Gulag

by Anne Applebaum

  Complex cases could take years to resolve. Jacques Rossi, a French communist born in Lyon, sent to the camps after a few years of teaching in Moscow, was still trying to get home in 1958. At first refused an exit visa to France, he tried to get one to Poland, where, he told the authorities, his brother and sister lived. That too was refused.61 On the other hand, the authorities did also sometimes abruptly lift all of their objections, and unexpectedly allowed foreigners to go home. At one point in 1947, at the height of the postwar famine, the NKVD unexpectedly released several hundred thousand war prisoners. There was no political explanation: the Soviet leadership reckoned, simply, that it did not have enough food to keep them all alive. 62

  Repatriation did not flow in only one direction. If large numbers of West Europeans found themselves in Russia at the end of the war, equally large numbers of Russians found themselves in Western Europe. In the spring of 1945, more than 5.5 million Soviet citizens were outside the borders of the Soviet Union. Some of them were soldiers, captured and imprisoned in Nazi POW camps. Others had been drafted into slave-labor camps in Germany and Austria. A few had collaborated during the German occupation of their country, and had retreated with the German army. Up to 150,000 were “Vlasovites,” Soviet soldiers who had fought—or, more often, had been forced to fight—against the Red Army under the command of General Andrei Vlasov, a captured Russian officer who had turned against Stalin and fought with Hitler, or in other pro-Hitler, anti-Stalin Wehrmacht brigades. Some, strange though it sounds, were not Soviet citizens at all. Scattered throughout Europe, most notably in Yugoslavia, there were also anti-communist émigrés: White Russians, that is, who had lost their fight against the Bolsheviks and settled in the West. Stalin wanted them back too: no one was to be allowed to escape Bolshevik retribution.

  In the end, he got them. Among the many controversial decisions they made at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin agreed that all Soviet citizens, whatever their individual history, must be returned to the Soviet Union. Although the protocols signed at Yalta did not explicity command the Allies to return Soviet citizens against their will, that, in effect, is what happened.

  Some wanted to return home. Leonid Sitko, a Red Army soldier who had spent time in a Nazi prison camp, and was later to spend more time in a Soviet camp, remembered making the choice to go home. Later, he put his feelings about his decision into verse:

  There were four roads—there were four countries. In three of them were peace and comfort. In the fourth, I knew, they destroy poets’ lyres And me, most likely, they will kill.

  And what happened? To the three countries I said: to hell with you! And I chose my Fatherland.63

  Others, frightened by what might await them, were nevertheless convinced to return by the NKVD officers who traveled to the POW and displaced persons camps scattered all over Europe. The officers trawled the camps, looking for Russians, offering them smiling visions of a bright future. All would be forgiven, they claimed: “You are now considered by us as true Soviet citizens, regardless of the fact that you were forced to join the German army ...”64

  Some, particularly those who had fallen on the wrong side of Soviet justice before, naturally did not want to go back at all. “There is enough room in the Motherland for everyone,” the Soviet military attaché in Britain told a group of Soviet soldiers living in Yorkshire POW camps. “We know what sort of room there will be for us,” one prisoner replied. 65 Allied officers were nevertheless under orders to send them—and so they did. In Fort Dix, New Jersey, 145 Soviet prisoners, captured wearing German uniforms, barricaded themselves inside their barracks to avoid being sent home. When American soldiers threw tear gas into the building, those who had not already committed suicide rushed out with kitchen knives and clubs, injuring some of the Americans. Afterward, they said they had wanted to incite the Americans to shoot them.66

  Worse were the incidents that involved women and children. In May 1945, British troops, under what they were told were direct orders from Churchill, undertook to repatriate more than 20,000 Cossacks, then living in Austria. These were former anti-Bolshevik partisans, some of whom had joined Hitler as a way of fighting Stalin, many of whom had left the USSR after the Revolution, and most of whom no longer held Soviet passports. After many days of promising them good treatment, the British tricked them. They invited the Cossack officers to a “conference,” handed them over to Soviet troops, and rounded up their families the following day. In one particularly ugly incident at a camp near Lienz, Austria, British soldiers used bayonets and rifle butts to force thousands of women and children onto trains which would take them to the USSR. Rather than go back, women threw their babies over bridges, and then jumped themselves. One man killed his wife and his children, laid their bodies neatly on the grass, and then killed himself. The Cossacks knew, of course, what would await them upon their return to the Soviet Union: firing squads—or the Gulag.67

  Even those who returned home of their own accord could fall under suspicion. Whether they had left the Soviet Union voluntarily or by force, whether they had collaborated or been captured, whether they had returned willingly or been forced onto cattle cars, all were asked, at the border, to fill out a form which asked whether they had collaborated. Those who confessed (and some did) and those who seemed suspicious—including many Soviet POWs, despite the torments they had suffered in German camps— were kept for further questioning in filtration camps. These camps, set up early in the war, looked, and felt, similar to Gulag camps. Ringed by barbed wire, those inside were forced laborers in all but name.

  In fact, the NKVD deliberately set up many of the filtration camps near industrial centers, so that the “suspects” could contribute free labor to the Soviet Union while the authorities investigated their cases. 68 Between December 27, 1941, and October 1, 1944, the NKVD investigated 421,199 detainees in filtration camps. In May 1945, more than 160,000 detainees were still living in them, engaged in forced labor. More than half were digging coal.69 In January 1946, the NKVD abolished the camps and repatriated another 228,000 to the USSR for further investigation. 70 Many, it is assumed, wound up in the Gulag.

  Even among the POWs, however, there were special cases. Perhaps because the NKVD was handing out sentences to Soviet slave laborers and POWs— people who had, in fact, committed no crime whatsoever—the authorities invented a new kind of sentence for actual war criminals: people who had allegedly committed real crimes. As early as April 1943, the Supreme Soviet declared that the Red Army, in the course of liberating Soviet territory, had uncovered “acts of unheard beastliness and horrific violence, carried out by German, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, and Finnish fascist monsters, Hitlerite agents, as well as by spies and traitors among Soviet citizens.” 71 In response, the NKVD declared that sentenced war criminals would receive fifteen-, twenty-, or even twenty-five-year sentences, to be spent in specially designed lagpunkts. The lagpunkts were duly built in Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Kolyma, the three harshest northern camps. 72

  With a curious linguistic flourish, and an ironic sense of history that may well reflect the involvement of Stalin himself, the NKVD named these lagpunktsusing a term taken from the penal history of Czarist Russia: katorga. The choice of this word would not have been accidental. Its resurrection, which echoed the resurrection of Czarist terminology in other spheres of Soviet life (military schools for officers’ children, for example), must have been intended to distinguish a new sort of punishment for a new sort of un-reformable, dangerous prisoner. Unlike the ordinary criminals condemned to ordinary punishment in the corrective labor camps of the Gulag, katorga prisoners could never hope to be reformed or redeemed, even in theory.

  The revival of the word certainly seems to have caused some consternation. The Bolsheviks had fought against katorga but now they were reinstating it like the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, who forbade animals to drink alcohol, and then began drinking whiskey themselves. Katorga was also reinvented just
as the world was beginning to discover the truth about the Nazi concentration camps. The use of the word eerily suggested that Soviet camps resembled “capitalist” camps a bit more than the Soviet authorities let on.

  Perhaps this is why General Nasedkin, the Gulag’s wartime boss, commissioned, at this time, a history of Czarist katorga, and passed it on to Beria, at his request. Among other “explanatory notes,” the history painstakingly attempts to explain the difference between Bolshevik katorga, Czarist katorga, and other forms of punishment in the West: in the conditions of the Soviet Socialist state, katorga— exile with forced labor—as a punishment method is based on a different principle than it was in the past. In Czarist Russia and in bourgeois countries this harsh criminal punishment was inflicted upon the most progressive elements in the society . . . in our conditions, katorga allows us to cut down on the high number of death sentences, and focuses on especially dangerous enemies...73

  Reading the instructions issued to describe the new regime, one wonders whether some of those assigned to katorga might not have preferred the death sentence after all. Katorga convicts were separated from other prisoners by high fences. They received distinct, striped uniforms, with numbers sewn on to the back. They were locked into their barracks at night, and the windows of the barracks were barred. They worked longer hours than ordinary prisoners, had fewer rest days, and were forbidden from carrying out any sort of work other than hard labor, at least for the first two years of imprisonment. They were carefully guarded: each group of ten prisoners was assigned two convoy guards, and each camp was told to deploy a minimum of five dogs. Katorga prisoners could not even be moved from one camp to another without the specific agreement of the Gulag administration in Moscow.74

  Katorga prisoners also seem to have become the mainstay of a brand-new Soviet industry. In 1944, the NKVD claimed, in a list of its economic achievements, to have produced 100 percent of the Soviet Union’s uranium. “It is not difficult,” writes the historian Galina Ivanova, “to deduce who it was that mined and processed the radioactive ore.” 75 Prisoners and soldiers would also build the first Soviet nuclear reactor in Chelyabinsk, after the war. “At that time, the whole building site was a camp of sorts,” remembered one worker. On the site, special “Finnish” cottages would be built for the German specialists who were also drafted to work on the project.76

  Without a doubt, the katorga prisoners included many genuine Nazi collaborators and war criminals, including those responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews. With such people in mind, Simeon Vilensky, a Kolyma survivor, once warned me not to be too convinced of the innocence of everyone who was in the Gulag: “These were people who would have been in prison, should have been in prison, under any regime.” As a rule, other prisoners shunned convicted war criminals, and were even known to attack and beat them.77

  Nevertheless, of the 60,000 prisoners condemned to katorga by 1947, quite a few had been sentenced on more ambiguous grounds.78 Among them, for example, were thousands of Polish, Baltic, and Ukrainian anti-Soviet partisans, many of whom had fought against the Nazis before turning around to fight against the Red Army. By doing so, all of them believed they were fighting for their own national liberation. According to a document on underage katorga prisoners, sent to Beria in 1945, these partisans included Andrei Levchuk, accused of joining the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), one of the two main anti-Soviet partisan groupings in Ukraine. While in their service he allegedly “took part in the murder of innocent citizens and the disarming of Red Army soldiers and the appropriation of their possessions.” At the time of his arrest in 1945, Levchuk was fifteen years old.

  Yaroslava Krutigolova was another such “war criminal.” Also a member of an OUN partisan group—she served as a nurse—she had been arrested at the age of sixteen.79 The NKVD also picked up a woman of German origin who had worked as a German translator for Soviet partisans. Hearing that she had been arrested for “aiding and abetting the enemy,” the leader of her partisan brigade made a special journey, away from the front lines, to testify on her behalf. Thanks to him, she received a ten-year katorga instead of twenty-five.80

  Finally, the ranks of katorga prisoners included Alexander Klein, a Red Army officer who was captured by the Germans, yet managed to escape and make his way back to a Soviet division. Upon his return, he was interrogated, as he later recounted:

  Suddenly the Major raised himself sharply, and asked, “Can you prove that you are Jewish?”

  I smiled, embarrassed, and said that I could—by taking off my trousers.

  The Major looked at Sorokin, and then again turned to me.

  “And you are saying that the Germans didn’t know that you are a Jew?”

  “If they had known, believe me, I wouldn’t be standing here.”

  “Ach, you yid mug!” exclaimed the dandy, and kicked me in the lower stomach so hard that I suddenly gasped hard for breath and fell.

  “What are these lies? Tell us, you motherfucker, with what mission were you sent here? Who are you involved with? When did you sell yourself? For how much? How much did you give yourself for, you creature for sale? What is your code name?”

  As a result of this interrogation, Klein was first sentenced to death. He was then reprieved—and given a twenty-year katorga. 81

  “There were all kinds of people in the camps, especially after the war,” wrote Hava Volovich later. “But we were all tormented just the same: the good, the bad, the guilty, and the innocent.” 82

  If, during the war years, millions of foreigners entered the Gulag against their will, at least one foreigner arrived voluntarily. The war may have provoked new paroxysms of anti-foreigner paranoia among the Soviet leadership; but it was also thanks to the war that a senior American politician visited the Gulag, for the first and only time. Henry Wallace, Vice President of the United States, made a trip to Kolyma in May 1944—and never even knew that he was visiting a prison.

  Wallace’s visit took place at the height of Soviet-American wartime friendship, the warmest moment of the alliance, when the American press was wont to describe Stalin as “Uncle Joe.” Perhaps for that reason, Wallace was inclined to look kindly upon the Soviet Union even before he arrived. In Kolyma, he saw all of his prejudices confirmed. As soon as he arrived, he saw the many parallels between Russia and the United States: both were great “new” countries, carrying none of the aristocratic baggage of the European past. He believed, as he told his hosts, that “Soviet Asia” was in fact the “Wild West of Russia.” He thought that there were “no other two countries more alike than the Soviet Union and the United States”: “The vast expanses of your country, her virgin forests, wide rivers and large lakes, all kinds of climate—from tropical to polar—her inexhaustible wealth, remind me of my homeland.” 83

  If the landscape pleased him, so too did what he took to be the nation’s industrial strength. Nikishov, the notoriously corrupt, high-living Dalstroi boss, escorted Wallace around Magadan, the main city of Kolyma. Wallace, in turn, imagined Nikishov, a senior NKVD officer, to be the rough equivalent of an American capitalist: “He runs everything around here. With Dalstroi’s resources at his command, he’s a millionaire.” Wallace enjoyed the company of his new friend “Ivan,” and watched as he “gamboled about” in the taiga, “enjoying the wonderful air immensely.” He also listened closely to “Ivan’s” account of Dalstroi’s origins: “We had to dig hard to get this place going. Twelve years ago the first settlers arrived and put up eight pre-fabricated houses. Today Magadan has 40,000 inhabitants and all are well-housed.”

  Nikishov failed to mention, of course, that the “first settlers” were prisoners, and that most of the 40,000 inhabitants were exiles, forbidden to leave. Wallace was equally ignorant of the status of the contemporary workers—nearly all prisoners—and went on to write approvingly of the Kolyma gold miners. They were, he recalled, “big, husky young men,” free workers who were far harder-working than the political priso
ners whom he supposed had inhabited the far north in Czarist times: “The people of Siberia are a hardy, vigorous race, but not because they are whipped into submission.”84

  This, of course, is precisely what the Dalstroi bosses wanted Wallace to think. According to the report which Nikishov himself later wrote for Beria, Wallace did ask to see a prison camp, but was kept away. Nikishov also assured his bosses that the only workers Wallace encountered were free workers rather than prisoners. Many of them may have even been members of the Komsomol, the Communist Youth league, who had been handed miners’ clothing and rubber boots only minutes before Wallace’s arrival, and would know what to say if asked questions. “I spoke with some of them,” Wallace noted later. “They were keen on winning the war.”85

  Later, Wallace did encounter real prisoners, although he did not know it: these were the singers and musicians, many of them arrested opera performers from Moscow and Leningrad, who performed for him in the Magadan theater. Told they were members of a “nonprofessional Red Army choir” stationed in the city, he marveled that amateurs could achieve such artistic heights. In fact, each one had been warned that “one word or sign that we were prisoners would be considered an act of treason.”86

  Wallace also saw some prisoner handiwork, although again he did not know that either. Nikishov took him to an exhibition of embroidery, and told him the works on display had been made by a group of “local women who gathered regularly during the severe winter to study needlework.” Prisoners, of course, had done the work, in preparation for Wallace’s visit. When Wallace stopped before one of the works, in clear admiration, Nikishov took it off the wall and handed it to him. Much to his (pleasurable) surprise, Nikishov’s wife, the much-feared Gridasova, modestly let it be known that she herself was the artist. Later, a prisoner, Vera Ustieva, learned that her picture was one of two which had been given to the Vice President as a memento of his trip. “Our boss received a letter from the wife of the Vice President, thanking her for the present and saying that the pictures hung in her hall,” she wrote later.87 In his memoirs Wallace also described the gifts: “These two wall paintings now convey to my visitors at my home in Washington rich impressions of the beauty of Russia’s rural landscape.”88