Even many in power now felt it was time to reorient Soviet production away from armaments and toward the consumer goods that people desperately needed. In a private telephone conversation, taped and recorded for posterity by the secret police, one Soviet general told another that “Absolutely everyone says openly how everyone is discontented with life. On the trains, in fact everywhere, it’s what everyone is saying.”4 Surely, the general speculated, Stalin must have known this too, and would soon have to take action.
By the spring of 1945, hopes were high among prisoners as well. In January of that year, the authorities had declared another general amnesty for women who were pregnant or had small children, and large numbers— 734,785 by July, to be precise—were being released.5 Wartime restrictions had been eased, and prisoners were allowed to receive food and clothing from home again. For the most part, it was not compassion that had dictated these new rules. The amnesty for women—which excluded political prisoners as a matter of course—did not represent a change of heart, but was rather a response to the shocking increase in the numbers of orphans, and the consequent problems of homeless children, hooliganism, and children’s criminal gangs all across the USSR: grudgingly, the authorities recognized that mothers were part of the solution. The lifting of restrictions on packages was not a kindness either, but an attempt to muffle the impact of the postwar famines: the camps could not feed the prisoners, so why not let their families help. One central directive declared sternly that “in the matter of prisoners’ food and clothing, packages and money orders must be treated as an important supplement.”6 Nevertheless, many drew hope from these decrees, interpreting them as harbingers of a new, more relaxed era.
It was not to be. Within a year of victory, the Cold War had begun. The American atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki persuaded the Soviet leadership that the Soviet economy must devote itself wholeheartedly to military and industrial production, and not to the manufacture of refrigerators and children’s shoes. Despite the devastation wreaked by five and a half years of fighting, Soviet planners tried harder than ever to cut corners, to build quickly—and to make as much use of forced labor as possible.7
As it happened, the emergence of a new threat to the Soviet Union suited Stalin’s purposes: it was precisely the excuse he needed to tighten, once again, his control over his people, exposed as they had been to the corrupting influence of the outside world. He therefore ordered his subordinates to “deliver a strong blow” to any talk of democracy, even before any such talk had become widespread.8 He also strengthened and reorganized the NKVD, which was split into two bureaucracies in March 1946. The Ministry of Internal Affairs—or MVD—continued to control the Gulag and the exile villages, effectively becoming the ministry of forced labor. The other, more glamorous bureaucracy—the MGB, later called the KGB— would control counter-intelligence and foreign intelligence, border guards, and ultimately the surveillance of the regime’s opponents as well.9
Finally, instead of relaxing repression after the war, the Soviet leadership embarked on a new series of arrests, again attacking the army, as well as select ethnic minorities, including Soviet Jews. One by one, the secret police “discovered” anti-Stalinist youth conspiracies in nearly every city in the country.10 In 1947, new laws prohibited marriages—and, in effect, all romantic relationships—between Soviet citizens and foreigners. Soviet academics who shared scientific information with colleagues abroad could be subject to criminal prosecution too. In 1948, the authorities rounded up some 23,000 collective farmers. All were accused of failing to work the obligatory number of days in the previous year, and were exiled to remote areas, without trial or investigation.11
Anecdotal evidence exists of some more unusual arrests made at the end of the 1940s. According to a recently declassified intelligence debriefing of a German POW, two American airmen may have found their way into the postwar Gulag as well. In 1954, the German ex-prisoner told American investigators that he had encountered two members of the U.S. Air Force in his POW camp in the Komi region, near Ukhta, in 1949. They were the pilots of a plane that had crashed near Kharkov, in Ukraine. They had been accused of spying, and put in what sounds, from the German’s description, like a katorga brigade. One allegedly died in the camp, murdered by one of the camp criminals. The other was taken away at a later date, supposedly to Moscow. 12
Fainter, even more tantalizing rumors float around the Komi region as well. According to a local legend, another group of Englishmen, or at least English speakers, were also incarcerated in another lagpunkt—Sedvozh, also near Ukhta—in the 1940s. As one local man tells the story, the Englishmen were spies, parachuted into Germany at the end of the war. The Red Army captured them, interrogated them, and deported them to the Gulag in great secrecy, since Britain and the USSR had, after all, been wartime allies. Evidence of their presence is slim: a lagpunkt locally nicknamed “Angliiskaya Koloniya,” the “English Colony,” and a single reference in the Moscow military archive to “ten Scotsmen,” whatever that may mean, in a prisoner-of-war camp in the area.13
Thanks to all of these new additions, the Gulag did not contract after the war. On the contrary, it expanded—reaching its highest level in the early 1950s. According to official statistics, on January 1, 1950, the Gulag contained 2,561,351 prisoners in the camps and colonies of its system—a million more than there had been five years earlier, in 1945. 14 The number of special exiles also grew, due to the major deportation operations in the Baltic States, Moldavia, and Ukraine, deliberately designed to complete the “Sovietization” of those populations. And at about the same time, the NKVD resolved, once and for all, the thorny question of the exiles’ future, decreeing that all deportees had been exiled “in perpetuity”—along with their children. By the 1950s, the number of exiles roughly matched the number of prisoners in camps.15
The second half of 1948 and the first half of 1949 brought yet another unexpected tragedy to the Gulag’s former inmates: a series of arrests, or rather re-arrests, of former prisoners, mostly those who had originally been arrested in 1937 and 1938, given ten-year sentences and only recently released. The re-arrests were systematic, thorough, and strangely bloodless. New investigations were rare, and most of the prisoners received only perfunctory interrogations. 16 The exile community in Magadan and the Kolyma valley knew something was wrong when they heard of the arrests of former “politicals” whose names all began with the first three letters of the Russian alphabet: the secret police, they realized, were re-arresting people in alphabetical order.17 No one could decide if this was funny or tragic. Evgeniya Ginzburg wrote that whereas “in ’37 evil had assumed a monumental tragic appearance . . . in ’49, the Georgian Serpent, yawning with repletion, was drawing up at leisure an alphabetical list of those to be exterminated ...”18
Overwhelmingly, the re-arrested describe feelings of indifference. The first arrest had been a shock, but also a learning experience: many had been forced to confront the truth about their political system for the first time. The second arrest brought no such new knowledge. “By ’49 I already knew that suffering can only cleanse one up to a point. When it drags on for decades and becomes a matter of routine, it no longer cleanses; it simply dulls all sensation,” wrote Ginzburg: “after my second arrest I would surely turn into a thing of wood.”19
When the police came for her the second time, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg went to her cupboard to pack, then stopped. “Why should I bother to take anything with me? The children can make better use of my things than I,” she thought. “Obviously I won’t survive this time; how could I possibly stand it?”20 Lev Razgon’s wife was re-arrested, and he demanded to know why. When told she had been sentenced again for the same crimes as before, he demanded further explanations:
“She’s already served her time. Does the law really permit you to punish a person twice for the same offense?”
The procurator looked at me in amazement.
“Of course not. But what’s the law got to do w
ith it?”21
The majority of those re-arrested were not sent back to camps, but instead into exile, usually in particularly remote and underpopulated regions of the country: Kolyma, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Kazakhstan.22 There, most would live lives of unrelenting tedium. Shunned by the local communities as “enemies,” they found it difficult to find living space, difficult to work. No one wanted to be associated with a spy or a saboteur.
To the victims, Stalin’s plans seemed clear enough: no one who had received a sentence for spying, sabotage, or any form of political opposition was ever to be allowed to return home. If released, they would be given “wolves passports,” which forbade them from living anywhere near a major city, and would be constantly subject to re-arrest.23 The Gulag, and the exile system which supplemented it, were no longer temporary punishments. For those condemned to them, they had become a way of life.
Yet the war did have a lasting impact on the camp system, albeit one which is hard to quantify. Camp rules and regulations were not liberalized following victory—but the prisoners themselves had changed, and the politicals in particular.
To begin with, there were more of them. The demographic upheaval of the war years, and the amnesties which had pointedly excluded the political prisoners, had left a much higher percentage of political prisoners in the camps. As of July 1, 1946, more than 35 percent of the prisoners in the entire system had been sentenced for “counter-revolutionary” crimes. In certain camps that number was far higher, well above half.24
Although the overall figure would drop again, the position of the politicals had changed too. This was a new generation of political prisoners, with a different set of experiences. The politicals arrested in the 1930s—and particularly those arrested in 1937 and 1938—had been intellectuals, party members, and ordinary workers. Most were shocked by their arrests, psychologically unprepared for prison life, and physically unprepared for forced labor. In the immediate postwar years, however, the politicals included former Red Army soldiers, Polish Home Army officers, Ukrainian and Baltic partisans, German and Japanese prisoners of war. These men and women had fought in trenches, conducted conspiracies, commanded troops. Some had survived German prison camps; others had led partisan bands. Many were openly anti-Soviet or anti-communist, and were not in the least surprised to find themselves behind barbed wire, as one prisoner remembered: “Having looked death in the eyes, having passed through the fires and hell of war, having survived hunger and much tragedy, they were a completely different generation from the inmates of the prewar period.”25
Almost as soon as they started appearing in the camps toward the end of the war, this new sort of prisoner began creating trouble for the authorities. By 1947, the professional criminals no longer found it so easy to dominate them. Among the various national and criminal tribes who dominated camp life, a new clan appeared: the krasnye shapochki, or “red hats.” These were usually ex-soldiers or ex-partisans who had banded together to fight against the dominance of the thieves—and, by extension, against the administration that tolerated them. Such groups operated well into the next decade, despite efforts to break them apart. In the winter of 1954–55, Viktor Bulgakov, then a prisoner in Inta, a far northern mining camp in the Vorkuta region, witnessed an administrative attempt to “break” a group of politicals by importing a contingent of sixty thieves into their camp. The thieves armed themselves, and prepared to start attacking the politicals:
They suddenly got hold of “cold weapons” [knives], just as one would expect in that sort of situation . . . we learned that they had stolen the money and possessions of an older man. We asked them to give the things back, but they weren’t accustomed to giving things back. So at about two o’clock in the morning, just as it was turning light, we surrounded their barrack from all sides, and began attacking it. We started to beat them, and we beat them until they couldn’t get up. One jumped through the window . . . ran to the vakhta, and collapsed on the threshold. But by the time the guards arrived, no one was there . . . They took the thieves out of the zone.26
A similar incident took place in Norilsk, as one prisoner recalled:
A party of thieves arrived at one lagpunkt, where all of the prisoners were politicals, and set about trying to set up their own system. The prisoners, all former Red Army officers, took them to pieces, even though they had no weapons. With wild screams the remaining thieves ran to the guards and the officers, begging for help.27
Even women had changed. Tired of being intimidated, a woman political told a group of female thieves that if they did not return some money they had stolen, “we will throw all of you and your rags outside and you can sleep outdoors tonight.” The criminal women returned the money. 28
The thieves did not always lose, of course. In one incident in Vyatlag, a struggle between the criminal and political prisoners ended with the death of nine politicals. The thieves had demanded a 25-ruble bribe from every prisoner, and had simply murdered those who refused to pay.29
But the authorities took note. If political prisoners could band together to fight thieves, they could also band together to fight the camp administration. In 1948, anticipating rebellion, the Gulag’s Moscow bosses ordered all of the “most dangerous” politicals into a new group of “special camps” (osobyelagerya). Specifically designed for “spies, diversionists, terrorists, Trotskyites, right-wingers, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, anarchists, nationalists, white emigrants and participants in other anti-Soviet organizations” the special camps were really an extension of the katorga regime, and contained many of the same features: the striped uniforms; the numbers on their foreheads, backs, and chests; the barred windows; and the locking of the barracks at night. Prisoners were permitted only minimal contact with the outside world, in some cases one or two letters a year. Correspondence with anyone other than family members was strictly forbidden. The working day was set at ten hours, and prisoners were forbidden to work at anything except manual labor. Medical facilities were kept to a minimum: no “invalid camps” were set up within the special camp complexes.30
Like the katorga lagpunkts, with whom they soon overlapped, the special camps were also set up exclusively in the harshest regions of the country, in Inta, Vorkuta, Norilsk, and Kolyma—all mining camps near or above the Arctic Circle—as well as in the Kazakh desert, and the bleak forests of Mordovia. In effect, they were camps within camps, as most were placed within existing forced-labor complexes. Only one thing distinguished them. With a surprisingly poetic touch, the Gulag authorities gave them all names derived from the landscape: Mineral, Mountain, Oak, Steppe, Seashore, River, Lake, Sand, and Meadow, among others. The point was presumably conspiratorial—to hide the nature of the camps—since there were no oak trees at Oak camp, and certainly no seashore at Seashore camp. Very soon, of course, the names were shortened, as was the Soviet custom, to Minlag, Gorlag, Dubravlag, Steplag, and so on. By the beginning of 1953, the ten special camps contained 210,000 people.31
But the isolation of the “most dangerous” political prisoners did not make them more docile. On the contrary, the special camps freed the politicals from their constant conflicts with the criminals, and from the mitigating influence of other prisoners. Left to themselves, their opposition to the system only grew: this was 1948, not 1937. Ultimately, they would embark on a lengthy, determined, and unprecedented struggle with the authorities.
As the repressive mechanisms started to tighten again, political prisoners were not the only ones caught in the noose. Now that profits mattered more than ever, the Gulag’s bosses began to re-examine their attitudes to the professional criminals. Their corruption, laziness, and threatening behavior toward the guards harmed the productivity of the camps. Now that they no longer controlled the political prisoners, they brought no corresponding benefits either. Although criminals would never attract the same enmity as the politicals, and although they would never receive the same hateful treatment from camp guards, the Gulag’s postwar leadership nevertheles
s resolved to put an end to the criminals’ rule of the camps—and to eliminate forever the thieves-in-law who refused to work.
In practice, the Gulag’s war on the thieves took both straightforward and covert forms. To begin with, the most dangerous, dedicated criminals were simply separated from other inmates, and given longer sentences— ten, fifteen, twenty-five years.32 In the winter of 1948, the Gulag also called for the creation of a group of strict-regime criminal lagpunkts for criminal recidivists. According to instructions issued in Moscow, only the most disciplined and “physically healthiest” of the camp guards were allowed to work in them, and they were to be surrounded by particularly high, reinforced fences. Separate instructions laid out the specifications. The Gulag called for the creation of twenty-seven such camps immediately, with space for more than 115,000 prisoners.33
Unfortunately, very little is known about daily life in these punishment lagpunkts, or even whether all of them were created: if they survived, these criminals were even less likely to write their memoirs than criminals in ordinary camps. In practice, though, most camps did have some form of separate incarceration for serious criminals and, thanks to an extremely bad twist of luck, Evgeniya Ginzburg found herself, briefly, in one of them: Izvestkovaya, a punishment lagpunkt in Kolyma. She was the lone political prisoner among a group of criminal women.
During her sojourn in Izvestkovaya, Ginzburg spent her days working in a limestone quarry, where she was unable to meet the norm and therefore received no food whatsoever. During her first few evenings she sat “bolt upright” in the corner of the barrack, since there was no space on the bunks, watching the mostly naked women drink ersatz alcohol in the vastly overheated cell. Later, one of the women, a syphilitic in the final stages of the disease, made way for Ginzburg and allowed her to lie down, but that was little comfort. “The overpowering stench of putrefaction” coming from the woman’s distintegrated nose nearly stifled her. “In Izvestkovaya, as in the most real of hells, there was not only no day and no night, there was not even an intermediate temperature to make existence bearable. It was either the glacial cold of the lime quarry or the infernal cauldron of the hut.”
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