Gulag (19 page)

In the camps, politicals were removed from the jobs they had held in planning or engineering, and forced to return to “general work,” meaning unskilled physical labor in mines or forests: “enemies” could no longer be allowed to hold any position of importance, for fear they would engage in sabotage. Pavlov, the new head of Dalstroi, personally signed the order forcing one prisoner geologist, I. S. Davidenko, to be “used as a common laborer and in no case allowed to conduct independent work. Davidenko’s tasks should be carefully controlled and subject to daily observation.”
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In a report filed in February 1939, the commander of Belbaltlag also claimed that he had “chased away all workers not deserving of political trust,” and in particular “all former prisoners, sentenced for counter-revolutionary crimes.” From then on, he pledged, administrative and technical jobs would be reserved for “Communists, Komsomol members [members of the Young Communist league] and trusted specialists.”
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Clearly, economic productivity was no longer the camps’ top priority.

Camp regimes across the system grew harsher for ordinary criminal prisoners as well as politicals. Bread rations for “general work” at the beginning of the 1930s could be as high as 1 kilogram per day, even for those who did not fulfill 100 percent of the norm, and up to 2 kilograms for Stakhanovites. In the main
lagpunkts
of the White Sea Canal, meat was served twelve days a month.
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By the end of the decade, the guaranteed ration had more than halved, falling to between 400 and 450 grams of bread, while those who managed 100 percent got an extra 200 grams. The punishment ration fell to 300 grams.
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Speaking of that era in Kolyma, Varlam Shalamov wrote that

In order for a healthy young man, beginning his career at the gold-face in the clean, cold air, to turn into a “goner,” he needed only a period of twenty to thirty days of sixteen-hour workdays, without days off, coupled with systematic starvation, tattered clothes, nights in 60 degrees below zero of cold in a canvas tent full of holes . . . out of entire brigades which began the gold-mining season, not a single person would survive, except the brigadier himself, the brigade orderly, and a few of the brigadier’s personal friends.
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Conditions also worsened because the number of prisoners rose, in some places with astonishing rapidity. The Politburo had, it is true, tried to prepare in advance for the influx, instructing the Gulag in 1937 to begin the construction of five new timber camps in the Komi region, as well as more “in the remote areas of Kazakhstan.” To hasten construction, the Gulag had even received an “advance of 10 million rubles” to organize these new camps. In addition, the People’s Commissariats of Defense, Health, and Forestry were ordered to find 240 commanding officers and political workers, 150 physicians, 400 medical attendants, 10 eminent forestry specialists, and “50 graduates of the Leningrad Academy of Forest Technology” to work in the Gulag—immediately.
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Nevertheless, the existing camps once again overflowed with new recruits, and the overcrowding of the early 1930s repeated itself. At a
lagpunkt
built for 250 to 300 people in Siblag, the Siberian forestry camp, a survivor guessed that the actual number of prisoners in 1937 surpassed 17,000. Even if the real number were only a quarter of that, the overestimate indicates how crowded it must have felt to be there. Lacking barracks, prisoners built
zemlyanki
, dugouts in the earth; even those were so crowded that it was “impossible to move, without stepping on someone’s hand.” Prisoners refused to go outside, for fear of losing their place on the floor. There were no bowls, no spoons, and huge lines for food. A dysentery epidemic began, and prisoners died rapidly.

In a later Party meeting, even Siblag’s camp administration solemnly remembered the “terrible lessons of 1938,” not least for the “number of working days lost” in the crisis.
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Throughout the camp system, the number of fatalities officially doubled from 1937 to 1938. Statistics are not everywhere available, but death rates are presumed to be much higher in those far northern camps—Kolyma, Vorkuta, Norilsk—where political prisoners were sent in large numbers.
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But prisoners did not die only from starvation and overwork. In the new atmosphere, the incarceration of enemies quickly began to seem insufficient: better that they cease to exist altogether. Thus, on July 30, 1937, the NKVD issued an order on the repression of “former kulaks, thieves, and other anti-Soviet elements”—an order that contained execution quotas for Gulag prisoners as well as others.
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Thus, on August 25, 1937, Yezhov signed another order calling for executions of inmates being held in the high-security political prisons. The NKVD, he said, must “finish within two months the operation for the repression of the most active counter-revolutionary elements . . . those sentenced for spying, diversion, terrorism, revolutionary activity, and banditry, as well as those sentenced for being members of anti-Soviet parties.”
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To the politicals, he added the “bandits and criminal elements” operating in Solovetsky, which by that time had been converted into a high-security political prison as well. The quota for Solovetsky was stated: 1,200 inmates still imprisoned on Solovetsky were to be shot. A witness recalled the day some of them were called away:

Unexpectedly, they forced everyone from the open cells of the Kremlin to a general count. At the count, they read out an enormous list of names— several hundred of them—to be taken on transport. They were given two hours to prepare, and were then meant to reassemble in the same central square. A terrible confusion ensued. Some people ran to gather up their things, others to bid farewell to friends. In two hours, most of those to be transported stood in their places . . . columns of prisoners marched out with suitcases and knapsacks . . . 43

Some were also apparently carrying knives, which they later used to attack those who shot them, near the village of Sandormokh in northern Karelia, injuring them badly. After that incident, the NKVD stripped all prisoners to their underwear before shooting them. Later, the NKVD man in charge of the operation was rewarded with what the archives describe only as a “valuable present” for his valor in carrying out the task. A few months later, he was shot too.
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In Solovetsky, the selection of prisoners for murder appears to have been random. In some camps, however, the administration took advantage of the opportunity to rid themselves of particularly difficult prisoners. This may also have been the case in Vorkuta, where a large number of the selected prisoners actually were former Trotskyites—genuine followers of Trotsky, that is, some of whom had been involved in camp strikes and other rebellions. One eyewitness reckoned that by the beginning of the winter of 1937–38, the Vorkuta administration had interned about 1,200 prisoners, mostly the Trotskyites, as well as other politicals and a sprinkling of criminals, in an abandoned brick factory and a series of large, crowded (“overflowing”) tents. No hot food was given to the prisoners at all: “the daily ration consisted only of 400 grams of half-dried bread .”
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There they remained until the end of March, when a new group of NKVD officers arrived from Moscow. The officers formed a “special commission” and called out the prisoners in groups of forty. They were told they were going off on a transport. Each was given a piece of bread. The prisoners in the tent heard them being marched away—“and then the sounds of shooting.”

The atmosphere inside the tents became hellish. One peasant, imprisoned for the crime of “speculation”—he had sold his own piglet at a bazaar—lay on his bunk, eyes open, reacting to nothing. “What do I have in common with you politicals?” he would periodically moan. “You were fighting for power, for rank, and I just need my life.” Another man committed suicide, according to the eyewitness. Two went mad. Finally, when there were about 100 people left, the shooting stopped, as abruptly and as inexplicably as it began. The NKVD bosses had returned to Moscow. The remaining prisoners returned to the mines. Throughout the camp, about 2,000 prisoners had been killed.

Stalin and Yezhov did not always send outsiders from Moscow to carry out such jobs. To speed up the process across the country, the NKVD also organized troikas, operating inside the camps as well as outside them. A troika was just what it sounds like: three men, usually the regional NKVD chief, the Chief Party Secretary of the province, and a representative of the prosecutor’s office or of the local government. Together, they had the right to pass sentence on a prisoner in absentia, without benefit of judge, jury, lawyers, or trial.
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Once in place, the troikas did move quickly. On September 20, 1937, a fairly typical day, the troika of the Karelian Republic sentenced 231 prisoners of the White Sea Canal camp, Belbaltlag. Assuming a ten-hour workday, with no breaks, less than three minutes would have been spent considering the fate of each prisoner. Most of those condemned had received their original sentences much earlier, at the beginning of the 1930s. Now, they were accused of new crimes, usually connected to bad behavior or a poor attitude to life in the camps. Among them were former politicals— Mensheviks, Anarchists, Social Democrats—and a former nun who “refused to work for the Soviet authorities,” as well as a kulak who had worked as a cook in the camp. He was accused of inciting dissatisfaction among the Stakhanovite workers. He had, the authorities claimed, deliberately created “long lines for them to stand in, having earlier given food to ordinary prisoners.”
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The hysteria did not last. In November 1938, the mass shootings came to an abrupt halt, both in the camps and in the rest of the country. Perhaps the purge had gone too far, even for Stalin’s tastes. Perhaps it had simply achieved what it was meant to achieve. Or perhaps it was causing too much damage to the still-fragile economy. Whatever the reason, Stalin told the Communist Party Congress of March 1939 that the purge had been accompanied by “more mistakes than might have been expected.”
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No one apologized or repented, and almost no one was ever punished. Just a few months earlier, Stalin had sent a circular to all of the NKVD bosses, complimenting them for “inflicting a crushing defeat on espionage-subversive agents of foreign intelligence services” and for “purging the country of subversive, insurrectionary, and espionage cadres.” Only then did he point out some of the “deficiencies” in the operation, such as the “simplified procedures for investigation,” the lack of witnesses and corroborating evidence.
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Nor did the purge of the NKVD itself come to a complete halt. Stalin removed the alleged author of all these “mistakes,” Nikolai Yezhov, from office in November 1938—and sentenced him to death. The execution took place in 1940, after Yezhov had pleaded for his life, just like Yagoda before him: “Tell Stalin that I shall die with his name upon my lips.”
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Yezhov’s protégés went down along with him, as had Yagoda’s cronies a few years earlier. In her prison cell, Evgeniya Ginzburg noticed one day that the prison regulations pasted to the wall had been removed. When they were replaced, the space in the top left-hand corner, which had read “Approved. Yezhov, Commissar-General for State Security,” had been pasted over with white paper. But the changes did not end there: “First the name Weinstock [the prison commander] was painted over and Antonov substituted; then Antonov went, and in his place it read: Chief Prison Administration. ‘That’ll save them from changing it again,’ we laughed.”
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The productivity of the camp system continued to spiral downward. In Ukhtpechlag, the mass shootings, the increased number of sick and weak prisoners, and the loss of prisoner specialists had forced the camp’s output to drop precipitously from 1936 to 1937. In July 1938, a special Gulag commission was called upon to discuss Ukhtpechlag’s massive deficit.
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The productivity of the Kolyma gold mines also fell. Even the huge influx of new prisoners failed to bring up the overall quantity of gold mined to levels comparable with those in the past. Before being deposed, Yezhov himself called for more money to be spent updating Dalstroi’s old-fashioned mining technology—as if that were the real problem.
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Meanwhile, the commander of Belbaltlag—the one who had bragged so proudly of his success in ridding the camp’s administrative staff of political prisoners—complained of the current “urgent need for administrative and technical personnel.” The purge had certainly made the camp’s technical staff politically “healthier,” he wrote carefully, but it had “increased its deficiencies” as well. In his fourteenth camp division, for example, there were 12,500 prisoners, of which only 657 were nonpoliticals. Of these, however, most had very severe criminal sentences, which also disqualified them from work as specialists and administrators, while 184 were illiterate—leaving only 70 who could be used as clerks or as engineers.
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Overall, the turnover of the NKVD camps, according to official statistics, dropped from 3.5 billion rubles in 1936 to 2 billion rubles in 1937. The value of the camps’ gross industrial production also dropped, from 1.1 billion rubles to 945 million rubles.
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The unprofitability and vast disorganization of most camps, as well as the increasing numbers of sick and dying prisoners, did not go unnoticed in Moscow, where extremely frank discussions of camp economics took place during meetings of the central Gulag administration’s Communist Party cell. At a meeting in April 1938, one bureaucrat complained of the “chaos and disorder” in the Komi camps. He also accused the Norilsk camp commanders of producing a “badly designed” nickel factory, and of wasting a great deal of money in consequence. Given the amount of money that had been spent setting up new forestry camps, grumbled another administrator, “We could have expected more. Our camps are organized unsystematically. Major buildings were constructed in the mud, and now have to be moved.”