While Early Students of Soviet history certainly identified terror as perhaps the definitive characteristic of the Soviet polity, their abiding conviction that a sentence in the Gulag represented death inhibited serious study of life within the Gulag. Even for those few scholars who sought methodically to understand life in the Gulag, the camp was little more than a site of exploitation and inevitable death. While terror, and the Gulag as an integral part of that terror, found itself at the center of early conceptualizations of the Soviet experience, the prisoner was thoroughly marginalized from understandings of the revolutionary transformation of society.1
Scholars of the Gulag have understood its emergence and role in the Soviet Union primarily in three distinct yet overlapping ways, emphasizing in turn the economic, the political, and the moral. While no scholar offers a monocausal explanation of the Gulag, they have typically placed particular stress on one of these factors. The economic understanding posits the Gulag as essentially a slave labor system emerging as a result of Stalin’s crash industrialization policies.2 Even proponents of this approach understand its limitations. The camp system was far from economically efficient, even in the world of inefficient Soviet industry.3 Arrests occurred chaotically and inefficiently, catching camp administrators unaware and unprepared. Arrests were not limited to healthy young men who could withstand work in the Gulag’s harsh climates but also included women, children, the elderly, and invalids. Anne Applebaum, for instance, notes that the economic “illogic” of the mass arrests have led “many to conclude that arrests were carried out primarily to eliminate Stalin’s perceived enemies, and only secondarily to fill Stalin’s camps.” Like many others before her, Applebaum argues that the explanations are not “entirely mutually exclusive either. Stalin might well have intended his arrests both to eliminate enemies and to create slave laborers.”4 Nonetheless, she generally adopts the economic motive for understanding the Gulag. This book, a careful study of life inside the Gulag’s institutions, will show the limitations of the economic understanding of the Soviet penal system. Many aspects of Gulag administration on the day-to-day level belie any economic rationality, and point to the camps as penal institutions concerned with differentiating and evaluating their prisoners, with important secondary concerns about the economy.
The political understanding of the Gulag sees the system, in Robert Conquest’s classic formulation, as not primarily a means of economic exploitation but rather “politically efficient. They effectively isolated masses of potential troublemakers, and were a great disincentive to any sort of anti-Stalinist activity, or even talk.”5 Conquest’s portrayal of life in the camps amounts to a slow, steady march toward death. Prisoners were worked as hard as possible and given a precisely measured amount of food to guarantee that they would not survive. On this regimen they inevitably reached “the last stage in the camps,” when “debilitated to the degree that no serious work could any longer be got out of them, prisoners were put on sub-starvation rations and allowed to hang around the camp doing odd jobs until they died.”6 The labor camps, in this political understanding, were really “death” camps. Few made it out alive. As Conquest writes, “Releases were very rare, and survival until the post-Stalin amnesties rarer still. The length of sentence . . . made little difference. . . . Upon the expiration of a sentence, it was usual for prisoners to be called before a Special Section officer and given a few more years.”7 No doubt the camps were intended to remove those deemed unfit or dangerous from Soviet society, but with the benefit of archival access that was denied to scholars of Conquest’s generation, we know that substantial percentages of the Gulag population were released to return to Soviet society. What are we to make of these people? This book will carefully evaluate that question.
Finally, we come to the moral interpretation, which lies at the heart of the work that forms the foundation of Gulag studies: Solzhenitsyn’s multivolume “experiment in literary investigation,” The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn’s work remains the most comprehensive available study of everyday life in the Gulag. The achievements of The Gulag Archipelago are perhaps more amazing today than when it was first published. Solzhenitsyn completed extensive research through oral history, circulated underground (samizdat) manuscripts, and prepared his lengthy texts despite the significant personal danger of doing so. Notwithstanding these limitations on Solzhenitsyn’s ability to work freely, his work remains unparalleled in the attempt to integrate an understanding of Gulag daily life into the broader context of Soviet and world history. No other work comes near the depth of his psychological probing of the Gulag experience.8 Even Applebaum’s more approachable catalog of Gulag suffering, though modeled on The Gulag Archipelago, pales in comparison to Solzhenitsyn’s multifaceted work.
Throughout the present study, I call on Solzhenitsyn’s insights extensively but cautiously. His work is problematic in some ways, particularly because it does not fall strictly in the genre of the historical monograph; rather, it is a combination of genres—documentary history, memoir, oral history, literature, and political-moral polemic. His sources and personal experience are especially valuable for their presentation of the prisoner’s view of life inside the corrective labor camps. Alternative sources confirm most of his conclusions about the living conditions in the camps.9 Nonetheless, his sources were less accurate in their speculations about the number and socioethnic makeup of the camp population.
The Gulag Archipelago, however, must be approached not just as a primary source but also as a work of history that stakes out a strong position on the moral significance of the Gulag. In Solzhenitsyn’s analysis, the spread of the Gulag represents the triumph of immorality cloaked in the justification of ideology.
Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad . . . so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. . . . Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.10
Ideology in The Gulag Archipelago is devoid of all constructive content. It lacks all relationship to ideas and worldviews, and is reduced to an empty “justification” for evildoing. For Solzhenitsyn, human nature contains an evil, dark side. Ideology effaces any checks on that evil, and the Gulag is the direct consequence.
In terms of reconciling the economic, political, and moral interpretations, the opening of the former Soviet archives has yielded mixed results to date. Much of the first decade of archival access was spent chasing the headline-gathering issue of the total number of victims, with little consideration for the role played by this system of victimization in the first place. Otherwise, scholars have often focused on extremely narrow questions, avoiding broad conceptual issues. The tide is fortunately beginning to turn.11 Of particular significance is Oleg Khlevniuk’s The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror.12 Simultaneously a monograph and a publication of documents, the book benefits from Khlevniuk’s careful and studied hand at working through the documents. Unfortunately the book limits itself to the 1930s, and because of its documentary nature does not seek to integrate memoirs into the story of the Gulag. Still, it makes a number of important contributions to our understanding of the camp system and its relationship to the highest levels of Soviet power. Lynne Viola’s recent The Unknown Gulag: The lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements is the definitive study of the Gulag exile system in the 1930s.13 In particular, she reveals the critical role of collectivization and de-kulakization in the initial mass growth of the Gulag. A wide variety of local studies have appeared in recent years. While each is a significant study in its own right, none seek a full conceptualization of the entire Gulag system.14 Finally, a group of young scholars working under the leadership of the economist Paul Gregory has been poring over the Gulag archives in an effort to understand the economic operation of the camp system. This group’s insights, published in The Economics of Forced Labor in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, have shed light on the inefficiencies and economic idiocy of the camp system.15 But the exclusive focus on economics is frequently too limited a framework to understand all the workings of the Gulag, as will be apparent throughout the present work.
To this day, the most important archival-based revelation remains a preliminary study by J. Arch Getty, Gábor Tamás Rittersporn, and Viktor N. Zemskov. Their study showed, among other things, that the Gulag had a revolving door with approximately 20 percent of inmates released every year.16 The Gulag was not a death chamber, as at least some Gulag inmates were deemed fit for release. The ramifications of this discovery needed to be pursued. If some inmates were going to be released back into Soviet society, how was it decided who would be released and who would not, and what, if anything, were Soviet penal authorities doing to make their inmates ready for release?
The present study seeks to understand the role played by the Gulag in the construction of a socialist society and the new Soviet person. In this respect, I examine the ever-evolving relationship among Bolshevik ideology, historical circumstances, and the institutions, practices, and identities of the Gulag. Ideology in this case reflects Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the phenomenon. It refers to an idea (or a worldview) and the logic of its application to understanding and transforming the course of history.17 Ideology in this sense is neither pejorative nor artificial. It is not a false consciousness foisted on an exploited class by their exploiters to hide the very fact of their exploitation. It is not, as Solzhenitsyn would have it, an empty vessel that “gives evildoing its long-sought justification.” And it is not an ex post facto justification for institutions created and maintained for more utilitarian reasons.18 Ideology as used here is a vision of what a society should become and the nature of the methods to realize that vision. Ideology is not a road map, and it is not some genetic code that can be deciphered as the key to understand a regime’s every action. Ideology does not operate in a vacuum. It is more than some ethereal theory worked out by intellectuals and divorced from real life. Ideology operates in real historical circumstances. It shapes and is shaped by the responses to those circumstances. Ideology makes certain responses to historical circumstances more likely and other responses less likely.
While ideology played a significant role in the development of the Soviet Gulag, this book does not seek to reduce its explanatory framework to the “primacy of ideology” but rather attempts to take up Michael David-Fox’s call for “multi-dimensional conceptual frameworks” in the field of Soviet history.19 The Gulag, after all, cannot be understood and explained merely by reference to the tenets of Marxism or Bolshevism. The Gulag emerged as the concrete historical response to a number of contingent factors, including the tsarist experience with forced labor, the late nineteenth-century invention of the concentration camp, the crime and chaos of a period of revolution and civil war, and the attempt to industrialize rapidly a backward peasant economy to prepare it for an anticipated war with capitalist powers. Furthermore, Bolshevik ideology was not constant and unchanging. It changed over time. It was interpreted and expressed in different ways by different historical actors. Yet Bolshevik ideology performed a meaningful part in the Gulag’s development. Bolshevik visions—of creating a perfect society, struggle as the motive force of history, enemies blocking the path to and contaminating utopia, labor as the defining feature of humanity, and criminality as created by social conditions—all combined with historical circumstances to make the creation and mass expansion of the Gulag possible. Here in the Gulag, in this secretive and lethal corner of the Soviet enterprise, ideology mattered, and if it mattered here, it mattered everywhere.
In this book I refer frequently to Belomor, the celebratory volume on the early 1930s’ construction of the White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal by Soviet concentration camp prisoners.20 Belomor was without question a work of propaganda, and it has been rightly condemned for whitewashing the brutality and death that accompanied the canal’s construction. The volume offers a series of anecdotes about the alleged “reforging” and reclamation of Belomor prisoners through Soviet forced labor.21 Nonetheless, the least interesting thing we can learn about the Belomor is that it is a work of propaganda. This is too obvious. Much can still be gleaned from exploring the type of whitewashing that it represents. Soviet authorities could have withheld forced labor from public view entirely. Certainly by the later 1930s, Soviet authorities simply refused to speak publicly about the Gulag. In the early 1930s, however, they not only spoke about it but also celebrated it. The book was immediately translated into English and offers up Soviet forced labor as the very forefront of world penal practice.
The volume is something of an ideal-type presentation of early Stalinist penal ideology. In many ways, it set the terms of ideological discussion about penal labor in the Soviet Union. Despite the fact that Soviet authorities would shut down public discussion of forced labor, the present book reveals how works like Belomor continued to appear throughout the Gulag’s history inside the camps whether in camp newspapers, like Karlag’s Putevka, or in special publications stamped “for use inside camps only.” While the Gulag was increasingly hidden from public view, such that open publication of works like Belomor at home and abroad, or national subscriptions to camp newspapers like that of the Solovetsky labor camp in the 1920s, ended by the mid-1930s, these types of materials were not the product of a single moment, a temporary belief in the malleability of the criminal. The continued appearance of these materials within the camps reveals a much more complex relationship with the subject of individual redeemability. Throughout this book, then, I compare the presentation in Belomor and these other volumes of propaganda to the real institutions, practices, and identities developed in the Gulag and Karaganda’s Gulag in particular, thereby facilitating the evaluation of ideology’s impact on the development of the Gulag and the Soviet polity at large. Gulag history was marked by a series of crises, competing demands from central and local Soviet authorities, and frequent cynicism about the institution’s reeducation mandate. The present book shows how ideology interacted with these elements to produce an especially Soviet penal institution that played an integral role in the construction of a Soviet civilization.22
Even though I will show the complexity surrounding the possibility of prisoner rehabilitation in Belomor and other works in this redemption genre, these were far from the final words on Soviet ideology related to its prisoner population. Also important was the constant propaganda barrage aimed at Gulag camp guards and employees emphasizing the dangerous as well as treasonous nature of their prisoner population. These sometimes-conflicting messages—of prisoner reformability and prisoner danger—animated Gulag activity. As I will demonstrate, the death of prisoners was always accepted as part and parcel of the work of the camp system. This presented yet another challenge to the notion of the prisoner as redeemable. Thus, Belomor, with only a single prisoner death recorded in its pages, is only a partial account of the ideological frameworks shaping the Gulag along with the relations of its authorities and prisoners. Yet given the constant release of a significant portion of the Gulag population throughout the institution’s history, it is quite clear that redeemability, at least for some segment of the prisoner population, was never totally abandoned.
A term in the Gulag would appear to epitomize the prisoner’s total marginalization from Soviet society. After all, the Gulag was quite literally in the margins. While Gulag institutions existed throughout the Soviet Union, its largest and most notorious outposts populated extreme geographic regions of the Soviet Union; Solovki, Vorkuta, Noril’sk, and Kolyma from west to east delineated the Soviet northern border, while other Gulag facilities—including those in Karaganda, the locus of the present study—filled Soviet Central Asia. The Gulag held those who were declared harmful to or unfit for the society being built. Some Gulag inmates would be defined as criminals in most societies, and some would not—the de-kulakized peasant, for example.23 Prisoner correspondence was extremely limited and censored. The prisoner of the Gulag virtually disappeared for the duration of their stay in the Gulag, and millions of the Gulag’s inmates would never return, dying somewhere on the vast stretches of the Siberian taiga or in the Central Asian steppe.
Yet it would be an error to see the Gulag and its inmate as marginal to Soviet society. The Gulag and its inmates were an integral part of the Soviet project—the revolutionary creation of a polity without margins. Neither the Gulag nor the prisoner was marginal in the Soviet polity. Rather, the Gulag and the prisoner, standing at the crossroads of inclusion in and exclusion from the Soviet social body, were essential components of a particular Soviet modernity.
Solzhenitsyn quite accurately states that “the Archipelago was born with the shots of the cruiser Aurora”—that is, with the onset of the Bolshevik revolution itself, for the Gulag’s existence depended on the revolution, and the revolutionary reshaping of society depended on the Gulag.24 The Gulag, like the revolution, was a product of a new modern political ethos that extended throughout the Euro-American world, saw society as a subject to be sculpted, and rejected limitations on the application of state power to this goal. This new political ethos of modernity can be construed broadly as an epistemic transformation, although its importance to the current study in revolution and penal policy can be simplified to a few characteristics. First, and from this perspective foremost, modernity is characterized by a politics of rational and scientific transformation of humanity. With roots in the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, this new political rationality envisioned a human being no longer entrenched in a preestablished order but instead as a subject who can and must redefine that order.25 Important in this respect was the “birth of the social.” The emergent practices of quantification led to a notion of society as something that could be “known.” Statistical representations of society facilitated the application of bodily images and hygienic practices to the social body. In accord with the transformative nature of modern politics, once society could be known, it could also be controlled, transformed, and healed. This new outlook had substantial effects on penal practice. Statistics revealed the ever-present nature of criminality, which in representations of the new social body took on the role of illness or infection. The disease of the social body could not be ignored, and thus the social body had to be protected from the criminal. In some cases, the isolation of the criminal (exile) could serve the purposes of social prophylaxis, but with society envisioned as a unified body, no individual, not even the exiled or imprisoned, was totally outside the social body. Isolation alone could not make the social body totally safe. Consequently, penal practice moved beyond isolation to the reformation (healing) of the criminal soul.26
From its earliest days, the Bolsheviks’ revolution was driven by this modern desire to transform society, to engineer a new socialist soul. While the new politics of social engineering was by no means an exclusively Bolshevik phenomenon, the Bolsheviks brought their own particularities to this transformative vision. The Bolshevik worldview could not envision social transformation through mere legislative action. Rather, the Bolsheviks expected—and even sought—struggle, merciless class struggle. The Soviet ethos assumed the existence of internal enemies—a contamination of the body politic.27 Instead of negotiation, accommodation, and bargaining with societal filth, violent purification of the body politic was the appropriate mode of operation.28 Furthermore, the Bolsheviks felt themselves in a race with time. In the often-quoted phrase from his 1931 speech, Stalin declared, “We have fallen behind the advanced countries by fifty to a hundred years. We must close that gap in ten years. Either we do this or we’ll be crushed.”29 The Gulag was an imprecise, crude tool for the transformation. During this chopping of wood, Soviet authorities accepted, chips were going to fly, but the forest would be refashioned. In the harsh conditions of the Gulag, the social body’s filth would either be purified (and returned to the body politic) or cast out (through death).30
A sense of the radical importance that the Bolsheviks accorded their project and the measures appropriate for completing it can be gathered from the metaphors they used to describe their work. First, criminality was an illness to be cured by the socialist government. In the words of the authors of Belomor, “The Government . . . takes a slice of this reality, a part of the Socialist plan—the Belomorstroy—measures a tiny dose for you and it will cure you, the criminal, with the truth of Socialism.”31 Belomor further referred to the “diseased and dangerous people” who in this book “themselves tell of their cure.”32 Yet the Bolsheviks were not merely physicians scientifically curing their patient. They viewed themselves as engineers reforging human raw material.33 The choice of an industrial metaphor in Stalin’s Soviet Union was unsurprising, and the conscious use of the term reforging carried with it all the connotations of the steel industry—the passage of materials through extreme heat and pressure to transform them into utterly new products.34 Finally, the Bolsheviks viewed criminality in relation to class war. Crime was a remnant of class exploitation. It was not the working-class criminal but rather the bourgeois class enemy who was responsible for crime. The battle against criminality thus became intimately tied to the one against the class and later the people’s enemy. The enemy, the Bolsheviks believed, must not be allowed to spread its harmful influence to society at large, and therefore had to be isolated from society until such time as it was reformed or destroyed.35
In this light, Solzhenitsyn’s tale of the prisoner ship greeted by the Dalstroi orchestra is not a contradiction requiring explanation. Rather in the Soviet ethos, the coexistence of violence and transformation—creation and destruction—was no contradiction at all. In fact, one was unimaginable without the other.36 Vyshinskii, the chief prosecutor of the notorious Great Terror trials, himself said as much: “All Soviet penal policy is based on a dialectical combination of the principle of repression and compulsion with the principle of persuasion and re-education. . . . The two-in-one task is suppression plus re-education of anyone who can be re-educated.”37 Thus, the great construction project at Magnitogorsk could be simultaneously the “most potent symbol of the heroic building of socialism,” and “a place of exile” without contradiction and without need for further explanation.38
In the Bolshevik struggle to transform the social body, no action, not even inaction, was apolitical. This Manichaean ethos recognized only “for us” and “against us” without neutral ground. Every individual had to be judged and placed in one of these fields. The Bolsheviks sought to create by force a polity without margins, a polity in which all would participate. The construction of Soviet socialism was fundamentally and forcibly about inclusion; nobody could sit out this revolution, not even the prisoner. The engineers at Belomor failed to prove their redemption, because they “felt that they were not active participants in a grandiose construction, but merely accidental lookers on.”39 The margins were recentered; nobody, not even the prisoner, remained marginal.40
The Gulag played a key role in the realization of this Soviet revolutionary project. Threat of punishment in the Gulag was one of many means used to compel compliance with newly emerging societal norms. In this respect, the Gulag served a substantially similar function to all modern penal institutions. Compliance with societal norms in the Soviet case, however, involved substantial active participation in the ongoing revolution. A virtual cult of action operated in the Soviet Union, and the Gulag itself made the prisoner an active part of the revolutionary transformation. In 1936, the Karlag newspaper Putevka, popularizing the Stakhanovite movement among prisoners, noted that the Stakhanovite movement was “Marxism in action,” complete with a set of two line drawings. The first illustration showed an individual sitting at a desk reading in front of a series of books by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Stalin with the caption “Reading a chapter from Marx.” Below that was another drawing of a man in a hard hat in front of overflowing train cars of coal with the caption “Writing a chapter from Marx.”41 As a slogan posted at the Solovetskii camp at the end of the 1920s declared, “A prisoner is an active participant in socialist construction!”42 Even Solzhenitsyn himself recognized the Soviet polity as a society in which there was “no place for forced idleness.”43
Bolshevik penal policy viewed labor as the key to reforging the prisoner and making them fit for a place in the new Soviet society. A poster at Kolyma in the late 1930s proclaimed that “our selfless labor will restore us to the family of the workers.”44 In the Bolshevik vision, to overcome the bourgeois devaluation of labor that led the proletarian to become criminal, penal institutions had to teach the criminal the value of labor—echoing the long-held Marxist view that labor was the activity that differentiated the human from the animal.45 In their labor, it was believed, prisoners would see and take pride in their contribution to the construction of socialism. When the Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie (GPU, or State Political Directorate) official Semen Firin was sent to Belomor, he was reminded that his task was “not only to increase production but also, above all, to organise educational work. . . . [T]here are no incurable criminals.”46 Labor was not only the means but also the measure of an inmate’s reform, and corrective labor was among the first innovations in Soviet penal practice.
The Soviet penal system was composed of a diverse range of institutions, prisoners, and practices. Yet through all its diversity, the Gulag was integrated at every point into the broader Soviet enterprise. Not only do the turning points of Soviet history express their influence in the Gulag compound; the Gulag was subject to every Soviet campaign from Stakhanovism to the politicization of everyday life. Social identities in the Gulag were even reconfigured on the basis of social hierarchies emergent in broader Soviet society. These institutions, social hierarchies, and practices brought the revolution to every individual daily. Each day, the individual prisoner had to prove their capacity for redemption. The Gulag was a total institution. From the organization of labor to officially sponsored cultural activities, from life in the barracks to the extensive surveillance system, every inch of the Gulag was filled with a new “socialist” content. Whether one explores the institutions, identities, or practices of the Gulag, it emerges as a transformative space—a site where society and the individual were remade for entry, or denied entry, into the imagined socialist future.
One way to understand the constantly shifting line between those Gulag inmates considered redeemable and those to be permanently excluded from Soviet society is to explore the diverse range of Gulag institutions. The term Gulag calls to mind the notorious forced labor camps in the extremes of Siberia such as those found along the Kolyma River. These corrective labor camps, however, of which Karlag was one, comprised only one of a number of distinctive Gulag penal institutions.47 Prisons, special prisons, special camps, corrective labor camps, special settlements, corrective labor colonies, and noncustodial forced labor (essentially a system of fines), not to mention special-purpose institutions like the scientific prison institutes (the sharashki of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle), filtration camps, and prisoner of war (POW) camps, afforded the authorities at different times a panoply of destinations for their detained populations. The array of institutions offered a gradation of detention, allowing the sorting of prisoners into different levels of isolation according to their perceived level of danger for Soviet society and their perceived chances for release.
The large category of corrective labor camps was also comprised of a diverse hierarchy of institutions. The entire collection of corrective labor camps was arranged in a rough geographic hierarchy, in which camps located in particularly remote regions of Siberia, the Far North, and Kazakhstan were categorized as “distant” camps, and were reserved for the most dangerous inmates. Even among the distant camps a further subhierarchy emerged in which Kolyma occupied a special place as the Gulag’s worst possible destination. Prisoners in other camps were often threatened with transfer to Kolyma for violations of camp order. Even within individual camps, a hierarchy of subinstitutions allowed an even finer sorting of inmates into camp divisions with different levels of regime ranging from light, general, and strict to katorga (the strictest of all) subdivisions. Furthermore, one could officially be a prisoner of a camp but be allowed to live outside the camp zone altogether.
As will be seen in detail in the chapters below, Gulag history was marked by a constant expansion of the hierarchy of institutions. New forms of detention were established at both the lighter and harsher ends of the spectrum, and finer gradations of institutions were inserted into the middle of the hierarchy, as Gulag authorities sought to sort their population into ever-finer subgroups based on a hierarchy of presumed redeemability. While that hierarchy was not static, the institutions are introduced briefly here in approximate order from those with the populations deemed least to most redeemable.
Execution was the ultimate punishment meted out by the Soviet penal system, and until the postwar period, it was also the only punishment, at least theoretically, with irreversible consequences (postmortem rehabilitation notwithstanding). Soviet authorities did not fear getting blood on their hands in this battle with alleged enemies of Soviet power. According to figures gathered by V. P. Popov, during the period from 1921 to 1953, Soviet secret police organs alone sentenced some eight hundred thousand people to death.48
On the one hand, Soviet propagandists and ideological thinkers constantly emphasized the reformability of criminals and denounced, quite vociferously, biological understandings of the regime’s enemies. On the other hand, it was always understood that no enemy could be allowed to interfere with the construction of the coming communist utopia. The Soviet leadership and its secret police organs had no inhibitions about taking the lives of their enemies, and considering the stakes—the creation of utopia, a virtual heaven on earth—mistakes were only seen as permissible in the direction of killing too many rather than too few. During the mass campaigns of the Great Terror in 1937–38, execution quotas were handed out region by region (and to Gulag camps). While the terror was undoubtedly directed from the center, local authorities immediately set out to “fulfill and overfulfill” their plan, and thus it did not take long for a frenzy to start of regional leaders writing to Moscow for permission to exceed those quotas.49
All convicted persons in the Soviet Union who escaped the sentence of execution and entered the gates of a Gulag camp had survived the first great break point between life and death, between reincorporation into Soviet society and total fatal expulsion from it. This study begins at that moment, when an inmate entered the Gulag proper. It was, however, far from the last time that a prisoner would teeter on the brink between life and death. As we will see, many Gulag practices—if not specifically designed to cause prisoner deaths—were at least designed with little concern for the maintenance of prisoner lives. Moreover, prisoners could be and were executed while in the Gulag.
Prisons occupied two spaces within the Gulag system. First, in the guise of interrogation prisons, they held nearly all inmates subject to individual arrest. They stood at the gates of the Gulag, housing individuals until judgment and sentencing determined the future site of the prisoner’s detention. The interrogation prisons and their notorious torture regimes are well known from Solzhenitsyn’s chilling descriptions. Interrogation prisons served as the locus of selection, where a prisoner was evaluated according to the prospects for redeemability. While an inmate was in the interrogation prison, the first life-or-death decision between execution and detention was made. It was in the interrogation prison that prisoners awaited their fate—their sentence and future destination within the Gulag system.
The interrogation prison was an institution quite different from all others in the Gulag. Located chronologically in the presentence phase of the Gulag experience, the interrogation prison was not designed to deal with who a prisoner would become but rather to determine who a prisoner was. As such, the interrogation prison did not seek to integrate its prisoners into the life of the society and instead isolated them throughout the course of interrogation.50
Prisons were also located in the range of postsentence punishments. For those condemned individuals who avoided a death penalty, the prison was reserved for the least redeemable. Prisons were places of total isolation, reserved for those deemed too dangerous and corrupting to come into contact with the Gulag population at large. They also held well-known foreigners, famous people, or purged secret police operatives in total isolation from other prisoners.51 For example, the orders for mass operation 00447 of the Great Terror against “former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements” declared that “the more inveterate and socially dangerous” of those who were not condemned to death should be given eight to ten years in prisons, while the rest would be sent to camps.52 Convicts could receive a specific sentence to prison from judicial or police organs. Labor camps also had the authority to transfer inmates to prisons. The latter was reserved for those who proved themselves especially incorrigible in the camps. As the declaration accompanying their transfer went: “All measures of correction exhausted, corrupts other prisoners, not suitable for labor camp.” Lists of those transferred to prisons were then posted in the camps as a means of deterring others.53 A different type of prison—the internal camp prison (usually called a “penalty isolator”)—occupied the space between the camp and prison. Camp authorities created these internal camp prisons to punish their inmates for short periods for violations of camp discipline and refusal to work. Penalty isolators were among the most hellish places in the Gulag—usually dark, cold, and damp, without sheets or blankets, and often with the prisoner stripped to their undergarments. Only repeated or especially severe violations resulted in transfer out of camps and into separate prisons.
As a place for those deemed unfit even for camps, the prison occupied the lowest rung on the institutional ladder of redeemability. In accord with this position, the inmates of the prisons were forcibly excluded from collective life, the basis of official Soviet efforts at creating a new person. In contrast to the labor camp inmates who were housed in barracks, and relatively free in their nonworking hours to move about the camp compound and mingle with fellow inmates, prison inmates were kept in solitary confinement cells, until the sheer volume of arrests forced the authorities to put multiple inmates in a single cell.54 No collective cultural activities or reeducation efforts were found in the prisons. Talking, singing, tapping on cell walls, and going near cell windows were all officially prohibited, although they occurred. The only activities officially allowed to the prisoners were all solitary—reading library books, say, and solitary exercise in the prison yard. So little did the authorities care about the reeducation of these prisoners that they did not even maintain the most modest control over access to reading material; the content of the prison library was so poorly controlled that many of the books made available to prisoners had been long since withdrawn from public libraries.55
The comparative exclusion of the prisoners vis-à-vis the camp inmates becomes even clearer when examining Eugenia Ginzburg’s transfer to camp life. In 1939, Ginzburg’s sentence (along with many others in her solitary confinement prison) was revised to a term in a corrective labor camp, and she immediately noticed the transition from solitary to collective life. Prisoners were no longer hidden from one another but instead were formed up into groups. Ginzburg recognized that the solitary prisons had been
inconsistent with the tempo of the age and with its economy. . . . Everything that had hitherto been strictly forbidden was suddenly enjoined with the same severity. For instance, at Yaroslavl [her prison] there was no greater crime than to try to enter into relations with the other prisoners. . . . But from the day in July 1939 on which we crossed the threshold of our cells for the last time, we were obliged to do everything together—whether it was working, sleeping, eating, bathing, or going to the lavatory.56
Once branded the most incorrigible, the prisoners were unable to completely erase the distrust aimed at them. Even in the corrective labor camp, they were stamped as “people from the prisons,” who were “the worst criminals, the worst off, the worst everything.”57 Nonetheless, they were now included in the grand crusade, and Ginzburg herself would be released from Kolyma at the conclusion of her ten-year sentence.
Although they will be discussed at greater length in chapters 4 and 5, a brief note should be made here of the katorga camp divisions and the special camps. The tsarist state had utilized a form of forced labor detention, which it labeled katorga. The Soviet government initially cast the term aside, as it considered katorga to be a reactionary element of the unjust tsarist penal system. In 1943, the term returned, as the Gulag created katorga divisions within regular corrective labor camps to hold a select portion of inmates deemed to be the most dangerous. The katorga divisions were especially strict, located in the Gulag’s harshest places, and performed the most dangerous labor tasks. In 1948, the practice was extended to an entire new group of independent camps dubbed special camps.
Both katorga divisions and special camps introduced a number of camp practices previously unknown in the Gulag, including the use of handcuffs, numbers on inmate clothing, locked barracks, and perhaps most significant, the isolation of a select portion of political prisoners from the criminals. The conditions in katorga divisions and special camps were more brutal, and the death rates were much higher, than in their regular camp cousins. Release from the special camps was a much less common affair, as their inmates typically had long sentences corresponding to the perceived level of dangerousness of their crimes. Furthermore, the creation of the special camps was accompanied by the application of permanent exile to all those released from such institutions—the first ever sentence other than execution that precluded a priori at least a theoretical end to punishment. While attention to prisoner rehabilitation was not completely abandoned, it took a much less prominent role in these places, as they held those inmates who were the least likely to make a full return to Soviet society.
The corrective labor camps are those most typically associated with images of the Gulag. They were the most direct descendant of the secret police camp system of the 1920s and early 1930s. These camps were initially reserved for prisoners who either had been sentenced to more than three years or had been sentenced by organs of the Ob’edinennoe Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie (OGPU, or Joint State Political Directorate) itself. After the merger of detention institutions in 1934, the corrective labor camps were reserved for prisoners sentenced to more than three years, while the corrective labor colonies held those with shorter sentences.58 This provision alone strongly affected the composition of the camps’ population. Few “political” prisoners arrested for so-called counterrevolutionary crimes were sentenced to less than three years, so most of them found their way into the corrective labor camps. Of the hordes of common criminals who filled the Soviet penal system, only those convicted for the crimes perceived by the Soviet government to be the most serious were imprisoned in the camps.
The corrective labor camps were generally located at the most extreme edges of the Gulag. Their number included the notorious Kolyma, Vorkuta, Noril’sk, and Karaganda camps. Gulag camp death rates, though quite variable over its history, were always high. Depending on the year and reliability of official statistics, somewhere from 1 to 25 percent of the Gulag camp population died per annum from a wide array of causes including illnesses related to starvation, accidents at a work site, and violence from both guards and other prisoners. Thus for many, a sentence in the corrective labor camps was actually a death sentence. Nonetheless, no matter how harsh the conditions, the prisoners of the corrective labor camp were not necessarily considered irredeemable. Some former prison inmates in fact thought of the labor camp as a definite step up, at least initially. As a Communist true believer named Tanya exclaimed to Ginzburg on their transfer from prisons to corrective labor camps, “Even now, things are better than in Yezhov’s time: he kept us two years in solitary, but now we’re getting a chance to work and develop the Far North, which shows they know we’re good workers.”59 Ginzburg herself was not quite such a believer, but even she recognized that the camps were a step closer to the “tempo of the age.”60
The spetspereselentsy, or the residents of the “special settlements,” were the exiles of the Soviet penal system.61 In many ways, the special settlers were a group quite distinct from the other residents of the Gulag. Yet they were emphatically part of the Gulag system.62 Special settlement entailed far more than mere exile. Like their relatives in the corrective labor camps, the special settlers were subjected to exile combined with labor and other measures of forced rehabilitation.63 Nevertheless, the special settler lived with the free population and in many ways lived like them. The special settlers occupied a space halfway between freedom and the concentration camp. Their next step could lead them in either direction.
The special settlers fell into two main groups: the former kulaks exiled during the collectivization campaign of the early 1930s, and the nationalities exiled in whole or part starting in the latter half of the 1930s and continuing to the postwar period. In general, exile occurred in groups, while arrest and sentence to labor camps took place individually. The special settlements were located throughout the Central Asian republics and Siberia. Nearly half of the special settlers in 1944 were spread through the republic of Kazakhstan, while the Uzbek Republic, Kirghiz Republic, Novosibirsk Oblast, Omsk Oblast, and Krasnoiarsk Krai each lodged over a hundred thousand special settlers.64
A quick overview of life in special settlements can be gained from the experience of Rachel and Israel Rachlin, deported in 1941 from Lithuania. While their experience is not universal, it reveals the main contours of life as an internal exile in the Soviet Union. The Rachlins, like most exiles, whether among the kulaks of the early 1930s, or the “punished peoples” of the latter 1930s and the war years, were not arrested, interrogated, or charged with any particular violation of the criminal code. They were sent to their place of exile as a family (although in some cases the men were arrested, separated from their family, and sent to labor camps, while the rest of the family was exiled as special settlers) and remained together as a family throughout their period in special settlement.65 The presence of families among the special settlements added a generational facet to this particular institution of the Gulag. For example, October 1932 saw approximately fifteen thousand children under the age of fourteen among the forty-two thousand special settlers at Magnitogorsk.66 The children of the special settlement were not themselves suspect but rather were considered to be in serious danger of contamination by their suspect elders. Soviet authorities constantly feared the “pernicious influence of the kulak ideology” on the settlement youths, and inadequate educational facilities for the youths were cause for special reprimand.67 At the same time, the children were the first to regain passports and the right to move away from the settlements.
Still, the life of the special settler was similar to that of the free worker living in the same region. Along the Rachlins’ transport route, representatives of local enterprises frequently came and chose from among the deportees to fill the needs of their industry. The Rachlins lived not behind barbed wire but instead on a state farm (sovkhoz), where they were paid as free workers.68 In general, the special settlers were required to provide for themselves, just as the free population had to do. They held jobs, and tended private plots or other individual gardens. Once the basics of life had been established, arriving exiles were supposed to be placed on salary. From that point, they had to take care of themselves, even though 25 percent of their income went to the administration of the special settlements. Invalids and the elderly among the exiles who were unable to work and had no relatives with them were to be placed in a special section of the special settlements, and would be given supplies for free. Women with babies and no head of household were also to be provided with supplies temporarily until they could gain paid work.69 Of course, reality often differed from what official documents prescribed, on occasion leading to cruel mass death.70
Deportees with education and talent were not necessarily barred from politically sensitive positions. Israel Rachlin became a teacher at a local school in Iakutsk. (He taught the German language, of all things, during the war—a rather surprisingly sensitive position for an unreliable element.)71 Later, when working for an experimental agriculture facility, he served as the facility’s representative in all legal matters. The Rachlins were allowed to vote, and their children grew up as their free peers did, joining the Young Pioneers and later the Communist Youth Leagues (Komsomol).72
Despite the similarities between the Rachlins’ life and that of the free workers, the involuntary detention—the severe restrictions on freedom of movement—of the special settler was ever present. The Rachlins may have worked in a sovkhoz with free workers, but they were required to appear twice monthly at the local People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) office.73 Gulag authorities were constantly preoccupied with preventing the escape of special settlers from their place of exile. In all periods of special settlement, the deportees were uniformly considered unreliable elements by the Soviet authorities. Throughout their frequent transfers from location to location, their substantial files traveled from one local NKVD chief to another. Relocation happened many times, continously tearing asunder the life that the deportees had built in their latest locale. The Rachlins also describe a perpetual fear of arrest and transfer to a labor camp. Further, while deportees like the Rachlins constantly sought survival through less physical work, their uncertain position always left them subject to the whims of a politically conscious manager or NKVD chief, who could take away their position and force them into physical labor.74
Special settlers were spread throughout the hinterlands of the Soviet Union, including Magnitogorsk. Stephen Kotkin contrasts life in the special labor settlement to the local corrective labor colony. The special labor settlement, created in 1931 to house recently de-kulakized peasants, was initially treated much more severely than the corrective labor colony, which held the “socially friendly” criminals. The “class enemy” special settlers were immediately enclosed by barbed wire, but this soon came down. Considered incorrigible by virtue of their class background, they were subject to less intense propaganda than the colony inhabitants. Unlike common criminals, most peasants remained in the area even after their rights were restored by the constitution of 1936. In this case the dekulakized peasants were allowed to join the “grand crusade,” and they did so, many staying on at Magnitogorsk even after their passports were restored to them.75
One other group of exiles should be mentioned, although they will be discussed further below. Most prisoners were subjected to some form of exile on their release from corrective labor camps. Some were refused permission to live only in certain special regions of the Soviet Union (usually near borders or military resources), while others were denied the right to live in the country’s largest cities. Many who were released from corrective labor camps after the completion of a sentence were subjected to a form of exile that was similar to that of the special settlers—that is, they were specifically required to live within the boundaries of a particular region.
The world of the deportee was an integral part of the Gulag, and ties between exile and camps were always tight. On the one hand, the exiled person was always particularly vulnerable to arrest and incarceration in the camps. For example, in July 1931, OGPU authorities in Kazakhstan were ordered to arrest all priests, monks, and former officers in exile without families. The arrestees were then transferred to the Kazakhstan Corrective Labor Camp (Kazitlag), the short-lived forerunner of the Karaganda region’s main camp, Karlag.76 At the same time, exiles and camps often populated the same regions. This was certainly the case in Karaganda, where the camp largely provided agricultural labor and the exiles largely provided workers for the mines.
Camp prisoners who had committed crimes while in exile were returned to their place of exile on completion of their sentence. Prisoners whose families had been sent into exile were also deported to join their families on completion of their camp term, although truly exceptional prisoner–shock workers could earn not only their own early release but the release of their families from exile as well.77 For kulaks arrested and given sentences of punishment in the camps, the presence of a family in exile could be a positive development. Gulag authorities were quite concerned with the capacity of families to survive in the head of household’s absence. Consequently, in July 1931, Gulag chief Lazar Kogan ordered that kulaks who had been arrested and given sentences of under three years could be released to join their families in exile. Even prisoners with sentences longer than three years were often released to join their family with the assent of central Gulag authorities. Kulaks without families, however, were required to complete their camp sentence. The same order created bureaus in special settlements with the task of locating and reuniting family members sent to exile in different regions.78
In the early 1930s, some OGPU camps were also given jurisdiction over the exiles in their region. Exiled kulaks in and around Akmolinsk were initially the responsibility of Kazitlag authorities. In late May 1931, an OGPU department was created to administer special settlements in Kazakhstan, and shortly after Kazitlag was ordered to transfer all exiled kulaks and the administrative staff responsible for them to the new administration’s authority.79
The corrective labor colonies are perhaps the forgotten component of the Gulag. Little about them appears in the published documentation, and they still await a full-length study in their own right. Their inmates are not included in the pantheon of well-known Gulag memoirists. Perhaps, more than anything else, this reflects the nature of the colonies’ inmates. Corrective labor colonies were set up in a fashion quite similar to the corrective labor camps, but the inmates of the colonies were subject to shorter sentences, usually less than three years. Consequently, few of the political criminals found their way into the colonies, which were filled largely with common criminals, few of whom left memoirs of their experiences. Unfortunately, they are largely beyond the scope of the present study as well. The Karaganda region was dominated by its major corrective labor camp and extensive system of internal exiles, and it barely had a corrective labor colony presence. On January 1, 1940, only 8,000 corrective labor colony prisoners were housed throughout the Kazakh Republic at a time when the entire Soviet Union saw 316,000 such prisoners. The vast majority, some 241,000 colony prisoners, were kept inside the Russian Republic, but even the Ukrainian and Uzbek republics held more colony prisoners at this time than did the Kazakh.80
Corrective labor colonies differed from corrective labor camps in three main ways: they were typically less remote geographically, held prisoners with sentences under three years, and were much smaller. Corrective labor colonies were quite literally found in every part of the Soviet Union, and many were no larger than the smallest subdivision of the larger labor camps. Often, the labor colonies were established in a particular location only to provide labor for one enterprise.
Kotkin, in portions of his work on Magnitogorsk, has provided enough material to render a few impressions of the labor colony. Due to the short sentences, new arrivals and releases were frequent in the corrective labor colony.81 These inmates were most clearly considered redeemable. In fact, they were expected to make a return to society. As such, they were typically hit with a barrage of cultural and educational propaganda. A corrective labor colony was established in Magnitogorsk in 1932. The colony, in Kotkin’s words, “tried to create a version of the revolutionary crusade and impart its values to the convicts.” Inmates thus were expected to learn a profession. The colony had its own newspaper, library, shock workers (who held their own conference, complete with orchestra), Stakhanovites, plays, films, political circles, and all the accompaniments of a typical 1930s’ work collective. Contrary to the practice at Magnitogorsk’s special settlement, the inmates at Magnitogorsk’s corrective labor colony were initially unconfined. The inmates were, after all, from among the ranks of those considered class allies and the socially friendly. Soon, however, a rash of escapes and “mayhem” brought barbed wire to the colony, along with practices becoming common in the corrective labor camps deeper in the heart of Siberia: the division of the colony into sectors, the creation of punishment/isolation areas, and a “special regime” barracks. Armed guards began to escort the inmates to work, and the inmates were fitted with distinct clothing and haircuts, which prevented them from disappearing among the local population. Ultimately, most of the efforts at reforging these criminals proved unsuccessful, and most of those released from the colony left Magnitogorsk.82
Finally, brief mention should be made of a judicial sentence reserved for particularly minor crimes. People could be sentenced to “corrective labor without deprivation of freedom” for relatively minor crimes. These sentences typically took the form of a fine, as a portion of the convict’s wages was garnisheed for the period of the punishment, though the convict would remain unconfined and at their former place of work.
• • • • •
I began with an intriguing contradiction: Solzhenitsyn’s tale of an orchestra greeting prisoners at Kolyma. Yet the story does not represent a real contradiction. The Gulag was simultaneously, and for Soviet authorities unproblematically, a site of both violence and reform—death and redemption. From a prisoner’s first day in the Gulag, they were confronted by a social space permeated by Soviet-style socialism. Bands played; posters announced the duty to remake oneself; collective life dominated both barracks and labor; and people died in unspeakably brutal conditions—all in the name of engineering a total human transformation. In some measure, the authorities succeeded. Prisoners learned to negotiate that social space, and in so doing learned to live on Soviet terms. Prisoners related to one another and their conditions through categories fostered by the Gulag authorities. When prisoners rose in the 1950s to challenge Soviet authority, they characteristically mounted that challenge in the form of a workers’ strike—that is, in the terms available in their social space, which were the terms of Soviet socialism, the terms of the Gulag.
The Gulag, then, comes to appear as a last chance for its prisoners. In the Gulag, people would either die, or be transformed and returned to Soviet society (even if the transformation was never exactly what Soviet authorities envisioned). The story of the Gulag is the story of prisoners attempting to negotiate that last chance—to survive—amid an ever-changing set of institutions, practices, and social identities that shaped their lives.