps were a useful end product.

Like everything else in Stalin’s epoch, the system operated by pressure from the top down. Every camp had its “plan,” and every camp chief worked under a system of penalties and rewards. There were some odd results. Camp chiefs are reported as having kept recaptured prisoners whom they should have returned to their original camps. Again, in the prison at Kotlas, there was a group of prisoners consisting entirely of invalids and old people, whom none of the camps would accept, for obvious economic reasons. They remained there for over a year as the problem solved itself by their dying.¹⁶²

FOOD AND DEATH

In the camps, the commandants operated the norm system vis-à-vis the prisoners. As a general principle there were various “cauldrons,” or food allotments. The principle is simple enough. Precise figures varied considerably, but the following shows a typical proportion. In the Kolyma camps, for men doing twelve to sixteen hours’ heavy physical labor a day, eight months of it in very low temperatures, the daily ration, of very poor bread, is given as follows by a former prisoner writing in the West:

for more than 100% of the norm

up to 930 grams (32 oz.)

for 100%

815 grams (28½ oz.)

for 70–99%

715 grams (25 oz.)

for 50–69%

500 grams (17½ oz.)

disciplinary ration

300 grams (10½ oz.)

plus “soup,” 3½ oz. of salt fish, and just over 2 oz. of groats

¹⁶³

A Soviet account of the same area gives

for 100% fulfillment

800 grams

nonfulfillment for whatever reason

500 grams

punitive

300 grams ‘

¹⁶⁴

The first is given in ounces in the original, so the slight discrepancy has no significance. What seems to be the abolition of the intermediate stage may be due to the fact that the Russian was serving there later—from 1942 until at least 1950—as against the other’s circa 1938 to 1946. A Polish account, of 1940 to 1941, gives 500 grams for 50 percent norm and 300 for less.¹⁶⁵

Another reported ration scheme, in one of the northern camps in the winter of 1941/1942:

for the full norm

700 grams of bread, plus soup and buckwheat

for those not attaining the norm

400 grams of bread, plus soup

¹⁶⁶

Most Arctic arrangements were probably close to these two. The ration outside the Arctic proper was rather lower, typically

over 100%

750–1,000 grams

100%

600–650 grams

50–100%

400–475 grams

penal (under 50%)

300–400 grams

¹⁶⁷

These rations may be compared with those of a camp system more familiar to Western readers—that of one of the Japanese P.O.W. camps on the River Kwai (Tha Makham). There, prisoners got a daily ration norm of 700 grams of rice, 600 of vegetables, 100 of meat, 20 of sugar, 20 of salt, and 5 of oil—for a total of 3,400 calories, but, as in Russia, very deficient in vitamins.¹⁶⁸ (Even in the 1980s in the USSR, the camp norm was of 2,400 calories only, mainly based on 700 grams of black bread.)

We can make certain other comparisons. In the Ukrainian cities in the famine period of the 1930s, the bread ration was 800 grams for industrial workers, 600 for manual workers, 400 for office employees. In the siege of Leningrad, in 1941 to 1942, about one-third to one-half of the population remaining in the city died of hunger, mostly during the first winter. The rations in the worst period were

October 1941

the basic ration was down to 400 grams of bread a day for workers and 200 grams for dependents

Late November 1941

250 grams for workers and 125 for dependents

Late December 1941

up to 350 grams for workers and 200 for dependents

¹⁶⁹

At Leningrad, there were small additional rations of meat and sugar; lumber workers got a supplementary ration above the norm; and a truly major difference is that in camps the prisoners never got their full ration, and if there was a bad or inedible portion of the original bulk ration, that was the part that went to them. Solzhenitsyn describes what happens to the groat issue:

Shukhov had had thousands of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he’d never had a chance to weigh a single one of them on a scale … he and every other prisoner had known a long time that the people who cut up and issued your bread wouldn’t last long if they gave you honest rations. Every ration was short. The only question was—by how much?¹⁷⁰

The reason was obvious:

When they left in the morning, the cook got an issue of groats from the big kitchen in the camp. It worked out to about two ounces a head—about two pounds for each gang. That is, a little over twenty pounds for everybody working on the site. The cook didn’t carry that stuff himself on the two-mile march from the camp. He had a trusty who carried it for him. He thought it was better to slip an extra portion of the stuff to a trusty at the expense of the prisoners’ bellies rather than to break his own back. Then there was water and firewood to carry and the stove to light. The cook didn’t do that either. He had other prisoners and “goners” to do it. And they got their cut too. It’s easy to give away things that don’t belong to you.

All the cook did was put groats and salt in the cauldron, and if there was any fat he split it between the cauldron and himself. (The good fat never got as far as the prisoners. Only the bad stuff went in the cauldron….) Then his only job was to stir the mush when it was nearly ready. The sanitary inspector didn’t even do that much. He just sat and watched. When the mush was ready, the cook gave him some right away and he could eat all he wanted. And so could the cook. Then one of the gang bosses—they took turns, a different one every day—came to taste it and see if it was good enough for the men to eat. He got a double portion too.

After this, the whistle went off. Now the other gang bosses came and the cook handed them their bowls through a kind of hatch in the wall. The bowls had this watery mush in them. And you didn’t ask how much of the ration they’d really put in it. You’d get hell if you opened your mouth.¹⁷¹

And so it was with everything: “They stole all the way down the line—out here on the site, in the camp, and in the stores too.”¹⁷²

The system was made more effective yet, in the lumber camps in particular, by turning it into a “brigade,” a gang, matter, with collective responsibility for inadequate work:

You might ask why a prisoner worked so hard for ten years in a camp. Why didn’t they say to hell with it and drag their feet all day long till the night, which was theirs?

But it wasn’t so simple…. It was like this—either you all got something extra or you all starved. (“You’re not pulling your weight, you swine, and I’ve got to go hungry because of you. So work, you bastard!”)

So when a really tough job came along, like now, you couldn’t sit on your hands. Like it or not, you had to get a move on. Either they made the place warm within two hours or they’d all be fucking well dead.¹⁷³

The brigade leader, himself a prisoner, worked out with a foreman, “the team surveyor,” the amount of work done by his brigade. Other camp officials then estimated the production compared with the “daily norm.” Their decisions were then sent to the food department for rationing according to the output.¹⁷⁴

More depended on the work rates than the work itself. A clever boss who knows his business really sweats over these work rates. That’s where the ration comes from. If a job hasn’t been done, make it look like it had. If the rates were low on a job, try to hike ‘em up. You had to have brains for this and a lot of pull with the fellows who kept the work sheets. And they didn’t do it for nothing.

But come to think of it, who were these rates for? For the people who ran the camps. They made thousands on the deal and got bonuses on top for the officers. Like old Volkovoy, with that whip of his. And all you got out of it was six ounces of bread in the evening. Your life depended on them.¹⁷⁵

On one occasion, the gang boss gets “better rates.” This means that “they’d have good bread rations for five days. Well, maybe four. The higher-ups always cheat on one day out of five.”¹⁷⁶

As to the quality of the food, the convicts in Solzhenitsyn’s book discuss the film Battleship Potemkin. The maggots on the meat which cause the mutiny are thought to be unrealistically large, and this is explained as necessary from the film point of view. Then comes the comment: “If they brought that kind of meat to the camp, I can tell you, and put it in the cauldron instead of the rotten fish we get, I bet we’d …’¹⁷⁷

He describes a meal:

The gruel didn’t change from one day to the next. It depended on what vegetables they’d stored for the winter. The year before they’d only stocked up with salted carrots, so there was nothing but carrots in the gruel from September to June. And now it was cabbage. The camp was best fed in June, when they ran out of vegetables and started using groats instead. The worst time was July, when they put shredded nettles in the cauldron.

The fish was mostly bones. The flesh was boiled off except for bits on the tails and the heads. Not leaving a single scale or speck of flesh on the skeleton, Shukhov crunched and sucked the bones and spat them out on the table. He didn’t leave anything—not even the gills or tail. He ate the eyes too when they were still in place, but when they’d come off and were floating around in the bowl on their own he didn’t eat them. The others laughed at him for this.

… The second course was a mush made from magara. It was one solid lump, and Shukhov broke it off in pieces. When it was hot—never mind when it was cold—it had no taste and didn’t fill you. It was nothing but grass that looked like millet. They’d gotten the bright idea of serving it instead of groats. It came from the Chinese, they said. They got ten ounces of it and that was that. It wasn’t the real thing, but it passed for mush.¹⁷⁸

The ration, and the whole estimate of norms, depended on all sorts of factors. First, the ideas of the officials in determining the piecework. For some types of work, it was on occasion set far above the possible—for example, in building the Kotlas–Vorkuta railway. It was impossible to do more than about 30 percent of the quota, so the ration, for this extremely hard work, was down to 400 grams.¹⁷⁹ On the extension down to Khalmer-Yu, average expectation of life was about three months.¹⁸⁰

Again, the goodness or badness of the year’s harvest immediately affected rations. The bad harvest of 1936 produced an appalling level of mortality from starvation in the camps in 1937.

Trouble was caused by the desire to eat anything at all. Rubbish boxes from the kitchens might be attacked by gangs. When these, in one camp, were thrown into the cesspool by the latrines, “even there the gangs waded after them.”¹⁸¹ When grass came up, every blade might be put in a tin and boiled and eaten. Grass eating was most common among intellectuals. Its long-term effects were deadly. Others tried to satisfy their appetites with boiling salt water, also ineffective.¹⁸²

Even in Solzhenitsyn’s penal camp, there are convicts who have served in worse places—a lumber camp where work went on until midnight if necessary to fill the quotas, and the basic ration was six ounces less.¹⁸³ In the area of the far north, to the east of the Urals, there seem to have been a number of camps of particularly rigorous regime, which are described as of “complete isolation.” Only a few rumors about them have emerged, as no one seems in any circumstances to have been released. The death rate is said to have been very high. Novaya Zemlya had an extremely bad reputation—with few, if any, returning.

Special punitive camps are often reported. After the introduction of a new and harsher regime of katorga in the early 1940s, those so sentenced were deprived of blankets and mattresses for the first three years and otherwise subjected to harder labor, longer hours, and worse conditions.¹⁸⁴ Sometimes, as in the Dzhido camp, offending prisoners were put in chains for the remainder of their sentences.¹⁸⁵ For women, the Stalinogorsk camp was particularly severe: inmates worked in iron and coal mines. The second Alekseyevka camp, in the Kargopol group, a particularly bad one listed as a disciplinary camp but in fact full of foreign prisoners who had had no time to commit offenses in other camps, had a large number of Polish Jews who had escaped from the Nazi persecution and died like flies. They hated the Soviet regime more bitterly and passionately than anyone in the camps.¹⁸⁶

In one respect, Solzhenitsyn was lucky. He was not in a lumber camp. Here rations were notoriously low, and work was extremely hard. Professor Swianiewicz, who was himself in a lumber camp at one time, says that the former inmates are inclined to overestimate the proportion of prisoners sent to such work, probably because they were “under the constant fear of being sent to the forest. It was the equivalent of a death sentence for a person not accustomed to heavy physical work to be assigned for a long period to a felling brigade.”¹⁸⁷ One former assistant to a doctor in a northern camp says that in two successive winters about 50 percent of the workers in some forestry brigades died. Overall, about 30 percent of the labor force was lost by death or total exhaustion per annum.¹⁸⁸ A Pole who was briefly in Alekseyevka describes the visible death as extraordinary. He saw two drop dead as they left the gates with other brigades. In his own brigade, three died at the work site on the first day.’¹⁸⁹ A very active man would sometimes remain healthy by producing 120 or 150 percent of his quota for a year or eighteen months, and then one night would be found dead of heart failure in his bunk.¹⁹⁰

Even comparatively mild lumber camps were great killers. Finnish prisoners who were experts in the matter held that the norms prevailing were impossible even for the best-fed workers. They could only be brought down even to the barely tolerable level by various forms of cheating (tufta) and bribery—using the same logs over again by sawing off the stamped end, and so forth. Herling never came across a prisoner who had worked in the forest for more than two years. After a year, prisoners were usually incurable and, following transfer as “goners” to lighter work, retired to the mortuary.¹⁹¹

This was the last stage in the camps. When worn down, debilitated to the degree that no serious work could any longer be got out of them, prisoners were put on substarvation rations and allowed to hang around the camp doing odd jobs until they died. This category is recognized in Soviet as well as foreign books. Gorbatov, who describes the usual symptoms, confirms that to go sick was ordinarily fatal. For if you did, you had your ration cut and from that point there was no way out.¹⁹² This corps commander was at one time able to sweep the camp office floors, and there found an occasional crust to keep him going. He was himself saved from death by a friendly doctor who got him transferred to an easier post. In general, throughout the period, all our sources emphasize that survival for any length of time was rare in most camps except among those qualifying for “functions”—office jobs or other work enabling them to escape the main labor of the camp in question.

During bad periods “the camps of the disabled and unfit … became the most populous, and the largest labor brigades were those of the woodcutters and the gravediggers.”¹⁹³ The dead were buried in pits, with small wooden tags attached with string to their legs.¹⁹⁴

One estimate is that a batch of prisoners in the camps would, on the average, lose half its number in two or three years.¹⁹⁵ An NKVD functionary who worked on the Baltic–White Sea Canal group of camps gave evidence¹⁹⁶ that there were 250,000 prisoners in these camps at the beginning of the Purges, and the death rate was 700 a day, a figure also given elsewhere.¹⁹⁷ However, 1,500 new prisoners came in daily, so the population continued to rise.

The mortality rate of the camps in 1933 is estimated at about 10 percent per annum, and in 1938 to be running at about 20 percent.¹⁹⁸ The 1936 prisoners were almost all extinct by 1940. A woman who worked in a camp hospital notes that patients sentenced in 1937 and 1938 filled it in 1939 and 1940, but by 1941 there were few of them to be seen.¹⁹⁹

In any case, of those who went into the camps, only a small proportion ever came out again. For long, some of the best evidence we had came from German Communists withdrawn from the camps and handed over to the Nazis in 1939 and 1940, from Poles released under the 1941 treaty, and from others who, benefiting from exceptional circumstances, were in for equally short periods. In general, releases were very rare, and survival until the post-Stalin amnesties rarer still.

The length of sentence anyhow made little difference. (Those who were released were in any case all rearrested around 1947–1948.) Upon the expiration of a sentence, it was usual for prisoners to be called before a Special Section officer and given a few more years, though in some cases they were sent back to prison in Moscow or elsewhere, reinterrogated, and sentenced for fresh crimes.

Shukhov sort of liked the way they pointed at him—the lucky guy nearly through with his sentence. But he didn’t really believe it. Take the fellows who should’ve been let out in the war. They were all kept in till forty-six—“till further notice.” And then those with three years who’d gotten five more slapped on. They twisted the law any way they wanted. You finished a ten-year stretch and they gave you another one. Or if not, they still wouldn’t let you go home.²⁰⁰

We do know of people who lasted up to seventeen years and were then rehabilitated—Snegov, referred to in Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, for instance, or Lieutenant-General Todorsky. They seem to have served in the less severe camps. But much of the published Soviet evidence until 1987 was from figures such as Gorbatov, who was among the rehabilitated officers of 1940 and would not otherwise have survived. (The routine of rehabilitation, in those few cases in which it applied, was slow. Gorbatov had, he later found out, been defended by Budenny, and on 20 March 1940 his sentence was rescinded and a review ordered. He did not get back from Magadan to the Butyrka until 25 December 1940. By 1 March 1941 he was in the Lubyanka, and on 5 March he was released.)

The other sort of Soviet witness was of the type of Solzhenitsyn, who says that though a man might possibly last ten years, any much longer period was out of the question—and this at a comparatively good period in camp history. Solzhenitsyn was in fact released after ten years, in the post-Stalin rehabilitations. He had fortunately been sentenced late in Stalin’s life. A man sentenced in 1938 would have had to wait seventeen or eighteen years. Of those arrested in the period 1936 to 1938, we can hardly allow 10 percent to have survived; in fact, a Soviet historian tells us that 90 percent of those who went to camp before the war perished, while Academician Sakharov notes that only 50,000 of the more than 600,000 party members sent to camp, rather than executed, survived.²⁰¹ A million would be an outside figure. Of the other 7 million-odd, the number who died either by execution or in camps during the actual two-year Yezhov period may be taken as about 3 million.²⁰² The rest followed over a period of years, during which time their number was continually added to by the victims of later arrest.

A recent Soviet article puts it that “their death was caused by unbearable toil, by cold and starvation, by unheard-of degradation and humiliation, by a life which could not have been endured by any other mammal.”²⁰³

In another we read,

I often hear the word “lucky” from those I am recording. I was lucky—the firing squad was replaced by twenty-five years of hard labor; lucky—I waited for hours on the tundra to be shot but wasn’t; lucky—I was transferred from general work to the meteorological station; lucky—I had enough time to take my daughter to my parents before the arrest; lucky…. One day we shall learn how many people died in the prisons and camps and how many returned.²⁰⁴

A Soviet poet wrote as long ago as 1963, in lzvestiya,

There—row on row, according to years,

Kolyma, Magadan,

Vorkuta and Narym

Marched in invisible columns.

The region of eternal frost

Wrote men off into eternity,

Moved them from the category of “living”

To that of “dead” (little difference between them)—

Behind that barbed wire

White and grizzled—

With that Special Article of the law code

Clipped to their case files.

Who and what for and by whose will—

Figure it out, History.²⁰⁵