Although the policy was never clear, in practice Beria also lifted the ban on “hiring” political prisoners with engineering, scientific, or technical skills to work in technical positions in the camps. On the ground, camp commanders were still wary of using political prisoners as “specialists,” and would remain so until the Gulag’s demise in the mid-1950s. As late as 1948, different branches of the security services would still be arguing about whether or not political prisoners should be forbidden from holding jobs as specialists, some arguing that it was too politically dangerous, others claiming the camps would be too difficult to run without them. 60 Although Beria never fully resolved this dilemma, he was too intent on making the NKVD into a productive part of the Soviet economy to allow all of the Gulag’s most important scientists and engineers to lose their limbs to frostbite in the far north. In September 1938, he began organizing special workshops and laboratories for prisoner scientists, known by prisoners as sharashki. Solzhenitsyn, who worked in a sharashka, described one—a “top-secret research establishment, officially referred to only by a code number”—in his novel The First Circle:
A dozen prisoners were brought from the camps to this old country house on the outskirts of Moscow, which had been duly surrounded by barbed wire . . . at that time, the prisoners did not know exactly what kind of research they had been brought to Mavrino to do. They were busy unpacking stacks of crates which two special goods trains had delivered, securing comfortable chairs and desks for themselves, and sorting equipment . . . 61
Initially, the sharashki were christened the “Special Construction Bureaus.” Later, they were known collectively as the “Fourth Special Department” of the NKVD, and about 1,000 scientists would eventually work in them. In some cases, Beria personally tracked down talented scientists, and ordered them brought back to Moscow. NKVD agents gave them baths, a haircut, a shave, and a long rest—and sent them off to work in prison laboratories. Among Beria’s most important “finds” was the aviation engineer Tupolev, who arrived at his sharashka carrying a bag with a hunk of bread and a few pieces of sugar (he refused to give them up, even after being told the food would improve).
Tupolev, in turn, gave Beria a list of others to recall, among them Valentin Glushko, the Soviet Union’s leading designer of rocket engines, and Sergei Korolev, later to be the father of the Sputnik, the Soviet Union’s first satellite—indeed the father of the entire Soviet space program. Korolev returned to Lubyanka prison after seventeen months in Kolyma, having lost many of his teeth to scurvy, looking “famished and exhausted,” in the words of his fellow prisoners.62 Nevertheless, in a report prepared in August 1944, Beria would list twenty important new pieces of military technology invented in his sharashki, and elaborate on the many ways in which they had been of use to the defense industry during the Second World War.63
In some ways, Beria’s reign would have seemed like an improvement to ordinary zeks too. Overall, the food situation did temporarily improve. As Beria pointed out in April 1938, the camp food norm of 2,000 calories per day had been set for people sitting in prisons, not for people working at manual labor. Because theft, cheating, and punishment for poor work reduced even this low quantity of food by as much as 70 percent, large numbers of prisoners were starving. This he regretted, not because he pitied them, but because higher death rates and higher levels of sickness prevented the NKVD from fulfilling its production plans for 1939. Beria requested the drawing up of new food norms, so that the “physical capabilities of the camp workforce can be put to maximum use in any industry.” 64
Although food norms were raised, Beria’s regime hardly heralded a re-discovery of prisoners’ humanity. On the contrary, the transformation of prisoners from human beings into units of labor had progressed several steps further. Prisoners could still be sentenced to die in the camps—but not for mere counter-revolutionary tendencies. Instead, those who refused to work or actively disorganized work were to be given “a stricter camp regime, punishment cells, worse food and living conditions, and other disciplinary measures.” “Shirkers” would also receive new sentences, up to and including death.65
Local prosecutors began investigations into shirking immediately. In August 1939, for example, a prisoner was shot, not just for refusing to work, but for encouraging others not to work as well. In October, three women prisoners, evidently Orthodox nuns, were accused both of refusing to work and of singing counter-revolutionary hymns in camp: two were shot and the third received an extra sentence.66
The years of the Great Terror had also left their mark in another way. Never again would the Gulag treat prisoners as wholly worthy of redemption. The system of “early release” for good behavior was dismantled. In his one known public intervention into the daily operations of the camps, Stalin himself had put an end to early releases, on the grounds that they hurt the economic operations of the camps. Addressing a meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1938, he asked,
Could we not think of some other form of reward for their work—medals, or such like? We are acting incorrectly, we are disturbing the work of the camp. Freeing these people may be necessary, but from the point of view of the national economy, it is a mistake . . . we will free the best people, and leave the worst.67
A decree to this effect was issued in June 1939. A few months later, another decree eliminated “conditional early release” for invalids too. The number of sick prisoners would rise correspondingly. The main source of incentive for hardworking prisoners now was to be the improvement of “supplies and food”—as well as the medals Stalin thought would be so appealing. By 1940, even Dalstroi had begun to hand them out.68
Several of these initiatives ran counter to the laws of the time, and actually encountered resistance. The chief prosecutor, Vyshinsky, and the People’s Commissar of Justice, Richkov, both opposed the liquidation of early release, as well as the imposition of the death sentence for those accused of “disorganizing camp life.” But Beria, like Yagoda before him, clearly had Stalin’s support, and he won all of his battles. From January 1, 1940, the NKVD was even granted the right to take back some 130,000 prisoners who had been “loaned” to other ministries. Beria was determined to make the Gulag really and truly profitable.69
With surprising speed, Beria’s changes did make an impact. In the final months before the Second World War, the economic activity of the NKVD began, once again, to grow. In 1939, the NKVD’s turnover was 4.2 billion rubles. In 1940, it was 4.5 billion rubles. As prisoners began to stream into the camps during the war years, those numbers would grow even more quickly. 70 According to official statistics, the number of deaths in camps also halved from 1938 to 1939, from 5 percent back to 3 percent, even as the number of prisoners continued to increase.71
There were also now far more camps than there had been, and they were much bigger than they had been at the beginning of the decade. The number of prisoners had nearly doubled between January 1, 1935, and January 1, 1938, from 950,000 to 1.8 million, with about another million people sentenced to exile.72 Camps which had contained nothing more than a few huts and some barbed wire had become true industrial giants. Sevvostlag, the main Dalstroi camp, contained nearly 200,000 prisoners in 1940. 73 Vorkutlag, the mining camp that developed out of Ukhtpechlag’s Rudnik No. 1, contained 15,000 prisoners in 1938; by 1951, it would contain over 70,000.
But there were new camps as well. Perhaps the grimmest of the new generation was Norillag, usually known as Norilsk. Located, like Vorkuta and Kolyma, north of the Arctic Circle, Norilsk sat right on top of an enormous nickel deposit, probably the largest in the world. The prisoners of Norilsk not only dug the nickel, but they also built the nickel-processing plant and the power stations alongside the mines. Then they built the city— Norilsk—to house the NKVD men who ran the mines and the factories. Like its predecessors, Norilsk grew quickly. The camp contained 1,200 prisoners in 1935; by 1940, it contained 19,500. At its largest, in 1952, 68,849 prisoners would be incarcerated there.74
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In 1937, the NKVD also founded Kargopollag, in the Arkhangelsk region, followed, in 1938, by Vyatlag, in central Russia, and Kraslag, in the Krasnoyarsk district of northern Siberia. All were essentially forestry camps, which acquired side interests—brick factories, wood-processing plants, furniture-making workshops. All would double or triple in size in the 1940s, by which time they contained some 30,000 prisoners apiece. 75
There were other camps too, opening and shutting and reorganizing themselves so frequently that it is difficult to give precise numbers for a particular year. Some were quite small, built to serve the needs of a particular factory or industry or building project. Others were temporary, built for the purposes of road or railway construction, and abandoned afterward. To manage their enormous numbers and complex problems, the Gulag administration eventually set up subdivisions: a Main Administration of Industrial Camps, a Main Administration of Road Building, a Main Administration of Forestry Work, and so on.
But it was not only their sizes that had changed. From the end of the 1930s, all new camps had a purely industrial character, without the fountains and “gardens” of Vishlag, without the idealistic propaganda that accompanied the building of Kolyma, without the prisoner specialists at all levels of camp life. Olga Vasileeva, an administrator who worked as an engineer and inspector on Gulag and other construction sites in the late 1930s and 1940s, remembered that in the earlier era “there were fewer guards, fewer administrators, fewer employees . . . In the 1930s, prisoners were enlisted in all sorts of work, as clerks, barbers, guards.” In the 1940s, however, she recalled that all of that stopped: “It all began to take on a mass character . . . things became harsher . . . as the camps grew bigger, the regime grew crueler.”76
It might be said, in fact, that by the end of the decade, the Soviet concentration camps had attained what was to be their permanent form. They had, by this time, penetrated nearly every region of the Soviet Union, all twelve of its time zones, and most of its republics. From Aktyubinsk to Yakutsk, there was not a single major population center that did not now have its own local camp or colony. Prison labor was used to build everything from children’s toys to military aircraft. In the Soviet Union of the 1940s it would have been difficult, in many places, to go about your daily business and not run in to prisoners.
More important, the camps had evolved. They were now no longer a group of idiosyncratically run work sites, but rather a full-fledged “camp-industrial complex,” with internal rules and habitual practices, special distribution systems and hierarchies.77 A vast bureaucracy, also with its own particular culture, ruled the Gulag’s far-flung empire from Moscow. The center regularly sent out orders to local camps, governing everything from general policy to minor details. Although the local camps did not (or could not) always follow the letter of the law, the ad hoc nature of the Gulag’s early days never returned.
The fortunes of prisoners would still fluctuate along with Soviet policy, economics, and, most of all, the course of the Second World War. But the era of trials and experiments was over. The system was now in place. The group of procedures that prisoners called the “meat-grinder”—the methods of arrest, of interrogation, of transport, of food, and of work—were, at the start of the 1940s, set in stone. In essence, these would change very little until Stalin’s death.
The Gulag at its zenith, 1939–1953
PART TWO
LIFE AND WORK IN THE CAMPS
Chapter 7
ARREST
We never asked, on hearing about the latest arrest, “What was he arrested for?” but we were exceptional. Most people, crazed by fear, asked this question just to give themselves a little hope; if others were arrested for some reason, then they wouldn’t be arrested, because they hadn’t done anything wrong. They vied with each other in thinking up ingenious reasons to justify each arrest: “Well, she really is a smuggler, you know,” “He really did go rather far,” or “It was only to be expected, he’s a terrible man,” “I always thought there was something fishy about him,” “He isn’t one of us at all . . .”
This was why we had outlawed the question “What was he arrested for?”
“What for?” Akhmatova would cry indignantly whenever, infected by the prevailing climate, anyone of our circle asked this question.
“What do you mean what for? It’s time you understood that people are arrested for nothing!”
—Nadezhda Mandelstam Hope Against Hope1
ANNA AKHMATOVA—the poet, quoted above by another poet’s widow—was both right and wrong. On the one hand, from the middle of the 1920s—by the time the machinery of the Soviet repressive system was in place—the Soviet government no longer picked people up off the streets and threw them in jail without giving any reason or explanation: there were arrests, investigations, trials, and sentences. On the other hand, the “crimes” for which people were arrested, tried, and sentenced were nonsensical, and the procedures by which people were investigated and convicted were absurd, even surreal.
In retrospect, this is one of the unique aspects of the Soviet camp system: its inmates arrived, most of the time, via a legal system, if not always the ordinary judicial system. No one tried and sentenced the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, but the vast majority of inmates in Soviet camps had been interrogated (however cursorily), tried (however farcically), and found guilty (even if it took less than a minute). Undoubtedly, the conviction that they were acting within the law was part of what motivated those working within the security services, as well as the guards and administrators who later controlled the prisoners’ lives in the camps.
But I repeat: the fact that the repressive system was legal does not mean that it was logical. On the contrary, it was no easier to predict with any certainty who would be arrested in 1947 than it had been in 1917. True, it became possible to guess who was likely to be arrested. During waves of terror in particular, the regime appears to have chosen its victims in part because they had for some reason come to the attention of the secret police—a neighbor had heard them tell an unfortunate joke, a boss had seen them engaging in “suspicious” behavior—and in larger part because they belonged to whichever population category was at that moment under suspicion.
Some of these categories were relatively specific—engineers and specialists in the late 1920s, kulaks in 1931, Poles or Balts in occupied territories during the Second World War—and some were very vague indeed. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, for example, “foreigners” were always considered suspect. By “foreigners,” I mean people who actually were citizens of other countries, people who might have contacts abroad, or people who might have some link, imaginery or real, to a foreign country. No matter what they did they were always candidates for arrest—and foreigners who stood out in any way, for any reason, stood a particularly high chance. Robert Robinson, one of several black American communists who moved to Moscow in the 1930s, later wrote that “Every single black I knew in the early 1930s who became a Soviet citizen disappeared from Moscow within seven years.”2
Diplomats were not exempt. Alexander Dolgun, for example, an American citizen and a junior employee of the American Embassy in Moscow, describes in his memoirs how he was picked up off the street in 1948 and accused, unjustly, of spying; suspicion fell upon him partly because of his youthful fondness for evading the “tails” that the secret police set on him, and because he was skilled in persuading embassy chauffeurs to lend him cars, leading the Soviet secret police to suspect that he might be more important than his rank would indicate. He spent eight years in camps, returning to the United States only in 1971.
Foreign communists were frequently targets. In February 1937, Stalin ominously told Georgi Dmitrov, General Secretary of the Communist International—the Comintern, the organization dedicated to the fomenting of world revolution—that “all of you there in the Comintern are working in the hands of the enemy.” Of the 394 members of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in January 1936, only 171 remained in A
pril 1938. The rest had been shot or sent to camps, among them people of many nationalities: German, Austrian, Yugoslav, Italian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Baltic, even English and French. Jews appear to have suffered disproportionately. In the end, Stalin killed more members of the pre-1933 German Communist Party Politburo than did Hitler: of the sixty-eight German communist leaders who fled to the Soviet Union after the Nazi seizure of power, forty-one died, by execution or in camps. The Polish Communist Party may have been even more thoroughly decimated. According to one estimate, 5,000 Polish communists were executed in the spring and summer of 1937.3
But it was not necessary to be a member of a foreign communist party: Stalin also targeted foreign fellow travelers, of whom the 25,000 “American Finns” were probably the most numerous. These were Finnish-speaking Finns, some had emigrated to America, some had been born there, all of whom came to the Soviet Union during the 1930s, the years of the Great Depression in the United States. Most were factory workers, and most had been unemployed in the United States. Encouraged by Soviet propaganda—Soviet recruiters traveled around Finnish-speaking communities in the United States, speaking of the wonderful living conditions and work opportunities in the USSR—they flocked to the Finnish-speaking Karelian Republic. Almost immediately, they caused problems for the authorities. Karelia was not, it turned out, much like America. Many loudly pointed this out to anyone who would listen, then tried to return—and wound up in the Gulag in the late 1930s instead.4
Soviet citizens with foreign connections were no less suspect. First in line were the “diaspora nationalities,” the Poles, Germans, and Karelian Finns who had relatives and contacts across the border, as well as the Balts, Greeks, Iranians, Koreans, Afghans, Chinese, and Romanians scattered across the USSR. According to their own archives, between July 1937 and November 1938, the NKVD convicted 335,513 people in these “national” operations.5 Similar operations would be repeated during and after the war, as we shall see.
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