Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  Dmitlag: the Gulag Archipelago at the gates of the capital: theparallel society of the camp zone

  This fantastic landscape arose chiefly through the slave labour of the inmates of Dmitlag. OGPU Order No. 889/s, of 14 September 1932, initiated the establishment of the corrective labour camp and its settlement.28

  The centre of the camp complex was the ancient Russian town of Dmitrov, which lies to the north of Moscow. The headquarters of Moskva–Volga Stroi were located in the cloisters of Saint Boris and Saint Gleb and the former clerical seminary attached to it. The museum housed in the monastery was relocated. Prisoners were brought there from all over, from other camps, and included those who had been released and wanted to return to Moscow but were forbidden to do so. But Dmitrov, a mere 60 kilometres from Moscow, was the sole exception. Former Muscovites desirous of returning home tried to get to Dmitrov, since from there it was easier to make contact with their families, businesses and the different institutes.29

  Numbers skyrocketed and reached their peak in 1936. The settlements along the route of the canal bore all the signs of an improvised, provisional town, an instant city created entirely by the canal project. It was an extreme but wholly characteristic form of town building in times of intensified industrialization: towns as appendages of their industrial enterprises and large-scale building sites, as entire suburbs of barracks for workers who had left the land and for forced labourers who had been transported there.

  The prisoners were in effect just dumped in a savage landscape and had to try as best they could to build a roof over their own heads, without housing, food supplies or infrastructure, however basic, or technical equipment of any kind. Working conditions were unimaginably harsh. This is attested to by the order of the commandant, Semen Firin, that outdoor work could be halted only when the temperature reached −30°C. Food rations were not even enough for normal working conditions: 200 grams of groats, 200 grams of macaroni, 100 grams of vegetable oil per person per month. There was more food if the plan was over-fulfilled. Workers went without lunch; the daily norm had to be reached even though it was unattainable for many of those unaccustomed to physical labour. They stood in water and swampy ground and were unable to warm themselves or dry their clothes. Many were forced by hunger to escape or tried to live off berries, mushrooms and food remnants. Many suffered from food poisoning.30 There were repeated refusals to work, infringements of camp discipline, acts of violence, and attacks on camp staff and guards or members of the engineering or technical personnel. The disciplinary responses to such incidents even went as far as executions. Thus eleven prisoners were executed on 13 April 1934.31 Time and again, entire sections were transferred to other camps. Many inmates were shot while trying to escape. The mortality rate was especially high in the first years: 1933: 8,873; 1934: 6,041; 1935: 4,349; 1936: 2,472; 1937: 1,068; 1938: 39. In total, between 14 September 1932 and 31 January 1938, 22,842 people died in Dmitlag.32

  The population of the camp zone – 200,000 at its high point – came from all over, from other camps in the north, from Siberia, from Kazakhstan. A first batch of ‘canal soldiers’ arrived at the end of 1932 and early in 1933, together with its ‘dead inventory’ – barracks, shovels, spades and excavators – and with the camp administration. It was a ‘mixed lot’. The construction site had representatives from forty-six nationalities. The overwhelming majority were prisoners, but there were also volunteers from everywhere in the USSR. Most commonly met with in Dmitlag were prisoners condemned under Articles 35, 72, 73, 79, 82, 83, 107, 109, 165–70, 217 and 230 of the Penal Code. These Articles dealt with economic crimes and crimes against property – ‘infringements against the separation of church and state’, ‘speculation’, escaping from prison, abuse of official positions, and the possession of weapons. Many of those who ended up in the camp had been condemned following the decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Supreme Economic Council of the USSR of 7 August 1932, concerning ‘the protection of property belonging to state enterprises, collective farms and cooperatives and the consolidation of socialist property’. It provided for the maximum penalty of death by shooting and, in the event of mitigating circumstances, ten years’ imprisonment. Dmitlag also contained prisoners sentenced under Articles 58 and 59, i.e. ‘political’ prisoners.33 Since it was not only prisoners who were working along the route of the canal, it happened that prisoners and free workers who had settled in the canal zone or who commuted from Moscow worked alongside one another, so that a strange intermediary world developed based on communal working and living.

  Everything hinged on finishing the canal in the shortest possible time – completion had originally been set for the end of 1934. After the initial work of prospecting and surveying the site, work began simultaneously in a number of sectors. The entire route was divided into fourteen administrative units (raiony). The regions for their part were subdivided into building sectors (uchastki).

  The prisoners had to provide themselves with everything they needed to live and work. They not only built the canal, they cut peat (for burning), felled trees (for burning and building), and constructed sawmills, brickworks, cement factories, repair shops and other factories. The zone extended to the outskirts of Moscow and included road-building – such as the Moscow–Mozhaisk–Minsk Highway. The administrative centre of the canal zone – Dmitrov – could be reached from Moscow by train, allowing free workers and specialists to commute. A special sector with its own dwellings was set aside in Dmitrov for a group of specialists – planners, engineers, architects, draftsmen, and organizers – while an apartment complex for the leading NKVD personnel was built in Moscow at 77–85 1st Meshchanskaia Street.

  Figure 18.2 The building site of the Moscow–Volga Canal

  ‘There was no lack of living workers. The Gulag procured a constant stream of them and in unlimited numbers.’

  This was the largest construction site of the Second Five-Year Plan, a concentration of heavy building equipment unprecedented in the Soviet Union – it involved some 200 excavators, 1,800 cars, 172 locomotives, 2,000 trucks and 300 tractors. Furthermore, some 650 kilometres of rail tracks were laid. But notwithstanding all this, and notwithstanding the fact that the building site brought excavators and cranes from all over the country, this huge effort relied chiefly on manual labour, particularly in the initial phase of the project, when earth-moving was the prime requirement. Just on its own, the cutting close to the village of Khlebnikovo involved the removal of 2 million cubic metres of soil with spades and shovels. There were so many people on the building site carrying the soil in wheelbarrows and panniers that it became necessary to control the traffic.34

  All earth-moving on the canal was carried out by hand. The soil was removed from the building site by labourers, and wheelbarrows too were used. Seen from the Iakhroma Hills, the canal route looked like an infinitely vast living anthill. By night this anthill was bathed in light from a large number of lamps. And that was how it was from the Volga all the way to Moscow, – a picture beyond all imagining. There was no lack of living workers. The Gulag procured a constant stream of them and in unlimited numbers. It can be said without exaggeration that the Moscow Canal was built on the bones of prisoners. After a few years had passed the canal, filled with water, would become the last line of defence in the great battle for Moscow.35

  The commandants of the individual sectors competed with one another to increase productivity, i.e. to exploit slave labour. New competitions in shock work and the Stakhanovite movement were constantly introduced. Those who suffered most were the intellectuals, who were unaccustomed to heavy manual work. Many prisoners, exhausted by the work, fell into the concrete foundations and were buried in them; many terminally sick workers were buried alive because hospital beds had to be kept free for those still capable of work. No one bothered to record the cause of death. Every day gravediggers would transport bodies from Dmitrov, Iakhroma, Orev, Dedeniv and Iksa. Mass graves were dug in the forests and swamps. Bodies were
sometimes buried in the local cemeteries. In the winter the corpses were piled up in heaps and covered with sand and left until the ground softened in spring and they could be buried.36

  Dmitrov was the capital of this empire of forced labour, a ‘centre in its own right, competing, in a sense, with Moscow itself’. Dmitrov contained the entire administrative machinery of the canal. Specialists had apartments in this little engineering town. The management and the free workers had an excellent canteen, a club, a stadium, hospitals – in other words, the infrastructure of an efficient, industrious town. The number of suburban trains was increased because of the pressure of commuters. According to an eyewitness, the mood in the weekend trains was usually pretty cheerful. There was even an asphalt road leading from the headquarters to the station. On Saturdays, all the Muscovites flocked to the station with their bags and baggage. According to one free worker, it was the only time in the history of Moscow when sausage was transported into and not out of Moscow. ‘Dmitrov had transformed itself into a lively centre.’ At lunchtimes the Dmitrov canteen was the chief meeting point where people came together and exchanged news. The square was planted with flowers and featured a lavishly equipped club where new films were shown between 4 and 8, when shifts changed. Such films were often shown at an earlier date than in Moscow itself.37

  Dmitlag was a society in miniature. It had its capital, its centre and its frontiers, its elite and its pariahs, its specialists and its foot soldiers. What held it together was the need to complete the project by the deadline. To ensure that this deadline was not missed, outstanding experts in what was a new organization of forced labour were transferred en masse from the White Sea Canal. In May 1932 Lazar' Kogan was appointed director of the building project; in June 1932 he was replaced by Matvei Berman.38 They were accompanied by other, tried-and-tested personnel from the White Sea Canal. On 23 September 1933 Semen Firin became director of Dmitlag, and on 3 December 1933 Sergei Zhuk was appointed chief engineer of the construction site.39 It was Firin and Zhuk in particular who would stamp their character on events on the canal route right up to its completion. This was the hard core of the management who built up the administration that was essential if the entire machinery was to be coordinated. This called for an organization, an administrative system for distribution and punishment – in short, a camp regime.

  The canal could be constructed only with the help of experts and expert knowledge. At its head were outstanding technical experts such as the chief engineer, Zhuk, who had acquired great experience building hydroelectric power stations – he subsequently became a member of the academy and a director of the Gidroproekt Institute. His deputy was Professor Vladimir Shurin, the former director of the Tashkent Scientific Institute of Hydrology, who had been condemned as a ‘counter-revolutionary’ under Article 58 of the Penal Code. Another figure of importance was Professor Nikolai Nekrasov, a leader of the Cadets, a deputy in the Duma, and then minister and deputy prime minister in the Provisional Government and governor general of Finland. He had not emigrated, but was arrested, and at Lenin’s suggestion he had then been appointed head of the organization of consumer cooperatives. In 1930 he had been arrested once again. Nekrasov was one of the project leaders on the White Sea Canal and, following completion of the Moscow–Volga Canal, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and put in charge of the Volgastroi project in the Kaliazin region. He was shot in 1940. The chief architect of the canal was Iosif Fridland, a graduate of the Bauman Moscow State Technical University and a relation of Iagoda’s. He had already directed a number of earlier projects. He was shot in Moscow on 20 June 1937.40

  The engineering and architectural work involved in the canal project was in the hands of outstanding and well-known Moscow architects, such as Georgii Vegman, Aleksandr Pasternak and Viktor Vesnin.

  Pyotr Kozyrev was in charge of the central design office in Dmitrov. He came from a noble family and later on remained on the Dmitlag construction site as a volunteer. Members of the ‘Kozyrev Group’, as it was known, included Ekaterina Zagriazhskaia, the young architect Iuri Ianshul, and many other ‘former people’ – governors, officers, aristocrats and professors whose high qualifications were indispensable to the project. Dmitlag had an omnivorous need for engineers, electrical experts, architects, hydrologists, peat excavation experts and others with long-standing foreign experience.

  The pilot Aleksandr Raievskii, who worked in the photographic laboratory in Dmitrov and was shot in 1937, had started life with Blériot, the pioneer pilot in France. Leopold Eikhenwald was an expert in the field of radio electronics. He had been born in Mitau (now Jelgava) in Courland (Latvia) in 1877, was educated in France and Belgium, was arrested in 1930 and condemned to death by shooting. His punishment was commuted to ten years in a corrective labour camp. He was released in 1937 because of his achievements and obtained a position in the organization assembling power stations for the Moscow–Volga Canal. Once there, he was arrested on 16 January 1938 and accused of ‘spying and agitation’.41

  Since 1918 Dmitrov had also been the home of Petr Kropotkin (1842–1921), the founder and theoretician of the anarchist movement, who had returned from exile. In the same house in which he had lived, Nikolai Polivanov, who was working on the canal, was arrested in 1937 as a ‘nephew of the prince and anarchist Kropotkin’ and was shot in Butovo on 8 December 1937.42 ‘Former people’ – i.e. members of the pre-revolutionary elite, such as Aleksandr von Zibert, Mikhail Mogilianskii and the Swedish-born St Petersburg architect Erich Gustavson – formed a further special group inside the world of the camp.43

  The events that took place in Dmitrov were not hidden away in an obscure corner. Moscow was surrounded by a considerable number of camps and their satellites; many camps did work for factories and building sites in the capital (such as the airfields of Podol'sk and Tushino, the Dynamo stadium and the southern port). As a model project demonstrating the achievements of the Second Five-Year Plan, the canal was at the centre of public interest and of newspaper reports. There was lively traffic from among the free workers and the administrative and camp personnel commuting between the various authorities and the People’s Commissariats. In addition, the canal zone was itself an attraction and the object of frequent visits from prominent Muscovites, particularly towards the end of the building works. It was the re-education of human beings that was on display.

  In the summer of 1936, the eyes of the entire nation were fixed on the canal construction site. In consequence, all sorts of famous people were keen to visit. There was the film actress Liubov' Orlova, the Arctic explorer Otto Iu. Schmidt, the pilot Mikhail Vodop'ianov, the writer Aleksei Tolstoi, and many others. Dmitrov became a centre of attraction for the Soviet elite.44

  Perekovka/reforging: the laboratory of the new man

  At a meeting of shock workers of both sexes in Dmitrov on 8 March 1934, one of the speakers proclaimed in a programmatic speech:

  We Chekists start from the assumption that no human beings are incorrigible … We must assume that the people we are concerned with are not ordinary people. They are people whose life experiences have been very, very difficult, people who have grown up and been brought up on the streets or in an anti-Soviet environment. We have to meet them halfway without offending them and show them how to remake themselves in a Soviet manner. In the White Sea project it was customary for the best collectives to include ten to twelve workshy people in their group in order to lead them onto the right path. With us it is the other way round – people recoil from them. That is not right. We have to try to transform them.45

  The camp appears as a great resocializing institution in which humans are transformed into ‘social beings’ through their labour.

  For this reason, almost all the organizations of a ‘proper society’ were to be found there. Right at the start a museum was established, soon to be followed by an archive. It was not difficult to find well-qualified personnel among the prisoners to staff such institutions. Thousands of prison
ers were processed through literacy classes – not very differently from what happened ‘outside’, in ‘free society’. The camp had music groups, folk-music ensembles, and even classical orchestras. Dmitrov orchestras played on the building sites in order to spur the workers on to greater efforts.46 Professional and amateur musicians alike took part in the composition competitions, in which the juries consisted of leading Soviet composers. On 23 June 1936 the results of a camp competition to create a specific canal-army piece of music were announced. The jury contained musicians such as Dmitri Kabalevsky and Dmitri Shostakovich, known throughout the USSR. Of 112 works, twenty were selected. The first prizes went to the Dmitlag prisoners who had composed the ‘Cement-Workers’ March’, and songs such as ‘Wind’, ‘Autumn in Orud'evo’ and ‘A Melody for Piano Accordion’. Dmitlag also had a brass band, whose conductor – Max Kuess – was the composer of the famous waltz ‘Amur’s Waves’, and there were permanent orchestras in the individual regions whose task it was to play ‘cheerful’ music for hours on end in quarries and building sites to raise the prisoners’ spirits.47 There were readings and concerts in the camps with poets and composers, among them the political prisoner Mikhail Cherniak. In 1936 a festival of the best creative talents of Dmitlag went on for six days. The centrepiece was on the subject of ‘Who lives well in Russia?’, after motifs taken from Nikolai Nekrasov, directed by Petr Triodin and the former ballerina Nina Vitkovskaia-Kun – who subsequently was accused under Article 58 and shot in Moscow in 1937.48 There were also theatrical groups in the camp, who produced plays from the classical repertoire as well as light entertainment.