Gulag

by Anne Applebaum

  The enthusiasm and energy of Chekists created and strengthened the Solovetsky camps, playing a large, positive role in the industrial and cultural development of the far northern European part of our country. The new camps, like Solovetsky, must play a reforming role in the economy and culture of the outer regions. For this responsibility . . . we need especially tough Chekists, volunteers desiring hard work . . .

  The volunteers were offered, among other things, up to 50 percent extra pay, a two-month holiday every year, and a bonus, after three years, of three months’ salary and a three-month holiday. In addition, the top administrators would receive monthly ration packages for free, and access to “radio, sporting facilities, and cultural facilities.”36

  Later on, as any genuine enthusiasm disappeared altogether (if it had ever existed), the inducements became more systematic. Camps were ranked according to their distance and their harshness. The more distant and the more harsh, the more NKVD officers would be paid to work in them. Some made a point of organizing sporting and other activities for their employees. In addition, the NKVD built special sanitoriums by the Black Sea, in Sochi and Kislovodsk, so that the highest-ranking officers could spend their long vacations in comfort and warmth.37

  The central administration also created schools where Gulag officers could improve their qualifications and their rank. One, for example, established in Kharkov, taught courses not only in the obligatory “History of the Party” and “History of the NKVD,” but also criminal law, camp policies, administration, management, accounting, and military subjects. 38 Those willing to work at Dalstroi, in distant Kolyma, could even have their children reclassified as “children of workers”: this qualified them for preferential acceptance at institutes of higher education, and proved a highly popular inducement.39

  The money and benefits were certainly enough to attract some employees at the lowest levels too. Many simply saw the Gulag as the best of all possible bad options. In Stalin’s Soviet Union—a country of war, famine, starvation—employment as a prison guard or warder could signify an immeasurable social advance. Susanna Pechora, a prisoner in the early 1950s, recalled meeting one female warder who was working in a camp because it was the only way to escape from the dire poverty of the collective farm where she had been born: “she fed her seven brothers and sisters on her camp salary.”40 Another memoirist tells the story of Maria Ivanova, a young woman who came voluntarily to work in a camp in 1948. Hoping to escape life on a collective farm, and hoping even more to find a husband, Maria Ivanova instead became the mistress of a series of officials of ever-declining rank. She wound up living with her two illegitimate children and her mother in a single room.41

  But even the prospects of high salaries, long vacations, and social advance were still not always enough to bring workers into the system, particularly at the lower levels. At times of great demand, Soviet labor boards would simply send workers where they were needed, not even necessarily telling them where they were going. One former Gulag nurse, Zoya Eremenko, was sent straight from nursing school to work on what she had been told would be a construction site. When she arrived, she discovered that it was a prison camp, Krasnoyarsk-26. “We were surprised, frightened, but when we got to know the place, we found that ‘there,’ the people were the same and the medical work was the same as what we had been led to expect from our studies,” she recalled.42

  Particularly tragic were the cases of those forced to work in the camps after the Second World War. Thousands of ex–Red Army soldiers who had fought their way across Germany, as well as civilians who had lived “abroad” during the war, as deportees or refugees, were effectively arrested upon crossing the border back into the Soviet Union, and confined to “filtration camps,” where they were carefully cross-examined. Those who were not arrested were sometimes immediately sent to work in the prison guard service. By the beginning of 1946, there were 31,000 such people, and in some camps they accounted for up to 80 percent of the guard service.43 Nor could they easily leave. Many had been deprived of their documents—passports, residence permits, military service certificates. Without them, they were unable to leave the camps, let alone search for new jobs. Between 300 and 400 every year committed suicide. One who attempted to do so, explained why: “I’ve been in the service for a very long time now, and I still have not been given a residence permit, and nearly every day a policeman comes round with an order to vacate the apartment, and this leads to quarrels in my family every single day.” 44

  Others simply degenerated. Karlo Stajner, a Yugoslav communist and a prisoner in Norilsk during and after the war, remembered such guards as being “notably different from those who hadn’t fought in the war”:

  There were definite signs of demoralization, for one. You could see it in their willingness to be bribed by the female prisoners or to become clients of the prettier ones, or to allow criminals to leave the brigade in order to break into some apartment, and share the loot with them later. They weren’t afraid of the severe punishments they would be subject to if their superiors found out about these misdeeds.45

  A very, very few protested. The archives record, for example, the case of one unwilling recruit, Danilyuk, who categorically refused to serve in the armed guards service, on the grounds that “I don’t want to serve in the organs of the Ministry of Internal Affairs at all.” Danilyuk kept up this stance despite what the archives call “processing sessions,” undoubtedly long periods of browbeating, perhaps actual beatings. He was, in the end, released from service. At least in his case, consistent and persistent refusal to work for the Gulag found its reward.46

  In the end, though, the system did reward its luckiest and most loyal members, some of whom received far more than a mere social advance or better rations: those who delivered large quantities of gold or timber to the state with their prisoner laborers would, eventually, receive their rewards. And while the average logging lagpunkt was never a nice place to live, even for those running it, the headquarters of some of the bigger camps did over time became very comfortable indeed.

  By the 1940s, the cities that stood at the center of the larger camp complexes—Magadan, Vorkuta, Norilsk, Ukhta—were large, bustling places, with shops, theaters, and parks. The opportunities for living the good life had increased enormously since the Gulag’s pioneering early days. Top commanders in the bigger camps got higher salaries, better bonuses, and longer vacations than those in the ordinary working world. They had better access to food and to consumer goods that were in short supply elsewhere. “Life in Norilsk was better than anywhere else in the Soviet Union,” remembered Andrei Cheburkin, a foreman in Norilsk and later a local bureaucrat:

  In the first place, all the bosses had maids, prisoner maids. Then the food was amazing. There were all sorts of fish. You could go and catch it in the lakes. And if in the rest of the Union there were ration cards, here we lived virtually without cards. Meat. Butter. If you wanted champagne you had to take a crab as well, there were so many. Caviar . . . barrels of the stuff lay around. I’m talking about bosses, of course. I am not talking about the workers. But then the workers were prisoners . . .

  The pay was good . . . say you were a brigadier, you’d get 6,000–8,000 rubles. In central Russia you would get no more than 1,200. I came to Norilsk to work as a work supervisor in a special directorate of the NKVD, which was looking for uranium. I was given a supervisor’s salary: 2,100 rubles I received from the first, and then each six months I got a 10 percent rise, about five times more than they got in normal civilian life.47

  Cheburkin’s first point—“all the bosses had maids”—was a key one, for it applied, in fact, not just to the bosses but to everyone. Technically, the use of prisoners as domestics was forbidden. But it was very widespread, as the authorities well knew, and despite frequent attempts to stop the practice, it continued.48 In Vorkuta, Konstantin Rokossovsky, a Red Army officer who later became a general, then a marshall, then Defense Minister of Stalinist Poland, worked as a servant to
a “loutish warder named Buchko, his duties consisting of fetching the man’s meals, tidying and heating his cottage and so forth.”49 In Magadan, Evgeniya Ginzburg worked, for a time, as a laundress for the wife of a camp administrator.50

  Thomas Sgovio also worked as a personal orderly to a senior camp guard in Kolyma, preparing his food and trying to procure alcohol for him. The man came to trust him. “Thomas, my boy,” he would say, “remember one thing. Take care of my Party membership card. Whenever I’m drunk— see that I don’t lose it. You’re my servant—and if I ever lose it, I’ll have to shoot you like a dog . . . and I don’t want to do that.” 51

  But for the really big bosses, servants were only the beginning. Ivan Nikishov, who became the boss of Dalstroi in 1939, in the wake of the purges, and held the post until 1948, became infamous for accumulating riches in the middle of desperate poverty. Nikishov was a different generation from his predecessor, Berzin—a generation far removed from the lean and more fervent years of the Revolution and the civil war. Perhaps as a result, Nikishov had no compunction about using his position to live well. He equipped himself with a “large personal security force, luxury automobiles, sweeping offices and a magnificent dacha overlooking the Pacific Ocean.” 52 The latter, according to prisoner accounts, was said to be equipped with oriental carpets, bearskins, and crystal chandeliers. In the luxurious dining room, he and his second wife—a young, ambitious camp commander named Gridasova—were said to dine on roast bear, wine from the Caucasus, fruits and berries flown in from the south, as well as fresh tomatoes and cucumbers from private greenhouses.53

  Nikishov was not alone in enjoying a life of luxury either. Lev Razgon, in his unforgettable description of Colonel Tarasyuk, the wartime commander of Ustvymlag, records similar excesses:

  He lived like a Roman who has been appointed governor of some barbarous newly conquered province. Vegetables and fruit, and flowers quite alien to the North, were grown for him in special hot-houses and orangeries. The best cabinet-makers were found to make his furniture. The most famous couturiers of the recent past dressed his capricious and willful wife. When he felt unwell he was not examined by some freely hired little doctor who had sold himself to the Gulag as a medical student. No, Tarasyuk was treated by professors who had headed the biggest Moscow clinics and were now serving their long sentences in the medical barracks of remote forest camps.54

  Often, prisoners were required to help indulge these whims. Isaac Vogelfanger, a camp doctor, found himself constantly short of medicinal alcohol because his pharmacist used it to make brandy. The camp boss then used the brandy to entertain visiting dignitaries: “The more alcohol they consume, the better their opinion of work in Sevurallag.” Vogelfanger also witnessed a camp cook prepare a “banquet” for visitors, using things he had saved up for the occasion: “caviar, smoked eel, hot rolls made from french dough with mushrooms, Arctic char in lemon aspic, baked goose and baked piglet.”55

  It was also in this period, the 1940s, that bosses like Nikishov began to see themselves as more than mere jailers. Some even began to compete with one another, in a fantastic version of keeping up with the Jones’s. They vied to produce the best prisoner theatrical groups, the best prisoner orchestras, the best prisoner artists. Lev Kopelev was in Unzhlag in 1946, at a time when its commander would select, straight from prison, “the best performers, musicians and artists, to whom he gave the best trusty jobs, working as cleaners and caretakers in the hospital.” The camp became known as an “asylum for artists.”56 Dalstroi also boasted an inmate troupe called the Sevvostlag Club, which performed in Magadan and in some of the outlying camps of the mining zone, benefiting from the many well-known singers and dancers incarcerated in Kolyma.57 Lev Razgon describes too the commander of Ukhtizhemlag, who “maintained a real opera troupe in Ukhta,” directed by a famous Soviet actor. He also “employed” a famous Bolshoi ballerina, as well as well-known singers and musicians:

  Sometimes the head of Ukhtizhemlag would pay his neighboring colleagues a visit. Although the official purpose was to “share experience,” this flat description belies the elaborate preparations and protocol which more resembled a visit by a foreign head of state. The bosses were accompanied by a large entourage of section heads, special hotel accommodation was prepared for them, routes were carefully planned and presents were brought in . . . The Ukhtizhemlag boss also brought his best performers with him so that his hosts could see that the arts were just as flourishing there, if not more so.58

  To this day, the former Ukhtizhemlag theater—a vast, white, columned building, with theatrical symbols on its pediment—is one of the most substantial buildings in the city of Ukhta. It stands within walking distance of the former camp commander’s residence, a spacious wooden house on the edge of a park.

  But it was not just those with artistic tastes who indulged their whims. Those who preferred sport also had an opportunity to try their hand at founding their own soccer teams, which competed with one another quite fiercely. Nikolai Starostin—the star player who was arrested because his team had the misfortune to beat Beria’s—was also sent to Ukhta, where his transport was met right at the train station. He was taken to meet the local soccer manager, who addressed him politely and told him that the camp boss had specially requested his presence: “the General’s soul is in soccer. He was the one who got you here.” Starostin was to spend much of his camp career managing soccer teams for the NKVD, moving from place to place according to whichever commander wanted him as trainer.59

  Occasionally, just occasionally, word of such excesses sparked alarm, or at least interest, in Moscow. Perhaps responding to complaints, Beria once commissioned a secret investigation into Nikishov’s luxurious lifestyle. The resulting report confirms, among other things, that on one occasion Nikishov spent 15,000 rubles, a huge sum at that time, on a banquet given to commemorate the visit of the Khabarovsk Operetta Company.60 The report also condemns the “atmosphere of sycophancy” around Nikishov and his wife, Gridasova: “The influence of Gridasova is so great, that even the deputies of Nikishov testify that they can work in their positions only so long as she looks kindly upon them.”61 No steps were taken, however. Gridasova and Nikishov continued to reign in peace.

  In recent years, it has become fashionable to point out that, contrary to their postwar protestations, few Germans were ever forced to work in concentration camps or killing squads. One scholar recently claimed that most had done so voluntarily—a view which has caused some controversy.62 In the case of Russia and the other post-Soviet states, the issue has to be examined differently. Very often, camp employees—like most other Soviet citizens— had few options. A labor committee simply assigned them a place of work, and they had to go there. Lack of choice was built right into the Soviet economic system.

  Nevertheless, it is not quite right to describe the NKVD officers and armed guards as “no better off than the prisoners they commanded,” or as victims of the same system, as some have tried to do. For although they might have preferred to work elsewhere, once they were inside the system, the employees of the Gulag did have choices, far more than their Nazi counterparts, whose work was more rigidly defined. They could choose to behave brutally, or they could choose to be kind. They could choose to work their prisoners to death, or they could choose to keep as many alive as possible. They could choose to sympathize with the prisoners whose fate they might have once shared, and might share again, or they could choose to take advantage of their temporary stretch of luck, and lord it over their former and future comrades in suffering.

  Nothing in their past history necessarily indicated what path they would take, for both Gulag administrators and ordinary camp guards came from as many different ethnic and social backgrounds as did the prisoners. Indeed, when asked to describe the character of their guards, Gulag survivors almost always reply that they varied enormously. I put that question to Galina Smirnova, who remembered that “they were, like everyone, all different.” 63 Anna Andreeva told me t
hat “there were sick sadists, and there were completely normal, good people.” Andreeva also recalled the day, soon after Stalin’s death, when the chief accountant in her camp suddenly rushed into the accounting office where prisoners were working, cheered, hugged them, and shouted, “Take off your numbers, girls, they’re giving you back your own clothes!”64

  Irena Arginskaya also told me that her guards were not only “very different sorts of people,” but also people who changed over time. The conscript soldiers in particular acted “like beasts” when they were new on the job, as they had been pumped full of propaganda, but “after a time they began to understand—not all of them, but a large part—and they often changed.”65

  True, the authorities exerted some pressure on both guards and administrators, discouraging them from showing prisoners any kindness. The archive of the Gulag’s inspectorate records the case of Levin, the boss of the supply division for a section of Dmitlag in 1937, who was actively investigated for his lenience. His crime was to have allowed a prisoner to meet with his brother: normally, relatives within the prison system were kept far apart. Levin was also accused of being too friendly to zeks in general, and especially so to a group of zeks said to be Mensheviks. Levin—himself a former prisoner on the White Sea Canal—claimed, in return, that he had not known they were Mensheviks. Given that this was 1937, he was convicted anyway. 66

  Yet such strictures were not rigorously applied. Indeed, several top commanders actually became renowned for their kindness to prisoners. In Let History Judge, his denunciation of Stalinism, the dissident historian and publicist Roy Medvedev describes one camp commander, V. A. Kundush, who took seriously the demands for increased production during wartime. He placed the better-educated political prisoners in clerical jobs, and set about treating his prisoners well, even securing some of them early release. His enterprise received the “Red Banner for Management” during the war. But when the war ended, he too was arrested, perhaps for the very humanity that had transformed his production.67 Lev Razgon describes an unusual transit prison in Georgievsk, which both he and his second wife, Rika, passed through: