Gulag (74 page)

Songs were written, of course. Someone composed a Ukrainian hymn, which at times all 13,500 striking prisoners would sing at once. The refrain went like this:

We will not, we will not be slaves

We will not carry the yoke any longer . . .

Another verse spoke of:

Brothers in blood, of Vorkuta and Norilsk, of Kolyma and Kengir . . .

“It was a wonderful time,” remembered Irena Arginskaya, forty-five years later. “I had not before then, and have not since, felt such a sense of freedom as I did then.” Others felt more foreboding. Lyuba Bershadskaya recalls that we “did everything without any awareness: none of us knew or even thought about what was waiting for us.”

Negotiations with the authorities continued. By May 27, the MVD commission delegated to deal with the strike had held its first meeting with the prisoners. Among what Solzhenitsyn calls the “golden-epaulted personages” on the commission were Sergei Yegorov, the deputy chief of the MVD; Ivan Dolgikh, then the commander of the Gulag system; and Vavilov, the deputy state prosecutor responsible for overseeing the Gulag. They were met by a gathering of 2,000 prisoners, led by Kuznetsov, who presented them with a list of demands.

By the time the strike was in full swing, these demands would include both the imposition of criminal charges on guards who had shot prisoners— which the prisoners had demanded from the beginning—as well as more clearly political demands. Among these were the reduction of all twentyfive-year sentences; the review of all political prisoners’ cases; the liquidation of the punishment cells and punishment barracks; more freedom for prisoners to communicate with relatives; the removal of the requirement of forced eternal exile for freed prisoners; easier living conditions for women prisoners; and a permanent reuniting of the men’s and women’s camps.

The prisoners also demanded a meeting with a member of the Communist Party Central Committee. They continued to make this demand until the very end, on the grounds that they could not trust either the Steplag authorities or the MVD to abide by any promises made. “And who could have inspired in you such hatred for the MVD?” the MVD deputy chief Yegorov reportedly asked them in response.

Had the strike taken place a few years earlier, there would, of course, have been no negotiations at all. But by 1954, the re-examination of politicals’ cases had in fact begun, albeit slowly. During the course of the strike, it even happened that individual prisoners were summoned to leave the camp in order to attend meetings of the tribunal re-investigating their cases. Knowing that many prisoners had already died, and apparently wanting a peaceful and rapid conclusion to events, Dolgikh almost immediately began to concede to some of the prisoners’ minor demands, calling for bars to be removed from barrack windows, for the establishment of an eight-hour workday, even for the transfer of certain particularly hated camp guards and officials out of Kengir. Under direct orders from Moscow, Dolgikh at first refrained from using force. He did try to break the prisoners’ resistance, however, actively urging them to leave the camp, and forbidding any new shipments of food or medicine.

As time went on, however, Moscow lost patience. In a telegram sent on June 15, Kruglov lashed out at his deputy, Yegorov, for filling his reports with pointless statistics—such as how many pigeons had been released from the camp carrying leaflets—and informed him that an echelon of troops, accompanied by five T-34 tanks, was on their way.

The last ten days of the strike were very tense indeed. The MVD commission issued stern warnings via the camp loudspeaker system. In response, the prisoners broadcast messages from their makeshift radio station, telling the world that they were starving to death. Kuznetsov made a speech, in which he spoke of the fate of his family, which had been destroyed by his arrest. “Many of us had also lost relatives, and listening to him we strengthened our resolve, deciding to stick it out until the end,” one prisoner remembered.

Just before dawn, at half past three on the morning of June 26, the MVD struck. The previous evening, Kruglov had telegrammed Yegorov, advising him to use “all possible resources,” and he complied: no less than 1,700 soldiers, ninety-eight dogs, and the five T-34 tanks surrounded the camp. At first, the soldiers sent flares soaring into the sky above the barracks, and fired blanks. Urgent warnings began to sound over the camp loudspeakers: “Soldiers are entering the camps. Prisoners who want to cooperate are asked to leave the camp quietly. Prisoners who resist will be shot . . .”

As the disoriented prisoners rushed around the camp, the tanks entered the gates. Armed troops, dressed in full battle gear, followed behind them. By some accounts, both the soldiers driving the tanks and those on the ground were drunk. While this may be a legend which grew up in the wake of the raid, it is true that both the Red Army and the secret police traditionally gave vodka to soldiers who were being asked to do dirty work: empty bottles are almost always found inside mass graves.

Drunk or not, the tank drivers had no qualms about running straight over those prisoners who advanced to meet them. “I stood in the middle,” recalled Lyubov Bershadskaya, “and all around me tanks crushed living people.” They ran straight over a group of women, who had locked arms together and stood in their path, not believing that the tanks would dare kill them. They ran over one newlywed couple who, holding on to one another tightly, deliberately threw themselves in their path. They destroyed barracks, with people sleeping inside. They resisted the homemade grenades, the stones, the picks, and other metal objects that the prisoners threw at them. Surprisingly quickly—within an hour and a half, according to the report filed later—the soldiers had pacified the camp, removed those prisoners who had agreed to go quietly, and put the rest in handcuffs.

According to the official documents, thirty-seven prisoners died outright that day. Nine more died later of their wounds. Another 106 were wounded, along with forty soldiers. Again, all of these numbers are much lower than those recorded by the prisoners themselves. Bershadskaya, who helped the camp doctor, Julian Fuster, take care of the wounded, writes of 500 dead:

Fuster told me to put on a white cap and a surgeon’s gauze mask (which I keep to this day) and asked me to stand by the operating table and write down the names of those who could still give their names. Unfortunately, almost nobody could. Most of the wounded died on the table, and, looking at us with departing eyes, said, “Write to my mother . . . to my husband . . . to my children,” and so on.

When it became too hot and stuffy to bear, I took off the cap and looked at myself in the mirror. I had a completely white head. At first, I thought that there must have been powder inside the cap for some reason. I didn’t realize that while standing in the center of that unbelievable slaughter, observing all that took place, all of my hair had turned gray within fifteen minutes.

Fuster stood for thirteen hours on his feet, saving whoever he could. Finally, that resilient, talented surgeon couldn’t take it anymore himself. He lost consciousness, fell into a faint, and the operations finished ...
³⁸

In the wake of the battle, all of the living who were not in hospital were marched out of the camp, and led out into the taiga. Soldiers with machine guns made them lie facedown, arms spread to the side—as if crucified—for many hours. Working from the photographs they had taken at the public meetings and from what few informers’ reports they had, the camp authorities picked through the prisoners and arrested 436 people, including all of the members of the strike commission. Six of them would be executed, including Keller, Sluchenkov, and Knopmus. Kuznetsov, who presented the authorities with a long, elaborate, written confession within forty-eight hours of his arrest, was sentenced to death—and then spared. He was moved to Karlag, and released in 1960. Another thousand prisoners—500 men and 500 women—were accused of supporting the rebellion, and were shipped off to other camps, to Ozerlag and Kolyma. They, too, it seems, were mostly released by the end of the decade.

During the uprising, the authorities appear to have had no idea that there was any organizing force within the camp other than the official strike committee. Afterward, they began to piece together the whole story, probably thanks to Kuznetsov’s elaborate account. They identified five representatives of the Center—the Lithuanian Kondratas; the Ukrainians Keller, Sunichuk, and Vakhaev; and the thief known by the underworld pseudonym “Mustache.” They even made a chart, showing the lines of command flowing out from the Center, through the strike committee, toward the departments of propaganda, defense, and counter-intelligence. They knew about the brigades that had been organized to defend each barrack, about the radio station and the makeshift generator.

But they never did identify all of the members of the Center, the real organizers of the uprising. According to one account, many of the “true activists” remained in the camp, quietly serving out their sentences, awaiting amnesty. Their names are unknown—and will probably remain so.

Chapter 25

THAW—AND RELEASE

Let’s not beat around the bush,
No more nonsense.
We are the children of the cult.
We are its flesh and blood
We have been raised in the fog
Ambiguous indeed,
Inside gigantomania
And scarcity of mind . . .

—Andrei Voznesensky, “Children of the Cult,” 1967
¹

ALTHOUGH THEY LOST their battle, the Kengir strikers won the war. In the aftermath of the Steplag rebellion, the leadership of the Soviet Union really did lose its appetite for forced-labor camps —and with striking speed.

By the summer of 1954, the unprofitability of the camps was widely recognized. Another survey of the Gulag’s finances, carried out in June 1954, had again shown that they were heavily subsidized, and that the costs of guards in particular made them unprofitable.
²
At a meeting of camp commanders and top Gulag personnel held soon after Kengir, many administrators complained openly about the poor organization of food supplies for camps, about the out-of-control bureaucracy—by this time there were seventeen separate food norms—and about the poor organization of camps. Some camps were still open, but with very few prisoners. Strikes and unrest continued. In 1955, prisoners organized another general strike in Vorkuta.
³
The incentive to change was now overwhelming—and change came.

On July 10, 1954, the Central Committee issued a resolution, bringing back the eight-hour workday, simplifying the camp regimes, and making it easier for prisoners to earn early release through hard work. The special camps were dissolved. Prisoners were allowed to write letters and receive packages, often without restriction. In some camps, prisoners were allowed to get married, even to live with their spouses. The barking dogs and convoy guards became things of the past. New items became available for the prisoners to purchase: clothing, which had been unavailable before, and oranges.
⁴
The inmates of Ozerlag were even allowed to plant flowers.
⁵

By this time, the upper echelons of the Soviet elite had also begun to conduct a wider debate about Stalinist justice. In early 1954, Khrushchev had ordered, and received, a report detailing how many prisoners had been accused of counter-revolutionary crimes since 1921, as well as an account of how many were still imprisoned. The numbers were by definition incomplete, since they did not include the millions sent into exile, those unjustly accused of technically nonpolitical crimes, those tried in ordinary courts, and those never tried at all. Still, given that these figures represent numbers of people who had been killed or sent to prison for no reason at all, they are shockingly high. By the MVD’s own count, 3,777,380 people had been found “guilty” of fomenting counter-revolution by the OGPU collegiums, the NKVD troikas, the Special Commissions, and all of the military collegiums and tribunals that had mass-produced sentences throughout the previous three decades. Of these, 2,369,220 had been sent to camps, 765,180 had been sent into exile, and 642,980 had been executed.
⁶

A few days later, the Central Committee undertook to re-examine all of these cases—as well as the cases of the “repeaters,” those prisoners who had been sentenced to a second term of exile in 1948. Khrushchev set up a national committee, led by the chief prosecutor of the Soviet Union, to oversee the task. He also set up local committees in every republic and region of the country to review prisoners’ sentences. Some politicals were released at this time, although their original sentences were not yet annulled: real rehabilitation—the state’s admission that a mistake had been made—would come later.
⁷

Releases began, although for the next year and a half, they would proceed at an excruciatingly slow pace. Those who had completed two-thirds of their sentences were sometimes let go, without explanation or rehabilitation. Others were kept inside the camps, for no reason at all. Despite everything they knew about the camps’ unprofitability, Gulag officials were unwilling to close them. They needed, it seemed, an extra jolt from above.

Then, in February 1956, the jolt arrived, when Khrushchev gave what came to be known as his “secret speech,” delivering it to a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party. For the first time, Khrushchev openly attacked Stalin and the “cult of personality” that had surrounded him:

It is impermissible, and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior. Such a belief about a man, and specifically about Stalin, was cultivated among us for many years.
⁸

Much of the rest of the speech was tendentious. Listing Stalin’s crimes, Khrushchev focused almost exclusively on the victims of 1937 and 1938, singling out the ninety-eight Central Committee members who were shot, as well as a handful of Old Bolsheviks. “The wave of mass arrests began to recede in 1939,” he declared—which was a patent falsehood, as in fact the numbers of prisoners increased in the 1940s. He did mention the Chechen and the Balkan deportations, perhaps because he had no hand in them. He did not mention collectivization, or the Ukrainian famine, or the mass repressions in western Ukraine and the Baltic States, perhaps because he had himself been involved in these operations. He spoke of 7,679 rehabilitations, and although those in the hall applauded him, this was in fact quite a small percentage of the millions whom Khrushchev knew had been falsely arrested.
⁹

Flawed though it might have been, the speech—soon transmitted, also in secrecy, to Party cells all over the country—shook the Soviet Union to its core. Never before had the Soviet leadership confessed to any crimes, let alone such a broad range of them. Even Khrushchev was uncertain what the reaction would be. “We were just coming out of a state of shock,” he wrote later. “People were still in prisons and in the camps, and we didn’t know how to explain what had happened to them or what to do with them once they were free.”
¹⁰

The speech galvanized the MVD, the KGB, and the administrators of the camps. Within weeks, the atmosphere in the camps lightened further, and the process of release and rehabilitation finally began to speed up. If 7,000-odd people had been rehabilitated in the three years preceding the secret speech, 617,000 were rehabilitated in the ten months that followed it. New mechanisms were created to speed the process further. Ironically, many of the prisoners who had been sentenced by troikas were now released by troikas as well. Commissions composed of three people—a prosecutor, a Central Committee member, and a rehabilitated Party member, often an ex-prisoner—traveled to camps and places of exile all over the country. They were empowered to conduct fast investigations into individual cases, to conduct interviews with prisoners, and to release them on the spot.
¹¹

In the months that followed the secret speech, the MVD also prepared to make much deeper changes to the structure of the camps themselves. In April, the new Interior Minister, N. P. Dudorov, sent a proposal for the reorganization of the camps to the Central Committee. The situation in the camps and colonies, he wrote, “has been abysmal for many years now.” They should be closed, he argued, and instead the most dangerous criminals should be sent to special, isolated prisons, in distant regions of the country, specifically naming the building site of the unfinished Salekhard–Igarka Railway as one such possibility. Minor criminals, on the other hand, should remain in their native regions, serving out their sentences in prison “colonies,” doing light industrial labor and working on collective farms. None should be required to work as lumberjacks, miners, or builders, or indeed to carry out any other type of unskilled, hard labor.
¹²

Dudorov’s choice of language was more important than his specific suggestions. He was not merely proposing the creation of a smaller camp system; he was proposing to create a qualitatively different one, to return to a “normal” prison system, or at least to a prison system which would be recognizable as such in other European countries. The new prison colonies would stop pretending to be financially self-sufficient. Prisoners would work in order to learn useful skills, not in order to enrich the state. The aim of prisoners’ work would be rehabilitation, not profit.
¹³

There were surprisingly angry objections to these suggestions. Although the representatives of economic ministries signaled their support, I. A. Serov, the KGB boss, lashed out at the Interior Minister’s proposals, calling them “incorrect” and “unacceptable,” not to mention expensive. He opposed the construction of new prison colonies, on the grounds that such a policy would “create the impression of the presence in the USSR of a huge number of places of incarceration.” He opposed the liquidation of the camps, and could not understand why
zeks
should not work as foresters or miners. After all, hard labor would help “re-educate them in the spirit of honest working life of Soviet society.”
¹⁴

The result of this clash between the two branches of the security services was a very mixed reform. On the one hand, the Gulag itself—the
Glavnoe
Upravlenie Lagerei
, the Main Camp Administration—was dissolved. In 1957, both Dalstroi and Norilsk, two of the biggest and most powerful camp complexes, were dismantled. Other camps followed suit. The appropriate ministries—of mining, machine-building, forestry, or road-building—took over large swathes of what had been the camp-industrial complex.
¹⁵
Slave labor would never again be an important part of the economy in the Soviet Union.

Yet at the same time, the judicial system remained unreformed. The judges were just as politicized, just as biased, just as unfair. The prison system also remained virtually untouched. The same jailers continued to enforce the same regimes in the same unpainted, unaltered cells. When, with time, the prison system began to expand once again, even the rehabilitation and re-education programs, the focus of so much concern and interest, would remain just as flimsy and as fictitious as they had been in the past.

The surprisingly vitriolic debate between the MVD chief, Dudorov, and the KGB chief, Serov, also prefigured other, larger debates to come. Following what they took to be Khrushchev’s lead, liberals wanted to make fast changes to almost every sphere of Soviet life. At the same time, defenders of the old system wanted to stop, reverse, or alter these changes, particularly when they affected the livelihoods of powerful groups of people. The result of this clash was predictable: not only unchanged prison cells, but also half-baked reforms, new privileges which were quickly revoked, and public discussions which were immediately hushed up. The era which came to be called the “Thaw” was indeed an era of change, but change of a particular kind: reforms took two steps forward, and then one step—or sometimes three steps—back.

Release, whether it came in 1926 or 1956, had always left prisoners with mixed feelings. Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov, a prisoner released in the 1930s, was surprised by his own reaction:

I imagined that I would be dancing instead of walking, that when I finally got my freedom I’d be drunk with it. But when I was actually released, I felt none of this. I walked through the gates and past the last guard, experiencing no happiness or sense of uplift . . . There, along the sun-drenched platform ran two young girls in light dresses, merrily laughing about something. I looked at them in astonishment. How could they laugh? How could all these people walk around conversing and laughing as if nothing unusual was happening in the world, as if nothing nightmarish and unforgettable stood in their midst ...
¹⁶

After Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s speech, the releases came more rapidly, and reactions became even more confused. Prisoners who had expected to spend another decade behind barbed wire were let go on a day’s notice. One group of exiles was summoned during working hours to the offices of their mine, and simply told to go home. As one remembered,
Spetskomandant
Lieutenant Isaev “opened a safe, pulled out our documents, and distributed them ...”
¹⁷
Prisoners who had filed petition after petition, demanding a re-examination of their cases, suddenly found that further letters were unnecessary—they could simply walk away.

Prisoners who had thought of nothing else except freedom were strangely reluctant to experience it: “Although I could hardly believe it myself, I was weeping as I walked out to freedom . . . I felt as though I had torn my heart away from what was dearest and most precious to it, from my comrades in misfortune. The gates closed—and it was all finished.”
¹⁸

Many were simply not ready. Yuri Zorin, riding a crowded prisoners’ train south from Kotlas in 1954, made it past only two stations. “Why am I going to Moscow?” he asked himself—and then turned around and headed back to his old camp, where his ex-commander helped him get a job as a free worker. There he remained, for another sixteen years.
¹⁹
Evgeniya Ginzburg knew a woman who actually did not want to leave her barracks: “The thing is that I—I can’t face living outside. I want to stay in camp,” she told her friends.
²⁰
Another wrote in his diary that “I really don’t want freedom. What is drawing me to freedom? It seems to me that out there . . . there are lies, hypocrisy, thoughtlessness. Out there, everything is fantastically unreal, and here, everything is real.”
²¹
Many did not trust Khrushchev, expected the situation to worsen again, and took jobs as free workers in Vorkuta or Norilsk. They preferred not to experience the emotions and undergo the hassle of return, if they were ultimately to be re-arrested anyway.