Gulag (66 page)

The vast majority of the clothing sent by the United States wound up on the backs of the camp administration and their wives, although some of the clothing did end up being used by camp theatrical productions, and some of the canned pork did make its way to the prisoners. They ate it with relish: many had never seen canned meat before. Better still, they used the empty cans to make drinking cups, oil lamps, pots, pans, stovepipes, and even buttons—hardly imagining the surprise such ingenuity would have occasioned in the country where the cans had originated.
⁹¹

Before Wallace left, Nikishov gave an elaborate banquet in his honor. Extravagant dishes, their ingredients carved out of prisoners’ rations, were served; toasts were made to Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Wallace himself made a speech, which included the following memorable words:

Both the Russians and the Americans, in their different ways, are groping for a way of life that will enable the common man everywhere in the world to get the most good out of modern technology. There is nothing irreconcilable in our aims and purposes. Those who so proclaim are wittingly or unwittingly looking for war—and that, in my opinion, is criminal.
⁹²

Chapter 21

AMNESTY—AND AFTERWARD

Today I bid farewell to the camp with a cheerful smile,
To the wires that for a year kept freedom away . . .
Will nothing be left of me here,
Will nothing restrain my hurried steps today?
Oh no! Behind the wire I leave a Golgotha of pain
Still trying to pull me to the outer ends of misery.
Behind I leave graves of anguish and the remains of yearning
And secretly shed tears, the beads of our rosary . . .

All that now seems to have floated away, like a leaf blown
off a tree
At long last we have broken our ties of bondage.
And my heart is no longer filled with hate
For today rainbows break through the clouds in my eyes!

—Janusz Wedów, “Goodbye to the Camp”
¹

MANY OF THE METAPHORS that have been used to describe the Soviet repressive system—the “meat-grinder,” the “conveyor belt”—make it sound relentless, inexorable, uncompromising. Yet at the same time, the system was not static: it kept turning, churning, producing new surprises. If it is true that the years from 1941 to 1943 brought death, illness, and tragedy to millions of Soviet prisoners, it is equally true that for millions of others the war brought freedom.

Amnesties for healthy men, of fighting age, began only days after the war broke out. As early as July 12, 1941, the Supreme Soviet ordered the Gulag to free certain categories of prisoners directly into the Red Army: “those sentenced for missing work, for ordinary and insignificant administrative and economic crimes.” The order was repeated several more times. In all, the NKVD released 975,000 prisoners during the first three years of the war, along with several hundred thousand ex-kulak special exiles. More amnesties continued up to, and during, the final assault on Berlin.
²
On February 21, 1945, three months before the end of the war, more orders were issued to release prisoners: the Gulag was told to have them ready for induction into the army by March 15.
³

The size of these amnesties had an enormous impact on the demography of the camps during the war, and, consequently, on the lives of those who remained behind. New prisoners poured into the camps, mass amnesties freed others, and millions died, making statistics for the war years extremely deceptive. Figures for the year 1943 show an apparent decline in the prisoner population, from 1.5 million to 1.2 million. In that year, however, another figure indicates that 2,421,000 prisoners passed through the Gulag, some newly arrested, some newly released, some transferred between camps, and many dead.
⁴
Still, despite the hundreds of thousands of new prisoners arriving every month, the total number of Gulag inmates most definitely declined between June 1941 and July 1944. Several forestry camps, hurriedly set up to accommodate the glut of new prisoners in 1938, were just as rapidly eliminated.
⁵
Remaining prisoners worked longer and longer workdays, yet even so, labor shortages were endemic. In Kolyma, during the war years, even free citizens were expected to help pan for gold in their free hours after work.
⁶

Not that all prisoners were allowed to go: the amnesty orders explicitly excluded both “criminal recidivists”—meaning the professional criminals—as well as the political prisoners. Exceptions were made for a very few. Recognizing, perhaps, the damage done to the Red Army by the arrests of leading officers in the late 1930s, a few officers with political sentences had been quietly released after the Soviet invasion of Poland. Among them was General Alexander Gorbatov, who was recalled to Moscow from a distant
lagpunkt
of Kolyma in the winter of 1940. Upon seeing Gorbatov, the interrogator assigned to reinvestigate his case looked again at a photograph taken before his arrest, and immediately began asking questions. He was trying to establish whether the skeleton in front of him could really be one of the army’s most talented young officers: “My quilt trousers were patched, my legs were wrapped in cloths and I wore miner’s ankle boots. I also had a padded jerkin which was smooth and shiny with dirt. I wore a tattered, filthy cap with earflaps ...”
⁷
Gorbatov was ultimately released in March 1941, just before the German offensive. In the spring of 1945, as noted, he led one of the assaults on Berlin.

For ordinary soldiers, amnesty did not guarantee survival. Many speculate—although the archives have not yet confirmed this—that the prisoners released from the Gulag into the Red Army were assigned to “penal battalions” and sent directly to the most dangerous sections of the front. The Red Army was notorious for its willingness to sacrifice men, and it is not hard to imagine that commanders were even more willing to sacrifice former prisoners. One ex-prisoner, the dissident Avraham Shifrin, claimed to have been put into a penal battalion because he was the son of an “enemy of the people.” According to his account, he and his comrades were sent directly to the front despite a shortage of weapons: 500 men were given 100 rifles. “Your weapons are in the hands of the Nazis,” the officers told them. “Go get them.” Shifrin survived, although he was wounded twice.
⁸

Nevertheless, Soviet prisoners who joined the Red Army often distinguished themselves. Perhaps surprisingly, few seem to have objected to fighting for Stalin either. At least from the way he tells it, General Gorbatov never had a moment’s hesitation about rejoining the Soviet army, or about fighting on behalf of a Communist Party which had arrested him without cause. Upon hearing of the German invasion, his first thought was of how fortunate he was to have been freed: he could use his regained strength for the benefit of the motherland. He also writes with pride of the “Soviet arms” that his soldiers were able to use, “thanks to the industrialization of our country,” with no comment about how that industrialization was achieved. True, on a number of occasions he showers scorn upon the Red Army’s “political officers”—the military secret police—for meddling too much with the work of the soldiers, and he was once or twice mistreated by NKVD officers, who murmured darkly that he “hadn’t learned much in Kolyma.” But the sincerity of his patriotism is hard to doubt.
⁹

This also appears to have been true of many other released prisoners, at least from the evidence contained in NKVD files. In May 1945, the Gulag’s boss, Viktor Nasedkin, composed an elaborate, almost gushing report on the patriotism and the fighting spirit shown by former prisoners who had entered the Red Army, quoting extensively from letters they sent back to their former camps. “First of all, I inform you that I am in a hospital in Kharkov, wounded,” wrote one. “I defended my beloved Motherland, disregarding my own life. I too was sentenced for working badly, but our beloved Party gave me the chance to pay back my debts to society by achieving victory on the front line. By my own calculations, I killed 53 fascists with my steel bullets.”

Another wrote to express his thanks:

First of all, I write to thank you sincerely for re-educating me. In the past, I was a recidivist, considered dangerous to society, and therefore was placed more than once in a prison, where I learned to work. Now, the Red Army has put even more trust in me, it has taught me to be a good commander, and trusted me with fighting comrades. With them, I go bravely into battle, they respect me for the care I take of them, and for correctness with which we fulfill the military tasks we are set.

Occasionally, officers wrote back to camp commanders too. “During the storming of Chernigov, Comrade Kolesnichenko commanded a company,” wrote one captain. “The former prisoner matured into a cultured, steadfast, and militant commander.”

With the exception of five ex
-zeks
who became Heroes of the Soviet Union, receiving the highest military distinction in the Red Army, there do not appear to be separate records of how many other ex-prisoners won medals. But the records of the more than 1,000
zeks
who wrote back to their camps are instructive: 85 had become officers, 34 had been inducted into the Communist Party, and 261 had won medals.
¹⁰
While this was probably not a typical sampling of ex-prisoners, there is no reason to think that it was very unusual either. The war produced a surge of patriotism across the Soviet Union, and former prisoners were allowed to take part in it.
¹¹

Perhaps more surprisingly, prisoners still serving out their sentences in camps were sometimes swept up by patriotic feelings as well. Even harsh new rules and cuts in food supplies did not necessarily turn all of the Gulag’s
zeks
into hardened opponents of the Soviet regime. On the contrary, many later wrote that the worst thing about having been in a concentration camp in June 1941 was being unable to go to the front and fight. The war was raging, their comrades were fighting—and they were far in the rear, burning with patriotism. They instantly snubbed all the German prisoners as fascists, insulted the guards for not being at the front, and constantly exchanged gossip and rumors about the war. As Evgeniya Ginzburg remembered, “We were ready to forgive and forget now that the whole nation was suffering, ready to write off the injustice done to us ...”
¹²

On a few occasions, prisoners in camps close to the front line had the opportunity to put their patriotism into practice. In a report he intended as a contribution to the history of the Great Motherland War, Pokrovsky, a former employee of Soroklag, a camp in the Karelian Republic, near the Finnish border, described an incident which took place during the camp’s hasty evacuation:

The column of tanks was growing closer, the situation was becoming critical, when one of the prisoners . . . jumped up into the cabin of a truck, and began driving as fast as possible toward the tank. Slamming into the tank, the prisoner-hero was destroyed, along with the truck—but the tank also stopped and burst into flames. The road was blocked, the other tanks turned around in the opposite direction. It saved the situation, and made possible the evacuation of the rest of the colony.

Pokrovsky also described how a group of more than 600 freed prisoners, stranded in the camp by the lack of trains, voluntarily threw themselves into the work of building the defenses of the city of Belomorsk:

All of them agreed with one voice, and immediately formed themselves into working brigades, delegating brigadiers and foremen. This group of freed prisoners worked on the defenses for more than a week, with exceptional zeal, from early morning until late evening, 13 to 14 hours every day. The only thing they demanded in return was that someone conduct political talks with them, and give them information about the situation on the front line. I fulfilled this task conscientiously.
¹³

Camp propaganda encouraged such patriotism, and generally gathered pace during the war. As elsewhere in the Soviet Union, there were poster campaigns, war films, and lectures. Prisoners were told “we would now have to work even harder, since every gram of gold we dug out would be a blow against facism.”
¹⁴
Of course, it is impossible to know whether this sort of propaganda worked, just as it is impossible to know whether any propaganda ever works. But the Gulag administration did perhaps take this message more seriously when the Gulag’s production capacity suddenly became vital to the Soviet war effort. In his pamphlet on re-education, “Return to Life,” the KVCh officer Loginov wrote that the slogan “All for the Front, all for Victory” found a “warm echo” in the hearts of those working behind the front lines in the camps of the Gulag: “The prisoners, temporarily isolated from society, doubled and tripled the pace of their work. Selflessly working in factories, building sites, woodlands, and fields, they threw all of their highly productive work into speeding up the defeat of the enemy at the front.”
¹⁵

Without a doubt, the Gulag did make an industrial contribution to the war effort. In the first eighteen months of the war, thirty-five Gulag “colonies” were converted to the production of ammunition. Many of the timber camps were put to work producing ammunition cases. At least twenty camps made Red Army uniforms, while others made field telephones, more than 1.7 million gas masks, and 24,000 mortar stands. Over one million inmates were put to work on the construction of railways, roads, and airfields. Whenever there was a sudden, urgent need for construction workers—when a pipeline gave way or a new rail route had to be constructed—the Gulag was usually called in to do it. As in the past, Dalstroi produced virtually all of the Soviet Union’s gold.
¹⁶

But, as in peacetime, this data, and the efficiency it appears to suggest, is deceptive. “From the first days of the war, the Gulag organized its industries in order to meet the needs of those fighting at the front,” wrote Nasedkin. Might those needs not have been better met by free workers? Elsewhere, he records that production of certain types of ammunition quadrupled.
¹⁷
How much more ammunition might have been made if patriotic prisoners had been allowed to work in ordinary factories? Thousands of soldiers who might have been at the front were kept behind the lines, guarding the imprisoned workforce. Thousands of NKVD men were deployed arresting and then releasing the Poles. They too might have been better used. Thus did the Gulag contribute to the war effort—and probably help to undermine it as well.