The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  After they had gone a few kilometres, Aleksei moored the boat, hid his wife and daughter in the bushes and walked back to the Kerzhaki settlement to rescue Tamara. Four days later he returned, carrying Tamara on his back.

  But their troubles were far from over. A patrol caught up with them, as they were making their way north. They were taken to another camp, a barrack surrounded by a high wire fence, 8 kilometres from Tomsk, where they spent the next six months. Aleksei transported vegetables by horse and cart to Tomsk, while Yevdokiia and the children were put to work with other prisoners in a kolkhoz. In Tomsk Aleksei got to know a town official, who took pity on his family and, as an act of conscience, agreed to help them escape. One day Aleksei covered his daughters with potato sacks and drove them in his cart to Tomsk, where they hid in the official’s house. They were joined by Yevdokiia, who had jumped on to a train as it passed through the field where she was working. Dressed in new clothes bought for them by the official, the Okorokovs returned by train to Kuznetsk (which by this time had been renamed Stalinsk). Aleksei worked in a coal mine and Yevdokiia in a canteen. And family life began again. ‘Father at once set to work building us a wooden house with one window and a clay oven. We lived in our little corner, without hurting anyone, and depending on no one.’

  And then a few months later, the passport system arrived in Stalinsk. Aleksei decided to go back to Ilinka, his native village, in the hope of getting registered, but as soon as he arrived he was arrested and imprisoned in a labour camp. Yevdokiia, waiting in Stalinsk, finally received a letter from Aleksei. Because the letter would alert the police to her whereabouts, Yevdokiia fled with her daughters to the nearby town of Tashtagol, where the passport system had not yet been introduced. Aleksei joined them shortly afterwards, having somehow managed to escape from the prison camp. He built a shack in which they lived. Yevdokiia picked up casual jobs. When she realized that she was pregnant, she performed an abortion on herself, smashing her fists against her womb and pulling out the foetus. She nearly died. She lay in bed for several months. None of the doctors in the town would even look at her, because abortion had been declared illegal by the government. Yevdokiia cured herself by eating herbs.

  In 1934, the passport system reached Tashtagol. Aleksei was rearrested and sent to the Stalinsk metal works as a penal labourer. Yevdokiia and the girls were arrested too. By sheer coincidence, they were sent off to join him at the metal works. They lived together – one of several hundred families – in a dug-out which ran along the river bank against the outside of the factory wall. The ‘roof’ was made of branches and pine needles packed with mud; the ‘walls’ leaked in the rain. Aleksei made some rudimentary furniture. He carved wooden cups and spoons. Once again the Okorokovs began to piece together a domestic existence. Miraculously, they had survived and managed to remain together as a family, but the traumas of the past three years had left their mark, especially on the girls. Maria and Tamara both suffered from nightmares. They were frightened and withdrawn. ‘After three years of living on the run,’ reflects Maria, ‘my sister and I had grown accustomed to not talking. We had learned to whisper rather than to talk.’47

  3

  The promise of the Five Year Plan was the creation of a modern industrial society. ‘We are marching full steam ahead on the road to industrialization, to socialism, leaving behind our age-old Russian backwardness,’ Stalin said in 1929. ‘We are becoming a nation of metal, motors and tractors, and when we have placed the Soviet man in an automobile and the peasant on a tractor, then let the capitalists of the West, who so proudly vaunt their civilization, attempt to catch up with us.’48

  The symbols of this progress were the huge construction projects of the First Five Year Plan: industrial cities like Magnitogorsk, a vast complex of steel and iron works built from scratch on the barren slopes of the Urals; railroads and canals, like the Moscow–Volga and the White Sea Canal, which opened up new areas to exploitation and supplied the booming cities with basic goods; and enormous dams like Dneprostroi, the largest hydro-electric installation in the world, whose turbines were turning by 1932. These ‘successes’ had an important propaganda value for the Stalinist regime at a time when there was still considerable opposition – inside and outside the Party – to the policies of forcible collectivization and the over-ambitious industrial targets of the Five Year Plan. They enabled it to foster the belief in ‘socialist progress’, in the imminent arrival of the Soviet utopia, which became the ideological justification for the sacrifices demanded from the people for the plan’s fulfilment. In his memoirs, written in the 1980s, Anatoly Mesunov, a peasant son who became an OGPU guard at the White Sea Canal, sums up the effect of this propaganda on millions of ‘ordinary Stalinists’, as he describes himself:

  I had my doubts about the Five Year Plan. I did not understand why we had to drive so many convicts to their deaths to finish the canal. Why did it have to be done so fast? At times it troubled me. But I justified it by the conviction that we were building something great, not just a canal, but a new society that could not have been built by voluntary means. Who would have volunteered to work on that canal? Today, I understand that it was very harsh and perhaps even cruel to build socialism in this way, but I still believe that it was justified.49

  Stalin’s industrial revolution was very different from the industrialization of Western societies. As Mesunov suggests, the rates of growth that Stalin had demanded in the Five Year Plan could not have been achieved without the use of forced labour, particularly in the cold and remote regions of the Far North and Siberia, where most of the country’s minerals and fuel supplies were located. The supply of slave labour, beginning with the mass arrest and deportation of the ‘kulaks’ in 1929, was the economic rationale of the Gulag system. Although originally conceived as a prison for the regime’s enemies, the Gulag system soon developed as a form of economic colonization – as a cheap and rapid way of settling the land and exploiting the industrial resources of the Soviet Union’s remote regions, where nobody would want to live – and this rationale was openly acknowledged by Gulag officials among themselves.50 Historians have different views of the Gulag’s origins – some seeing it as a by-product of Stalin’s consolidation of political power, others emphasizing its role as a means of isolating and punishing phantom ‘classes’ like the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘kulaks’, or national and ethnic groups which were deemed dangerous to the state.51 These factors all played their part, but the economic motive was key, growing in importance from the moment the regime began to look for ways to make its prisons pay for themselves.

  In the 1920s, the labour camps were basically prisons in which the prisoners were expected to work for their keep. The most important was the Solovetsky Camp of Special Significance (SLON), established by OGPU in a former monastery on the White Sea island of that name in 1923, which was to become the prototype of the Gulag in its use of slave labour. Employed in tsarist times to incarcerate political dissidents, the monastery was turned by the Bolsheviks into a general prison for all its adversaries – members of the outlawed opposition parties, intellectuals, former Whites – as well as ‘speculators’ and common criminals. One of the prisoners was Naftaly Frenkel, a Jewish businessman from Palestine who had become involved in smuggling to Soviet Russia and was arrested by the Soviet police in 1923. Shocked by the prison’s inefficiency, Frenkel wrote a letter setting out his ideas on how to run the camp and put it in the prisoners’ ‘complaints box’. Somehow the letter got to Genrikh Iagoda, the fast-rising OGPU boss. Frenkel was whisked off to Moscow, where he explained his plans for the use of prison labour to Stalin, who was keen on the idea of using prisoners for economic tasks. Frenkel was released in 1927 and placed in charge of turning SLON into a profit-making enterprise. The prison’s population expanded rapidly, from 10,000 in 1927 to 71,000 in 1931, as SLON won contracts to fell timber and build roads and took over factories in Karelia, on the Finnish border. Most of the new arrivals were ‘kulak’ peasants, like Nik
olai Golovin, who came to the Solovetsky camp in December 1930. The prisoners were organized according to their physical abilities and given rations according to how much work they did. The strong survived and the weak died.52

  In 1928, as the mass arrests of ‘kulaks’, priests and traders, ‘bourgeois specialists’ and engineers, ‘wreckers’, ‘saboteurs’ and other ‘enemies’ of Stalin’s forced industrialization threatened to overwhelm the Soviet prison system, the Politburo established a commission to study the possible use to which the growing prison population could be put. Headed by the Commissar of Justice, N. M. Ianson, the commission included Interior Commissar V. N. Tolmachyov as well as Iagoda, the OGPU chief. The three men were locked in battle for control of the prison population, but Stalin clearly favoured Iagoda, who proposed using it to colonize and exploit the industrial resources of the Far North and Siberia through a new network of labour camps. There was an almost inexhaustible supply of timber in these remote areas; and geologists, like Pavel Vittenburg, were charting rich reserves of gold, tin, nickel, coal, gas and oil, which could be cheaply mined by convict labourers. In April 1929, the commission proposed the creation of a new system of ‘experimental’ camps, each with 50,000 prisoners, controlled by OGPU. The commission underlined that, by concentrating larger numbers in the camps, the costs of maintaining this slave labour force could be reduced from 250 to just 100 roubles per capita per year. Two months later, the Politburo passed a resolution (‘On the Use of Prison Labour’) instructing OGPU to establish a network of ‘correctional-labour camps’ for the ‘colonization of [remote] regions and the exploitation of their natural wealth through the work of prisoners’. From this point on, the political police became one of the main driving forces of Soviet industrialization. It controlled a rapidly expanding empire of penal labour camps, whose population grew from 20,000 prisoners in 1928 to 1 million by 1934, when OGPU merged with the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs); the new authority then took control of the political police and directed all these labour camps through the Gulag.53

  The largest of the early penal labour camps, Belbaltlag, with more than 100,000 prisoners by 1932, was used to build the White Sea Canal, 227 kilometres of waterway connecting the Baltic with the White Sea. The idea of the canal had first been advanced in the eighteenth century, but it had proved beyond the technical capabilities of the old regime, so the idea of building it was a vital part of the propaganda mission of the Five Year Plan to demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet system. It was a fantastically ambitious project, given that the planners intended to construct the canal without machines or even proper surveys of the land. Critics of the project (who envisaged building it with free labour) had argued that the huge construction costs could not be justified because there was relatively little shipping on the White Sea. But Stalin was insistent that the canal could be built both cheaply and in record time – a symbol of the Party’s will and power – as long as OGPU supplied sufficient prison labour. Frenkel was put in charge of construction. The methods he had used in SLON were re-employed on the canal, as were many of the prisoners, who were transferred from the Solovetsky camp to the canal. To save time and money, the depth of the canal was soon reduced from 22 feet to just 12, rendering it virtually useless for all but shallow barges and passenger vessels (in some of the southern sections, built in a rush at the end of the project in 1932–3, the canal was only 6 feet deep). Prisoners were given primitive hand tools – crudely fashioned axes, saws and hammers – instead of dynamite and machinery. Everything was done by hand – the digging of the earth, the dragging of the heavy stones, the carting of the earth in wheelbarrows, the construction of the wooden cranes and scaffolding, not to mention the camp sites, which were built by the prisoners themselves along the route of the canal. Worked to exhaustion in the freezing cold, an unknown number of prisoners, but somewhere in the region of 25,000, died in the first winter of 1931–2 alone, although among the survivors the number of dead was rumoured to be much higher. Dmitry Vitkovsky, a former prisoner of the Solovetsky labour camp who worked as a supervisor on the White Sea Canal, recalls the scene:

  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 sub-camp 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 fulfil 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 the 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 for ever.54

  Apart from the physical destruction of human life, the White Sea Canal brought untold suffering to many families.

  Ignatii and Maria Maksimov were childhood sweethearts from the village of Dubrovo in the Valdai region of Novgorod province. They were married in 1924, when Maria turned sixteen, and worked on Ignatii’s family farm until 1927, when they moved to Leningrad, where Ignatii found work as a carpenter. In October 1929, five months after the birth of their daughter Nadezhda, Ignatii was arrested (he had taken part in a peasant uprising against the Bolsheviks in 1919) and was sent first to the Solovetsky camp, and then to the northern sector of the White Sea Canal. Meanwhile, Maria was evicted from their room in Leningrad. She returned with Nadezhda to Dubrovo, only to discover that her parents’ house, like the Maksimovs’, had been destroyed, and both families sent into exile. No one from her family was left in Dubrovo. Maria was advised by an old neighbour to flee the village to avoid arrest herself. Carrying her baby, she walked across the border into the neighbouring province of Tver (hoping this would put her beyond the reach of the Novgorod police) and knocked on the door of the first house of the first village she came across. The door was opened by an old couple. Maria went down on her knees and begged them to take in her daughter, so that she could run away: nobody would give work to a woman with a child. The couple were kind people. They nursed Nadezhda for two years, while Maria got a job as a cook on the Leningrad to Murmansk railway. The railway ran along the northern sector of the White Sea Canal, where Ignatii was working, although Maria did not know that at the time. She knew nothing about her husband until 1932, when she heard from an acquaintance that he was at a labour camp somewhere in the region of Belomorsk, where the canal ran into the White Sea. Maria tried to make contact with her husband by writing notes on little scraps of paper and throwing them from the kitchen-carriage window as the train passed the building works at Belomorsk. Finally, a miracle occurred: she received a letter from Ignatii, who was actually in a camp near Kem, 55 kilometres further north on the railway line towards Murmansk. At the end of 1932, Ignatii was released and sent into exile in Arkhangelsk, where he was reunited with Maria and Nadezhda.55

  Maria, Nadezhda and Ignatii Maksimov with Ignatii’s brother Anton (standing), Arkhangelsk, 1934

  The Gulag was more than a source of labour for building projects like the White Sea Canal. It was itself a form of industrialization. The first industrial complex of the Gulag system was the integrated pulp-and-paper mill at Vishlag, an OGPU complex of labour camps on the Vishera River in the Urals. The complex began life in 1926 as a vast network of logging camps administered by SLON, but it was not until the summer of 1929, when Eduard Ber
zin, the Latvian Bolshevik, was placed in charge of building works, that the camp developed its industrial activities. The purity of the Vishera’s waters led the Politburo to choose it as the site for producing the high-quality paper that began to appear in the early 1930s, when prestigious publications like the Large Soviet Encyclopedia were printed on the paper of the Vishlag mill. By 1930, the Vishlag camps had a population of 20,000 prisoners (including the writer Varlam Shalamov): 12,000 were employed in the logging camps; 2,000 in the smaller factories (making bricks and cellulose); while the rest were used to build the pulp-and-paper mill, as well as the barracks settlements at Krasnovishersk and Gorod Sveta (‘Town of Light’), which grew into civilian towns.56 Berzin conceived of these Gulag settlements as an ‘experimental form of industrial development’ whose cultural institutions would re-educate the prisoners to become ‘Soviet workers’. Gorod Sveta boasted film and radio clubs, libraries and canteens, health centres, gardens laid out with fountains, wildlife areas, open-air theatres, debating areas and the ‘main camp club’ in a colonnaded building, which reminded Shalamov of the Parthenon, ‘only it was more frightening’.57

  Vishlag was typical of the Gulag system in its early years, when the idea of using prison labour to ‘reforge’ human beings in a Soviet mould was not just propaganda but an article of faith for many Bolsheviks. For all that, the Vishlag camp with its paper-mill was primarily an economic venture. Berzin’s operating principles were based entirely on the projected returns from his investments, which included moral and material incentives to stimulate the prisoners to meet production plans. In November 1931, Berzin moved on to become the first boss of Dalstroi (Far Northern Construction Trust), a vast conglomerate of labour camps (including the infamous Kolyma camps) in the north-east corner of Siberia – an area the size of Western Europe between the Pacific and the Arctic oceans – where the world’s biggest gold reserve lay beneath the frozen ground. Berzin ran the Dalstroi camps on the same economic principles as he had run Vishlag: his job was to get his prisoners to dig as much gold as possible (by the mid-1930s the gold production of the Dalstroi camps exceeded the total gold production of the Soviet Union in 1928).58 During Berzin’s reign (1931–7) conditions in the Dalstroi camps were much better than they would become in later years, when many prisoners would look back with nostalgia to the Berzin period, as Shalamov did in his Kolyma Tales: