Out on the work sites, he encounters “healthy lads” in linen shirts and sturdy boots. He meets few political prisoners and, when he does, he dismisses them as “counter-revolutionaries, emotional types, monarchists.” When they tell him they have been unfairly arrested, he presumes them to be lying. At one point, he seems to hint at the legendary encounter with the fourteen-year-old boy. During his visit to a group of juvenile delinquents, he writes, one of them brought him a protest note. In response, there were “loud cries” from the children, who called the young man a “squealer.”
But it was not just the living conditions that made Solovetsky, in Gorky’s description, a new type of camp. Its inmates, the “rescued passengers,” were not just happy and healthy, they were also playing a vital role in a grand experiment: the transformation of criminal and asocial personalities into useful Soviet citizens. Gorky was revitalizing Dzerzhinsky’s idea that the camps were to be not mere penitentiaries but “schools of labor,” specially designed to forge the sort of worker required by the new Soviet system. In his view, the experiment’s ultimate goal was to ensure the “abolition of prisons”—and it was succeeding. “If any so-called cultured European society dared to conduct an experiment such as this colony,” Gorky concluded, “and if this experiment yielded fruits as ours had, that country would blow all its trumpets and boast about its accomplishments.” Only the “modesty” of the Soviet leaders had, he reckoned, prevented them from doing so before.
Later, Gorky allegedly said that not a single sentence of his essay on Solovetsky had been left “untouched by the censors’ pen.” We do not know, in fact, whether he wrote what he did out of naïveté, out of a calculated desire to deceive, or because the censors made him do it.11 Whatever his motivations, Gorky’s 1929 essay on Solovetsky was to become an important foundation stone in the forming of both public and official attitudes to the new and far more extensive system of camps which were conceived in that same year. Earlier Bolshevik propaganda had defended revolutionary violence as a necessary, albeit temporary evil, a transitory cleansing force. Gorky, on the other hand, made the institutionalized violence of the Solovetsky camps seem a logical and natural part of the new order, and helped to reconcile the public to the growing, totalitarian power of the state.12
As it turned out, 1929 would be remembered for many things other than Gorky’s essay. By that year, the Revolution had matured. Nearly a decade had passed since the end of the civil war. Lenin was long dead. Economic experiments of various kinds—the New Economic Policy, War Communism—had been tried and abandoned. Just as the ramshackle concentration camp on the Solovetsky Islands had become the network of camps known as SLON, so too had the random terror of the Soviet Union’s early years subsided, giving way to a more systematic persecution of the regime’s perceived opponents.
The Revolution had also acquired, by 1929, a very different sort of leader. Throughout the 1920s, Josef Stalin had bested or eliminated first the Bolsheviks’ enemies, and then his own enemies, partly by putting himself in charge of Party personnel decisions, and partly by making liberal use of secret information gathered on his behalf by the secret police, in which he took a particular personal interest. He launched a series of Party purges, which at first meant Party expulsions, and arranged for them to be announced at emotional, recriminatory mass meetings. In 1937 and 1938, these purges would become lethal: expulsion from the Party would often be followed by a camp sentence—or death.
With notable finesse, Stalin had also finished off his most important rival for power, Leon Trotsky. First he discredited Trotsky, then deported him to an island off the Turkish coast, and then used him to set a precedent. When Yakov Blyumkin, an OGPU agent and ardent Trotsky supporter, visited his hero in his Turkish exile—and returned with a message from Trotsky to his supporters—Stalin had Blyumkin sentenced and executed upon his return. By doing so, he established the state’s willingness to use the full force of its repressive organs not only against members of other socialist parties and the old regime but also against dissidents within the Bolshevik Party itself.13
However, in 1929, Stalin was not yet the dictator he would become by the end of the following decade. It is more accurate to say that in that year Stalin put in place the policies that would ultimately enshrine his own power and transform the Soviet economy and society beyond recognition at the same time. Western historians variously labeled these policies the “Revolution from Above” or the “Stalinist Revolution.” Stalin himself called them the “Great Turning Point.”
At the heart of Stalin’s revolution was a new program of extremely— almost hysterically—rapid industrialization. At that time, the Soviet Revolution had still not brought real material improvement to the lives of most people. On the contrary, the years of Revolution, civil war, and economic experimentation had led to greater impoverishment. Now Stalin, perhaps sensing the growing popular discontent with the Revolution, set out to change ordinary people’s living conditions—radically.
To that end, the Soviet government in 1929 approved a new “Five-Year Plan,” an economic program that called for a 20 percent annual increase in industrial output. Food rationing returned. For a time, the seven-day week—five days of work, two days of rest—was abandoned. Instead, workers rested in shifts, so as to prevent any factory from ever shutting down. On high-priority projects, thirty-hour shifts were not unknown, and some workers stayed on the job an average of 300 hours a month.14 The spirit of the age, imposed from above but enthusiastically adopted below, was a form of one-upmanship, in which factory owners and bureaucrats, workers and clerks, vied with one another to fulfill the plan, to overfulfill the plan, or at least to propose newer and faster ways of overfulfilling the plan. At the same time, no one was allowed to doubt the wisdom of the plan. This was true at the highest levels: Party leaders who doubted the worth of rushed industrialization did not remain long in office. It was also true at the lowest levels. One survivor of that era remembered marching around his kindergarten classroom, carrying a little banner and chanting:
Five in Four, Five in Four, Five in Four And not in five!
Alas, the meaning of this phrase—that the Five-Year Plan was to be completed in four years—escaped him entirely.15
As was to be the case with all major Soviet initiatives, the onset of mass industrialization created whole new categories of criminals. In 1926, the Soviet criminal code had been rewritten to include, among other things, an expanded definition of Article 58, which defined “counter-revolutionary” crimes. Formerly a mere paragraph or two, Article 58 now contained eighteen subsections—and the OGPU made use of them all, most notably to arrest technical specialists.16 Predictably, the high tempo of change could not be met. Primitive technology, applied too quickly, led to mistakes. Someone had to be blamed. Hence the arrests of the “wreckers” and the “saboteurs” whose evil aims were preventing the Soviet economy from living up to the propaganda. Some of the earliest show trials—the Shakhty trial of 1928, the Industrial Party trial of 1930—were in fact trials of engineers and technical intelligentsia. So too was the Metro-Vickers trial of 1933, which attracted a great deal of international attention because it included British citizens as well as Russians, all accused of “espionage and sabotage” on behalf of Great Britain.17
But there would be other sources of prisoners too. For in 1929, the Soviet regime also accelerated the process of forced collectivization in the countryside, a vast upheaval which was in some ways more profound than the Russian Revolution itself. Within an incredibly short period of time, rural commissars forced millions of peasants to give up their small landholdings and to join collective farms, often expelling them from land their families had tilled for centuries. The transformation permanently weakened Soviet agriculture, and created the conditions for the terrible, devastating famines in Ukraine and southern Russia in 1932 and 1934—famines that killed between six and seven million people.18 Collectivization also destroyed— forever—rural Russia’s sense of continu
ity with the past.
Millions resisted collectivization, hiding grain in their cellars or refusing to cooperate with the authorities. These resisters were labeled kulaks, or wealthy peasants, a term which (much like the definition of “wrecker”) was so vague that nearly anyone could qualify. The possession of an extra cow, or an extra bedroom, was enough to qualify some distinctly poor peasants, as was an accusation from a jealous neighbor. To break the kulaks’ resistance, the regime revived, in effect, the old Czarist tradition of the administrative deportation order. From one day to the next, trucks and wagons simply arrived in a village and picked up entire families. Some kulaks were shot, some were arrested and given camp sentences. In the end, however, the regime deported most of them. Between 1930 and 1933, over two million peasant kulaks were exiled to Siberia, to Kazakhstan, and to other underpopulated regions of the Soviet Union, where they lived out the rest of their lives as “special exiles,” forbidden to leave their exile villages. A further 100,000 were arrested, and wound up in the Gulag.19
As famine kicked in, helped by poor rainfall, more arrests followed. All available grain was taken out of the villages, and deliberately denied to kulaks. Those caught stealing tiny amounts, even to feed their children, also ended up in prison. A law of August 7, 1932, demanded the death penalty, or else a long camp sentence, for all such “crimes against state property.” Soon afterward, the “gleaners” appeared in the camps: peasant women who had picked up leftover grain in order to survive. They were joined by others, such as the hungry people who received ten-year sentences for stealing a pound of potatoes or a handful of apples.20 These laws explain why peasants formed the vast majority of prisoners in Soviet camps throughout the 1930s, and why peasants would remain a substantial part of the prison population until Stalin’s death.
The impact of these mass arrests on the camps was enormous. Almost as soon as the new laws came into effect, camp administrators began to call for a rapid and radical overhaul of the entire system. The “ordinary” prison system, still run by the Commissariat of the Interior (and still far larger than Solovetsky, which was run by the OGPU) had remained overcrowded, disorganized, and over-budget throughout the previous decade. Nationally, the situation was so bad that at one point the Commissariat of the Interior attempted to reduce inmate numbers by sentencing more people to “forced labor without deprivation of freedom”—assigning them jobs but not locking them up—thereby relieving the strain on the camps.21
As the pace of collectivization and the strength of repression picked up, however—as millions of kulaks were evicted from their homes—such solutions began to seem politically inopportune. Once again, the authorities determined that such dangerous criminals—enemies of Stalin’s great drive for collectivization—required a more secure form of incarceration, and the OGPU prepared to build one.
Knowing that the prison system was deteriorating as fast as prisoner numbers were rising, the Politburo of the Communist Party set up a commission in 1928 to deal with the problem. Ostensibly, the commission was neutral, and contained representatives of the Interior and Justice Commissariats, as well as the OGPU. Comrade Yanson, the Commissar of Justice, was placed in charge of it. The commission’s task was to create “a system of concentration camps, organized in the manner of the OGPU camps” and its deliberations took place within clear limits. Despite Maxim Gorky’s lyrical passages about the value of labor in the reformation of criminals, all of the participants used fiercely economic language. All expressed the same concerns about “profitability” and spoke frequently about “rational use of labor.”22
True, the protocol written up after the commission meeting of May 15, 1929, records a few practical objections to the creation of a mass camp system: camps would be too difficult to set up, there were no roads leading to the far north, and so on. The Commissar of Labor thought it was wrong to subject minor criminals to the same punishment as recidivists. The Commissar of the Interior, Tolmachev, pointed out that the system would look bad abroad: the “White Guard emigrants” and the bourgeois foreign press would claim that “instead of building a penitentiary system intended to reform prisoners through corrective labor, we’ve put up Chekist fortresses.” 23
Yet his point was that the system would look bad, not that it was bad. No one present objected on the grounds that camps “of the Solovetsky type” were cruel or lethal. Nor did anyone mention the alternative theories of criminal justice of which Lenin had been so fond, the notion that crime would disappear along with capitalism. Certainly no one talked about prisoner re-education, the “transformation of human nature,” which Gorky had lauded in his essay on Solovetsky and which would be so important in the public presentation of the first set of camps. Instead, Genrikh Yagoda, the OGPU’s representative on the committee, put the regime’s real interests quite clearly:
It is already both possible and absolutely necessary to remove 10,000 prisoners from places of confinement in the Russian republic, whose labor could be better organized and used. Aside from that, we have received notice that the camps and jails in the Ukrainian republic are overflowing as well. Obviously, Soviet policy will not permit the building of new prisons. Nobody will give money for new prisons. The construction of large camps, on the other hand—camps which will make rational use of labor—is a different matter. We have many difficulties attracting workers to the North. If we send many thousands of prisoners there, we can exploit the resources of the North . . . the experience of Solovetsky shows what can be done in this area.
Yagoda went on to explain that the resettlement would be permanent. After their release, prisoners would stay put: “with a variety of measures, both administrative and economic, we can force the freed prisoners to stay in the North, thereby populating our outer regions.”24
The idea that prisoners should become colonists—so similar to the Czarist model—was no afterthought. While the Yanson commission was holding its deliberations, a separate committee of the Soviet government had also begun to investigate the labor crisis in the far north, variously proposing to send the unemployed or Chinese immigrants to solve the problem. 25 Both committees were looking for solutions to the same problem at the same time, and no wonder. In order to fulfill Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, the Soviet Union would require huge quantities of coal, gas, oil, and wood, all available in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the far north. The country also needed gold in order to purchase new machinery abroad, and geologists had recently discovered gold in the far northeastern region of Kolyma. Despite freezing temperatures, primitive living conditions, and inaccessibility, these resources had to be exploited at breakneck speed.
In the then-fierce spirit of interministry competition, Yanson initially proposed that his own commissariat take over the system and set up a series of forestry camps in order to increase the Soviet Union’s export of timber, a major source of foreign currency. This project was put aside, probably because not everyone wanted Comrade Yanson and his judicial bureaucrats to control it. Indeed, when the project was suddenly revived, in the spring of 1929, the Yanson commission’s conclusions were slightly different. On April 13, 1929, the commission proposed the creation of a new, unified camp system, one which eliminated the distinction between “ordinary” and “special” camps. More significant, the commission handed direct control of the new unified system straight to the OGPU.26
The OGPU took control of the Soviet Union’s prisoners with startling speed. In December 1927, the Special Department of the OGPU had controlled 30,000 inmates, about 10 percent of the prison population, mostly in the Solovetsky camps. It employed no more than 1,000 people, and its budget hardly exceeded .05 percent of state expenditure. By contrast, the Commissariat of the Interior’s prison system had 150,000 inmates and consumed .25 percent of the state budget. Between 1928 and 1930, however, the situation reversed itself. As other government institutions slowly gave up their prisoners, their prisons, their camps, and the industrial enterprises attached to them, the number of prisoners under OGPU ju
risdiction swelled from 30,000 to 300,000. 27 In 1931, the secret police also took control of the millions of “special exiles”—mostly deported kulaks—who were effectively forced laborers, since they were forbidden to leave their assigned settlements and workplaces under pain of death or arrest.28 By the middle of the decade, the OGPU would control all of the Soviet Union’s vast prisoner workforce.
In order to cope with its new responsibilities, the OGPU reorganized its Special Department for camps and renamed it the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Labor Settlements. Eventually, this unwieldy title would be shortened to the Main Camp Administration or, in Russian, Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei. Hence the acronym by which the department, and ultimately the system itself, would be known: GULAG.29
Ever since the Soviet concentration camps first came into existence on a grand scale, their inmates and their chroniclers have argued about the motives that lay behind their creation. Did they come about haphazardly, as a side effect of collectivization, industrialization, and the other processes taking place in the country? Or did Stalin carefully plot the growth of the Gulag, planning in advance to arrest millions of people?
In the past, some scholars have claimed that no grand design lay behind the camps’ founding. One historian, James Harris, has argued that local leaders, not bureaucrats in Moscow, led the drive to build new camps in the Ural region. Forced to comply with the impossible requirements of the Five-Year Plan on the one hand and facing a critical labor shortage on the other, the Ural authorities increased the pace and cruelty of collectivization in order to square the circle: every time they removed a kulak from his land, they created another slave laborer.30 Another historian, Michael Jakobson, argues along similar lines that the origins of the mass Soviet prison system were “banal”: “Bureaucrats pursued unattainable goals of prison self-sufficiency and inmate re-education. Officials sought manpower and funds, expanded their bureaucracies, and tried to meet unrealistic goals. Administrators and warders dutifully enforced rules and regulations. Theorists rationalized and justified. Eventually, everything was reversed or modified or abandoned.”31
Gulag Page 10