In April there was an incessant forty-eight-hour storm assault—hurrah! Thirty thousand people did not sleep!
And by May 1, 1933, People’s Commissar Yagoda reported to his beloved Teacher that the canal had been completed on time.
D. P. Vitkovsky, a Solovetsky Islands veteran, who worked on the White Sea Canal as a work supervisor and saved the lives of many prisoners with that very same “tukhta,” the falsification of work reports, draws a picture of the evenings:
At the end of the workday there were corpses left on the work site. The snow powdered their faces. One of them was hunched over beneath an overturned wheelbarrow, he had hidden his hands in his sleeves and frozen to death in that position. Someone had frozen with his head bent down between his knees. Two were frozen back to back leaning against each other. They were peasant lads and the best workers one could possibly imagine. They were sent to the canal in tens of thousands at a time, and the authorities tried to work things out so no one got to the same subcamp as his father; they tried to break up families. And right off they gave them norms of shingle and boulders that you’d be unable to fulfill even in summer. No one was able to teach them anything, to warn them; and in their village simplicity they gave all their strength to their work and weakened very swiftly and then froze to death, embracing in pairs. At night the sledges went out and collected them. The drivers threw the corpses onto the sledges with a dull clonk.
And in the summer bones remained from corpses which had not been removed in time, and together with the shingle they got into the concrete mixer. And in this way they got into the concrete of the last lock at the city of Belomorsk and will be preserved there forever.
The Belomorstroi newspaper choked with enthusiasm in describing how many Canal Army Men, who had been “aesthetically carried away” by their great task, had in their own free time (and, obviously, without any payment in bread) decorated the canal banks with stones—simply for the sake of beauty.
Yes, and it was quite right for them to set forth on the banks of the canal the names of the six principal lieutenants of Stalin and Yagoda, the chief overseers of Belomor, six hired murderers each of whom accounted for thirty thousand lives: Firin—Berman—Frenkel—Kogan—Rappoport—Zhuk.
Frenkel, Firin, and Uspensky
Distribution of the food bonus
Map of the Belomor Canal
In 1966 I spent eight hours by the canal. During this time there was one self-propelled barge which passed from Povenets to Soroka, and one, identical in type, which passed from Soroka to Povenets. Their numbers were different, and it was only by their numbers that I could tell them apart and be sure that it was not the same one as before on its way back. Because they were loaded altogether identically: with the very same pine logs which had been lying exposed for a long time and were useless for anything except firewood.
And canceling the one load against the other we get zero.
And a quarter of a million corpses to be remembered.
Sergei Zhuk
Naftaly Frenkel
Yakov Rappoport
Matvei Berman
Lazar Kogan
Genrikh Yagoda
Chapter 4
The Archipelago Hardens
AND THE CLOCK of history was striking.
In 1933, at the January session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Great Leader, who at that time was already computing the number of two-legged beings who had yet to be exterminated in this country, declared that the dying off of the state, so firmly promised by Lenin and fervently expected by humanists, would not come about through weakening the state, but on the contrary through strengthening it to the utmost, which was necessary in order to kill off the moribund classes. . . .
This was so unexpectedly brilliant that it was not given to every little mind to grasp it, but Vyshinsky, ever the loyal apprentice, immediately picked it up: “And this means the maximum strengthening of corrective-labor institutions.”
Entry into socialism via the maximum strengthening of prison! And this was not some satirical magazine cracking a joke either, but was said by the Prosecutor General of the Soviet Union!
And an iron curtain descended around the Archipelago. No one other than the officers and sergeants of the NKVD could enter and leave via the camp gatehouse. That harmonious order of things was established which the zeks themselves would soon come to consider the only conceivable one. . . .
And that is when the wolf’s fangs were bared! And that is when the bottomless pit of the Archipelago gaped wide!
“I’ll shoe you in tin cans, but you’re going to go out to work!”
“If there aren’t enough railroad ties, I’ll make one out of you!”
They say that in February-March, 1938, a secret instruction was circulated in the NKVD: Reduce the number of prisoners. (And not by releasing them, of course.) I do not see anything in the least impossible here: this was a logical instruction because there was simply not enough housing, clothing, or food. Gulag was grinding to a halt from exhaustion.
And this was when the pellagra victims lay down and died en masse. This was when the chiefs of convoy began to test the accuracy of machine-gun fire by shooting at the stumbling zeks. And this was when every morning the orderlies hauled the corpses to the gatehouse, stacking them there.
In the Kolyma, that pole of cold and cruelty in the Archipelago, that very same about-face took place with a sharpness worthy of a pole.
According to the recollections of Ivan Semyonovich Karpunich-Braven (former commander of the 40th Division and of the XII Corps, who recently died with his notes incomplete and scattered), a most dreadfully cruel system of food, work, and punishment was established in the Kolyma. The prisoners were so famished that at Zarosshy Spring they ate the corpse of a horse which had been lying dead for more than a week and which not only stank but was covered with flies and maggots. At Utiny Goldfields the zeks ate half a barrel of lubricating grease, brought there to grease the wheelbarrows. At Mylga they ate Iceland moss, like the deer. And when the passes were shut by snowdrifts, they used to issue three and a half ounces of bread a day at the distant goldfields, without ever making up for previous deficiencies. Multitudes of “goners,” unable to walk by themselves, were dragged to work on sledges by other “goners” who had not yet become quite so weak. Those who lagged behind were beaten with clubs and torn by dogs. Working in 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, they were forbidden to build fires and warm themselves.
The beginning of the war shook the Archipelago chieftains: the course of the war at the very start was such that it might very likely have led to the breakdown of the entire Archipelago, and perhaps even to the employers having to answer to the workers. As far as one can judge from the impressions of the zeks from various camps, the course of events gave rise to two different kinds of conduct among the bosses. Some of them, those who were either more reasonable or perhaps more cowardly, relaxed their regime and began to talk with the prisoners almost gently, particularly during the weeks of military defeats. They were unable, of course, to improve the food or the maintenance. Others who were more stubborn and more vicious began, on the contrary, to be even stricter and more threatening with the 58s, as if to promise them death before liberation. And in some camps (sensing intuitively the direction of future policy) they began to isolate the 58s from the nonpolitical offenders in compounds guarded with particular strictness, put machine guns up on the watchtowers, and even spoke thus to the zeks who had formed up: “You are hostages!”
From the first days of the war, everywhere in the Archipelago (on opening the packages of mobilization instructions) they halted all releases of 58s. There were even cases of released prisoners being sent back to camp while on their way home. In Ukhta on June 23 a group released was already outside the perimeter waiting for a train when the convoy chased them back and even cursed them: “It’s because of you the war began!” Karpunich received his release papers on the morning of June 23 but had not yet succe
eded in getting through the gatehouse when they coaxed them out of him by fraud: “Show them to us!” He showed them and was kept in camp for another five years. This was considered to mean “until special orders.” (When the war had already come to an end, in many camps they were forbidden even to go to the Classification and Records Section and ask when they would be freed. The point was that after the war there were not enough people for a while, and many local administrations, even if Moscow allowed them to release prisoners, issued their own “special orders” so as to hold on to manpower.
Here’s what the wartime camp was: more work and less food and less heat and worse clothes and ferocious discipline and more severe punishment—and that still wasn’t all.
For the 58s the wartime camps were particularly unbearable because of their pasting on second terms, which hung over the prisoners’ heads worse than any ax. The Security officers, busily engaged in saving themselves from the front, discovered in well-set-up backwaters and backwoods, in logging expeditions, plots involving the participation of the world bourgeoisie, plans for armed revolts and mass escapes.
Such are the forms into which the islands of the Archipelago hardened, but one need not think that as it hardened it ceased to exude more metastases from itself.
In 1939, before the Finnish War, Gulag’s alma mater, Solovki, which had come too close to the West, was moved via the Northern Sea Route to the mouth of the Yenisei River and there merged into the already created Norillag, which soon reached 75,000 in size. So malignant was Solovki that even in dying it threw off one last metastasis—and what a metastasis!
The Archipelago’s conquest of the unpeopled deserts of Kazakhstan belongs to the prewar years. That was where the nest of Karaganda camps swelled like an octopus; and fertile metastases were propagated in Dzhezkazgan with its poisoned cuprous water, in Mointy and in Balkhash. And camps spread out over the north of Kazakhstan also.
New growths swelled in Novosibirsk Province (the Mariinsk Camps), in the Krasnoyarsk region (the Kansk Camps and Kraslag), in Khakassiya, in Buryat-Mongolia, in Uzbekistan, even in Gornaya Shoriya.
Nor did the Russian North, so beloved by the Archipelago, end its own growth.
Chapter 5
What the Archipelago
Stands On
THE CAMPS ARE not merely the “dark side” of our postrevolutionary life but very nearly the very liver of events.
Just as every point is formed by the intersection of at least two lines, every event is formed by the intersection of at least two necessities—and so although on one hand our economic requirements led us to the system of camps, this by itself might have led us to labor armies, but it intersected with the theoretical justification for the camps, fortunately already formulated.
And so they met and grew together. And that is how the Archipelago was born.
The economic need manifested itself, as always, openly and greedily; for the state which had decided to strengthen itself in a very short period of time and which did not require anything from outside, the need was manpower:
a. Cheap in the extreme, and better still—for free.
b. Undemanding, capable of being shifted about from place to place any day of the week, free of family ties, not requiring either established housing, or schools, or hospitals, or even, for a certain length of time, kitchens and baths.
It was possible to obtain such manpower only by swallowing up one’s own sons.
The theoretical justification could not have been formulated with such conviction in the haste of those years had it not had its beginnings in the past century. Engels discovered that the human being had arisen not through the perception of a moral idea and not through the process of thought, but out of happenstance and meaningless work (an ape picked up a stone—and with this everything began). Marx, concerning himself with a less remote time (“Critique of the Gotha Program”), declared with equal conviction that the one and only means of correcting offenders (true, he referred here to criminals; he never even conceived that his pupils might consider politicals offenders) was not solitary contemplation, not moral soul-searching, not repentance, and not languishing (for all that was superstructure!)—but productive labor. He himself had never in his life taken a pick in hand. To the end of his days he never pushed a wheelbarrow, mined coal, felled timber, and we don’t even know how his firewood was split—but he wrote that down on paper, and the paper did not resist.
And for his followers everything now fell into place: To compel a prisoner to labor every day (sometimes fourteen hours at a time, as at the Kolyma mine faces) was humane and would lead to his correction. On the contrary, to limit his confinement to a prison cell, courtyard, and vegetable garden, to give him the chance to read books, write, think, and argue during these years meant to treat him “like cattle. (This is from that same “Critique of the Gotha Program.”)
True, in the heated times immediately following the October Revolution they paid little heed to these subtleties, and it seemed even more humane simply to shoot them.
Oh, “what an intelligent, farsighted humane administration from top to bottom,” as Supreme Court Judge Leibowitz of New York State wrote in Life magazine, after having visited Gulag. “In serving out his term of punishment the prisoner retains a feeling of dignity.” That is what he comprehended and saw.
And oh, you well-fed, devil-may-care, nearsighted, irresponsible foreigners with your notebooks and your ball-point pens—beginning with those correspondents who back in Kem asked the zeks questions in the presence of the camp chiefs—how much you have harmed us in your vain passion to shine with understanding in areas where you did not grasp a lousy thing!
Human dignity! Of persons condemned without trial? Who are made to sit down beside Stolypin cars at stations with their rear ends in the mud? Who, at the whistle of the citizen jailer’s lash, scrape up with their hands the urine-soaked earth and carry it away, so as not to be sentenced to the punishment block? Of those educated women who, as a great honor, have been found worthy of laundering the linen of the citizen chief of the camp and of feeding his privately owned pigs? And who, at his first drunken gesture, have to make themselves available, so as not to perish on general work the next day?
Serfs! This comparison occurred to many when they had the time to think about it, and not accidentally either. Not just individual features, but the whole central meaning of their existence was identical for serfdom and the Archipelago; they were forms of social organization for the forced and pitiless exploitation of the unpaid labor of millions of slaves.
But there are some who will object that nonetheless there are really not so many similarities between serfs and prisoners. There are more differences.
And we agree with that: there are more differences. But what is surprising is that all the differences are to the credit of serfdom! All the differences are to the discredit of the Gulag Archipelago!
The serfs did not work longer than from sunrise to sunset. The zeks started work in darkness and ended in darkness (and they didn’t always end either). For the serfs Sundays were sacred; and the twelve sacred Orthodox holidays as well, and local saints’ days, and a certain number of the twelve days of Christmas (they went about in mummers’ costumes). The prisoner was fearful on the eve of every Sunday: he didn’t know whether they would get it off. And he never got holidays at all; those firsts of May and those sevenths of November involved more miseries, with searches and special regimen, than the holidays were worth (and a certain number were put into punishment blocks every year precisely on those very days). For the serfs Christmas and Easter were genuine holidays; and as for a body search either after work or in the morning or at night, the serfs knew not of these! The serfs lived in permanent huts, regarding them as their own, and when at night they lay down on top of their stoves, or on their sleeping platform between ceiling and stove—or else on a bench, they knew: This is my own place, I have slept here forever and ever, and I always will. The prisoner did not know what barracks he w
ould be in on the morrow (and even when he returned from work he could not be certain that he would sleep in that place that night). He did not have his “own” sleeping shelf or his “own” multiple bunk. He went wherever they drove him.
Old Russia, which experienced Asiatic slavery for seven whole centuries, did not for the most part know famine. “In Russia no one has ever died of starvation,” said the proverb. And a proverb is not made up out of lies and nonsense. The serfs were slaves, but they had full bellies. The Archipelago lived for decades in the grip of cruel famine. The zeks would scuffle over a herring tail from the garbage pail. For Christmas and Easter even the thinnest serf peasant broke his fast with fat bacon. But even the best worker in camp could get fat bacon only in parcels from home.
The serfs lived in families. The sale or exchange of a serf away from his family was a universally recognized and proclaimed barbarism. Popular Russian literature waxed indignant over this. Hundreds of serfs, perhaps thousands (but this is unlikely), were torn from their families. But not millions. The zek was separated from his family on the first day of his arrest and, in 50 percent of all cases—forever. If a son was arrested with his father (as we heard from Vitkovsky) or a wife together with her husband, the greatest care was taken to see that they did not meet at the same camp. And if by some chance they did meet, they were separated as quickly as possible. Similarly, every time a man and a woman zek came together in camp for fleeting or real love, they hastened to penalize them with the punishment cell, to separate them and send them away from one another. . . .
There was a famous incantation repeated over and over again: “In the new social structure there can be no place for the discipline of the stick on which serfdom was based, nor the discipline of starvation on which capitalism is based.”
The Gulag Archipelago Page 26