Indeed, if the Gulag’s origins were haphazard, that would not be surprising. Throughout the early 1930s, the Soviet leadership in general, and Stalin in particular, constantly changed course, implemented policies and then reversed them, and made public pronouncements deliberately designed to disguise reality. It is not easy, when reading the history of the era, to detect an evil master plan designed by Stalin or anyone else.32 Stalin himself launched collectivization, for example, only to change his mind, apparently, in March 1930, when he attacked overzealous rural officials who had become “Dizzy with Success.” Whatever he meant by this pronouncement, it had little effect on the ground, and the destruction of the kulaks continued unabated for years.
The OGPU bureaucrats and secret police who planned the expansion of the Gulag also seem, initially, to have been no clearer about their ultimate goals. The Yanson commission itself made decisions, and then reversed them. The OGPU also conducted policies which seemed contradictory. Throughout the 1930s, for example, the OGPU declared frequent amnesties, intended to end overcrowding in prisons and camps. Invariably, the amnesties would be followed by new waves of repression, and new waves of camp construction, as if Stalin and his henchmen were never quite sure if they wanted the system to grow or not—or as if different people were giving different orders at different times.
Similarly, the camp system would go through many cycles: now more repressive, now less so, now more repressive again. Even after 1929, when the camps had been set firmly on the path of economic efficiency, a few anomalies remained in the system. As late as 1937, for example, many political prisoners were still kept in jails where they were explicitly forbidden to work—a practice that would seem to contradict the general drive for efficiency.33 Nor were many of the bureaucratic changes terribly meaningful. Although the formal division between secret police camps and nonsecret police camps did come to an end in the 1930s, a vestigial division remained between “camps,” supposedly designed for more dangerous and political criminals, and “colonies,” for petty criminals with shorter sentences. In practice, the organization of work, food, and daily life at both camps and colonies was very similar.
And yet—there is also now a growing consensus that Stalin himself had, if not a carefully designed plan, then at least a very firm belief in the enormous advantages of prison labor, which he maintained until the end of his life. Why?
Some, like Ivan Chukhin, a former secret policeman and historian of the early camp system, speculate that Stalin promoted the Gulag’s overambitious early construction works in order to build up his own prestige. At this time, he was still just emerging as the leader of the country after a long and bitter power struggle. He may have imagined that new industrial feats, achieved with the help of prison slave labor, would help him secure his power. 34
Stalin may also have been inspired by an older historical precedent. Robert Tucker, among others, has amply demonstrated Stalin’s obsessive interest in Peter the Great, another Russian ruler who deployed massive serf and prison labor to achieve enormous feats of engineering and construction. In a speech to a Central Committee plenum, made just as he was getting ready to launch his industrial program in 1928, Stalin noted admiringly that
When Peter the Great, conducting business with the more advanced countries in the West, feverishly built mills and factories to supply the army and strengthen the defenses of the country, it was a special sort of effort to leap clear of the confines of his backwardness.35
The italics are mine: they emphasize the link between Stalin’s “Great Turning Point” and the policies of his eighteenth-century predecessor. In the Russian historical tradition, Peter is remembered as both a great and a cruel leader, and this is not thought to be a contradiction. After all, nobody remembers how many serfs died during the building of St. Petersburg, but everybody admires the city’s beauty. Stalin may well have taken his example to heart.
Yet Stalin’s interest in concentration camps need not have had a rational source at all: perhaps Stalin’s obsessive interest in vast construction projects and toiling teams of forced laborers was connected, somehow, to his particular form of megalomaniacal madness. Mussolini once said of Lenin that he “is an artist who has worked in men as others have worked in marble or metal.”36 This description may be better applied to Stalin, who literally enjoyed the sight of large numbers of human bodies, marching or dancing in perfect synchronization.37 He was captivated by the ballet, by orchestrated exhibitions of gymnastics, and by parades featuring giant pyramids built out of anonymous, contorted human figures. 38 Like Hitler, Stalin was also obsessed with the cinema, particularly Hollywood musicals, with their enormous casts of coordinated singers and dancers. He might have derived a different but related form of pleasure from the vast teams of prisoners who dug canals and built railway lines at his bidding.
Whatever his inspiration, whether political, historical, or psychological, it is clear that from the Gulag’s earliest days, Stalin took a deep personal interest in the camps, and exerted an enormous influence on their development. The crucial decision to transfer all of the Soviet Union’s camps and prisons away from the ordinary justice system and into the hands of the OGPU, for example, was almost certainly made at Stalin’s behest. By 1929, Stalin had taken a great personal interest in this institution. He took an interest in the careers of the top secret policemen, and oversaw the construction of comfortable houses for them and their families.39 By contrast, the prison administration of the Interior Commissariat was very much out of his favor: its leaders had backed Stalin’s opponents in the bitter, internal Party factional fighting of the time.40
Everyone who took part in the Yanson commission would have known all of these details perfectly well, which might have been enough to persuade them to put the prisons in the hands of the OGPU. But Stalin also intervened directly in the Yanson commission’s deliberations. At one point in the tangled deliberations, the Politburo actually reversed its original decision, declaring its intention to take the prison system away from the secret police once again, and put it back in the hands of the Commissariat of the Interior. This prospect outraged Stalin. In a 1930 letter to his close collaborator, Vyacheslav Molotov, he denounced this idea as an “intrigue” orchestrated by the Commissar of the Interior who is “rotten through and through.” He ordered the Politburo to implement its original decision, and shut down the Commissariat of the Interior altogether.41 Stalin’s decision to give the camps to the OGPU determined their future character. It removed them from ordinary judicial scrutiny, and placed them firmly in the hands of a secret police bureaucracy whose origins lay in the mysterious, extralegal world of the Cheka.
While there is less hard evidence to support the theory, it may also be that the constant emphasis on the need to build “camps of the Solovetsky type” came from Stalin as well. As mentioned earlier, the Solovetsky camps never were profitable, not in 1929, not ever. In the June 1928–June 1929 working year, SLON still received a 1.6-million-ruble subsidy from the state budget.42 Although SLON might have appeared more successful than other local businesses, anyone who understood economics knew that it hardly competed fairly. Forestry camps which employed prisoners would always appear more productive than regular forestry enterprises, for example, simply because the latter’s peasant employees only worked in the winter, when they were unable to farm.43
Nevertheless, the Solovetsky camps were perceived to be profitable—or at least Stalin perceived them to be profitable. Stalin also believed that they were profitable precisely because of Frenkel’s “rational” methods—his distribution of food according to prisoners’ work, and his elimination of needless “extras.” Evidence that Frenkel’s system had won approval at the highest levels is in the results: not only was the system very quickly duplicated around the country, but Frenkel himself was also named chief of construction on the White Sea Canal, the first major project of the Stalin-era Gulag, an extremely high post for a former prisoner. 44 Later, as we shall see, he was protected
from arrest and possibly execution by intervention at the very highest level.
Evidence of interest in prison labor can also be found in Stalin’s continuing interest in the intimate details of camp administration. Throughout his life, he demanded regular information about the level of “inmate productivity” in the camps, often through specific statistics: how much coal and oil they had produced, how many prisoners they employed, how many medals their bosses had received.45 He was particularly interested in the gold mines of Dalstroi, the complex of camps in the far northeastern region of Kolyma, and demanded regular and precise information about Kolyma’s geology, Dalstroi’s mining technology, and the precise quality of the gold produced, as well as its quantity. To ensure that his own edicts were carried out in the more far-flung camps, he sent out inspection teams, often requiring camp bosses to make frequent appearances in Moscow as well. 46
When a particular project interested him, he sometimes got even more closely involved. Canals, for example, seized his imagination, and it sometimes seemed as if he wanted to dig them almost indiscriminately. Yagoda was once forced to write to Stalin, politely objecting to his boss’s unrealistic desire to build a canal using slave labor in central Moscow.47 As Stalin took greater control of the organs of power, he also forced his colleagues to focus their attention on the camps. By 1940, the Politburo would discuss one or another of the Gulag’s projects almost every week. 48
Yet Stalin’s interest was not purely theoretical. He also took a direct interest in the human beings involved in the work of the camps: who had been arrested, where he or she had been sentenced, what was his or her ultimate fate. He personally read, and sometimes commented upon, the petitions for release sent to him by prisoners or their wives, often replying with a word or two (“keep him at work” or “release”). 49 Later, he regularly demanded information about prisoners or groups of prisoners who interested him, such as the west Ukrainian nationalists. 50
There is also evidence that Stalin’s interest in particular prisoners was not always purely political, and did not include only his personal enemies. As early as 1931, before he had consolidated his power, Stalin pushed a resolution through the Politburo which allowed him enormous influence over the arrests of certain kinds of technical specialists.51 And—not coincidentally—the pattern of arrests of engineers and specialists in this earlier era does suggest some higher level of planning. Perhaps it was not sheer accident that the very first group of prisoners sent to the new camps in the Kolyma gold fields included seven well-known mining experts, two labor-organization experts, and one experienced hydraulic engineer.52 Nor, perhaps, was it mere chance that the OGPU managed to arrest one of the Soviet Union’s top geologists on the eve of a planned expedition to build a camp near the oil reserves of the Komi Republic, as we shall see.53 Such coincidences could not have been planned by regional Party bosses reacting to the stresses of the moment.
Finally, there is a completely circumstantial, but nevertheless interesting body of evidence suggesting that the mass arrests of the late 1930s and 1940s may also have been carried out, to some degree, in order to appease Stalin’s desire for slave labor, and not—as most have always assumed—in order to punish his perceived or potential enemies. The authors of the most authoritative Russian history of the camps to date point out the “positive connection between the successful economic activity of the camps and the number of prisoners sent to them.” Surely it is no accident, they argue, that sentences for petty criminal activity suddenly became much harsher just as the camps were expanding, just as more prison laborers were urgently needed.54
A few scattered archival documents hint at the same story. In 1934, for example, Yagoda wrote a letter to his subordinates in Ukraine, demanding 15,000 to 20,000 prisoners, all “fit to work”: they were needed urgently in order to finish the Moscow–Volga Canal. The letter is dated March 17, and in it Yagoda also demanded that the local OGPU bosses “take extra measures” to ensure that the prisoners had arrived by April 1. Where these 15,000 to 20,000 prisoners were supposed to come from was not, however, clearly explained. Were they arrested in order to meet Yagoda’s requirements?55 Or—as historian Terry Martin believes—was Yagoda simply struggling to ensure a nice, regular inflow of labor into his camp system, a goal which he never in fact achieved?
If the arrests were intended to populate the camps, then they did so with almost ludicrous inefficiency. Martin and others have also pointed out that every wave of mass arrests seems to have caught the camp commanders completely by surprise, making it difficult for them to achieve even a semblance of economic efficiency. Nor did the arresting officers ever choose their victims rationally: instead of limiting arrests to the healthy young men who would have made the best laborers in the far north, they also imprisoned women, children, and old people in large numbers.56 The sheer illogic of the mass arrests seems to argue against the idea of a carefully planned slave-labor force—leading many to conclude that arrests were carried out primarily to eliminate Stalin’s perceived enemies, and only secondarily to fill Stalin’s camps.
Yet, in the end, none of these explanations for the growth of the camps is entirely mutually exclusive either. Stalin might well have intended his arrests both to eliminate enemies and to create slave laborers. He might have been motivated both by his own paranoia and by the labor needs of regional leaders. Perhaps the formula is best put simply: Stalin proposed the “Solovetsky model” of concentration camps to his secret police, Stalin selected the victims—and his subordinates leaped at the opportunity to obey him.
Chapter 4
THE WHITE SEA CANAL
Where mossy cliffs and waters slumbered
There, thanks to the strength of labor
Factories will be built
And towns will grow.
Smokestacks will rise up
Under the Northern skies,
Buildings will shine with the lights
Of libraries, theaters, and clubs.
—Medvedkov, a White Sea Canal prisoner, 19341
IN THE END, only one of the objections raised during the meetings of the Yanson commission caused any further concern. Although they were certain that the great Soviet nation would overcome the lack of roads, although they had few qualms about using prisoners as slave laborers, Stalin and his henchmen remained exceptionally touchy about the language foreigners used to describe their prison camps abroad.
In fact—contrary to popular belief—foreigners in this era described Soviet prison camps rather frequently. Quite a lot was generally known in the West about the Soviet concentration camps at the end of the 1920s, perhaps more than was generally known at the end of the 1940s. Large articles about Soviet prisons had appeared in the German, French, British, and American press, particularly the left-wing press, which had wide contacts among imprisoned Russian socialists.2 In 1927, a French writer named Raymond Duguet published a surprisingly accurate book about Solovetsky, Un Bagne en Russie Rouge (A Prison in Red Russia), describing everything from the personality of Naftaly Frenkel to the horrors of the mosquito torture. S. A. Malsagov, a Georgian White Army officer who managed to escape from Solovetsky and cross the border, published Island Hell, another account of Solovetsky, in London in 1926. As a result of widespread rumors about Soviet abuse of prison labor, the British Anti-Slavery Society even launched an investigation into the matter, and wrote a report deploring the evidence of scurvy and maltreatment.3 A French senator wrote a much-quoted article based on the testimony of Russian refugees, comparing the situation in the Soviet Union to the findings of the League of Nations’ slavery investigation in Liberia. 4
The White Sea Canal, northern Russia, 1932–1933
After the expansion of the camps in 1929 and 1930, however, foreign interest in the camps shifted, moving away from the fate of the socialist prisoners, and focusing instead on the economic menace which the camps appeared to pose to Western business interests. Threatened companies, and threatened trade unions, began organizing. Pressur
e grew, particularly in Britain and the United States, for a boycott of cheaper Soviet goods allegedly produced by forced labor. Paradoxically, the movement for a boycott clouded the whole issue in the eyes of the Western Left, which still supported the Russian Revolution, particularly in Europe, even if many of the leaders were uncomfortable about the fate of their socialist brethren. The British Labor Party, for example, opposed a ban on Soviet goods because it was suspicious of the motives of the companies promoting it.5
In the United States, however, trade unions, most notably the American Federation of Labor, came out in support of a boycott. Briefly, they succeeded. In America, the Tariff Act of 1930 prescribed that “All goods . . . mined, produced or manufactured . . . by convict labor or/and forced labor . . . shall not be entitled to entry at any of the ports of the United States.” 6 On that basis, the U.S. Treasury Department banned the import of Soviet pulpwood and matches.
Although the U.S. State Department failed to support the ban, which lasted only a week, discussion of the issue continued.7 In January 1931, the Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. Congress met to consider bills “relating to the prohibition of goods produced by convict labor in Russia.”8 On May 18, 19, 20, 1931, The Times of London printed a series of surprisingly detailed articles on forced labor in the Soviet Union, concluding with an editorial condemning the British government’s recent decision to grant diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. Lending money to Russia would, the editorialists wrote, put “more power into the hands of those who are openly working for their overthrow and for the destruction of the British Empire.”
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