Gulag (68 page)

The Bulgarian and Yugoslav camps had a different ethos. Bulgarian police appear to have been less concerned with the fulfillment of a plan and more interested in punishing the inmates. A Bulgarian actress who survived one of the camps later described being beaten nearly to death after collapsing from the heat:

They covered me with old rags and left me alone. The next day everyone went to work, while I was locked up for the entire day with no food or water or medication. I was too weak to get up, due to my bruises and all that I had endured the day before. I’d been brutally beaten. I was in a coma for fourteen hours, and survived by a miracle.
³⁷

She also witnessed a father and son being beaten to death in front of one another, merely to satisfy the sadistic pleasures of those doing the beating. Other survivors of Bulgarian camps describe being tormented by heat, cold, hunger, and physical abuse.
³⁸
The location of these more southerly camps also brought other sorts of suffering: among the most infamous Yugoslav camps was one built on the Adriatic island of Saint-Gregoire, where water was scarce and the main torment was thirst.
³⁹

Unlike the Gulag, the majority of these camps did not last, and many had closed even before Stalin’s death. The East German
spetslagerya
were in fact disbanded in 1950, mostly because they contributed to the deep unpopularity of the East German Communist Party. To improve the new regime’s image—and to prevent more Germans from escaping to the West, which was then still possible—the East German secret police actually nursed prisoners back to health before their release, and provided them with new clothes. Not all were let go: those deemed the most serious political opponents of the new order were, like the Poles arrested in this era, deported to the Soviet Union. Members of the
spetslagerya
burial battalions appear to have been deported as well. Otherwise, they might have exposed the existence of the camps’ mass graves, which were not located and exhumed until the 1990s.
⁴⁰

The Czech camps did not last either: they reached their peak in 1949, and began shrinking after that, before vanishing altogether. The Hungarian leader Imre Nagy liquidated his country’s camps immediately following Stalin’s death, in July 1953. The Bulgarian communists, on the other hand, maintained several hard-labor camps well into the 1970s, long after the mass system of Soviet camps had been disbanded. Lovech, one of the cruelest camps in the Bulgarian system, operated from 1959 until 1962.
⁴¹

Perhaps unexpectedly, the Gulag’s export policy had its most enduring impact outside of Europe. In the early 1950s, at the height of the era of Sino-Soviet collaboration, Soviet “experts” helped set up several Chinese camps, and organized forced-labor brigades at a coal mine near Fushun. The Chinese camps
—laogai—
still exist, although they scarcely resemble the Stalinist camps they were set up to emulate. They are still labor camps—and a sentence in one of them is often followed by a period of exile, just as in Stalin’s system—but the camp commanders seem to be less obsessed with the norms and central work plans. Instead, they concentrate on a rigid form of “re-education.” Prisoners’ atonement, and prisoners’ ritual abasement before the Party, seem to matter to the authorities as much, if not more, than the goods that the prisoners manage to produce.
⁴²

In the end, the details of daily life in the camps of the Soviet satellite states and allies—what they were used for, how long they lasted, how rigid or disorganized they became, how cruel or liberal they remained—all depended on the particular country and its particular culture. It was, it turned out, relatively easy for other nations to alter the Soviet model to meet their own needs. Or perhaps I should say it
is
relatively easy. The following quotation, from a collection published in 1998, describes an even more recent experience in a concentration camp, in the last remaining communist country on the Eurasian landmass:

On my very first day—at the age of nine—I received a quota. The first work I had to carry out was to walk to the mountain and collect firewood and bring back a large load to the school. I was told to repeat it ten times. It took two or three hours for a round trip from the mountain to the school with a load of wood. Unless you finish it you can’t go home. I worked through the night and by the time I had finished it was after midnight and I fell to the ground. Of course, other children who had been there longer could do it faster . . .

Other types of work included collecting gold from sand, using a net in the river (shaking and washing it in the river). This was much easier; sometimes you would be lucky and meet the quota earlier, and then you could play just a little, rather than tell your teacher you had already met the quota ...
⁴³

The writer Chul Hwan Kong defected from North Korea in 1992. He had previously spent ten years, along with his entire family, in Yodok punishment camp. One Seoul human rights group estimates that about 200,000 North Koreans are still being held in similar prison camps, for “crimes” such as reading a foreign newspaper, listening to a foreign radio station, speaking to a foreigner, or in any way “insulting the authority” of North Korea’s leadership. About 400,000 are thought to have died as prisoners in such camps.
⁴⁴

Nor are the North Korean camps confined to North Korea. In 2001, the
Moscow Times
reported that the North Korean government was paying off its debts to Russia by sending labor teams to work in heavily guarded mining and logging camps across isolated parts of Siberia. The camps—“a state within a state”—contain their own internal food distribution networks, their own internal prison, and their own guards. Some 6,000 workers were thought to be involved. Whether they were being paid or not was unclear— but they were certainly not free to leave.
⁴⁵

Not only was the idea of the concentration camp general enough to export, in other words, but it was also enduring enough to last to the present day.

Chapter 22

THE ZENITH OF THE CAMP–INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

At seventeen—we loved to study.
At twenty—we learned to die.
To know that if we are allowed to live
That means nothing has happened, just yet.
At twenty-five—we learned to exchange
Life for dried fish, firewood and potatoes . . .
What was left to learn at forty?
We have skipped so many pages
Perhaps we’ve learned that life is short—
But then, we already knew that at twenty . . .

—Mikhail Frolovsky, “My Generation”
¹

Meanwhile, 1949, twin brother of 1937, was advancing on
our land, on the whole of Eastern Europe, and, before all
else, on the places of prison and exile . . .

—Evgeniya Ginzburg,
Within the Whirlwind
2

WITH THE END OF THE WAR came victory parades, tearful reunions—and the widespread conviction that life would, and should, grow easier. Millions of men and women had endured terrible privations in order to win the war. Now they wanted to live easier lives. In the countryside, rumors of the abolition of the collective farms spread rapidly. In cities, people openly complained about the high prices charged for rationed food. The war had also exposed millions of Soviet citizens, both soldiers and slave laborers, to the relative luxuries of life in the West, and the Soviet regime could no longer plausibly claim, as it had once done, that the Western working man was far poorer than his Soviet equivalent.
³

Even many in power now felt it was time to reorient Soviet production away from armaments and toward the consumer goods that people desperately needed. In a private telephone conversation, taped and recorded for posterity by the secret police, one Soviet general told another that “Absolutely everyone says openly how everyone is discontented with life. On the trains, in fact everywhere, it’s what everyone is saying.”
⁴
Surely, the general speculated, Stalin must have known this too, and would soon have to take action.

By the spring of 1945, hopes were high among prisoners as well. In January of that year, the authorities had declared another general amnesty for women who were pregnant or had small children, and large numbers— 734,785 by July, to be precise—were being released.
⁵
Wartime restrictions had been eased, and prisoners were allowed to receive food and clothing from home again. For the most part, it was not compassion that had dictated these new rules. The amnesty for women—which excluded political prisoners as a matter of course—did not represent a change of heart, but was rather a response to the shocking increase in the numbers of orphans, and the consequent problems of homeless children, hooliganism, and children’s criminal gangs all across the USSR: grudgingly, the authorities recognized that mothers were part of the solution. The lifting of restrictions on packages was not a kindness either, but an attempt to muffle the impact of the postwar famines: the camps could not feed the prisoners, so why not let their families help. One central directive declared sternly that “in the matter of prisoners’ food and clothing, packages and money orders must be treated as an important supplement.”
⁶
Nevertheless, many drew hope from these decrees, interpreting them as harbingers of a new, more relaxed era.

It was not to be. Within a year of victory, the Cold War had begun. The American atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki persuaded the Soviet leadership that the Soviet economy must devote itself wholeheartedly to military and industrial production, and not to the manufacture of refrigerators and children’s shoes. Despite the devastation wreaked by five and a half years of fighting, Soviet planners tried harder than ever to cut corners, to build quickly—and to make as much use of forced labor as possible.
⁷

As it happened, the emergence of a new threat to the Soviet Union suited Stalin’s purposes: it was precisely the excuse he needed to tighten, once again, his control over his people, exposed as they had been to the corrupting influence of the outside world. He therefore ordered his subordinates to “deliver a strong blow” to any talk of democracy, even before any such talk had become widespread.
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He also strengthened and reorganized the NKVD, which was split into two bureaucracies in March 1946. The Ministry of Internal Affairs—or MVD—continued to control the Gulag and the exile villages, effectively becoming the ministry of forced labor. The other, more glamorous bureaucracy—the MGB, later called the KGB— would control counter-intelligence and foreign intelligence, border guards, and ultimately the surveillance of the regime’s opponents as well.
⁹

Finally, instead of relaxing repression after the war, the Soviet leadership embarked on a new series of arrests, again attacking the army, as well as select ethnic minorities, including Soviet Jews. One by one, the secret police “discovered” anti-Stalinist youth conspiracies in nearly every city in the country.
¹⁰
In 1947, new laws prohibited marriages—and, in effect, all romantic relationships—between Soviet citizens and foreigners. Soviet academics who shared scientific information with colleagues abroad could be subject to criminal prosecution too. In 1948, the authorities rounded up some 23,000 collective farmers. All were accused of failing to work the obligatory number of days in the previous year, and were exiled to remote areas, without trial or investigation.
¹¹

Anecdotal evidence exists of some more unusual arrests made at the end of the 1940s. According to a recently declassified intelligence debriefing of a German POW, two American airmen may have found their way into the postwar Gulag as well. In 1954, the German ex-prisoner told American investigators that he had encountered two members of the U.S. Air Force in his POW camp in the Komi region, near Ukhta, in 1949. They were the pilots of a plane that had crashed near Kharkov, in Ukraine. They had been accused of spying, and put in what sounds, from the German’s description, like a
katorga
brigade. One allegedly died in the camp, murdered by one of the camp criminals. The other was taken away at a later date, supposedly to Moscow.
¹²

Fainter, even more tantalizing rumors float around the Komi region as well. According to a local legend, another group of Englishmen, or at least English speakers, were also incarcerated in another
lagpunkt
—Sedvozh, also near Ukhta—in the 1940s. As one local man tells the story, the Englishmen were spies, parachuted into Germany at the end of the war. The Red Army captured them, interrogated them, and deported them to the Gulag in great secrecy, since Britain and the USSR had, after all, been wartime allies. Evidence of their presence is slim: a
lagpunkt
locally nicknamed “Angliiskaya Koloniya,” the “English Colony,” and a single reference in the Moscow military archive to “ten Scotsmen,” whatever that may mean, in a prisoner-of-war camp in the area.
¹³

Thanks to all of these new additions, the Gulag did not contract after the war. On the contrary, it expanded—reaching its highest level in the early 1950s. According to official statistics, on January 1, 1950, the Gulag contained 2,561,351 prisoners in the camps and colonies of its system—a million more than there had been five years earlier, in 1945.
¹⁴
The number of special exiles also grew, due to the major deportation operations in the Baltic States, Moldavia, and Ukraine, deliberately designed to complete the “Sovietization” of those populations. And at about the same time, the NKVD resolved, once and for all, the thorny question of the exiles’ future, decreeing that all deportees had been exiled “in perpetuity”—along with their children. By the 1950s, the number of exiles roughly matched the number of prisoners in camps.
¹⁵

The second half of 1948 and the first half of 1949 brought yet another unexpected tragedy to the Gulag’s former inmates: a series of arrests, or rather re-arrests, of former prisoners, mostly those who had originally been arrested in 1937 and 1938, given ten-year sentences and only recently released. The re-arrests were systematic, thorough, and strangely bloodless. New investigations were rare, and most of the prisoners received only perfunctory interrogations.
¹⁶
The exile community in Magadan and the Kolyma valley knew something was wrong when they heard of the arrests of former “politicals” whose names all began with the first three letters of the Russian alphabet: the secret police, they realized, were re-arresting people in alphabetical order.
¹⁷
No one could decide if this was funny or tragic. Evgeniya Ginzburg wrote that whereas “in ’37 evil had assumed a monumental tragic appearance . . . in ’49, the Georgian Serpent, yawning with repletion, was drawing up at leisure an alphabetical list of those to be exterminated ...”
¹⁸

Overwhelmingly, the re-arrested describe feelings of indifference. The first arrest had been a shock, but also a learning experience: many had been forced to confront the truth about their political system for the first time. The second arrest brought no such new knowledge. “By ’49 I already knew that suffering can only cleanse one up to a point. When it drags on for decades and becomes a matter of routine, it no longer cleanses; it simply dulls all sensation,” wrote Ginzburg: “after my second arrest I would surely turn into a thing of wood.”
¹⁹

When the police came for her the second time, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg went to her cupboard to pack, then stopped. “Why should I bother to take anything with me? The children can make better use of my things than I,” she thought. “Obviously I won’t survive this time; how could I possibly stand it?”
²⁰
Lev Razgon’s wife was re-arrested, and he demanded to know why. When told she had been sentenced again for the same crimes as before, he demanded further explanations:

“She’s already served her time. Does the law really permit you to punish a person twice for the same offense?”

The procurator looked at me in amazement.

“Of course not. But what’s the law got to do with it?”
²¹

The majority of those re-arrested were not sent back to camps, but instead into exile, usually in particularly remote and underpopulated regions of the country: Kolyma, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Kazakhstan.
²²
There, most would live lives of unrelenting tedium. Shunned by the local communities as “enemies,” they found it difficult to find living space, difficult to work. No one wanted to be associated with a spy or a saboteur.

To the victims, Stalin’s plans seemed clear enough: no one who had received a sentence for spying, sabotage, or any form of political opposition was ever to be allowed to return home. If released, they would be given “wolves passports,” which forbade them from living anywhere near a major city, and would be constantly subject to re-arrest.
²³
The Gulag, and the exile system which supplemented it, were no longer temporary punishments. For those condemned to them, they had become a way of life.

Yet the war did have a lasting impact on the camp system, albeit one which is hard to quantify. Camp rules and regulations were not liberalized following victory—but the prisoners themselves had changed, and the politicals in particular.

To begin with, there were more of them. The demographic upheaval of the war years, and the amnesties which had pointedly excluded the political prisoners, had left a much higher percentage of political prisoners in the camps. As of July 1, 1946, more than 35 percent of the prisoners in the entire system had been sentenced for “counter-revolutionary” crimes. In certain camps that number was far higher, well above half.
²⁴

Although the overall figure would drop again, the position of the politicals had changed too. This was a new generation of political prisoners, with a different set of experiences. The politicals arrested in the 1930s—and particularly those arrested in 1937 and 1938—had been intellectuals, party members, and ordinary workers. Most were shocked by their arrests, psychologically unprepared for prison life, and physically unprepared for forced labor. In the immediate postwar years, however, the politicals included former Red Army soldiers, Polish Home Army officers, Ukrainian and Baltic partisans, German and Japanese prisoners of war. These men and women had fought in trenches, conducted conspiracies, commanded troops. Some had survived German prison camps; others had led partisan bands. Many were openly anti-Soviet or anti-communist, and were not in the least surprised to find themselves behind barbed wire, as one prisoner remembered: “Having looked death in the eyes, having passed through the fires and hell of war, having survived hunger and much tragedy, they were a completely different generation from the inmates of the prewar period.”
²⁵

Almost as soon as they started appearing in the camps toward the end of the war, this new sort of prisoner began creating trouble for the authorities. By 1947, the professional criminals no longer found it so easy to dominate them. Among the various national and criminal tribes who dominated camp life, a new clan appeared: the
krasnye shapochki,
or “red hats.” These were usually ex-soldiers or ex-partisans who had banded together to fight against the dominance of the thieves—and, by extension, against the administration that tolerated them. Such groups operated well into the next decade, despite efforts to break them apart. In the winter of 1954–55, Viktor Bulgakov, then a prisoner in Inta, a far northern mining camp in the Vorkuta region, witnessed an administrative attempt to “break” a group of politicals by importing a contingent of sixty thieves into their camp. The thieves armed themselves, and prepared to start attacking the politicals: