The OGPU built Vishlag at the same time as the White Sea Canal, and Berzin seems to have very much approved of (or, at least, enthusiastically paid lip service to) Gorky’s ideas about prisoner reform. Glowing with paternalistic goodwill, Berzin provided his inmates with film theaters and discussion clubs, libraries and “restaurant-style” dining halls. He planted gardens, complete with fountains and a small zoological park. He also paid prisoners regular salaries, and operated the same policy of “early release for good work” as did the commanders of the White Sea Canal. Not everyone benefited from these amenities: prisoners who were deemed poor workers, or who were simply unlucky, might be sent to one of Vishlag’s many small forestry lagpunkts in the taiga, where conditions were poor, death rates were higher, and prisoners were quietly tortured and even murdered. 24
Still, Berzin’s intention, at least, was that his camp appeared to be an honorable institution. All of which makes him seem, at first glance, an odd candidate to become the first boss of the Far Northern Construction Administration—Dalstroi—the “trust,” or pseudo-corporation, which would develop the Kolyma region. For there was nothing particularly romantic or idealistic about the founding of Dalstroi. Stalin’s interest in the region dated from 1926, when he sent an envoy engineer to the United States to study mining techniques.25 Later, between August 20, 1931, and March 16, 1932, the Politburo discussed the geology and geography of Kolyma no less than eleven times—with Stalin himself contributing frequently to the discussions. Like the Yanson commission’s deliberations on the organization of the Gulag, the Politburo conducted these debates, in the words of the historian David Nordlander, “not in the idealistic rhetoric of socialist construction, but rather in the practical language of investment priorities and financial returns.” Stalin devoted his subsequent correspondence with Berzin to questions about inmate productivity, quotas, and output, never touching on the ideals of prisoner reform.26
Kolyma, 1937
On the other hand, Berzin’s talent for creating rosy public images may have been precisely what the Soviet leadership wanted. For although Dalstroi would later be absorbed directly into the Gulag administration, in the beginning the trust was always referred to—in public—as if it were a separate entity, a sort of business conglomerate, which had nothing to do with the Gulag at all. Quietly, the authorities founded Sevvostlag, a Gulag camp which leased out convicts to the Dalstroi Trust. In practice, the two institutions never competed. The boss of Dalstroi was also the boss of Sevvostlag, and nobody had any doubt about that. On paper, however, they were kept separate, and in public they appeared to be distinct entities. 27
There was a certain logic to this arrangement. For one, Dalstroi needed to attract volunteers, especially engineers and marriageable women (there were always shortages of both in Kolyma) and Berzin conducted many recruiting drives in an attempt to persuade “free workers” to emigrate to the region, even setting up offices in Moscow, Leningrad, Odessa, Rostov, and Novosibirsk.28 For that reason alone, Stalin and Berzin may have wanted to avoid associating Kolyma too closely with the Gulag, fearing that the link might frighten away potential recruits. Although there is no direct proof, these machinations may also have been directed at the outside world. Like Soviet timber, Kolyma’s gold would be sold directly to the West, exchanged for desperately needed technology and machinery. This may help explain why the Soviet leadership wanted to make the Kolyma gold fields seem as much like a “normal” economic enterprise as possible. A boycott of Soviet gold would be far more damaging than a boycott of Soviet timber.
In any case, Stalin’s personal involvement with Kolyma was extremely strong from the beginning. In 1932, he actually demanded daily reports on the gold industry, and, as already noted, interested himself in the details of Dalstroi’s exploration projects and quota fulfillments. He sent out inspectors to examine the camps, and required Dalstroi’s leaders to travel frequently to Moscow. When the Politburo allotted money to Dalstroi, it also issued precise instructions as to how the money was to be spent, as it did with Ukhtpechlag.29
Yet Dalstroi’s “independence” was not entirely fictitious either. Although he did answer to Stalin, Berzin also managed to leave his mark on Kolyma, so much so that the “Berzin era” was later remembered with some nostalgia. Berzin appears to have understood his task in quite a straightforward manner: it was his job to get his prisoners to dig as much gold as possible. He was not interested in starving them or killing them or punishing them—only production figures mattered. Under Dalstroi’s first boss, conditions were therefore not nearly as harsh as they became later, and prisoners were not nearly as hungry. Partly as a result, Kolyma’s gold output increased eight times in the first two years of Dalstroi’s operation. 30
True, the first years were fraught with the same chaos and disorganization that prevailed elsewhere. By 1932, nearly 10,000 prisoners were at work in the region—among them the group of inmate engineers and specialists whose skills tallied so beautifully with the task in front of them—along with more than 3,000 voluntary “free workers”—camp workers who were not prisoners.31 The high numbers were accompanied by high death rates. Of the 16,000 prisoners who traveled to Kolyma in Berzin’s first year, only 9,928 even reached Magadan alive.32 The rest were thrown, underclothed and underprotected, into the winter storms: survivors of the first year would later claim that only half of their number had lived. 33
Still, once the initial chaos had passed, the situation did gradually improve. Berzin worked hard to improve conditions, apparently believing, not irrationally, that prisoners needed to be warm and well-fed in order to dig large quantities of gold. As a result, Thomas Sgovio, an American Kolyma survivor, wrote that camp “old-timers” spoke of Berzin’s reign warmly: “when the frost dipped below minus 60 degrees, they were not sent to work. They were given three Rest Days a month. The food was adequate and nutritious. The zeks [prisoners] were given warm clothing—fur caps and felt boots ...”34 Varlam Shalamov, another Kolyma survivor—whose short stories, Kolyma Tales, are among the bitterest in the entire camp genre—also wrote of the Berzin period as a time of excellent food, a workday of four to six hours in winter and ten in summer, and colossal salaries for convicts, which permitted them to return to the mainland as well-to-do men when their sentences were up . . . The cemeteries dating back to those days are so few in number that the early residents of Kolyma seemed immortal to those who came later. 35
If living conditions were better than they would be later, the camp command also treated prisoners with a greater degree of humanity. At that time, the line between the volunteer free workers and the prisoners was blurred. The two groups associated normally; inmates were sometimes allowed to move out of their barracks to live in the free workers’ villages, and could be promoted to become armed guards, as well as geologists and engineers. 36 Mariya Ioffe, an exile in Kolyma in the mid-1930s, was allowed to keep books and paper, and remembered that most exile families were allowed to stay together.37
Inmates were also allowed to participate, up to a point, in the political events of their time. Like the White Sea Canal, Kolyma promoted its own inmate shock-workers and Stakhanovites. One prisoner even became Dalstroi’s “instructor in the Stakhanovite methods of labor,” and those inmates who performed well could receive a small badge, declaring them to be “Kolyma shock-workers.”38
Like Ukhtpechlag, Kolyma’s infrastructure quickly became more sophisticated. In the 1930s, prisoners built not only the mines, but also the docks and breakwaters for Magadan’s port, as well as the region’s single important road, the Kolyma Highway, which leads due north from Magadan. Most of Sevvostlag’s lagpunkts were located along this road, and indeed they were often named according to their distance from Magadan (“Camp Forty-seventh Kilometer,” for example). Prisoners also built the city of Magadan itself, which contained 15,000 people by 1936, and would go on growing. Returning to the city in 1947, after serving seven years in the farther-flung camps, Evgeniya Ginzburg “nearly
swooned with surprise and admiration” at the speed of Magadan’s growth: “It was only some weeks later that I noticed you could count the big buildings on your fingers. But at the time it really was a great metropolis for me.” 39
In fact, Ginzburg was one of the few prisoners to notice a peculiar paradox. It was strange, but true: in Kolyma, as in Komi, the Gulag was slowly bringing “civilization”—if that is what it can be called—to the remote wilderness. Roads were being built where there had been only forest; houses were appearing in the swamps. Native peoples were being pushed aside to make way for cities, factories, and railways. Years later, a woman who had been the daughter of a camp cook in a far-flung outpost of Lokchimlag, one of the Komi logging camps, reminisced to me about what life had been like when the camp was still running. “Oooh, there was a whole warehouse of vegetables, fields full of squash—it wasn’t all barren like today.” She waved her arm in disgust at the tiny village which now stood on the site, at the former camp punishment cells, still inhabited. “And there were real electric lights, and the bosses in their big cars drove in and out almost every day . . .”
Ginzburg made the same observation, more eloquently:
How strange is the heart of man! My whole soul cursed those who had thought up the idea of building a town in this permafrost, thawing out the ground with the blood and tears of innocent people. Yet at the same time I was aware of a sort of ridiculous pride . . . How it had grown, and how handsome it had become during my seven years’ absence, our Magadan! Quite unrecognizable. I admired each street lamp, each section of asphalt, and even the poster announcing that the House of Culture was presenting the operetta The Dollar Princess. We treasure each fragment of our life, even the bitterest.40
By 1934, the expansion of the Gulag in Kolyma, in Komi, in Siberia, in Kazakhstan, and elsewhere in the USSR had followed the same pattern as Solovetsky. In the early days, slovenliness, chaos, and disorder caused many unnecessary deaths. Even without outright sadism, the unthinking cruelty of guards, who treated their prisoners as domestic animals, led to much misery.
Nevertheless, as time went on, the system seemed to be falling shakily into place. Death rates dropped from their high of 1933 as famine across the country receded and camps became better organized. By 1934, they were, according to the official statistics, hovering at around 4 percent.41 Ukhtpechlag was producing oil, Kolyma was producing gold, the camps in the Arkhangelsk region were producing timber. Roads were being built across Siberia. Mistakes and mishaps abounded, but this was true everywhere in the USSR. The speed of industrialization, the lack of planning, and the dearth of well-trained specialists made accidents and overspending inevitable, as the bosses of the big projects surely would have known.
Despite the setbacks, the OGPU was fast becoming one of the most important economic actors in the country. In 1934, Dmitlag, the camp that constructed the Moscow–Volga Canal, deployed nearly 200,000 prisoners, more than had been used for the White Sea Canal. 42 Siblag had grown too, boasting 63,000 prisoners in 1934, while Dallag had more than tripled in size in the four years since its founding, containing 50,000 in 1934. Other camps had been founded all across the Soviet Union: Sazlag, in Uzbekistan, where prisoners worked on collective farms; Svirlag, near Leningrad, where prisoners cut trees and prepared wood products for the city; and Karlag, in Kazakhstan, which deployed prisoners as farmers, factory workers, and even fishermen.43
It was also in 1934 that the OGPU was reorganized and renamed once again, partly to reflect its new status and greater responsibilities. In that year, the secret police officially became the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs—and became popularly known by a new acronym: NKVD. Under its new name, the NKVD now controlled the fate of more than a million prisoners.44 But the relative calm was not to last. Abruptly, the system was about to turn itself inside out, in a revolution that would destroy masters and slaves alike.
Chapter 6
THE GREAT TERROR AND ITS AFTERMATH
That was a time when only the dead
Could smile, delivered from their struggles,
And the sign, the soul of Leningrad
Dangled outside its prison house;
And the regiments of the condemned,
Herded in the railroad-yards
Shrank from the engine’s whistle-song
Whose burden went, “Away, pariahs!”
The star of death stood over us.
And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed
Under the crunch of bloodstained boots,
Under the wheels of Black Marias.
—Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem 1935–1940” 1
OBJECTIVELY SPEAKING, the years 1937 and 1938—remembered as the years of the Great Terror—were not the deadliest in the history of the camps. Nor did they mark the camps’ greatest expanse: the numbers of prisoners were far greater during the following decade, and peaked much later than is usually remembered, in 1952. Although available statistics are incomplete, it is still clear that death rates in the camps were higher both at the height of the rural famine in 1932 and 1933 and at the worst moment of the Second World War, in 1942 and 1943, when the total number of people assigned to forced-labor camps, prisons, and POW camps hovered around four million.2
As a focus of historical interest, it is also arguable that the importance of 1937 and 1938 has been exaggerated. Even Solzhenitsyn complained that those who decried the abuses of Stalinism “keep getting hung up on those years which are stuck in our throats, ’37 and ’38,” and in one sense he is right.3 The Great Terror after all, followed two decades of repression. From 1918 on, there had been regular mass arrests and mass deportations, first of opposition politicians at the beginning of the 1920s, then of “saboteurs” at the end of the 1920s, then of kulaks in the early 1930s. All of these episodes of mass arrest were accompanied by regular roundups of those responsible for “social disorder.”
The Great Terror was also followed, in turn, by even more arrests and deportations—of Poles, Ukrainians, and Balts from territories invaded in 1939; of Red Army “traitors” taken captive by the enemy; of ordinary people who found themselves on the wrong side of the front line after the Nazi invasion in 1941. Later, in 1948, there would be re-arrests of former camp inmates, and later still, just before Stalin’s death, mass arrests of Jews. Although the victims of 1937 and 1938 were perhaps better known, and although nothing as spectacular as the public “show trials” of those years was ever repeated, the arrests of the Great Terror are therefore best described not as the zenith of repression, but rather as one of the more unusual waves of repression that washed over the country during Stalin’s reign: it affected more of the elite—Old Bolsheviks, leading members of the army and the Party—encompassed in general a wider variety of people, and resulted in an unusually high number of executions.
In the history of the Gulag, however, 1937 does mark a genuine water-shed. For it was in this year that the Soviet camps temporarily transformed themselves from indifferently managed prisons in which people died by accident, into genuinely deadly camps where prisoners were deliberately worked to death, or actually murdered, in far larger numbers than they had been in the past. Although the transformation was far from consistent, and although the deliberate deadliness of the camps did ease again by 1939— death rates would subsequently rise and fall with the tides of war and ideology up until Stalin’s death in 1953—the Great Terror left its mark on the mentality of camp guards and prisoners alike.4
Like the rest of the country, the Gulag’s inhabitants would have seen the early warning signs of the terror to come. Following the still mysterious murder of the popular Leningrad Party leader Sergei Kirov in December of 1934, Stalin pushed through a series of decrees giving the NKVD far greater powers to arrest, try, and execute “enemies of the people.” Within weeks, two leading Bolsheviks, Kamenev and Zinoviev—both past opponents of Stalin’s—had already fallen victim to the decrees, and were arrested along with thousands of their supporters and alleged
supporters, many from Leningrad. Mass expulsions from the Communist Party followed, although they were not, to start with, much broader than expulsions that had taken place earlier in the decade.
Slowly, the purge became bloodier. Throughout the spring and summer of 1936, Stalin’s interrogators worked on Kamenev and Zinoviev, along with a group of Leon Trotsky’s former admirers, preparing them to “confess” at a large public show trial, which duly took place in August. All were executed afterward, along with many of their relatives. Other trials of leading Bolsheviks, among them the charismatic Nikolai Bukharin, followed in due course. Their families suffered too.
The mania for arrests and executions spread down the Party hierarchy, and throughout society. It was pushed from the top by Stalin, who used it to eliminate his enemies, create a new class of loyal leaders, terrorize the Soviet population—and fill his concentration camps. Starting in 1937, he signed orders which were sent to the regional NKVD bosses, listing quotas of people to be arrested (no cause was given) in particular regions. Some were to be sentenced to the “first category” of punishment—death—and others to be given the “second category”—confinement in concentration camps for a term ranging from eight to ten years. The most “vicious” among the latter were to be placed in special political prisons, presumably in order to keep them from contaminating other camp inmates. Some scholars speculate that the NKVD assigned quotas to different parts of the country according to its perception of which regions had the greatest concentration of “enemies.” On the other hand, there may have been no correlation at all.5
Reading these orders is very much like reading the orders of a bureaucrat designing the latest version of the Five-Year Plan. Here, for example, is one dated July 30, 1937:
Clearly, the purge was in no sense spontaneous: new camps for new prisoners were even prepared in advance. Nor did the purge encounter much resistance. The NKVD administration in Moscow expected their provincial subordinates to show enthusiasm, and they eagerly complied. “We ask permission to shoot an additional 700 people from the Dashnak bands, and other anti-Soviet elements,” the Armenian NKVD petitioned Moscow in September 1937. Stalin personally signed a similar request, just as he, or Molotov, signed many others: “I raise the number of First Category prisoners in the Krasnoyarsk region to 6,600.” At a Politburo meeting in February 1938, the NKVD of Ukraine was given permission to arrest an additional 30,000 “kulaks and other anti-Soviet elements.”7
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