The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (37 page)

Meanwhile, behind the bombast of Stalinist propaganda, the Five-Year Plans were turning Russia’s cities into congested hellholes, with vast mills both darker and more satanic than anything ever seen in the West. New industrial metropolises like Magnitogorsk in the southern Urals could never have been constructed without massive coercion. With temperatures plunging to –40°C in winter and rising to 40°C in summer, conditions for those who built the city’s vast steelworks – which was intended to be the world’s largest single milling and shaping factory – were close to unendurable. For years after work began there in March 1929, many of the workers were housed in tents or mud huts. When finally residential buildings were constructed, only the most rudimentary resources were made available. Even when complete, the new apartment blocks had no kitchens or toilets, since workers were supposed to use communal facilities. These, however, did not exist. The ‘linear city’ model proposed by the German architect Ernst May proved wholly unsuitable to the winds of the steppe, which howled between the long rows of apartment blocks. All over the Soviet Union, the haste with which people were drafted into industry condemned a generation to live in the most cramped conditions imaginable, with only the most basic amenities. Their places of work were even worse, with horrendous rates of industrial injury and mortality, as well as life-shortening quantities of toxins in the air (in Magnitogorsk the snow was black with soot). The American John Scott, who spent five years in Magnitogorsk, guessed that ‘Russia’s battle of ferrous metallurgy alone involved more casualties than the battle of the Marne’. He was almost certainly right. One who survived was a young man from a village near Kursk named Alexander Luznevoy, who had been sent to Magnitigorsk by his mother to escape the famine at home. Underclad and underfed – he received just 600 grams of bread a day, provided he fulfilled his quota of eight cubic metres of ditch – Luznevoy soon realized that his only hope was to seize the opportunities for social mobility that were inherent in the Stalinist system.
*
He learned to read, became a lathe
operator, studied at night and joined the Komsomol youth organization, which entailed voluntary work at weekends. Taking up poetry, he ended his career as a member of the Writers’ Union – a self-made member of the
nomenklatura
.

It was all economic lunacy, perfectly symbolized by the palm trees the workers at Magnitogorsk built for themselves out of telegraph poles and sheet steel in lieu of real foliage. Collectivization wrecked Soviet agriculture. Forced industrialization misallocated resources as much as it mobilized them. Cities like Magnitogorsk cost far more to support than the planners acknowledged, since coal had to be transported there from Siberian mines more than a thousand miles away. Just heating the homes of miners in Arctic regions burned a huge proportion of the coal they dug up. For all these reasons the economic achievements of Stalinism were far less than was claimed at the time by the regime and its numerous apologists. Between 1929 and 1937, according to the official Soviet statistics, the gross national product of the USSR increased at an annual rate of between 9.4 and 16.7 per cent and per capita consumption by between 3.2 and 12.5 per cent, figures that bear comparison with the growth achieved by China since the early 1990s. But when allowances are made for idiosyncratic pricing conventions, real GNP growth was closer to 3–4.9 per cent per annum, while per capita consumption rose by no more than 1.9 per cent and perhaps by as little as 0.6 per cent per annum – roughly a fifth or a sixth of the official figure. In any case, what do per capita figures mean when the number of people is being drastically reduced by political violence? If there was any productivity growth under the Five-Year Plans – and the statistics suggest that there was – it was partly because so much labour was being shed for political rather than economic reasons. No serious analysis can regard a policy as economically ‘necessary’ if it involves anything up to twenty million excess deaths. For every nineteen tons of additional steel produced in the Stalinist period, approximately one Soviet citizen was killed. Yet
anyone who questioned the rationality of Stalin’s policies risked incurring the wrath of his loyal lieutenants. As Khataevich explained to one waverer:

I’m not sure that you understand what has been happening.A ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime. It’s a struggle to the death. This year was a test of our strength and their endurance. It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay. We’ve won the war.

Breakneck industrialization, in short, was always intended to break necks.

This was the crucial point that Western dupes like Shaw failed to see: the planned economy was in reality a slave economy, based on levels of coercion beyond the darkest nightmares of Bloomsbury. Like so many of the grandiose Soviet construction projects of the 1930s, the Moscow–Volga Canal was in fact built by thousands of convicts. The workforce that built Magnitogorsk also included around 35,000 deported prisoners. Lurking behind the seeming miracles of the planned economy was the giant network of prisons and camps known simply as the Gulag.
*

It was in the former monastery on the Solovetsky Islands, a barely habitable archipelago in the White Sea just ninety miles from the Arctic Circle, that the Gulag was born. There had of course been camps since the earliest days of the Revolution. As early as December 1919, there were already more than twenty; within a year that number has quintupled. But it was not at first quite clear what the purpose of incarcerating ‘class enemies’ was: to reform them, to punish them, or to kill them? The camp established at Solovetsky in 1923 provided the answer. The initial objective was simply to send the opponents of the Bolsheviks as far away as possible from the centre of political decision-making. But as the number of political prisoners grew – so
rapidly that the Cheka’s successor organization, the OGPU,
*
could barely cope – an ingenious possibility suggested itself. The commander of Solovetsky, Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel, was himself a former prisoner.
†
Instead of merely starving or freezing the inmates, Frenkel came to realize, the camp authorities could make them work. After all, their labour was free. And there was no task the so-called
zeki
could refuse to perform. In 1924 the Solovetsky camp journal called for ‘re-educat[ing] prisoners through accustoming them to participating in organized productive labour’. However, re-education mattered less to Frenkel than the possibility of profiting from slave labour. The authorities in Moscow merely wanted the camps to be self-supporting sinks that would reduce the country’s overcrowded prisons. Frenkel believed he could do better than that. By the end of the 1920s Solovetsky and the other ‘northern special significance camps’ had become a rapidly growing commercial operation involved in forestry and construction.

In a matter of years, there were camps dotted all over the Soviet Union: camps for mining, camps for road building, camps for aircraft construction, even camps for nuclear physics. Prisoners performed every conceivable kind of work, not only digging canals but also catching fish and manufacturing everything from tanks to toys. At one level, the Gulag was a system of colonization enabling the regime to exploit resources in regions hitherto considered uninhabitable. Precisely because they were expendable,
zeki
could mine coal at Vorkuta in the Komi Republic, an area in the Arctic north-west, benighted half the year, swarming with blood-sucking insects the other half. They could dig up gold and platinum at Dalstroi, located in the equally
inhospitable east of Siberia.
*
Yet so convenient did the system of slave labour become to the planners that camps were soon established in the Russian heartland too. The author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the Gulag as ‘an amazing country… which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically… crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located… cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets.’ To prisoners within the Gulag, the rest of the Soviet Union was merely
bolshaya zona
, ‘the big [prison] zone’.

The key thing in this vast system of slavery was to ensure a sustained flow of new slaves. The alleged spies and saboteurs convicted in show trials like the Shakhty Trial (1928), the Industrial Party Trial (1930) and the Metro-Vickers Trial (1933) were victims of only the most spectacular of innumerable legal and extra-legal procedures. By defining the slightest grumble as treason or counter-revolution, the Stalinist system was in a position to send whole armies of Soviet citizens to the Gulag. Files now available in the Russian State Archives show just how the system worked. Berna Klauda was a little old lady from Leningrad; she could scarcely have looked less like a subversive element. In 1937, however, she was sentenced to ten years in the Perm Gulag for expressing anti-government sentiments. ‘Anti-Soviet Agitation’ was the least of the political crimes for which one could be convicted. More serious was ‘Counter-revolutionary Activity’; worse still, ‘Counter-revolutionary Terrorist Activity’ and, worst of all, ‘Trotskyist Terrorist Activity’. In fact, the overwhelming majority of people convicted for such offences were guilty – if they were guilty of anything at all – of trivial misdemeanours: a word out of turn to a superior, an overheard joke about Stalin, a complaint about some aspect of the all-pervasive system, at worst some petty economic infraction like ‘speculation’ (buying and re-selling goods). Only a tiny fraction of political prisoners were genuinely opposed to the regime – revealingly, in 1938 little more than 1 per cent of camp inmates had higher education; a third were illiterate. By 1937 there were quotas for arrests just as there were quotas for steel production. Crimes
were simply made up to fit the punishments. Prisoners became mere outputs, referred to by the NKVD as ‘Accounts’ (male prisoners) and ‘Books’ (pregnant female prisoners).

At the height of the Gulag system, there was a total of 476 camp systems scattered all over the Soviet Union, each, like Solovetsky, composed of hundreds of individual camps. All told, around eighteen million men, women and children passed through the system under Stalin’s rule. Taking into account the six or seven million Soviet citizens who were sent into exile, the total percentage of the population who experienced some kind of penal servitude under Stalin approached 15 per cent.

Many of the camps were located, like Solovetsky, in the remotest, coldest regions of the Soviet Union; the Gulag was at once colonial and penal. Weaker prisoners died in transit since the locked carriages and cattle trucks used were unheated and insanitary. The camp facilities were primitive in the extreme;
zeki
at new camps had to build their own barracks, which were little more than wooden shacks into which they were packed like sardines. And the practice – also pioneered by Frenkel – of feeding strong prisoners better than weak ones ensured that, literally, only the strong survived. The camps were not primarily intended to kill people (Stalin had firing squads for that) but they were run in such a way that mortality rates were bound to be very high indeed. Food was inadequate, sanitation rudimentary and shelter barely sufficient. In addition, the sadistic punishments meted out by camp guards, often involving exposing naked prisoners to the freezing weather, ensured a high death toll. Punishment was as arbitrary as it was brutal; the guards, whose lot in any case was far from a happy one, were encouraged to treat the prisoners as ‘vermin’, ‘filth’ and ‘poisonous weeds’. The attitudes of the professional criminals – the clannish ‘thieves-in-law’ who were the dominant group among inmates – were not very different. On December 14, 1926, three former Solovetsky inmates wrote a desperate letter to the Presidium of the Party’s Central Committee, protesting against

the arbitrary use of power and the violence that reign at the Solovetsky concentration camp… It is difficult for a human being even to imagine such terror, tyranny, violence, and lawlessness. When we went there, we could not
conceive of such a horror, and now we, crippled ourselves, together with several thousands who are still there, appeal to the ruling centre of the Soviet state to curb the terror that reigns there… the former tsarist penal servitude system in comparison to Solovetsky had 99 per cent more humanity, fairness, and legality… People die like flies, i.e., they die a slow and painful death… The entire weight of this scandalous abuse of power, brute violence, and lawlessness that reign at Solovetsky… is placed on the shoulders of workers and peasants; others, such as counterrevolutionaries, profiteers and so on, have full wallets and have set themselves up and live in clover in the Soviet State, while next to them, in the literal meaning of the word, the penniless proletariat dies from hunger, cold, and back-breaking 14–16 hour days under the tyranny and lawlessness of inmates who are the agents and collaborators of the State Political Directorate [GPU].

If you complain or write anything (‘Heaven forbid’), they will frame you for an attempted escape or for something else, and they will shoot you like a dog. They line us up naked and barefoot at 22 degrees below zero and keep us outside for up to an hour. It is difficult to describe all the chaos and terror that is going on… One example is the following fact, one of a thousand…
THEY FORCED THE INMATES TO EAT THEIR OWN FAECES
…

[I]t is possible, that you might think that it is our imagination, but we swear to you all, by everything that is sacred to us, that this is only one small part of the nightmarish truth…

Of the 100,000 prisoners sent to Solovetsky in the years up to its closure in 1939, roughly half died. Yet when Maxim Gorky visited the camp in June 1929, three years before his return to the Soviet Union from self-imposed exile, he made it sound almost idyllic, with healthy inmates and salubrious cells.

Perhaps nothing illustrates better the diabolical character of the Stalinist regime than the 140-mile Belomor Canal, built at Stalin’s instigation to link the Baltic Sea and the White Sea. Between September 1931 and August 1933, somewhere between 128,000 and 180,000 prisoners – most of them from Solovetsky, with Frenkel directing their efforts – hacked out a waterway, equipped only with the most primitive pick-axes, wheelbarrows and hatchets. So harsh were the conditions and so inadequate the tools that tens of thousands of them died in the process. This was hardly unforeseeable; for six months of
the year the ground was frozen solid, while in many places the prisoners had to cut through solid granite. And, as so often, the net result was next to worthless economically: far too narrow and shallow to be navigable by substantial vessels. Yet when Shaw’s fellow Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb were given a tour of the finished canal they were oblivious to all this. As they put it in their book
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?
(1935), it was ‘pleasant to think that the warmest appreciation was officially expressed of the success of the OGPU, not merely in performing a great engineering feat, but in achieving a triumph in human regeneration’. The Webbs explicitly rejected the ‘naive belief that… penal settlements are now maintained and continuously supplied with thousands of deported manual workers and technicians, deliberately for the purpose of making, out of this forced labour, a net pecuniary profit to add to the State revenue.’ Such notions were simply ‘incredible’ to ‘anyone acquainted with the economic results of the chain-gang, or of prison labour, in any country in the world’. Slavery always has its apologists, but seldom are they so ingenuous. The thirty-six Soviet writers who, under Gorky’s direction, produced the hyperbolic book
The Belomor–Baltic Canal Named for Stalin
at least had the excuse that the alternative to lying might be dying. The Webbs wrote their rubbish in the safety of Bloomsbury.
*