Gulag (16 page)

It can be no accident that during the three years following this decision, the number of prisoners nearly quadrupled, from 4,797 in mid-1932 to 17,852 in mid-1933.
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At the very highest levels of the Soviet hierarchy, someone very much wanted Ukhtpechlag to grow. Given his power and prestige—that could only have been Stalin himself.

In the same way that Auschwitz has become, in popular memory, the camp which symbolizes all other Nazi camps, so too has the word “Kolyma” come to signify the greatest hardships of the Gulag. “Kolyma,” wrote one historian, “is a river, a mountain range, a region, and a metaphor.”
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Rich in minerals—and above all rich in gold—the vast Kolyma region in the far northeastern corner of Siberia, on the Pacific coast, may well be the most inhospitable part of Russia. Kolyma is colder than Komi—temperatures there regularly fall to more than 49 degrees Fahrenheit below zero in the winter—and even more remote.
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To reach the camps of Kolyma, prisoners traveled by train across the entire length of the USSR—sometimes a three-month journey—to Vladivostok. They made the rest of the trip by boat, traveling north past Japan, through the Sea of Okhotsk, to the port of Magadan, the gateway to the Kolyma River valley.

Kolyma’s first commander is one of the most flamboyant figures in the history of the Gulag. Eduard Berzin, an Old Bolshevik, had been commander of the First Latvian Rifle Division, which guarded the Kremlin in 1918. Later, he helped to crush the Social Revolutionaries, Lenin’s socialist opponents, and to unmask Bruce Lockhart’s “British plot.”
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In 1926, Stalin gave Berzin the task of organizing Vishlag, one of the very first large-scale camps. He took to the job with enormous enthusiasm, inspiring a historian of Vishlag to speak of his reign there as being the height of the Gulag’s “romantic period.”
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The OGPU built Vishlag at the same time as the White Sea Canal, and Berzin seems to have very much approved of (or, at least, enthusiastically paid lip service to) Gorky’s ideas about prisoner reform. Glowing with paternalistic goodwill, Berzin provided his inmates with film theaters and discussion clubs, libraries and “restaurant-style” dining halls. He planted gardens, complete with fountains and a small zoological park. He also paid prisoners regular salaries, and operated the same policy of “early release for good work” as did the commanders of the White Sea Canal. Not everyone benefited from these amenities: prisoners who were deemed poor workers, or who were simply unlucky, might be sent to one of Vishlag’s many small forestry
lagpunkts
in the taiga, where conditions were poor, death rates were higher, and prisoners were quietly tortured and even murdered.
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Still, Berzin’s intention, at least, was that his camp
appeared
to be an honorable institution. All of which makes him seem, at first glance, an odd candidate to become the first boss of the Far Northern Construction Administration—Dalstroi—the “trust,” or pseudo-corporation, which would develop the Kolyma region. For there was nothing particularly romantic or idealistic about the founding of Dalstroi. Stalin’s interest in the region dated from 1926, when he sent an envoy engineer to the United States to study mining techniques.
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Later, between August 20, 1931, and March 16, 1932, the Politburo discussed the geology and geography of Kolyma no less than eleven times—with Stalin himself contributing frequently to the discussions. Like the Yanson commission’s deliberations on the organization of the Gulag, the Politburo conducted these debates, in the words of the historian David Nordlander, “not in the idealistic rhetoric of socialist construction, but rather in the practical language of investment priorities and financial returns.” Stalin devoted his subsequent correspondence with Berzin to questions about inmate productivity, quotas, and output, never touching on the ideals of prisoner reform.
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Kolyma, 1937

On the other hand, Berzin’s talent for creating rosy public images may have been precisely what the Soviet leadership wanted. For although Dalstroi would later be absorbed directly into the Gulag administration, in the beginning the trust was always referred to—in public—as if it were a separate entity, a sort of business conglomerate, which had nothing to do with the Gulag at all. Quietly, the authorities founded Sevvostlag, a Gulag camp which leased out convicts to the Dalstroi Trust. In practice, the two institutions never competed. The boss of Dalstroi was also the boss of Sevvostlag, and nobody had any doubt about that. On paper, however, they were kept separate, and in public they appeared to be distinct entities.
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There was a certain logic to this arrangement. For one, Dalstroi needed to attract volunteers, especially engineers and marriageable women (there were always shortages of both in Kolyma) and Berzin conducted many recruiting drives in an attempt to persuade “free workers” to emigrate to the region, even setting up offices in Moscow, Leningrad, Odessa, Rostov, and Novosibirsk.
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For that reason alone, Stalin and Berzin may have wanted to avoid associating Kolyma too closely with the Gulag, fearing that the link might frighten away potential recruits. Although there is no direct proof, these machinations may also have been directed at the outside world. Like Soviet timber, Kolyma’s gold would be sold directly to the West, exchanged for desperately needed technology and machinery. This may help explain why the Soviet leadership wanted to make the Kolyma gold fields seem as much like a “normal” economic enterprise as possible. A boycott of Soviet gold would be far more damaging than a boycott of Soviet timber.

In any case, Stalin’s personal involvement with Kolyma was extremely strong from the beginning. In 1932, he actually demanded daily reports on the gold industry, and, as already noted, interested himself in the details of Dalstroi’s exploration projects and quota fulfillments. He sent out inspectors to examine the camps, and required Dalstroi’s leaders to travel frequently to Moscow. When the Politburo allotted money to Dalstroi, it also issued precise instructions as to how the money was to be spent, as it did with Ukhtpechlag.
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Yet Dalstroi’s “independence” was not entirely fictitious either. Although he did answer to Stalin, Berzin also managed to leave his mark on Kolyma, so much so that the “Berzin era” was later remembered with some nostalgia. Berzin appears to have understood his task in quite a straightforward manner: it was his job to get his prisoners to dig as much gold as possible. He was not interested in starving them or killing them or punishing them—only production figures mattered. Under Dalstroi’s first boss, conditions were therefore not nearly as harsh as they became later, and prisoners were not nearly as hungry. Partly as a result, Kolyma’s gold output increased eight times in the first two years of Dalstroi’s operation.
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True, the first years were fraught with the same chaos and disorganization that prevailed elsewhere. By 1932, nearly 10,000 prisoners were at work in the region—among them the group of inmate engineers and specialists whose skills tallied so beautifully with the task in front of them—along with more than 3,000 voluntary “free workers”—camp workers who were not prisoners.
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The high numbers were accompanied by high death rates. Of the 16,000 prisoners who traveled to Kolyma in Berzin’s first year, only 9,928 even reached Magadan alive.
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The rest were thrown, underclothed and underprotected, into the winter storms: survivors of the first year would later claim that only half of their number had lived.
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Still, once the initial chaos had passed, the situation did gradually improve. Berzin worked hard to improve conditions, apparently believing, not irrationally, that prisoners needed to be warm and well-fed in order to dig large quantities of gold. As a result, Thomas Sgovio, an American Kolyma survivor, wrote that camp “old-timers” spoke of Berzin’s reign warmly: “when the frost dipped below minus 60 degrees, they were not sent to work. They were given three Rest Days a month. The food was adequate and nutritious. The
zeks
[prisoners] were given warm clothing—fur caps and felt boots ...”
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Varlam Shalamov, another Kolyma survivor—whose short stories,
Kolyma Tales
, are among the bitterest in the entire camp genre—also wrote of the Berzin period as a time of excellent food, a workday of four to six hours in winter and ten in summer, and colossal salaries for convicts, which permitted them to return to the mainland as well-to-do men when their sentences were up . . . The cemeteries dating back to those days are so few in number that the early residents of Kolyma seemed immortal to those who came later.
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If living conditions were better than they would be later, the camp command also treated prisoners with a greater degree of humanity. At that time, the line between the volunteer free workers and the prisoners was blurred. The two groups associated normally; inmates were sometimes allowed to move out of their barracks to live in the free workers’ villages, and could be promoted to become armed guards, as well as geologists and engineers.
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Mariya Ioffe, an exile in Kolyma in the mid-1930s, was allowed to keep books and paper, and remembered that most exile families were allowed to stay together.
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Inmates were also allowed to participate, up to a point, in the political events of their time. Like the White Sea Canal, Kolyma promoted its own inmate shock-workers and Stakhanovites. One prisoner even became Dalstroi’s “instructor in the Stakhanovite methods of labor,” and those inmates who performed well could receive a small badge, declaring them to be “Kolyma shock-workers.”
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Like Ukhtpechlag, Kolyma’s infrastructure quickly became more sophisticated. In the 1930s, prisoners built not only the mines, but also the docks and breakwaters for Magadan’s port, as well as the region’s single important road, the Kolyma Highway, which leads due north from Magadan. Most of Sevvostlag’s
lagpunkts
were located along this road, and indeed they were often named according to their distance from Magadan (“Camp Forty-seventh Kilometer,” for example). Prisoners also built the city of Magadan itself, which contained 15,000 people by 1936, and would go on growing. Returning to the city in 1947, after serving seven years in the farther-flung camps, Evgeniya Ginzburg “nearly swooned with surprise and admiration” at the speed of Magadan’s growth: “It was only some weeks later that I noticed you could count the big buildings on your fingers. But at the time it really was a great metropolis for me.”
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In fact, Ginzburg was one of the few prisoners to notice a peculiar paradox. It was strange, but true: in Kolyma, as in Komi, the Gulag was slowly bringing “civilization”—if that is what it can be called—to the remote wilderness. Roads were being built where there had been only forest; houses were appearing in the swamps. Native peoples were being pushed aside to make way for cities, factories, and railways. Years later, a woman who had been the daughter of a camp cook in a far-flung outpost of Lokchimlag, one of the Komi logging camps, reminisced to me about what life had been like when the camp was still running. “Oooh, there was a whole warehouse of vegetables, fields full of squash—it wasn’t all barren like today.” She waved her arm in disgust at the tiny village which now stood on the site, at the former camp punishment cells, still inhabited. “And there were real electric lights, and the bosses in their big cars drove in and out almost every day . . .”

Ginzburg made the same observation, more eloquently:

How strange is the heart of man! My whole soul cursed those who had thought up the idea of building a town in this permafrost, thawing out the ground with the blood and tears of innocent people. Yet at the same time I was aware of a sort of ridiculous pride . . . How it had grown, and how handsome it had become during my seven years’ absence, our Magadan! Quite unrecognizable. I admired each street lamp, each section of asphalt, and even the poster announcing that the House of Culture was presenting the operetta
The Dollar Princess.
We treasure each fragment of our life, even the bitterest.
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By 1934, the expansion of the Gulag in Kolyma, in Komi, in Siberia, in Kazakhstan, and elsewhere in the USSR had followed the same pattern as Solovetsky. In the early days, slovenliness, chaos, and disorder caused many unnecessary deaths. Even without outright sadism, the unthinking cruelty of guards, who treated their prisoners as domestic animals, led to much misery.

Nevertheless, as time went on, the system seemed to be falling shakily into place. Death rates dropped from their high of 1933 as famine across the country receded and camps became better organized. By 1934, they were, according to the official statistics, hovering at around 4 percent.
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Ukhtpechlag was producing oil, Kolyma was producing gold, the camps in the Arkhangelsk region were producing timber. Roads were being built across Siberia. Mistakes and mishaps abounded, but this was true everywhere in the USSR. The speed of industrialization, the lack of planning, and the dearth of well-trained specialists made accidents and overspending inevitable, as the bosses of the big projects surely would have known.