INTRODUCTION
1. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 1:582.
2. Alexander Dolgun with Patrick Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story: An American in the Gulag (New York: Knopf, 1975), 164. Of course, Nazi camps were also known for greeting new prisoners with music—only one of many comparisons that can be made between the two systems. For more on this comparison, see Steven A. Barnes, “Soviet Society Confined: The Gulag in the Karaganda Region of Kazakhstan, 1930s–1950s” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2003).
3. Gulag is actually an acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei (Main Administration of the Camps), a particular Soviet central bureaucratic institution responsible for running the concentration camp system. Here and throughout the book, I have opted to use the term in its broadest sense, common since the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s works, as shorthand for the entire Soviet penal detention system, including everything from prisons to labor camps and colonies to internal exile.
4. Anne Applebaum has done a good job of sifting through historians’ best understanding of the Gulag’s overall demographic figures. By their nature, the numbers will always be somewhat imprecise, but it is unlikely that they are off by orders of magnitude. See Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 578–88. For execution figures, see V. P. Popov, “Gosudarstvennyi terror v sovetskoi Rossii, 1923–1953 gg. (istochniki i ikh interpretatsiia),” Otechestvennye Arkhivy, no. 2 (1992): 20–31.
5. The phrase comes from Robert Conquest, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (New York: Viking Press, 1978).
6. On this point, see Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 3.
7. For a sample of this, the project of the Hoover Institution Archives and the State Archive of the Russian Federation to microfilm the central Gulag archive came to more than 1.5 million frames. (These materials are now available at the Hoover Institution Archives and in several other libraries.) Numerous volumes of central administrative Gulag documents have been published in collections and are used extensively throughout this book. The archives in Karaganda include individual prisoner files and administrative materials related to the camps there, and number hundreds of thousands of pages. I have put a number of the documents used in this book on the archive of the Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives Web site, available at http://gulaghistory.org, under “Karlag documents” or “Karaganda.” An Italian Web site created by Moscow’s Memorial Society and the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, available at http://www.gulag-italia.it/gulag/frameset_biblio_generale.html, has a bibliography of nearly six hundred published Gulag memoirs. The Moscow Memorial Society lists some three hundred unpublished memoirs in its collection; see http://memo.ru/history/memories/index.htm. Orlando Figes has also put a portion of the hundreds of interviews and family archives related to the terror and Gulag that he and the Memorial Societies of Moscow, Perm, and Saint Petersburg gathered online; see http://orlandofiges.com/index.php.
8. This has been most strongly and recently argued by Orlando Figes, who offers up oral testimony as a preferable source for the subjective experience of terror and camps. He writes that oral testimonies, on the whole, are more reliable than literary memoirs, which have usually been seen as a more authentic record of the past. Like all memory, the testimony given in an interview is unreliable, but, unlike a book, it can be cross-examined and tested against other evidence to disentangle true memories from received or imagined ones.” Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 636–37. Figes is off base here, though, as memoirs are also subject to cross-examination and testing through the use of complementary sources—both official and unofficial—to verify their accounts. Of course, Figes makes precisely such careful use of published and unpublished memoirs throughout his text. Although J. Arch Getty is well known for his critique of the use of memoir sources, he does not recommend their dismissal entirely. Rather, he encourages a critical approach to their use, and dismisses those memoirs that opine on aspects of high politics through second- and thirdhand accounts or rumors, and were treated uncritically by some early scholars of the terror. Speaking of camp memoirs in particular, Getty notes, “They can tell us what the camps were like but not why they existed.” J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 213. It is precisely for that “what the camps were like” that memoirs are used in the present study.
9. Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 6–8.
10. This differs at different points in time, but the most notable influences are the publications of Solzhenitsyn, the samizdat (underground) circulation of manuscripts, and the writings of Varlam Shalamov and others. On this point, I agree with Figes, but it is still a solvable problem through the use of multiple types of sources. See Figes, The Whisperers, 634–36.
11. On recent neuroscience research that reveals “that we alter our memories just by remembering them,” see Kathleen McGowan, “How Much of Your Memory Is True,” Discover Magazine, July–August 2009, available at http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/03-how-much-of-your-memory-is-true (accessed September 4, 2009). McGowan observes that “until recently, long-term memories were thought to be physically etched into our brain, permanent and unchanging. Now it is becoming clear that memories are surprisingly vulnerable and highly dynamic. . . . Already it corrodes our trust in what we know and how we know it. It pokes holes in eyewitness testimony, in memoirs, in our most intimate records of truth. Every time we remember, it seems, we add new details, shade the facts, prune and tweak. Without realizing it, we continually rewrite the stories of our lives. Memory, it turns out, has a surprising amount in common with imagination, conjuring worlds that never existed until they were forged by our minds.”
12. See especially chapter 6 on the Kengir uprising, which Solzhenitsyn discussed in significant detail; most of his findings are now confirmed by official documentation to which he had no access.
13. Based on a study of criminal statistics, Popov contends that “a new stage of terror accompanied each stage in the development of a new power, representing in fact the planned extermination of various social structures and groups.” Popov, “Gosudarstvennyi terror v sovetskoi Rossii,” 29–30. While it will become clear below that I disagree with the characterization of the Soviet penal system as solely an instrument of annihilation, Popov is right to emphasize the direct tie between developments in the penal system and the broader course of Soviet history.
CHAPTER 1: THE ORIGINS, FUNCTIONS, AND INSTITUTIONS OF THE GULAG
1. Even works from critics of these early studies continue to examine Soviet penal policy without reference to life inside the camps themselves. See Gábor Tamás Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1991), 237.
2. David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947), ix. For a lengthy discussion of the Gulag in historical comparison with slave-holding economies throughout history and around the world, see especially ibid., 88–107. For other accounts that tie the Gulag’s growth to rapid industrialization, see Edwin Bacon, The Gulag at War: Stalin’s Forced Labour System in the Light of the Archives (London: Macmillan, 1994); James R. Harris, “The Growth of the Gulag: Forced Labor in the Urals Region, 1929–1931,” Russian Review 56 (April 1997) 265–80; Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 111–12. Applebaum treads this well-established ground, noting that “the primary purpose of the Gulag, according to both the private language and the public propaganda of those who founded it, was economic.” While she recognizes that Soviet forced labor camps were inefficient and unprofitable, she argues that they were “perceived to be profitable.” Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), xxxviii, 54. Meanwhile, David J. Nordlander, in his archival-based study of Kolyma, maintains that the economic factor was primary in the early 1930s while the political factor—the elimination of “enemies”—assumed prominence in the latter 1930s. David J. Nordlander, “Capital of the Gulag: Magadan in the Early Stalin Era, 1929–1941” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997); see also “Origins of a Gulag Capital: Magadan and Stalinist Control in the Early 1930s,” Slavic Review 57, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 791–812. Applebaum follows Nordlander in her interpretation of the later 1930s, although she believes that economics returned to the fore after the Great Terror of 1937–38.
3. See, for example, the conclusions in Iurii Nikolaevich Afanas’ev, et al., eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga: Konets 1920-kh–pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov: Sobranie dokumentov v semi tomakh (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004), 1:54–55. While each volume of Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga carries a separate title, I will refer in the notes to the general name and volume number.
4. Applebaum, Gulag, 56. The fixation on Stalin—at times assuming the role of historical mind reader—and the assumption that no other individual or institutional interest in the Soviet Union had the capacity to shape the Gulag, is prevalent throughout the book.
5. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 333. Conquest, of course, does not deny the economic uses of the prisoners, and he too equates them with slaves. The economic factor was secondary, however; internment and death was primary. As he writes, “A man killed by squeezing a year or two’s effort out of him is of more use than a man kept in prison.” Ibid., 333. In his more recent introduction to Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, Conquest’s stance seems to have changed somewhat. “The Gulag itself, and comparable institutions, was designed with two main objectives—the penal isolation of the victims, and their use as slave labor in Soviet economic projects. Both aims were always kept in mind, but at times one or the other predominated.” Yet it remains that “the whole terror operations can, in fact, be understood as a conscious effort, on what were seen as Marxist grounds, to eliminate or crush all those categorized as unamenable to the new order.” Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:30.
6. Conquest, The Great Terror, 338.
7. Ibid., 339. As we will see below, the assumption that releases from the Gulag were “very rare” was one of the major mistakes of the first generation of Gulag historians. The reason for this mistake will be explored later. Nevertheless, the work of Conquest, Dallin, and Nicolaevsky is particularly impressive given that it was completed not only prior to the opening of the archives but prior to the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus as well.
8. Rittersporn develops a lengthy critique of Solzhenitsyn’s work, describing his history as “a series of rumours . . . which then developed into an oral tradition and put down deep roots into the collective consciousness.” Thus, he views Solzhenitsyn’s work (and by implication the work of other Gulag memoirists) as a “mixture—and often an inextricable one—of indisputable facts and of their trace, sometimes very imprecise or distorted, preserved by a collective memory that has been more concerned about elevating a memorial to the martyrdom of its guardians then [sic] with the authenticity of its traditions.” Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications, 16. My research reveals the bankruptcy of such a notion. Solzhenitsyn, as will be seen repeatedly, was right much more often than he was wrong, and now the availability of official sources allows the confirmation of many of his findings. Rittersporn’s dismissal of Solzhenitsyn significantly weakens his own work. The unwillingness to wade through Solzhenitsyn’s work to find its contributions leaves an analysis seriously flawed by its deliberate inattention to the conditions of life in the Gulag. Soviet penal practice simply cannot be fully understood with an exclusive focus on legal codes and official documentation.
9. The accuracy of Solzhenitsyn’s presentation of the Kengir uprising in 1954, discussed at length in chapter 6, is particularly impressive.
10. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 1:174.
11. One of the few works to seek a broad approach to the subject is Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Gulag. While important for drawing the attention of the educated reading audience to the Gulag, Applebaum’s book is of limited use to scholars. Her use of archives is so unsystematic that the book is more valuable for its cataloging of memoir testimony than for its few archival notations. Furthermore, Applebaum has added little to the well-established debate on the Gulag’s origins and significance, and ultimately offers little more than Solzhenitsyn did some thirty years earlier. Scholars working on the Gulag have largely limited their work either chronologically, or to a single type or even a single Gulag institution. As will be shown below, in order to fully understand the Gulag, one must look at all its variety of institutions.
12. Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, trans. Vadim A. Staklo, ed. David J. Nordlander (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
13. Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
14. A portion of this extensive work includes: Nicholas Baron, “Conflict and Complicity: The Expansion of the Karelian Gulag, 1923–1933,” Cahiers du Monde russe 42, nos. 2–4 (2001): 615–48; “Production and Terror: The Operation of the Karelian Gulag, 1933–1939,” Cahiers du Monde russe 43, no. 1 (2002): 139–80; Nordlander, “Capital of the Gulag”; “Origins of a Gulag Capital”; Nicolas Werth, Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Viktor Berdinskikh, Istoriia odnogo lageria (Viatlag) (Moscow: Agraf, 2001); Liubov’ Gvozdkova, Prinuditel’nyi trud. Ispravitel’no-trudovye lageriakh v Kuzbasse (30–50-e gg.), 2 vols. (Kemerovo: Kuzbassvuzizdat, 1994); V. M. Kirillov, Istoriia repressii v Nizhnetagil’skom regione Urala. 1920-e–nachalo 50-kh gg. Tom 1: Repressii 1920–1930-kh gg., tom 2: Tagillag 1940-e–nach. 50-kh gg. (Nizhnii Tagil: Nizhnetagil’skii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii institut, 1996); Sergei Aleksandrovich Krasil’nikov, Serp i molokh. Krest’ianskaia ssylka v Zapadnoi Sibiri v 1930-e gg. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2003); Ol’ga Aleksandrovna Nikitina, Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie v Karelii (Petrozavodsk: Karel’skii Nauchnyi tsentr RAN, 1997); Viktor Iakovlevich Shashkov, Repressii v SSSR protiv krest’ian i sud’by spetspereselentsev Karelo-Murmanskogo kraia (Murmansk: IPP “Sever,” 2000); Nikolai Alekseevich Morozov, Gulag v Komi krae (Syktyvkar: Izd–vo Syktyvkarskogo Universiteta, 1997); S.A. Pankov, “Lagernaia sistema i prinuditel’nyi trud v Sibiri i na Dal’nem vostoke 1929–1941 gg.,” in Vozvrashchenie pamiati. Istoriko-publitsisticheskii al’manakh. Vyp. 3, ed. Irina Vladimirovna Pavlova (Novosibirsk: Novosibirskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1997), 37–67.
15. Paul R. Gregory and Valerii Vasil’evich Lazarev, eds., The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2003). See also Leonid I. Borodkin, Paul Gregory, and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, eds., GULAG: Ekonomika prinuditel’nogo truda (Moscow: Rosspen, 2008).
16. J. Arch Getty, Gábor Tamás Rittersporn, and Viktor N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” American Historical Review (October 1993): 1017–49. The critical question of which inmates were released is not addressed in this statistics-driven piece based primarily on the research accomplished by Zemskov in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For Zemskov’s work, see the various articles cited herein along with Viktor N. Zemskov, Spetsposelentsy v SSSR (Moscow: Nauka, 2005). The characterization of the Gulag’s door as a revolving one has been pursued not only in my own work but also in Golfo Alexopoulos, “Amnesty 1945: The Revolving Door of Stalin’s Gulag,” Slavic Review 64, no. 2 (2005): 274–306.
17. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1958), 468–72. Also significant here is Michael Walzer’s use of the term: “The power of an ideology . . . lies in its capacity to activate its adherents and to change the world. Its content is necessarily a description of contemporary experience as unacceptable and unnecessary and a rejection of any merely personal transcendence or salvation. Its practical effect is to generate organization and cooperative activity.” Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 27. Michael David-Fox usefully describes ideology as “outlooks deriving from disseminated doctrine,” and understands it not as a “discrete variable or factor” but rather as “a more diffuse phenomenon.” Michael David-Fox, “On the Primacy of Ideology: Soviet Revisionists and Holocaust Deniers (in Response to Martin Malia),” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 1 (2004): 103.
18. Bacon, The Gulag at War, 47.
19. David-Fox, “On the Primacy of Ideology,” 104.
20. Maksim Gorky, Leopol’d Auerbach, and Semen Firin, eds., Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea, trans. Amabel Williams-Ellis (New York: H. Smith and R. Haas, 1935).
21. The key work on Belomor is Cynthia Ruder, Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998). See also Solzhenitysn and Applebaum, among others, for expressions of moral outrage at this whitewashing of history. For a particularly enlightening commentary on the volume, and in particular on the relationship of the famed Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov and the construction of the canal, see Figes, The Whisperers, 192–207.
22. For an enlightening argument on the relationship between circumstances and ideology in historiographical considerations of the Soviet period, see David-Fox, “On the Primacy of Ideology.”
23. Soviet authorities used the term kulak for the peasantry’s “class enemy”—officially, the “rich” peasants. The term was applied quite broadly to potential opponents of the collectivization of agriculture in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the Soviet government embarked on “the destruction of the kulaks as a class,” sending millions into internal exile or to other institutions of the Gulag. For the classic statements on the Soviet meaning of the term kulak and peasants resistance against the term, see Moshe Lewin, “Who Was the Soviet Kulak?” in The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: New Press, 1994), 121–41; Viola, The Unknown Gulag; Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
24. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:9.
25. Aspects of this transformative vision of politics can be traced back at least to the Calvinists in European history. On the Calvinists break with ways of thinking based on the Great Chain of Being, see Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints. It should be emphasized again that the roots of many individual characteristics of modernity can be traced deeply into the historical past. Nonetheless, modernity as a fundamentally new compilation of characteristics into a coherent, new epistemology can be traced to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Arendt also recognized this “tremendous intellectual change which took place in the middle of the last century . . . the refusal to view or accept anything ‘as it is’ and in the consistent interpretation of everything as being only a stage of some further development.” Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 464.
26. The emergence of modernity occupies an important place in a broad range of European historiography. For the intellectual roots of the above discussion, see especially James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977); David G. Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), especially 18–34; Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism; Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Amir Weiner, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). For modernity in the Soviet context, see especially Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Weiner, Landscaping the Human Garden, 1–18; Peter Holquist, “State Violence as Technique: The Logic of Violence in Soviet Totalitarianism,” in Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework, ed. Amir Weiner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 19–45; David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); David L. Hoffman and Yanni Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000; Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
27. From Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, we learn that “there were still enemies within the new world” (19).
28. It is quite interesting that Solzhenitsyn, despite his radical hatred of the Bolsheviks, himself operates in the same ethos imagining a contaminated society—sure enough contaminated by the Bolsheviks themselves as opposed to the class enemy, but contaminated nonetheless. “What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body?” The similarities between Solzhenitsyn and the Bolsheviks continue: “We have the duty to seek them all out and bring them all to trial! Not to put them on trial so much as their crimes. And to compel each one of them to announce loudly: ‘Yes, I was an executioner and a murderer.’” Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1:176–77.
29. I have adopted the translation in Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005) 273. The same quote appears with a slightly different translation in Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, 18.
30. Igal Halfin captured the Bolshevik spirit of violence in the name of utopia: “Communists ended up committing bloody deeds they hardly expected would follow from the lofty principles they thought shaped their project. The dream of universal emancipation spun out of control precisely because those who dreamed of ‘human perfectability’ or ‘classless society’ never imagined that a vision so perfect, so utopian, could embrace slaughter and systematic persecution. But once entrenched in the tissue of power, messianic dreams that structured the Communist discourse and provided it a frame of moral reference that set standards of conformity could not be easily curbed, even when some of their horrific implications asserted themselves with a vengeance.” Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 6.
31. Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, 37.
32. Ibid., 338.
33. Ibid. quotes Stalin’s reference to writers as the “engineers of the soul” (337). Reforging was generally the preferred term for the work of the Gulag. Shock workers at Belomor had their portraits made and hung in the camp bearing the decisive caption: “Reforged.” Ibid., 153. Reforging was also the most popular name for newspapers in the corrective labor camps. On humans as material, see ibid., 151.
34. On the use of engineering and surgical metaphors in Gulag memoirs, see Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 35.
35. On the relationship between Bolshevik visions and the early formation of the Gulag, see the prearchival but fantastic study in Michael Jakobson, Origins of the Gulag: The Soviet Prison-Camp System, 1917–1934 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993). It was believed that the failure to combat bourgeois influences would lead to the corruption of the proletariat, like engineer K. M. Zubrik at Belomor, “the classic story of the proletarian who is tempted by bourgeois culture and who makes bourgeois ideology his own, together with the knowledge he receives in the bourgeois school.” Ibid., 163.
36. On Soviet state violence as more than merely repressive, see Holquist, “State Violence as Technique.”
37. Quoted in Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:144–45.
38. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 75.
39. Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, 256.
40. Not even the “small peoples of the north” remained marginal during the Soviet era. See Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). On the inclusion of every individual in modern state projects for refashioning society, see Weiner, Landscaping the Human Garden, 2.
41. “Stakhanovskoe dvizhenie–Marksizm v deistvii,” Putevka, January 21, 1936, plate 429, in The GULAG Press, 1920–1937 (Leiden, Netherlands: IDC Publishers, 2000).
42. Cited in Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:67.
43. Ibid., 2:13.
44. Eugenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 24.
45. On the Marxist understanding of labor as the key feature of humanity, see Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution, Volume I: The Founders, trans. Paul S. Falla (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) 133–34. In the context of the Gulag, see Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, 340: “Man has developed throughout his mammalian history; he is human in as far as he is a worker, so when he is put into conditions which allow free development of his various abilities, it is natural for him to begin unconsciously to accept his real calling.”
46. Ibid., 244.
47. Solzhenitsyn’s work was far more complex than many of his readers thought. While he clearly understood the array of institutions, readers have often reduced his work and, thus, their concept of the Gulag to the labor camp alone.
48. V. P. Popov, “Gosudarstvennyi terror v sovetskoi Rossii, 1923–1953 gg. (istochniki i ikh interpretatsiia),” Otechestvennye Arkhivy, no. 2 (1992): 20–31.
49. For some of the protocols allowing for an increase in quotas, see Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:290–93.
50. See Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1:185. The ideal situation in the eyes of Soviet authorities was the maintenance of interrogation prison inmates in solitary confinement. Periods of mass arrest rendered this impossible. Yet even in such times, they attempted to negate as far as possible any contact of the prisoner with the outside world.
51. Ibid., 1:478.
52. Cited in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:270.
53. Cited in Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:289.
54. Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 211. In the text, I chose to use Eugenia rather than the proper Evgeniia for her first name given its wide English usage since the translated publication of her memoirs.
55. Ibid., 206, 209, 214.
56. Ibid., 280.
57. Ibid., 348.
58. See Arkhivnyi Otdel Tsentra Pravovoi Statistiki i Informatsii pri Prokurature Karagandinskoi Oblasti (Archive Department of the Center for Legal Statistics and Information under the Procurator of the Karaganda Region; hereafter AOTsPSI), Karaganda, fond (f.) Karlaga, sviazka (sv.) 2, delo (d.) 44, list (l.) 15.
59. Quoted in Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, 333. Nikolai Ezhov (sometimes spelled Yezhov) was the people’s commissar of internal affairs, or the secret police chief, for the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs during the worst years of the Great Terror in 1937–38. His name became synonymous with this dark period.
60. Quoted in ibid., 280.
61. The exact term used to described Soviet internal exiles varied, but spetspereselentsy was the most common. I will use the terms “special settlers” and “exiles” interchangeably throughout the text.
62. With the appearance of Viola’s The Unknown Gulag, the special settlements will likely be increasingly integrated into a consideration of the Gulag in the future.
63. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation; hereafter GARF), Moscow, f. 9414, opis (op.) 1, d. 28, l. 17.
64. See the report from September 5, 1944, in “Spetspereselentsy v SSSR v 1944 godu ili god bol’shogo pereseleniia,” Otechestvennye arkhivy, no. 5 (1993): 103.
65. Rachel Rachlin and Israel Rachlin, Sixteen Years in Siberia (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988), 25, 238–40.
66. See the report from October 5, 1932, in Nicolas Werth and Gael Moullec, eds., Rapports Secrets Sovietiques: La Societe Russe Dans Les Documents Confidentiels, 1921–1991 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 369–72.
67. See the 1932 report in Werth and Moullec, Rapports Secrets, 358–61; see also another report from 1931 on the unsatisfactory cultural work among the special settlement youths at Magnitostroi, in ibid., 363–66.
68. Rachlin and Rachlin, Sixteen Years in Siberia, 31, 34. Some exiles lived in specially constructed special settlements, where exile populations were concentrated and to a certain extent isolated from the surrounding populations. Often, however, they mixed right in with the local population, as did the Rachlins.
69. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 2, d. 43, ll. 18–22.
70. See Werth, Cannibal Island.
71. Rachlin and Rachlin, Sixteen Years in Siberia, 100. Both Ginzburg and Solzhenitsyn, after their release from camps into exile, also worked as teachers.
72. Ibid., 124, 174.
73. Ibid., 34.
74. Ibid., 44–45, 110–11.
75. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 133, 234–35.
76. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 2, d. 43, l. 22.
77. Ibid., sv. 4 URO, d. 32, ll. 47–48.
78. Ibid., sv. 2, d. 43, l. 22.
79. Ibid., sv. 2, d. 21, l. 28. Clearly, the special settlement administration and Kazitlag authorities jousted over their relative responsibilities during this transfer of authority. In July 1931, central Gulag chief Kogan intervened with a five-page, twenty-two-point order laying out the authority and responsibilities of the two organizations. He placed his deputy Naftalii Frenkel’ in charge of any further disputes. Ibid., sv. 2, d. 43, ll. 18–22.
80. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1154, l. 4. The colony prisoner population in the Kazakh Republic did grow throughout 1940, but it still numbered a relatively small 11,500 in November. Ibid., l. 90.
81. See Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 134.
82. Ibid., 134, 230–34.
CHAPTER 2: RECLAIMING THE MARGINS AND THE MARGINAL
1. Militsa Cheslavovna Stefanskaia, Chernoe i beloe (Moscow: Suzdalev, 1994), 22.
2. Nauchno-Informatsionnyi i Prosvetitel’skii Tsentr “Memorial” (Scientific Information and Enlightenment Center “Memorial”; hereafter NIPTs), Moscow, f. 2, op. 3, d. 60, memoir of Galina Aleksandrovna Semenova, str. 6, 83–84. (Page numbers are listed according to the pagination of the memoir.)
3. Cited in GARF, f. 9414, op. 2, d. 108, l. 4.
4. Andrei Sergeevich Elagin, A. K. Ivanenko, and B. N. Abisheva, Karaganda (Almaty, Kazakhstan: “Nauka” Kazakhskoi SSR, 1989), 5–6; R. N. Nurgaliev, ed., Karaganda, Karagandinskaia oblast’: Entsiklopediia (Almaty, Kazakhstan: Kazakhskaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1986), 4–6.
5. Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, trans. Carol Flath (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), 70–71. Originally published as Gulag v sisteme totalitarnogo gosudarstva (Moscow: Moskovskii obshchestvennyi nauchnyi fond, 1997).
6. Mikhail Borisovich Smirnov, Sistema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR 1923–1960: Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ia, 1998), 278–79. Diusetai Aimagambetovich Shaimukhanov and Saule Diusetaevna Shaimukhanova Karlag (Karaganda: Poligrafiia, 1997), 15–16, place the amount of land allocated to the camp far lower, at about 110,000 hectares.
7. Cited in GARF, f. 9414, op. 2, d. 108, l. 6.
8. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 2, d. 43, ll. 18–22.
9. On specific mortality rates in Karlag and the camps generally, see below. On the famine in Kazakhstan, see Niccolo Pianciola, “The Collectivization Famine in Kazakhstan, 1931–1933,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 25, nos. 3–4 (2001): 237–51; “Famine in the Steppe: The Collectivization of Agriculture and the Kazakh Herdsmen, 1928–1934,” Cahiers du monde russe 45, nos. 1–2 (2004): 137–92.
10. For the instructions on dismantling Kazitlag, see AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 2, d. 43, ll. 45–51. Shaimukhanov and Shaimukhanova Karlag, 16, date the transfer from Kazitlag to Karlag as December 1931. All documentary materials relating to Kazitlag were transferred to the Karlag administration and can be found today among the materials at AOTsPSI. On the transfer, see GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1156, l. 205.
11. Shaimukhanov and Shaimukhanova, Karlag, 16.
12. Elagin, et al., Karaganda, 5–6.
13. GARF, f. 9414, op. 2, d. 108, l. 5. Prisoners frequently likened the territory of Karlag to the size of France. The porousness of its borders and the geographic separation of one camp division from another make the evaluation of such a statement nearly impossible.
14. Cited in ibid. It is no surprise in this self-promoting work that Karlag summed up its four years as a time of unremitting and persistent struggle, of great victories as well as the actions of Chekist and prisoner heroes.
15. On official conceptions of the steppe as empty and the reality that the steppe was not empty but emptied, see Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 176–77.
16. Cited in GARF, f. 9414, op. 2, d. 108, l. 8.
17. Iurii Nikolaevich Afanas’ev, et al., eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga: Konets 1920-kh–pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov: Sobranie dokumentov v semi tomakh (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004), 3:74–79.
18. Ibid., 3:100–101.
19. Ibid., 3:123–24, 525–26.
20. Ibid., 3:525.
21. Shaimukhanov and Shaimukhanova, Karlag, 17–18.
22. Cited in GARF, f. 9414, op. 2, d. 108, ll. 4b–5.
23. Cited in ibid., ll. 4–4b.
24. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:114–15.
25. Ibid., 115–16.
26. Viola makes this point clearly. See Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). On peasant resistance, often including violent resistance, to collectivization, see Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
27. Applebaum points this out, but nevertheless maintains that the camps’ growth was primarily economic in nature. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 56. The point perhaps is made most clearly in Nicolas Werth, Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), which reveals the utter devastation wreaked on special settlers due to the complete unpreparedness of local authorities. The same is true in Viola, The Unknown Gulag.
28. Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, trans. Vadim A. Staklo, ed. David J. Nordlander (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 24. This lies at odds with the statement from the editors (one of whom was Khlevniuk himself) in the introduction to Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga that arrests seemed at times driven by political concerns and at other times the Gulag’s “economic considerations appeared paramount, such as during the construction of major infrastructure projects in the early 1930s or the return to an economic orientation in 1939 during [Lavrenty] Beria’s reforms of 1939, which were closely connected to the growing economic activities of the NKVD.” See Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:55. Perhaps this apparent contradiction in Khlevniuk’s thinking about the early 1930s is indicative of disagreement among the volume editors. As will become clear throughout the present volume, I believe the history shows that Gulag economic concerns were never the driving factor behind campaigns of arrest.
29. All of these campaigns are covered in ibid., vol. 1. On the passport campaign and the removal of socially dangerous elements, see Paul Hagenloh, “‘Socially Harmful Elements’ and the Great Terror,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000), 286–308; Paul Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941, (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009); Werth, Cannibal Island. See also Oleg Khlevnyuk, “The Economy of the Gulag,” in Behind the Façade of Stalin’s Command Economy, ed. Paul R. Gregory (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2001), 113–18. Khlevniuk (the author’s surname has been transliterated Khlevnyuk and Khlevniuk in his English publications) even argues that the great number of death sentences handed out in 1937–38 was in part an effect of the critical overcrowding in Gulag camps that rendered the economic use of such large new prisoner populations impossible.
30. Applebaum, to her credit, acknowledges a number of these counterarguments, but attributes most of the rationale to the category of inefficiency in the arrests and contends that “none of these explanations for the growth of the camps is entirely mutually exclusive either.” Yet here again, she finds it necessary to return to Stalin as the sole motive force behind the system. See Applebaum, Gulag, 56–57.
31. This is from a monograph prepared by Gulag central authorities in 1940 or 1941 about the Gulag’s history and practices. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 28, l. 8. (The monograph contains no archival numbering, so the reference is to the monograph’s page numbers.) This was also a primary rule for the internal exile population.
32. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 3:8–10.
33. On the latter, see Natalia Kuziakina, Theatre in the Solovki Prison Camp, trans. Boris M. Meerovich (Newark, NJ: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), 14.
34. Maksim Gorky, Leopol’d Auerbach, and Semen Firin, eds., Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea, trans. Amabel Williams-Ellis (New York: H. Smith and R. Haas, 1935), 20–21. This slogan frequently appeared in camp propaganda in the form of posters, wall newspapers, and newspapers in general, and it even adorned the camp gates.
35. Edward Buca, Vorkuta (London: Constable, 1976), 140.
36. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:106.
37. Andrei Vyshinsky, ed., Ot tiurem k vospitatel’nym uchrezdeniiam (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo Sovetskoe zakonodatel’stvo, 1934), quoted in Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:13.
38. Quoted in Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:14.
39. Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, 104. “By March, 1932, the basic camp population in the fourth division knew what part of the work it was doing, why this work was being done, and what would happen when the whole construction was finished. And this, of course, could not but show first and foremost, in the work itself. The productivity of labour rose. People worked more eagerly, and in a more comradely spirit.” Ibid., 175. Notice that work is measured not only in the productivity of labor but also in the attitude of the laborer.
40. Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor relates the story of one Belomor prisoner who had performed the labor of Sing Sing, but he was only redeemed in a Soviet labor camp. Ibid., 207. Of course, the White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal was ultimately of so little value that its prisoner laborers accomplished little more than the Sing Sing prisoner.
41. For one particularly strong argument in this vein, see Edwin Bacon, The Gulag at War: Stalin’s Forced Labour System in the Light of the Archives (London: Macmillan, 1994), 78. See also Applebaum, Gulag, 185, 221, 231–41.
42. The classic statement on the politicization of labor in Stalin’s Soviet Union is Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
43. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1958), 430.
44. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:54.
45. Applebaum, Gulag, 29. This work further shows that Solovetskii’s supposed economic success in the later 1920s under Naftalii Frenkel was an illusion, even if many believed it. Ibid., 35.
46. Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme, 102.
47. Ibid., 125.
48. Sergei A. Krasil’nikov, ed., “Rozhdenie Gulaga: Diskussiia v verkhnykh eshelonakh vlasti,” Istoricheskii arkhiv 4 (1997): 142–56.
49. For an example of this argument, see Applebaum, Gulag.
50. Cited in AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 2, d. 43, l. 10.
51. Applebaum, Gulag, 89, drawing on Ginzburg’s shock and admiration at the rapid growth of the city of Magadan. For the classic statement on extending the revolution to the remote regions of the union, see Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
52. This does not, of course, mean that mass cases of prisoner and exile death would not be investigated. See, for example, Werth, Cannibal Island. Nonetheless, it seems clear that excessive deaths would never be a reason to slow down the Gulag’s growth or operation.
53. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 4 URO, d. 32, ll. 9–25.
54. Bardach’s memoir of his experience in the Kolyma camps was written long after he became a renowned medical school professor in the United States. The memoir is frequently remarkable for its willingness to discuss topics that Russian memoirists shy away from, including, as we will see, homosexual rape and a more sympathetic rendering of professional criminal inmates. See Janusz Bardach and Kathleen Gleeson, Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). In addition, with the publication of his second volume, Surviving Freedom, Bardach explores his life after the Gulag—a topic rarely covered by Russian memoirists. Janusz Bardach and Kathleen Gleeson, Surviving Freedom: After the Gulag (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). On the limitations of topics in Gulag memoirs, see Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
55. See especially Elena Osokina, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–1941, trans. Greta Bucher, ed. Kate S. Transchel (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000).
56. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 6, d. 108, l. 173.
57. See Applebaum, Gulag, 206–15. For numerous examples of prisoner food rations and their tie to different levels of labor productivity, see Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, vol. 4.
58. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 3:71.
59. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 2, d. 44, l. 16.
60. Again, there were equivalents outside the Gulag of individuals living around rather than through the differentiated ration system. See Osokina, Our Daily Bread; Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917–1953 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
61. Bardach and Gleeson, Man Is Wolf to Man, 135.
62. Stefanskaia, Chernoe i beloe, 23–24.
63. Vladimir Petrov, Escape from the Future: The Incredible Adventures of a Young Russian (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 90.
64. Stefanskaia, Chernoe i beloe, 26–27.
65. Ibid., 28. Karlag was by no means the only Gulag camp in which prisoners lived without barbed wire. See, for example, Applebaum, Gulag, 82.
66. Stefanskaia, Chernoe i beloe, 29.
67. Cited in AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 14, d. 230, l. 19. By no means was this a phenomenon exclusive to Karlag. Allowing prisoners in any camp to leave their camp or production zones freely, even for short periods of time, created a breach in the camp censorship system. Petrov recalls his own experience in Kolyma, where exceptional labor performance earned him a permit to live outside the camp zone. While he felt that his situation was precarious, because any negative report from a local resident could lead to the withdrawal of the permit, he also noted an incredible sense of freedom, as nobody bothered to prevent him from going to the telegraph office to send telegrams to anybody he wished. Petrov, Escape from the Future, 133–34.
68. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 6, d. 108, l. 31.
69. In a brief report short on details, two Karlag prisoners went to the city of Karaganda on March 30, 1934, and got drunk. When they tried to steal an automobile, a garage employee named G. Bochek tried to stop them, whereupon the prisoners began to beat him. While it is unclear what exactly happened and where the weapon came from, the outcome is plain enough: in the midst of the struggle, one of the prisoners shot and fatally wounded Bochek. Ibid., l. 73. For other decrees and reports critical of the failure to isolate Karlag prisoners from the surrounding populations, see ibid., sv. 3, d. 51, ll. 38–39, 54; sv. 4, d. 75, ll. 26–27.
70. Ibid., sv. 13, d. 220, l. 24.
71. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 2:258, 453.
72. Aleksandr Kokurin and Nikita Petrov, “Arkhiv. GULAG: Strukture i kadry,” Svobodnaia mysl’ no. 3 (2000): 105–23.
73. The UNKVDs were local and regional departments of the NKVD.
74. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 9, d. 155, ll. 20–22.
75. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 28, l. 10.
76. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 2:280. It seems perhaps a bit much, though, to write as Applebaum does that the guards performed their work “often with only the dimmest idea of why they were doing it.” Applebaum, Gulag, 260.
77. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 28, l. 10.
78. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 2, d. 43, l. 10; Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 2:81–82.
79. Petrov, Escape from the Future, 176. See also David Nordlander’s discussion of the privileges required to recruit guards to Kolyma. David J. Nordlander, “Capital of the Gulag: Magadan in the Early Stalin Era, 1929–1941” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997), 39.
80. The Soviet secret police changed its name several times over its history. Thus, VChK (or Cheka), OGPU, and NKVD all refer to the Soviet secret police.
81. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 6, d. 108, ll. 179–82.
82. See, for example, AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 7, d. 114, l. 1.
83. Petrov, Escape from the Future, 176–77.
84. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (Russian State Archive of Sociopolitical History; hereafter RGASPI), f. 560, op. 1, d. 44, ll. 1–2. The existence in the camps of so-called real enemies and Solzhenitsyn’s failure to write about them was not an uncommon topic in letters to Novyi mir responding to the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, even in letters from former prisoners themselves. See Denis Kozlov, “The Readers of Novyi Mir, 1945–1970: Twentieth-Century Experience and Soviet Historical Consciousness” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2005), 335–36. On katorga camp divisions, see chapters 4 and 5 herein. The term Vlasovites refers to those who fought alongside General Andrei Vlasov in the Russian Liberation Army, cooperating with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. The term Banderites refers to members of Ukrainian nationalist partisan armies who fought against both Soviet and Nazi forces.
85. Quoted in RGASPI, f. 560, op. 1, d. 44, ll. 3–4.
86. The key study on official corruption in the Gulag system is James Heinzen, “Corruption in the Gulag: Dilemmas of Officials and Prisoners,” Comparative Economic Studies 47, no. 2 (2005): 456–75.
87. As we will see in chapter 5, sometimes prisoners were shot and then their bodies were arranged so that it appeared as if they were attempting to escape. Applebaum is particularly solid in discussing the guard-prisoner relationship. See Applebaum, Gulag, 256–79.
88. See, for example, the report in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 4:184–87.
89. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 2, d. 16, l. 1.
90. Ibid., sv. 1 URO, d. 1, ll. 8–9; sv. 4, d. 75, l. 30.
91. Ibid., sv. 1 URO, d. 1, l. 20.
92. Cited in ibid., sv. 2 URO, d. 5, l. 62.
93. Ibid., sv. 1 pr., d. 3, l. 129.
94. Cited in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 28, l. 11.
95. Margarete Buber, Under Two Dictators (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1949), 27. One sometimes sees this author’s name as Buber and sometimes as Buber-Neumann.
96. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977). Note also that the panopticon was actually developed in eighteenth-century Russia by the brothers Samuel and Jeremy Bentham in an attempt “to improve the surveillance and labor efficiency of English wage laborers” working in Russia on Grigorii Potemkin’s estate. Jeremy Bentham took these ideas with him when he left Russia in 1787 and developed the panopticon as a general means of supervision, whether in hospitals, prisons, or schools, or for labor. See Alessandro Stanziani, “Free Labor–Forced Labor: An Uncertain Boundary,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 9, no. 1 (2008): 27–52, especially 43–47.
97. On gathering the mood of the population and on surveillance in Soviet society at large, see Vladlen Izmozik, Glaza i ushi rezhima: gosudarstvennyi politicheskii kontrol za naseleniem Sovetskoi Rossii v 1918–1928 godakh, (Saint Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Sankt-peterburgskogo universiteta ekonomiki i finansov, 1995); Peter Holquist, “‘Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work’: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Modern History 69, no. 3 (1997): 415–50.
98. The central Gulag collection in GARF (f. 9414) is entirely declassified with the exception of two subsections. The first classified section includes Gulag personnel files that remain off-limits due to official restrictions on access to individual information. The second classified section includes the materials of the Gulag’s surveillance section, its Third Department. In the central collection of the administration of special settlements (f. 9479), the materials of the surveillance section are not separated out into an easily classified subsection. Initially, the entirety of this collection was declassified and made available to scholars. The discovery of surveillance section materials subsequently led to the reclassification of a large number of previously available files in the collection. In Karaganda, at AOTsPSI, I was provided access to any document I wished in Karlag’s archive, yet all requested photocopies and my notes on the issue of surveillance in the camps were taken from me prior to leaving the archive.
One can do little more than speculate about the reasons for the continued sensitivity toward this subject in both post–Soviet Russia and post–Soviet Kazakhstan. In both cases, I have actually seen some of the classified materials on surveillance. In the case of Moscow, some of the materials on surveillance were provided as photocopies to scholars prior to the reclassification. Several of these documents are used in chapters 5 and 6 below. The Moscow documents report various expressions revealing the mood of individual exiles. One suspects that the inclusion of actual information on individual exiles and possible clues to the identity of the informants may explain the sensitivity. Certainly some camp and deportee informers must still be alive, and contemporary authorities would no doubt be reluctant to have them identified. Yet the documents in Karaganda were quite different. All of the documents that I read in Karaganda prior to their confiscation from my notes and photocopy requests were mere administrative and regulatory documents, without any information about individual prisoners or informers. They simply laid out the nature of the surveillance operation, the means to recruit informers, and the like. In this case, one also suspects that current institutions of detention in former Soviet states may continue to operate similar forms of internal surveillance, and therefore do not wish such information to become public.
99. Quoted in AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 6, d. 94, l. 21.
100. The inverse of the belief in the enemy’s ability to become an honest citizen was the ability of the honest citizen to become an enemy.
101. Bardach and Gleeson, Man Is Wolf to Man, 113–14.
102. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 9, d. 155, l. 58.
103. For these figures, see J. Arch Getty, Gábor Tamás Rittersporn, and Viktor N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” American Historical Review (October 1993): 1048–49.
105. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 4:188.
106. See, for example, AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 4, d. 75, ll. 26–27.
107. Ibid., sv. 5, d. 83, ll. 28–29. Unfortunately, I was unable to determine what happened to those responsible.
108. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 431.
109. Quoted in AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 2, d. 44, l. 3.
110. Quoted in ibid., sv. 3 prikazy, d. 7, l. 229.
111. Ibid., sv. 5 prikazy, d. 11, ll. 110–11.
112. See, for example, ibid., sv. 3 prikazy, d. 7, l. 229.
113. Many historians have made the mistake of assuming that the official commitment to reeducation (whether real or not) was abandoned in the mid-1930s with the Great Terror. While it is certainly the case that prisoners were no longer a topic of public discussion as they were when Belomor was published, the Gulag’s indoctrination activities never ceased, as we will see in subsequent chapters. How real this commitment to reeducation was is, of course, a matter open to debate, but that the apparatus itself continued to operate is not. For these arguments, see Michael Jakobson, Origins of the Gulag: The Soviet Prison-Camp System, 1917–1934 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), though the author did not have access to archival materials; Applebaum, Gulag, 100, even though the author should have known better.
114. This is the main problem for Applebaum in her section on the KVChs. She treats their activities in complete isolation from the question of release and looks at labor in isolation from reeducation. As such, she cannot understand the KVChs’ enormous efforts. See Applebaum, Gulag, 216–41.
115. Kuziakina, Theatre in the Solovki Prison Camp, 30.
116. Buca, Vorkuta, 93.
117. Cited in Kuziakina, Theatre in the Solovki Prison Camp, 90.
118. Cited in Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:67.
119. See ibid., 2:470. The failure of the KVCh at Svirlag to involve a significant percentage of the inmates in socialist competition and shock work was criticized by the assistant chief of the Gulag in a report on June 1, 1935. See Nicolas Werth and Gael Moullec, eds., Rapports Secrets Sovietiques: La Societe Russe Dans Les Documents Confidentiels, 1921–1991 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 374–76.
120. Quoted in GARF, f. 9414, op. 2, d. 108, l. 7.
121. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 232.
122. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:106.
123. Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, 156–59.
124. The classic work is Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
125. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 232.
126. Quoted in AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 9, d. 155, ll. 20–22.
127. “Glavnoe—eto liubit’ svoiu rabotu,” Putevka, January 19, 1936, plate 429, in The GULAG Press, 1920–1937 (Leiden, Netherlands: IDC Publishers, 2000).
128. “Rekordnaia vyrabotka zaboishchikov shakhty ‘Dubovka’ Kurmanbaeva i Gol’tsmana,” Putevka, January 5, 1936, plate 429, in The GULAG Press, 1920–1937 (Leiden, Netherlands: IDC Publishers, 2000).
129. Various articles in ibid.
130. On Karlag’s response to the USSR Sovnarkom, and calls from the Communist Party’s Central Committee to liquidate illiteracy entirely in 1936 and 1937, see AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 5 prikazy, d. 11, ll. 110–12.
131. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:474.
132. Ibid., 2:471.
133. Applebaum states that no photographs of Stalin or other leaders were allowed on the walls of camps or prisons. This seems contradicted by the photograph from Belomor available at http://gulaghistory.org/items/show/287, part of the International Memorial Society, Moscow collection. Leaders did certainly appear in camp newspapers. See, for example, the photograph of Lenin on the tenth anniversary of his death in Karlag’s newpaper, Putevka, January 21, 1936, plate 429, in The GULAG Press, 1920–1937 (Leiden, Netherlands: IDC Publishers, 2000).
134. On Gulag newspapers as a means to instill “culturedness” among the prisoners, see Wilson Bell, “One Day in the Life of Educator Khrushchev: Labour and Kul’turnost’ in the Gulag Newspapers,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 46, nos. 3–4 (2004): 289–313.
135. Kuziakina, Theatre in the Solovki Prison Camp, 23.
136. Virtually every issue of Putevka carried this phrase across its front page: “Circulation outside of the camp is not allowed.”
137. Cited in AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 5 prikazy, d. 11, ll. 187–88.
138. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 3 prikazy, d. 7, l. 240.
139. “Moe spasibo chekistam,” Putevka, December 24, 1936, plate 406, in The GULAG Press, 1920–1937 (Leiden, Netherlands: IDC Publishers, 2000). A similar article appears just below this one in the same issue titled “I Became a Man” (Ia stal chelovekam).
140. Putevka, January 19, 1936, 4, plate 429, in The GULAG Press, 1920–1937 (Leiden, Netherlands: IDC Publishers, 2000).
141. Ibid.
142. Various articles, Putevka, January 5, 1936, plate 429, in The GULAG Press, 1920–1937 (Leiden, Netherlands: IDC Publishers, 2000).
143. Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, 219–20.
144. Quoted in ibid., 220–21.
145. Kuziakina, Theatre in the Solovki Prison Camp, 51.
146. Eugenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 16.
147. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 2, d. 44, l. 52.
148. Ibid., sv. 9, d. 157, l. 113. Although I have chosen a particular example from the period of the terror, these restrictions during state holidays were not limited to that time. Intriguingly, though, prisoners were still allowed to celebrate Soviet and religious holidays in the 1920s at Solovki. See Applebaum, Gulag, 27.
149. Petrov, Escape from the Future, 168–69.
150. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 232.
151. Petrov, Escape from the Future, 116.
152. Cited in Kuziakina, Theatre in the Solovki Prison Camp, 15.
153. Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, 24.
154. Cited in AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 13, d. 220, l. 24.
155. Ibid., sv. 5, d. 93, l. 52.
156. Cited in ibid., sv. 2, d. 44, l. 11.
157. For just two of the many different regulations over the years that spelled out some of the possible penalties along with the operation and daily regime of penalty institutions, see AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 2, d. 44, ll. 11–11b; sv. 5, d. 93, ll. 123–28.
158. Ibid., sv. 5, d. 93, ll. 52–53.
159. Ibid., sv. 9, d. 157, ll. 106–7.
160. Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, 103.
161. Petrov, Escape from the Future, 136–37.
162. Rachel Rachlin and Israel Rachlin, Sixteen Years in Siberia (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988), 110–11; Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:380.
163. Joseph Scholmer, Vorkuta (New York: Holt, 1955), 173.
164. Cited in AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 8, d. 146, l. 28.
165. For one early regulation on paying prisoners dated November 13, 1930, see ibid., sv. 2, d. 43, ll. 42–44. On privileges for productive prisoners, see, among others, ibid., sv. 2, d. 44, l. 16.
166. Quoted in ibid., sv. 13, d. 224, l. 129.
167. Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years,” 1041, 1048–49.
168. NIPTs, f. 2, op. 3, d. 60, memoir of Galina Aleksandrovna Semenova, str. 5.
169. Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, 171–72.
170. Ibid., 308.
171. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 28, l. 7.
172. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 8, d. 128, ll. 53–58.
173. Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, 199.
174. Ibid., 217.
175. See, for example, AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 7, d. 117, l. 95.
176. By far the best study of the accounted working day system, which Simon Ertz calls “workday credits,” is in his “Trading Effort for Freedom: Workday Credits in the Stalinist Camp System,” Comparative Economic Studies 47, no. 2 (2005): 476–91.
177. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 1 URO, d. 1, l. 23. Also see the regulations cited in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 3:79–81, 126–32.
178. Cited in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 3:128.
179. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 3, d. 51, l. 6.
180. On lishentsy, see Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
181. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 3:126, 128. On prisoner Stakhanovites, see ibid., 3:133–34.
182. The Karlag individual prisoner files from the 1930s at AOTsPSI are full of such forms.
183. Cited in AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 4 URO, d. 32, l. 6.
184. Ibid., sv. 4 URO, d. 32, l. 48.
185. Quoted in ibid., sv. 3 prikazy, d. 7, l. 37.
186. For one example, see the death penalty case in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 3:165–66. The case was sent to all camps and ordered read to prisoners with the explanation that local camp authorities tell all prisoners that sabotage, malicious refusal to work, and other violations of camp discipline would be punished severely. See also the order to punish self-mutilators for their criminal attempt to avoid work in ibid., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 3:166–67.
187. Quoted in ibid., 4:71. He is quoted with a slightly different translation in Applebaum, Gulag, 112.
188. Applebaum, Gulag, 112.
189. See the discussion in Ertz, “Trading Effort for Freedom”; see also the documents in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 3:283–95. During the same period, Gulag authorities experimented with the reintroduction of pay for some prisoners. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 3:296–314. These were two of the failed last-ditch efforts in the waning Stalin years to make the system economically profitable. For others, see ibid., 3:314–53.
190. See the politburo decision cited in ibid., 2:158. See also the discussion in Beria’s letter to Vyacheslav Molotov on the end of the system in ibid., 3:160–61.
191. All figures for the camps alone are calculated based on GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1155, ll. 1–2. The combined figures for the camps and colonies are in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 3:55. Despite the increase in 1937, the numbers do not seem enough to justify Applebaum’s assertion that 1937 was a year in which “Soviet camps temporarily transformed themselves from indifferently managed prisons in which people died by accident, into genuinely deadly camps where prisoners were deliberately worked to death, or actually murdered, in far larger numbers than they had been in the past.” Applebaum, Gulag, 93. As was typical, the most “murderous” location of the Great Terror was outside the camps in the system of direct execution of enemies. Furthermore, during the mass operations of the Great Terror, the camps had their own quotas of enemies to be shot—not worked to death, but shot.
192. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1155, ll. 1–2.
193. Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, 274.
194. The image—”Graveyard of the Lazy,” Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives, item no. 785, owned by the International Memorial Society in Moscow—is available at http://gulaghistory.org/items/show/785 (accessed May 17, 2009).
195. See the push to recategorize prisoners’ health toward fitness for heavier forms of labor in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 3:93–94.
CHAPTER 3: CATEGORIZING PRISONERS
1. Many of these statistical compilations from central Gulag archives have been published in Iurii Nikolaevich Afanas’ev, et al., eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga: Konets 1920-kh–pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov: Sobranie dokumentov v semi tomakh (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004), vol. 4. They are ubiquitous in the central and local Gulag archives.
2. On sending copies from prisoner files to central authorities along with prisoners’ appeals for clemency, see ibid., 4:90.
3. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 8, d. 143.
4. See Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 220.
5. Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 348.
6. For the text of the corrective labor code of 1924, see Aleksandr Kokurin and Nikolai Petrov, eds., GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 1917–1960, (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia,” 2000), 30–56.
7. Danylo Shumuk, Life Sentence: Memoirs of a Ukrainian Political Prisoner (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1984), 172. Shumuk was faced with the same questions on his entry into the camps. See ibid., 180.
8. Joseph Scholmer, Vorkuta (New York: Holt, 1955), 41.
9. Gustav Herling, A World Apart: The Journal of a Gulag Survivor (New York: Arbor House, 1951), 45.
10. For a fascinating discussion of this shift in 1936, after which “few retained their earlier confidence that class origins were a reliable clue to the soul,” see Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 254–62.
11. For one example, see the descriptions of prison life, especially the moral code of the political prisoners, in Isaac Steinberg, Spiridonova: Revolutionary Terrorist (London: Methuen, 1935). Steinberg, a Left Socialist-Revolutionary, was the people’s commissar of justice during the brief Bolshevik–Left Socialists Revolutionary coalition government of December 1917–March 1918.
12. Natalia Kuziakina, Theatre in the Solovki Prison Camp, trans. Boris M. Meerovich (Newark, NJ: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), 18.
13. Article 58 refers to the criminal code of the RSFSR. Other republics had analogous codes, although the number of the article enumerating counterrevolutionary crimes often differed.
14. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 1:60.
15. See Peter H. Solomon Jr., Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
16. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1:60.
17. Those historians who in recent years have gone to great lengths to disprove Solzhenitsyn’s assertion that the Gulag was overwhelmingly populated by political prisoners miss this point. See especially Gábor Tamás Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1991), 261–65; J. Arch Getty, Gábor Tamás Rittersporn, and Viktor N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” American Historical Review (October 1993): 1030–39. As I will show here, the question of who was a “political” prisoner in the Gulag is a complex one.
Moreover, an almost-implicit element of the argument over the proportion of the Gulag population comprised of political prisoners revolves around the level of moral culpability or evil inherent in the Gulag system. After all, every modern state has deemed it necessary to detain and punish a certain population that it has understood as criminal. While the exact definition of criminal behavior and the concomitant punishment for crimes varies from state to state, at the broadest level a shared notion of criminality can be found. Murder, rape, assault, and theft are among those crimes normally subject to sanction in the modern state. The incarceration of political prisoners is presented as a differentiating element in modern penal practice. Assertions about the prevalence of political prisoners in the Gulag are in large part reflective of this process. If the Gulag can be shown as housing primarily criminals, individuals who would be incarcerated in virtually every modern state, then the Soviet Union was not terribly abnormal. Its methods of incarceration essentially should be understood as one particular type of penal incarceration. If, on the other hand, the Gulag can be shown as composed almost entirely of political prisoners, where criminals are found mostly as an element in the regime’s repression of political prisoners, then the Soviet Union was an evil state more concerned with suppressing dissent, real or imagined, than with incarcerating the criminals who presented a much more real danger to society.
In fact, however, it is the coexistence of these two systems—one for detaining criminals, and one for detaining politicals—inside a single all-encompassing institution like the Gulag that really sets apart the Soviet system of detention. The question of relative weights of political and criminal prisoners is essentially unsolvable. As John Keep has demonstrated, “crimes” understood as merely criminal today were often redefined as political tomorrow. Even criminal offenses typically also encompassed actions that would be passed over or at least punished only minimally by most modern states. If the Gulag had been populated solely by criminals, though, as the term would have been understood in other modern states, the utilization of a concentration camp system as a state’s penal institution was a particularly Soviet phenomenon. John Keep, “Recent Writing on Stalin’s Gulag: An Overview,” Crime, Histoire, and Sociétés 1, no. 2 (1997): 91–112.
18. On the special regime camps, see chapter 5 herein.
19. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:67–70.
20. For other Gulag practices that either excluded or singled out counterrevolutionaries, always to their detriment, see chapter 2 herein.
21. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:255.
22. Ibid., 2:501.
23. Maksim Gorky, Leopol’d Auerbach, and Semen Firin, eds., Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea, trans. Amabel Williams-Ellis (New York: H. Smith and R. Haas, 1935), 329–30. This is one of a relatively small number of instances in which counterrevolutionary prisoners are still referred to as political by Soviet authorities.
24. GARF, f. 9414, op. 2, d. 108, l. 9.
25. Ibid., l. 10.
26. Ibid., ll. 9–11b.
27. When presenting the draft of the 1936 constitution for ratification, Stalin declared, “Our Soviet society has already, in the main, succeeded in achieving socialism.” J. V. Stalin, Joseph Stalin: Selected Writings (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1970), 386. That victory was embodied in Article 1 of the constitution of 1936 in its declaration of the Soviet Union as a state of two nonantagonistic classes: peasants and workers.
28. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:271. In 1937, just at Kolyma alone, over 12,500 were arrested and nearly 5,900 shot. Ibid., 1:360.
29. V. P. Popov, “Gosudarstvennyi terror v sovetskoi Rossii, 1923–1953 gg. (istochniki i ikh interpretatsiia),” Otechestvennye Arkhivy, no. 2 (1992): 28–29.
30. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 6 URO, d. 52, l. 56.
31. Jacques Rossi writes repeatedly of the replacement of the counterrevolutionary with the term anti-Soviet by the late 1930s. Jacques Rossi, The Gulag Handbook: An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Soviet Penitentiary Institutions and Terms Related to the Forced Labor Camps (New York: Paragon House, 1989). While he may be correct in some respects, the term counterrevolutionary continued to appear time and again in official Gulag documentation.
32. Articles 130 and 131. For an English translation of all Soviet constitutions through the Brezhnev era, see Aryeh L. Unger, Constitutional Development in the USSR: A Guide to the Soviet Constitutions (New York: Pica Press, 1982).
33. Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme totalitarnogo gosudarstva (Moscow: Moskovskii obshchestvennyi nauchnyi fond, 1997), 93–96.
34. Quoted in Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, 342. Also quoted in Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:93.
35. Quoted in Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, 71. Also quoted with a slightly different translation in Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:85–86.
36. Cited in Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, 145. This order naturally raises the question of gendered identities in the Gulag, as discussed below. Women became an especially important part of the Gulag population during the war years, when their share of the population rose from 7 percent in 1941 to 26 percent in 1944. See “Gulag v gody voiny: Doklad nachal’nika GULAGa NKVD SSSR V. G. Nasedkina, avgust 1944 g.,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 3 (1994): 64. Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor does devote an entire chapter to the subject; see “Women at Belomorstroy,” 150–55.
37. Cited in AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 3, d. 55, l. 3.
38. Quoted in Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, 53.
39. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 2 URO, d. 5, l. 18.
40. Quoted in Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:434–35.
41. Gustav Herling, A World Apart: The Journal of a Gulag Survivor (New York: Arbor House, 1951), 5.
42. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1:190.
43. Ibid., 1:226–27.
44. Ibid., 1:458–61.
45. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:438.
46. Ibid., 1:11, 503; 2:438, 442–43, 446.
47. Eugenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 12.
48. Militsa Cheslavovna Stefanskaia, Chernoe i beloe (Moscow: Suzdalev, 1994), 23–25, 27.
49. Vladimir Petrov, Escape from the Future: The Incredible Adventures of a Young Russian (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 98.
50. Janusz Bardach and Kathleen Gleeson, Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 183.
51. Margarete Buber, Under Two Dictators (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1949), 59–60.
52. Bardach and Gleeson, Man Is Wolf to Man, 94.
53. Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, 276.
54. Kuziakina, Theatre in the Solovki Prison Camp, 73.
55. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:311.
56. Stefanskaia, Chernoe i beloe, 31.
57. This is intriguing but unsurprising given his complaints precisely about these prisoners seeking to exclude all non-Communist Article 58 prisoners from their own understanding of politicals. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:319.
58. Buber, Under Two Dictators, 40.
59. Ibid., 40–41.
60. Quoted in Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, 116.
61. Ibid., 223.
62. Ibid., 237.
63. Although a huge literature now exists on the issue, key works are Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 414–52; Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).
64. See Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, 182. For more on national minorities at the Moscow-Volga Canal, see Applebaum, Gulag, 299.
65. Gorky, Auerbach, and Firin, Belomor, 63, 252.
66. See AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 3, d. 46, ll. 215–16; sv. 5, d. 87, l. 3; sv. 6, d. 99, ll. 23–24; sv. 3, d. 60, ll. 32–32b. See also the numerous articles in the camp newspaper, Putevka, during 1933–34, in ibid., sv. gazety, d. 3, 5; see also the microfilm collection in The GULAG Press, 1920–1937 (Leiden, Netherlands: IDC Publishers, 2000). Mixed into these two collections of newspapers are the few extant copies of the camp’s Kazakh-language newspaper.
67. See Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
68. For the explicit ties between the promulgation of the new constitution and a renewed focus on the category of nation, see the press coverage of the holiday celebration in July 1935 honoring the adoption of the Soviet constitution of 1923. The holiday, held shortly after the announcement in June 1935 of the commencement of drafting a new constitution, was organized around the theme of the “triumph” of the Leninist-Stalinist nationality policy, and all celebratory activities highlighted the participation of Soviet peoples from all nationalities. The quote here comes from a speech at the celebration given by politburo member and Ukrainian Vlas Chubar’. Pravda, July 6, 1935, 1.
69. The literature on the ethnicization of the Soviet enemy is voluminous. See, for example, Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 4 (1998): 813–61; Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Jeffrey Burds, “The Soviet War against ‘Fifth Columnists’: The Case of Chechnya, 1942–4,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 2 (2007): 267–314; Michael Gelb, “An Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation: The Far-Eastern Koreans,” Russian Review 54, no. 3 (July 1995): 389–412; “The Western Finnic Minorities and the Origins of the Stalinist Nationalities Deportations,” Nationalities Papers 24, no. 2 (1996): 237–68.
70. As Viola shows, this commitment, though real, often lacked substantial resources for its realization. Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
71. See Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 234.
72. Nikolai F. Bugai, ed., “Mobilizovat’ nemtsev v rabochie kolonny . . . I. Stalin” Sbornik dokumentov (1940-e gody) (Moscow: Gotika, 1998), 15.
73. See NKVD USSR order no. 00447, in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:268–75.
74. Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 207. For an intimate description of these deportations from the border regions of Ukraine, see Brown, A Biography of No Place, 134–52. See also Gelb, “The Western Finnic Minorities.”
75. Gelb, “An Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation.” In Gelb’s generally superb article, one searches in vain for evidence of Soviet racial thinking to support his claims that Soviet policy toward the Koreans was racist.
76. Ibid., 406–7.
77. Ibid., 401.
78. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 7, d. 117, l. 78.
79. Brown, A Biography of No Place, 173–91.
80. Brown writes, “The deportees had adopted Soviet assumptions about the nature of a community and the ignorant and primitive quality of Kazakh nomadic agriculture.” Ibid., 188.
81. Anne Applebaum discusses gender and sex extensively in one of her best chapters. See Applebaum, Gulag, 307–33.
82. Christopher Lawrence Zugger, The Forgotten: Catholics of the Soviet Empire from Lenin through Stalin (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 202.
83. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 5, d. 93, l. 2. See also ibid., sv. 9, d. 155, ll. 46–48. Petrov described this practice in Kolyma. See Petrov, Escape from the Future, 107–8.
84. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 14, d. 230, l. 19.
85. Ibid., sv. 6, d. 108, l. 73.
86. On venereal diseases, see ibid., sv. 9, d. 157, ll. 84, 108–9. On concentrating female prisoners, see ibid., sv. 13, d. 220, l. 23. Petrov also noted the prevalence of venereal disease. “The direct result of these conditions is that all women prisoners are victims of venereal diseases. They may contract them a little sooner, or a little later, but they can escape them never. When this happens they are isolated in special, strictly guarded camp quarters where they rot away almost without any medical care.” Petrov, Escape from the Future, 108.
87. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 9, d. 155, ll. 46–48.
88. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 4:197–99.
89. Petrov, Escape from the Future, 107.
90. Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, 331, 347.
91. Stefanskaia, Chernoe i beloe, 32.
92. Ibid., 33.
93. NIPTs, f. 2, op. 3, d. 60, memoir of Galina Aleksandrovna Semenova, str. 155.
94. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 364–65.
95. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 4:189. Of course, it is entirely possible that they made no such agreement, and that Bondar’ simply murdered Medvedeva before turning the gun on himself.
96. NIPTs, f. 2, op. 3, d. 60, memoir of Galina Aleksandrovna Semenova, str. 156.
97. The key scholarly works are Anfisa R. Kukushkina, Akmolinskii lager’ zhen ‘izmennikov rodiny’: Istoriia i sud’by (Karaganda: Kazakhstanskii finansovo–ekonomicheskii universitet, 2002); Vladimir M. Grinev and Aleksandr Iu. Daniel’, Uznitsy ‘ALZhIRa’: spisok zhenshchin-zakliuchennykh Akmolinskogo i drugikh otdelenii Karlaga (Moscow: Zven’ia, 2003); Galina Stepanova Kliuchnikova, Kazakhstanskii Alzhir (Malinovka, Kazakhstan: Assotsiatsiia zhertv nezakonnykh repressii, 2003). Figes also writes of Alzhir. Figes, The Whisperers, especially 356–69.
98. See NIPTs, f. 2, op. 3, d. 60, memoir of Galina Aleksandrovna Semenova, str. 4, 158. She was herself arrested when she had a nursing child, and also knew many who were pregnant when arrested. Figes relates a tale of an Alzhir prisoner with a nursing infant too. See Figes, The Whisperers, 316–18.
99. The order is cited in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:277–81. It remained in force for just over a year—from August 1937 until October 1938—when it was decided that wives should only be arrested if they participated in their husbands’ activities or independently had anti-Soviet feelings. See the order from October 1938 in ibid., 287–88.
100. See Figes, The Whisperers, 316–20.
101. NIPTs, f. 2, op. 3, d. 60, memoir of Galina Aleksandrovna Semenova, str. 5.
102. Ibid., str. 51, 149.
103. Ibid., str. 5–8, 14–15.
104. Ibid., str. 6–7, 12.
105. Ibid., str. 10.
106. The order closing these special divisions is cited in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 2:157. Figes is mistaken in continuing to write about Alzhir after this point, as it no longer officially existed. See Figes, The Whisperers, 357–58.
107. Bardach and Gleeson, Man Is Wolf to Man, 125.
108. The key work is the epilogue in Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
CHAPTER 4: ARMAGEDDON AND THE GULAG
1. Portions of this chapter previously appeared in Steven A. Barnes, “All for the Front, All for Victory! The Mobilization of Forced Labor in the Soviet Union during World War Two,” International Labor and Working Class History 58 (Fall 2000): 239–60.
2. Quoted in I. V. Kashkina, “‘Ia khochu znat’ prichinu moego aresta . . . ’: Pis’mo V. N. Pilishchuka—byvshego zakliuchennogo Karlaga,” in Golosa Istorii, ed. Isaak S. Rozental’, vypusk 23, kniga 2 (Moscow: Tsentral’nyi muzei revoliutsii, 1992), 172–78. My thanks to Jan Plamper for pointing me to this source.
3. Quoted in ibid., 177.
4. The regulations of 1939 and the decrees in June 1939 on the elimination of conditional early release have been published in Aleksandr Kokurin and Nikolai Petrov, eds., GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 1917–1960 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia,” 2000), 116–17, 456–73. See also Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii (Russian State Archive of Contemporary History; hereafter RGANI), f. 89, per. 73, dok. 3, ll. 1–2.
5. Applebaum is incorrect to assert that “by the end of [the 1930s], the Soviet concentration camp[s] had attained what was to be their permanent form.” Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 114. As this and later chapters will show, the Gulag in general and the structures of the Soviet system were far from complete by the end of the 1930s. Significant shifts in practices, institutions, and identities were still to come.
6. I will use this Soviet term Westerners for ease and convenience to refer to the nationalists from those territories annexed by the Soviet Union after 1939.
7. See Yehoshua Gilboa, Confess! Confess! Eight Years in Soviet Prisons (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 220.
8. Ibid., 90–91, 174.
9. Shumuk certainly fell into this category. A member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and a veteran of Polish prisons and German POW camps, Shumuk personally exerted a strong influence on Gulag life, taking a leading role in one of the post-Stalin camp uprisings. Danylo Shumuk, Life Sentence: Memoirs of a Ukrainian Political Prisoner (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1984), especially x, 17–28 (on political prisoners in Poland).
10. Gilboa, Confess! 41–42.
11. See ibid., 31, 220. See also the entries for zapadniki and zakhidniki in Jacques Rossi, The Gulag Handbook: An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Soviet Penitentiary Institutions and Terms Related to the Forced Labor Camps (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 129–30, 132.
12. These numbers have been revised down from previous estimates of as many as 1 million deportees and 440,000 arrested. See Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, exp. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), xiv. See also Oleg A. Gorlanov and Arsenii B. Roginskii, “Ob arestakh v zapadnykh oblastiakh Belorussii i Ukraini v 1939–1941 gg.,” in Repressii protiv poliakov i pol’skikh grazhdan, ed. Aleksandr E. Gur’ianov (Moscow: Zven’ia, 1997), 77, 82–84, 86; John Keep, “Recent Writing on Stalin’s Gulag: An Overview,” Crime, Histoire, and Sociétés 1, no. 2 (1997): 91–112. Many of the decrees and reports on the Westerners’ exile and arrests are cited in Iurii Nikolaevich Afanas’ev, et al., eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga: Konets 1920-kh–pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov: Sobranie dokumentov v semi tomakh (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004), 1:389–407. The classic account of national and gender identity among deported Polish women is Katherine R. Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002).
13. “Gulag v gody voiny: Doklad nachal’nika GULAGa NKVD SSSR V. G. Nasedkina, avgust 1944 g.,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 3 (1994): 65.
14. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:475–476. None were destined for the Karaganda region.
15. J. Otto Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System: A Statistical History of Soviet Repression and Terror, 1930–1953 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1997), 70.
16. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 21, d. 331, l. 19.
17. Edwin Bacon, The Gulag at War: Stalin’s Forced Labour System in the Light of the Archives (London: Macmillan, 1994), 104.
18. Gilboa, Confess! 111–22.
19. Jerzy Kmiecik, A Boy in the Gulag (London: Quartet Books, 1983).
20. See, among others, Gilboa, Confess! 65.
21. Quoted in AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, arkhivnoe sledstvennoe delo 3663, l. 11.
22. Ibid., l. 9. For photographs of the prisoners, see ibid., l. 21. The photograph of Selivanov appears coerced. He is looking down, the image is blurry, and his hands are crossed, as if they may have been tied. All of this is in contrast to the photographs of the other prisoners involved in the case. Selivanov’s refusal to cooperate with the photographer is confirmed in ibid., ll. 243–46.
23. Ibid., ll. 22b, 23b.
24. “Gulag v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny,” Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 1 (1991): 23. The results of carrying this directive out are discussed in the document cited in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:428–30.
25. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, arkhivnoe sledstvennoe delo 3663, l. 22b.
26. Kmiecik, A Boy in the Gulag, 146–47.
27. All the figures are in Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 416–20. Pohl has slightly different total population figures. See Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 11.
28. Viktor N. Zemskov, “Zakliuchennye, Spetsposelentsy, Ssyl’noposelentsy, Ssyl’nye i Vyslannye: Statistiko-geograficheskii aspekt,” Istoriia SSSR, no. 5 (1991): 152–53; Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 46; Viktor N. Zemskov, “Sud’ba ‘Kulatskoi Ssylki’: 1930–1954 gg.,” Otechestvennaia Istoriia, no. 1 (1994): 124–25.
29. These figures are from the 1944 report of the chief of the Gulag administration. “Gulag v gody voiny,” 64. The numbers offered by Zemskov differ. He claims a total of 1,929,729 in the camps and colonies on January 1, 1941, and a total of 1,179,819 on January 1, 1944. Zemskov, “Zakliuchennye, Spetsposelentsy,” 152. See also Bacon, The Gulag at War, 83.
30. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 328, l. 18.
31. The figures are in, respectively, AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 2 spetsotdel, d. 14, ll. 16–18; GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1160, ll. 6, 11, 16, 46; AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 3 spetsotdel, d. 36, ll. 81–82. The population would jump again in April 1943 with the merger of Dzhezkazganlag with Karlag, but this February 1943 population represented the growth of Karlag merely through additional prisoner arrivals in the intervening period.
32. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 328, l. 9; “Gulag v gody voiny,” 64. NKVD officials met with considerably less success in their attempts to evacuate exiled peoples from areas near the front, although they made efforts to do so, focusing especially on the evacuation of men of fighting age. See Viktor N. Zemskov, “‘Kulatskaia ssylka’ nakanune i v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, no. 2 (1992): 16.
33. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 42, ll. 60–62. In his 1944 report, Nasedkin mentioned that some prisoners had been evacuated over a thousand kilometers on foot. “Gulag v gody voiny,” 64. Many industrial workers were also evacuated on foot. See Richard Overy, Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet War Effort: 1941–1945 (New York: Penguin, 1998), 170–71.
34. Janusz Bardach and Kathleen Gleeson, Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 98.
35. Ibid., 102–3.
36. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 42, ll. 60–62.
37. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 3 spetsotdel, d. 24, l. 217.
38. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 328, l. 8. Instructions for carrying out these orders are cited in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:424–28. Somehow Figes misses this mass release, stating that the postwar amnesty in 1945 was the “first mass release of prisoners.” See Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 449. Figes also generally neglects the constant release of significant portions of the Gulag’s prisoners during every year of its existence in his otherwise-excellent study.
39. Diusetai Aimagambetovich Shaimukhanov and Saule Diusetaevna Shaimukhanova, Karlag (Karaganda: Poligrafiia, 1997), 41.
40. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 330, l. 61; “Gulag v gody voiny,” 65.
41. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1146, l. 33.
42. Zemskov, “Sud’ba,” 131–33; “Kulatskaia ssylka,” 20. The entirety of this drop in exiled kulaks cannot be explained by releases into the Red Army and the affiliated familial releases, but it does account for a high proportion.
43. The disaster was not in the food supply alone. Mark Harrison estimates that the real national income of the Soviet Union fell by more than 40 percent between 1940 and 1942, with between 66 and 75 percent of the national economic resources devoted to the military. Mark Harrison, “Resource Mobilization for World War II: The U.S.A., U.K., U.S.S.R., and Germany, 1938–1945,” Economic History Review 41 (1988): 185.
44. Numerous memoirists testify to the reduction of food norms during the war. See I. V. Kashkinoi, “Pis’mo V. N. Pilishchuka,” 176. Pilishchuk attributes his own survival to the 240 rubles accumulated in his prisoner account during his first several years in camps. See also Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, “My Journey,” in Till My Tale Is Told: Women’s Memoirs of the Gulag, ed. Simeon Vilensky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 57; Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 2:132. Official evidence of the reduction in food norms starting in June 1941 can be found in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 4:355–57.
45. “Gulag v gody voiny,” 69.
46. Quoted in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 4:376–77.
47. Kashkinoi, “Pis’mo V. N. Pilishchuka,” 176. Karlag’s order 0037, dated June 23, 1941, based on NKVD order 221, dated June 22, 1941, prohibited all visitation and correspondence for all inmates. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 6 s. s. pr., d. 153, ll. 126–27.
48. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 328, l. 82. These figures come from background materials used by the Gulag chief in preparing his report of 1944. In his report, he does not offer the details of camp mortality.
49. See Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 441–42.
50. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 24, d. 387, ll. 76–80. For the monthly percentages of the camp population and death rates, see Sergei Kruglov’s letter of April 24, 1943 to Zhuravlev, in ibid., ll. 121–21b. For the overall death rate for the year, for the entire Gulag and Kolyma, see Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 4:55, 512.
51. NIPTs, f. 2, op. 3, d. 60, memoir of Galina Aleksandrovna Semenova, str. 11.
52. From April 1940 through April 1943, this camp division had been an independent camp known as Dzhezkazganlag, with a prisoner population varying between 6,000 and 14,000. Mikhail Borisovich Smirnov, Sistema ispravitel’notrudovykh lagerei v SSSR 1923–1960: Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ia, 1998), 211–12. In the postwar period, the division was removed from Karlag and became part of a new special camp called Steplag. On the June 1943 mortality rate, see AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 3 spetsotdel, d. 36, l. 128.
53. NIPTs, f. 2, op. 3, d. 60, memoir of Galina Aleksandrovna Semenova, str. 30.
54. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 24, d. 3897, ll. 76–80.
55. Gilboa, Confess! 64.
56. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 3 spetsotdel, d. 24, l. 291.
57. Kamenlag, officially known either as Kamenskii or Novo-Kamenskii corrective labor camp, existed from April 1942 through June 1944 in the Saratov region. It should not be confused with a separate Kamenlag located in the Novosibirsk region from 1953 to 1955. Smirnov, Sistema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei, 280–81.
58. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 24, d. 387, ll. 76–80.
59. The sanotdel was responsible for the treatment of ill prisoners and prophylactic measures to prevent illness.
60. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 24, d. 387, l. 27.
61. Ibid., l. 26.
62. It is also not apparent on whose order Drevits went to Moscow. Zhuravlev does not seem to have been surprised that he was there, but he was certainly unhappy about the aftermath.
63. Ibid., ll. 19–19b. One cannot determine from the archival materials whether Nasedkin actually approved this transfer, but Drevits’s veracity can be called into question. He concludes that Nasedkin had given a positive review to his work as head of Karlag’s sanotdel. Yet considering the following condemnation by Kruglov and Nasedkin of the conditions at Karlag, such a positive review would seem unlikely. There is still the possibility, however, that Nasedkin agreed to provide such a positive review and transfer in exchange for blunt, detailed information on Karlag’s conditions.
64. Quoted in ibid., ll. 6–6b.
65. Quoted in ibid., l. 4.
66. Ibid., ll. 4–6b.
67. Ibid., ll. 4–6b.
68. NIPTs, f. 2, op. 3, d. 60, memoir of Galina Semenova, str. 109.
69. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 24, d. 387, ll. 13–15.
70. Ibid., l. 23.
71. Ibid., ll. 25–25b.
72. Istoshchenie is literally translated as “emaciation” or “exhaustion.” In the world of the Gulag, it was the term most frequently used when a prisoner had been worked and starved to death.
73. Ibid., ll. 126–28b.
74. Pellagra is a disease caused by a deficiency of niacin and protein in the diet, and is characterized by skin eruptions, digestive and nervous system disturbances, and eventual mental deterioration. It was common in the Gulag, and in the present case would lay the blame for dysentery not on the work of the sanotdel but rather on food provision in the camp.
75. See, for example, Alexander Dolgun with Patrick Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story: An American in the Gulag (New York: Knopf, 1975), 178–84, 205–6, 237–51.
76. Bardach and Gleeson, Man Is Wolf to Man.
77. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 24, d. 387, ll. 126–128b.
78. Ibid., sv. 10 URO, d. 86, l. 160. Thus, Applebaum is incorrect when stating that mass burials were “technically forbidden.” Applebaum, Gulag, 342. They may have been forbidden in certain periods, but not for the entirety of Gulag history.
79. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 4:534–35.
80. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 24, d. 387, ll. 121–21b.
81. Ibid., d. 452, l. 3.
82. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 328, l. 8; “Gulag v gody voiny,” 62–67.
83. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 328, l. 3; “Gulag v gody voiny,” 62, 72.
84. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 2 spetsotdel, d. 14, ll. 16–18; GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1160, ll. 6, 11, 16, 46.
85. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 45, l. 542.
86. John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London: Longman, 1991), 144–45.
87. Viktor N. Zemskov, “Spetsposelentsy (po dokumentatsii NKVD-MVD SSSR),” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, no. 11 (1990): 8; “Gulag v gody voiny,” 71; GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 328, l. 2; “Spetspereselentsy v SSSR v 1944 godu ili god bol’shogo pereseleniia,” Otechestvennye arkhivy, no. 5 (1993): 99.
88. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 328, l. 22. As early as September 1939, the NKVD created an administration to organize the detention and labor utilization of POWs. Its first prisoners were Polish soldiers captured in fall 1939, but the numbers became significant only in 1943, when the Soviet advance to the west started in earnest. On May 11, 1945, the Soviet Union held just under 2.1 million POWs. Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme totalitarnogo gosudarstva (Moscow: Moskovskii obshchestvennyi nauchnyi fond, 1997), 56; “‘Voennoplennye oznakomilis’s metodami sotsialisticheskogo stroitel’stva,’ Dokladnaia zapiska MVD SSSR,” Istochnik, no. 1 (1999): 83–88.
89. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 6, s. s. pr., d. 153, ll. 141–42.
90. “Mirovaia praktika. Protokol,” Kommersant, September 10, 2003, 9.
91. The NKVD instructions from December 28, 1941 on the foundation and operation of such camps are in RGANI, f. 89, per. 40, dok. 1, ll. 1–5.
92. Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme, 52–53.
93. In 1943 and 1944, the State Committee of Defense forbade prisoners working in the defense industry from leaving their place of work on the completion of their sentence until the end of the war, but the damaging losses of prisoner laborers had already taken place. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 38, l. 23. Similar laws had been applied to portions of the civilian working population since 1940.
94. “Bol’sheviki Karagandy v bor’be za ugol’,” Pravda, July 24, 1943, 1.
95. On the labor laws of 1940, see Peter J. Solomon Jr., Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 299–336. Popov describes the arrests under these laws as the third of three major peaks in Soviet criminal prosecutions. See V. P. Popov, “Gosudarstvennyi terror v sovetskoi Rossii, 1923–1953 gg. (istochniki i ikh interpretatsiia),” Otechestvennye Arkhivy, no. 2 (1992): 24.
96. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:545–47, 551–52.
97. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 8 pr., d. 19, l. 151.
98. Ibid., l. 252.
99. Ibid., sv. 19, d. 288, l. 47. During the same period, another 428 prisoners were given additional sentences—243 for escape, 80 for counterrevolutionary offenses, and 60 for banditism, robbery, and hooliganism. The cases discussed above accounted for four of the nine executions in Karlag during this time frame.
100. Cited in ibid., sv. 8 pr., d. 19, ll. 203–3b.
101. Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme, 172, 185–86.
102. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 20, d. 296, l. 27.
103. Barber and Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 61; Overy, Russia’s War, 80.
104. “Gulag v gody voiny,” 65, 68. The provision of no less than eight hours of sleep for prisoners each day was adopted on March 10, 1942. See Karlag’s order implementing the policy in AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 6 s. s. pr., d. 154, l. 76.
105. Some industries were given the right to force the transfer of their civilian workforce. See Barber and Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 60–61.
106. “Gulag v gody voiny,” 65.
107. Ibid., 66–67; GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 328, ll. 21–26.
108. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 328, ll. 17, 26.
109. “Gulag v gody voiny,” 79–81, 83.
110. Exiled special settlers typically worked in industries outside of the NKVD. Only 4.34 percent worked in NKVD industries on October 1, 1941, although the NKVD derived income from a 5 percent garnishment of the special settlers’ salaries. Viktor N. Zemskov, “Kulatskaia ssylka,” 16.
111. “Gulag v gody voiny,” 85. The ruble was not a convertible currency. No meaningful translation into dollar amounts can be made. Rather, as follows, I will attempt to draw some comparisons between the size of the Gulag economy and the Soviet economy as a whole.
112. Based on figures for Gulag prisoners employed in NKVD industries, Gulag prisoners subcontracted out, and the total working population in Mark Harrison, Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 98, 269. These numbers exclude special settlers and POWs, whose labor did not figure into Nasedkin’s account. From 1940 to 1945, the percentages run 2.3, 3.3, 3.9, 2.9, 2.4, and 2.5, respectively. Even as the total Gulag labor force contracted, its portion of the total working population remained relatively constant due to the simultaneous contraction of the civilian labor force.
113. As Harrison’s lengthy study attests, calculating Soviet economic output is an extremely complex subject. Without question, my presentation here greatly simplifies the matter. The figures nonetheless at least provide some sense of the Gulag’s economic production in comparison to the total Soviet economy, and most likely err on the side of showing the Gulag as more productive than it really was, since two groups of Gulag laborers—the small portion of special settlers working in Gulag industries and undetained forced laborers—are included in the totals for economic production but not in the total labor force. Furthermore, the figures take no account of the tremendous number of Gulag staffers needed merely to operate Gulag industries.
114. Merely the secrecy involved in operating the Gulag bureaucracy was a tremendous expense. In 1940 alone, the NKVD circulated over twenty-five million secret packets of correspondence, each requiring special handling. And by 1948, Gulag administrative costs topped 11.5 billion rubles per year. Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme, 96, 113–14.
115. Ibid., 102, 115.
116. As a decorated Stakhanovite miner declared at the first Karaganda oblast’ party conference in 1937, “Comrade Stalin in his speech at the Central Committee plenum correctly stated that ‘wreckers do not always try to wreck, but sometimes they try to fulfill plans and prove themselves. . . . ’ Every wrecker tries to prove himself and under the flag of a party card will wreck us.” Fulfilling plans alone was never sufficient proof of one’s innocence or honesty. Even though this meeting occurred during the worst period of the terror, the statement is true to the ethos throughout the Stalin period. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 21, d. 1612, l. 6.
117. Cited in GARF, f. 9414, op. 3, d. 14, l. 173.
118. Bacon, The Gulag at War, 160.
119. Cited in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1442, l. 29.
120. Cited in ibid.
121. Ibid., d. 39, ll. 68–71. For a French translation, see Nicolas Werth and Gael Moullec, eds., Rapports Secrets Sovietiques: La Societe Russe Dans Les Documents Confidentiels, 1921–1991 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 380–81. For other examples of problems blamed on poor political work, see GARF, f. 9414, op. 3, d. 14, l. 174; f. 9414, op. 3, d. 22, l. 30. The archives are filled with many other similar instances. For just one example of this attitude outside the Gulag in which successful coal mining was credited to proper political work by Communists, see “Bol’sheviki Karagandy v bor’be za ugol’,” 1.
122. GARF, f. 9414, op. 3, d. 14, l. 173.
123. Ibid., op. 1, d. 1441, ll. 236–37.
124. Ibid., op. 3, d. 14, ll. 118–34; Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme, 173.
125. “Gulag v gody voiny,” 72.
126. Cited in “Voennoplennye oznakomilis’,” 83–88. Political education aimed at POWs was by no means a Soviet monopoly during World War II. See the episode of the British television documentary film series Timewatch, Series 1 titled The Germans We Kept, in which former German POWs describe the complex categorization of these POWs according to their political attitudes and attempts to denazify them. Of course, the conditions in POW camps in the different combatant countries varied greatly.
127. Barber and Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 68.
128. Eugenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 27. Certainly, in referring to “four years of suffering,” Ginzburg is implicitly excluding all those arrested in the years other than the Great Terror.
129. Figes, The Whisperers, 447.
130. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:121.
131. Ibid., 2:134–35.
132. GARF, f. 9414, op. 4, d. 145, l. 2b.
133. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 26, d. 421, l. 16.
134. Cited in GARF, f. 9414, op. 4, d. 145, l. 3.
135. Compare the comments of one Vladivostoklag division head in November 1941 on the “poor” work of the cultural-educational sections, which “do not know the moods of the prisoners.” Quoted in ibid., op. 3, d. 14, l. 186. Interestingly, knowing the political mood of the prisoners was also the job of the camp surveillance system. See the discussion of the surveillance system to follow.
136. The similarities between Loginov’s anecdotes and those in Belomor are striking.
137. Quoted in ibid., op. 4, d. 145, l. 3. His stories also expose yet again the capriciousness of the Soviet political system. Consider, for example, Ekaterina Sh., whose husband was shot in 1937 as a “double-dyed spy.” After her husband’s execution, Ekaterina was arrested for “loss of vigilance of a Soviet wife.” It seems that if she had exhibited enough “vigilance,” she would have realized that her husband was a spy. Ibid., l. 4b.
138. Quoted in ibid., l. 5, l. 7.
139. Quoted in ibid., l. 10b, l. 11, l. 12.
140. Barber and Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 69–70, 160–61, 174–76.
141. See, for example, ibid., 30, 68–72; Overy, Russia’s War, 161–63.
142. Quoted in GARF, f. 9414, op. 4, d. 145, ll. 11–12b.
143. Quoted in ibid., l. 3.
144. On the postwar disappearance of particular Jewish suffering and heroism into the universal story of Soviet suffering and heroism, see Amir Weiner, “Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism,” American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (1999): 1114–55.
145. Overy, Russia’s War, xxi. In the main text, however, Overy himself also subscribes at times to the notion that revolution and socialism disappeared from official propaganda. His book is after all titled Russia’s War. At other times, he recognizes the continued significance of defending the Soviet Union as a force of “socialist progress.” Compare ibid., 114–15 with ibid., 153.
146. GARF, f. 9414, op. 4, d. 145, ll. 11–12b. Of course, we do not know if Gol’dshtein’s story is true.
147. Here from a report written on January 5, 1943, by the head of the central Gulag Cultural-Educational Department to several local camp Cultural-Educational Departments. Ibid., op. 1, d. 1449, l. 5.
148. Ibid., d. 325, l. 52.
149. Cited in ibid., d. 1449, l. 5.
150. Cited in ibid.
151. See the roundtable discussion in “Gulag v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny,” 22. Although no documents are referenced directly in the discussion, most of the facts mentioned by the participants are verifiable in sources to which I have had access (one exception is Gulag mortality statistics for the war years well below those that I have uncovered; see ibid., 23). I am unfamiliar with any source confirming this claim of a decrease in the number of labor refusers.
152. “Gulag v gody voiny,” 65.
153. Shaimukhanov and Shaimukhanova, Karlag, 42–44. At least two of these twenty-one former Karlag prisoners had been sentenced under Article 58. The first had been released because his conviction was overturned, and the second was sent to the front on the basis of a granted petition sent to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.
154. Suprisingly, then, I found no reference to Breusov in any Karlag document throughout my research—this despite Karlag’s documented success at self-promotion, whether through the many photo albums sent to central Gulag, or the camp officials’ own “history” written and submitted to central authorities in 1934.
155. Strictly in terms of commitment to labor, the Gulag successfully engaged both prisoners loyal to and devout enemies of the Soviet state order. For the former, as discussed in the introduction to this chapter, see Kashkinoi, “Pis’mo V. N. Pilishchuka,” 170–85. For an avowed enemy of the Soviet state drawn to labor effectively anyway, see Dmitri Panin, The Notebooks of Sologdin (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).
156. Contrary to Barber and Harrison’s assertion that “prewar themes of internal division and ‘intensified’ class struggle against the enemy within gave way to national [Russian] unification in order to drive out the foreign invader,” the battle with the enemy within took on new elements but never ceased. Barber and Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 30, 39–41. On one manifestation of that battle with the enemy, see the discussion of wartime deportations below.
157. Ibid., 29–30.
158. The description of the uprising comes in a letter written by Beria on January 27, 1942. At that time, the battle against the uprising continued with nearly one hundred prisoners still on the loose. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 45, ll. 102–5.
159. These figures are in Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme, 54, which relies on an article in Nezavisimaia gazeta, January 23, 1992. The incident is also discussed in Applebaum, Gulag, 404–8.
160. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 45, ll. 102–5.
161. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 6, s. s. pr., d. 154, ll. 18–18b.
162. Here, the head of the politotdel of Vladivostoklag quotes Stalin’s speech to a meeting of the Party activists on November 24, 1941. Quoted in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 14, l. 158. As Popov noted, it was precisely this call for struggle with the enemies of the rear that led to a wartime surge in the arrests of counterrevolutionary criminals by secret police organizations. Popov, “Gosudarstvennyi terror v sovetskoi Rossii,” 29.
163. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 41, l. 14. Specialists among the prisoners were also among the first evacuated.
164. Considering the history of political executions in the 1920s and 1930s, it is surprising that she and these other prisoners were still alive by 1941. “Tragediia v medvedevskom lesu: o rasstrele politzakliuchennykh Orlovskoi tiur’my,” Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 11, (1990): 124–31. On general orders for shooting prisoners in the face of the Nazi advance, see Bacon, The Gulag at War, 89, which equates the policy with the Soviet destruction of industrial equipment to avoid its falling into enemy hands. According to Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, approximately 10,800 prisoners were shot throughout the camps during the first three years of the war. J. Arch Getty, Gábor Tamás Rittersporn, and Viktor N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” American Historical Review (October 1993): 1041.
165. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 328, ll. 6, 48. For a local camp experience with the “concentration” of these categories of prisoners into “special zones” under strengthened guard, see ibid., op. 3, d. 14, ll. 136–49. On calls for additional vigilance among Gulag workers, see ibid., ll. 163–68. Solzhenitsyn also wrote of the isolation of Article 58 prisoners from other prisoners and the halt placed on the release of Article 58 prisoners. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:131.
166. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 6, s. s. pr., d. 153, ll. 126–27, 136–39.
167. Ibid., d. 154, l. 78.
168. Ibid., d. 153, l. 129.
169. Ibid., sv. 14, d. 229, l. 45.
170. Ibid., sv. 20, d. 296, l. 40.
171. Ibid., sv. 6 s. s. pr., d. 154, l. 3.
172. Cited in “Gulag v gody voiny,” 74.
173. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 19, d. 288, l. 163.
174. GARF, f. 9401, op. 1a, d. 135, ll. 121–21b. Karlag chief Zhuravlev informed the Gulag of the escape’s liquidation and the recovery of all weapons in a letter on June 12, 1943. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 24, d. 387, l. 141.
175. “Gulag v gody voiny,” 74.
176. Zemskov, “Kulatskaia ssylka,” 22.
177. “Gulag v gody voiny,” 74–75; GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 328, l. 11. Only when discussion of the surveillance system appeared in general documents like these, which were kept outside the collection of the operchekotdel, do we find this information in a declassified form.
178. “Gulag v gody voiny,” 75–76.
179. Werth and Moullec, Rapports Secrets Sovietiques, 384–85.
180. Ivanova opines that these “organizations” existed “only on paper,” since Gulag workers in their meetings never spoke of organizations, but only of individual or group escapes. Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme, 55.
181. Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 16.
182. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 24, d. 387, ll. 141–44. The number of especially dangerous prisoners, according to Zhuravlev, had risen by more than six thousand, approaching a total of sixteen thousand at Karlag.
183. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 2:210–11.
184. Ibid., 2:227–33.
185. Ibid., 2:233–38.
186. From the Gulag chief’s report in 1945 on the operation of katorga divisions during the war. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 76, l. 4.
187. Ibid., d. 1146, l. 28b; Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme, 53.
188. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 76, ll. 2–4b, 56–58; f. 9414, op. 1, d. 328, l. 5; Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 2:220–21.
189. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:8.
190. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1146, l. 28b. By September 1947, the katorga population did reach sixty thousand. Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme, 53.
191. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:9–10.
192. The “Short Historical Note on Katorga” is in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 76, ll. 24–36.
193. Cited in ibid., ll. 1–4.
194. Ibid., ll. 24–26.
195. Ibid., ll. 1–4.
196. Cited in ibid., l. 34.
197. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 2:220–21.
198. Ibid., 2:372–73.
199. “Gulag v gody voiny,” 64.
200. The 1945 figure is in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 76, l. 11; the 1947 number is in Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme, 53. Karlag continued to house an especially small number of katorga prisoners—only 172 on September 1, 1945.
201. “Spetspereselentsy v SSSR v 1944 godu,” 109.
202. Bardach and Gleeson, Man Is Wolf to Man, 62.
203. Gorlanov and Roginskii have shown convincingly that NKVD arrests in the newly annexed territories were related more to the arrestee’s social and political past than to their nationality. Furthermore, a large portion of the arrests were for illegal border crossings, a “crime” that was quite frequent as families tried to reunite across the new borders, Jews attempted to flee Nazi rule, and others attempted to control under which political regime they would live. Oleg A. Gorlanov and Arsenii B. Roginskii, “Ob arestakh v zapadnykh oblastiakh Belorussii i Ukraini v 1939–1941 gg.,” in Repessii protiv poliakov i pol’skikh grazhdan, ed. Aleksandr E. Gur’ianov (Moscow, Zven’ia 1997), 88–89, 91. For a similar evaluation of the motivations of deportations, see Aleksandr E. Gur’ianov, “Pol’skie spetspereselentsy v SSSR v 1940–1941 gg.,” in Repessii protiv poliakov i pol’skikh grazhdan, ed. Aleksandr E. Gur’ianov (Moscow: Zven’ia, 1997), 114–36.
204. See Viktor N. Zemskov, “Prinuditel’nye migratsii iz Pribaltiki v 1940–1950-kh godakh,” Otechestvennye arkhivy, no. 1 (1993): 13.
205. Ingeborg Fleischhauer asserts that the deportations of the Soviet Germans were likely planned before the Nazi invasion ever took place. They were delayed, he argues, mainly due to economic needs in the European part of the Soviet Union prior to the evacuation of these areas. Ingeborg Fleischhauer, “‘Operation Barbarossa’ and the Deportation,” in The Soviet Germans: Past and Present, ed. Ingeborg Fleischhauer and Benjamin Pinkus (London: Hurst, 1986), 70. He may be right, especially considering that some Soviet Germans were evacuated from the Crimea and other areas close to the front prior to the mass deportation orders.
206. Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, 28. Alas, this was one of the few instances in which being Jewish provided an improvement in status in the Gulag.
207. NIPTs, f. 2, op. 3, d. 60, memoir of Galina Aleksandrovna Semenova, str. 63.
208. Edward Buca, Vorkuta (London: Constable, 1976), 6. One must be careful not to ascribe essential characteristics to national groupings in the Gulag, even if memoirists did so. Applebaum, in one of the least satisfying discussions in her book, falls prey to this easy lumping of Soviet and non-Soviet Chinese in the camps into a single group without even asking the question of whether a Soviet citizen of Chinese descent had more in common with their fellow Soviet citizens than with citizens of China arrested for “accidentally . . . walk[ing] over the very long Chinese-Soviet border.” Applebaum, Gulag, 300. Was Soviet power such a nonfactor that the Soviet Chinese were no more equipped to deal with Gulag labor, food, and people than Chinese Chinese?
209. Joseph Scholmer, Vorkuta (New York: Holt, 1955), 103.
210. Lev Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1977), 5.
211. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 77, l. 145. The provisions also applied to all those from the Baltics and Bessarabia who had been convicted of counterrevolutionary offenses, along with all participants in nationalist organizations.
212. Pohl notes the important difference from the later deportations of the Chechens, Ingush, and others. The Germans were accused of harboring potential spies, while the Chechens and others were accused of actual acts of espionage, sabotage, and collaboration. Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 74–75.
213. The text of the decree has been published in numerous places. See, for example, an English translation of a German copy of the text in Fred C. Koch, The Volga Germans: In Russia and the Americas, from 1763 to the Present (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1977), 284; see also the original Russian from the August 30, 1941, edition of Bol’shevik in Vladimir A. Auman and Valentina G. Chebotareva, eds., Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh (1763–1992 gg.) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi institut gumanitarnykh programm, 1993), 159–60. Beria’s implementation order from the following day, August 27, 1941, is in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:455–57.
214. For some of these decrees, see Auman and Chebotareva, Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh, 160–68.
215. Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 76.
216. Zemskov, “Spetsposelentsy (po dokumentatsii); Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 78; Kaidar S. Aldazhumanov, “Deportatsiia narodov—prestuplenie totalitarnogo rezhima,” in Deportatsiia narodov i problema prav cheloveka: Materialy seminara, Almaty 12 iiunia 1997 goda, ed. Igor’ Trutanov, Vladislav Nabokov, and Iurii Romanov (Almaty, Kazakhstan: Istorichesko-prosvetitel’skoe obshchestvo “Adilet,” 1998): 13.
217. Aldazhumanov, “Deportatsiia narodov—prestuplenie totalitarnogo rezhima,” 13.
218. T. B. Mitropol’skaia and I. N. Bukhanova, eds., Iz istorii nemtsev Kazakhstana, 1921–1975 gg.: Sbornik dokumentov (Almaty, Kazakhstan: Gotika, 1997), 135.
219. For the decree laying out the details of resettling Volga Germans, see Nikolai F. Bugai, ed., “Mobilizovat’ nemtsev v rabochie kolonny . . . I. Stalin” Sbornik dokumentov (1940-e gody) (Moscow: Gotika, 1998), 19–22. For the decree laying out the details for resettling Germans from the Moscow region, see Auman and Chebotareva, Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh, 161–62. In many cases, city residents were also resettled in kolkhozy and sovkhozy; see Mitropol’skaia and Bukhanova, Iz istorii nemtsev Kazakhstana, 107–8. The deportees’ property often was never returned to them after their trip into exile. On the frequent recurrence in the archives of group complaints about lost property, see Aldazhumanov, “Deportatsiia narodov—prestuplenie totalitarnogo rezhima,” 17.
220. Auman and Chebotareva, Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh, 164.
221. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:455–57. For slightly different figures on the number taking part in the deportations, see Auman and Chebotareva, Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh, 160–61.
222. The initial deportation orders for the Volga Germans even included the obligation that the state would supply the deportees with livestock in their new locale equivalent to those that they had left behind at their previous homes, although there is little evidence that this requirement was met. Bugai, “Mobilizovat’ nemtsev v rabochie kolonny,” 20.
223. See Mitropol’skaia and Bukhanova, Iz istorii nemtsev Kazakhstana, 94–96, 100–102.
224. Ibid., 102–4.
225. Mitropol’skaia and Bukhanova, Iz istorii nemtsev Kazakhstana contains several documents from different localities in Kazakhstan offering tales of various anti-Soviet activities among the exiled Germans.
226. Ibid., 110–12. Kondratenko’s proposals were altered but accepted, and these Soviet Germans were moved in December 1941–January 1942. See ibid., 113–15. For other letters from localities on the moods of the Soviet German population, see ibid., 107–10.
227. Aldazhumanov, “Deportatsiia narodov—prestuplenie totalitarnogo rezhima,” 18. Unfortunately, Aldazhumanov does not provide a citation to this document. Archives of the former Kazakh republic-level NKVD are much less accessible to scholars than many of their local or unionwide counterparts. Such sentiments were not reserved for Soviet German exiles alone. Local authorities and citizens frequently expressed their distrust of peoples who were deemed enemies merely based on their status as exiles. One Kazakhstan sovkhoz director expressed similar sentiments on the arrival of Polish exiles in the 1940–41 period. Expressions of sympathy were also common, as a different local resident described the exile of Poles as “barbarism.” See Gur’ianov, “Pol’skie spetspereselentsy,” 122–23.
228. For these three State Committee of Defense decrees, all signed by Stalin, see Bugai, “Mobilizovat’ nemtsev v rabochie kolonny,” 39–44; Auman and Chebotareva, Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh, 168–70, 172. A later clarification of the decree of October 7, 1942 gave local authorities the leeway to excuse women with more than three children from labor mobilization, if they had no close relatives with whom to leave their children. Otherwise, only a few Soviet Germans were excluded from incorporation into the mobilized labor force—those from the easternmost regions of the USSR and those from regions in which there were fewer than one thousand individuals falling under these provisions. Bugai, “Mobilizovat’ nemtsev v rabochie kolonny,” 45–46, 78.
229. Barber and Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 166.
230. This GKO decree is in Bugai, “Mobilizovat’ nemtsev v rabochie kolonny,” 44–45.
231. Ibid., 61, 65, 76.
232. Mitropol’skaia and Bukhanova, Iz istorii nemtsev Kazakhstana, 135–36.
233. Karlag did not house any of the mobilized Germans.
234. Bugai, “Mobilizovat’ nemtsev v rabochie kolonny,” 61, 63, 114–17, 122–25; Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 129–32; GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 328, l. 43. Mobilized Germans were paid for their work, but the cost of their housing, food, and communal services was deducted from their pay. Even then, they could only gain access to their money or send it to their families with permission of the chief of their working column. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 45, l. 258.
235. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 39, ll. 165–67.
236. Mitropol’skaia and Bukhanova, Iz istorii nemtsev Kazakhstana, 144.
237. Ibid., 138–39.
238. On reports of provocations designed to test the loyalty of Soviet Germans, see Fleischhauer, “‘Operation Barbarossa’ and the Deportation,” 80. For a cogent consideration of the lack of evidence for widespread Soviet German disloyalty, see Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 75. Aldazhumanov also notes that no military evidence ever uncovered significant Soviet German disloyalty. Aldazhumanov, “Deportatsiia narodov—prestuplenie totalitarnogo rezhima,” 13.
239. Bugai, “Mobilizovat’ nemtsev v rabochie kolonny,” 19–22. Intriguingly, Soviet German members of the Komsomol and Communist Party, while subject to both the deportations and labor mobilizations, were not stripped of their membership.
240. Ibid., 28–29.
241. Ibid., 45–46.
242. Ibid., 19–26.
243. See Ingeborg Fleischauer, “The Ethnic Germans under Nazi Rule,” in The Soviet Germans: Past and Present, ed. Ingeborg Fleischhauer and Benjamin Pinkus (London: Hurst, 1986), 92–102.
244. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 10 URO, d. 86, l. 201.
245. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 417, 425.
246. Naimark and Pohl argue that there is no evidence that Chechens and Ingush collaborated in numbers larger than any other Soviet nationality. See Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 95; Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 100. Burds disagrees. See Jeffrey Burds, “The Soviet War against ‘Fifth Columnists’: The Case of Chechnya, 1942–4,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 2 (2007): 267–314.
247. Nicolas Werth, “‘The Chechen Problem’: Handling an Awkward Legacy, 1918–1958,” Contemporary European History 15, no. 3 (2006): 347–66; Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 92–96. While Pohl essentially agrees with Naimark’s analysis, he attempts to ascribe the deportations fundamentally to “ethnic hatred” and “the Stalinist revival of Russian chauvinism.” Even though the deportation operated, obviously, on an ethnic basis, it was not merely the result of ethnic hatred or Russian chauvinism. There was something more. Pohl’s explanation fails to account for all of the nationalities not deported during the war. Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 100–101.
248. Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 94.
249. Ibid., 96–97.
250. This figure included some 390,000 Chechens and 90,000 Ingush. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:490; Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 103.
251. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:488–90.
252. Abdazhapar Abdakimov, Totalitarizm: Deportatsiia narodov i repressiia intelligentsii (Karaganda: Apparat akima Karagandinskoi oblasti, 1997), 55.
253. Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 96–97; Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 106–7; Werth, “The Chechen Problem,” 357–58.
254. Werth, “The Chechen Problem,” 358.
255. Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 101, 104–5. For more on Chechens and Ingush in Karlag, see the following two chapters herein.
256. Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 105; Werth, “The Chechen Problem,” 358–59.
257. Mitropol’skaia and Bukhanova, Iz istorii nemtsev Kazakhstana, 141.
258. “Gulag v gody voiny,” 85.
259. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 330, l. 55.