Gulag (64 page)

From March 1944, however, the NKVD undertook to “improve” the situation, and set up a new department of forced-labor camps, specially designed for the POWs. Although they were under the jurisdiction of the secret police, these new camps were not technically part of the Gulag, but rather belonged first to the NKVD’s Administration of War Prisoners (UPV) and, after 1945, to its Main Administration of War Prisoners and Internees (GUPVI).
⁴³

The new bureaucracy did not necessarily bring better treatment. Japanese authorities, for example, reckon that the winter of 1945–46—after the war had ended—was the hardest for Japanese prisoners, one in ten of whom died in Soviet captivity. Although they were hardly in a position to pass on useful military information, harsh restrictions on their letters to relatives remained firmly in place: prisoners of war were allowed to write home only after 1946, and then using special forms marked “letter of a POW.” Special censor offices, staffed by censors with foreign-language training, were set up to read their mail.
⁴⁴

Nor did overcrowding cease. Throughout the last year of the war, and even afterward, the numbers of people in these new camps continued to grow, reaching staggering levels. According to official statistics, the Soviet Union took 2,388,000 German prisoners of war between 1941 and 1945. Another 1,097,000 other European soldiers fighting for the Axis also fell into Soviet hands—mostly Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, and Austrians, as well as some French, Dutch, and Belgians—and about 600,000 Japanese, a stunning number, considering that the Soviet Union was at war with Japan relatively briefly. By the time of the armistice, the total number of captured soldiers had surpassed four million.
⁴⁵

This figure, large as it is, does not include all the foreigners swept into Soviet camps during the Red Army’s march across Europe. The NKVD, trailing in the army’s wake, were also looking for other types of prisoners: anyone accused of war crimes, anyone thought to be a spy (even for an Allied government), anyone thought to be anti-Soviet for any reason, anyone to whom any secret police took a personal dislike. Their scope ranged particularly wide in those central European countries where they intended to remain after the war’s end. In Budapest, for example, they quickly picked up some 75,000 Hungarian civilians, sending them first to temporary camps in Hungary, and then to the Gulag—along with the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian war prisoners who were already there.
⁴⁶

Just about anyone could be arrested. Among the Hungarians picked up in Budapest, for example, was George Bien, age sixteen. He was arrested, along with his father, because they owned a radio.
⁴⁷
At the other end of the social spectrum, NKVD officers also arrested Raul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who had singlehandedly saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportation to Nazi concentration camps. In the course of his negotiations Wallenberg had had many dealings with both fascist authorities and Western leaders. He also came from a prominent, and wealthy, Swedish family. For the NKVD, those were sufficient reasons for suspicion. They arrested him in Budapest in January 1945, along with his chauffeur. Both men disappeared into Soviet prisons—Wallenberg was registered there as a “prisoner of war”—and were never heard from again. Throughout the 1990s, the Swedish government searched for clues as to Wallenberg’s ultimate fate, to no avail. It is now widely assumed that he died under interrogation, or was executed soon after his arrest.
⁴⁸

In Poland, the NKVD set its sights on the remaining leaders of the Polish Home Army. This partisan army had, up until 1944, actually fought alongside Soviet troops against the Germans. As soon as the Red Army crossed the old Polish border, however, NKVD troops captured and disarmed Home Army partisan units, and arrested Home Army leaders. Some hid in Poland’s forests, and continued fighting until the mid-1940s. Others were executed. The rest were deported. Thus did tens of thousands of Polish citizens, both partisans and suspect civilians, wind up in the Gulag and the exile villages after the war.
⁴⁹

But no occupied country was exempt. The Baltic states and Ukraine were, as I’ve said, subjected to vast postwar repressions, as were Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and, most of all, Germany and Austria. The NKVD hauled everyone who was discovered in Hitler’s bunker at the time of the Red Army’s advance on Berlin back to Moscow for interrogation. They picked up several of Hitler’s distant relations in Austria too. Among them were a cousin, Maria Koopensteiner, to whom Hitler had once sent some money, as well as her husband, her brothers, and one of the brother’s sons. None, not even Maria, had laid eyes on Hitler since 1906. They were all to die in the USSR.
⁵⁰

In Dresden, the NKVD also picked up an American citizen, John Noble, who had been stranded in Nazi Germany and kept under house arrest during the war, along with his German-born father, a naturalized American. Noble finally returned to the United States more than nine years later, having spent much of the interim in Vorkuta, where his fellow prisoners nicknamed him “Amerikanets.”
⁵¹

The vast majority of those swept up in the melee eventually found their way into camps, either in the POW labor camps or the Gulag itself. The distinction between the two types of camps was never clear. Although they technically belonged to different bureaucracies, the administration of the prisoner-of-war camps soon came to approximate that of the forced-labor camps—so much so that in tracing the history of the POW camps and the history of the Gulag, it becomes difficult to keep the two separate. Sometimes, Gulag camps set up special lagpunkts just for POWs, and the two types of prisoner worked side by side.
⁵²
For no clearly discernible reason, the NKVD also sometimes sent POWs directly into the Gulag system.
⁵³

By the end of the war, the food rations of war prisoners and criminal prisoners were nearly the same, as were the barracks they inhabited and the work they did. Like zeks, POWs worked in construction, in mines, in manufacturing, in road and railway building.
⁵⁴
Like zeks, some of the better-educated POWs found their way into the sharashki, where they designed new military aircraft for the Red Army.
⁵⁵
To this day, residents of certain districts of Moscow speak with pride of the apartment blocks they inhabit, supposedly finished to a higher standard by meticulous German prisoners of war.

Also like
zeks
, the war prisoners eventually became the recipients of a Soviet-style “political education.” In 1943, the NKVD began organizing “anti-fascist” schools and courses in the POW camps. The courses were intended to persuade the participants to “conduct the battle for the ‘democratic’ reconstruction of their countries and uproot the remains of fascism” on returning home to Germany, Romania, or Hungary—and, of course, to prepare the way for Soviet domination.
⁵⁶
Many former German POWs did indeed wind up working in the new police force of communist East Germany.
⁵⁷

But even for those who demonstrated their new loyalty, the return home would not come quickly. Although the USSR repatriated a group of 225,000 prisoners, mostly sick or injured privates, as early as June 1945, and although others continued steadily to return home after that, complete repatriation of the Soviet Union’s POWs took more than a decade: 20,000 remained in the USSR in 1953, when Stalin died.
⁵⁸
Stalin, still convinced of the efficacy of state slavery, looked upon the prisoners’ labor as a form of reparation, and considered their long captivity to be wholly justified. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s—and indeed after, as the Wallenberg case illustrates—Soviet authorities continued to cloak the issue of captive foreigners in confusion, propaganda, and counter-propaganda, releasing people when it suited them, denying all knowledge of their existence when it did not. In October 1945, for example, Beria wrote to Stalin asking him to authorize the release of Hungarian war prisoners in the run-up to Hungarian elections: the Americans and British had released their war prisoners, he added, implying that the Soviet Union looked bad for not having done so.
⁵⁹

The fog persisted for decades. In the first few years following the war, envoys from all over the world kept pressing Moscow with lists of their citizens who had disappeared during the Red Army’s occupation of Europe, or had, for one reason or another, fallen into POW or Gulag camps. Answers were not always easy to come by, since the NKVD itself did not necessarily know of these prisoners’ whereabouts. Eventually, the Soviet authorities set up special commissions to find out how many foreigners were still in captivity in the USSR, and to examine the case for releasing them.
⁶⁰

Complex cases could take years to resolve. Jacques Rossi, a French communist born in Lyon, sent to the camps after a few years of teaching in Moscow, was still trying to get home in 1958. At first refused an exit visa to France, he tried to get one to Poland, where, he told the authorities, his brother and sister lived. That too was refused.
⁶¹
On the other hand, the authorities did also sometimes abruptly lift all of their objections, and unexpectedly allowed foreigners to go home. At one point in 1947, at the height of the postwar famine, the NKVD unexpectedly released several hundred thousand war prisoners. There was no political explanation: the Soviet leadership reckoned, simply, that it did not have enough food to keep them all alive.
⁶²

Repatriation did not flow in only one direction. If large numbers of West Europeans found themselves in Russia at the end of the war, equally large numbers of Russians found themselves in Western Europe. In the spring of 1945, more than 5.5 million Soviet citizens were outside the borders of the Soviet Union. Some of them were soldiers, captured and imprisoned in Nazi POW camps. Others had been drafted into slave-labor camps in Germany and Austria. A few had collaborated during the German occupation of their country, and had retreated with the German army. Up to 150,000 were “Vlasovites,” Soviet soldiers who had fought—or, more often, had been forced to fight—against the Red Army under the command of General Andrei Vlasov, a captured Russian officer who had turned against Stalin and fought with Hitler, or in other pro-Hitler, anti-Stalin Wehrmacht brigades. Some, strange though it sounds, were not Soviet citizens at all. Scattered throughout Europe, most notably in Yugoslavia, there were also anti-communist émigrés: White Russians, that is, who had lost their fight against the Bolsheviks and settled in the West. Stalin wanted them back too: no one was to be allowed to escape Bolshevik retribution.

In the end, he got them. Among the many controversial decisions they made at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin agreed that all Soviet citizens, whatever their individual history, must be returned to the Soviet Union. Although the protocols signed at Yalta did not explicity command the Allies to return Soviet citizens against their will, that, in effect, is what happened.

Some wanted to return home. Leonid Sitko, a Red Army soldier who had spent time in a Nazi prison camp, and was later to spend more time in a Soviet camp, remembered making the choice to go home. Later, he put his feelings about his decision into verse:

There were four roads—there were four countries. In three of them were peace and comfort. In the fourth, I knew, they destroy poets’ lyres And me, most likely, they will kill.

And what happened? To the three countries I said: to hell with you! And I chose my Fatherland.
⁶³

Others, frightened by what might await them, were nevertheless convinced to return by the NKVD officers who traveled to the POW and displaced persons camps scattered all over Europe. The officers trawled the camps, looking for Russians, offering them smiling visions of a bright future. All would be forgiven, they claimed: “You are now considered by us as true Soviet citizens, regardless of the fact that you were forced to join the German army ...”
⁶⁴

Some, particularly those who had fallen on the wrong side of Soviet justice before, naturally did not want to go back at all. “There is enough room in the Motherland for everyone,” the Soviet military attaché in Britain told a group of Soviet soldiers living in Yorkshire POW camps. “We know what sort of room there will be for us,” one prisoner replied.
⁶⁵
Allied officers were nevertheless under orders to send them—and so they did. In Fort Dix, New Jersey, 145 Soviet prisoners, captured wearing German uniforms, barricaded themselves inside their barracks to avoid being sent home. When American soldiers threw tear gas into the building, those who had not already committed suicide rushed out with kitchen knives and clubs, injuring some of the Americans. Afterward, they said they had wanted to incite the Americans to shoot them.
⁶⁶

Worse were the incidents that involved women and children. In May 1945, British troops, under what they were told were direct orders from Churchill, undertook to repatriate more than 20,000 Cossacks, then living in Austria. These were former anti-Bolshevik partisans, some of whom had joined Hitler as a way of fighting Stalin, many of whom had left the USSR after the Revolution, and most of whom no longer held Soviet passports. After many days of promising them good treatment, the British tricked them. They invited the Cossack officers to a “conference,” handed them over to Soviet troops, and rounded up their families the following day. In one particularly ugly incident at a camp near Lienz, Austria, British soldiers used bayonets and rifle butts to force thousands of women and children onto trains which would take them to the USSR. Rather than go back, women threw their babies over bridges, and then jumped themselves. One man killed his wife and his children, laid their bodies neatly on the grass, and then killed himself. The Cossacks knew, of course, what would await them upon their return to the Soviet Union: firing squads—or the Gulag.
⁶⁷

Even those who returned home of their own accord could fall under suspicion. Whether they had left the Soviet Union voluntarily or by force, whether they had collaborated or been captured, whether they had returned willingly or been forced onto cattle cars, all were asked, at the border, to fill out a form which asked whether they had collaborated. Those who confessed (and some did) and those who seemed suspicious—including many Soviet POWs, despite the torments they had suffered in German camps— were kept for further questioning in filtration camps. These camps, set up early in the war, looked, and felt, similar to Gulag camps. Ringed by barbed wire, those inside were forced laborers in all but name.