Gulag

by Anne Applebaum

  The cells were not only swept but washed, both the floors and the bed boards. The food was so filling that the constant hunger of prisoners in transit disappeared. You could really get clean in the bath-house. There was even a special and fully equipped room (and this amazed Rika more than anything else) where the women could primp and perk...68

  And there were others. At one point during his camp career, Genrikh Gorchakov, a Russian Jew arrested in 1945, was assigned to an invalids’ camp within the Siblag complex. The camp had recently been taken over by a new commander, a former frontline officer who could not find any other work after the war. Taking his job seriously, the commander built new barracks, saw to it that prisoners had mattresses and even sheets, and reorganized the work system, completely transforming the camp.69

  Yet another ex-zek, Aleksei Pryadilov, arrested at sixteen, was sent to a farming camp in the Altai. There the camp boss “ran the camp like an economic organization, and behaved toward prisoners not as if they were criminals and enemies, whom it was necessary to ‘re-educate,’ but as though they were workers. He was convinced that there was no point in trying to get good work out of hungry people.”70 Even Gulag inspectors sometimes uncovered good commanders. One visited Birlag in 1942, and found that “the prisoners of this factory worked excellently because their conditions were excellent.” Their barracks were clean, each prisoner had his or her own sheets and blankets, good clothes and shoes.71

  There were also more direct forms of kindness. The memoirist Galina Levinson recalled one camp commander who talked a woman prisoner out of having an abortion. “When you leave the camp you will be alone,” he told her. “Think how good it will be to have a child.” To the end of her life, the woman was grateful to him. 72 Anatoly Zhigulin wrote too of a “good” camp boss, who “saved hundreds from death,” called his charges “comrade prisoners” in defiance of the rules, and ordered the cook to feed them better. Clearly, noted Zhigulin, he “didn’t know the rules yet.” Mariya Sandratskaya, arrested for being the wife of an “enemy,” also describes a camp boss who paid special attention to the mothers in the camp, making sure the nursery was well run, that nursing women had enough to eat, and that mothers did not work too hard.73

  In fact, kindness was possible: at all levels, there were always a few who resisted the propaganda describing all prisoners as enemies, a few who understood the true state of affairs. And a startling number of memoirists do note a single experience of kindness from a prison guard, or a single instance of consideration. “I don’t doubt,” wrote Evgeny Gnedin, “that in the enormous army of camp administrators, there were honest workers who were distressed by their role as overseers to completely innocent people.” 74 Yet at the same time, most memoirists also marvel at how exceptional such understanding was. For despite the few counter-examples, clean prisons were not the norm, many camps were lethal—and the majority of guards treated their charges with indifference at best, outright cruelty at worst.

  Nowhere, I repeat, was cruelty actually required. On the contrary: deliberate cruelty was officially frowned upon by the central administration. Camp guards and administrators who were unnecessarily harsh to prisoners could be punished, and often were. The archives of Vyatlag contain reports of guards punished for “systematically beating up zeks,” for stealing prisoners’ belongings, and for raping women prisoners. 75 The archives of Dmitlag record the criminal sentences handed out to camp administrators accused of beating prisoners while drunk. The Gulag’s central archives also record punishments for prison camp commanders who beat up prisoners, who tortured them during investigations, or who sent them on transports without proper winter clothes.76

  Yet cruelty persisted. Sometimes it was genuinely sadistic. Viktor Bulgakov, a prisoner in the 1950s, recalled one of his guards, an illiterate Kazakh, who appeared to derive pleasure from forcing prisoners to stand, slowly freezing, in the snow, and another who liked to “show off his strength and beat prisoners” for no particular reason.77 The Gulag’s archives also contain, among many other similar records, a description of the chief of one of the lagpunkts at Volgostroi during the war, Comrade Reshetov, who put zeks in freezing cold cells as punishment, and ordered sick prisoners to work in severe frost, as a result of which many died on the job.78

  More often, cruelty was not so much sadism as self-interest. Guards who shot escaping prisoners received monetary rewards, and could even be granted a vacation at home. Guards were therefore tempted to encourage such “escapes.” Zhigulin described the result:

  The guard would shout at someone in the column, “Hey, bring me that plank!”

  “But it’s across the fence . . .”

  “Doesn’t matter. Go!”

  The prisoner would go, and a line of machine-gun fire would follow him.79

  Such incidents were common—as archives show. In 1938, four VOKhR guards working in Vyatlag were sentenced for killing two prisoners whom they had “provoked” to escape. In the aftermath, it emerged that the division commander and his assistant had helped themselves to the prisoners’ belongings as well.80 The writer Boris Dyakov also mentions the practice of provoking escapes in his “pro-Soviet” Gulag memoir, published in the USSR in 1964.81

  As on the convoy trains, the cruelty in camps seemed, at times, to derive from anger or boredom at having to do a menial job. While working as a nurse in a Kolyma hospital, the Dutch communist Elinor Lipper sat up in the night beside a patient with pleurisy and high fever. He also had a carbuncle on his back which had burst, thanks to the guard who had brought him to the hospital:

  In painful gasps, he told me that the guard had wanted to get the uncomfortable march over with as soon as possible, and so he had driven the sick, feverish prisoner on for hours with the blows of a club. At the end of the march he had threatened to break every bone in the prisoner’s body if the man reported at the hospital that the guard had beaten him.

  Frightened to the end, the man refused to repeat the story in the presence of nonprisoners. “We let him die in peace,” wrote Lipper, “and the guard went on beating prisoners undisturbed.”82

  Most of the time, however, the cruelty of Soviet camp guards was unthinking, stupid, lazy cruelty, of the sort that might be shown to cattle or sheep. If guards were not explicitly told to mistreat prisoners, neither were they taught to consider prisoners, particularly political prisoners, as fully human either. On the contrary, great effort was put into cultivating hatred for prisoners, who were constantly described as “dangerous criminals, as spies and saboteurs trying to destroy the Soviet people.” Such propaganda had an enormous effect on people who were already embittered by misfortune, by their unwanted jobs, and by poor living conditions.83 It also shaped the views of the camp’s free workers—the local people working in the camp who were not NKVD employees—as much as the armed guards, as one prisoner remembered: “Usually, from the free workers we were cut off by a wall of mutual distrust . . . Our gray shapes, being led under convoy and sometimes with dogs, [were] probably, for them, something very unpleasant, of which it was better not to think.”84

  This was true as early as the 1920s, the era when Solovetsky guards were forcing freezing prisoners to jump into rivers at the cry of “Dolphin!” It grew worse, of course, in the late 1930s, with the downgrading of political prisoners to “enemies of the people,” and the harshening of the camp regimes. In 1937, hearing that a large transport of Trotskyites were on their way to Kolyma, the boss of the camp, Eduard Berzin, told a group of co-workers that “If these swine, who are now on their way here, committed sabotage on the mainland, let’s make sure that here in Kolyma they work for the Soviet Union. We have the means to force them to work . . .” 85

  Even after the Great Terror ended, however, the propaganda never really let up. Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, prisoners were regularly referred to as war criminals and collaborators, traitors and spies. The Ukrainian nationalists who began pouring into the camps after the Second World War were variously called “s
nake-like, slavish dogs of the Nazi hangmen,” the “Ukrainian German Fascists,” or the “agents of foreign intelligence services.” Nikita Khrushchev, then the leader of Ukraine, told a Central Committee plenum that the Ukrainian Nationalists had “killed themselves trying to please their master, Hitler, and to get only a small portion of the loot for their doggish service.”86 During the war, guards called almost all political prisoners “fascists” or “Hitlerites” or “Vlasovites” (followers of General Vlasov, who deserted the Red Army and supported Hitler).

  This was especially galling for Jews, for veterans who had bravely fought the Germans, and for foreign communists who had fled fascism in their own countries.87 “We’re not fascists, most of us are former Party members,” the Yugoslav communist Karlo Stajner indignantly told a group of jeering criminal prisoners, who had flung the “fascist” insult at a brigade of politicals.88 Margarete Buber-Neumann, a German communist who was released from the Gulag only to be transferred directly into a German concentration camp, Ravensbruck, also wrote that she was repeatedly referred to as “the German Fascist.”89 And when one arrested NKVD officer, Mikhail Shreider, told his interrogator that as a Jew he could hardly be accused of collaborating with Hitler, he was told that he was not a Jew, but rather “a German disguised as a Jew.” 90

  This name-calling was not just a pointless juvenile exercise, however. By describing their prisoners as “enemies” or as “subhuman,” guards reassured themselves of the legitimacy of their own actions. In fact, the rhetoric of “enemies” was only a part of the ideology of the Gulag cadres. The other part—call it the rhetoric of “state slavery”—constantly hammered home the importance of work, and of the ever-increasing production figures which were necessary for the continued existence of the Soviet Union. To put it bluntly: anything could be justified if it brought more gold out of the ground. This thesis was beautifully summed up by Aleksei Loginov, a retired former director of production and of prison camps in Norilsk, in an interview he gave to a British documentary filmmaker:

  From the beginning we knew perfectly well that the outside world would never leave our Soviet Revolution alone. Not only Stalin realized it— everyone, every ordinary communist, every ordinary person realized that we had not only to build, but to build in the full knowledge that soon we would be at war. So in my area, the search for all sources of raw materials, copper, nickel, aluminum and iron, and so on, was incredibly intense. We had always known of the huge resources in Norilsk—but how to develop them in the Arctic? So the whole venture was put in the hands of the NKVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Who else could have done it? You know how many people had been arrested. And we needed tens of thousands up there . . .91

  Loginov was speaking in the 1990s, nearly half a century after Norilsk ceased to be a vast prison complex. But his words echo those written in 1964 by Anna Zakharova, the wife of a camp commander, in a letter to the government newspaper Izvestiya which was never published—but did later appear in the underground press. Like Loginov, Zakharova also spoke of duty and of the sacrifices her husband had made for the greater glory of their country: “His health has already been ruined working with the criminal world, because all the work here wears on your nerves. We would be happy to move on, because my husband has already served his time, but they won’t let him go. He is a Communist and an officer, and he is bound by the duty of his position.”92

  Similar views were put to me by a camp administrator who wanted to remain anonymous. With pride she told me of the work her prisoners had done on behalf of the USSR during the war: “Absolutely every prisoner worked and paid his own way, and gave everything to the front that he could.” 93

  Within this larger framework of loyalty to the Soviet Union and its economic goals, cruelty carried out in the name of production figures seemed, to the perpetrators, downright admirable. More to the point, the true nature of the cruelty, like the true nature of the camps, could be hidden beneath the jargon of economics. After interviewing a former Karlag administrator in 1991, the American journalist Adam Hochschild complained, “From the colonel’s words you would not have known that it was a prison. Instead, he talked almost entirely about Karlag’s role in the Soviet economy. He sounded like a proud regional Party boss. ‘We had our own agricultural experiment station. Cattle breeding was also advanced. A special breed of cow, Red Steppe, was raised here, also Kazakh whiteheads . . .’”94

  At the highest levels, administrators frequently described the prisoners as if they were machines or tools, necessary for completing the job and nothing else. They were openly thought of as convenient, cheap labor—a necessity, simply, just like supplies of cement or steel. Again, Loginov, the Norilsk commander, puts it best:

  If we had sent civilians [to Norilsk] we would first have had to build houses for them to live in. And how could civilians live there? With prisoners it is easy—all you need is a barrack, an oven with a chimney, and they survive. And then maybe later somewhere to eat. In short, prisoners were, under the circumstances of that time, the only possible people you could use on such a large scale. If we had had time, we probably wouldn’t have done it that way . . .95

  At the same time, economic jargon enabled the camp leadership to justify anything, even death: all was for the greater good. At times, this argument was taken to real extremes. Lev Razgon, for example, gives an account of a conversation between Colonel Tarasyuk, then the commander of Ustvymlag, and a camp doctor, Kogan, who made the mistake of bragging to Tarasyuk about how many patients he had “plucked from the grips of pellagra,” a disease caused by starvation and protein deprivation. According to Razgon, the following dialogue ensued:

  Tarasyuk: What are they getting?

  Kogan: They are all receiving the anti-pellagra ration established by the Gulag Health and Sanitation Department (and he specified the quantity of proteins in calories).

  Tarasyuk: How many of them will go out to work in the forest, and when?

  Kogan: Well, none of them will ever go to work in the forest again, of course. But now they’ll survive and it will be possible to use them for light work within the compound.

  Tarasyuk: Stop giving them any anti-pellagra rations. Write this down: these rations are to be given to those working in the forest. The other prisoners are to get the disability rations.

  Kogan: Comrade Colonel! Obviously I didn’t explain clearly. These people will only survive if they are given a special ration. A disabled prisoner receives 400 grams of bread. On that ration they’ll be dead in ten days. We can’t do that!

  Tarasyuk looked at the upset doctor, and there was even a sign of interest in his face. “What’s the matter? Do your medical ethics prevent you from doing this?”

  “Of course they do . . .”

  “Well, I don’t give a damn for your ethics,” said Tarasyuk calmly, and with no indication whatsoever of anger. “Have you written that down? Let’s move on . . .”

  All 246 died within the month.96

  Such conversations were not unique, nor apocryphal, as archives show. One inspector, reporting on the conditions of prisoners in Volgostroi during the war, complained that the camp’s administration was “exclusively interested in producing wood . . . and was not even slightly interested in the feeding or clothing of prisoners, sending them out to work without regard to physical fitness, never worrying about whether they were clothed, healthy, and fed.”97 Accounts also record the following comment, made at a meeting of Vyatlag officers in January 1943. Speaking in the purely neutral language of statistics, Comrade Avrutsky made the following proposal: “We have 100 percent of our workforce, but we cannot fulfill our program, since Group B continues to grow. If the food which we gave to Group B were given to another contingent—then we wouldn’t have Group B at all, and we would fulfill the program . . .”98 The phrase “Group B,” of course, referred to weaker prisoners, who would indeed cease to exist if they were not given any food.

  If camp commanders had the luxury of making such decisions
far removed from the people who would actually be affected, proximity did not necessarily make those lower down the hierarchy feel any more sympathy. One Polish prisoner, Kazimierz Zarod, was in a column of prisoners marching to a new camp site. Given virtually no food, prisoners began to weaken. Finally, one of them fell, and was unable to get up again. A guard raised a gun at him. A second guard threatened to shoot:

  “For God’s sake,” I heard the man groan, “if you will only let me rest for a while I can catch up.”

  “You walk, or die,” said the first guard . . .

  I saw him lift his rifle and take aim—I could not believe that he would shoot. The men in the column behind me had by this time regrouped and my view of what was happening was obscured, but suddenly a shot rang out followed by a second, and I knew the man was dead.

  But Zarod also records that not all of those who fell while marching were shot. If they were young, those too exhausted to walk farther were picked up and thrown onto a cart, where they “lay like sacks until they recovered . . . The reasoning, as far as I could see, being that the young would recover and have work left in them, while the old were not worth saving. Certainly those thrown like bundles of old clothes into the provisions carts were not there because of any humanitarian reason. The guards, although young men, had traveled this route before and were apparently devoid of any human feelings.”99