CHAPTER 5: A NEW CIRCLE OF HELL
1. Quoted in Arkhiv Prezidenta Respubliki Kazakhstana (Presidential Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan; hereafter APRK), f. 819, op. 1, d. 21, l. 116b.
2. Quoted in RGASPI, f. 82, op. 2, d. 148, ll. 68–70.
3. Lev Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1977), 120.
4. Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, trans. Carol Flath (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), 43. One official document places the total repatriates from the occupied territories passing through the camps as of August 1, 1945 at 2.4 million, of whom 1.3 million were currently in eighty-five camps and filtration points. See RGANI, f. 89, per. 40, d. 2, ll. 2–3.
5. GARF, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 64, ll. 9–12.
6. RGANI, f. 89, per. 40, d. 3, ll. 2–3.
7. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 86, l. 2.
8. RGANI, f. 89, per. 40, d. 2, ll. 2–3; d. 3, ll. 2–3.
9. Viktor N. Zemskov, “GULAG (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt),” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, no. 7 (1991): 6. A copy of the amnesty can be found at AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 27, d. 457, ll. 4–4b. On the amnesty, see Alexopoulos, “Amnesty 1945.”
10. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1155, ll. 1a–2.
11. The total colony population on January 1 of the following years was 516,000 in 1944, 745,000 in 1945, 510,000 in 1946, 895,000 in 1947, and 1,061,000 in 1948. Ibid., ll. 76b–80b.
12. Ibid., ll. 1a–2, 76b–80b.
13. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 2:136.
14. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 27, d. 457, ll. 4–4b.
15. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1155, l. 3.
16. 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), 2:271–73.
17. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1155, l. 3.
18. Ibid., d. 80, l. 8. Only Sevvostlag at Kolyma (139,000), Vorkutlag (77,000), and Sevpechlag (66,000), both in the Komi region, were larger.
19. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 36 d. 537, ll. 99, 101–2.
20. On February 1, 1949, the Karlag population had dropped to 57,061, but there was still only 1.2 square meters of living space per prisoner. Ibid., l. 105.
21. Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme totalitarnogo gosudarstva (Moscow: Moskovskii obshchestvennyi nauchnyi fond, 1997); 49–51; Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:550–51.
22. Viktor N. Zemskov, “Zakliuchennye, Spetsposelentsy, Ssyl’noposelentsy, Ssyl’nye i Vyslannye: Statistiko-geograficheskii aspect,” Istoriia SSSR, no. 5 (1991): 152.
23. See the figures in ibid., 152. Zemskov himself attributes the rising Gulag population of the late 1940s to the elimination of the death penalty in 1947. This, he suggests, meant that a number of individuals who previously would have been executed were now finding their way into the Gulag. Zemskov, “GULAG (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt),” 7. No doubt this contributed to the population growth, but its role must have been minor in comparison to the adoption of the June 4, 1947 decree on the theft of state property. The Gulag population in 1947, after all, jumped by nearly one-half million—a population boost much too large to explain with the ban on capital punishment. These figures show that Figes is completely mistaken in attributing the growth of the Gulag population between 1945 and 1950 to “the mass arrest of ‘nationalists’” from the western territories. See Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 467.
24. Zemskov, “GULAG (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt),” 10. The percentages in the camps and colonies under the laws of June 4, 1947 are similar to the percentages in the camps and colonies of all Gulag prisoners.
25. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:188–90.
26. On the Soviet population’s expectations of relaxation in the postwar era and the state’s refusal to meet these expectations, see Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans. and ed. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998).
27. APRK, f. 819, op. 1, d. 1, l. 6.
28. Quoted in ibid., l. 25.
29. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 31, d. 494, l. 131.
30. APRK, f. 819, op. 1, d. 122, l. 7.
31. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 27, d. 456, l. 69b–70.
32. See, for example, the speech of the Kazakh minister of internal affairs Bogdanov on June 12, 1946. APRK, f. 819, op. 1, d. 4, l. 1.
33. Ibid., d. 122, l. 4b. This is the same Aleksandr Matrosov celebrated by the Gulag as one of its former prisoners recognized as a Hero of the Soviet Union.
34. On the use of the term fascist by “thieves,” see Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:169.
35. Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever, 171.
36. Lev Kopelev, The Education of a True Believer (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1980). On the anti-Semitic rumors of Soviet Jews fighting only on the “Tashkent front,” see Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009) 267–68.
37. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 30, d. 493, ll. 25–28.
38. From the resolutions adopted at the first Kazakh UITLK party conference. APRK, f. 819, op. 1, d. 1, l. 70.
39. Quoted in ibid., d. 21, l. 119b.
40. Ibid., d. 122, l. 7b, 9.
41. “Chtoby stroit’ nado znat’, chtoby znat’ nado uchit’sia.” The maxim is repeated in ibid., d. 122, l. 9b; d. 1, l. 48.
42. Ibid., d. 1, l. 25b.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., d. 122, l. 6.
45. Ibid., d. 178, l. 27.
46. Quoted in ibid., d. 1, l. 30b.
47. Payments to some prisoners in Kolyma had been introduced as early as 1949. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 326, l. 23.
48. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 6 s.s. pr., d. 156, ll. 61–63.
49. Ibid., sv. 33, d. 519, ll. 24–25, 49–50.
50. Alexander Dolgun with Patrick Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story: An American in the Gulag (New York: Knopf, 1975), 109–10.
51. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 326, l. 1. During 1947, 1.5 million newly convicted prisoners arrived in the Gulag compared to just over 1 million releases. Approximately 22 percent of these prisoners were women.
52. Ibid., l. 2. These “k-r” inmates had accounted for 34 percent of the total Gulag population just one year earlier.
53. Ibid., l. 5.
54. Ibid., ll. 5–6.
55. This word-for-word formulation was repeated again and again in documents discussing the work of the special camps.
56. The decision on February 21, 1948 by the Council of Ministers to create the special camps is in Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 2:326–27. The implementation directive of February 28, 1948, is in ibid., 2:328–30; Aleksandr Kokurin and Nikolai Petrov, eds., GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 1917–1960 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia,” 2000), 135–37.
57. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 559.
58. Ibid., 135–41; RGANI, f. 89, per. 60, d. 11, l. 3.
59. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 135–41; RGANI, f. 89, per. 60, d. 11, l. 3.
60. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 4:125–26.
61. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 135–37.
62. Mikhail Borisovich Smirnov, Sistema ispravitel’no trudovykh lagerei v SSSR 1923–1960: Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ia, 1998), 403–4.
63. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 2:371.
64. Ibid., 2:385–86. Among the most well-known inmates in Ekibastuz was Dmitri Panin. See Dmitri Panin, The Notebooks of Sologdin (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).
65. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 162–64.
66. On Dolgun’s meeting a prisoner in the course of his transfer to the Spassk subdivision for invalids, Steplag’s “camp for the dying,” due to his contraction of silicosis in Dzhezkazgan, see ibid., 162. As Dolgun wrote, “Yes, he was terrified of death, but it could not be worse to die than to live in the living hell of Dzhezkazgan.” Silicosis is a “disease of the lungs caused by continued inhalation of the dust of siliceous minerals and characterized by progressive fibrosis and a chronic shortness of breath.” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
67. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 135–37. At the time that the MVD issued its implementation instructions, the exact details of the special camp regime were not worked out.
68. GARF, f. 9414. op. 1, d. 1858, ll. 212–14.
69. Panin, The Notebooks of Sologdin, 293–94, 297.
70. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 205. On further reports of such shooting incidents at Steplag, see ibid., 66–74.
71. Ibid., 244.
72. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 558.
73. Ibid., 556–58, 563. By mid-May 1949, every Steplag subdivision was equipped with an internal camp prison. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1858, ll. 212, 273.
74. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 563–64.
75. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:57; Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 556.
76. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 171–72.
77. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 557–58.
78. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 165.
79. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 557.
80. Ibid., 560–61.
81. Ibid., 556.
82. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:67.
83. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 218.
84. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:58–60.
85. See Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 556.
86. Ibid., 555.
87. For a description of some minor cultural-educational activities at Steplag in 1949, see GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1858, l. 289.
88. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 258.
89. Ibid., 132.
90. Ibid., 211.
91. Ibid., 166.
92. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:97.
93. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 225.
94. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:231–32.
95. RGASPI, f. 560, op. 1, d. 4. The file holds the autobiography and memoirs of N. M. Busarev. No archival page numbers are apparent. Rather, there are two texts in the folder: a typescript text, and a handwritten one. The quoted passage is in the typescript text, 57.
96. Vory v zakone were the “thieves-in-law,” a professional criminal underground organization.
97. Artem Fel’dman, Riadovoe delo (Moscow: Memorial, 1993), 41.
98. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 202–3.
99. Quoted in ibid., 147–48.
100. Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever, 217.
101. Quoted in ibid., 222.
102. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:438.
103. Ibid., 3:243.
104. Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever, 234–37.
105. Quoted in ibid., 235–37.
106. Edward Buca, Vorkuta (London: Constable, 1976), 57.
107. Quoted in Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever, 238, 244.
108. Ibid., 244.
109. Ibid., 245.
110. Quoted in ibid., 248.
111. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 1 s. pr., d. 129, l. 124.
112. Ibid., l. 304. This particular directive called for the creation of a separate clinic for bandit prisoners to be constructed with barred windows and guarded entrances.
113. Ibid., d. 130, l. 10.
114. Ibid., sv. 2 s. pr., d. 132, ll. 171–72.
115. Ibid., d. 131, ll. 181–82.
116. Ibid., ll. 164–65.
117. Ibid., ll. 221–22. I found no information on the outcome of the hunger strike, although Karlag chief Z. P. Volkov did order an investigation of the shooting incident.
118. Karlag compiled a plan for the complete dispersal of prisoners according to their conviction. The plan included camp points for men in strict regime, women in strict regime, men in regular regime, women in regular regime, men from the group vory, men from the group otoshedshie, men from the group otkolovshiesia, and men from the group “m.” I have been unable to determine the meaning of group m. Another document lays out different camp subdivisions for criminal gangs fighting one another: the vory, the otoshedshie, and those not aligned with either of these two groups. See ibid., sv. 4 spetsotdel, d. 45, l. 7.
119. The signed form is apparent in nearly all of the individual prisoner files from this period.
120. Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme, 62.
121. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 210.
122. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:238; Panin, The Notebooks of Sologdin, 303–6; Fel’dman, Riadovoe delo, 36–38. For a scholarly account that mentions the killings of informers and campaign to prevent the recruitment of new informers, see Marta Craveri [Kraveri], “Krizis Gulaga: Kengirskoe vosstanie 1954 goda v dokumentakh MVD,” Cahiers du Monde russe 36, no. 3 (1995): 322. She also notes that prisoners were forming their own system of internal surveillance.
123. Panin, The Notebooks of Sologdin, 306.
124. Ibid., 308.
125. Ibid., 309.
126. Panin, The Notebooks of Sologdin, 310–11. Dolgun reports rumors of a similar incident in which three honest thieves were placed in a cell full of bitches, and the bitches promptly hung their three adversaries. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 157.
127. Panin, The Notebooks of Sologdin, 312–19. Craveri puts this hunger strike in January 1951 rather than Panin’s January 1952. Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga,” 322.
128. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 33, d. 519, l. 15. For a slightly different figure for 1951 of seventy prisoner-on-prisoner murders in a 1952 report, see ibid., sv. 34, d. 520, l. 136.
129. Ibid., sv. 34, d. 520, l. 136.
130. Ibid., sv. 2 s. pr., d. 131, ll. 71–72.
131. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 318, 320.
132. Zemskov, “GULAG (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt),” 11.
133. See James Heinzen, “Corruption in the Gulag: Dilemmas of Officials and Prisoners,” Comparative Economic Studies 47, no. 2 (2005): 456–75, especially 467–69.
134. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 326, ll. 19–20.
135. Ibid., ll. 25–26. In August and September 1949, the Council of Ministers of the USSR ordered the creation of two new special camps in the Karaganda coal basin, raising the total to nine.
136. Ibid., ll. 35, 37.
137. Ibid., d. 1858, l. 212.
138. Smirnov, Sistema ispravitel’no trudovykh lagerei, 210, 228–29, 352–54.
139. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 387. The intended number of guards was much higher—9,986—but they were unable to fill all the positions. Compare this with the regular camp Karlag, where the intended number of guards in 1951 was limited to 7 percent of the prisoner population. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 33, d. 519, l. 56.
140. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 388.
141. Quoted in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 326, l. 11.
142. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 36, d. 537, ll. 100–103.
143. Adding 17,498 remaining especially dangerous prisoners who could not within regulations really be used in field work to the 28,554 physically weak and invalid prisoners left only 19,761 prisoners to complete economic tasks designed for 42,000 laborers. Ibid., ll. 99, 105–6. Thus, Karlag was once again forced to weigh its competing tasks: the isolation of the especially dangerous versus the completion of economic plans.
144. The death penalty was abolished on May 26, 1947. It returned on January 12, 1950. Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme, 58, 62.
145. The comparison with Dante’s hell is obviously suggested in Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle. On the commission of offenses in a camp leading to prisoners’ transfer to harsher regime camps as indicative of movement deeper into Dante’s hell, see Buca, Vorkuta, 177.
146. On katorga divisions, see chapter 4 herein.
147. Fel’dman, Riadovoe delo, 39.
148. This party functionary primarily had in mind the Kazakh population, which made up 30 percent of the prisoner population among the corrective labor colonies directly under the authority of the Kazakh Republic’s MVD. Quoted in APRK, f. 819, op. 1, d. 21, l. 114.
149. Ibid., d. 178, l. 196.
150. Joseph Scholmer, Vorkuta (New York: Holt, 1955), 95.
151. Ibid., 147–48. Scholmer also reports that religion was an important element of Ukrainian community at Vorkuta.
152. Fel’dman, Riadovoe delo, 39.
153. Scholmer, Vorkuta, 95.
154. Buca, Vorkuta, 111.
155. Quoted in ibid., 114.
156. Ibid., 122.
157. This recalls the common picture of racial communities in U.S. prisons.
158. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 302–3.
159. Like so much else in the Gulag, the absence of a particular Russian community echoes the absence of particularly Russian party and social organizations in the Soviet Union at large. See Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 32, no. 2 (1994): 414–52.
160. Panin, The Notebooks of Sologdin, 300.
161. Ibid., 299.
162. See the speech of the Kazakh minister of internal affairs in 1946. APRK, f. 819, op. 1, d. 4, l. 5.
163. See Nicolas Werth, “‘The Chechen Problem’: Handling an Awkward Legacy, 1918–1958,” Contemporary European History 15, no. (2006): 347.
164. Buca, Vorkuta, 55, 79–81.
165. Scholmer, Vorkuta, 137. Control over the city of Vilnius was contested for much of its history. From the beginning of the First World War until the end of the second, Lithuania and Poland fought over and traded control of Vilnius numerous times. Only after the Soviet annexation of Lithuania did Vilnius become the permanent capital of the republic and then independent post-Soviet state.
166. Ibid., 198.
167. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 244.
168. Buca, Vorkuta, 18. Scholmer echoes the opinion, surmising that some 50 percent of the prisoners at Vorkuta were Ukrainian, with 70 to 80 percent of those being western Ukrainian. Scholmer, Vorkuta, 129.
169. These prisoners played an integral role in the mass prisoner uprising at Kengir. See chapter 6 below.
170. Zemskov, “GULAG (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt),” 3, 8–9.
171. GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 213, l. 1.
172. Ibid., l. 7.
173. Viktor N. Zemskov, “Spetsposelentsy” (po dokumentatsii NKVD-MVD SSSR),” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, no. 11 (1990): 8.
174. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 2 spetsotdel, d. 18, l. 110.
175. GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 641, ll. 367–68. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:524–26, 530–32, 536.
176. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:526–29, 533–39.
177. GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 641, ll. 367–69.
178. Ibid., l. 368. Portions of the Vlasovites were sent to Karaganda for employment in the industries of the Karaganda coal basin. Ibid., GARF, d. 213, l. 20.
179. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:543–44.
180. Viktor N. Zemskov, “Sud’ba ‘Kulatskoi Ssylki’: 1930–1954 gg,” Otechestvennaia Istoriia, no. 1 (1994): 133.
181. On releases of former kulak exiles, see ibid., 133–42. As noted in earlier chapters, the process of their release began even before the war.
182. Zemskov, “Spetsposelentsy,” 16.
183. RGANI, f. 89, per. 18, d. 26, ll. 1–5; Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:595–97.
184. Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, 279.
185. Ibid., 292–94, 311.
186. From Lazarev’s typescript memoirs written and sent to the Central Committee in March 1966. RGASPI, f. 560, op. 1, d. 22, ll. 71, 74.
187. From Busarev’s typescript memoirs written between 1967 and 1971, and sent to the Central Committee. Ibid., d. 4, pp. 68–71. The page numbers are from the typescript text.
188. Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, 330–31.
189. Zemskov, “Spetsposelentsy,” 9–10; Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme, 56–57.
190. Zemskov, “Spetsposelentsy,” 9.
191. On the extension of OUN exile to permanent status in the Buriat-Mongol autonomous republic, see GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 547, ll. 608. Particular care was taken to use the surveillance apparatus to uncover cases of OUN exiles planning escape.
192. Ibid., ll. 3–4. On this phenomenon of some Ukrainians accepting and even embracing their status, see the discussion of Kate Brown’s work in chapter 3 above.
193. Ibid., ll. 4–5. The rest of this archival file contains similar reports from other regions where OUN exiles were confined.
194. Ibid., l. 227.
195. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:47.
196. Scholmer, Vorkuta, 191–92.
197. APRK, f. 819, op. 1, d. 22, l. 59.
198. Ibid., d. 21, l. 116. The attack on these journals in 1946 was part of the launch of the deeply xenophobic anticosmopolitan campaign.
199. Ibid., l. 113b.
200. GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 482, ll. 115–20.
201. Ibid., ll. 1–6. The exiles were spread out among every region of Kazakhstan. While Karaganda held the most, it was followed closely by Akmolinsk region with 107,000 exiles. In fact, only two regions, western Kazakh and the Gur’evsk, held fewer than 10,000 exiles. Ibid., ll. 19–20.
202. Ibid., d. 646, ll. 6, 15. Exiles of Russian nationality numbered a mere 1,043, earning only seventh place in the list of exile by nationality, and also trailing Poles and Greeks. There were only 294 Kazakhs among the exiles.
203. For the data on the locations and populations of individual special settlements in the Karaganda region in early 1953, see ibid., d. 767, ll. 118–27.
204. See the protocol of a meeting of local Kazakh UITLK Party secretaries held in April 1946. APRK, f. 819, op. 1, d. 21, l. 114.
205. Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever, 6.
206. Ibid., 65.
207. Scholmer, Vorkuta, 108, 113.
208. Fel’dman, Riadovoe delo, 38. Fel’dman himself was arrested in relation to one murder, although he was quickly released. The murder, however, was pinned on another Jewish prisoner who had never even seen the murdered prisoner. The conviction was overturned after Stalin’s death.
209. Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, 345.
210. Quoted in Danylo Shumuk, Life Sentence: Memoirs of a Ukrainian Political Prisoner (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1984), 173.
211. Quoted in Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever, 137–38.
212. Ibid., 5. On the assertiveness of the population in general in the immediate wake of the victory, see Figes, The Whisperers, 459.
213. Buca, Vorkuta, 53–55. In this case, the Red Army officers were differentiated from Banderites or others who fought against Soviet rule.
214. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 2:175–76.
215. Ibid., 3:359.
216. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 34, d. 520, l. 133.
217. Ibid., ll. 133–37.
218. Ibid., ll. 218–19.
219. Ibid., l. 220. In an always-related campaign, they also had to improve the isolation of male from female prisoners.
220. Quoted in ibid., ll. 38–41. The bragging came in the midst of a furious bureaucratic battle to avoid the transfer of the educational camp point from its independent location into the zone of an industrial camp point.
CHAPTER 6: THE CRASH OF THE GULAG
1. Portions of this chapter have previously been published as Steven A. Barnes, “In a Manner Befitting Soviet Citizens: An Uprising in the Post-Stalin Gulag,” Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 823–50. For the text of the radio message, in a publication of Soviet documents on the Kengir uprising, see “Vosstanie v Steplage,” Otechestvennye arkhivy, no. 4 (1994): 62.
2. For accounts of the assault, see Marta Craveri [Kraveri], “Krizis Gulaga: Kengirskoe vosstanie 1954 goda v dokumentakh MVD,” Cahiers du Monde russe 36, no. 3 (1995): 333; Dmitrii Iakovenko, “Osuzhden po 58-i,” Zvezda Vostoka 57, no. 4 (1989): 71–72; Liubov’ Bershadskaia, Rastoptannye zhizni (Paris: Piat’ kontinentov, 1975), 94–97; Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 3:326–29; Fedir Varkony, “The Revolt in Kingir,” in 500 Ukrainian Martyred Women, ed. Stephania Halychyn (New York: United Ukrainian Women’s Organization of America, 1956), 22–29; GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, ll. 21–35, 277–78; AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, arkhivnoe lichnoe delo 470542 Kuznetsova, Kapitona Ivanovicha (d. Kuznetsova), l. 116. Official documents only noted two female prisoners run over by tanks, and they blamed the incident on other prisoners who allegedly pushed the women in front of the tanks. The volume 500 Ukrainian Martyred Women asserted that some five hundred Ukrainian women were run over by tanks, even though its own eyewitness source, Varkony, makes no such claim, speaking rather of over five hundred total victims of the assault. Other than the issue of the total victims, all accounts of these events (eyewitness and official) agree with only minor discrepancies in details. With regard to the total deaths, the variance is significant. While official documents admitted to forty-six prisoner deaths, five of whom were allegedly killed by other prisoners (AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova, l. 116; GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 278), the memoirists all placed the number far higher. Iakovenko wrote that four hundred prisoners were either killed or seriously wounded. Bershadskaia stated that over five hundred lives were lost. Solzhenitsyn claimed to have found an official Steplag document that reported over seven hundred deaths. I have located no official documents with figures in that range. Applebaum has written about the uprising based entirely on some of the sources noted above, especially Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago; Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga.” See Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 495–505.
3. Consider, for example, the quick and brutal response to uprisings in Kronstadt in 1921, Ivanova in 1932, or even later in Novocherkassk in 1962. See Paul Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); Israel Getzler, Kronstadt 1917–1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jeffrey Rossman, Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Samuel H. Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, 1962 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).
4. The total, which does not include prison inmates, is in J. Otto Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System: A Statistical History of Soviet Repression and Terror, 1930–1953 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1997), 131. Pohl’s book is a useful compendium of Gulag population statistics based not on his own archival research but rather on the many various articles by Zemskov, Bugai, Aleksandr N. Dugin, Aleksandr Ia. Malygin, Popov, Rittersporn, and Getty. The camp and colony total comes from GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1398, ll. 14–22, in Aleksandr F. Kiselev and Ernst M. Shchagin, eds., Khrestomatiia po otechestvennoi istorii (1946–1995 gg.) (Moscow: Gumanitarnyi izdatel’skii tsentr VLADOS, 1996), 50–54. Considering camps and colonies alone, the 2.4 million population on January 1, 1953 was just off the maximum of 2.56 million on January 1, 1950. See Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 11. Beria told the Presidium of the Central Committee on March 26, 1953 that the total prisoner population, including prisons, colonies, and camps, was 2.53 million. See Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii, f. 3, op. 52, d. 100, ll. 7–9, in V. P. Naumov and Iu. V. Sigachev, eds., Lavrentii Beriia, 1953: Stenogramma iiul’skogo plenuma TsK KPSS i drugie dokumenty (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia,” 1999), 19–21.
5. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1398, ll. 14–22, in Khrestomatiia po otechestvennoi istorii, 50–54; Nanci Adler, The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 169, 192.
6. Aleksei Tikhonov discusses these proposals. See “The End of the Gulag,” in Behind the Façade of Stalin’s Command Economy, ed. Paul R. Gregory (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2001), 67–74.
7. Marta [Kraveri] Craveri and Oleg Khlevniuk, “Krizis ekonomiki MVD (konets 1940-kh–1950-e gody),” Cahiers du Monde russe 36, nos. 1–2 (1995): 182–83. Ivanova echoes the argument exactly. The mass protests “forced the leadership of the Gulag to ease conditions there and to remove the cruelest, most odious officials from the camp administration; on the other hand, the obvious inefficiency of forced labor itself and the sharp decline in the economic performance of the Gulag forced the leadership to act to improve conditions in the camps.” Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, trans. Carol Flath (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), 66. Ivanova’s “proof,” however, is a report from 1953 of a commission under the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR that stated that the camp regime had led to protests, refusal to work, escape attempts, and hooliganism among the prisoners, along with low labor productivity, high rates of illness, and low prisoner morale. The report derided the 77 percent work attendance among the prisoner workforce and 11.9 percent of prisoners failing to fulfill their norm. RGANI, f. 89, per. 55, dok. 28, l. 16. The problem with this proof is that such conditions had prevailed and been complained about almost throughout the Gulag’s existence, but never before had they caused the decline of the system. On the contrary, it grew almost without pause throughout the Stalin era.
8. The numbers come from two tables in Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 16, 48–49. With the exception of a slight uptick in the relative numbers of escapes in 1946–47, the downward trend holds in 1937–53. In 1953, escapes amounted to 0.045 percent of the corrective labor camp population, while deaths amounted to 0.34 percent of the camp population.
9. Craveri and Khlevniuk, “Krizis ekonomiki MVD,” 183–84, 187.
10. Alexander Dolgun with Patrick Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story: An American in the Gulag (New York: Knopf, 1975), 261.
11. Artem Fel’dman, Riadovoe delo (Moscow: Memorial, 1993), 43–44. “Traur iz alykh i chernykh lent. Umer i Stalin, i Gotval’d Klement. Drognuli litsa stal’nye. Kogda peremrut ostal’nye?!”
12. Quoted in RGASPI, f. 560, op. 1, d. 17, l. 8. The materials in this file are the notebooks and letters of Mikhail Davydovich Korol’ written in the camps. Many of these materials were later published by his daughter; see Maia Korol’, Odisseia razvedchika: Pol’sha–SShA–Kitai–GULAG (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Rossiiskogo obshchestva medikov-literaturov, 1999). Figes writes of some who were “crying from happiness.” Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 526.
13. Zayara Veselaia, interview in the documentary film Stolen Years.
14. See, for example, Adler, The Gulag Survivor, 69, quoting the memoirs of one survivor, “I loved the Soviet regime even when I was in exile, I cried bitterly in March 1953.” Buca, a prisoner in the special camp at Vorkuta, recalls prisoners crying at the news of Stalin’s death. Edward Buca, Vorkuta (London: Constable, 1976), 230. Figes recounts other victims of the Stalinist regime crying at his death, but generally dismissed the notion that any actually cried inside the camps. See Figes, The Whisperers, 525, 529.
15. The transfers of some camp industries, including agriculture, occurred over the next several months. Craveri and Khlevniuk, “Krizis ekonomiki MVD,” 181–82. The economic activities of several of Karlag’s divisions were transferred over to the control of the Ministry of Agriculture on June 1, 1953. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 3 s. pr., d. 136, ll. 281–84.
16. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1398, ll. 14–22, in Khrestomatiia po otechestvennoi istorii, 50–54.
17. One certainly expects Solzhenitsyn’s characterization of this amnesty as marked by “tenderness for thieves and its viciousness toward politicals.” Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:280. Much more surprising is Adler’s statement that Stalin’s death was followed by a “trickle” of released prisoners and how this amnesty “offered less than met the eye.” Although her book is heavily focused on political prisoners, the comment is startling given the magnitude of the March 27 amnesty and Adler’s obvious knowledge of that fact. See Adler, The Gulag Survivor, 6, 21, 78.
18. Adler, The Gulag Survivor, 78.
19. In actuality, not all Article 58 prisoners were excluded. The majority was, yet in rare cases in which individuals were convicted under Article 58 but were given five years or less, they were potentially eligible for release. For one such release, see AOTsPSI, f. Steplaga, arkhivnoe lichnoe delo 22340 (Kalina, Zara-Irina Ignat’evna), ll. 61, 111–13. Ignat’evna was sentenced to five years under articles 58-10, part 1, and 58-11 for participation in an anti-Soviet organization and anti-Soviet agitation. She was released under the March 27 amnesty on April 17, 1953. For similar case involving Anna Kholmogorova, see AOTsPSI, f. Peschanlaga, arkhivnoe lichnoe delo 6407 (Kholmogorova, Anna Andreevna), ll. 8, 13.
20. See Amy W. Knight, Beria, Stalin’s First Lieutenant (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Craveri and Khlevniuk, “Krizis ekonomiki MVD,” 182.
21. Lavrentii Beriia, 19–21.
22. For Karlag’s administrative plan for carrying out the amnesty, see AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 3 s. pr., d. 136, ll. 205–12.
23. Ibid.
24. For an example of this statement, see AOTsPSI, f. Steplaga, arkhivnoe lichnoe delo 22340 (Kalina, Zara-Irina Ignat’evna), l. 113.
25. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 35, d. 527, l. 38.
26. See Adler, The Gulag Survivor, 83; see especially Miriam Dobson, “‘Show the Bandit-Enemies No Mercy!’: Amnesty, Criminality, and Public Response in 1953,” in The Dilemma of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Polly Jones (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006), 21–40; Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).
27. As we will see, these complaints became the typical response of Soviet authorities to the problem of recidivism.
28. Iurii Nikolaevich Afanas’ev, et al., eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga: Konets 1920-kh–pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov: Sobranie dokumentov v semi tomakh (Moscow, 2004), 2:429–30.
29. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 3 s. pr., d. 136, ll. 205–12.
30. Ibid., sv. 35, d. 527, l. 137. Of course, they had been urged to do just such a thing repeatedly throughout the history of Karlag.
31. On the release of significant numbers of informants in the 1953 amnesty and the problems it caused in camp surveillance work, see James Heinzen, “Corruption in the Gulag: Dilemmas of Officials and Prisoners,” Comparative Economic Studies 47, no. 2 (2005): 471–72.
32. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1398, ll. 14–22, in Khrestomatiia po otechestvennoi istorii, 50–54.
33. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 3 s. pr., d. 136, ll. 246–47.
34. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 2:430–31.
35. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 3 s. pr., d. 136, ll. 297–98.
36. Ibid., sv. 35, d. 527, l. 139.
37. Solzhenitsyn writes of the uncertainty exhibited by the secret police organs in the wake of Beria’s demise. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:289.
38. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 261. A similar rumor is reported in Nikolai L’vovich Kekushev, Zveriada (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1991), 127. Kekushev believed the rumor to be an especially poorly planned provocation.
39. Quoted in Fel’dman, Riadovoe delo, 43–44.
40. Figes, The Whisperers, 526.
41. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 261.
42. Kekushev, Zveriada, 126.
43. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 265–66.
44. Interview with Karl Riewe, German national and former inmate of Steplag, in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, Public Records Office (hereafter TNA PRO), FO 371/122936, N S1551/6, 9–10.
45. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 274–76. The significance for prisoners of removing their numbers was stressed time and again by memoirists. See also Kekushev, Zveriada, 127; Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:485.
46. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 283. Figes places the improvement in conditions in Gulag camps in the early 1950s. See Figes, The Whisperers, 516.
47. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 35, d. 527, ll. 146–47. Although I never located the main speech of Karlag chief Volkov at this conference, none of the related materials indicated any awareness of the Beria situation in Moscow.
48. Ibid., ll. 137, 140.
49. Ibid., l. 137. The continual campaigns to reemphasize regulations that had long been on the books were a long-term characteristic of Gulag administration.
50. Ibid., sv. 3 s. pr., d. 137, ll. 18–20.
51. Solzhenitsyn devoted an entire chapter of The Gulag Archipelago, the “Forty Days of Kengir,” to the uprising, which served as the narrative climax of his three-volume magnum opus. The Gulag Archipelago dealt with the subject of arrest and the absence of resistance. “Yes, resistance should have begun right there, at the moment of the arrest itself. But it did not begin.” Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1:15. The volumes are then structured as a conversion story, which reaches its peak when prisoners finally unite against their common enemy in a series of uprisings culminating with that at Kengir. Ibid., 3:285–331. Given that Applebaum’s volume offers essentially a slightly updated version of Solzhenitsyn, it is no surprise that Kengir plays a similar role for her. She adds little to our knowledge from the scholarly works noted below.
For the Ukrainian émigré community, the violent overturn of the Kengir uprising was celebrated as an instance of martyrdom in the face of Soviet oppression—this one gendered female due to the presence of large numbers of Ukrainian women in the uprising. See Varkony, “The Revolt in Kingir.”
Numerous memoirists and correspondents have made the Kengir uprising a key element of their Gulag stories. See Bershadskaia, Rastoptannye zhizni; Fel’dman, Riadovoe delo; V. Frants, “Vosstanie v Kengire,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, no. 6 (1956): 104–10; Kekushev, Zveriada.
Even historical research and documentary publications have now become possible. The first, a model of the best prearchival research, was Andrea Graziosi, “The Great Strikes of 1953 in Soviet Labor Camps in the Accounts of Their Participants: A Review,” Cahiers du Monde russe et sovietique 33, no. 4 (1992): 419–46. For the best account using archives, see Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga.” For a publication of key documents from the uprising, see “Vosstanie v Steplage.”
52. From the voluminous literature on west Ukrainian and Baltic resistance movements, see especially Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 73–89, 154–201; Timothy Snyder, “The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943,” Past and Present, no. 179 (2003): 197–234; Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jeffrey Burds, “Agentura: Soviet Informants’ Networks and the Ukrainian Rebel Underground in Galicia, 1944–1948,” East European Politics and Societies 11, no. 1 (1997): 89–130; Jeffrey Burds, “The Early Cold War in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944–1948,” Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1505, University of Pittsburgh, 2001; Jeffrey Burds, “Gender and Policing in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944–1948,” Cahiers du monde russe 42, nos. 2–4 (2001): 279–319; Juozas Daumantas, Fighters for Freedom: Lithuanian Partisans versus the U.S.S.R. (1944–1947), trans. E. J. Harrison (New York: Manyland Books, 1975); Mart Laar, War in the Woods: Estonia’s Struggle for Survival, 1944–1956, trans. Tiina Ets (Washington, DC: Compass Press, 1992); Georgii Sannikov, Bol’shaia okhota: Razgrom vooruzhennogo podpol’ia v zapadnoi Ukraine (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2002); Rein Taagepara, “Soviet Documentation on the Estonian Pro-independence Guerrilla Movement, 1945–1952,” Journal of Baltic Studies 10, no. 2 (1979): 91–106.
53. In particular, see Vladimir Kozlov, Massovye besporiadki v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve, 1953-nachalo 1980-kh gg. (Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf, 1999). Unfortunately, the translators completely missed Kozlov’s argument on this point when they mistranslated the title into English. Instead of the appropriate translation, Mass Disorders, the translators chose the more heroic and less accurate Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin Years (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002).
54. “Thinking Bolshevik” comes from Jochen Hellbeck’s playful expansion of Kotkin’s notion of “speaking Bolshevik.” See Jochen Hellbeck, “Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 1 (2000): 71–96; Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
55. On earlier incidents of resistance, see Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga”; Semen S. Vilenskii, ed., Soprotivlenie v Gulage: Vospominaniia, pis’ma, dokumenty (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 1992). Resistance, in these accounts, exists but is remarkable for its rarity until Stalin’s death. For an extended consideration of one early uprising during the war, see chapter 4 herein.
56. Gulag authorities described their exposure for a long period of time to bourgeois ideology as one of the reasons leading to the Kengir rebellion. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 286.
57. On the OUN and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and their ferocious guerrilla struggle with Soviet authority, see Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
58. On the changed mind-set of veterans after the war, see Weiner, Making Sense of War; Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans. and ed. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998).
59. One former Steplag prisoner, Vagarshak Batoian, wrote that the contingent of prisoners who had been arrested before the war were “more careful, more restrained,” while it was the former POWs and other people arrested after the war who were the decisive elements in the uprising. Batoian, in Soprotivlenie v Gulage: Vospominaniia, pis’ma, dokumenty, ed. Semen S. Vilenskii, (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 1992), 91. On the centrality of these new prisoner contingents in all of the post-Stalin Gulag uprisings, see Graziosi, “The Great Strikes of 1953,” 422–24; Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga,” 320.
60. All prisoners in the special camps were political prisoners, but all political prisoners were not in these camps.
61. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:231–32, 238.
62. On earlier uprisings, see Graziosi, “The Great Strikes of 1953”; Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga”; Soprotivlenie v Gulage.
63. Although recent historiography has reevaluated Beria and painted a picture of him as one of the primary initiators of the Gulag’s dismantling, Gulag prisoners at the time viewed him as the ultimate criminal. As shown below, prisoners tossed Beria’s name around as an epithet in the wake of his arrest and execution. See Knight, Stalin’s First Lieutenant.
64. On the raised and dashed expectations of changes after Stalin’s death, see Frants, “Vosstanie v Kengire,” 104.
65. Ibid., 104; Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:293; Batoian, in Soprotivlenie v Gulage, 82; Iakovenko, “Osuzhden po 58-i,” 66.
66. “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 78; GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 270. Of course, it is always possible that a great number of Gulag prisoners were completely innocent of the charges against them. Thus, we will never truly know how many of these prisoners were really members of nationalist organizations.
67. Riewe interview, TNA PRO FO 371/122936, N S1551/6, 4; Batoian, in Soprotivlenie v Gulage, 82; Varkony, “The Revolt in Kingir,” 22–24; Iakovenko, “Osuzhden po 58-i,” 68–69. Iakovenko, a member of the militarized guard at Kengir at the time of the uprising, testified that such murders did occur and were covered up. Dolgun, a U.S. prisoner at a different Steplag subdivision, noted that the local authorities would help cover up illegal shootings by throwing corpses into the firing corridor prior to taking pictures. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 244.
68. For one such example, see the comments of a prisoner named Popov at a production meeting on June 6, 1954 in Steplag’s first camp subdivision—a subdivision not involved in the uprising. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 168. For a lengthy report on those in the secret police apparatus who lost their jobs immediately after Beria’s arrest, see Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 2:437–43.
69. Official documents admit to shootings in May 1953 and February 1954. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, ll. 109–10. See also Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga,” 324; Varkony, “The Revolt in Kingir,” 22; Frants, “Vosstanie v Kengire,” 104; Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:285–86. Solzhenitsyn argues that the shootings were an intentional act on the part of camp authorities, who sought to provoke disturbances to stave off budgetary and staff cuts in the wake of Beria’s arrest. Solzhenitsyn’s assertion, though plausible, is not easily proved or disproved.
70. See Frants, “Vosstanie v Kengire,” 104; Varkony, “The Revolt in Kingir,” 22; Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:286–89.
71. See Frants, “Vosstanie v Kengire,” 105; Varkony, “The Revolt in Kingir,” 23; Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:290–92; Batoian, in Soprotivlenie v Gulage, 85. Riewe writes of sixty rather than six hundred common criminals. Riewe interview, TNA PRO FO 371/122936, N S1551/6, 16. The transfer of common criminals to Kengir is confirmed in official documents in “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 78. Frants also asserts that prisoners from the uprising at Vorkuta arrived at Kengir in 1954 and played a role in the uprising. Frants, “Vosstanie v Kengire,” 104. I have found no official document confirming this transfer, but as we will see in the aftermath of Kengir, the transfer of prisoners to different camps in the wake of uprisings was a common practice.
72. Their goal in these actions is disputed. Solzhenitsyn writes that the common criminals, in agreement with the political prisoners, specifically sought to provoke a confrontation with authorities. They entered the service yard with the goal of seizing control of the camp’s food stores. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:293–96. This account accords with Varkony’s testimony in 1956. Varkony, “The Revolt in Kingir,” 23–24. Official documents consistently maintained that the criminals were seeking access to the women’s zone in order to engage in mass rape of the female prisoners. See, for example, GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 271. While on its face the official version seems more likely considering the long history of rape in the Gulag, Bershadskaia, a prisoner in the women’s section at Kengir during the uprising, confirms that the criminals all behaved themselves, and many female prisoners even hid the men from authorities. Bershadskaia, Rastoptannye zhizni, 83.
73. The events are described in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, ll. 270–72; Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:293–300; Frants, “Vosstanie v Kengire,” 105; Varkony, “The Revolt in Kingir,” 23–24; Bershadskaia, Rastoptannye zhizni, 83–85; TNA PRO FO 371/122936, N S1551/6, 16; “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 37–38; Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga,” 325. Craveri—based on GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 272—found slightly different figures: 13 prisoners dead, and 43 prisoners wounded. Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga,” 325. The numbers in “Vosstanie v Steplage” seem to be more complete. Witnesses placed the total dead at far higher. Bershadskaia estimated more than 100 wounded and 100 killed, while Frants wrote that the MVD killed 60 to 70 prisoners and wounded many others. The rumors that reached Riewe spoke of about 150 total dead and wounded.
74. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:299–300; AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova, ll. 116, 117, 121; Frants, “Vosstanie v Kengire,” 106.
75. “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 37.
76. For many of the telegrams to and from Kruglov and Rudenko, see ibid., 36–81.
77. See Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga,” 325–26; “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 38–39; Frants, “Vosstanie v Kengire,” 105–6; Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:298–99; GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 273.
78. “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 44–45. The authorities also cut off electric power to the zone. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 226.
79. “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 54.
80. Ibid., 55.
81. Ibid., 56.
82. From Kuznetsov’s declaration three days after the end of the uprising. “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 64–65. Early in the course of the uprising, Soviet officials believed that former OUN members were leading the events. Ibid., 40–41.
83. Kuznetsov asserted that the departments were created by the conspiracy center and without his agreement. Ibid., 66. An elaborate organizational chart of all the departments and subdepartments among the prisoners was prepared during the course of the MVD’s investigation of the uprising. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 18.
84. Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga,” 328; AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova, ll. 115, 117; Iakovenko, “Osuzhden po 58-i,” 71; Kekushev, Zveriada, 133; “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 56, 71. There is no evidence that the prisoners were actually successful at laying minefields.
85. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova, l. 117.
86. “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 67. Riewe reported that it was informers and all of the recently arrived criminals who were placed in an internal prison during the uprising. Riewe interview, TNA PRO FO 371/122936, N S1551/6, 17. Solzhenitsyn stated that only four prisoners were arrested and placed in the internal prison. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:315. It seems unlikely that the number was so low. The Kazakh Supreme Court verdict asserted that “more than forty” were arrested. The verdict included a partial list of family names of the arrested (fewer than forty, but more than four)—individuals who presumably provided evidentiary testimony of their arrest and beating. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova, ll. 114–15, 117. For a similar list, see GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 34. While such testimony could certainly have been falsified, neither Solzhenitsyn nor Kuznetsov denied the existence of the prison.
87. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:316–17.
88. Treating prisoners as an integral part of Soviet society was a common practice throughout the history of the Gulag. It is somewhat surprising, though, given the ferocity of the anti-Soviet actions of these particular prisoners. This was not mere ritual incantation but rather evidence of the Gulag officials’ confidence that they could break even the fiercest resisters, bending them toward compliance with Soviet norms.
89. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:316–17. For many of the radio appeals, see GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228. For a number of excerpts, see Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga,” 331–32.
90. “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 44–45. On the prisoners’ demands, see below.
91. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, ll. 113–14.
92. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:306 (emphasis removed).
93. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, ll. 60–61.
94. I thank the anonymous reviewer of my Slavic Review article for suggesting this line of interpretation.
95. Quoted in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 71.
96. Quoted in ibid., l. 136.
97. Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga,” 331; Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:322; “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 48; GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, ll. 63, 72–74; Frants, “Vosstanie v Kengire,” 105; Batoian, in Soprotivlenie v Gulage, 98; Kekushev, Zveriada, 133. Here again, the numbers vary widely. Solzhenitsyn wrote that only “about a dozen” prisoners exited the camp during the uprising, while Frants testified that some 160 prisoners who did not want to join the uprising were sent out of the camp during the rebellion’s first days. Batoian wrote of “several hundred” who left the camp, while Kekushev stated that it was only the camp “aristocracy” who fled the zone during the uprising.
98. Quoted in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 75.
99. Quoted in ibid., ll. 82–83. The comparison of the commission to the Gestapo is echoed in another prisoner’s radio address. Ibid., l. 137.
100. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:294.
101. Quoted in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 100.
102. Ibid., l. 166.
103. From Kuznetsov’s testimony. “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 69. Solzhenitsyn confirms Kuznetsov’s account, writing that Sluchenkov told others that he had been urged “to provoke a racial bloodbath” to provide an excuse for liquidating the uprising by force. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:314.
104. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova, l. 65.
105. Quoted in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, ll. 146–47. The speech is transcribed in Russian. It is not clear whether the speaker delivered the speech in Russian or Ukrainian.
106. “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 44–45.
107. See, for example, ibid., 37–38.
108. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:306.
109. Quoted in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, ll. 102–6.
110. On such rapes, see Burds, “Gender and Policing.” I thank the anonymous reviewer for my Slavic Review article for suggesting the significance of this bitter irony.
111. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:318n6.
112. Ibid., 3:306n5. On the investigations following the uprising, see Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga,” 324. For the report of a female Kengir prisoner, see Bershadskaia, Rastoptannye zhizni, 83.
113. TNA PRO FO 371/122936, N S1551/6, 18.
114. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova l. 114; “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 60, 73.
115. Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga,” 330; AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova, ll. 114–15; Kekushev, Zveriada, 132–34; Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:316–17, 319; “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 53, 73; GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 31. It appears that the radio transmitter was never successfully built.
116. “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 73.
117. For a list of demands, see “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 42. With few exceptions, the list is confirmed in Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga,” 326; Iakovenko, “Osuzhden po 58-i,” 71; Frants, “Vosstanie v Kengire,” 105; “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 39; Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:311–12.
118. Graziosi’s study of the uprisings in Vorkuta and Noril’sk showed that the prisoners’ political programs were generally of a socialist orientation. He found this orientation not too surprising, given that the Gulag authorities consistently treated their prisoners as workers, particularly after the introduction of wages for prisoners in 1950. Graziosi, “The Great Strikes of 1953,” 428.
119. Their faith also recalls long Russian traditions of resistance not against the tsar but in the name of the tsar. This is particularly intriguing given the absence of such traditions among the nationalists. I thank the anonymous reviewer of my Slavic Review article for suggesting the latter point.
120. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:297. For similar accounts, see Bershadskaia, Rastoptannye zhizni, 86; TNA PRO FO 371/122936, N S1551/6, 17.
121. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:302–3. Solzhenitsyn identifies the quote’s source as the notes of Makeev, a fellow member of the prisoners’ commission. As the next section on Kuznetsov will demonstrate, the sentiment is consistent with everything that we know about Kuznetsov.
122. Ibid., 3:303. The sign greeting the Soviet constitution is confirmed in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 136. See also Kekushev, Zveriada, 134.
123. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, ll. 194–95. For a similar transcript from June 24, see ibid., ll. 209–12. The range of the broadcast signal is unclear, but the transcript is filled with ellipses, apparently designating points at which the reception was so weak or the volume so low that the MVD transcribers could not decode what was being said.
124. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:301, 313. Bershadskaia writes that the prisoners had been allowed to remove their numbers earlier in 1954. Bershadskaia, Rastoptannye zhizni, 80. On religious services in camp during the uprising, see GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 280.
125. Bershadskaia, Rastoptannye zhizni, 91–92. One wonders whether the Russian prisoners truly sang the Ukrainian hymn.
126. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:312.
127. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova, ll. 4–5b, 13–15.
128. Ibid., ll. 60–61. Applebaum, then, is quite wrong, when she writes of Kuznetsov, “If these accusations are true, they help explain his behavior during the strike. Having played the part of turncoat once, he would have been well prepared to play a double role once again.” She, like Solzhenitsyn, is quite unable to accept that a prisoner could have been pro-Soviet but also a leader of the uprising. Applebaum, Gulag, 498.
129. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova, ll. 20, 42. The file does not contain information on his time at Dubrovlag or the reason for his transfer to Steplag.
130. Frants, “Vosstanie v Kengire,” 105. No other witnesses and no documents in Kuznetsov’s file speak of the reason for his incarceration in the camp’s internal prison, yet the fact that he was in the internal prison when the uprising began is indicated by several witnesses and confirmed by authorities in numerous documents.
131. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:302.
132. For a similar statement made by a prisoner at a different Steplag subdivision, see GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 162.
133. Kekushev, Zveriada, 136.
134. A caveat is in order here. In his appeals and declarations to Soviet authorities, Kuznetsov certainly had significant incentive to downplay his role in the uprising as much as possible. Nonetheless, as we will see, many different sources place the true power of the uprising in the hands of the criminals and nationalists rather than with Kuznetsov.
135. “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 52.
136. Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga,” 328.
137. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova, ll. 116, 122.
138. Ibid., l. 114.
139. Ibid.; Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:313–14.
140. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:306. This may seem to be an exaggeration by Solzhenitsyn, placing his own words in the mouth of his story’s hero, but a similar statement made by a prisoner in a different Steplag subdivision during the same period of time is recorded in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 168. Furthermore, the statement fits with Sluchenkov’s radical, outspoken nature, which emerges from other sources.
141. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 166.
142. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova, l. 118.
143. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:304.
144. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova, ll. 148b, 178–80.
145. Ibid., ll. 149, 208–9.
146. Ibid., l. 209b. Kuznetsov never made this claim before 1959.
147. Ibid., 208–9. Kuznetsov’s version is supported by Craveri’s oral interviews with two former prisoners and Batoian’s memoirs. Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga,” 326.
148. “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 66; Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga,” 327; Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:313.
149. Quoted in GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 131.
150. Quoted in AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova, ll. 212–15. Kuznetsov attached these excerpts from Sluchenkov’s appeal to his own appeal against his sentence. How he gained access to this material is not clear, although he did state that he had not seen it before 1958.
151. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova, l. 210.
152. Weiner suggestively offers the idea of a “community of blood, a fighting family, that overpowers ethnic and ideologically imposed divisions” to bring together veterans, regardless of their side in the war. Weiner, Making Sense of War, 378. Interestingly, Sluchenkov and Keller sometimes referred to Kuznetsov, perhaps sarcastically, as “tovarishch voennyi” (comrade serviceman). “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 72.
153. It is no accident that the prisoners’ military department created subdivisions modeled on the practices of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 279.
154. Ibid., ll. 9, 33.
155. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova, ll. 122–23.
156. Ibid., ll. 124, 131.
157. “Vosstanie v Steplage,” 43n4; Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga,” 334.
158. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, d. Kuznetsova, ll. 130, 132–35, 141, 147, 160.
159. Ibid., ll. 263–64, 272.
160. For a complete review of the changes made after the Kengir uprising, see Craveri, “Krizis Gulaga.”
161. Iakovenko, “Osuzhden po 58-i,” 71.
162. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 228, l. 286.
163. TNA PRO FO 371/122936, N S1551/6, 18.
164. It is worth recalling that Kotkin’s notion of speaking Bolshevik did not demand that Soviet citizens believe, just that they “participate as if [they] believed.” Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 220.
165. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:486. Ivanova also has noted a “certain humanization of the camp system” during this period. Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism, 66.
166. RGANI, f. 89, per. 55, dok. 28, l. 16. This did not prevent the closing of Steplag in May 1956, however, as discussed below.
167. Kekushev, Zveriada, 143.
168. Quoted in TNA PRO FO 371/122936, N S1551/6, 10, 13.
169. For MVD Kruglov’s speech, see Aleksandr Kokurin and Nikolai Petrov, eds., GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 1917–1960 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia,” 2000), 664–65. See also Riewe interview, TNA PRO FO 371/122936, N S1551/6, 11–13.
170. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:485–88. Note that prisoners began to be paid for their labor in 1950. See Simon Ertz, “Trading Effort for Freedom: Workday Credits in the Stalinist Camp System,” Comparative Economic Studies 47, no. 2 (2005): 476–91.
171. Quoted in AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 24 pr., d. 105, l. 232.
172. For just a couple other examples, see AOTsPSI, f. Peschanlaga, arkhivnoe lichnoe delo 24988 (Navitskas, Petras s. Antanasa), ll. 39, 45; AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, arkhivnoe lichnoe delo 475746 (Novikova, Evdokiia Arsent’evna), ll. 16–17, 40, 47.
173. Numerous decrees led to the release of different categories of inmates. I will not review them all here. For seven different decrees from 1954, see Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 436.
174. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1398, ll. 14–22, in Khrestomatiia po otechestvennoi istorii, 50–54.
175. Adler, The Gulag Survivor, 192. The number may appear at first glance impossible, given the camp and colony population of 2.4 million in 1953. Yet it is likely correct, as prisoner releases were counterbalanced to some degree by new prisoner arrivals.
176. The decree allowed for the review of all convictions of counterrevolutionary crimes by extrajudicial authorities (primarily by the MVD organs), with the exception of those convicted of crimes committed while in the camps. For the total release figure, see Adler, The Gulag Survivor, 21–22. For the order itself, see E. A. Zaitsev, ed., Sbornik zakonodatel’nykh i normativnykh aktov o repressiiakh i reabilitatsii zhertv politicheskikh repressii (Moscow: Respublika, 1993), 78–80.
177. For the amnesty, see Kiselev and Shchagin, Khrestomatiia po otechestvennoi istorii, 270–71.
178. For the translation, see Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism, 68. For the ukaz itself, see Zaitsev, Sbornik zakonodatel’nykh i normativnykh aktov, 80–81.
179. Adler, The Gulag Survivor, 169–70.
180. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:490. I have been able to find no confirmation either that prisoners were obliged to admit their guilt or that those who refused to do so were refused release. Nonetheless, one can certainly imagine individual local commissions operating in just such a fashion in which a refusal to admit one’s guilt was taken as evidence of continued hostility to the Soviet system and thus providing a continued necessity to detain the prisoner.
181. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 7 s. s. pr., d. 165, ll. 177–78. Of course, it is unclear to what extent any of these provisions were fulfilled.
182. See ibid., arkhivnoe lichnoe delo 475746 (Novikova, Evdokiia Arsent’evna), ll. 4b, 7, 14, 17, 40, 41, 49.
183. For these official notices of release, see, for example, one case in which the issue of the prisoner’s guilt was not addressed but her labor and behavior was: ibid., f. Steplaga, arkhivnoe lichnoe delo 12641 (Rinkevichute, Adelia d. Povilo), l. 104; see also another case in which the prisoner was determined not to have committed the alleged crime, but his labor and behavior were still taken into consideration in his release: ibid., f. Peschanlaga, arkhivnoe lichnoe delo 24988 (Navitskas, Petras s. Antanasa), l. 51.
184. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 314. On Gulag memoirists’ frequent reticence to write about their release and life after release, see Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
185. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 316, 318, 324.
186. GARF, f. 9401, op. 1a, d. 568, l. 11
187. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 4 s. pr., d. 143, ll. 93–94.
188. Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 3:366.
189. On the closing of numerous camps and camp subdivisions throughout this period, see the individual entries in Mikhail Borisovich Smirnov, Sistema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR 1923–1960: Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ia, 1998).
190. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1398, ll. 14–22, in Khrestomatiia po otechestvennoi istorii, 50–54; Adler, The Gulag Survivor, 169, 192.
191. Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme totalitarnogo gosudarstva (Moscow: Moskovskii obshchestvennyi nauchnyi fond, 1997), 66. For a more detailed discussion of this shift in focus, see the concluding section below.
192. GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 646, l. 15. The entire Kazakh Republic housed over 940,000 exiled adults and children. Ibid., l. 6.
193. Broken down by their locale of residence, 43,751 were in the city of Karaganda, 5,536 in the city of Balkhash, 6,413 in the city of Temir-Tau, 2,666 in the city of Dzhezkazgan, 3,991 in the city of Saran’, 7,984 in the Osokarovskii raion (district), 6,553 in the Tel’manskii raion, 2,505 in the Nurinskii raion, 3,563 in the Zhana-Arkinskii raion, 1,718 in the Karkaralinskii raion, 1,592 in the Voroshilovskii raion, 1,418 in the Shetskii raion, 180 in the Kuvskii raion, 235 in the Kounradskii raion, 1,487 in the Karsakpaiskii raion, 116 in the Ulu-Tauskii raion, and 956 in the settlement of Akchatau. Twenty-four thousand of the over 47,000 German exiles lived in the city of Karaganda, along with 4,658 of the 5,877 OUN members, 11,331 of the 29,046 exiles from the Caucasus, and 1,769 of the 2,036 exiled Poles. Ibid., d. 847, ll. 109–10.
194. Ibid., d. 847, l. 115.
195. Ibid., ll. 116–17.
196. Viktor N. Zemskov, “Massovoe osvobozhdenie spetsposelentsev i ssyl’nykh (1954–1960 gg.),” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, no. 1 (1991): 10, 14. For a petition for release from exile by a group of students according to this law, see GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 847, l. 5.
197. GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 847, ll. 116–17. On this law, see also Adler, The Gulag Survivor, 88. According to Zemskov, a total of over 117,000, including over 105,000 Soviet Germans and nearly 12,000 former kulaks, were released from exile throughout the Soviet Union under this act. See Zemskov, “Massovoe,” 14. It is a bit unusual that over 4,000 of the nearly 12,000 released former kulaks were in the Karaganda region. On the mobilized Germans, see chapter 4 herein.
198. Zemskov, “Massovoe,” 10. For the text of the decision, see Zaitsev, Sbornik zakonodatel’nykh i normativnykh aktov, 127–28.
199. Zemskov, “Massovoe,” 10–11. An instruction of the USSR general procurator from July 20, 1954 detailed these provisions of the Council of Ministers’ decision. Zaitsev, Sbornik zakonodatel’nykh i normativnykh aktov, 126–27.
200. Quoted in GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 847, ll. 118–20.
201. Quoted in ibid., ll. 121–22.
202. Quoted in ibid., l. 123.
203. Ibid., ll. 135–36.
204. Ibid., ll. 105–7.
205. On the formation of special strict-regime divisions exclusively for Chechen and Ingush prisoners in zone 2 of the Spassk camp division of Karlag, see AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 4 s. pr., d. 143, ll. 90–91. Interestingly, the 1956 order also dealt with the isolation of ill inmates, transferring all Karlag invalid prisoners sentenced for common, nonserious crimes to a special invalid section in zone 2 of the Spassk camp division. The official justification was the desire to improve “sanitary-prophylactic measures” and free the camp divisions from the necessity to care for invalids. The order also encouraged the further separation of prisoners with venereal diseases from among the invalids in accord with a Karlag order of December 1955. See also ibid., sv. 7 s. s. pr., d. 165, ll. 203–4.
206. GARF, f. 9401, op. 1a, d. 531, ll. 468–69.
207. The event is merely mentioned in a related order from 1956. See AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 4 s. pr., d. 143, l. 147.
208. Ibid., sv. 5 s. pr., d. 147, ll. 164–65.
209. Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 98–99, 106–7. Werth states Kazakhstan and Kirghizia were the areas considered for these permanent settlements. Werth, “The Chechen Problem,” 362.
210. GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 847, ll. 133–34.
211. Ibid., ll. 2a, 65–66. Similar were the cases of Efim Nikolaevich Brizhko and his wife, whose nationality was changed from German to Ukrainian. As such, they were released from exile in Karaganda. Ibid., ll. 4, 68. Also, the mother and daughter Gerta Iulevna Beliakova and Valentina Mikhailovna Beliakova had their nationality changed from Germans to Estonian and Russian, respectively. Ibid., l. 64.
212. Ibid., ll. 43–44.
213. Ibid., l. 75.
214. Ibid., l. 38, 40. Other invalid exiles were allowed to join their families. See, for example, Abel Abkarovich Khachuturian, who was permitted to leave Karaganda to join his family in the Altai Krai. Ibid., l. 52.
215. See, for example, the cases of Matson, Remizova, and Nelep, all German citizens of the USSR exiled to Karaganda from Moscow in 1941, all invalids without family members in a place of exile, and all of whom had requested release to return to Moscow, where they would be taken in as dependents by family members. Their petition was denied. Ibid., l. 54.
216. Ibid., l. 46.
217. See, for example, Liubov’ Antonovna Khorosh, a Greek exiled in 1944 from Crimea to Karaganda. Ibid., l. 47. On other family members of the OUN, see the denial of release to the Stefinin family exiled from Ukraine to Karaganda in 1947. Ibid., l. 50.
218. Ibid., ll. 88–89. Compare also the release of the Grube family from Karaganda due to their health and advanced age, despite their lack of relatives in exile with whom they could live. The defining factor may have been the petition for their release originated with a letter from K. L. Zelinskii to Voroshilov in October 1954. Ibid., l. 85.
219. Zemskov, “Massovoe,” 10, 14. According to Zemskov, over thirteen thousand were released under the decree of May 1955, while over forty-five thousand were released under the November decree. In March 1956, release was extended to family members of those released under the decree of November 1955, encompassing nearly thirty-three thousand additional releases.
220. Ibid., 13–14. Unionwide, these releases totaled over fifteen thousand.
221. Ibid., 14, 19–20. Over sixty thousand were released under this provision. For the order itself, see ibid.; Zaitsev, Sbornik zakonodatel’nykh i normativnykh aktov, 47.
222. RGANI f. 89, per. 18, d. 26, ll. 1–5; see also Afanas’ev, et al., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, 1:595–97.
223. See Zemskov, “Massovoe,” 14, 20; Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 129.
224. Zemskov, “Massovoe,” 16–18. According to Zemskov, over 25 percent of the Chechen, Ingush, and Karachai exiles in Kazakhstan refused to sign. The secretary of the Karaganda regional committee (obkom) noted that they attempted to educate the newly released Soviet German exiles on the significance of the release decree with the hope of mobilizing their support for completion of the Sixth Five-Year Plan, and “to fix them in their current place of residence and work.” As many of them had their own private homes, with only a few exceptions, they seemed, he wrote, quite inclined to stay put. See T. B. Mitropol’skaia and I. N. Bukhanova, Iz istorii nemtsev Kazakhstana, 1921–1975 gg.: Sbornik dokumentov (Almaty, Kazkhstan: Gotika, 1997), 211–12.
225. RGANI, f. 89, per. 61, dok. 13, ll. 2–7.
226. Some 46,790 Soviet German exiles were released in the Karaganda Oblast’ on the basis of the decree of December 13, 1955. See Mitropol’skaia and Bukhanova, Iz istorii nemtsev Kazakhstana, 211.
227. Zemskov, “Massovoe,” 15; Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 89–90. For the 1955 release, the 1964 disavowal of their “guilt,” and the 1972 decision allowing them to choose freely their place of residence, see Vladimir A. Auman and Valentina G. Chebotareva, eds., Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh (1763–1992 gg.) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi institut gumanitarnykh programm, 1993), 177–79. For one Soviet German woman’s experience of exile and release in the Karaganda region, see Berta Bachmann, Memories of Kazakhstan: A Report on the Life Experiences of a German Woman in Russia (Lincoln, NE: American Historical Society of Germans, 1983), especially 78.
228. Zemskov, “Massovoe,” 16.
229. For the order on the release of the Kalmyks, with its specific denial of their right to return to their homes, see RGANI, f. 89, per. 61, dok. 12, l. 2.
230. Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System, 118. For the release order, see GARF, f. 9401, op. 1a, d. 568, ll. 6–7.
231. Ibid., ll. 338–39.
232. For the data on all these releases, see Zemskov, “Massovoe,” 14; see also Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System.
233. Zemskov, “Massovoe,” 18–25. Zemskov had no data for the number of exiles remaining after 1960, the point at which the MVD materials in GARF stop.
234. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 316. On prisoners staying near the location of their imprisonment after their release, see Adler, The Gulag Survivor, 231–33.
235. Riewe interview, TNA PRO FO 371/122936, N S1551/6, 6.
236. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 317.
237. Ibid., 319.
238. In an interesting yet problematically limited book, Adler discusses these difficulties in some depth. Unfortunately, Adler’s study is almost exclusively focused on political prisoners, missing the important and different experiences of both nationalists and ordinary criminals after the Gulag. Adler, The Gulag Survivor.
239. GARF, f. 9479, op. 1, d. 847, ll. 186–87.
240. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 171.
241. Adler, The Gulag Survivor, 175. The similarities to the KGB recommendations in 1962 for “strengthening the struggle of the security organs against hostile manifestations by anti-soviet elements” in the wake of the major strike at Novocherkassk are telling, indicating a long-entrenched Soviet mind-set that did not disappear in the late 1950s. As Baron writes, “Among other things, surveillance of released convicts and nationalist and religious elements was to be stepped up.” Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union, 92.
242. Adler, The Gulag Survivor, 29.
243. Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme, 68.
244. Adler, The Gulag Survivor, 219. Consider also her statement, “Thus far we have explored a number of psychological and emotional reasons why former zeks would seek CPSU membership or reinstatement but put very simply and pragmatically, Party membership made Soviet life a lot easier.” Ibid., 223.
245. Quoted in RGASPI, f. 560, op. 1, d. 32, l. 2b. For this along with other typescript and handwritten memoirs and letters, see RGASPI, f. 560. This sentiment echoes that of Ginzburg.
246. Figes has a good discussion of this. Figes, The Whisperers, 535–96.
247. For an insightful discussion of the reception of the publication, see Kozlov, “The Readers of Novyi Mir,” 301–61.
248. Dolgun with Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story, 319.
249. For an NKVD document from 1945 on this practice and a KGB directive from 1955 confirming its continuation, see Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 133, 163. A KGB document from April 1956 provides allowance for these deaths to be registered at ZAGS. RGANI, f. 89, per. 18, dok. 35, ll. 1–2.
250. See AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, arkhivnoe lichnoe delo 275643 (Valeev, Kanzafar Mufazalovich). The letter to his daughter is in the front of the file without a page number while the official death certificate is in ibid., l. 24–24b.
251. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:494.
252. See Adler, The Gulag Survivor, 24, 177, 193.
253. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 173, quoting Vladimir Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1958–65), 26:372.
254. RGANI, f. 89, per. 55, dok. 28, l. 17.
255. For the report, see GARF, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 479, ll. 388–99; see also Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 165. For the report and the proposed reorganization, see RGANI, f. 89, per. 16, dok. 1, ll. 4–36.
256. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 165. The complete isolation of prisoners considered to be the most harmful element in the camps harks back to the creation of the special camps for political prisoners in 1948.
257. Ibid., 167. The report noted that 517 prisoners were murdered in 1954 and another 240 were murdered in 1955.
258. Ibid., 165.
259. Ibid., 170.
260. See Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme, 67. For the report, see RGANI, f. 89, per. 18, dok. 36, ll. 1–4.
261. GARF, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 505, ll. 302–29, in Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 208.
262. AOTsPSI, f. Karlaga, sv. 7 s. s. pr., d. 165, ll. 203–4.
263. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 209–10. For more on the battle with criminal gangs, see Federico Varese, “The Society of the Vory-v-zakone, 1930s–1950s,” Cahiers du Monde russe 39, no. 4 (1998): 515–38.
264. Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG: (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 209–10. Over the course of 1957–58, a mere 7,115 prisoners escaped (well under 1 in 200 per year), and only 135 (less than 2 percent of the escapees) were never apprehended. As throughout Gulag’s history, even these low figures were sharply criticized.
265. Ibid., 211.
266. Ibid., 212.
267. Ibid., 211.
268. Ibid., 443–46. The percentages on January 1, 1956 and January 1, 1960, respectively, were 58.8 and 68.8 percent for Russians, 17.1 and 10.9 percent for Ukrianians, 3.8 and 2.7 percent for Belarusians, 2.2 and 0.9 percent for Lithuanians, 1.4 and 0.6 percent for Latvians, and 1.1 and 0.4 percent for Estonians. The percentages for all other nationalities were essentially unchanged.
CONCLUSION
1. V. P. Popov, “Gosudarstvennyi terror v sovetskoi Rossii, 1923–1953 gg. (istochniki i ikh interpretatsiia),” Otechestvennye Arkhivy, no. 2 (1992): 21.
2. Halfin makes a similar point, observing, “High expectations generated enormous anxiety: now that society had been declared perfect, only the individual could be blamed for negative actions.” Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 244.