“The warders you will organize on the spot. You will select them yourselves.”
“Very well; but I know nothing about oil.”
“Get the imprisoned Engineer Dukhanovich to be your assistant.”
“What good is he? His specialty is the cold drawing of metals.”
“What do you want? Are we to condemn the professors you require to concentration camps? There is no such clause in the Penal Code. And we are not the Oil syndicate.”
With those words, Berman then sent the OGPU agent off to do his job. “A crazy affair,” notes Kanal’s authors. Within “a month or two,” however, the OGPU man and his colleagues are bragging to one another about the successes they have achieved with their ragtag group of prisoners. “I’ve got a colonel who’s the best lumberjack in the entire camp,” crows one; “I have a field engineer on excavation work—an ex-cashier embezzler,” says another.35
The message is clear: material conditions were difficult, the human material was rough—but the all-knowing, never-failing Soviet political police succeeded, against all the odds, in transforming them into good Soviet citizens. Thus actual facts—the primitive technology, the lack of competent specialists—were deployed to give verisimilitude to an otherwise fanciful portrait of life in the camps.
Much of the book, in fact, is taken up with heartwarming, semireligious stories of prisoners “reforging” themselves through their work on the canal. Many of the prisoners thus reborn are criminals, but not all. Unlike Gorky’s Solovetsky essay, which dismissed or minimized the presence of political prisoners, Kanal features some star political converts. Fettered by “caste prejudice, Engineer Maslov, a former ‘wrecker,’” tries to “veil with iron those dark and deep processes of reconstruction of his conscience which were continually surging within him.” Engineer Zubrik, a working-class ex-saboteur, “honestly earned the right to return again to the bosom of the class in which he was born.” 36
But Kanal imeni Stalina was by no means the only literary work of the time to praise the transforming powers of the camps. Nikolai Pogodin’s play, Aristokraty—a comedy about the White Sea Canal—is another notable example, not least because it picks up on an earlier Bolshevik theme: the “lovability” of thieves. First performed in December 1934, Pogodin’s play (eventually made into a film called Prisoners) ignores the kulaks and politicals who constituted the bulk of the canal’s inmates, instead depicting the jolly japes of the camp bandits (the “aristocrats” of the title) using a very mild form of criminal slang. True, there are one or two sinister notes in the play. At one point, a criminal “wins” a girl in a card game, meaning his opponent must capture her and force her to submit to him. In the play, the girl escapes; in real life, she would probably not have been so lucky.
In the end, though, everyone confesses to their previous crimes, sees the light, and begins to work enthusiastically. A song is sung:
I was a cruel bandit, yes,
I stole from the people, hated to work,
My life was black like the night.
But then they took me to the canal,
Everything past now seems a bad dream.
It is as if I were reborn.
I want to work, and live and sing . . .37
At the time, this sort of thing was hailed as a new and radical form of theater. Jerzy Gliksman, a Polish socialist who saw Aristokraty performed in Moscow in 1935, described the experience:
Instead of being in the usual place, the stage was built in the centre of the edifice, the audience sitting in a circle around it. The director’s aim was to draw the audience closer to the action of the play, to bridge the gap between actor and spectator. There was no curtain, and the stage settings were exceedingly simple, almost as in the Elizabethan theatre . . . the topic—life in a labour camp—was thrilling in itself. 38
Outside the camps, such literature had a dual function. On the one hand, it played a role in the continuing campaign to justify the rapid growth of prison camps to a skeptical foreign public. On the other hand, it probably also served to calm Soviet citizens, disquieted by the violence of collectivization and industrialization, by promising them a happy ending: even the victims of the Stalinist revolution would be given a chance to rebuild their lives in the labor camps.
The propaganda worked. After seeing Aristokraty, Gliksman asked to visit a real labor camp. Somewhat to his surprise, he was soon taken to the “show” camp at Bolshevo, not far from Moscow. He later recalled “nice white beds and bedding, fine washing rooms. Everything was spotlessly clean,” and met a group of younger prisoners who told the same uplifting personal stories that Pogodin and Gorky had described. He met a thief who was now studying to become an engineer. He met a hooligan who had seen the error of his ways and now ran the camp storeroom. “How beautiful the world could be!” a French film director whispered into Gliksman’s ear. Alas for Gliksman, five years later he found himself on the floor of a packed cattle car, heading for a camp that would bear no relationship to the model camp at Bolshevo, in the company of prisoners very different from those in Pogodin’s play.39
Inside the camps, similar propaganda played a role as well. Camp publications and “wall newspapers”—sheets posted on bulletin boards for prisoners to read—contained the same sorts of stories and poems told to outsiders, with some slight differences of emphasis. The newspaper Perekovka (“reforging”), written and produced by the inmates of the Moscow–Volga Canal, a project begun in the wake of the “success” of the White Sea Canal, is typical. Filled with praise for shock-workers, and descriptions of their privileges (“They don’t have to stand in line, they are given food straight at the table by waitresses!”), Perekovka spends less time than the authors of Kanal imeni Stalina singing hymns to the advantages of spiritual transformation, and more time discussing the concrete privileges inmates might gain if they worked harder.
Nor is there quite so much pretense about the higher justice of the Soviet system. The issue of January 18, 1933, reprinted a speech made by Lazar Kogan, one of the camp bosses: “We cannot judge whether someone was rightly or wrongly imprisoned. That’s the business of the prosecutor . . . You are obliged to create something valuable to the state with your work, and we are obliged to make of you someone who is valuable to the state.” 40
Also notable is Perekovka’s open and extremely candid “complaints” department. Prisoners wrote in to complain about the “squabbling and swearing” in the womens’ barracks on the one hand, and the “singing of hymns” on the other; about unfulfillable norms; about shortages of shoes or clean underwear; about the unnecessary beating of horses; about the black-market bazaar in the center of Dmitrov, the headquarters of the camp; and about the misuse of machinery (“there are no bad machines, only bad managers”). This sort of openness about camp problems would disappear later, banished to the private correspondence between camp inspectors and their overlords in Moscow. In the early 1930s, however, such glasnost was quite common outside the camps as well as within them. It was a natural part of the urgent, frantic drive to improve conditions, improve work standards, and—above all—to keep pace with the feverish demands of the Stalinist leadership.41
Walking along the banks of the White Sea Canal today, it is hard to conjure up that near-hysterical atmosphere. I visited the site on a lazy day in August 1999, in the company of several local historians. We stopped, briefly, to look at the small monument to the victims of the canal in Povenets, which bears a brief inscription: “To the innocents, who died while building the White Sea Canal, 1931–1933.” While we stood there, one of my companions insisted on ceremonially smoking a “Belomor” cigarette. He explained that the “Belomor” cigarette brand, once one of the Soviet Union’s most popular, was for decades the only other monument to the canal’s builders.
Nearby stood an old trudposelok, or “exile settlement,” now virtually empty. The large, once-solid houses, made of wood in the Karelian style, were boarded up. Several had begun to sag. A local man, who came
originally from Belorussia—he even spoke a little Polish—told us that he had tried to buy one of the houses a few years ago, but the local government would not sell it to him. “Now it’s all falling apart,” he said. In a little garden behind the house he grew squash and cucumbers and berries. He offered us homemade liquor. With his garden and his 550-ruble pension—at the time, about $22 per month—he had enough, he said, to live on. Of course there was no work to be had on the canal.
And no wonder: along the canal itself, boys were swimming, throwing stones. Cows waded in the murky, shallow water, and weeds grew through the cracks of the concrete. Alongside one of the locks, in a small booth with pink curtains and the original Stalinist columns on the outside, the lone woman controlling the rise and fall of water told us that there were perhaps seven passing ships a day at the most, and often only three or four. That was more than Solzhenitsyn saw in 1966, when he spent a whole day beside the canal and saw two barges, both carrying firewood. Most goods by then, as nowadays, travel by rail—and, as a canal worker told him, the waterway is so shallow that “not even submarines can pass through it under their own power; they have to be loaded on barges.” 42
The shipping route from the Baltic to the White Sea had not, it seemed, proved so urgently necessary after all.
Chapter 5
THE CAMPS EXPAND
We go forward, and behind us
The whole brigade walks merrily along.
In front of us, the victory of the Stakhanovites
Opens a new path . . .
For the old path is no longer known to us,
From our dungeons we have risen to the call
Along the path of Stakhanovite triumph
Believing, we walk towards a life of freedom . . .
—From the journal Kuznitsa printed in Sazlag, 1936 1
POLITICALLY, THE WHITE SEA CANAL was the most important Gulag project of its era. Thanks to Stalin’s personal involvement, no existing resources were spared on its construction. Lavish propaganda also ensured that its successful completion was trumpeted far and wide. Yet the canal was not typical of the Gulag’s new projects, of which it was neither the first nor the largest.
In fact, even before construction of the canal had begun, the OGPU had already started quietly deploying prison labor all over the country, with far less fuss and propaganda. By the middle of 1930, the Gulag system already had 300,000 inmates at its disposal, dispersed among a dozen or so camp complexes and a few smaller sites. It had put 15,000 people to work in Dallag, a new camp in the far east. More than 20,000 were building and operating chemical plants in Vishlag, a camp organized on the base of the Vishersky division of SLON, on the western side of the Ural Mountains. In Siblag, in western Siberia, prisoners were building the northern railways, making bricks, and cutting trees, while the 40,000 prisoners of SLON were at work building roads, cutting wood for export, and packaging 40 percent of the fish harvested in the White Sea.2
Unlike the White Sea Canal, these new camps were not for show. Although they were certainly of greater economic significance to the Soviet Union, no teams of writers set out to describe them. Their existence was not completely secret—not yet—but no one publicized them either: the “real” achievements of the Gulag were not for foreign or even domestic consumption.
As the camps expanded, the nature of the OGPU changed too. As before, Soviet secret police continued to spy upon the regime’s enemies, to interrogate suspected dissidents, and to ferret out “plots” and “conspiracies.” From 1929 on, the secret police also shouldered part of the responsibility for the Soviet Union’s economic development. Over the next decade, they would even become pioneers of a sort, often organizing the exploration as well as the exploitation of the Soviet Union’s natural resources. They planned and equipped geological expeditions which sought to identify the coal, oil, gold, nickel, and other metals that lay beneath the frozen tundra of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of the Soviet far north. They decided which of the enormous stands of timber would be the next to be cut into valuable raw-wood exports. To move these resources into the Soviet Union’s major cities and industrial centers, they set up a huge network of road and rail links, carving out a rudimentary transport system across thousands of kilometers of uninhabited wilderness. On occasion, they took part in these ventures themselves, marching across the tundra, clad in heavy fur coats and thick boots, telegraphing their discoveries back to Moscow.
Prisoners acquired new roles along with their captors. Although some continued to toil behind barbed wire, digging coal or ditches, throughout the first half of the 1930s prisoners also paddled canoes down rivers north of the Arctic Circle, carried the equipment needed for the geological surveys, and broke the ground for new coal mines and oil wells. They built the barracks, unrolled the barbed wire, and set up the watchtowers for new camps. They constructed the refineries needed to process the resources, pounded in the stakes for the railways, and poured the cement for the roads. Eventually, they settled the newly opened territories too, populating the virgin wilderness.
Later, Soviet historians would lyrically call this episode in Soviet history the “Opening Up of the Far North,” and it is true that it did represent a real break with the past. Even in the last decades of Czarist rule, when a belated industrial revolution had finally exploded across Russia, no one had attempted to explore and settle the far northern regions of the country with this intensity. The climate was too harsh, the potential human suffering too great, Russian technology too primitive. The Soviet regime was less troubled by such concerns. Although its technology was not much better, it had little regard for the lives of the people it sent to do the “opening up.” If some of them died—well, more could be found.
Tragedies were plentiful, particularly at the outset of this new era. Recently, the veracity of one particularly horrific incident, long a part of camp survivors’ folklore, was confirmed by a document found in the archives in Novosibirsk. Signed by an instructor of the Party Committee in Narym, western Siberia, and sent to the personal attention of Stalin in May 1933, it precisely describes the arrival of a group of deported peasants—described as “backward elements”—on the island of Nazino in the Ob River. The peasants were exiles, and as such were supposed to settle on the land, and presumably to farm it:
The first convoy contained 5,070 people, and the second 1,044; 6,114 in all. The transport conditions were appalling: the little food that was available was inedible and the deportees were cramped into nearly airtight spaces . . . The result was a daily mortality rate of 35–40 people. These living conditions, however, proved to be luxurious in comparison to what awaited the deportees on the island of Nazino . . . The island of Nazino is a totally uninhabited place, devoid of any settlements . . . There were no tools, no grain, and no food. That is how their new life began. The day after the arrival of the first convoy, on 19 May, snow began to fall again, and the wind picked up. Starving, emaciated from months of insufficient food, without shelter and without tools . . . they were trapped. They weren’t even able to light fires to ward off the cold. More and more of them began to die . . .
On the first day, 295 people were buried. It was only on the fourth or fifth day after the convoy’s arrival on the island that the authorities sent a bit of flour by boat, really no more than a few pounds per person. Once they had received their meagre ration, people ran to the edge of the water and tried to mix some of the flour with water in their hats, their trousers or their jackets. Most of them just tried to eat it straight off, and some of them even choked to death. These tiny amounts of flour were the only food that the deportees received during the entire period of their stay on the island . . .
By August 20, three months later, the Party functionary went on to write, nearly 4,000 of the original 6,114 “settlers” were dead. The survivors had lived because they ate the flesh of those who had died. According to another inmate, who encountered some of these survivors in the Tomsk prison, they looked “like walking corpses,
” and were all under arrest— accused of cannibalism.3
Even when the death toll was not quite so horrific, living conditions in many of the Gulag’s best-known early projects could be very nearly as intolerable. BAMlag, a camp organized around the construction of a railway line from Baikal to Amur, in the Russian far east—part of the Trans-Siberian Express railway system—was one notable example of how badly things could go wrong through simple lack of planning. Like the White Sea Canal, the railway construction was carried out in great haste, with no advance preparation whatsoever. The camp’s planners carried out the exploration of the terrain, the design of the railway, and the building of the railway simultaneously; construction began before the surveys were complete. Even so, surveyors were forced to make their report of the 2,000-kilometer track in under four months, without adequate shoes, clothing, and instruments. Existing maps were poor, as a result of which costly mistakes were made. According to one survivor, “two workers’ parties [each surveying a separate length of track] found they could not close ranks and finish work, because the two rivers along which they were walking came together only on maps, when in fact they were far apart.” 4
Convoys began arriving at the camp’s headquarters in the town of Svobodny (the name means “Freedom”) without any respite, as soon as the work had begun. Between January 1933 and January 1936 the numbers of prisoners rose from a few thousand to over 180,000. Many were already weak upon arrival, shoeless and badly clothed, suffering from scurvy, syphilis, dysentery, among them survivors of the famines that had swept the rural Soviet Union in the early 1930s. The camp was totally unprepared. One arriving convoy was put in cold, dark barracks upon arrival and given bread covered with dust. The BAMlag commanders were unable to deal with the chaos, as they admitted in reports they filed to Moscow, and were particularly ill-equipped to deal with weak prisoners. As a result, those too ill to work were simply put on disciplinary rations and left to starve. One convoy of twenty-nine people died within thirty-seven days of arrival.5 Before the railway was completed, tens of thousands of prisoners may well have died.
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