Gulag

by Anne Applebaum

  KVCh: THE CULTURAL-EDUCATIONAL DEPARTMENT

  Were they not clearly marked as belonging to the NKVD archives, the casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the photographs of Bogoslovlag, which appear in a carefully preserved album, dated 1945, were not of a camp at all. The pictures show carefully planted gardens, flowers, shrubs, a fountain, and a gazebo in which prisoners could sit and rest. The entrance to the camp is marked by a red star, and a slogan: “All of our strength for the future power of the Motherland!” The photographs of prisoners gracing another album, filed nearby, are equally hard to reconcile with the popular image of the Gulag inmate. There is a happy man holding a pumpkin; cows pulling a plow; a smiling camp commander picking an apple. Beside the pictures are graphs. One shows the camp’s planned production, the other the plan’s fulfillment. 54

  All of these albums, neatly cut, pasted, and labeled with the same conscientiousness that schoolchildren show when putting together a class project, were produced by the same institution: the Gulag’s Kulturno-Vospitatelnaya Chast, the Cultural-Educational Department, or KVCh, as it was usually known to prisoners. The KVCh, or its equivalent, had been in existence since the Gulag began. In 1924, the very first edition of SLON, the journal of the Solovetsky prison, contained an article on the future of prisons in Russia: “The corrective-labor policy of Russia must re-educate prisoners through accustoming them to participating in organized productive labor.” 55

  Most of the time, however, the real goal of camp propaganda was higher production figures. This was even the case during the building of the White Sea Canal, when, as we have seen, the “re-education” propaganda was at its loudest and perhaps most sincere. At that time, the national cult of the shock-worker was at its height. Camp artists painted portraits of the canal’s best workers, and camp actors and musicians put on special concerts for them. The shock-workers were even invited to huge assemblies, at which songs were sung and speeches were read out. One such assembly, held on April 21, 1933, was followed by a two-day “work storm”: for forty-eight hours, none of the 30,000 shock-workers left their workplaces at all.56

  This sort of activity was unceremoniously abandoned in the late 1930s when prisoners became “enemies” and could no longer be “shock-workers” at the same time—nevertheless, after Beria took control of the camps in 1939, propaganda did slowly return. While there would never again be a White Sea Canal—a Gulag project whose “success” was trumpted to the world—the language of re-education was brought back to the camps. By the 1940s, every camp theoretically had at least one KVCh instructor, as well as a small library and a KVCh “club,” where theatrical performances and concerts were put on, political lectures were given, and political discussions were held. Thomas Sgovio remembered one such club: “The main room, seating about thirty persons, had wooden, gaudily painted walls. There were a few tables, supposedly for reading purposes. However, there were no books, newspapers or periodicals. How could there be? Newspapers were worth their weight in gold. We used them for smoking.”57

  From the 1930s on, the main “clients” of the KVCh were supposed to be the criminal prisoners. Just as it was unclear whether politicals would be allowed to hold specialists’ jobs, so too was it unclear whether it was worth anybody’s time trying to re-educate them. A 1940 NKVD directive on the cultural-educational work of the camps stated explicity that those who had committed counter-revolutionary crimes were not suitable targets for re-education. In camp theatrical productions, they were allowed to play musical instruments, but not to speak or sing.58

  As was so often the case, these orders were ignored more frequently than they were obeyed. And—as was also often the case—the KVCh’s actual function in camp life differed from what the Gulag’s masters in Moscow had intended it to do. If Moscow intended the KVCh to force prisoners to work harder, the prisoners used the KVCh for their own purposes: for moral support—and for survival.

  On the face of it, it appears as if the cultural-educational instructors inside the camps sought to propagate the value of work among prisoners much in the same way that Communist Party operatives sought to do so in the world outside the prison gates. In the larger camps, the KVCh produced camp newspapers. Sometimes these were full newspapers, with reports and long articles on the successes of the camp, as well as “self-criticism”— comments about what was going wrong inside the camp—a standard feature of all the Soviet press. Aside from a brief period in the early 1930s, these newspapers were intended largely for the free workers and the camp administration.59

  For prisoners, there were also “wall newspapers,” designed not for distribution (there were paper shortages, after all) but for display on special notice boards. One prisoner described the wall newspapers as “an attribute of the Soviet way of life, no one ever read them but they appeared regularly.” They often featured “humor sections”: “They assumed, obviously, that workers dying of hunger would read the material in this section, give a great belly laugh, and finally hold up to shame those refusers and shirkers who didn’t want to repay their guilt to the Motherland through honest work.”60

  Ludicrous though they seemed to many, the central Gulag administration in Moscow took the wall newspapers very seriously. Wall newspapers, ordered one directive, should “portray the best examples of work, popularize the shock-workers, condemn the shirkers.” No pictures of Stalin were allowed: these were, after all, still criminals, not “comrades,” and they were still excommunicated from Soviet life, forbidden even to gaze upon their leader. The often absurd atmosphere of secrecy which had descended upon the camps in 1937 remained in place throughout the 1940s as well: newspapers printed in the camps could not be taken out of the camps.61

  Along with hanging up newspapers, the KVCh also showed films. Gustav Herling was shown an American musical, “full of women in fitted bodices, men in tight jackets and frilly cravats,” as well as a propaganda film which ended in “the triumph of righteousness”: “The clumsy students came first in their socialist competition of work and with blazing eyes delivered a speech glorifying the State where manual labor had been raised to the highest position of honor.”62

  Meanwhile, some criminal prisoners took advantage of the darkened rooms where the films were shown to carry out revenge killings and murders. “I remember, at the end of one of these performances, seeing the body of a dead man carried past on a stretcher,” one prisoner told me.63

  The KVCh also sponsored football matches, chess matches, concerts, and performances referred to solemnly as “self-taught creative activities.” One archival document lists the following repetoire of an NKVD singing and dancing ensemble, which was touring the camps:

  The Ballad of Stalin

  The Cossack Meditation on Stalin

  The Song of Beria

  The Song of the Motherland

  The Fight for the Motherland

  Everything for the Motherland

  The Song of the NKVD Warriors

  The Song of the Chekists

  The Song of the Distant Frontier Post

  The March of the Border Guards64

  There were also some lighter numbers such as “Let’s Smoke” and “Song of the Dnieper,” the latter celebrating a river at least, and not a secret police institution. The theatrical repetroire included some Chekhov plays as well. Nevertheless, the bulk of the artistic efforts were meant, at least in theory, for the prisoners’ enlightenment, not their entertainment. As one 1940 order from Moscow declared, “Every performance must educate the prisoners, teaching them greater consciousness of labor.” 65 As we shall see, the prisoners learned to use the performances to help them survive, as well.

  But “self-taught creative activity” was not the Cultural-Educational Department’s only concern—nor was it the only path to a lighter workload. The KVCh was also responsible for collecting suggestions as to how to improve or “rationalize” the prisoners’ work, a task which it took grimly seriously. In its semi-annual report to Moscow, one camp in Nizhne-
Amursk claimed, without irony, to have achieved 302 rationalizations, of which 157 were put into practice, thereby saving 812,332 rubles.66

  Isaak Filshtinskii also notes, with a great deal of irony, that some prisoners became adept at twisting this policy to their own advantage. One, a former chauffeur, claimed that he knew how to construct a mechanism that would allow cars to run on oxygen. Excited by the prospect of discovering a really important “rationalization,” the camp bosses gave him a laboratory in which to work on the idea: “I can’t say whether they believed him or not. They were simply fulfilling instructions of the Gulag. In every camp, there should be people working as rationalizers and inventors . . . and who knows, maybe Vdovin would find something, and then they would all get the Stalin prize!” Vdovin’s bluff was called, finally, when he returned one day from his lab with a giant construction made of scrap metal, the purpose of which he was incapable of explaining.67

  As in the outside world, the camps also continued to hold “socialist competitions,” work contests in which prisoners were meant to compete against one another, the better to raise output. They also honored the camp shock-workers, for their alleged ability to triple and quadruple the norms. I’ve described the first such campaigns in Chapter 4, which began in the 1930s, but they continued—with markedly less enthusiasm and markedly more absurd hyperbole—into the 1940s. Prisoners who participated could win many different sorts of awards. Some received bigger rations or better living conditions. Others received more intangible prizes. In 1942, for example, a reward for good performance could include a knizhka otlichnika , a booklet awarded to those who attained the status of “excellent” workers. This contained a little calendar, with space for putting in daily percentages of norms fulfilled; a blank space for writing in suggestions for “rationalizations”; a list of the rights of the booklet holder (to receive the best place in the barracks, to get the best uniforms, the unlimited right to receive parcels, etc.); and a quote from Stalin: “The hardworking person feels himself a free citizen of his country, a social activist of a sort. And if he works hard, and gives society that which he can give, he is a hero of labor.”68

  Not everybody would have taken such a prize terribly seriously. Antoni Ekart, a Polish prisoner, also described one such work campaign:

  A plywood Board of Honor was put up on which were posted the results of the Socialist Workers’ Contests when announced. Sometimes a crude portrait of the leading “shock” man was exhibited, giving details of the records achieved. Almost unbelievable figures, showing outputs of five hundred percent or even one thousand percent of the normal, were shown. This referred to the digging up of the ground with spades. Even the most backward prisoner could understand that to excavate five to ten times more than the standard was impossible . . . 69

  But the KVCh instructors were also ultimately responsible for convincing “refusers” that it was in their interest to work, not to sit in punishment cells, or to attempt to get by on small rations. Clearly, not many took their lectures seriously: there were too many other ways to persuade prisoners to work. But a few did, much to the delight of the Gulag’s bosses in Moscow. In fact, they took this function terribly seriously, and even held periodic conferences of KVCh instructors, designed to discuss such questions as “What are the basic motives of those who refuse to work?” and “What are the practical results of eliminating the prisoners’ day off?”

  At one such meeting, held during the Second World War, the organizers compared notes. One acknowledged that some “shirkers” could not work because they were too weak to live off the amount of food they were given. Still, he claimed, even starving people could be motivated: he had told one shirker that his behavior was “like a knife in the neck of his brother, who was at the front.” That was enough to persuade the man to ignore his hunger, and work harder. Another claimed he had shown some shirkers photographs of “Leningrad in battle,” after which they all went immediately to work. Yet another said that in his camp, the best brigades were allowed to decorate their own barracks, and the best workers were encouraged to plant flowers in their own individual plots. On the minutes from this meeting, preserved in the archives, someone has made a notation beside this latter comment: “Khorosho!” “Excellent!” 70

  This sharing of experiences was considered so important that at the height of the war, the Cultural-Educational Department of the Gulag in Moscow took the trouble to print a pamphlet on the subject. The title—with clear religious echoes—was Return to Life. The author, one Comrade Loginov, describes a series of relationships he had with prisoner “shirkers.” Using clever psychological tactics, he converted every one of them to a belief in the value of hard work.

  The stories are fairly predictable. In one of them, for example, Loginov explains to Ekaterina Sh., the educated wife of a man condemned to death for “espionage” in 1937, that her ruined life can once again have meaning within the context of the Communist Party. To another prisoner, Samuel Goldshtein, Loginov recounts Hitler’s “racial theories” and explains to him what “Hitler’s new order” in Europe would mean for him. So inspired is Goldshtein by this surprising (in the USSR) appeal to his Jewishness, that he wants to leave immediately for the front. Loginov tells him that “today, your weapon is your labor,” and persuades him to work harder in the camp. “Your life is needed by your fatherland, and so are you,” he tells yet another prisoner who, with tears in his eyes, returns to work upon hearing these words.71

  Clearly, Comrade Loginov was proud of his work, and applied himself to it with great energy. His enthusiasm was real. The rewards he received for his work were real too: V. G. Nasedkin, then the boss of the entire Gulag system, was so pleased with his effort that he ordered the pamphlet sent to all of the camps in the system, and awarded Loginov a bonus of 1,000 rubles.

  Whether Loginov and his shirkers actually believed in what he was doing is less clear. We do not know, for example, whether Loginov understood, at some level, that many of the people he was “bringing back to life” were innocent of any crime. Nor do we know whether people like Ekaterina Sh. (if she existed) really reconverted to Soviet values, or whether she suddenly realized that by appearing to be so converted she might receive better food, better treatment, or an easier job. The two possibilities are not even mutually exclusive. For people shocked and disoriented by their rapid transition from useful citizen to despised prisoner, the experience of “seeing the light” and rejoining Soviet society may have helped them make a psychological recovery from their experiences, as well as providing them with the better conditions that saved their lives.

  In fact, this question—“Did they believe in what they were doing?”—is actually a small part of a much larger question, one which goes to the heart of the nature of the Soviet Union itself: Did any of its leaders ever believe in what they were were doing? The relationship between Soviet propaganda and Soviet reality was always a strange one: the factory is barely functioning, in the shops there is nothing to buy, old ladies cannot afford to heat their apartments, yet in the streets outside, banners proclaim the “triumph of socialism” and the “heroic achievements of the Soviet motherland.”

  These paradoxes were no different within the camps than outside them. In his history of the Stalinist industrial city Magnitogorsk, Stephen Kotkin points out that in the prison newspaper of the Magnitogorsk corrective-labor colony, the profiles of reformed convicts were written in “language strikingly reminiscent of what could be heard from accomplished workers outside the colony: they were laboring, studying, making sacrifices and trying to better themselves.”72

  Still, there was an extra level of strangeness in the camps. If, in the free world, the enormous gap between this sort of Soviet propaganda and Soviet reality already struck many as ludicrous, in the camps, the absurdity seemed to reach new heights. In the Gulag, where they were constantly addressed as “enemies,” explicitly forbidden to call one another “comrade,” and forbidden to gaze upon a portrait of Stalin, prisoners were nevert
heless expected to work for the glory of the socialist motherland, just the same as those who were free—and to participate in “self-taught creative activity” just as if they were doing so out of the sheer love of art. The absurdity was perfectly clear to all. At one point in her camp career, Anna Andreeva became a camp “artist,” meaning that she was actually employed to paint those slogans. This job, very easy by camp standards, certainly saved her health and possibly her life. Yet interviewed years later, she claimed not even to be able to remember the slogans. She said, she supposed, that “the bosses thought them up. Something like, ‘We give all of our strength to work,’ something like that . . . I wrote them very quickly, and technically very well, but I absolutely forgot everything that I wrote. It was some kind of self-defense mechanism.” 73

  Leonid Trus, a prisoner in the early 1950s, was also struck by the pointlessness of the slogans which were plastered all over the camp buildings, and were repeated through the loudspeakers:

  There was a camp radio system, which regularly transmitted information on our labor successes, which scolded those who worked badly. These transmissions were very crude, but they reminded me of transmissions I had heard in freedom. I became convinced that they were no different, except that in freedom the people were more talented, they knew how to describe it all in a prettier way . . . but in general [the camp] was the same as freedom—the same posters, the same slogans—except that in the camp the phrases all sounded more absurd. “They took on the job, they finished the job,” for example. Or “Labor in the USSR—it is a thing of honesty, of glory, of valor and heroism”—the words of Stalin. Or all of the other slogans, like “We are for peace,” or “We welcome peace in the whole world.”74

  Foreigners, who were not used to the presence of slogans and banners, found the work of the “re-educators” even more bizarre. Antoni Ekart, a Pole, described a typical political indoctrination session: