Some children, however, were permanently damaged by their orphanage experiences. One mother returned from exile, and was reunited with her young daughter. The child, at the age of eight, could still barely talk, grabbed at food, and behaved like the wild animal that the orphanage had taught her to be.81 Another mother released after an eight-year sentence, went to get her children from the orphanage, only to find that they refused to go with her. They had been taught that their parents were “enemies of the people” who deserved no love and no affection. They had been specifically instructed to refuse to leave, “if your mother ever comes to get you,” and they never wanted to live with their parents again. 82
Not surprisingly, children ran away from such orphanages—in large numbers. Once they found themselves on the streets, they fell very quickly into the criminal netherworld. And once they were part of the criminal netherworld, the vicious cycle continued. Sooner or later, they would probably be arrested too.
At first glance, the 1944–45 annual NKVD report from one particular group of eight camps in Ukraine show nothing out of the ordinary. The report lists which of the camps met the Five-Year Plan, and which did not. It praises inmate shock-workers. It notes sternly that in most of the camps the food was very poor and monotonous. It notes more approvingly that an epidemic had broken out in only one camp, during the time period surveyed— and that that was after five inmates had been transferred there from the overcrowded Kharkov prison.
A few of the report’s details, however, serve to illustrate the precise nature of these eight Ukrainian camps. An inspector complains, for example, that one of the camps is short of “textbooks, pens, notebooks, pencils.” There is also a strict note about the propensity of certain inmates to gamble their food away, sometimes losing their bread rations for many months in advance: the younger denizens of the camp were, it seems, too inexperienced to play cards with the older ones.83
The eight camps in question were the eight children’s colonies of Ukraine. For not all of the children who fell under the jurisdiction of the Gulag belonged to arrested parents. A portion of them found their way into the camp system by themselves. They committed crimes, were arrested, and were sent to special camps for juveniles. These were run by the same bureaucrats who ran the adult camps, and they resembled the adult camps in many ways.
Originally, these “children’s camps” were organized for the besprizornye, the orphans, waifs, and dirty street children who had gotten lost or run away from their parents during the years of civil war, famine, collectivization, and mass arrest. These street children had become, by the early 1930s, a common sight in the train stations and public parks of Soviet cities. The Russian writer Victor Serge described them:
I saw them in Leningrad and in Moscow, living in sewers, in billboard kiosks, in the vaults of cemeteries where they were the undisturbed masters; holding conferences at night in urinals; traveling on the roofs of trains or on the rods below. They would emerge, pestiferous, black with sweat, to ask a few kopecks from travelers and to lie in wait for the chance to steal a valise ...84
So numerous and so problematic were these children that in 1934 the Gulag set up the first children’s nurseries within the adult camps, in order to prevent the children of arrested parents from roaming the streets. 85 Slightly later, in 1935, the Gulag decided to set up special children’s colonies as well. Children were picked up off the streets in mass raids, and sent to the colonies to be educated and prepared to join the workforce.
In 1935, the Soviet authorities also passed a notorious law making children as young as twelve liable to be charged as adults. Afterward, peasant girls arrested for stealing a few grains of wheat, and children of “enemies” suspected of collaborating with their parents, found their way into juvenile prison alongside the underage prostitutes, young pickpockets, street children, and others.86 According to an internal report, NKVD agents in the 1930s picked up a twelve-year-old Tartar girl who spoke no Russian and had been separated from her mother at a train station. They deported her, alone, to the far north.87 So numerous were the Soviet Union’s child criminals that the NKVD created children’s homes with a “special regime” in 1937, for children who systematically broke the rules in the ordinary children’s homes. By 1939, mere orphans were no longer sent to the children’s camps at all. Instead, these were now reserved for child criminals who had actually been sentenced by courts or by the osoboe soveshchanie, the “special commission.”88
Despite the threat of harsher punishment, the number of juvenile delinquents continued to grow. The war produced not only orphans but runaways as well, unsupervised children whose fathers were at the front, and whose mothers were working twelve-hour days in factories, as well as whole new categories of child criminals: underage workers who had run away from their factory jobs—sometimes after the factories had been evacuated, away from the children’s families—thereby violating the wartime law “On Unauthorized Departure from Work at Military Enterprises.” 89 According to the NKVD’s own statistics, children’s “reception centers” collected an extraordinary 842,144 homeless children in the years 1943 to 1945. Most were sent back to their parents, to children’s homes, or to trade schools. But a sizeable number—52,830, according to the records—were assigned to “labor-educational colonies.” The phrase “labor-educational colony” was nothing more than a palatable description of a children’s concentration camp.90
In many ways, the treatment of children in juvenile camps hardly differed from the treatment of their parents. Children were arrested and transported according to the same rules, with two exceptions: they were meant to be kept separately from adults, and were not to be shot in the case of attempted escape. 91 They were kept in the same kind of jail as adults, in separate but equally poor cells. An inspector’s description of one such cell is depressingly familiar: “The walls are dirty; not all prisoners have bunks and mattresses. They don’t have sheets, pillowcases, or blankets. In cell No. 5, the window is covered by a pillow, for lack of a windowpane, and in cell No. 14, one window does not close at all.”92 Another report describes juvenile prisons as “unacceptably unsanitary,” with shortages of hot water and elementary necessities such as mugs, bowls, and stools. 93
Some younger prisoners were also interrogated like adults. After his arrest in an orphanage, fourteen-year-old Pyotr Yakir was first placed in an adult prison, and then subjected to a full adult interrogation. His interrogator accused him of “organizing a band of Anarchist cavalry, whose aim it was to be active behind the lines of the Red Army,” citing as evidence the fact that Yakir was a keen rider. Afterward, Yakir was sentenced for the crime of being a “Socially Dangerous Element.”94 Jerzy Kmiecik, a sixteen-year-old Polish boy who was caught trying to cross the Soviet border into Hungary—this was in 1939, following the Soviet invasion of Poland—was also interrogated like an adult. Kmiecik was kept standing or sitting on a backless stool for hours on end, fed salty soup, and denied water. Among other things, his questioners wanted to know “How much did Mr. Churchill pay you for providing information.” Kmiecik did not know who Churchill was, and asked to have the question explained. 95
Archives have also preserved the interrogation records of Vladimir Moroz, age fifteen, who was accused of conducting “counter-revolutionary activity” in his orphanage. Moroz’s mother and his seventeen-year-old elder brother had already been arrested. His father had been shot. Moroz had kept a diary, which the NKVD found, in which he decried the “lies and slander” all around him: “If someone had fallen into a deep sleep twelve years ago, and suddenly woken up now, he would be shocked by the changes which had taken place here in that time.” Although condemned to serve three years in camp, Moroz died in prison, in 1939.96
These were not isolated incidents. In 1939, when the Soviet press reported a few cases of NKVD officers arrested for extorting false confessions, a Siberian newspaper told the story of one case involving 160 children, mostly between the ages of twelve and fourteen, but some as young as
ten. Four officers in the NKVD and the prosecutors’ office received five- to ten-year sentences for interrogating these children. The historian Robert Conquest writes that their confessions were obtained “with comparative ease”: “A ten-year-old broke down after a single night-long interrogation, and admitted to membership in a fascist organization from the age of seven.” 97
Child prisoners were not exempt from the relentless demands of the slave labor system either. Although children’s colonies were not, as a rule, usually located within the tougher northern forestry or mining camps, in the 1940s there was a children’s lagpunkt in the far northern camp of Norilsk. Some of its 1,000 inmates were put to work in the Norilsk brick factory, while the others were put to work clearing snow. Among them were a few children of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, with the majority fifteen or sixteen, the older juvenile prisoners having already been transferred to the adult camp. Many inspectors complained about the conditions in the Norilsk children’s camp and it was eventually moved to a more southerly part of the USSR—but not before many of its young prisoners fell victim to the same diseases of cold and malnutrition as their adult counterparts. 98
More typical is the Ukrainian report, which explains that children in the Ukrainian children’s labor colonies had been assigned jobs in woodwork, metalwork, and sewing.99 Kmiecik, who was in a children’s colony near Zhitomir, in Ukraine, worked in a furniture factory.100 Still, the colonies observed many of the same practices as the adult camps. There were production targets to be achieved, individual norms to meet, a regime to observe. One NKVD order of 1940 directed children between the ages of twelve and sixteen to work four-hour days, and to spend a further four hours on schoolwork. The same order required children age sixteen to eighteen to work eight-hour days, with two hours devoted to schoolwork. 101 In the Norilsk camp, this regime was not observed, as there was no school at all.102
In Kmiecik’s juvenile camp, there were only evening classes. Among other things, he was taught there that “England is an island in Western Europe . . . It is ruled by lords wearing red robes with white collars. They own the workers who toil for them, paying them little money.” 103 Not that the children were there primarily to be educated: in 1944, Beria proudly informed Stalin that the Gulag’s juvenile camps had contributed impressively to the war effort, producing mines, grenades, and other goods worth a total of 150 million rubles.104
Children were also subjected to the same sort of camp propaganda as adults were. Camp newspapers of the mid-1930s feature child Stakhanovites, and gush with praise for the “35ers,” the street children placed in camps according to the law of 1935, glorifying those who had seen the light and been reformed by physical work. The same newspapers also lambast those children who had not understood that “they must abandon their past, that it is time to start a new life . . . Card games, drunkenness, hooliganism, refusal to work, thievery, etc., are all widespread among them.” 105 To combat this youthful “parasitism,” children were made to take part in the same sorts of cultural-educational concerts as adults, singing the same Stalinist songs.106
Finally, children were subject to the same psychological pressures as adults. Another NKVD directive of 1941 called for the organization of an agenturno-operativnoe obsluzhivanie—a “network of informers”—within NKVD children’s colonies and children’s reception centers. Rumors had spread of counter-revolutionary sentiments among both the staff and the children in the camps, particularly the children of counter-revolutionaries. The children in one camp had even staged a mini-revolt. They took over the dining room, trashed it, and attacked the guards, wounding six of them.107
In only one sense were the children of the juvenile camps lucky: they had not been sent to ordinary camps, to be surrounded by ordinary adult prisoners, as other children were. Indeed, just like ubiquitous pregnant women, the endlessly expanding numbers of juveniles in adult camps provided a perennial headache for camp commanders. In October 1935, Genrikh Yagoda angrily wrote to all camp commanders that “despite my instructions, underaged prisoners are not being sent to work colonies for juveniles, but are being mixed up in prison with adults.” At last count, he stated, there had been 4,305 juveniles still in ordinary prisons. 108 Thirteen years later, in 1948, investigators from the prosecutors’ office were still complaining that there were too many underaged prisoners in adult camps, where they were being corrupted by adult criminals. Even camp authorities noticed when a camp’s reigning criminal boss transformed one eighteen-year-old petty thief into a contract murderer.109
The maloletki—“juveniles”—inspired little sympathy among their fellow inmates. “Hunger and the horror of what had happened had deprived them of all defenses,” wrote Lev Razgon, who observed that the juveniles gravitated naturally toward those who seemed the strongest. These were the professional criminals, who turned the boys into “servants, mute slaves, jesters, hostages, and everything else,” and both boys and girls into prostitutes.110 Their horrifying experiences failed to inspire much pity, however; on the contrary, some of the harshest invective in camp memoir literature is reserved for them. Razgon wrote that whatever their background, child prisoners soon “all displayed a frightening and incorrigibly vengeful cruelty, without restraint or responsibility.” Worse,
They feared nothing and no one. The guards and camp bosses were scared to enter the separate barracks where the juveniles lived. It was there that the vilest, most cynical and cruel acts that took place in the camps occurred. If one of the prisoners’ criminal leaders was gambling, lost everything and had staked his life as well, the boys would kill him for a day’s bread ration or simply “for the fun of it.” The girls boasted that they could satisfy an entire team of tree-fellers. There was nothing human left in these children and it was impossible to imagine that they might return to the normal world and become ordinary human beings again.111
Solzhenitsyn felt the same:
In their consciousness there was no demarcation line between what was permissible and what was not permissible, and no concept of good and evil. For them, everything that they desired was good and everything that hindered them was bad. They acquired their brazen and insolent manner of behavior because it was the most advantageous form of conduct in the camp . . .112
A Dutch prisoner, Johan Wigmans, also writes of the young people who “probably did not really mind having to live in these camps. Officially they were supposed to work, but in practice that was the last thing they ever did. At the same time they had the benefit of regular means and ample opportunity of learning from their cronies.”113
There were exceptions. Alexander Klein tells the story of two thirteen-year-old boys, arrested as partisans, who had received twenty-year camp sentences. The two remained ten years in the camps, managing to stick together by declaring hunger strikes when anyone separated them. Because of their age, people took pity on them, gave them easy work and extra food. Both managed to enroll in camp technical courses, becoming competent engineers before being let out in one of the amnesties that followed Stalin’s death. If it had not been for the camps, wrote Klein, “who would have helped half-literate country boys become educated people, good specialists?”114
Nevertheless, when, in the late 1990s, I began to look around for memoirs of people who had been juvenile prisoners, I found it very difficult to find any. With the exception of Yakir’s, Kmiecik’s, and a handful of others collected by the Memorial Society and other organizations, there are very few.115 Yet there had been tens of thousands of such children, and many should still have been alive. I even suggested to a Russian friend that we advertise in a newspaper, in an attempt to find a few such survivors to interview. “Don’t,” she advised me. “We all know what such people became.” Decades of propaganda, of posters draped across orphanage walls, thanking Stalin “for our happy childhood,” failed to convince the Soviet people that the children of the camps, the children of the streets, and the children of the orphanages had ever become anything but full-fledged members of the S
oviet Union’s large and all-embracing criminal class.
Chapter 16
THE DYING
What does it mean—exhaustion? What does it mean—fatigue? Every movement is terrifying, Every movement of your painful arms and legs Terrible hunger—Raving over bread “Bread, bread,” the heart beats. Far away in the gloomy sky, The indifferent sun turns. Your breath is a thin whistle It’s minus fifty degrees What does it mean—dying? The mountains look on, and remain silent.
—Nina Gagen-Torn, Memoria1
THROUGHOUT THE GULAG’S EXISTENCE, the prisoners always reserved a place at the very bottom of the camp hierarchy for the dying—or rather, for the living dead. A whole sub-dialect of camp slang was invented to describe them. Sometimes, the dying were called fitili, or “wicks,” as in the wick of a candle, soon to be blown out. They were also known as gavnoedy “shit-eaters” or pomoechniki “slop-swillers.” Most often they were called dokhodyagi, from the Russian verb dokhodit, “to reach” or “to attain,” a word usually translated as “goners.” Jacques Rossi, in his Gulag Handbook, claims the expression was a sarcastic one: the dying were at last “reaching socialism.”2 Others, more prosaically, say the expression meant they were reaching not socialism, but the end of their lives.
Put simply, the dokhodyagi were starving to death, and they suffered from the diseases of starvation and vitamin deficiency: scurvy, pellagra, various forms of diarrhea. In the early stages, these diseases manifested themselves in the form of loosened teeth and skin sores, symptoms which sometimes even afflicted the camp guards.3 In later stages, prisoners would lose their ability to see in the dark. Gustav Herling remembered “the sight of the night-blind, walking slowly through the zone in the early mornings and evenings, their hands fluttering in front of them.”4
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