Gulag (18 page)

Perhaps the most dramatic 1937 camp-boss saga was one that occurred toward the end of that year, in Magadan, and began with the arrest of Eduard Berzin, the Dalstroi boss. As Yagoda’s direct subordinate, Berzin ought to have suspected that his career would soon be shortened. He ought also to have been suspicious when, in December, he received a whole new group of NKVD “deputies,” among them Major Pavlov, an NKVD officer who ranked higher than Berzin himself. Although Stalin often introduced soon-to-be-disgraced officials to their successors in this manner, Berzin showed no sign of suspecting anything. When the ominously named SS
Nikolai Yezhov
pulled into Nagaevo Bay, carrying his new team, Berzin organized a brass band to welcome them. He then spent several days showing his new “staff” the ropes—although they virtually ignored him—before boarding the SS
Nikolai Yezhov
himself.

Upon reaching Vladivostok, he proceeded, quite normally, to take the Trans-Siberian Express for Moscow. But although Berzin left Vladivostok as a first-class passenger, he arrived a prisoner. Just 70 kilometers outside Moscow, in the town of Aleksandrov, his train ground to a halt. In the middle of the night of December 19, 1937, Berzin was arrested on the station platform—outside the capital, so as not to cause a fuss in central Moscow— and driven to Lubyanka, Moscow’s central prison, for interrogation. He was quickly indicted for “counter-revolutionary sabotage-wrecking activities.” The NKVD accused him of organizing a “spy-diversionist Trotskyist organization in Kolyma,” which was allegedly shipping gold to the Japanese government and plotting a Japanese takeover of the Russian far east. They also accused him of spying for England and Germany. Clearly, the Dalstroi boss had been a very busy man. He was shot in August 1938 in the basement of Lubyanka prison.

The absurdity of the charges did not detract from the deadlines of the case. By the end of December, Pavlov, working quickly, had arrested the majority of Berzin’s subordinates. I. G. Filippov, the boss of the Sevvostlag camp, provided, under torture, an extensive confession which implicated virtually all of them. Confessing that he had “recruited” Berzin in 1934, he admitted that their “anti-Soviet organization” had planned to overthrow the Soviet government through the “preparation of an armed uprising against Soviet power in Kolyma . . . the preparation and accomplishment of terrorist acts against the leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet government . . . the encitement of the native population . . . and the encouragement of widespread wrecking,” among other things. Berzin’s chief deputy, Lev Epshtein, subsequently confessed to “gathering secret intelligence for France and Japan while conducting sabotage, diversion and wrecking.” The chief medical doctor at the Magadan polyclinic was accused of having “connections with alien elements and doubledealers.” By the time it was over, hundreds of people who had been associated with Berzin, from geologists to bureaucrats to engineers, were either dead or had themselves become prisoners.
¹³

To put their experience in perspective, the Kolyma elite was not the only powerful network to be eliminated in 1937 and 1938. By the end of that year, Stalin had purged the Red Army of a whole host of notables, including Deputy People’s Commissar for Defense Marshal Tukhachevsky, Army Commander Ion Yakir, Army Commander Uborevich, and others, along with their wives and children, most of whom were shot, but some of whom wound up in camps.
¹⁴
The Communist Party met a similar fate. The purge penetrated not only Stalin’s potential enemies in the Party leadership, but also the provincial Party elite, the First Party Secretaries, the heads of local and regional councils, and the leaders of important factories and institutions.

So thorough was the wave of arrests in certain places and among a certain social class, later wrote Yelena Sidorkina—herself arrested in November 1937—that “Nobody knew what tomorrow would bring. People were afraid to talk to one another or meet, especially families in which the father or mother had already been ‘isolated.’ The rare individuals foolhardy enough to stand up for those arrested would themselves be automatically nominated for ‘isolation.’”
¹⁵

But not everyone died, and not every camp was wiped out. In fact, the more obscure camp bosses even fared slightly better than the average NKVD officer, as the case of V. A. Barabanov, a protégé of Yagoda’s, illustrates. In 1935, when he was the deputy commander of Dmitlag, Barabanov was arrested along with a colleague for having arrived at the camp “in a drunken state.” As a result, he lost his job, received a light prison sentence, and was working at a distant camp in the far north in 1938 when the mass arrests of Yagoda’s henchmen took place. In the chaos, his existence was forgotten. By 1954, his love of alcohol forgiven, he had risen through the ranks once again to become the deputy commander of the entire Gulag system.
¹⁶

But in the folk memory of the camps, 1937 was not only remembered as the year of the Great Terror; it was also the year that propaganda about the glories of criminal re-education finally ground to a halt, along with any remaining lip service to the ideal. In part, this may have been due to the deaths and arrests of those most closely associated with the campaign. Yagoda, still linked in the public mind to the White Sea Canal, was gone. Maxim Gorky had died suddenly in June 1936. I. L. Averbakh, Gorky’s collaborator on
Kanal imeni Stalina
and author of
From Crime to Labour
, a subsequent tome dedicated to the Moscow–Volga Canal, was denounced as a Trotskyite and arrested in April 1937. So were many of the other writers who had taken part in Gorky’s White Sea Canal collective.
¹⁷

But the change had deeper origins as well. As the political rhetoric grew more radical, as the hunt for political criminals intensified, the status of the camps, where these dangerous politicals resided, changed as well. In a country gripped by paranoia and spy-mania, the very existence of camps for “enemies” and “wreckers” became, if not exactly a secret (prisoners working on roads and apartment blocks were to be a common sight in many major cities in the 1940s) then at least a subject never discussed in public. Nikolai Pogodin’s play,
Aristokraty
, was banned in 1937, to be revived again, though only briefly, in 1956, well after Stalin’s death.
¹⁸
Gorky’s Kanal imeni Stalina was also placed on the list of forbidden books, for reasons that remain unclear. Perhaps the new NKVD bosses could no longer stomach the frothy praise for the disgraced Yagoda. Or perhaps its bright depiction of the successful re-education of “enemies” no longer made sense in an era when new enemies were appearing all the time, and when hundreds of thousands of them were being executed, instead of reformed. Certainly its tales of smooth, all-knowing Chekists were hard to reconcile with the massive purges of the NKVD.

Not wanting to seem lax in their task of isolating the regime’s enemies, the Gulag’s commanders in Moscow issued new internal secrecy regulations too, entailing huge new costs. All correspondence now had to be sent by special courier. In 1940 alone, the NKVD’s couriers had to transmit twenty-five million secret packages. Those writing letters to camps now wrote exclusively to post office boxes, as the locations of camps became a secret. The camps themselves disappeared from maps. Even internal NKVD correspondence referred to them euphemistically as “special objects” (spetsobekty) or “subsections” (podrazdeleniya) in order to conceal their real activity.
¹⁹

For more specific references, both to camps and to the activities of their inhabitants, the NKVD devised an elaborate code which could be used in open telegrams. A document from 1940 listed these code names, some bizarrely creative. Pregnant women were to be referred to as “Books,” and women with children as “Receipts.” Men, on the other hand, were “Accounts.” Exiles were “Rubbish,” and prisoners undergoing investigation were “Envelopes.” A camp was a “Trust,” a camp division a “Factory.” One camp was code-named “Free.”
²⁰

Language used inside the camps changed too. Until the autumn of 1937, official documents and letters frequently referred to camp inmates by profession, referring to them simply as “lumberjacks,” for example. By 1940, an individual prisoner was no longer a lumberjack, but just a prisoner: a
zakl
yuchennyi, or z/k, in most documents—pronounced zek.
²¹
A group of prisoners became a
kontingent
(“contingent,” or “quota”), a bureaucratic, depersonalized term. Nor could prisoners earn the coveted title of Stakhanovite: one camp administrator sent an indignant letter to his subordinates ordering them to refer to hardworking prisoners as “prisoners, working as shock-workers” or “prisoners, working according to the Stakhanovite methods of labor.”

Any positive use of the term “political prisoner” had, of course, long since disappeared. Privileges for the socialist politicals had ended with their transfer from Solovetsky in 1925. But now, the term “political” went through a complete transformation. It included anyone sentenced according to the infamous Article 58 of the prison code, which included all “counter-revolutionary” crimes—and it had thoroughly negative connotations. The politicals—sometimes called “KRs” (counter-revolutionaries), kontras, or
kontriks—
were more and more often referred to as
vragi naroda
: “enemies of the people.”
²²

This term, a Jacobin epithet first used by Lenin in 1917, had been revived by Stalin in 1927 to describe Trotsky and his followers. It began to have a wider meaning in 1936 after a secret letter—“of Stalin’s authorship,” in the view of Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin’s Russian biographer—went out from the Central Committee to the Party organizations in the regions and republics. The letter explained that while an enemy of the people “appeared tame and inoffensive,” he did everything possible to “crawl stealthily into socialism,” even though he “secretly did not accept it.” Enemies, in other words, could no longer be identified by their openly professed views. A later NKVD boss, Lavrenty Beria, would also frequently quote Stalin, noting that “an enemy of the people is not only one who commits sabotage, but one who doubts the rightness of the Party line.” Ergo, an “enemy” could mean anybody who opposed Stalin’s rule, for any reason, even if he did not openly profess to do so.
²³

In the camps, “enemy of the people” now became an official term used in official documents. Women were arrested as “wives of enemies of the people” after an NKVD decree of 1937 made such arrests possible, and the same applied to children. Officially, they were sentenced as “ChSVR”: “Member of the Family of an Enemy of the Revolution.”
²⁴
Many of the “wives” were incarcerated together in the Temnikovsky camp, also known as Temlag, in the republic of Mordovia, central Russia. Anna Larina, the wife of Bukharin, the disgraced Soviet leader, remembered that there “We had become equals in our troubles—Tukhachevskys and Yakirs, Bukharins and Radeks, Uboreviches and Gamarniks: ‘Misfortune shared is half misfortune!’”
²⁵

Another Temlag survivor, Galina Levinson, remembered that the camp’s regime had been relatively liberal, perhaps because “we didn’t have sentences, we were just ‘wives.’” The majority of women in the camp, she noted, were people who until then had been “absolutely Soviet people,” and were still convinced that their arrests were due to the machinations of some secret, fascist organization within the Party. Several occupied themselves writing daily letters to Stalin and the Central Committee, complaining angrily about the plot being conducted against them.
²⁶

Aside from its official uses, “enemy of the people” had also, by 1937, evolved into a term of abuse. From the time of Solovetsky, the camps’ founders and planners had organized the system around the idea that prisoners were not human, but rather “units of labor”: even at the time of the building of the White Sea Canal, Maxim Gorky had described the kulaks as “half-animals.”
²⁷
Now, however, the propaganda described “enemies” as something even lower than two-legged cattle. From the late 1930s, Stalin also began publicly to refer to “enemies of the people” as “vermin,” “pollution,” and “filth,” or sometimes simply as “weeds” which needed to be uprooted.
²⁸

The message was clear:
zeks
were no longer considered full citizens of the Soviet Union, if they were to be considered people at all. One prisoner observed that they were subject to “a kind of excommunication from political life, and are allowed to take no part in its liturgies and sacred rites.”
²⁹
After 1937, no guard used the word
tovarishch
, or “comrade,” to address prisoners, and prisoners could be beaten for using it to address guards, who they had to call
grazhdanin
, or “citizen.” Photographs of Stalin and other leaders never appeared on the walls within the camps or in prisons. A relatively common sight of the mid-1930s—a train carrying prisoners, its wagons bedecked with portraits of Stalin and banners declaring the occupants to be Stakhanovites—became unthinkable after 1937. So did celebrations of the workers’ holiday on the First of May, such as those once held at the Solovetsky kremlin.
³⁰

Many foreigners were surprised at the powerful effect that this “excommunication” from Soviet society had on Soviet prisoners. One French prisoner, Jacques Rossi, author of
The Gulag Handbook
, an encyclopedic guide to camp life, wrote that the word “comrade” could electrify prisoners who had not heard it in a long time: “A brigade that had just completed an eleven-and-a-half-hour shift agreed to stay and work the next shift only because the chief engineer . . . said to the prisoners: ‘I ask that you do this, comrades.’”
³¹

From the dehumanization of the “politicals” there followed a very distinct, and in some places drastic, change in their living conditions. The Gulag of the 1930s had been generally disorganized, frequently cruel, and sometimes deadly. Nevertheless, in some places and at some times during the 1930s, even political prisoners had been offered the genuine possibility of redemption. The workers of the White Sea Canal could read the newspaper
Perekovka
, whose very name meant “reforging.” The conclusion of Pogodin’s
Aristokraty
featured the “conversion” of an ex-saboteur. Flora Leipman—daughter of a Scotswoman who had married a Russian, moved to St. Petersburg, and quickly been arrested as a spy—visited her imprisoned mother in a northern logging camp in 1934, and found that “there was also still an element of humanity between the guards and the prisoners as the KGB was not so sophisticated and psychologically orientated as it was to become a few years later.”
³²
Leipman knew what she was talking about, since she herself became a prisoner “a few years later.” For after 1937, attitudes did change, particularly toward those arrested under Article 58 of the criminal code for “counter-revolutionary” crimes.