Gulag (4 page)

Still, in the nineteenth century,
katorga
remained a relatively rare form of punishment. In 1906, only about 6,000
katorga
convicts were serving sentences; in 1916, on the eve of the Revolution, there were only 28,600.
³⁰
Of far greater economic importance was another category of prisoner: the forced settlers, who were sentenced to live in exile, but not in prison, in underpopulated regions of the country, chosen for their economic potential. Between 1824 and 1889 alone, some 720,000 forced settlers were sent to Siberia. Many were accompanied by their families. They, not the convicts laboring in chains, gradually populated Russia’s empty, mineral-rich wastelands.
³¹

Their sentences were not necessarily easy ones, and some of the settlers thought their fate worse than that of the
katorga
prisoners. Assigned to remote districts, with poor land and few neighbors, many starved to death over the long winters, or drank themselves to death from boredom. There were very few women—their numbers never exceeded 15 percent—fewer books, no entertainment.
³²

On his journey across Siberia to Sakhalin, Anton Chekhov met, and described, some of these exiled settlers: “The majority of them are financially poor, have little strength, little practical training, and possess nothing except their ability to write, which is frequently of absolutely no use to anybody. Some of them commence by selling, piece by piece, their shirts of Holland linen, their sheets, their scarves and handkerchiefs, and finish up after two or three years dying in fearful penury . . .”
³³

But not all of the exiles were miserable and degenerate. Siberia was far away from European Russia, and in the East officialdom was more forgiving, aristocracy much thinner on the ground. The wealthier exiles and ex-prisoners sometimes built up large estates. The more educated became doctors and lawyers, or ran schools.
³⁴
Princess Maria Volkonskaya, wife of the Decembrist Sergei Volkonsky, sponsored the building of a theater and concert hall in Irkutsk: although she had, like her husband, technically been deprived of her rank, invitations to her soirées and private dinners were eagerly sought after, and discussed as far away as Moscow and St. Petersburg.
³⁵

By the early twentieth century, the system had shed some of its previous harshness. The fashion for prison reform which spread through Europe in the nineteenth century finally caught up with Russia too. Regimes grew lighter, and policing grew laxer.
³⁶
Indeed, in contrast to what came later, the route to Siberia now seems, if not exactly pleasurable, then hardly an onerous punishment for the small group of men who would lead the Russian Revolution. When in prison, the Bolsheviks received a certain amount of favorable treatment as “political” rather than criminal prisoners, and were allowed to have books, paper, and writing implements. Ordzhonikidze, one of the Bolshevik leaders, later recalled reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, Plekhanov, William James, Frederick W. Taylor, Dostoevsky, and Ibsen, among others, while resident in St. Petersburg’s Schlüsselberg Fortress.
³⁷
By later standards, the Bolsheviks were also well-fed, well-dressed, even beautifully coiffed. A photograph taken of Trotsky imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1906 shows him wearing spectacles, a suit, a tie, and a shirt with an impressively white collar. The peephole in the door behind him offers the only clue to his whereabouts.
³⁸
Another taken of him in exile in eastern Siberia, in 1900, shows him in a fur hat and heavy coat, surrounded by other men and women, also in boots and furs.
³⁹
All of these items would be rare luxuries in the Gulag, half a century later.

If life in Czarist exile did become intolerably unpleasant, there was always escape. Stalin himself was arrested and exiled four times. Three times he escaped, once from Irkutsk province and twice from Vologda province, a region which later became pockmarked with camps.
⁴⁰
As a result, his scorn for the Czarist regime’s “toothlessness” knew no bounds. His Russian biographer Dmitri Volkogonov characterized his opinion like this: “You didn’t have to work, you could read to your heart’s content and you could even escape, which required only the will to do so.”
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Thus did their Siberian experience provide the Bolsheviks with an earlier model to build upon—and a lesson in the need for exceptionally strong punitive regimes.

If the Gulag is an integral part of both Soviet and Russian history, it is inseparable from European history too: the Soviet Union was not the only twentieth-century European country to develop a totalitarian social order, or to build a system of concentration camps. While it is not the intention of this book to compare and contrast the Soviet and the Nazi camps, the subject cannot be comfortably ignored either. The two systems were built at roughly the same time, on the same continent. Hitler knew of the Soviet camps, and Stalin knew of the Holocaust. There were prisoners who experienced and described the camps of both systems. At a very deep level, the two systems are related.

They are related, first of all, because both Nazism and Soviet communism emerged out of the barbaric experiences of the First World War and the Russian civil war, which followed on its heels. The industrialized methods of warfare put into wide use during both of these conflicts generated an enormous intellectual and artistic response at the time. Less noticed—except, of course, by the millions of victims—was the widespread use of industrialized methods of incarceration. Both sides constructed internment camps and prisoner-of-war camps across Europe from 1914 on. In 1918 there were 2.2 million prisoners of war on Russian territory. New technology—the mass production of guns, of tanks, even of barbed wire—made these and later camps possible. Indeed, some of the first Soviet camps were actually built on top of First World War prisoner-of-war camps.
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The Soviet and Nazi camps are also related because they belong, together, to the wider history of concentration camps, which began at the end of the nineteenth century. By concentration camps, I mean camps constructed to incarcerate people not for what they had done, but for who they were. Unlike criminal prison camps, or prisoner-of-war camps, concentration camps were built for a particular type of noncriminal civilian prisoner, the member of an “enemy” group, or at any rate of a category of people who, for reasons of their race or their presumed politics, were judged to be dangerous or extraneous to society.
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According to this definition, the first modern concentration camps were set up not in Germany or Russia, but in colonial Cuba, in 1895. In that year, in an effort to put an end to a series of local insurgencies, imperial Spain began to prepare a policy of
reconcentración
, intended to remove the Cuban peasants from their land and “reconcentrate” them in camps, thereby depriving the insurgents of food, shelter, and support. By 1900, the Spanish term
reconcentración
had already been translated into English, and was used to describe a similar British project, initiated for similar reasons, during the Boer War in South Africa: Boer civilians were “concentrated” into camps, in order to deprive Boer combatants of shelter and support.

From there, the idea spread further. It certainly seems, for example, as if the term
kontslager
first appeared in Russian as a translation from the English “concentration camp,” probably thanks to Trotsky’s familiarity with the history of the Boer War.
⁴⁴
In 1904, German colonists in German South-West Africa also adopted the British model—with one variation. Instead of merely locking up the region’s native inhabitants, a tribe called the Herero, they made them carry out forced labor on behalf of the German colony.

There are a number of strange and eerie links between these first German-African labor camps and those built in Nazi Germany three decades later. It was thanks to these southern African labor colonies, for example, that the word
Konzentrationslager
first appeared in the German language, in 1905. The first imperial commissioner of Deutsche Sud-West Afrika was one Dr. Heinrich Goering, the father of Hermann, who set up the first Nazi camps in 1933. It was also in these African camps that the first German medical experiments were conducted on humans: two of Joseph Mengele’s teachers, Theodor Mollison and Eugen Fischer, carried out research on the Herero, the latter in an attempt to prove his theories about the superiority of the white race. But they were not unusual in their beliefs. In 1912, a best-selling German book,
German Thought in the World
, claimed that nothing can convince reasonable people that the preservation of a tribe of South African kaffirs is more important for the future of humanity than the expansion of the great European nations and the white race in general . . . it is only when the indigenous people have learned to produce something of value in the service of the superior race . . . that they can be said to have a moral right to exist.
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While this theory was rarely put so clearly, similar sentiments often lay just beneath the surface of colonial practice. Certainly some forms of colonialism both reinforced the myth of white racial superiority and legitimized the use of violence by one race against another. It can be argued, therefore, that the corrupting experiences of some European colonists helped pave the way for the European totalitarianism of the twentieth-century.
⁴⁶
And not only European: Indonesia is an example of a post-colonial state whose rulers initially imprisoned their critics in concentration camps, just as their colonial masters had.

The Russian Empire, which had quite successfully vanquished its own native peoples in its march eastward, was no exception.
⁴⁷
During one of the dinner parties that takes place in Leo Tolstoy’s novel
Anna Karenina
, Anna’s husband—who has some official responsibilities for “Native Tribes”—holds forth on the need for superior cultures to absorb inferior ones.
⁴⁸
At some level, the Bolsheviks, like all educated Russians, would have been aware of the Russian Empire’s subjugation of the Kirgiz, Buryats, Tungus, Chukchi, and others. The fact that it didn’t particularly concern them—they, who were otherwise so interested in the fate of the downtrodden—itself indicates something about their unspoken assumptions.

But then, full consciousness of the history of southern Africa or of eastern Siberia was hardly required for the development of European concentration camps: the notion that some types of people are superior to other types of people was common enough in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. And this, finally, is what links the camps of the Soviet Union and those of Nazi Germany in the most profound sense of all: both regimes legitimated themselves, in part, by establishing categories of “enemies ” or “sub-humans” whom they persecuted and destroyed on a mass scale.

In Nazi Germany, the first targets were the crippled and the retarded. Later, the Nazis concentrated on Gypsies, homosexuals, and, above all, on the Jews. In the USSR the victims were, at first, the “former people”—alleged supporters of the old regime—and later the “enemies of the people,” an ill-defined term which would come to include not only alleged political opponents of the regime, but also particular national groups and ethnicities, if they seemed (for equally ill-defined reasons) to threaten the Soviet state or Stalin’s power. At different times Stalin conducted mass arrests of Poles, Balts, Chechens, Tartars, and—on the eve of his death—Jews.
⁴⁹

Although these categories were never entirely arbitrary, they were never entirely stable either. Half a century ago, Hannah Arendt wrote that both the Nazi and the Bolshevik regimes created “objective opponents” or “objective enemies,” whose “identity changes according to the prevailing circumstances—so that, as soon as one category is liquidated, war may be declared on another.” By the same token, she added, “the task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.”
⁵⁰
Again: people were arrested not for what they had done, but for who they were.

In both societies, the creation of concentration camps was actually the final stage in a long process of dehumanization of these objective enemies— a process which began, at first, with rhetoric. In his autobiography,
Mein
Kampf
, Hitler wrote of how he had suddenly realized that the Jews were responsible for Germany’s problems, that “any shady undertaking, any form of foulness” in public life was connected to the Jews: “on putting the probing knife to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the suddenness of the light . . .”
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Lenin and Stalin also began by blaming “enemies” for the Soviet Union’s myriad economic failures: they were “wreckers” and “saboteurs” and agents of foreign powers. From the late 1930s, as the wave of arrests began to expand, Stalin took this rhetoric to greater extremes, denouncing the “enemies of the people” as vermin, as pollution, as “poisonous weeds.” He also spoke of his opponents as “filth” which had to be “subjected to ongoing purification”—just as Nazi propaganda would associate Jews with images of vermin, of parasites, of infectious disease.
⁵²

Once demonized, the legal isolation of the enemy began in earnest. Before the Jews were actually rounded up and deported to camps, they were deprived of their status as German citizens. They were forbidden to work as civil servants, as lawyers, as judges; forbidden to marry Aryans; forbidden to attend Aryan schools; forbidden to display the German flag; forced to wear gold stars of David; and subjected to beatings and humiliation on the street.
⁵³
Before their actual arrest in Stalin’s Soviet Union, “enemies” were also routinely humiliated in public meetings, fired from their jobs, expelled from the Communist Party, divorced by their disgusted spouses, and denounced by their angry children.