Similar stories were repeated across the country. On the Gulag railway construction site of Sevlag, northeast of Arkhangelsk, engineers determined in 1929 that the number of prisoners assigned to their project would have to be increased sixfold. Between April and October of that year, convoys of prisoners duly began to arrive—to find nothing. One prisoner remembered: “There were neither barracks, nor a village. There were tents, on the side, for the guards and for the equipment. There weren’t many people, perhaps one and a half thousand. The majority were middle-aged peasants, former kulaks. And criminals. No visible intelligentsia . . .”6
Yet although all of the camp complexes founded in the early 1930s were disorganized to start out with—and all of them were unprepared to receive the emaciated prisoners coming in from the famine districts—not all of them descended into lethal disarray. Given the right set of circumstances— relatively favorable conditions on the ground, combined with strong support from Moscow—some found it possible to grow. With surprising speed, they developed more stable bureaucratic structures, built more permanent buildings, even spawned a local NKVD elite. A handful would eventually occupy whole swathes of territory, converting entire regions of the country into vast prisons. Of the camps founded at this time, two—the Ukhtinskaya Expedition and the Dalstroi Trust—eventually attained the size and status of industrial empires. Their origins deserve a closer look.
To the unobservant passenger, an automobile ride along the crumbling cement highway that leads from the city of Syktyvkar, the administrative capital of the Komi Republic, to the city of Ukhta, one of Komi’s major industrial centers, would seem to offer little of interest. The 200-kilometer road, somewhat the worse for wear in a few places, leads through endless pine forests and across swampy fields. Although the road crosses a few rivers, the views are otherwise unremarkable: this is the taiga, the splendidly monotonous sub-Arctic landscape for which Komi (and indeed all of northern Russia) is best known.
Even though the views are not spectacular, closer examination reveals some oddities. If you know where to look, it is possible in certain places to see indentations in the ground, just alongside the road. These are the only remaining evidence of the camp that was once strung out along the length of the road, and of the teams of prisoners that built it. Because the building sites were temporary, prisoners here were often housed not in barracks but in zemlyanki, earth dugouts: hence the marks in the ground.
On another section of the road lies the remains of a more substantial sort of camp, once attached to a small oil field. Weeds and underbrush now cover the site, but they are easily pushed away to reveal rotting wooden boards—possibly preserved by the oil that came off the prisoners’ boots— and bits of barbed wire. There is no memorial here, although there is one at Bograzdino, a transit camp farther along the road, which held up to 25,000 people. No trace remains of Bograzdino whatsoever. In yet another place along the road—behind a modern gas station, property of Lukoil, a present-day Russian company—stands an old wooden watchtower, surrounded by metal debris and bits of rusted wire.
Carry on to Ukhta in the company of someone who knows the city well, and its hidden history will be quickly revealed. All of the roads leading into town were once built by prisoners, as were all of central Ukhta’s office blocks and apartment buildings. In the very heart of the city there is a park, planned and built by prisoner architects; a theater in which prisoner actors performed; and sturdy wooden houses, where the camp commanders once lived. Today, the managers of Gazprom, another new Soviet company, inhabit modern buildings on the same leafy street.
Nor, in the Komi Republic, is Ukhta unique. Although difficult at first to see, traces of the Gulag are visible all over Komi, this vast region of taiga and tundra which lies to the northeast of St. Petersburg and to the west of the Ural Mountains. Prisoners planned and built all of the republic’s major cities, not just Ukhta but also Syktyvkar, Pechora, Vorkuta, and Inta. Prisoners built Komi’s railways and roads, as well as its original industrial infrastructure. To the inmates who were sent there in the 1940s and 1950s, Komi seemed to be nothing but one vast camp—which it was. Many of its villages are still referred to locally by their Stalinist-era names: “Chinatown,” for example, where a group of Chinese prisoners were held; or “Berlin,” once inhabited by German prisoners of war.
The origins of this vast republic of prisons lay in one of the earliest OGPU expeditions, the Ukhtinskaya Expedition, which set out in 1929 to explore what was then an empty wilderness. By Soviet standards, the expedition was relatively well-prepared. It had a surfeit of specialists, most of whom were already prisoners in the Solovetsky system: in 1928 alone, sixty-eight mining engineers had been sent to SLON, victims of that year’s campaigns against the “wreckers” and “saboteurs” who were supposedly holding back the Soviet Union’s drive to industrialization.7
In November 1928, with mysteriously good timing, the OGPU also arrested N. Tikhonovich, a well-known geologist. After throwing him into Moscow’s Butyrka prison, however, they did not carry out an ordinary interrogation. Instead, they brought him to a planning meeting. Wasting no time on preliminaries, Tikhonovich remembered later, a group of eight people—he was not told who they were—asked him, point-blank, how to prepare an expedition to Komi. What clothes would he take if he were going? How many provisions? Which tools? Which method of transport? Tikhonovich, who had first been to the region in 1900, proposed two routes. The geologists could go by land, trekking on foot and on horseback over the mud and forest of the uninhabited taiga to the village of Syktyvkar, then the largest in the region. Alternatively, they could take the water route: from the port of Arkhangelsk in the White Sea, along the northern coast to the mouth of the Pechora River, then continuing inland on the Pechora’s tributaries. Tikhonovich recommended the latter route, pointing out that boats could carry more heavy equipment. On his recommendation, the expedition proceeded by sea. Tikhonovich, still a prisoner, became its chief geologist.
No time was wasted, and no expense was spared, for the Soviet leadership considered the expedition to be an urgent priority. In May, the Gulag administration in Moscow named two senior secret police bosses to lead the group: E. P. Skaya—the former chief of security at the Smolny Institute, Lenin’s first headquarters during the Revolution, and later chief of security at the Kremlin itself—and S. F. Sidorov, the OGPU’s top economic planner. At about the same time, the expedition bosses selected their “workforce”— 139 of the stronger, healthier prisoners in the SLON transit camp in Kem, politicals, kulaks, and criminals among them. After two more months of preparation, they were ready. On July 5, 1929, at seven o’clock in the morning, the prisoners began loading equipment on to SLON’s steamer, the Gleb Boky. Less than twenty-four hours later, they set sail.
Not surprisingly, the floating expedition encountered many obstacles. Several of the guards appear to have got cold feet, and one actually ran away during a stopover in Arkhangelsk. Small groups of prisoners also managed to escape at various points along the route. When the expedition finally made it to the mouth of the Pechora River, local guides proved difficult to find. Even if paid, the indigenous Komi natives did not want anything to do with prisoners or the secret police, and they refused to help the ship navigate upstream. Nevertheless, after seven weeks the ship finally arrived. On August 21, they set up their base camp in the village of Chibyu—later to be renamed Ukhta.
After the tiring voyage, the general mood must have been exceptionally gloomy. They had traveled a long way—and where had they arrived? Chibyu offered little in the way of creature comforts. One of the prisoner specialists, a geographer named Kulevsky, remembered his first view of the place: “The heart compressed at the sight of the wild, empty landscape: the absurdly large, black, solitary watch tower, the two poor huts, the taiga and the mud . . .”8
He would have had little time for further reflection. By late August, hints of autumn were already in the air. There was little time to spare. As soon as they ar
rived, the prisoners immediately began to work twelve hours a day, building their camp and their work sites. The geologists set out to find the best places to drill for oil. More specialists arrived later in the autumn. New prisoner convoys arrived too, first monthly and then weekly, throughout the 1930 “season.” By the end of the expedition’s first year, the number of prisoners had grown to nearly a thousand.
Despite the advance planning, conditions in these early days, for both prisoners and exiles, were horrendous, as they were everywhere else. Most had to live in tents, as there were no barracks. Nor were there enough winter clothes and boots, or anywhere near enough food. Flour and meat arrived in smaller quantities than had been ordered, as did medicines. The number of sick and weakened prisoners rose, as the expedition’s leaders admitted in a report they filed later. The isolation was no less difficult to bear. So far were these new camps from civilization—so far were they from roads, even, let alone railway lines—that no barbed wire was used in Komi until 1937. Escape was considered pointless.
Still, prisoners kept arriving—and supplementary expeditions continued to set out from the base camp at Ukhta. If they were successful, each one of these expeditions founded, in turn, a new base camp—a lagpunkt— sometimes in places that were almost impossibly remote, several days’ or weeks’ trek from Ukhta. They, in turn, founded further sub-camps, to build roads or collective farms to serve the prisoners’ needs. In this manner, camps spread like fast-growing weeds across the empty forests of Komi.
The route of the Ukhtinskaya Expedition, Komi Republic, 1929
Ukhtpechlag, Komi Republic, 1937
Some of the expeditions proved to be temporary. Such was the fate of one of the first, which set out from Ukhta in the summer of 1930 for Vaigach Island, in the Arctic Sea. Earlier geological expeditions had already found lead and zinc deposits on the island, although the Vaigach Expedition, as it came to be called, was well provided with geologist prisoners as well. Some of these geologists performed in such an exemplary manner that the OGPU rewarded them: they were allowed to bring their wives and children to live with them on the island. So remote was the location that the camp commanders appear not to have worried about escape, and they allowed prisoners to walk anywhere they wished, in the company of other prisoners or free workers, without any special permissions or passes. To encourage “shock-work in the Arctic,” Matvei Berman, then the Gulag boss, granted prisoners on Vaigach Island two days off their sentence for every such day worked. 9 In 1934, however, the mine filled with water, and the OGPU moved both prisoners and equipment off the island the following year.10
Other expeditions would prove more permanent. In 1931, a team of twenty-three set off northward from Ukhta by boat, up the inland waterways, intending to begin the excavation of an enormous coal deposit—the Vorkuta coal basin—discovered in the Arctic tundra of the northern part of Komi the previous year. As on all such expeditions, geologists led the way, prisoners manned the boats, and a small OGPU contingent commanded the operation, paddling and marching through the swarms of insects that inhabit the tundra in summer months. They spent their first nights in open fields, then somehow built a camp, survived the winter, and constructed a primitive mine the following spring: Rudnik No. 1. Using picks and shovels and wooden carts, and no mechanized equipment whatsoever, the prisoners began to dig coal. Within a mere six years, Rudnik No. 1 would grow into the city of Vorkuta and the headquarters of Vorkutlag, one of the largest and toughest camps in the entire Gulag system. By 1938, Vorkutlag contained 15,000 prisoners and had produced 188,206 tons of coal.11
Technically, not all of the new inhabitants of Komi were prisoners. From 1929, the authorities also began to send “special exiles” to the region. At first these were almost all kulaks, who arrived with their wives and children and were expected to start living off the land. Yagoda himself had declared that the exiles were to be given “free time” in which they were to plant gardens, raise pigs, go fishing, and build their own homes: “first they will live on camp rations, then at their own cost.”12 While all of that sounds rather rosy, in fact nearly 5,000 such exile families arrived in 1930—over 16,000 people—to find, as usual, almost nothing. There were 268 barracks built by November of that year, although at least 700 were needed. Three or four families shared each room. There was not enough food, clothing, or winter boots. The exile villages lacked baths, roads, postal service, and telephone cables.13
Although some died, and many tried to escape—344 had attempted to escape by the end of July—the Komi exiles became a permanent adjunct to the Komi camp system. Later waves of repression brought more of them to the region, particularly Poles and Germans. Hence the local references to some of the Komi villages as “Berlin.” Exiles did not live behind barbed wire, but did the same jobs as prisoners, sometimes in the same places. In 1940, a logging camp was changed into an exile village—proof that, in a certain sense, the groups were interchangeable. Many exiles also wound up working as guards or administrators in the camps.14
In time, this geographical growth was reflected in camp nomenclature. In 1931, the Ukhtinskaya Expedition was renamed the Ukhto-Pechorsky Corrective-Labor Camp, or Ukhtpechlag. Over the subsequent two decades, Ukhtpechlag itself would be renamed many more times—and reorganized and divided up—to reflect its changing geography, its expanding empire, and its growing bureaucracy. By the end of the decade, in fact, Ukhtpechlag would no longer be a single camp at all. Instead, it spawned a whole network of camps, two dozen in total, including: Ukhtpechlag and Ukhtizhemlag (oil and coal); Ustvymlag (forestry); Vorkuta and Inta (coal-mining); and Sevzheldorlag (railways).15
In the course of the next several years, Ukhtpechlag and its descendants also became denser, acquiring new institutions and new buildings in accordance with their ever-expanding requirements. Needing hospitals, camp administrators built them, and introduced systems for training prisoner pharmacists and prisoner nurses. Needing food, they constructed their own collective farms, their own warehouses, and their own distribution systems. Needing electricity, they built power plants. Needing building materials, they built brick factories.
Needing educated workers, they trained the ones that they had. Much of the ex-kulak workforce turned out to be illiterate or semiliterate, which caused enormous problems when dealing with projects of relative technical sophistication. The camp’s administration therefore set up technical training schools, which required, in turn, more new buildings and new cadres: math and physics teachers, as well as “political instructors” to oversee their work.16 By the 1940s, Vorkuta—a city built in the permafrost, where roads had to be resurfaced and pipes had to be repaired every year—had acquired a geological institute and a university, theaters, puppet theaters, swimming pools, and nurseries.
Yet if the expansion of Ukhtpechlag was not much publicized, neither was it haphazard. Without a doubt the camp’s commanders on the ground wanted their project to grow, and their prestige to grow along with it. Urgent necessity, not central planning, would have led to the creation of many new camp departments. Still, there was a neat symbiosis between the Soviet government’s needs (a place to dump its enemies) and the regions’ needs (more people to cut trees). When Moscow wrote offering to send exile settlers in 1930, for example, local leaders were delighted.17 The camp’s fate was discussed at the highest possible levels as well. It is worth noting that in November 1932, the Politburo—with Stalin present—dedicated most of an entire meeting to a discussion of the present state and future plans of Ukhtpechlag, discussing its prospects and its supplies in surprising detail. From the meeting’s protocols, it seems as if the Politburo made all the decisions, or at least approved everything of any importance: which mines the camp should develop; which railways it should construct; how many tractors, cars, and boats it required; how many exile families it could absorb. The Politburo also allocated money for the camp’s construction: more than 26 million rubles. 18
It can be no accident that during the three years fo
llowing this decision, the number of prisoners nearly quadrupled, from 4,797 in mid-1932 to 17,852 in mid-1933.19 At the very highest levels of the Soviet hierarchy, someone very much wanted Ukhtpechlag to grow. Given his power and prestige—that could only have been Stalin himself.
In the same way that Auschwitz has become, in popular memory, the camp which symbolizes all other Nazi camps, so too has the word “Kolyma” come to signify the greatest hardships of the Gulag. “Kolyma,” wrote one historian, “is a river, a mountain range, a region, and a metaphor.”20 Rich in minerals—and above all rich in gold—the vast Kolyma region in the far northeastern corner of Siberia, on the Pacific coast, may well be the most inhospitable part of Russia. Kolyma is colder than Komi—temperatures there regularly fall to more than 49 degrees Fahrenheit below zero in the winter—and even more remote.21 To reach the camps of Kolyma, prisoners traveled by train across the entire length of the USSR—sometimes a three-month journey—to Vladivostok. They made the rest of the trip by boat, traveling north past Japan, through the Sea of Okhotsk, to the port of Magadan, the gateway to the Kolyma River valley.
Kolyma’s first commander is one of the most flamboyant figures in the history of the Gulag. Eduard Berzin, an Old Bolshevik, had been commander of the First Latvian Rifle Division, which guarded the Kremlin in 1918. Later, he helped to crush the Social Revolutionaries, Lenin’s socialist opponents, and to unmask Bruce Lockhart’s “British plot.”22 In 1926, Stalin gave Berzin the task of organizing Vishlag, one of the very first large-scale camps. He took to the job with enormous enthusiasm, inspiring a historian of Vishlag to speak of his reign there as being the height of the Gulag’s “romantic period.”23
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