Stalin wanted the Palace of Soviets on the site where the famous Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer then stood. The cathedral was the largest house of worship in the USSR, created from contributions of ordinary citizens to celebrate victory over Napoleon, but now it was leveled. Distraught clerics who protested were dragged off and shot the same night.21
But publicists hailed the coming palace as “a symbol in the people’s eyes of all the achievements of socialism.”22 There was an ironic truth in this boast, because the palace was never built. While the foundations were being poured, it was discovered that the land could not hold such a massive building and that water seepage into the foundation could not be stopped. Construction was halted when the war came, and eventually the site was converted into a swimming pool. After the end of Communism, the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer was rebuilt in record time and stands today as a symbol of Moscow’s rejuvenation.
Stalin also pressed ahead with the White Sea-Baltic Canal (Belomor), in one of the most inhospitable regions of the country. Again he wanted to use only Gulag labor.
The Politburo had approved the project on May 5, 1930, and it began in February 1931. New camp sites were created as the project moved forward, with prisoners living in horrendous conditions. Solzhenitsyn reports the rumor that a hundred thousand died during 1931–32, the first winter of the project. Even if this number is exaggerated, death was common and bodies were left unburied, their bones eventually interred in the canal.23
In August 1933 the canal was ready for Stalin to take a maiden voyage. He was followed by a group of writers led by Maxim Gorky, who had already written in praise of the concentration camps upon his visit to Solovki in the summer of 1929. Solovki had been readied at that time for Gorky to “inspect,” and he triumphantly proclaimed the camp an unqualified success. “If any so-called cultured European society dared to conduct an experiment such as this colony, and if this experiment yielded fruits as ours had, that country would blow all its trumpets and boast about its accomplishments.”24 The winter that followed Gorky’s visit was especially hard for Solovki. Another twenty thousand men arrived at the already overcrowded camp; given the woeful sanitary conditions, typhus broke out “and many thousands died.”25
On August 17, Gorky led an outing of 120 authors on a visit to the newly completed canal. We have their impressions in a book they published. Written by an authors’ collective, The White Sea-Baltic Canal gave everything the highest grades, especially the concentration camp— a veritable “torch of progress.” They were impressed by forced labor, which, they asserted, worked miracles and transformed what they called “human raw material.”
The authors repeated the line about the causes of crime and the need for labor camps: “Criminals are the result of the repulsive conditions of former times, and our country is beautiful, powerful and generous, and it needs to be beautified.” Those compelled to work on the canal would be “reforged.” No longer was a sentence in prison merely time behind bars, because forced labor led to the “restructuring of the consciousness and the pride of the builder.” Gorky and his authors’ collective did not mention a single person who had died on the Belomor canal.26
George Bernard Shaw came to see the wonders of the Socialist experiment in 1931 and was ushered through the camps, buffed up only hours before. He was impressed and heartily recommended Stalinist Socialism to his friends Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who were equally taken on their visit that year.27
The Gulag had fifty-three camps in 1940, some of them enormous. The Bamlag, for example, was another “moving” camp given the task of building a two-thousand-kilometer-long railway line from Baikal to Amur in the east. The prisoners, numbering 260,000 in 1939, had the impossible task of finishing the railway in four months, not only in the absence of proper machinery but also without adequate clothing and even shoes. Once again, the deaths of the zeks ranged in the tens of thousands.28 The same general lack of utility and wastage of human lives was in evidence in these massive railway construction projects as in the canals.29 The former earned the dubious title of “dead railroads” in every sense of the term. Despite the enormous effort, the results “were insignificant.”30
For a long time the number of Gulag prisoners was top secret, but recently we have found the official figures. Caution is advised because Soviet record keeping was so sloppy. Historians now add together the populations of the Gulag camps with those in “labor colonies.” Thus, in addition to the Gulag prison population we have already mentioned, many were confined in these places. The figures we have show that from 1935 onward, there was somewhere between 240,000 and 885,000 in the colonies. In 1938 there were close to 2 million in the Gulag and colonies combined.31
If we want to imagine a complete picture of how many people were affected, we have to keep in mind what statisticians call “in-out migration,” that is, people who were released (because they were sick or too old) and who were replaced each year. Thus, if 400,000 left the camps and the same number of new prisoners were sent to them in any given year and if we only note the camp population on the first day of the year, we overlook the fact that 400,000 additional people had endured the ordeal. It is, therefore, difficult to say for certain how many passed through the camps.
The great majority were men between the ages of nineteen and forty. In the 1930s women made up on average 6.7 percent of the camp population.32 The fate of women was horrendous. They were assaulted by guards and other prisoners alike; rape and sexual abuse were daily occurrences, and many had to make deals with one or more men who would protect them in return for sexual favors.
The Gulag knew no age limits. Juveniles aged up to eighteen could be sent to the camps or the colonies for many “crimes,” including being homeless or abandoned, breaking passport laws, or being petty thieves.
“Members of the family of repressed persons” (chlen repres-sirovannogo), including children, were not spared in the terror. What happened to them, even young Communists devoted to the cause, can be seen in the case of Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko. His father, Vladimir, was an Old Bolshevik who stormed the Winter Palace in 1917, served as a Red Army commander in the civil war, and for twelve years was a Soviet ambassador abroad. He was recalled in 1937, arrested like so many other Old Bolsheviks, and executed. His son Anton was seventeen at the time, a member of the Komsomol, and a true believer. He could not accept the guilt of his father, but still believed Stalin’s name “was sacred.” His father’s arrest tainted him, and he was arrested in 1940, released, but arrested again the day after the German invasion in June 1941. He endured the next twelve years in the Gulag. That happened even though in the spring of 1938 Stalin had made the famous statement “The son does not answer for the father.”33
GLIMPSES OF THE GULAG FROM THE OUTSIDE
The industrial engineer Victor Kravchenko escaped the purges and clutches of the local NKVD in Ukraine. He was never arrested, but transferred as a plant manager to Pervouralsk in the Urals near Sverdlovsk (formerly Yekaterinburg), where he found the system of favors, the NKVD, which meddled in everything, and the concentration camps. He wrote as follows about the short drive from the railway station:
I suddenly saw the barbed-wire fence of a concentration camp a few hundred meters off the road. We stopped the car so I could take a better look. The camp, acres and acres of bleak barracks in a huge clearing in the woods, seemed deserted, silent as death. It was six-sided and at each of the six corners there was a watchtower, equipped with big searchlights and machine guns.
“Where are the prisoners?” I asked my companion.
“At work this time of the day,” he said. “A few of them are in our own factory, the rest in other plants, mines and on construction jobs. Victor Andreyevich, I see you’re new to the Urals. You’d better get accustomed to the prisoners everywhere.”34
One day Kravchenko went with a colleague on an outing and soon “came across a dismal stretch of marshes where perhaps three hundred prisoners, many of them women, were at work
. All of the unfortunates were indescribably dirty and grotesquely clad, and many of them stood up to their knees in muddy water. They worked in absolute silence, with the most primitive tools and seemed utterly indifferent to the two strangers.”35
In the summer, Kravchenko took two visitors, both members of the Party, to see the beautiful river nearby. They found themselves “on a hillock looking down on the barbed-wire enclosure, in a forest clearing several hundred yards from the river’s edge. As usual, there were the four towers at the corners of the quadrangle. Guards with fixed bayonets were in evidence. At the farther end of the enclosure several hundred prisoners, men and women, were working on the construction of a new row of barracks. Our expedition was ended there and then. All desire to see more of the river left us and we drove back to Pervouralsk in silence.”36
The region around Sverdlovsk, as Kravchenko soon discovered, was one of the areas where concentration camp labor was most heavily used. It seemed that there was a camp with two thousand prisoners or so in all directions. They had to tramp six or seven miles to work sites each day and in all weather.
There were concentration camps in the nearby city of Magnitogorsk, the industrial center created from scratch in the context of the Five-Year Plan. Former kulaks lived in a special labor settlement (spetstrud-poselok). In the early 1930s, there were somewhere between thirty and fifty thousand of these unfortunates kept behind barbed wire in the city. Over the winter of 1932–33 the kulaks had to live in tents, and an estimated four or five thousand workers died. No children under ten survived. The dead were replaced each year by a stream of newcomers, so the population of the colony stayed the same. By the end of the 1930s an estimated thirty thousand were still in this camp.37 During the 1930s the kulaks made the most of their bad situation, and eventually the barbed wire came down and the armed guards were removed. They still lived in “wretched” wooden barracks and had to repay the government for the cost of constructing these camps.38
Although the kulaks in Magnitogorsk regained the right to vote, only about one-quarter obtained passports, so that 75 percent of them could not leave town. Over the years, when ordinary people suffered during times of shortages, the former kulaks, as social outcasts, had it far worse.39 Officially, 389,521 of these “special settlers” died between 1932 and 1940.40
Also in Magnitogorsk was a separate corrective labor colony (ITK) that belonged to the Gulag and held “harmful elements.”41 One day the American John Scott, a Communist fellow traveler, came upon “a curious sight” of forty or fifty Orthodox clergy “wearing dirty, ragged, black robes.” Scott noted distantly how “they were hard at work with pick and shovel, digging away a little hill. A pug-nosed plowboy sat on a near-by knoll with an old rifle on his lap and surveyed them placidly. I asked one of them what he was there for, but he did not even answer me.”42
Scott did not empathize with the forlorn and seemed unmoved upon hearing that they “had been charged with burning grain or some such semi-criminal, semi-political offense.”43
In the few years of its existence through 1933, the ITK in Magnitogorsk “officially” received 26,786 settlers. Their treatment was reflected in their physical condition, which was so bad that they stood out; they were easily recaptured when they tried to escape.44
In all of the Soviet Union in 1940 there were 425 of these corrective labor colonies with a population numbering 315, 584. The original intention was for them to hold men and women who were serving short sentences, but that rule varied. The Soviet gospel on crime was that people had to work to find a “cure,” but in fact they were fed so badly and worked so hard that many died.45
Stalin and other leaders were bombarded with requests from the commissariats for more “cheap” Gulag labor. At the meeting of the All-Russian Central Committee of the Party in July 1940, Stalin raised objections. He found the use of such labor in remote places acceptable but was less certain about the cities, “where a criminal is working on the side, and then a non-criminal is working there. I don’t know about that. I would say it’s very impractical and not altogether proper.” His quibbles were minor and had no effect. Forced labor continued to be used on projects Stalin thought improper.46
The Gulag was by no means confined to the north or the east but located all over the country. The census for 1939 registered more than 100,000 inhabitants of the Gulag in or near the capital, which included 16,551 “prisoners of camps, prisons, and colonies” under the Moscow NKVD, and another 91,080 under the NKVD of the Moscow region.47 The country was covered from one end to the other.
“MEASURING” TERROR
One way of calculating the extent of the terror in the 1930s and before the war in 1941 is to look at recently revealed statistics on prisoners in the Gulag. These include the census of the camps, taken on the first day of January each year. The system grew annually with the notable exception of 1937, the year of the Great Terror, when so many were executed. The highest number of prisoners in NKVD corrective labor camps was reached on January 1, 1941, when a census counted 1, 500,524 prisoners. There were another 429,000 in labor colonies and some 488,000 in prisons.
The Gulag system, in all its divisions, held a total of four million as of June 1941, with another two million involved in corrective labor. They were entitled to only a small part of their salaries, most of which was withheld by the state. They lived in constant dread, since even a minor infraction of the rules could mean incarceration.48
Apart from being sent to the Gulag, approximately 20 million (including some repeat offenders) were “convicted” in one way or another between 1930 and 1941. We might recall that the 1939 census counted 37, 500,000 families, and 4 million single adults. If we match the “convictions” to these population figures, we can see that one or more members of every second family suffered arrest, execution, or detention.49
Imposing work discipline was yet another side of the terror. It became mandatory to fire and to evict workers from company housing in 1938 if they were late for work on three occasions. In 1939 the effort was stepped up by criminalizing misbehavior at the workplace. A compulsory workbook was introduced to keep tabs on employees.50
In June 1940 a decree was passed “on the adoption of the eight-hour day, the seven-day working week, and the ban on leaving work of one’s own accord.” Employees more than twenty minutes late (including people like schoolteachers) could be punished by six months of “corrective work.” Moreover, they would be docked 25 percent of their wages and might be sent to prison for up to four months. This decree, which pressured everyone, was one of the most hated.51
On August 10, a new decree increased the punishment for offenses like shoddy work, petty theft, and “hooliganism.” Culprits could be sent to the camps for up to three years or subjected to other punishments. Given the high-handed and often corrupt ways of supervisory officials, in tandem with the arbitrary police, the new decree made ordinary citizens more vulnerable than ever to the vagaries of the system.
The commissar of armaments, Boris Vannikov, persuaded Stalin that these measures were needed to control the workforce. The Great Terror had undermined the authority of managers, he said, and discipline had to be restored.52 Stalin went along but was uneasy. As he suspected, the new regulations were unpopular, and prosecuting undisciplined workers swamped the court system. In the first year the decree on tardiness led to the prosecution of three million (approximately 8 percent of the total workforce), with half sentenced to imprisonment. Lesser punishments were also devised for the tardy—for example, forcing surface workers in the coal fields to work down in the mines.53 The number of “hooligans” sent to the camps doubled in 1940 what it had been in 1939.54
According to Wolfgang Leonhard, a true-believing Communist and student who lived in Moscow at the time, the new decrees “came to occupy so central a position in the life of every inhabitant of the Soviet Union, that others were hardly noticed at all. The collapse of France, the air battles over England, the occupation of the Baltic states by
Soviet forces and their conversion into Republics of the USSR, the annexation of Bessarabia and the northern part of Bukovina to the Soviet Union—all paled into insignificance in comparison with the struggle against the so-called shirkers, idlers and disruptive elements.”55
At the beginning of the Nazi invasion, the NKVD reported some Moscow workers as defiantly saying, “When Hitler takes our towns, he will put up posters saying ‘I won’t put workers on trial, like your government does, just because they are twenty-one minutes late for work.’” Such remarks were mixed in with calls to get rid of the Communists and the Jews, revealing again some of the fatal ways anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism became entangled in these dangerous times.56
Stalin worried about the productivity of the countryside. When he heard of continuing problems, he was usually told that the collective farmers paid more attention to their tiny private plots than to the large enterprise. In 1939 an investigation led by A. A. Andreyev reported at the end of May that peasants were undermining collective farms to devote time to their own pursuits. Many did not work full-time on the collective at all, some put in a few days, while others did piecework for money. Stalin and other leaders were appalled, and in the discussion of Andreyev’s report the terms that kept coming up were “compelling,” “obliging,” “limiting,” “forcing,” and “nationalizing” to describe the method to get peasants to produce more.57
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