Gulag (6 page)

In August, Lenin made use of the term as well. In a telegram to the commissars of Penza, site of an anti-Bolshevik uprising, he called for “mass terror against the
kulaks
[rich peasants], priests and White Guards” and for the “unreliable” to be “locked up in a concentration camp outside town.”
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The facilities were already in place. During the summer of 1918—in the wake of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty which ended Russia’s participation in the First World War—the regime freed two million war prisoners. The empty camps were immediately turned over to the Cheka.
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At the time, the Cheka must have seemed the ideal body to take over the task of incarcerating “enemies” in “special” camps. A completely new organization, the Cheka was designed to be the “sword and shield” of the Communist Party, and had no allegiance to the official Soviet government or any of its departments. It had no traditions of legality, no obligation to obey the rule of law, no need to consult with the police or the courts or the Commissar of Justice. Its very name spoke of its special status: the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage—or, using the Russian abbreviation for “Extraordinary Commission”—the Ch-K, or Cheka. It was “extraordinary” precisely because it existed outside of “ordinary” legality.

Almost as soon as it was created, the Cheka was given an extraordinary task to carry out. On September 5, 1918, Dzerzhinsky was directed to implement Lenin’s policy of Red Terror. Launched in the wake of an assassination attempt on Lenin’s life, this wave of terror—arrests, imprisonments, murders—more organized than the random terror of the previous months, was in fact an important component of the civil war, directed against those suspected of working to destroy the Revolution on the “home front.” It was bloody, it was merciless, and it was cruel—as its perpetrators wanted it to be.
Krasnaya Gazeta
, the organ of the Red Army, described it: “Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin . . . let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie—more blood, as much as possible . . .”
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The Red Terror was crucial to Lenin’s struggle for power. Concentration camps, the so-called “special camps,” were crucial to the Red Terror. They were mentioned in the very first decree on Red Terror, which called not only for the arrest and incarceration of “important representatives of the bourgeoisie, landowners, industrialists, merchants, counter-revolutionary priests, anti-Soviet officers” but also for their “isolation in concentration camps.”
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Although there are no reliable figures for numbers of prisoners, by the end of 1919 there were twenty-one registered camps in Russia. At the end of 1920 there were 107, five times as many.
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Nevertheless, at this stage, the purpose of the camps remained ambiguous. The prisoners were to carry out labor—but to what end? Was labor meant to re-educate the prisoners? Was it meant to humiliate them? Or was it supposed to help build the new Soviet state? Different Soviet leaders and different institutions had different answers. In February 1919, Dzerzhinsky himself made an eloquent speech advocating a role for the camps in the ideological re-education of the bourgeoisie. The new camps would, he said, make use of the labor of those persons under arrest; for those gentlemen who live without any occupation; and for those who are unable to work without being forced to do so. Such punishment ought to be applied to those working in Soviet institutions who demonstrate unconscientious attitudes to work, tardiness, etc. . . . In this way we will create schools of labor.
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When the first official decrees on the special camps were published in the spring of 1919, however, slightly different priorities appeared to take precedent.
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The decrees, a surprisingly lengthy list of rules and recommendations, suggested that each regional capital set up a camp for no less than 300 people, “on the border of the city, or in nearby buildings like monasteries, estates, farms, etc.” They mandated an eight-hour workday, with extra hours and night work allowed only “in agreement with the labor code.” Food packages were forbidden. Meetings with members of the immediate family were allowed, but only on Sundays and holidays. Prisoners attempting escape could have their sentence multiplied by ten. A second attempt could be punished by death—an extremely harsh sentence in comparison with the lax Czarist laws on escape, which the Bolsheviks knew only too well. More important, the decrees also made clear that the work of the prisoners was intended not for their own educational benefit, but to pay for the cost of the camp’s upkeep. Prisoners with disabilities were to be sent elsewhere. The camps were to be self-financing. Optimistically, the camps’ original founders believed that they would pay their own way.
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Thanks to the irregular flow of state financing, those running the camps quickly became interested in the idea of self-finance or at least in making some practical use of their prisoners. In September 1919, a secret report shown to Dzerzhinsky complained that sanitary conditions in one transit camp were “below criticism,” largely because they rendered so many people too ill to work: “During wet autumn conditions they will not be places to collect people and make use of their labor, but will rather become seedbeds for epidemics and other illnesses.” Among other things, the writer proposed that those incapable of work should be sent elsewhere, thereby making the camp more efficient—a tactic that would later be deployed many times by the leadership of the Gulag. Already, those responsible for the camps were concerned about sickness and hunger mostly insofar as sick and hungry prisoners are not useful prisoners. Their dignity and humanity, not to mention their survival, hardly interested those in charge at all.
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In practice, not all camp commanders were concerned either with re-education or self-financing. Instead they preferred to punish the formerly well-off by humiliating them, giving them a taste of the workers’ lot. A report from the Ukrainian city of Poltava, filed by a White Army investigating commission after the temporary recapture of the city, noted that bourgeois captives arrested during the Bolshevik occupation had been given jobs which were “intended as a way of scoffing at people, trying to lower them. For example, one arrestee . . . was forced to clean a thick layer of dirt from a filthy floor with his hands. Another was told to clean a toilet, and . . . was given a tablecloth in order to do the job.”
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True, these subtle differences in intention probably made little difference to the many tens of thousands of prisoners, for whom the very fact of being arrested for no reason at all was humiliation enough. They probably did not affect prisoners’ living conditions either, which were universally appalling. One priest sent to a camp in Siberia later recalled soup made from entrails, barracks without electricity, and virtually no heat in winter.
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Alexander Izgoev, a leading Czarist-era politician, was sent to a camp north of Petrograd. On the way, his party of prisoners stopped in the town of Vologda. Instead of the hot meal and warm apartments they had been promised, the prisoners were marched from place to place in search of shelter. No transit camp had been prepared for them. Finally, they were lodged in a former school, furnished with “bare walls and benches.” Those with money eventually purchased their own food in the town.
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But this sort of chaotic mistreatment was not reserved only for prisoners. At crucial moments of the civil war, the emergency needs of the Red Army and the Soviet state overrode everything else, from re-education to revenge to considerations of justice. In October 1918, the commander of the northern front sent a request to the Petrograd military commission for 800 workers, urgently needed for road construction and trench digging. As a result, “a number of citizens from the former merchant classes were invited to appear at Soviet headquarters, allegedly for the purpose of registration for possible labor duty at some future date. When these citizens appeared for registration, they were placed under arrest and sent to the Semenovsky barracks to await their dispatch to the front.” When even this did not produce enough workers, the local Soviet—the local ruling council—simply surrounded a part of Nevsky Prospekt, Petrograd’s main shopping street, arrested everyone without a Party card or a certificate proving they worked for a government institution, and marched them off to a nearby barracks. Later, the women were released, but the men were packed off to the north: “not one of the thus strangely mobilized men was allowed to settle his family affairs, to say goodbye to his relatives, or to obtain suitable clothing and footwear.”
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While certainly shocking to the pedestrians thus arrested, that incident would have seemed less odd to Petrograd’s workers. For even at this early stage in Soviet history, the line between “forced labor” and ordinary labor was blurred. Trotsky openly spoke of turning the whole country into a “workers’ army” along the lines of the Red Army. Workers were early on forced to register at central labor offices, from where they might be sent anywhere in the country. Special decrees were passed prohibiting certain kinds of workers—miners, for example—from leaving their jobs. Nor did free workers, in this era of revolutionary chaos, enjoy much better living conditions than prisoners. Looking from the outside, it would not always have been easy to say which was the work site and which the concentration camp.
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But this too was a harbinger of what was to come: confusion would beset the definitions of “camp,” “prison,” and “forced labor” for most of the next decade. Control over penal institutions would remain in constant flux. Responsible institutions would be endlessly renamed and reorganized as different bureaucrats and commissars attempted to gain control over the system.
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Nevertheless, it is clear that by the end of the civil war, a pattern had been set. Already, the Soviet Union had clearly developed two separate prison systems, with separate rules, separate traditions, separate ideologies. The Commissariat of Justice, and later the Commissariat of the Interior, ran the “regular” prison system, which dealt mainly with what the Soviet regime called “criminals.” Although in practice this system was also chaotic, its prisoners were kept in traditional prisons, and its administrators’ stated goals, as presented in an internal memorandum, would be perfectly comprehensible in “bourgeois” countries: to reform the criminal through corrective labor—“prisoners should work in order to learn skills they can use to conduct an honest life”—and to prevent prisoners from committing further crimes.
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At the same time, the Cheka—later renamed the GPU, the OGPU, the NKVD, and finally the KGB—controlled another prison system, one that was at first known as the system of “special camps” or “extraordinary camps.” Although the Cheka would use some of the same “re-education” or “reforging” rhetoric within them, these camps were not really meant to resemble ordinary penal institutions. They were outside the jurisdiction of other Soviet institutions, and invisible to the public eye. They had special rules, harsher escape penalties, stricter regimes. The prisoners inside them had not necessarily been convicted by ordinary courts, if they had been convicted by any courts at all. Set up as an emergency measure, they were ultimately to grow larger and ever more powerful, as the definition of “enemy” expanded and the power of the Cheka increased. And when the two penal systems, the ordinary and the extraordinary, eventually united, they would unite under the rules of the latter. The Cheka would devour its rivals.

From the start, the “special” prison system was meant to deal with special prisoners: priests, former Czarist officials, bourgeois speculators, enemies of the new order. But one particular category of “politicals” interested the authorities more than others. These were members of the non-Bolshevik, revolutionary socialist political parties, mainly the Anarchists, the Left and Right Social Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and anyone else who had fought for the Revolution, but had not had the foresight to join Lenin’s Bolshevik faction, and had not taken full part in the coup of October 1917. As former allies in the revolutionary struggle against the Czarist regime, they merited special treatment. The Communist Party’s Central Committee would repeatedly discuss their fate up until the end of the 1930s, when most of those who remained alive were arrested or shot.
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In part, this particular category of prisoner bothered Lenin because, like all leaders of exclusive sects, he reserved his greatest hatred for apostates. During one typical exchange, he called one of his socialist critics a “swindler,” a “blind puppy,” a “sycophant of the bourgeoisie,” and a “yes-man of blood-suckers and scoundrels,” fit only for the “cesspit of renegades.”
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Indeed, long before the Revolution, Lenin knew what he would do with those of his socialist comrades who opposed him. One of his revolutionary companions recalled a conversation on this subject:

“I said to him: ‘Vladimir Ilyich, if you come to power, you’ll start hanging the Mensheviks the very next day.’ And he glanced at me and said: ‘It will be after we’ve hanged the last Socialist-Revolutionary that the first Menshevik will get hanged.’ Then he frowned and gave a laugh.”
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But the prisoners who belonged to this special category of “politicals” were also much more difficult to control. Many had spent years in Czarist prisons, and knew how to organize hunger strikes, how to put pressure on their jailers, how to communicate between prison cells in order to exchange information, and how to organize joint protests. More important, they also knew how to contact the outside world, and who to contact. Most of Russia’s non-Bolshevik socialist parties still had émigré branches, usually in Berlin or Paris, whose members could do great damage to the Bolsheviks’ international image. At the third meeting of the Communist International in 1921, representatives of the émigré branch of the Social Revolutionaries—the party ideologically closest to the Bolsheviks (some of its members actually worked briefly in coalition with them)—read aloud a letter from their imprisoned comrades in Russia. The letter caused a sensation at the Congress, largely because it claimed prison conditions in revolutionary Russia were worse than in Czarist times. “Our comrades are being half-starved,” it proclaimed, “many of them are jailed for months without being allowed a meeting with relatives, without letters, without exercise.”
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