Gulag (20 page)

By April 1939, the complaints worsened. At the northern camps, there was a “particularly difficult situation with food supplies,” which led to “an enormous percentage of weak workers, an enormous percentage of prisoners who couldn’t work at all, and a high death rate and illness rate.”
⁵⁶
In that same year, the Council of People’s Commissars acknowledged that up to 60 percent of camp prisoners suffered from pellagra or other diseases of malnutrition.
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The Great Terror was not responsible for all of these problems, of course. As noted, even Frenkel’s forestry camps, so admired by Stalin, had never actually made a profit.
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Prison labor had always been—and would always be—far less productive than free labor. But this lesson had not yet been learned. When Yezhov was removed from power in November 1938, his replacement as NKVD chief, Lavrenty Beria, almost immediately set about altering camp regimes, changing the rules, streamlining the procedures, all in order to put the camps back where Stalin wanted them: at the heart of the Soviet economy.

Beria had not—yet—concluded that the camp system itself was unproductive and wasteful by its very nature. Instead, he seemed to believe that the people in charge of the camp system had been incompetent. Now he was determined to turn the camps into a genuinely profitable part of the Soviet economy, this time for real.

Beria did not, then or later, release large numbers of unjustly accused prisoners from camps (although the NKVD released some from jails). The camps did not, then or later, become any more humane. The dehumanization of “enemies” continued to permeate the language of the guards and camp administrators until Stalin’s death. The mistreatment of political prisoners, indeed of all prisoners, continued: in 1939, under Beria’s watchful eye, the first prisoners began working in Kolyma’s uranium mines with virtually no protection against radiation.
⁵⁹
Beria changed only one aspect of the system: he told camp commanders to keep more prisoners alive, and to make better use of them.

Although the policy was never clear, in practice Beria also lifted the ban on “hiring” political prisoners with engineering, scientific, or technical skills to work in technical positions in the camps. On the ground, camp commanders were still wary of using political prisoners as “specialists,” and would remain so until the Gulag’s demise in the mid-1950s. As late as 1948, different branches of the security services would still be arguing about whether or not political prisoners should be forbidden from holding jobs as specialists, some arguing that it was too politically dangerous, others claiming the camps would be too difficult to run without them.
⁶⁰
Although Beria never fully resolved this dilemma, he was too intent on making the NKVD into a productive part of the Soviet economy to allow
all
of the Gulag’s most important scientists and engineers to lose their limbs to frostbite in the far north. In September 1938, he began organizing special workshops and laboratories for prisoner scientists, known by prisoners as
sharashki.
Solzhenitsyn, who worked in a
sharashka
, described one—a “top-secret research establishment, officially referred to only by a code number”—in his novel
The First Circle
:

A dozen prisoners were brought from the camps to this old country house on the outskirts of Moscow, which had been duly surrounded by barbed wire . . . at that time, the prisoners did not know exactly what kind of research they had been brought to Mavrino to do. They were busy unpacking stacks of crates which two special goods trains had delivered, securing comfortable chairs and desks for themselves, and sorting equipment . . . 61

Initially, the
sharashki
were christened the “Special Construction Bureaus.” Later, they were known collectively as the “Fourth Special Department” of the NKVD, and about 1,000 scientists would eventually work in them. In some cases, Beria personally tracked down talented scientists, and ordered them brought back to Moscow. NKVD agents gave them baths, a haircut, a shave, and a long rest—and sent them off to work in prison laboratories. Among Beria’s most important “finds” was the aviation engineer Tupolev, who arrived at his
sharashka
carrying a bag with a hunk of bread and a few pieces of sugar (he refused to give them up, even after being told the food would improve).

Tupolev, in turn, gave Beria a list of others to recall, among them Valentin Glushko, the Soviet Union’s leading designer of rocket engines, and Sergei Korolev, later to be the father of the
Sputnik
, the Soviet Union’s first satellite—indeed the father of the entire Soviet space program. Korolev returned to Lubyanka prison after seventeen months in Kolyma, having lost many of his teeth to scurvy, looking “famished and exhausted,” in the words of his fellow prisoners.
⁶²
Nevertheless, in a report prepared in August 1944, Beria would list twenty important new pieces of military technology invented in his
sharashki
, and elaborate on the many ways in which they had been of use to the defense industry during the Second World War.
⁶³

In some ways, Beria’s reign would have seemed like an improvement to ordinary
zeks
too. Overall, the food situation did temporarily improve. As Beria pointed out in April 1938, the camp food norm of 2,000 calories per day had been set for people sitting in prisons, not for people working at manual labor. Because theft, cheating, and punishment for poor work reduced even this low quantity of food by as much as 70 percent, large numbers of prisoners were starving. This he regretted, not because he pitied them, but because higher death rates and higher levels of sickness prevented the NKVD from fulfilling its production plans for 1939. Beria requested the drawing up of new food norms, so that the “physical capabilities of the camp workforce can be put to maximum use in any industry.”
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Although food norms were raised, Beria’s regime hardly heralded a re-discovery of prisoners’ humanity. On the contrary, the transformation of prisoners from human beings into units of labor had progressed several steps further. Prisoners could still be sentenced to die in the camps—but not for mere counter-revolutionary tendencies. Instead, those who refused to work or actively disorganized work were to be given “a stricter camp regime, punishment cells, worse food and living conditions, and other disciplinary measures.” “Shirkers” would also receive new sentences, up to and including death.
⁶⁵

Local prosecutors began investigations into shirking immediately. In August 1939, for example, a prisoner was shot, not just for refusing to work, but for encouraging others not to work as well. In October, three women prisoners, evidently Orthodox nuns, were accused both of refusing to work and of singing counter-revolutionary hymns in camp: two were shot and the third received an extra sentence.
⁶⁶

The years of the Great Terror had also left their mark in another way. Never again would the Gulag treat prisoners as wholly worthy of redemption. The system of “early release” for good behavior was dismantled. In his one known public intervention into the daily operations of the camps, Stalin himself had put an end to early releases, on the grounds that they hurt the economic operations of the camps. Addressing a meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1938, he asked,

Could we not think of some other form of reward for their work—medals, or such like? We are acting incorrectly, we are disturbing the work of the camp. Freeing these people may be necessary, but from the point of view of the national economy, it is a mistake . . . we will free the best people, and leave the worst.
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A decree to this effect was issued in June 1939. A few months later, another decree eliminated “conditional early release” for invalids too. The number of sick prisoners would rise correspondingly. The main source of incentive for hardworking prisoners now was to be the improvement of “supplies and food”—as well as the medals Stalin thought would be so appealing. By 1940, even Dalstroi had begun to hand them out.
⁶⁸

Several of these initiatives ran counter to the laws of the time, and actually encountered resistance. The chief prosecutor, Vyshinsky, and the People’s Commissar of Justice, Richkov, both opposed the liquidation of early release, as well as the imposition of the death sentence for those accused of “disorganizing camp life.” But Beria, like Yagoda before him, clearly had Stalin’s support, and he won all of his battles. From January 1, 1940, the NKVD was even granted the right to take back some 130,000 prisoners who had been “loaned” to other ministries. Beria was determined to make the Gulag really and truly profitable.
⁶⁹

With surprising speed, Beria’s changes did make an impact. In the final months before the Second World War, the economic activity of the NKVD began, once again, to grow. In 1939, the NKVD’s turnover was 4.2 billion rubles. In 1940, it was 4.5 billion rubles. As prisoners began to stream into the camps during the war years, those numbers would grow even more quickly.
⁷⁰
According to official statistics, the number of deaths in camps also halved from 1938 to 1939, from 5 percent back to 3 percent, even as the number of prisoners continued to increase.
⁷¹

There were also now far more camps than there had been, and they were much bigger than they had been at the beginning of the decade. The number of prisoners had nearly doubled between January 1, 1935, and January 1, 1938, from 950,000 to 1.8 million, with about another million people sentenced to exile.
⁷²
Camps which had contained nothing more than a few huts and some barbed wire had become true industrial giants. Sevvostlag, the main Dalstroi camp, contained nearly 200,000 prisoners in 1940.
⁷³
Vorkutlag, the mining camp that developed out of Ukhtpechlag’s Rudnik No. 1, contained 15,000 prisoners in 1938; by 1951, it would contain over 70,000.

But there were new camps as well. Perhaps the grimmest of the new generation was Norillag, usually known as Norilsk. Located, like Vorkuta and Kolyma, north of the Arctic Circle, Norilsk sat right on top of an enormous nickel deposit, probably the largest in the world. The prisoners of Norilsk not only dug the nickel, but they also built the nickel-processing plant and the power stations alongside the mines. Then they built the city— Norilsk—to house the NKVD men who ran the mines and the factories. Like its predecessors, Norilsk grew quickly. The camp contained 1,200 prisoners in 1935; by 1940, it contained 19,500. At its largest, in 1952, 68,849 prisoners would be incarcerated there.
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In 1937, the NKVD also founded Kargopollag, in the Arkhangelsk region, followed, in 1938, by Vyatlag, in central Russia, and Kraslag, in the Krasnoyarsk district of northern Siberia. All were essentially forestry camps, which acquired side interests—brick factories, wood-processing plants, furniture-making workshops. All would double or triple in size in the 1940s, by which time they contained some 30,000 prisoners apiece.
⁷⁵

There were other camps too, opening and shutting and reorganizing themselves so frequently that it is difficult to give precise numbers for a particular year. Some were quite small, built to serve the needs of a particular factory or industry or building project. Others were temporary, built for the purposes of road or railway construction, and abandoned afterward. To manage their enormous numbers and complex problems, the Gulag administration eventually set up subdivisions: a Main Administration of Industrial Camps, a Main Administration of Road Building, a Main Administration of Forestry Work, and so on.

But it was not only their sizes that had changed. From the end of the 1930s, all new camps had a purely industrial character, without the fountains and “gardens” of Vishlag, without the idealistic propaganda that accompanied the building of Kolyma, without the prisoner specialists at all levels of camp life. Olga Vasileeva, an administrator who worked as an engineer and inspector on Gulag and other construction sites in the late 1930s and 1940s, remembered that in the earlier era “there were fewer guards, fewer administrators, fewer employees . . . In the 1930s, prisoners were enlisted in all sorts of work, as clerks, barbers, guards.” In the 1940s, however, she recalled that all of that stopped: “It all began to take on a mass character . . . things became harsher . . . as the camps grew bigger, the regime grew crueler.”
⁷⁶

It might be said, in fact, that by the end of the decade, the Soviet concentration camps had attained what was to be their permanent form. They had, by this time, penetrated nearly every region of the Soviet Union, all twelve of its time zones, and most of its republics. From Aktyubinsk to Yakutsk, there was not a single major population center that did not now have its own local camp or colony. Prison labor was used to build everything from children’s toys to military aircraft. In the Soviet Union of the 1940s it would have been difficult, in many places, to go about your daily business and not run in to prisoners.

More important, the camps had evolved. They were now no longer a group of idiosyncratically run work sites, but rather a full-fledged “camp-industrial complex,” with internal rules and habitual practices, special distribution systems and hierarchies.
⁷⁷
A vast bureaucracy, also with its own particular culture, ruled the Gulag’s far-flung empire from Moscow. The center regularly sent out orders to local camps, governing everything from general policy to minor details. Although the local camps did not (or could not) always follow the letter of the law, the ad hoc nature of the Gulag’s early days never returned.

The fortunes of prisoners would still fluctuate along with Soviet policy, economics, and, most of all, the course of the Second World War. But the era of trials and experiments was over. The system was now in place. The group of procedures that prisoners called the “meat-grinder”—the methods of arrest, of interrogation, of transport, of food, and of work—were, at the start of the 1940s, set in stone. In essence, these would change very little until Stalin’s death.