Gulag

by Anne Applebaum

  In the months that followed the secret speech, the MVD also prepared to make much deeper changes to the structure of the camps themselves. In April, the new Interior Minister, N. P. Dudorov, sent a proposal for the reorganization of the camps to the Central Committee. The situation in the camps and colonies, he wrote, “has been abysmal for many years now.” They should be closed, he argued, and instead the most dangerous criminals should be sent to special, isolated prisons, in distant regions of the country, specifically naming the building site of the unfinished Salekhard–Igarka Railway as one such possibility. Minor criminals, on the other hand, should remain in their native regions, serving out their sentences in prison “colonies,” doing light industrial labor and working on collective farms. None should be required to work as lumberjacks, miners, or builders, or indeed to carry out any other type of unskilled, hard labor.12

  Dudorov’s choice of language was more important than his specific suggestions. He was not merely proposing the creation of a smaller camp system; he was proposing to create a qualitatively different one, to return to a “normal” prison system, or at least to a prison system which would be recognizable as such in other European countries. The new prison colonies would stop pretending to be financially self-sufficient. Prisoners would work in order to learn useful skills, not in order to enrich the state. The aim of prisoners’ work would be rehabilitation, not profit.13

  There were surprisingly angry objections to these suggestions. Although the representatives of economic ministries signaled their support, I. A. Serov, the KGB boss, lashed out at the Interior Minister’s proposals, calling them “incorrect” and “unacceptable,” not to mention expensive. He opposed the construction of new prison colonies, on the grounds that such a policy would “create the impression of the presence in the USSR of a huge number of places of incarceration.” He opposed the liquidation of the camps, and could not understand why zeks should not work as foresters or miners. After all, hard labor would help “re-educate them in the spirit of honest working life of Soviet society.”14

  The result of this clash between the two branches of the security services was a very mixed reform. On the one hand, the Gulag itself—the Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, the Main Camp Administration—was dissolved. In 1957, both Dalstroi and Norilsk, two of the biggest and most powerful camp complexes, were dismantled. Other camps followed suit. The appropriate ministries—of mining, machine-building, forestry, or road-building—took over large swathes of what had been the camp-industrial complex.15 Slave labor would never again be an important part of the economy in the Soviet Union.

  Yet at the same time, the judicial system remained unreformed. The judges were just as politicized, just as biased, just as unfair. The prison system also remained virtually untouched. The same jailers continued to enforce the same regimes in the same unpainted, unaltered cells. When, with time, the prison system began to expand once again, even the rehabilitation and re-education programs, the focus of so much concern and interest, would remain just as flimsy and as fictitious as they had been in the past.

  The surprisingly vitriolic debate between the MVD chief, Dudorov, and the KGB chief, Serov, also prefigured other, larger debates to come. Following what they took to be Khrushchev’s lead, liberals wanted to make fast changes to almost every sphere of Soviet life. At the same time, defenders of the old system wanted to stop, reverse, or alter these changes, particularly when they affected the livelihoods of powerful groups of people. The result of this clash was predictable: not only unchanged prison cells, but also half-baked reforms, new privileges which were quickly revoked, and public discussions which were immediately hushed up. The era which came to be called the “Thaw” was indeed an era of change, but change of a particular kind: reforms took two steps forward, and then one step—or sometimes three steps—back.

  Release, whether it came in 1926 or 1956, had always left prisoners with mixed feelings. Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov, a prisoner released in the 1930s, was surprised by his own reaction:

  I imagined that I would be dancing instead of walking, that when I finally got my freedom I’d be drunk with it. But when I was actually released, I felt none of this. I walked through the gates and past the last guard, experiencing no happiness or sense of uplift . . . There, along the sun-drenched platform ran two young girls in light dresses, merrily laughing about something. I looked at them in astonishment. How could they laugh? How could all these people walk around conversing and laughing as if nothing unusual was happening in the world, as if nothing nightmarish and unforgettable stood in their midst ...16

  After Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s speech, the releases came more rapidly, and reactions became even more confused. Prisoners who had expected to spend another decade behind barbed wire were let go on a day’s notice. One group of exiles was summoned during working hours to the offices of their mine, and simply told to go home. As one remembered, Spetskomandant Lieutenant Isaev “opened a safe, pulled out our documents, and distributed them ...”17 Prisoners who had filed petition after petition, demanding a re-examination of their cases, suddenly found that further letters were unnecessary—they could simply walk away.

  Prisoners who had thought of nothing else except freedom were strangely reluctant to experience it: “Although I could hardly believe it myself, I was weeping as I walked out to freedom . . . I felt as though I had torn my heart away from what was dearest and most precious to it, from my comrades in misfortune. The gates closed—and it was all finished.” 18

  Many were simply not ready. Yuri Zorin, riding a crowded prisoners’ train south from Kotlas in 1954, made it past only two stations. “Why am I going to Moscow?” he asked himself—and then turned around and headed back to his old camp, where his ex-commander helped him get a job as a free worker. There he remained, for another sixteen years. 19 Evgeniya Ginzburg knew a woman who actually did not want to leave her barracks: “The thing is that I—I can’t face living outside. I want to stay in camp,” she told her friends. 20 Another wrote in his diary that “I really don’t want freedom. What is drawing me to freedom? It seems to me that out there . . . there are lies, hypocrisy, thoughtlessness. Out there, everything is fantastically unreal, and here, everything is real.”21 Many did not trust Khrushchev, expected the situation to worsen again, and took jobs as free workers in Vorkuta or Norilsk. They preferred not to experience the emotions and undergo the hassle of return, if they were ultimately to be re-arrested anyway.

  But even those who wanted to return home often found it nearly impossible to do so. They had no money, and very little food. Camps released prisoners with the equivalent of 500 grams of bread for every day they were expected to be on the road—a starvation ration.22 Even that was insufficient, since they were often on the road much longer than expected, as it proved almost impossible to obtain tickets on the few planes and trains leading south. Arriving at the station in Krasnoyarsk, Ariadna Efron found “such a crowd, that to leave was impossible, simply impossible. People from all of the camps were there, from all of Norilsk.” She was finally given a ticket out of the blue by an “angel,” a woman who by chance had two. Otherwise, she might have waited for months.23

  Facing a similarly crowded train, Galina Usakova, like many others, solved the problem by riding home on a baggage rack.24 Still others did not make it at all: it was not uncommon for prisoners to die on the difficult journey home, or within weeks or months of arrival. Weakened by their years of hard labor, tired out by exhausting journeys, the emotions surrounding their return overwhelmed them, resulting in heart attacks and strokes. “How many people died from this freedom!” one prisoner marveled.25

  Some wound up back in prison. The MVD itself produced a report revealing that freed prisoners coming out of Vorkuta, Pechora, and Inta camps could not buy clothes, shoes, or bedding, as “the towns above the Arctic Circle have no markets.” In desperation, some committed minor crimes in order to be re-arrested. At least in prison they were guaranteed a bread ration.26 Not t
hat those in charge of the camps necessarily minded this: facing an employment crisis, the Vorkuta administration disobeyed orders from above and actually tried to prevent certain categories of prisoners from leaving the mines.27

  If they did manage to return to Moscow, Leningrad, or whatever village they had originally come from, former camp inmates often found their lives no easier. Mere release, it turned out, was not sufficient to re-establish a “normal” life. Without the documents testifying to actual rehabilitation— documents which annulled the prisoners’ original sentence—former politicals were still suspect.

  True, a few years earlier, they would have been handed the dreaded “wolves passports,” which forbade ex-political prisoners from living in or near any of the Soviet Union’s major cities. Others would have been sent directly into exile. Now the “wolves passports” had been abolished, but it was still difficult to find places to live, to find work, and, in Moscow, to get permission to remain in the capital. Prisoners returned to find their homes had long ago been requisitioned, their possessions disbursed. Many of their relatives, also “enemies” by association, were dead, or impoverished: long after they had been released, families of “enemies” remained stigmatized, subject to official forms of discrimination and forbidden from working in certain kinds of jobs. Local authorities were still suspicious of former prisoners. Thomas Sgovio spent a year “petitioning and hassling” before he was allowed to become a legal resident of his mother’s apartment. 28 Older prisoners found it impossible to get a proper pension. 29

  These personal difficulties, coupled with their sense of injured justice, persuaded many to seek full rehabilitation—but this was not a simple or straightforward process either. For many, the option was not even available. The MVD categorically refused to review the case of anyone sentenced before 1935, for example.30 Those who had gained an extra sentence in a camp, whether for insubordination, dissidence, or theft, were never given the coveted rehabilitation certificates either.31 The cases of the highest-ranking Bolsheviks—Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev—remained taboo, and those condemned in the same investigations as those leaders were not rehabilitated until the 1980s.

  For those who could attempt it, the rehabilitation process was a long one. Appeals for rehabilitation had to come from prisoners or their families, who often had to write two, three, or many more letters before their appeals were granted. Even after they succeeded, the arduous process sometimes went backward: Anton Antonov-Ovseenko received a posthumous rehabilitation certificate for his father, which was then revoked in 1963.32 Many former prisoners also remained wary of applying. Those who received a summons to appear at a meeting of a rehabilitation commission, usually held within the offices of the MVD or the Justice Ministry, would often turn up in layers of clothes, gripping food parcels, accompanied by weeping relatives, certain they were about to be sent away again.33

  At the highest levels, many feared the rehabilitation process could go too fast and too far. “We were scared, really scared,” wrote Khrushchev later. “We were afraid the thaw might unleash a flood, which we wouldn’t be able to control and which could drown us.”34 One former senior KGB investigator, Anatoly Spragovsky, later recalled that between 1955 and 1960 he had traveled throughout the Tomsk region, interviewing witnesses and visiting the scenes of alleged crimes. He learned, among other things, that ex-prisoners had been accused of plotting to blow up factories or bridges that never existed. Yet when Spragovsky wrote to Khrushchev, proposing to streamline the rehabilitation process and speed it up, he was rebuffed: in Moscow, it seemed, officials did not want the errors of the Stalin years to seem too broad, or too absurd, and they did not want the investigation of old cases to proceed too quickly. Anastas Mikoyan, a Stalinist Politburo member who survived into the Khrushchev era, at one point explained why it was impossible to rehabilitate people too quickly. If they were all declared innocent at once, “it would be clear that the country was not being run by a legal government, but by a group of gangsters.” 35

  The Communist Party was also wary of admitting too much error. Although it reviewed more than 70,000 petitions from ex-members, demanding to have their Party membership reinstated, less than half the petitions were granted.36 As a result, full social rehabilitation—with the complete reinstatement of job, apartment, and pension—remained very rare.

  Far more common than full rehabilitation was the mixed experience, and the mixed feelings, of Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, who filed for her rehabilitation and that of her husband in 1954. She waited for two years. Then, after Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956, she received her certificate. It declared that her case had been reviewed, and closed for lack of evidence. “I had been arrested on April 27, 1936. So I had paid for this mistake with twenty years and forty-one days of my life.” In compensation, the certificate stated, Adamova-Sliozberg was entitled to two months’ pay for herself and her dead husband, and a further 11 rubles and 50 kopeks to compensate for the money that had been in her husband’s possession at the time of his death. That was all.

  As she stood in the waiting room outside an office of the Supreme Court building in Moscow, absorbing this news, she became aware of someone shouting. It was an elderly Ukrainian woman, who had just been handed a similar piece of news:

  The old Ukrainian woman started yelling: “I don’t need your money for my son’s blood; keep it yourself!” She tore up the certificates and threw them on the floor.

  The soldier who had been handing out the certificates came up to her: “Calm down, citizen,” he began.

  But the old woman started shouting again and choked in a paroxysm of rage.

  Everyone was silent, overwhelmed. Here and there I heard stifled sobs and tears.

  I went back to my apartment, from which no policeman could evict me now. There was no one home, and finally I was able to weep freely.

  To weep for my husband, who perished in the cellars of the Lubyanka, when he was thirty-seven years old, at the height of his powers and talent; for my children, who grew up orphans, stigmatized as the children of enemies of the people; for my parents, who died of grief; for Nikolai who was tortured in the camps; and for all of my friends who never lived to be rehabilitated but lie beneath the frozen earth of Kolyma.37

  Although often ignored in standard histories of the Soviet Union, the return home of millions of people from camps and exile must have stunned the millions of other Soviet citizens they encountered upon their arrival. Khrushchev’s secret speech had been a shock, but it was a remote event, directed at the Party hierarchy. By contrast, the reappearance of people long considered dead brought home the message of the speech in a far more direct way, to a far wider range of people. Stalin’s era had been one of secret torture and hidden violence. Suddenly, the camp veterans were on hand to provide living evidence of what had happened.

  They were also on hand to bring news, both good and bad, of the vanished. By the 1950s, it had become customary for released prisoners to pay visits to the homes of both their dead and living comrades, to transmit oral messages or to repeat last words. M. S. Rotfort went back to Kharkov via Chita and Irkutsk, in order to see the families of his friends. 38 Gustav Herling paid an awkward visit to the family of his camp mate General Kruglov, whose wife pleaded with him not to tell their daughter about her father’s new camp sentence, checked her watch repeatedly, and begged him to leave quickly.39

  The returning prisoners were also a source of terror—to the bosses, the colleagues, the people who had sent them to prison in the first place. Anna Andreeva remembered that all of the trains to Moscow from Karaganda and Potma were filled with former prisoners in the summer of 1956. “Everything was full of joy and its opposite, because people were meeting the people who had condemned them, who had condemned others. It was happy, and tragic, and all of Moscow would soon be filled with this.”40 In his novel Cancer Ward, Solzhenitsyn imagines the reaction of a Party boss, ill with cancer, after his wife had told him that a former friend—a man he had personally den
ounced in order to take possession of his apartment—was due to be rehabilitated:

  A weakness gripped his whole body—his hips, his shoulders; his arms had grown weak too, and the tumor seemed to wrench his head sideways. “Why did you tell me that?” he moaned in a miserable, feeble voice. “Haven’t I had enough misfortune?” And twice his head and chest shuddered with tearless sobs . . .

  “What right have they to let these people out now? Have they no pity? How dare they cause such traumas!”41

  Feelings of guilt could be unbearable. After Khrushchev’s secret speech, Aleksandr Fadeev, a committed Stalinist and much-feared literary bureaucrat, went on an alcoholic binge. While drunk, he confessed to a friend that as head of the Writers’ Union, he had sanctioned the arrests of many writers he knew to be innocent. Fadeev killed himself the following day. He allegedly left a one-sentence suicide letter, addressed to the Central Committee: “The bullet fired was meant for Stalin’s policies, for Zhdanov’s aesthetics, for Lysenko’s genetics.”42

  Others went mad. Olga Mishakova, an employee of the Komsomol, had denounced the youth organization’s leader, Kosarev. After 1956, Kosarev was rehabilitated, and the Komsomol Central Committee expelled Mishakova. Nevertheless, for a year afterward, she continued to come to the Komsomol building, to sit all day in her empty office, even to take a break for lunch. After the Komsomol confiscated her pass, she kept coming, standing by the entrance during her old office hours. When her husband was transferred to a job in Ryazan, she still got on the Moscow train every morning at four o’clock, and spent the day in front of her former office, returning in the evening. She was eventually placed in a mental institution.43