Chapter 2

RECLAIMING THE MARGINS AND THE MARGINAL: GULAG PRACTICES IN KARAGANDA, 1930s

Every ravine, every gully, every stream presented itself as a kind of fortress that was stormed in battle by the hero-organizers of Karlag agriculture. Yesterday’s wreckers, bandits, thieves, and prostitutes, gathered from the various ends of the Soviet country, under the able and experienced Chekist leadership, accomplished great things. Burning with the flame of constructive enthusiasm, valuing highly and proud of that faith placed in them, the former lawbreakers stormed the semideserts of Kazakhstan.

—Karlag’s “official” history, sent to central Gulag authorities in 1934

 

In Spring 1938, at the age of twenty-two, Militsa Stefanskaia arrived at Karlag, the large agricultural corrective labor camp centered in the steppe of Kazakhstan’s Karaganda region. Stefanskaia was born to a Smolensk intelligentsia family. Her father leaned politically toward the Bolsheviks and joined the Red Army shortly after the October Revolution. In the early 1920s, her family moved to Moscow, where her father and grandfather worked in the young Soviet government. On the night of November 1, 1937, Stefanskaia, an employee of a medical institute library, was arrested. She spent seven months in prison, and after a few interrogations was sentenced to three years for alleged counterrevolutionary activity and sent to Karaganda. Though this was quite a light sentence in these years of the Great Terror, the term in the Gulag would tear Stefanskaia’s life apart. In her memoirs, Stefanskaia vividly recalls her trip to Karaganda: “The train went through the steppe. The naked Kazakh steppe, steppe and more steppe—I do not remember anything else. . . . We went and went. The steppe flashed past the windows—we had gone to Kazakhstan. . . . And we kept going and going. Where to? Nobody knew.”1

Sixty-eight years later, in March 2006, I visited a Karaganda camp graveyard holding thousands of former Soviet Gulag and World War II POW graves. The cemetery was in the empty steppe near Spassk, just south of the city of Karaganda. At various times, Spassk was a division of Karlag, a POW camp, and a division of the postwar special camp Steplag and the graveyard held victims of all these institutions. Long unmarked, the cemetery today includes numerous monuments placed by visiting foreign delegations in honor of their compatriots who found their final resting place in the Kazakh steppe. On this day, the temperature hovered right around freezing—significantly warmer than the forty below of just a few months earlier—but the winds swept across the flat open steppe, piercing through my thick winter coat and several layers of clothing. As I ran from monument to monument snapping photographs of this cemetery, with quick breaks in a car to warm up, I was forced to try to imagine just how brutal life as a camp inmate in the Karaganda region would have been, working out in the steppe with inadequate clothing in temperatures much lower than I faced. After all, Galina Aleksandrovna Semenova, one Karlag prisoner in the late 1930s, recalled temperatures reaching as low as negative sixty-four degrees Celsius (such that when it improved to negative fifty degrees, they said it was “warming up”), extreme winds, and snow so deep that the barracks were totally buried and darkened, and prisoners had to dig their way out.2 Winter must have seemed endless in this steppe, and looking at the untrammeled view in every direction, escape must have seemed impossible without trees or even hills as cover. Many never escaped and never left this steppe alive, with most ending up in graveyards that remain unmarked to this day.

Founding Karaganda’s Gulag

In September 1934, Karlag officials proudly sent a history of their concentration camp’s first four years in Karaganda to the central Gulag authorities in Moscow. The first section, “Four Years of the Struggle for Reclamation of the Semi-Desert and for Reforging,” placed the camp’s creation in the political context of the Great Break.

[Karlag] did not emerge accidentally, just as nothing appears accidentally in the great proletarian country in the epoch of the dictatorship of the proletariat under the leadership of the party of Lenin with the genius leader of the world proletariat com[rade] Stalin at its head. At the XVI Congress of the VKP/b/com[rade] Stalin put before the party, before the working class and all the laborers of the countries of the Soviets, one of the most important problems—THE PROBLEM OF THE RECLAMATION OF THE MARGINS, the problem of its economic flowering on the basis of the newest techniques and socialist forms of the organization of economic activity. The margins liberated by the Great October Revolution from the rampant exploitation and oppression of the capitalists—the former subcolonies of the tsar—by the historic decisions of the XVI Congress of the Communist Party were included in the plan of socialist construction as powerful bases of raw materials, as centers of heavy industry, born in the margins by the will of the Bolsheviks.3

Rich as it was in natural resources, especially coal, the Karaganda region was certainly ripe for development. The region’s resources, while known in the tsarist era, remained underdeveloped until the 1930s. Lenin signed a decree in May 1918 nationalizing the Karaganda coal mines, Spassk brass works, and Uspenskii copper mines from the Russian and foreign investors who had begun their development in the nineteenth century. In 1920, he ordered the study of the region’s subsoil to prepare for the development of its natural wealth.⁴ Massive development of the region, however, awaited the era of the First Five-Year Plan as well as the explosive growth of the Gulag’s exile and prisoner populations in the area. In fact, development of the Karaganda region’s natural resources proceeded hand in hand with the growth of Karaganda’s Gulag.

As early as 1925, Soviet authorities had identified the Kazakh steppe as a likely destination for their labor camp inmates.⁵ Yet the history of corrective labor camps in the Karaganda region really began with the arrival in late 1930 of a handful of Chekists and their prisoners to establish a subdivision of an OGPU camp called the Kazakhstan Corrective Labor Camp (Kazitlag, or Kazlag). Headquartered in Almaty, Kazitlag included far-flung divisions engaged in labor at the brickyards of the Turksib construction project and paving the streets of Almaty. In Karaganda, Kazitlag operated the state farm (sovkhoz) Gigant. In July 1931, some 1 million hectares of land (just under 2.5 million acres, or 3,900 square miles) were transferred to Kazitlag for agricultural use.⁶

The first winter at Kazitlag’s Gigant division was quite difficult. Prisoners faced living conditions that are only hinted at in the official history: “The winter of 1930 passed in unbelievably harsh conditions: there were no living quarters. The camp population was accommodated willy-nilly [koe-kak].”⁷ The Karaganda region was sparsely populated and lacked building materials. Prisoners lived in tents, mud huts, and even under the open sky, as the construction of living space lagged behind the expansion of the prisoner population throughout Karlag’s history. Inmates built their own prison camps. Barely able to provide for themselves, the prisoners were also required to provide food and construct living space for the rapidly expanding peasant exile population.⁸ The official history, unsurprisingly, contains no information on prisoner deaths, but given the shortage of housing, extreme climatic conditions of the Karaganda region, and famine that struck Kazakhstan in the early 1930s, they were substantial.⁹

Kazitlag was disbanded within a year. All of its subdivisions were liquidated with the exception of Gigant, whose agricultural territory became the basis for a new independent camp: Karlag.10 Karlag was one of the largest (geographically and in terms of prisoner population) and longest-lasting camps in the Gulag system. Its administrative center was ultimately placed in the village of Dolinka, located approximately forty-five kilometers outside the city of Karaganda. The former Karlag administration building still stands in Dolinka today. The hulking two-story neoclassic building stands abandoned—a bizarre site with its columns rising out of a little village of dilapidated one-story shacks.

Karlag was the central institution of the Karaganda region, even though one finds nary a mention of it in Soviet-era histories and encyclopedias of the region. Karaganda would become the second-largest city in Kazakhstan, but representative of the true order of the region, it would only officially achieve the status of “city” in 1934, fully three years after the founding of the concentration camp that bore its name. The camp was ordered hierarchically, with a varying number of camp subdivisions administratively subordinate to the central camp authorities. These camp subdivisions administered a large number of camp points, and the actual locales housed varying numbers of prisoners. The camp’s core territory spread some 300 kilometers from north to south and 200 kilometers from east to west, but it also encompassed independent divisions in and around Akmolinsk and Balkhash (350 and 650 kilometers, respectively, from the camp’s administration). It would later spread even farther with the addition of a camp division around the city of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan.¹¹

Karlag was primarily, though not exclusively, an agricultural camp established to transform the semidesert of the steppe into a productive agricultural base for the provision of livestock and crops to the region’s growing population engaged in the extraction of natural resources. The formation of Karlag as an independent camp followed almost immediately on the heels of a Central Committee resolution in August 1931 on the development of the Karaganda basin as the Soviet Union’s number three provider of coal. While the late Soviet history of Karaganda emphasizes the city as “an offspring of October,” and carefully enumerates the fifteen hundred Communists, three thousand Komsomols, and twelve thousand miners and builders sent to Karaganda in 1931–32 to construct the coal basin, Karaganda was perhaps more accurately an offspring of the Gulag, particularly of Karlag’s prisoner population and the region’s population of internal exiles, starting with kulaks and later an array of deported nationalities.¹²

The agricultural task before Karlag was daunting. They camp was asked to develop a semidesert that exceeded in size many European countries.13 With what must have been a tremendous understatement, the 1934 Karlag history noted that more than a few “skeptics, opportunists, and pessimists” disseminated their doubts about the possibility of accomplishing such a major task given the climatic and soil conditions of the region. Yet many were also, no doubt, caught up in the atmosphere of “revolutionary times . . . of socialist construction [when t]here are no fortresses that the Bolsheviks cannot storm.”¹⁴

Nonetheless, in these conditions Karlag somehow established a semblance of mechanized agriculture in the steppe. Its authorities brought combines, tractors, and automobiles to what they thought of as an “empty” steppe.¹⁵ Prisoners built massive irrigation works, damming up regional rivers, and they turned Dolinka into a small city with electric stations, radio stations, repair shops, and the like. They also constructed the roads and railroads that connected “the periphery with the center.”¹⁶ Exiled special settlers to the region built railroad lines connecting Gigant with the city of Karaganda and the Uspenskii mines. At Gigant, they planted wheat, corn, oats, and other grains, and raised cattle and sheep. Labor camp prisoners also directly participated in the initial construction of coal mines in the region, although they would mostly give way to the special settlers for the mining work.¹⁷ By 1933, Gulag officials envisioned prisoners and special settlers extracting over 70 percent of all mined coal in the Karaganda coal basin.¹⁸

Primarily, though, the prisoners of Karlag were involved in agricultural work—and in massive proportions. In 1934, Karlag covered 1.7 million hectares, on which the prisoners operated eight state farms (sovkhozov) for livestock, and planted over 32,000 hectares of land in grains, producing over 22,500 tons, or 143 percent of their annual plan, with another 20,000 hectares opened and ready for the following year. Another 210,000 hectares were cultivated for hay. Plans were under way to prepare 45,000 hectares with irrigation from dam works. In addition, Karlag had at that time over 37,000 head of cattle, 60,000 head of sheep, and 700 sows. The work was completed, much of it without the benefit of tractors, with a total prisoner population of just over twenty-five thousand by the end of 1934.¹⁹ In that year, Gulag agricultural facilities, of which Karlag was the most important, reportedly provided all meat and dairy products to the entire camp system, along with 70 percent of its potatoes and vegetables.²⁰

Karlag and central Soviet authorities indeed acted as if the lands of Karlag were empty. But the population on the territory at the time of the camp’s founding is estimated at eighty thousand Kazakhs along with another twelve hundred households of Germans, Russians, and Ukrainians. Portions of these populations were forcibly resettled in 1930–31 out of the camp’s territory, but within the Karaganda region. The resettlements occurred as part of the collectivization and de-kulakization campaigns in the region. Prisoners were then dispatched around the camp’s lands to build barracks, railroads, and other infrastructure. The land was definitively claimed from the native population for the camp, even to the point of destroying the graves of Kazakh notables to use the stones in camp construction.21

The formation of Karlag and the establishment of agriculture in the steppe were of added significance in the midst of the collectivization drive. Karlag was supposed to be a shining example of the possibilities of socialist agriculture. Despite the difficulties, bragged the authorities in their self-history, Karlag was able to overfulfill its agricultural plan for 1931, and considering the nature of the officials’ criminal human resources, they provided a strong example for local collective farms.

The propagandistic declarations in Karlag’s official history were in great part hyperbole and self-promotion, yet they also contained something of the tenor of the age. For as the official history noted repeatedly, and as camp practices showed time and time again, Karlag’s work was not just about its economic role. As Karlag officials wrote in 1934, their task was not only to introduce a huge territory “into the stock of socialist agriculture but also to return tens of thousands of former lawbreakers reforged in the hearth of collective labor into the ranks of the genuine shock workers of socialist construction.”²²

Karlag was an integral part of the approach to this problem, where local camp authorities “battled” for the “reclamation of the semidesert and the reforging” of criminals into honest Soviet citizens. Karlag’s primary tasks, as described in the official history, were twofold: the development of agriculture in the vast desert-steppe of central Kazakhstan to support the emerging industrial centers of the region, and in coordination with these “economic-political tasks to solve the social-political task of the reeducation of tens of thousands of former lawbreakers” through instruction in collective agricultural labor.²³

The Practices of the Gulag

These two primary tasks, the economic and the penal, drove the history of Karlag and the Gulag itself. While the economic and the penal often worked in complementary ways, especially with regard to the practice of corrective labor, the tasks usually competed for attention and caused conflict. Individuals with authority at all levels of the Gulag and individual camp administrations wrestled with the competing tasks, fearing the consequences of failing in either sphere. Exploring the practices of the Gulag, as they emerged and were reshaped throughout the 1930s, allows us insight into these tasks placed before individual camp employees and shows us how prisoners negotiated the demands from those authorities in an attempt to survive until release from the Soviet penal system.

 

TABLE 1.1 1930s
Karlag and Soviet Corrective Labor Camp Populations

Date	Karlag Population1	Population of all corrective labor camps2	Population of corrective labor camps and colonies3
1930		179,000
1931		212,000
1932	10,4004	268,700
1933		334,300
January 1, 1934	24,148	510,307
January 1, 1935	25,110	725,483	990,554
January 1, 1936	38,194	839,406	1,296,494
January 1, 1937	27,504	820,881	1,196,369
January 1, 1938	31,5485	996,367	1,881,570
October 1, 1938	40,109
January 1, 1939	35,072	1,317,195	1,672,438

1. Karlag’s population compiled from GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1155, l. 20; Sistema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR 1923–1960: Spravochnik (Moscow, 1998), 285. Diusetai Aimagambetovich Shaimukhanov and Saule Diusetaevna Shaimukhanova Karlag (Karaganda: Poligrafiia, 1997), 19, offer figures without exact dates or archival citation that are generally close to those figures, with the exception of a population in 1931 of 21,329 that seems unlikely given the population in December 1932 found in official documentation.

2. Gulag labor camp populations are from GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 1155, l. 1a; they do not include exiles or inmates of prisons or corrective labor colonies.

3. 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), 4:129–30.

4. Karlag population in December 1932.

5. Of this number, seventy-three hundred (or 23 percent) were sentenced for counterrevolutionary crimes. Ibid., 4:70.

Corrective Labor and the Gulag’s Economy

The dramatic growth of the Gulag, including its Karaganda outposts, into a mass social institution was sparked by collectivization and the concomitant attempt to “liquidate the kulaks as a class.” The secret police troiki (committees of three with the administrative power to sentence individuals to punishment) saw, in official Soviet terms, a “colossal growth in the number of accused” appearing before them. In 1929, they had handled 5,885 cases, while in 1930 the number grew 7550 percent to 179,620.24 Furthermore, by October 1931, nearly 1.2 million people had been exiled during the process of collectivization, which along with de-kulakization drove the exiling and frequent arrest of these so-called kulaks.²⁵ No evidence points to collectivization and de-kulakization as a process primarily motivated by the need for labor power either in camps or the locales of special settlement. Rather, these policies were decided on for political purposes related to Soviet power in the villages—collectivization as a way to modernize and create a purportedly socialist agriculture that enabled the state to reliably extract grain from peasants, and de-kulakization as a manifestation of the expected class war in the village as well as to remove those who opposed the collectivization process. Only once this political decision was made did Soviet authorities approach the question of what to do with these individuals, or how best to make use of them.²⁶

Gulag authorities were not demanding more prisoner laborers. They were instead always running behind the curve, trying to find ways to make productive economic use of their burgeoning prisoner population.²⁷ As Oleg Khlevniuk has put it, “In the early 1930s . . . mass arrests were not really dictated by economic needs. On the contrary, the OGPU leadership frantically tried, and often failed, to find occupations for the tens of thousands of prisoners.”²⁸ The key events in the growth of the Gulag’s prisoner population were external to the Gulag itself. Although most kulaks were sent into internal exile during the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” they also constituted the first major infusion of prisoners into forced labor camps in the Stalin era. Their arrival made the camp system a major social and economic institution for the first time. The camp population quickly reached some 180,000 by the beginning of 1930—a population several times the limit on labor camp populations envisioned only six months earlier. Similarly, Gulag authorities did not request or even foresee the explosive growth of the prisoner population resulting from the law of August 7, 1932 on the theft of socialist property, the introduction of the passport system and its demand to cleanse the cities of socially dangerous elements, the Great Terror of 1937–38, the labor discipline laws of 1940, the waves of mass deportation of nationalities during the war, or the law of 1947 on property theft.²⁹ If arrests and terror were driven primarily by the desire to fill the camps with laborers, one also questions why so many potential prisoner-workers were executed? All of these massive campaigns of repression dramatically increased the size of the Gulag, and each of them can be explained with reference to political events external to the Gulag itself and its “need” for labor. The introduction and intensification of terror and mass arrest in the Soviet era simply cannot be understood according to an economic, slave-labor logic, when real (if false) fears of enemies populated the public and private rhetoric of those involved in the terror apparatus. Finally, the notion that the Gulag and arrests were primarily driven by the need to gain slave laborers is challenged by the presence of numerous arrestees—the elderly and the invalid—who were not fit to labor in these extreme conditions.30

If economic demands did not propel the growth of the Gulag, what role did they play? Economic production was one, but only one, of several tasks assigned to the Gulag. Aside from isolating, indoctrinating, and punishing inmates, the camp system was expected to use forced laborers (arrested for other reasons) to complete economic tasks of significance to the Soviet state. The most fundamental rule of the Gulag labor camp was that “every prisoner must work as appointed by the administration of the camp.”³¹ Labor was the defining feature of the Soviet Gulag, and it occupied an overwhelming portion of a prisoner’s daily life. Prisoners often spent up to twelve hours per day at work, not including travel to and from the workplace. Not uncommonly, prisoners got less than four hours of sleep.³² The Gulag made a substantial, if costly, contribution to the Soviet economy from the 1930s through the 1950s. Gulag laborers completed such massive construction projects as the White Sea to Baltic Sea and Volga River to Moscow River canals, opened up gold mines along the far east’s Kolyma River, built rail lines throughout the Soviet Union, felled timber in Siberia, produced oil and coal in places like Vorkuta, Noril’sk, and Karaganda, and operated large agricultural enterprises in Siberia and Karaganda.

The compound term corrective labor, so prominent that it appeared in the names of two of the Gulag’s most important institutions—the corrective labor camp and the corrective labor colony—must be understood with reference to both halves of the phrase. In scholarly studies, the corrective aspects of this Soviet practice are often eradicated in favor of an understanding of labor as exclusively a practice of deriving economic benefit from slave labor. Yet in the Soviet Union, corrective labor involved a great deal more than mere economic output, much as Leon Trotsky envisioned compulsory labor not just as a means of economic output but as the main force for building socialism too.³³ Corrective labor entailed a combination of economic output with human transformation. Whether in a corrective labor camp or a special settlement, all able-bodied inmates of the Gulag were required to work, as a measure of punishment and a means of rehabilitation.

Similar to labor in the Soviet Union at large, labor in the camps was intensely politicized. Labor, in the Bolshevik worldview, was the defining feature of human existence. It had been devalued and denigrated by the capitalists, but as Belomor declared, “Work in the U.S.S.R. has in reality become a matter of honour, a matter of glory, a matter of valour and of heroism. . . . Labour is no longer a hateful means of existence, but the rational expression of a happy life.”34 Production meetings were frequently called to address problems of “slackening morale,” and “how to increase output quickly so we won’t be ashamed of our failure to provide our country with the quantity of coal needed to build up our industrial potential, increase the wealth of our citizens, and strengthen the position of the Soviet Union in the world.”³⁵ Or as Solzhenitsyn writes, “Every prisoner had to be informed about the production plans! And every prisoner had to be informed about the entire political life of the country! Therefore at morning line-up . . . there was a ‘five-minute production session,’ and after returning to camp . . . there was a ‘five-minute political session.’”³⁶ Corrective labor was supposedly “not that kind of work which dries out the mind and the heart of the human being [but rather] the miracle work . . . , which transforms people from nonexistence and insignificance into heroes,” in the words of Stalin’s prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky.³⁷ At the seventh All-Union Congress of Soviets, the people’s commissar of justice explained that “labor is the best means of paralyzing the disintegrating influence . . . of the endless conversations of prisoners among themselves in the course of which the more experienced instruct the newcomers. . . . It is essential to teach [the prisoners] to become accustomed to Communist, collective labor.”³⁸

Thus, prisoners in the Gulag not only had to work; they also had to “realise the significance of the great task which has been entrusted to the G.P.U. by the Party and the Government.”³⁹ The labor of Sing Sing in which the prisoner spent an entire day moving a pile of stones only to spend the next day moving them back again was supposedly not the model for Gulag labor.⁴⁰ Corrective labor comprised an integral part of the greater Soviet project, and the camps’ educational apparatus taught the inmates the details of the plan and the place of Gulag labor within that plan. Through participation in the projects of Soviet society, it was thought, prisoners could successfully return to that society.

Historians of the Gulag have rarely given much credence to the ideological elements of its rise, and understandably so. Given the incredible brutality of life in the Gulag, the high mortality rates, and the lack of concern for individual human life, how are we to think of all this as anything but a propaganda fig leaf? Scholars therefore reduced the corrective element of the Gulag to the work of the camp system’s Cultural- Educational Sections (KVChs), and labor itself is understood only in economic terms.⁴¹ Such observations miss the tie between correction and death in the Gulag. Brutality was itself part and parcel of the ideology of labor in the Gulag. Labor was not only the means but also the measure of rehabilitation—and failure in the reeducation process was meant to be fatal. As we will see, several other Gulag practices ensured that labor, reeducation, and death were tightly connected. Reeducation and redemption were not just window dressing but rather life-or-death issues for Gulag prisoners. The task of reeducation was never intended to be an easy process. Given this, camp cultural activities coexisted with the harsh nature of corrective labor, with the two working together to forge a new person and destroy those incapable of reformation.

Political indoctrination was ubiquitous in the Soviet Union both in and out of the Gulag. In free Soviet society, workers were often required to spend their lunch hours discussing the international situation or the building of socialism. Similarly, exiles were constantly called on to exhibit a proper political attitude toward their work. Ultimately, the politicization of labor signifies a radical difference in the Bolshevik attitude toward labor. Industrialization was not only about the construction of factories but also about the construction of a new person and civilization.42

The debate about the Gulag’s economy has been a long one. Arendt was among the early skeptics about the profitability of Soviet forced labor. She suggests that although mass arrests were quite possibly the Soviet method of “solving its unemployment problem, it is also generally known that the output in those camps is infinitely lower than that of ordinary Soviet labor and hardly suffices to pay the expenses of the police apparatus.”⁴³ One of the more important conclusions of the best recent scholarship on the Gulag has been putting to rest once and for all the illusion that forced labor was free, or even cheap. As the editors of Istoriia stalinskogo gulaga conclude, “The Gulag was a drain on the economic resources of the country. The productivity of Gulag labor was low and a matter of constant concern to Gulag authorities.”⁴⁴ Forced labor was ineffective, almost exclusively physical, and unqualified, and its productivity remained low. Even as early as the Solovetskii camp’s operation in the 1920s, Soviet authorities recognized that their penal institutions were failing in the mission to be self-supporting.⁴⁵ During the 1930s, they may have convinced themselves that the camps were profitable, as the Gulag participated in the great construction projects of building socialism, and began the extraction of rich deposits of natural resources in places like Vorkuta, Kolyma, and Karaganda. Even if the Gulag was profitable during this time—something that has not been demonstrated yet in the literature—it still would not indicate that it was more efficient than other means of getting labor power to these projects. Regardless, as early as World War II, the Gulag chief recognized that the average daily output of the Gulag laborer was 50 percent lower than the output of a free laborer.⁴⁶ Yet even in wartime, when the Soviet state needed to make efficient use of all its resources just to survive, dismantling the Gulag was never even considered.

Although Gulag authorities attempted almost perpetually to improve the Gulag’s productivity, the Gulag as an economically profitable institution was always undercut by the Gulag as a highly secretive detention institution for those considered dangerous to Soviet society. The Gulag was a financial catastrophe for the Soviet state. Why, then, did the system prosper? On the one hand, we can certainly understand how Soviet authorities may have deceived themselves for years about the profitability of the operation. Or perhaps they continually believed that they could tinker with the system to make it profitable. Above all, the Soviet secret police organs had a significant self-serving institutional interest in fostering a belief in the profitability of Gulag labor, which would lead to further increases in their own budget and staffing.

Ultimately, though, the focus on profitability is mistaken. One must consider that the Gulag was in fact a penal institution first, and a productive institution second. In the Gulag, it often even seemed that the process of labor was more important than its output, its productivity. Why was it necessary for prisoners to manually dig a trench in minus-thirty-degree weather? It certainly was neither productive nor economically rational, but the key statistic for the Gulag bureaucracy was “labor utilization” (trudovoe ispol’zovanie). Every prisoner had to work. The prisoner’s actual production was generally secondary. Furthermore, the Gulag’s role in the battle with alleged class enemies and enemies of the people was far more critical to Soviet authorities than its profitability. In all the efforts of Gulag bureaucrats to increase productivity and decrease costs, one cost-cutting tactic was never even considered: reducing the size of the militarized guard. In actuality, the militarized guard as a percentage of the detained population grew significantly through the history of the Gulag.47

Labor was, of course, always an immensely important part of the Gulag’s activities. A number of historians have focused on the documents related to the establishment of a large number of new OGPU camps in the early 1930s aimed at “colonization” (kolonizatsiia) and exploiting the material wealth of the geographically distant parts of the Soviet Union.⁴⁸ These writers draw the conclusion that the expansion of the Gulag in the period of the First Five-Year Plan was thus primarily economically determined.⁴⁹ Yet central OGPU orders for the recruitment of staff into these new camps reveal that colonization was to be cultural as well as economic. The enthusiasm and energy of the Chekists was praised for making the Solovetskii camps a success in the “industrial and cultural development” of the far north. Recruiting staff for the new camps was therefore a priority. As Karlag administrative documents reveal, “The new camps under Chekist leadership, just like at Solovetskii, must play a transformative role in the economy and culture of the distant margins.”50 The colonization of the periphery was part and parcel of the Stalinist revolution from above that sought to bring the fruits of socialist civilization to every corner of the Soviet Union. Applebaum herself notes that “in Kolyma, as in Komi, the Gulag was slowly bringing ‘civilization’—if that is what it can be called—to the remote wilderness. Roads were being built where there had only been forest; houses were appearing in the swamps.”⁵¹

Moreover, these officials were meeting to determine what to do with the already-arrested prisoners who were overcrowding the existing prisons. They were not planning or even asking for further arrests to fulfill economic goals. Faced with a Soviet economy that was demanding labor and the well-established practice of labor as a method for reeducation, it is no surprise that they would decide that prisoners must work. Prisoners sitting idly in isolation would have been contrary to the tenor of the age. Further, removing prisoners and exiles to remote locations served the task of isolating individuals deemed dangerous to state and society. If the conditions of the Gulag’s remote locations killed many, so be it. Punishment was also part of the mandate.⁵² If it increased the power and influence of the secret police apparatus, all the better in the officials’ eyes.

None of this is to say that labor productivity was not a factor in the Gulag. Throughout the Gulag’s history, Gulag authorities sought ways to make their prisoners more productive while also cutting costs. As just one example, in 1934, following the emphasis on economizing and cost accounting in the Soviet’s Second Five-Year Plan, Gulag authorities sought to make their camps self-funding by pushing responsibility for economizing down to the prisoners themselves. In this case, they decreed the creation of a system of “labor columns.” Each labor column was given the responsibility for operating without financial losses. Unlike previous experiences, which focused the prisoner laborers on output without regard to the costs involved, they would now need knowledge of input as well. Labor columns were required to learn and stay within the plans for expenditures of such camp resources as the workforce, auto transport, the amortization of instruments, and the repair and provision of new tools. In addition to receiving financial premiums for high labor output, labor columns and prisoners could earn bonuses for savings on the expenditure side of the ledger. The labor column was given collective responsibility for its production figures and behavior. Yet even in this practice, the work was far from “just” economic. Information and education were seen as key to raising prisoner productivity and lowering resource expenditure. All members of a labor column lived together, and they were to police themselves, “reforging the negative element and studying the personality of every inmate.” The labor column was responsible for ensuring the cultural education of all its members, especially for the eradication of illiteracy in its ranks. Prisoners systematically failing to fulfill their labor norms, refusing to work, and violating camp rules were removed to special labor columns under strict guard.53

In spite of these efforts, and many others throughout the history of the Gulag system, the penal institutions would never be made profitable or self-funding. Nonetheless, they not only continued to operate, they expanded.

Survival of the Fittest: Food and Labor in the Gulag

[Fellow prisoner and brigade leader Gromov] poked his finger into my chest. “You work, you eat. You stop working, you die. I take care of my people if they produce, but loafers don’t stand a chance.”⁵⁴

—Janusz Bardach, man Is wolf to man

The close tie between death and correction in the Gulag cannot be fully understood without reference to the provision of food in the camps. Correction was never guaranteed to all prisoners, and food operated in such a manner that those determined to be irredeemable were placed on a downward spiral toward death. The provision of food served the system of both punishment and reward in the Gulag. The main practice related to food was the “differentiation” of rations—a practice that like so many others in the Gulag, echoed practices in Soviet society at large.⁵⁵ According to official regulations, and usually in practice, prisoners received different amounts of food corresponding to different levels of labor productivity. This was a high-priority Gulag activity. In 1934, Karlag’s director wrote to his subdivision heads that the completion of the production program was dependent on the differentiation of food provisions. The practice was the primary means for dealing with “idlers and simulators.” The director also noted that the constant failure to provide adequate and quality food to prisoners who were working well completely undermined the system.⁵⁶

While this system certainly served to cajole prison laborers to increase output, it also functioned within the system to tie the measure of redemption to the fulfillment of work norms. The failure to fulfill norms evidenced a failed commitment to self-rehabilitation. Nobody was understood as “unable” to fulfill norms. Rather, the failure to fulfill norms was treated as a willful activity, as an indication that a prisoner was still an enemy and actively resisting participation in the grand crusade of Soviet socialism. Reduced rations were the main cudgel to destroy that resistance. Reduced rations, so the theory went, would break down a prisoners’ resistance, compel them to improve their labor performance, and thus lead to their reeducation, or if the prisoners continued to “resist” reeducation by failing to fulfill norms, their rations would lead to starvation and death, removing them from Soviet society once and for all.

Soviet authorities were constantly adjusting rations in an attempt to find that precise point between survival and death. Similar to the evergrowing differentiation of institutions that aimed at an ever-finer categorization of prisoners according to their perceived level of danger and capacity for reeducation, Gulag authorities eventually developed a highly differentiated set of official rations. At times, there were as many as nine different levels of official rations.57 A differentiated approach to the prisoner population was always an important part of Gulag practice and reveals that economic considerations were never the only priority. As early as 1930, central OGPU authorities authorized the creation of work teams for weakened prisoners to work light duty three to four hours per day for four to six weeks in order to improve their health and allow them to return to full labor capacity. Yet, this provision specifically included in the light-duty work teams only those who had already shown “good behavior and a conscientious attitude toward labor.”⁵⁸ Not all prisoners were eligible for this potentially life-saving (and labor-saving) practice. The Gulag never tried to save all of its prisoner laborers, only those who had shown some measure of reconstruction into honest citizens.

Of course, even the productive prisoner was often short of food in the Gulag. When the Soviet Union went through particularly hungry times, the Gulag prisoner, the lowest priority in Soviet society, suffered severely. Food, especially the lack of adequate food, was a constant preoccupation of the Gulag prisoner. Even though official regulations prohibited the reduction of prisoner rations “below an established calorie minimum,” rarely was even the most productive prisoner laborer guaranteed enough rations to survive.⁵⁹

When official channels failed to provide adequate food for survival, and when many prisoners were quite deliberately placed on starvation rations as a means of punishment, a secondary market in food arose.⁶⁰ Prisoners jockeyed for the privileged positions in the camp that provided access to food. Many of those who survived did so thanks to getting jobs in camp kitchens or tending to vegetable gardens and crop fields. As we will see below, access to food was a driving factor in the creation and maintenance of a prisoner society. Nationality, friendship, and membership in criminal gangs—the categories of a prisoner’s existence—were important elements in determining who gained access to food outside the official ration system and with whom well-placed prisoners shared their privileged access to food.

Often survival in the face of the cycle toward death caused by the tie between food rations and labor output was only possible with the help of someone else—help that generally came at a price. Bardach recalled his work in the Gulag timber industry.

As Pike [his work partner] and I grew weaker, we fulfilled less and less of our norm and received less and less to eat. One afternoon [brigade leader] Kovalov took me aside and said, “Let me have your boots. Then I’ll put you back on full rations. I’ll also give you an extra paika [ration], or even two.” My boots were my only treasure. But the sucking in my intestines nearly drove me to eat boiled shoe leather or the bark from a tree, and in the evening I gave Kovalov my boots.61

Frequently, contacts with people outside the camps—whether relatives who might send a food parcel or locals who might provide food products through black market transactions—were crucial to survival beyond the official rationing system. Gulag authorities attempted to maintain control over these external sources, either by treating the receipt of packages as a privilege that could be taken away or by engaging in a constant battle against black market transactions. Nonetheless, the repeated focus on these practices in Gulag documentation reveals that the officials were never able to gain control over them. Particularly problematic in this regard was the way that the external provision of food undermined the system of differentiating food rations—a key aspect of official control over who would survive and who would not in the Gulag system.

Diverse Gulag Living Conditions

After the time spent at work, prisoners spent most of their time in their living quarters. Often, but not always, labor camp prisoner living space accorded with typical visions of concentration camp life. Walls of stone, wood, or even just barbed wire topped with watchtowers surrounded camp zones of barracks and communal buildings like cafeterias, medical clinics, baths, and the like. Each camp zone differed in certain details. Some had no walls, just barbed wire; some had no medical clinic or no bath. Sometimes communal facilities were shared among neighboring camp zones. Nonetheless, the typical camp zone involved some type of guarded exterior boundary, usually surrounded by a free-fire forbidden zone, and an interior within which prisoners were relatively free to move during their nonworking hours.

Yet a great diversity marked living conditions in the Soviet corrective labor camps. Different prisoners in different camp divisions enjoyed different levels of free movement. At its most basic level, the freedom of movement within the camp zone signaled the fundamental difference between the concentration camp and the cellular prison. Prisoners usually noted the difference immediately on arrival, and at least until the more brutal realities of camp life set in, they could even find the atmosphere of the concentration camp a refreshing change from the prison. Thus, Stefanskaia recalls her first impressions on her spring arrival at Karlag. Sun, grass, wildflowers, and fresh air were all an improvement over crowded, dark prisoner cells saturated with the smell of the cheap prisoner “tobacco” makhorka. Her attitude changed quickly, however, as she completed the seventy-kilometer march to the transit camp. “Sand, coal and scorching heat! . . . The steppe with its grasses ended. Here was Karaganda’s transit camp. Barracks. They led us behind the barbed wire, counted and turned us over to the camp’s directors. Many barracks. Many prisoners.”62 Quickly, the labor camps earned a harsh reputation in the prisoner world. As former Kolyma prisoner Vladimir Petrov recalled hearing from one transit camp prisoner, “Everybody who wants to survive must do all he can to avoid being sent to a camp, since even the best camp is many times worse than the worst prison.”⁶³

Stefanskaia’s story itself, though, reveals a Gulag world that is less familiar but surprisingly common. She soon made her way from the transit point to the camp division at Dolinka, where prisoners were divided according to their alleged crime and the length of their sentence. Karlag was a large camp geographically. As an expansive state farm with migratory grazing livestock and crops spread around the steppe, Karlag was even more diffuse and sparsely populated than most Gulag camps. Many of Karlag’s prisoners moved about with their herds, living in far-flung corners of the camp’s steppe, without zones, barbed wire, or barracks, and frequently without guard. As much as possible, Karlag authorities sought to allow free movement only to the most trusted prisoners, which meant those who had proven their capacity for rehabilitation through their labor performance, behavior in camps, class background, alleged crime, or sentence—all the categories according to which prisoners were constantly evaluated. But the extremely mobile nature of Karlag’s work often forced them to allow even so-called counterrevolutionaries and hardened recidivists to live outside of camp zones.

Keeping prisoners outside of camp zones and sending them to work without an accompanying armed guard were practices by no means unique to Karlag. Every camp used these strategies to cope with the persistent shortages of camp zones and armed guard staff. Central Gulag authorities rather grudgingly tolerated such practices, seeking to ensure that only the most trusted of prisoners were allowed out without guard. Thus, they strictly forbade counterrevolutionary and other prisoners deemed particularly dangerous, especially those known to be inclined toward escape, from being kept outside zones and working in unguarded brigades. Even these rules were broken a lot, however, as local camp authorities attempted to balance their assigned economic tasks, the profile of their prisoner population, and their available facilities. The particularities of Karlag’s economic tasks made such conditions more common, and the related problems of meeting the competing demands of economic production and maintaining strict isolation and guard of especially dangerous prisoners caused constant difficulties for camp authorities.

Stefanskaia was fortunate not to be one of those kept under perpetual surveillance, always living behind barbed wire and under armed guard even at work. Even though she had been convicted of a counterrevolutionary crime, she was placed in a general unguarded camp zone and was free to work in any part of Karlag’s agricultural zone without an armed guard accompanying her to work. Stefanskaia soon became acquainted with a veterinary medic who had earned the right to move freely about the camp’s territory. Along with Liusia, a female prisoner friend, she began to work as the veterinary medic’s assistant. At first they continued to live in the camp zone at Dolinka, but as part of their work, they traveled rather freely around the steppe caring for ill sheep. Days among the flowers and grasses were a sharp contrast with the filth and criminal “exotica” of the camp zone. As she described it, “My God, it was such beauty! It was as if we had fallen into another world.”64

Soon, Stefanskaia and Liusia began to live full time near the veterinary station with the medic and another female prisoner. They lived “like one family.” Her life had certainly changed from the prison, train, and camp zone.

We forgot that we were prisoners that before us was a long term. This was all the particularity of grand Karlag. It is very big. Its territory is huge. In the middle of Karlag is the convoyed zone. Strict regime. Everyone is under strict supervision and convoy. But the rest of the prisoners, those under the “general” regime, live without convoy. The camp is agricultural and the un-convoyed mass of prisoners was occupied in agriculture, animal husbandry and sheep herding.⁶⁵

As Stefanskaia was quick to point out, her good fortune was only a relative phenomenon. In losing her freedom, she had lost much. Her contemporaries at home “received higher education, their chosen profession, established their personal lives, started families and participated in the life of our country. But we were prisoners and our life did not belong to us.” Yet she really lived in the Gulag. Her story reflects the great diversity of the Gulag experience. Some concentration camp prisoners lived behind barbed wire, under constant armed guard, and with relatively little personal space or time. Some lived, as did Stefanskaia, in conditions almost indistinguishable from the internal exile population. Stefanskaia’s freedom, of course, was significantly curtailed. She could not return to her old life. Still, she was held neither behind barbed wire nor under armed guard. As we will see, she even fell in love.66

Karlag’s particularities as an agricultural camp exerted a strong influence on daily life inside and outside its porous borders. With so many prisoners living outside of camp zones without guard in the steppe, Karlag’s capabilities of preventing the mixing of camp and noncamp populations were quite limited. This manifested itself in many ways. First, Karlag authorities blamed contact between the prisoner and free populations of Karaganda for crimes and disorders committed in the camp. In February 1938, they noted that such contacts facilitated the theft of camp property, speculation, and other criminal activities on the part of both prisoners and voluntary camp employees. Camp employees sent letters for prisoners outside the camp censorship system, distributed the best food and living conditions to their prisoner acquaintances, and provided vodka for them. Prisoners even engaged in drinking and dancing parties at the apartments of camp employees. All of these events prompted Karlag’s leadership to remind its employees that the camp “was not a sovkhoz and was not a recreation spot but was a place of concentration for elements opposed to the Soviet system and dangerous for society.”⁶⁷

In April 1934, central Karlag authorities complained bitterly of prisoners’ ever-more-frequent drinking of alcohol. Drunken prisoners, they claimed, had led to a growth in criminal activities in the camp, including murders. Two of the numerous sources of the alcohol were identified: free citizens living in settlements near the camp’s borders, and prisoners working in transport who had contacts with the world outside the camp.⁶⁸

Karlag authorities issued a regular stream of decrees, the very existence of which testified to their powerlessness in fully isolating the camp from the surrounding free populations. Given that a great many Karlag prisoners lived outside confined camp zones and moved about the steppe in their agricultural labors, this inability to keep prisoners isolated from the free population is unsurprising. Nonetheless, it was a constant source of concern for Karlag officials, who feared not only the negative consequences for their control of the prisoner population but also the possible physical danger and potentially contaminating effects of prisoners on free Soviet society. Reports include drunken prisoners descending on the city of Karaganda, getting ahold of a weapon, and shooting a local resident, or prisoners spreading communicable diseases to the free and exile populations.⁶⁹ Yet they also feared intellectual contact between the prisoner and free populations. A memo from August 1937 reminded local camp subdivisions that their cultural brigades and theatrical groups were forbidden from performing in front of audiences from among the free population.⁷⁰

Gulag authorities used the diversity of living conditions in the camps as a way to reward and punish their prisoners. Those who had proved themselves reliable were transferred to an easier camp regime with fewer restrictions on movement, lighter work duties, and enhanced access to the necessities of survival. Exactly the opposite occurred for those prisoners deemed particularly dangerous and inveterate in their enemy activity. These prisoners were sent to harsh camp divisions where survival was more difficult due to heavy labor and poor access to supplementary food provisions.

Guarding “Enemies”

The Gulag employed a large staff of administrators and armed guards both centrally and at each individual outpost. The “voluntary” staff of the Gulag was an enormous expense that served to undermine considerably any chance that prisoner laborers would be profitable. By January 1, 1945, the Gulag counted over 273,000 employees (of whom 104,000 worked as guards)—a number not including prisons, children’s colonies, and the administration of road construction, which all also belonged to the penal system. By March 1953, this number grew to 445,000 (of whom 234,000 worked as guards). Yet according to official accounts, the Gulag was always understaffed.71 As a result of understaffing, the line between prisoners and voluntary Gulag workers was often fuzzy. Prisoners were employed in camp administration and even the camp guard itself. Furthermore, Gulag employees knew all too well how quickly they could be arrested and become prisoners themselves. Even camp chiefs could swiftly make the trip from commander to prisoner. O. G. Linin was the chief of Karlag through much of the 1930s. In February 1937, he was awarded a medal for “grand accomplishments in agriculture and for showing initiative and energy.” On December 29 of that same year, Linin was removed from his post, and arrested for “disorder” in the work of the camp and for “wrecking.”⁷² I have been unable to determine his fate. His permanent replacement, V. P. Zhuravlev, did not arrive from his post as chief of the Upravlenie Narodnogo Komissariata Vnutrennykh Del (UNKVD, or Directorate of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) of the Moscow region until June 22, 1939.⁷³

The gap between prisoners and camp employees was rather clear, though. Camp guards and staff often operated in the camps with a great deal of independence and impunity. Consequently, the attitude of Gulag staff toward their work and prisoners could make a tremendous difference in the quality of daily life. It was not uncommon for camp guards and staff to beat prisoners. Camp employees sometimes ordered the arrest and incarceration of prisoners in penalty units, even when they did not have the authority to do so. Sometimes the central camp administration learned of these official violations of camp rules and regulations, and sometimes they lodged complaints and even threatened or punished the perpetrators.74 Official documents nevertheless fail to record much of the brutality in the camp relationship between Gulag employees and prisoners, which is detailed at great length in memoirs.

Camp employees fulfilled a wide range of tasks. They were cultural educators, camp division directors, medical officials, and record keepers. The camp employee, however, with whom the prisoner had the most frequent and direct contact, was the member of the militarized guard (voennizirovanie okhrany). The number of camp guards grew throughout the Gulag’s history in both absolute terms and proportion to the prisoner population. But camp authorities were always calling for more guards and complaining about their inability to fill all the available positions. The militarized guards were employees of the Gulag, but according to central Gulag authorities in 1940, the guards primarily came from the ranks of demobilized Red Army soldiers and young commanders from the troops of the NKVD.⁷⁵ Gulag guards were the least educated segment of Gulag employees. In 1946, for example, 87 percent of the guard had less than a middle school education.⁷⁶ In 1940, some 107,000 guards were tasked with the isolation of prisoners, convoy of prisoners to and from work sites, guarding of prisoners at the work site, transferring prisoners from one camp to another, and search for escapees.⁷⁷

Recruiting employees for the militarized guard was difficult, much as it was for recruiting employees for any Soviet enterprises located in the Soviet Union’s extreme geographic locations. Many of the camps were in virtually uninhabitable parts of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, from the early 1930s central camp authorities continually stressed the need to recruit qualified employees into the camp system—“firm Chekists, voluntarily choosing to work [in the camps.]” A number of incentives were given to recruits, including bonus pay of up to 50 percent depending on the location of their camp work, two months of yearly vacation, and the possibility after a three-year period of working in the camps to transfer to “operative” work in the location of their choice.⁷⁸ Petrov reported a conversation with a camp guard about recruitment techniques:

During their service in the Red Army all soldiers were constantly under observation. . . . Toward the end of their army tenure the most [politically] reliable of the men were transferred to the N.K.V.D. troops of internal defence. Here they were offered higher pay and numerous privileges to make them sign up with the N.K.V.D. on a voluntary basis for a period of from three to five years, or for permanent duty. Many soldiers were tempted by these offers. . . . Those who volunteered for this service were usually men not well adapted to normal working life because they were not too bright, lacked professional skills, or preferred an easy life. As guards in our camps they really did have a pretty easy time of it. They were not bothered with drill, their duty hours were usually short—on the average not more than four or five per day—and they were excellently fed. They had little to complain about.79

Petrov’s description of the incentives conforms with official documents, but his portrait of the Kolyma camp guard’s duty as easy seems unlikely to say the least. Even working short hours would have been little comfort given the extreme climatic conditions of Kolyma. Granted, Kolyma guards were immeasurably better off than their prisoner wards. Still, moving about in Kolyma weather with prisoners was no light matter, especially considering the harsh punishment that could result from a single prisoner escape. The same can be said of Karlag (and many other Gulag camps), where harsh winter winds, extreme blizzards, soaring summer temperatures, and the existence of many prisoners outside the camp zones made their work particularly difficult. Without question, the brutalities of life as a guard contributed to the brutalities carried out by guards on prisoners.

As with the prisoners themselves, and as was common at any job in the Soviet 1930s, Gulag authorities implemented a comprehensive program of political education and morale building among their employees. Every camp had its own political department (politotdel) composed primarily of Communist Party and Komsomol members who oversaw educational work among camp staff and guards. Such educational work took several directions. First, political education sought to raise feelings of pride at being Chekists. Each year’s December 20 anniversary of the Cheka’s 1917 formation (the first Soviet secret police agency) was widely celebrated in the Gulag. Speeches and events reminded camp employees and guards of the glorious history of the VChK-OGPU-NKVD, “the weapon of the proletarian dictatorship.”⁸⁰ The October Revolution, camp employees were reminded, was not—and could not be—the final and decisive blow in the battle with the ruling classes. The role of the Chekist was in armed defense of the proletarian dictatorship from the forces of internal and international counterrevolution. The camp system’s political department took this opportunity to emphasize repeatedly that the OGPU was a fighting organ, engaged in pitched battle with the remaining elements of capitalism that resisted the final construction of a classless society.⁸¹

Educational activities among camp staff and guard always focused on their role in the Soviet battle with its enemies. Gulag employees were on the front lines of this particular fight and were reminded repeatedly of the danger to Soviet society that their prisoners presented. Gulag authorities tried repeatedly to raise fear, suspicion, and hatred of the prisoners. Whenever incidents of prisoner resistance occurred, especially incidents involving the killing or wounding of guards or staff, central Gulag authorities made sure to send out a description of the events to all Gulag camps, with instructions that all Gulag employees be made aware of the incident.82

This type of propaganda could be quite effective. Petrov recalls the guards in Kolyma:

A considerable percentage of these guards were members of the Young Communist League, wholly convinced that their happy life was possible only because of the Soviet government. They were therefore most ready to defend that government from the disarmed and helpless “enemies of the people” who were held in concentration camps. In fact, they were systematically indoctrinated with the idea that camp inhabitants were all dangerous criminals whom one could treat like the scum of the earth with complete impunity. . . . Instances of guards using their fists on the slightest provocation were becoming more and more frequent.⁸³

Even more intriguing is a letter sent on March 4, 1964, from an anonymous correspondent to the Central Committee about Solzhenitsyn’s one day in the life of Ivan denisovich. The author, a fifteen-year employee of a postwar labor camp and a party member, took considerable exception with a number of elements in Solzhenitsyn’s portrait of camp life. While the author’s comments in some ways relate to particularities of the postwar Gulag, they offer here testimony to the power of official propaganda on many Gulag employees. Although the Gulag employee for the most part believed that Solzhenitsyn was correct in his presentations of daily life in the camps, he was especially displeased with the notion that the novella’s katorga camp division was filled with “innocent and very good people.” If only innocent people were imprisoned there, he asked, “then where did they send the genuine enemies of Soviet power like the Vlasovites, the Banderites, the police and the Bandits of the [Baltic] military-fascist organizations,” and so on. Not a word of Solzhenitsyn’s tale, he complained, revealed the “frightful crimes” committed by these enemies.⁸⁴

As to daily life, the anonymous correspondent objected to Solzhenitsyn’s characterizations of the camp’s internal surveillance system, especially his references to informants as “stoolies” (stukachi) and “bitches” (suki). Surveillance work in camps for the especially dangerous prisoners “had an especially important significance—the eyes and ears of the camp leadership. It was assigned to the timely discovery and prevention of all criminal activities in the camp . . . [with] special attention paid to preventing escapes, criminal-bandit activities, murders, bribery, beatings of prisoners and so forth.” The camp leadership recruited prisoners into service as informers as part of the attempt to make them into good Soviet citizens to “influence them to turn their back on their criminal past and honestly complete their sentence in the camp. (Those who declared that they were wrongly convicted, as is right, were not recruited.)” The absence of informants, he concluded, would have brought the camp to a state of “anarchy.”85

Although Gulag propaganda constantly focused on the redeemability of its prisoner population, a counternarrative accompanied this message. It spoke of a highly dangerous prisoner population composed of enemies bent on the destruction of the socialism that the entire Soviet Union was engaged in constructing. Local camp authorities, and especially the guards most directly in contact with the prisoners and with this counternarrative, dealt with these mixed messages, and consequently often treated their prisoners with the complete disregard of the subhuman.

In spite of all the propaganda and punishments aimed at discouraging close contact between guards and prisoners, both memoirs and official documents attest to the inability of Gulag authorities to prevent these relationships. Camp employees drank with prisoners, engaged in surreptitious transactions with prisoners, took on female prisoners as lovers and domestic servants, and otherwise took part in illicit activities from the point of view of central Gulag officials. Despite frequent attempts to end these practices, they continued throughout the history of the camp system, not least because many of the guards and administrators in the camps were prisoners and former prisoners.⁸⁶ Furthermore, on their own volition, Gulag authorities often chose to behave with kindness toward their prisoners, without regard to material gain. The guard-prisoner relationship was nonetheless typically one of barbarous cruelty. Camp officials were more likely to reward than to punish a guard for shooting a prisoner “attempting to escape.”⁸⁷ Lengthy reports detail incidents in which guards shot prisoners, usually with the short conclusion to each that “weapons were used properly.”⁸⁸

Due to the difficulties in recruiting staff and guards, former prisoners usually filled many of the voluntary positions in camps. Of course, for many former prisoners, the level of voluntariness in staying on as employees of the camp was questionable at best. Many released prisoners were refused permission to return to their homes, generally with notations of a certain number of cities in which they could not live. This dramatically reduced their freedom of movement and left them the option of taking work in the camp system, which they knew, or moving to a location where they had no contacts whatsoever. The developing camp system took advantage of this precarious position. Thus, in December 1930 Arkadii Vasil’evich Orlov-Rumiantsev was dispatched to the concentration camp centered in Akmolinsk (presently Astana, the capital of independent Kazakhstan) to work in the accounting department. Orlov-Rumiantsev had spent 1926–28 as a prisoner in the Solovetskii camp for illegally crossing a border. He was released early for a positive attitude toward labor and discipline, but due to his conviction was denied permission to live in Moscow, Leningrad, Khar’kov, Kiev, Odessa, Rostov on the Don, or near any borders. Consequently, he had agreed to work for the OGPU’s camp system.89

It was not just former prisoners, though, who held positions in the camp administration. Throughout the history of the Gulag, certain prisoners themselves worked in various administrative, supervisory, and even security roles in the camps. The chief of the OGPU camp system Kogan noted in a letter from April 1931 to all OGPU camp chiefs that difficulties in filling staff positions had led them to employ “prisoners not sentenced for counterrevolutionary crimes” as lower camp administrative staff and armed camp guards. He was concerned, however, about providing the proper “stimulus for correction and excellent work” of these prisoners who had been removed from general work. As a result, then deputy OGPU chief Genrikh Iagoda ordered that for “absolutely faultless behavior and outstanding work,” prisoners in these positions could earn a reduction of their sentences by one-third. Prisoners qualifying for this sentence reduction could petition the central Gulag authorities for early release.⁹⁰ Subsequent correspondence between central Gulag authorities and Kazitlag reveal that counterrevolutionary prisoners were also being employed in such positions, but they were ineligible for early release.⁹¹

The issue of counterrevolutionary prisoners working in the camp administration or guard was a long saga. The camps were driven by the competing demands of filling the posts necessary to complete their work and preventing enemies from working in sensitive positions. The task was all the more difficult, because often it was precisely the counterrevolutionary prisoners who had the necessary education, training, or skills to complete certain camp tasks. Counterrevolutionary prisoners served their camps as bookkeepers, engineers, draftspeople, and doctors. Yet it was their employment in the camp guard that caused officials the greatest consternation. In November 1930, Kazitlag authorities complained of guards employed from among prisoners “politically alien to the contemporary order . . . kulaks and those sentenced for banditism and under counterrevolutionary articles.” The decree demanded an immediate purge of the guard staff to remove such people.⁹² In 1931, Kazitlag authorities ordered that a prisoner with an improper class background be removed from the guard at Dolinka.⁹³ The problem of cleansing the administration and guard of certain types of prisoners was never solved, nor did the necessity of employing some prisoners in sensitive positions ever come to an end. On January 1, 1939, fully twenty-five thousand “well-recommended prisoners” continued to be employed as camp guards.94

Surveillance and Escapes in the gulag

In the camps, prisoners were quickly made to understand that they would be strictly monitored throughout their stay in the Gulag. From their arrival into the Gulag system, prisoners were subject to intentional humiliation, the destruction of all private space, and the assertion of total state control over their lives. Not even the body was a private domain. As Margarete Buber-Neumann, a prisoner at Karlag, recalled of her time in prison prior to arriving in the camps: “A bodily search at the Lubianka is the thing to let you know to the full what being a prisoner means; not even the most intimate parts of your body are any longer decently your own; you are no longer a human being; you are a thing, an object to be mauled unceremoniously.”⁹⁵

Modern prison systems were built based on the ideal of the panopticon. That is, they were specifically constructed in such a way that all prisoner cells were visible to guards and prison authorities at all times.⁹⁶ The concentration camp was something quite different, built on the model of a military encampment. Watchtowers on the corners of a concentration camp facility offered a clear sight line of a camp’s perimeter and some visibility of the interior of a camp’s zone. The typical zone, though, had barracks and other buildings within its walls that provided interior spaces invisible to the prying eyes of the state. In the historical development of the concentration camp, such a system made sense. The camps of the South African Anglo-Boer War were not designed as a penal system but instead were holding pens for the rural populations that were supporting the irregular Boer resistance. British colonial authorities did not care much about what happened inside these camps, so long as their prisoners stayed there. So the concentration camp setup, with its capacity to prevent escape, worked for these needs.

The Gulag was something different. It was both a concentration camp and penal system, and Soviet authorities cared deeply about what was going on inside the barbed wire and the minds of the prisoners themselves. Consequently, the camp system developed an extensive system of internal surveillance primarily operating through prisoner informants in order to keep track of things inside the camp. The system of surveillance is perhaps one of the most interesting and telling practices of the Gulag. Why was it necessary to fund a broad system of surveillance in the deepest reaches of the Gulag, where escape was rare and surviving escape was nearly impossible? Surveillance was ubiquitous in the Gulag. From their interrogation cell to their prisoner transports, and ultimately to their labor camp or special settlements, Gulag inmates were subject to constant and intense surveillance. While informants were especially important for revealing escape plans and attempts, they also reported on outbreaks of disease and supplied the material for reports on the camp population’s mood.97

A large surveillance apparatus operated inside the Gulag. Officially referred to as the Operative-Chekist Department or Third Department, we know much about surveillance and informants from the memoir literature. The Gulag’s surveillance system, however, remains the primary off-limits topic in terms of access to archival documentation.⁹⁸ Nonetheless, a great deal can be learned about surveillance from the hints in publicly available documents. First, the top priority in the Third Department’s work was the prevention of escape. Second, it is quite clear that the Third Department, the surveillance section, was responsible for monitoring both camp inmates and employees. The main interest of the Third Department as related to camp employees was the maintenance of vigilance against escape, and the prevention of ties between prisoners and guards or other staff that might lead to escapes, theft of camp property, or other violations of camp rules. Thus, the Third Department of the Samarskoe subdivision was criticized severely in May 1934 by Karlag’s Third Division director for its failure to prevent multiple escapes or recover the escaping inmates. Its battle against escape, alleged the director, was fake and existed “only on paper.” Where, he asked, was its claimed “strong” network of informants or “multi-member” action group for liquidating escapes that had singularly failed to prevent “a colossal number of escapes”—one-quarter of all escapes in Karlag?⁹⁹

Gulag guards knew that they could be quite severely punished if escapes occurred. In the Stalinist Soviet Union, everything was treated as political. Machines did not just break; industrial accidents were no accident. Every negative occurrence could potentially be treated as an instance of criminal sabotage, and many Gulag inmates arrived in just such a way. Bardach, for example, was a Red Army tank driver during the war. He accidentally rolled the tank during a river crossing and found himself soon in Kolyma on charges of “wartime treason.” In such an atmosphere, the escape of an enemy from the clutches of the Gulag was always treated as potentially treasonous, and could lead to criminal punishment for the guards and camp authorities responsible for preventing escape. Nobody in Soviet society was inherently trustworthy.¹⁰⁰ An escape could mean that the guards and administrators were part of, or sympathetic to, the anti-Soviet activities and conspiracies that were imagined to be everywhere. For this reason and because of the constant barrage of propaganda that taught Gulag employees that they were guarding extremely dangerous anti-Soviet people, guards often reacted quite brutally to escape attempts. Bardach recalled the guards’ words after recapturing him from an attempted escape from a prisoner train during the war.

“I think we need to teach the ze-ka [prisoner] a lesson so no one else tries to escape. Let’s bloody him up and parade him in front of the prisoners.”

. . . “You don’t need to kill him. Just make it so he’ll never want to fuck again.”

“You fucking slime!” A belt buckle smashed across my stomach.

“Give me the belt! I’ll castrate him for life.”

“Smash his balls.”

“Beat his face to a pulp!”

. . . The buckle smashed across my ribs and abdomen again and again.

After the guards beat Bardach severely, the commander ordered them to show his beaten and bleeding body to the other prisoners as a warning of what might happen to future escapees.101

Weak surveillance work and a failure to recruit enough prisoner informants were frequently offered as the main cause of excessive escapes.¹⁰² Preventing escape was objectively one of the Gulag’s greatest success stories, even if camp authorities were never satisfied. While significant numbers of prisoners managed to escape in each year of the 1930s, once the Gulag system had passed through its initial growth phase, escape began a steady decline. From an all-time high of over 83,000 escapes in 1934, escape totals decreased, even as the prisoner population continued to grow. By 1939, escapes were a relatively rare occurrence, never again exceeding 12,500 in any particular year, even as the population of the Gulag swelled in the postwar period to its highest levels. In fact, through the years 1944–53, escapes never exceeded 4,500—a minuscule portion of the Gulag population.¹⁰³ For camp authorities, though, these escape totals were still much too high. Central Gulag officials clearly expected that escapes should reach zero. Even one escape was evidence of a failure on the part of camp staff, guards, and surveillance personnel. Consequently, the decrease in escapes entailed no reduction in surveillance or camp guards.¹⁰⁴

Punishment for escapes, like so much else in Gulag practice, was a differentiated affair. Certain types of prisoners were understood as the most dangerous, and their attempts to escape would be punished most severely. While all escapes were treated as “the most malicious form of sabotage and disorganization of camp life and production,” and all escapees after 1939 were subject to criminal penalties, for a select group of prisoners, the penalty was to be death. This included the usual contingent of the “most dangerous” inmates: “counterrevolutionaries, bandits, robbers and other especially dangerous criminals along with prisoners of other categories, who have escaped repeatedly.”105

Karlag officials relied on their camp’s particularities as an agricultural enterprise as an excuse for their escape figures. With the dispersed nature of the camp population, it was simply impossible, they argued, to string enough barbed wire to reduce escape numbers to zero. Yet no matter how often Karlag authorities complained to central Gulag about the specificities of their camp, severe criticism continued, and the primary blame for escape was placed on a lack of vigilance, discipline, and appropriate education for the responsible parties from the camp chief down to the individual members of the militarized guard.¹⁰⁶

The surveillance system was tasked with providing that discipline among camp employees. Their operatives monitored, policed, and punished the camp administration and guards. Violations of discipline were rife among camp staff. Drinking, sleeping on duty, and cavorting with prisoners—the violations were many and varied. Occasionally, the brutal actions of camp staff and guards were actually brought to light by prisoners. A Karlag report from October 1933 related the investigation of “criminal violations of corrective labor policies” in Koturskoe subdivision’s camp point Sasykul’. Prisoner witnesses and a Third Department investigation revealed several instances of brutal treatment of prisoners refusing to work. One time, a cord was used to tie several of these prisoners’ hands behind their back and bind them to one another. They were displayed to other prisoners as an example and only released when they asked to go to work. In another situation, three prisoners had their hands and feet bound with cord, and were tossed out into the cold weather, where they were left for three hours until the pain became so great that they agreed to go to work in exchange for being untied. Other camp subdivisions were warned not to repeat such actions.¹⁰⁷ It is unclear whether such practices actually stopped after the Third Department’s intervention. But even if this particular brutality was ended, no doubt it was simply replaced by the many other cruelties of Gulag life. Still, on this one occasion, the surveillance apparatus operated in favor of the prisoners.

Unsurprisingly, the surveillance apparatus was much more likely to cause trouble for prisoners than to help them. The authorities had eyes seemingly everywhere, reading prisoner correspondence, listening to prisoner conversations, and watching prisoner activities. The labor camp inmate did not know who was an informant, so everybody was suspect—a factor creating great rifts and distrust in Gulag society. In spite of the overwhelming presence of surveillance in the Gulag, however, the layout of a concentration camp differed markedly from the prison panopticon. On the one hand, the system of anonymous informants left substantially less private space for the prisoner. No matter how close a prisoner became with one of their fellow unfortunates, they could never be absolutely certain that they were not in the presence of an informer. The Gulag represented, par excellence, what Arendt termed a “system of ubiquitous spying, where everybody may be a police agent and each individual feels himself under constant surveillance.”108 At the same time, not every prisoner was an informer. Every personal interaction inside a concentration camp was potentially under the watchful eyes of the surveillance apparatus, but not every personal interaction was under actual surveillance. The concentration camp itself—the massing of large numbers of prisoners who were relatively free to move about within the camp zone during nonworking hours—left great potential for unwatched spaces. The existence of these uncontrolled spaces was a source of enormous discomfort for camp authorities, and explains to a large extent the constant growth of the surveillance apparatus in regions where escapes were unlikely and the capacity of prisoners to harm Soviet society was extremely limited.

Reforging: The Meaning of Reeducation in the Gulag

Socialism is creeping in everywhere around you, and even within you.

—Belomor, describing the feeling to be engendered in the wayward prisoner by the Cultural-Educational Section’s permeation of the entire camp space with socialism

Hand in hand with the corrective elements of labor came the didactic work of the KVCh. All camps and colonies operated a KVCh subordinate to both their individual camp leadership and the central Gulag Cultural-Educational Department. In 1931, Gulag chief Kogan wrote to Kazitlag about the cultural-educational and political work of the camps. These tasks, he noted, have two goals: “a) to achieve full class stratification of the prisoners and with the help of the strata socially close to us to carry out the necessary measures, and b) to correct and politically educate the socially close element.”¹⁰⁹ From the Gulag’s early days, then, Kogan laid out the fundamentals of “reeducation” Gulag style. Reeducation would be a high-priority activity for the camps, but it would be carried out in a differentiated fashion. Not all were redeemable. Educational work, furthermore, would “achieve full class stratification of the prisoners”—that is, it would play an integral role in the very definition of who was redeemable and who was not.

The primary job of the Gulag’s educational workers, as described by Karlag authorities in 1935, was “the reforging of former lawbreakers in the matter of returning to socialist society former socially dangerous people as enthusiasts for socialist construction.”110 Regardless of the exact terminology used, the matter was always the same. Fundamentally, educational workers were responsible for reeducating those Gulag prisoners who could be made fit for a return to Soviet society. Two particularly important elements arise from this basic premise. First, prisoners could be made to return to Soviet society by using the same political drives launched in Soviet society itself. Thus, both consciously and unconsciously, the educational workers of the Gulag were re-creating Soviet society inside the labor camps. Second, educational workers spent much more effort on those prisoners deemed of high potential to earn their way back to Soviet society and repeatedly took actions limiting the access of the most suspect prisoners to educational activities. Educational activities in the Gulag were never uniform. They always served to further distinguish prisoners from one another.

Economic production was itself always a high concern of cultural-educational work. Many students of the Gulag have naturally focused on this to argue that the educational apparatus was merely a propaganda show designed to exhort prisoners to work harder. Without question, KVCh documents reveal repeatedly the institution’s responsibility for labor productivity, but this was always tied to the task of reforging criminals. The two activities were understood as inseparable, because the improvement of economic production, like every other qualitative issue of Soviet life, was understood in an incredibly political and ideological manner. In some respect, the call to improve labor production was an integral part of the Gulag’s mandate to create honest Soviet citizens of its criminal inmates. After all, what was a better indication of full involvement in Soviet society than being a productive laborer?

The camp system spent a lot of resources on educational activities. Nonetheless, great cynicism frequently surrounded the project, which is unsurprising given the brutal conditions in the Gulag that reduced prisoners to subhuman conditions and the constant calls for vigilance in watching over allegedly highly dangerous populations. Individual chiefs of camps and camp subdivisions were usually reluctant to commit the resources necessary for cultural-educational activity. They perceived the rather-vague activities of remaking prisoners to be a waste of resources, time, and staff in the face of more concrete economic targets. Cultural-educational activities required the provision of such frequently scarce items as paper, ink, and prisoner laborers. As with nearly every other demand placed on them by central Gulag authorities, Karlag officials relied on the camp’s agricultural particularities to explain the difficulty in carrying out educational work with their prisoners. The dispersed, unconcentrated character of Karlag’s prisoner population made the provision of classes and cultural activities a difficult question of logistics and personnel. Only during the winter period did a substantial number of prisoners attend literacy classes.111 Despite their recurrent and justified protests, Karlag’s authorities were never released from their duty to complete these crucial Gulag tasks.

The failure to pay adequate attention to educational work itself could result in severe criticism from higher levels. In fact, failure in the economic sphere was laid primarily at the doorstep of poor cultural-educational work. Central camp authorities often complained of the “great divide” between cultural education and production, when they should be closely coordinated with one another.¹¹² Such complaints persisted throughout the Gulag’s life span. Much as the repetitive documentary warnings about shortcomings in living conditions in the camps failed to lead to significant improvements, little evidence indicates that the constant barrage of directives on educational activities had much impact, except to the extent that they prevented the abandonment of educational activity in its entirety. Educational work was uneven in the camps. The memoir literature reveals the wide range in cultural and educational activities in the camps. Some places at some times took the whole operation quite seriously, but it was just as often ignored or at least shunted off to the margins of camp activity.

One should certainly be careful not to make too much of the “educational” apparatus of the Gulag. It was, at most, a rather marginal activity, pushed on to the few nonworking hours of the day. Yet the KVCh did operate throughout the history of the camps.¹¹³ To focus solely on the indoctrination apparatus itself, though, fails to appreciate the role in Bolshevik ideology accorded to labor itself. Furthermore, one must understand the tie between reeducation and release in the camps—a feature discussed in more detail below. Without understanding educational activities, labor, and release/death all in conjunction with one another, the system can never be explained.¹¹⁴

A great deal can be learned about the ongoing redefinition of “honest Soviet citizens” from the particular methods and content chosen in this effort to educate criminals into that very ideal. The KVCh’s activities along with the Soviet vision of its ideal citizen were both tied first and foremost to labor. The work of the KVCh appeared everywhere in the camps driving prisoners toward a new version of themselves. KVCh posters at the Solovetskii camp declared, “Through work we shall return to society” and “Work redeems guilt.” And in the theater, signs stated, “Work without art is barbarity.”¹¹⁵ The slogan above the camp gate at Vorkuta read, “Welcome! We greet you with bread and salt. By honest work we will give coal to our country.”¹¹⁶ Labor was frequently tied to the international context. Thus in 1930, the Solovetskii camp newspaper declared that events on the Chinese Oriental Railway “evoked the just indignation of the Solovetskii inmates. . . . [H]undreds of convicts . . . signed a collective appeal for permission to organize a Shock-Labour Day.”117

Most important, the KVCh proclaimed, “A prisoner is an active participant in socialist construction!”¹¹⁸ To prepare the prisoner adequately for reintegration into the Soviet polity, the Gulag participated fully in the broad range of labor productivity programs during the period of socialist construction. In the early 1930s, Gulag camps actively engaged in socialist competition and the shock worker movement.¹¹⁹ Karlag attributed its own early successes to the personal visit of Gulag chief Matvei Berman in 1931 and his urging of prisoners to work as “shock workers,” and as such “to start decisively on the path of reforging and to try with all their force to make right their guilt before Soviet power.”¹²⁰ The corrective labor colony of Magnitogorsk held a number of shock worker conferences, complete with orchestra and group renditions of the “Internationale.”¹²¹

The title shock worker entailed far more than mere labor productivity. Solzhenitsyn recalled the rhetoric on the Belomor Canal: “In order to get the title of shock worker it was not enough merely to have production successes! It was necessary, in addition: (a) to read the newspapers; (b) to love your canal; (c) to be able to talk about its significance.” The shock worker had to be politically educated, understand the importance of their work, and carry the appropriate attitude toward their labor.¹²² Belomor depicted the unredeemed convict as typified by a lack of interest in and pessimism about the canal. Consequently, the prisoner was unable and unwilling to fulfill the norms. Only the inculcation of a spirit of optimism and interest in the canal allowed the individual to undergo the requisite transformation allowing them to perform in excess of the norm, form a brigade, and teach the brigade to overfulfill the norm. Consider the story of Engineer V. N. Maslov, who “had no faith whatsoever in the possibility of creating an immense canal. . . . He was willing to place at the disposal of these people his knowledge and his brains, but no more. Not a single emotion. Not a single smile.” But ultimately, Maslov solved unsolvable engineering problems and became “convinced of the advantages of Socialist organisation of labour.” He was released early, but continued to work on the project, earning the Order of the Red Banner. Such stories are repeated endlessly in Belomor and became the motif for all redemption tales told in the Gulag.¹²³

After Aleksei Stakhanov kicked off the movement that would bear his name by producing record levels of coal in the Donbass on August 31, 1935, the Stakhanovite quest for production records predictably made its way to the Gulag.¹²⁴ In November 1935, the Magnitogorsk labor colony held its own Stakhanovite conference.¹²⁵ As in Soviet society, however, the Stakhanovite movement often prompted resistance from officials, who recognized the false nature of Stakhanovite records. Often, an entire enterprise saw its work interrupted to prepare the conditions for a single worker to break a record. Local officials and managers also recognized that Stakhanovite records usually merely paved the way for an overall increase in production targets, merely making it more difficult for an enterprise to meet its production plans. Local Soviet economic enterprises understood the Stakhanovite movement as more about putting on a political show than increasing overall economic productivity. The same ambivalence toward Stakhanovism was evident in local Gulag outposts as well—perhaps even more so. Enthusiasm for prisoner production achievements and reeducation was particularly difficult to maintain in the face of the barrage of propaganda reminding camp staff that they were guarding dangerous enemies of the Soviet state. Thus, it was unsurprising to find Karlag officials complain in March 1936 about the “absence of necessary care and attention for STAKHANOVITES and SHOCK WORKERS, not to mention rank-and-file inmates” in the establishment of normal living conditions—problems that were undermining camp productivity and increasing the number of prisoners refusing to work.126

Issues of the newspaper Putevka (Path), a production of Karlag’s KVCh, were filled with articles on labor heroism among the prisoners, shock workers, and Stakhanovite movement. These articles frequently represented the close tie between prisoner attitudes and production. One article on how to bring the Stakhanovite movement into animal husbandry in the camp was titled “Mainly—This Is to Love Your Work.”¹²⁷ In another issue, the record-setting prisoner miner Senkul Kurmanbaev succeeded in part because “he loved the mine and his work.” So when he learned of the Stakhanovite movement, he immediately agreed to work by these methods and completed 677 percent of his daily quota on his big day. The article came complete with a line drawing of Kurmanbaev.¹²⁸ Other articles covering the Stakhanovite movement called for an “exchange of experience,” explained the operation of the “Stakhanovite cafeteria,” a special facility providing enhanced food rations to the Stakhanovite prisoner, and included prisoner-written pieces such as “How I Became a Stakhanovite.”¹²⁹

The work of the KVCh was not limited to labor campaigns alone. The KVCh led the types of cultural activities common throughout Soviet society. They supervised the Gulag’s participation in the nationwide campaign to stamp out illiteracy.¹³⁰ Radio loudspeakers filled every barrack with the sounds and educational messages of Radio Moscow.¹³¹ The KVChs sponsored political lectures, professional and technical training courses, and oral readings of newspapers.¹³² Barracks and camp workplaces were festooned with slogans, photographs, and illustrations, similar to what one would find in Soviet society at large.¹³³

Camps usually published their own newspapers.134 As early as the 1920s, the Solovetskii camp published its own newspaper and journal, and made subscriptions available to the general public.¹³⁵ By the 1930s, camp newspapers were marked for camp use only, but they continued to occupy significant camp resources.¹³⁶ In March 1937, Karlag’s administration celebrated the fifth anniversary of the general camp newspaper, Putevka. The paper’s circulation had grown to 6,500, and it oversaw the production of 202 wall newspapers as well as the distribution of camp bulletins and flyers. The tasks of the paper over that period included “the cultivation of the new man, reforging of his consciousness, familiarizing with labor the hundreds of delinquents who had never known what labor meant and who had lost the proper path in life. . . . Together with the masses and at their head, Putevka stormed the half-wild Kazakh steppe, transforming this region of the fearless bird into a blossoming oasis of Kazakhstan’s socialist agriculture.”¹³⁷ The title of the newspaper, Putevka, evoked the famous Soviet film Putevka v zhizn (The Path to life, sometimes in English as The Road to life), which depicted the reeducation of juvenile delinquents.

Although they happily celebrated the newspaper’s anniversaries, Karlag authorities were at best ambivalent about bringing camp newspapers to their prisoners. With the expansive nature of Karlag, merely getting newspapers to the prisoners could prove to be such a hassle that camp staff resisted assigning resources to distribution. This was equally as true of papers from outside the camps like Pravda and Izvestiia, which were supposed to be made available to prisoners, as it was for papers produced in the camps. In some cases, prisoners working in the KVCh were hoarding the newspapers to trade or sell for such uses as cigarette wrappers.¹³⁸ Yet it should be emphasized that Karlag did not abandon the production and distribution of newspapers entirely, despite its drain on scarce material and human resources.

The issues of Putevka covered a wide variety of production topics and carefully prepared stories about life in the camp. Many articles in Putevka could sit just as easily in the pages of Belomor. For example, on December 24, 1936, Putevka printed an article on its front page titled “My Thanks to the Chekists.” Presumably written by a prisoner named Krasil’shchinov, the article told the story of the author’s trip from a hardened thief who continuously refused to work in the camps and spent all his time in penalty isolators, to a model prisoner who was trusted to work without convoy guards and was appointed a brigade leader. Ultimately, wrote Krasil’shchinov, he enrolled in specialist training in Karlag to become a technician in sheep breeding. Although the course work was difficult, and in frustration he began showing up late for classes or skipping them, plus returning to his old ways, because of the “attention and care” of the teachers, Krasil’shchinov corrected himself and started to learn well. As a result, he was working in the camp in sheep breeding and emoted, “I love my work and I love labor.” He wrote to thank the camp administration and teachers for helping him become a man, and declared that he would never return to the thieving life.139 Of course, just as with the stories in Belomor, it is impossible to evaluate the truthfulness of this one, but it is important for the picture it reveals of the ideal reeducated inmate.

Not all articles in Putevka emphasized positive outcomes. The newspaper was filled with criticisms of prisoners and the camp administration. Sometimes, Putevka included caricatures of prisoners who failed in their work. One drawing was based on the reporting of a lagkor (a camp correspondent—essentially prisoners who wrote from their local subdivisions to the camp newspaper with critiques of problems in the camp). The lagkor portrayed a prisoner who completely ignored his fifty-nine head of sheep, failing to feed or water them for over a day. The drawing showed a prisoner walking away from bleating sheep, sticking his tongue out at them. A short poem underneath furthered the criticism.¹⁴⁰ Lagkory could also criticize camp authorities themselves. One wrote about the refusal of the camp subdivision director to take them to the baths for over three months. Another complained that prisoners were freezing, because the barracks were unheated, while in other barracks prisoners completely lacked bunks and had to sleep on the floor.¹⁴¹ At times, the lagkory signed their letters to the newspaper, but others came from “a witness” or with just a single letter for a name.

Putevka also included articles on topics related to events happening outside the camp, whether locally or internationally. Thus, one issue that had numerous articles on the Stakhanovite movement in Karlag also included articles on the opening of a highway between Karaganda and Balkash—a development that would allow Karaganda’s coal to be used in a much wider sphere. Further, articles appeared on the opening to the public of an apartment in which Lenin lived in Pskov and the Italian-Abyssinian War.¹⁴² Through these articles, frequently republished from other organs of the Soviet press, the camps sought to include their prisoners in the general political atmosphere of Soviet society.

The KVChs also prepared wall newspapers throughout the Gulag to publicize the exploits of a camp’s most productive prisoners and cast shame on its worst. In fact, the KVChs made wide use of shame in their attempts to transform prisoners. The KVCh loudspeakers would wake the prisoners to the disdainful sounds of “Shame on the loafers!” followed by a listing of the lagging workers.¹⁴³ Along with the portraits of shock workers and the reforged, the KVCh would hang caricatures of the slackers on wall newspapers, with one such image depicting “a disheveled man with angrily bared teeth; next to him is a bourgeois, with a gold chain across his waistcoat. Under the disheveled man is an inscription: ‘Fyodor Zhigalov is a traitor to the workers.’” Zhigalov wrote a letter to the camp newspaper declaring, “And when I saw myself this morning drawn arm-in-arm with a capitalist, and it was written underneath that we both work together with the class enemy, then I understood that I was really a class enemy. . . . I’m ashamed that I wanted to stop the construction, and that I’m a class enemy of the Soviet Government.”144

Many labor camps, again starting with the Solovetskii camp, also operated their own theater groups, orchestras, and folk music ensembles. Many of the so-called cultural brigades offered a wide range of performances. Access to camp entertainment from the 1920s’ Solovetskii camp was reserved for camp officials and those prisoners holding privileged positions—the same prisoners who by cooperating with camp authorities or other powerful prisoners garnered better access to food, clothing, living space, and other commodities of camp life.¹⁴⁵ Ginzburg described the cultural brigade as “a serf theater that staged shows for the camp officials who were bored in those provincial backwaters.” Only a few prisoners “selected from the trusties and shock workers were allowed into the back rows.”¹⁴⁶

While prisoners were typically subjected to every educational and political campaign that occurred in Soviet society as a whole, a few propaganda practices were deemed too risky in camps. For example, a November 28, 1931, OGPU Gulag circular sent to Karlag ordered “comrade courts” in concentration camps dissolved. Comrade courts had been created by a Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) state decree of February 20, 1931. By November, they had only made an appearance in a few camps, and then without the express sanction of central camp authorities. Clearly, practice had already revealed to these local camps that a propaganda campaign outside the camps should be immediately introduced in the camps. In this case, they were wrong, and they were warned that the introduction of new practices in the future should be preauthorized. No specific reason for the decision was given, but one suspects that Gulag authorities were cautious about handing prisoners the type of authority that came with punishing their fellow inmates. Still, they were concerned with “the organization of the social opinion of the socially close strata against the violators [of camp discipline].” They felt that the appropriate means included the more easily controlled media of the camp press, wall newspapers, brigade meetings, reading, and explaining camp decrees at roll calls as well as through other forms of cultural-educational work.¹⁴⁷

The distinctions between camp propaganda work and the general Soviet experience comes into particularly sharp relief during major state holidays. In the camps, holidays like the anniversary of the October Revolution were a cause of great uneasiness. It was on such days that camp authorities most feared their prisoners. Consequently, restrictions on prisoners were typically ramped up around holidays. For example, in late October 1937, Karlag’s chief issued an order on preparations for the coming celebration of the revolution’s twentieth anniversary. From November 5 to 9, all movement of prisoners inside and between camp subdivisions was forbidden. Camp supply chiefs and subdivision chiefs were ordered to ensure proper food and fuel supplies so that no trips beyond the camp’s boundaries would be necessary during the holiday period. From November 6 to 8, in several of the camp’s subdivisions located in greater proximity to free populations, no prisoner was allowed to go beyond the barbed wire at all, with only a few exceptions for those required to run the camp’s priority facilities like its electric station. Any prisoner found during this period on the streets of Dolinka without a special pass (all regular passes were void during the holiday period) was immediately placed in a prison cell. Finally, all prisoner visits with relatives were suspended from November 1 to 10.148

Prisoners also recall the uneasiness around holidays. Petrov remembers preparations in Kolyma for the first elections to the USSR Supreme Soviet in 1937. On the one hand, prisoners were allowed or even required to participate. “The free employees held meetings, organized election districts, painted placards and slogans. Incidentally, the entire technical work of these preparations was done by prisoners—carpenters, joiners, painters, artists, etc.” Election day itself was another matter. “On special instructions directly from the new N.K.V.D. head, Yezhov, a reinforced military guard was thrown around all the camps, ostensibly in order to prevent anti-Soviet demonstrations. I remained free along with several workers, since it was necessary to set up a festive illumination on the roof of every village house. . . . [T]he official government candidate received twelve more votes than there were voters in Kolyma.”¹⁴⁹

Did the prisoners buy into all of this educational activity? Were they in fact reformed? These questions are not so easily answered. On the one hand, living through an extreme experience like the Soviet concentration camp changed everybody. That change, however, did not necessarily correspond to the theories behind the KVChs’ work. Prisoners did quickly learn to at least mouth the language of redemption. Perhaps this was all that was required. In Kotkin’s memorable formulation, it was not necessary that Soviet citizens believed, only that they acted as if they did so. Labor colony inmates at Magnitogorsk repeatedly professed their own transformations “in language strikingly reminiscent of what could be heard from accomplished workers outside the colony: they were laboring, studying, making sacrifices, and trying to better themselves.” Yet at the same time they continued to express openly their sentiment against the Soviet regime, and in spite of shock worker conferences and the Stakhanovite movement, absences, disorganization, drunkenness, and feigned illnesses remained rampant among Magnitogorsk’s labor colony population.150

It would be quite an understatement to say that many prisoners were skeptical of the Soviet government’s seriousness about reeducation in the harsh environs of the Gulag. Petrov recounts his arrival off a ship at Kolyma:

Standing at the broadside I saw a small open space on the shore being quickly cleared of boxed-up merchandise and filled with a crowd of guards who had just arrived in automobiles. Some of them held dogs on leashes—big, well-fed sheep dogs.

A gangway was laid directly to the shore and an empty barrel was set at its upper end by the gate. Up on this barrel climbed a camp official who addressed us in words something like this:

“Comrades! You have all committed various crimes against our just worker-peasant laws. Our great government has granted you the right to live, and a great opportunity—to work for the good of our socialist country and the international proletariat. You all know that in the Soviet Union work is a matter of honour, a matter of glory, a matter of valour and heroism, as was said by our great leader and teacher, Comrade Josef Vissarionovich Stalin. Our worker-peasant government and our own Communist party do not inflict punishment. We recognize no penal policy. You have been brought here to enable you to reform yourselves—to realize your crimes, and to prove by honest, self-sacrificing work that you are loyal to socialism and to our beloved Stalin. Hurrah, Comrades!”¹⁵¹

Did Petrov’s prisoner comrades answer the official’s hurrah? Most responded with silence, while one prisoner toward the back let off a string of obscenities. In this case, then, the prisoners did not even mouth the words.

On the other hand, we have seen articles in Putevka in which prisoners write of their reeducation. We’ll never be certain that prisoners really wrote these articles, of course, or if they did so, that they were sincere. Yet below, we will meet prisoners who speak not with words but rather actions. Released prisoners fought valiantly at the front in World War II. Some of these prisoners would even send letters back to their camp KVCh thanking it for turning them into honest Soviet citizens and fighting heroes. Prisoners measured themselves by their labor performance, just as Gulag authorities did. Furthermore, we will find prisoners resisting Gulag power in Soviet terms.

Whether or not the prisoners took the work of the KVChs seriously, central Gulag authorities certainly did so. Consonant with the tenor of the age, every problem in the Soviet Union was understood in political terms—either as the result of enemy activity, or the failure of leading Soviet workers to inculcate the proper attitude and education level among the Soviet population. This was as true inside the camps as it was outside. Typically, the first place that central Gulag authorities looked when they discovered shortcomings in a camp was at the work of educational officials—both those responsible for educating prisoners and those responsible for educating other camp employees. Consequently, throughout the history of the Gulag, the camp system never seriously contemplated the disbandment of the KVChs. Even as it became clearer that the camp system was a financial drain on the state budget, that the promise of cheap prisoner labor never came to fruition, the response of central authorities was never to eliminate the costly cultural-educational activities.

Despite the repeated emphasis on remaking prisoners, Gulag authorities never imagined that they would reforge all of their inmates, nor did they hope to do so. Granted, the Solovetskii magazine tried to convince its readers that “even the most die-hard criminal could be reformed. . . . [T]he Soviet prison was capable of changing man.”152 And Ginzburg was not wrong to note that the KVCh itself was “based on the premise that even out-and-out enemies of the people might respond to benevolent re-education efforts.”¹⁵³ Nevertheless, throughout the Gulag’s history, a great deal of confusion and contradiction reigned in the question of other prisoners, especially the counterrevolutionary prisoners, and their relationship to cultural-educational work. Was the counterrevolutionary prisoner fit for attention from an apparatus designed first and foremost for the reeducation of prisoners into honest Soviet citizens?

In August 1937, Karlag issued an order for the removal of all counterrevolutionary prisoners from posts running camp clubs as well as leaders of drama circles and agitation brigades. Counterrevolutionary prisoners could only be used in “technical” work in the KVChs. Moreover, “the more dangerous k-r [counterrevolutionary] element: spies, terrorists, Trotskyites and others,” could not be used in any forms of “club-mass work.”¹⁵⁴ Of course, the necessity for such a decree only highlights the fact that such prisoners were active participants in the KVCh. As we know, many of the counterrevolutionary prisoners were educated and talented cultural figures—exactly the kind of person needed to operate camp theaters, newspapers, musical productions, and so on. It therefore should be of little surprise that official documents repeatedly return to proposed prohibitions on the use of certain categories of counterrevolutionary prisoners in cultural-educational work.

The constant invocations of a ban on cultural-educational activities with certain subsections of the prisoner population again contradict the notion that the KVChs’ work was simply and exclusively a matter of propagandizing for better prisoner labor productivity. If cultural-educational work was solely aimed at increasing labor output, why would Soviet authorities exclude, even just in principle, any part of their prisoner population from these activities? Would they not want to induce every prisoner to work harder regardless of the crime they had committed? The KVChs were deeply enmeshed in the Gulag’s project of defining the line between reintegration into and permanent exclusion from Soviet society. Camp authorities had limited resources to complete their educational work, and as we have seen, it could be a costly project inside Gulag camps. So they focused their reeducation activities on those they believed most likely to be reeducated, and in so doing further defined the line between those who could and could not be reeducated. Being defined as unworthy of reeducation greatly increased the chance of dying in the camps. The question of different prisoner groups’ worthiness for inclusion in cultural and educational activities played an important part in the maintenance of a hierarchical categorization of inmates, as pursued further in the next chapter.

Punishment

Controlling and limiting access to food was not the only means of punishment available to Gulag officials. To maintain order in the camps, good prisoner behavior, and high labor output, Gulag officials devised an extensive penalty regime. Prisoners could be placed on a penalty regime for organizing or on suspicion of being inclined to organize an escape, or systematic violations of camp discipline.155 Karlag officials had the authority to sentence prisoners to various penalty regimes for a wide variety of offenses, including a chronic refusal to work or chronic failure to fulfill work norms. Often, punishment involved the removal of the undisciplined prisoner from the regular camp zone and barracks in order to prevent the “influence of the negative element on other prisoners.”¹⁵⁶ Camp chiefs, and even the heads of camp subdivisions and camp points, had the authority to place prisoners in penalty barracks, penalty isolators, or penalty camp zones for limited periods of time.

Penalty facilities varied in all camps, including Karlag. They included solitary confinement cells, group cells, and locked barracks. Conditions in punishment facilities were notorious among prisoners throughout the Gulag. Cells were generally unheated and damp, and prisoners were typically deprived of bedding while under punishment. Prisoners in punishment facilities were often required to continue work in their regular brigade while spending all nonworking hours in their camp prisons. Sometimes punished prisoners were transferred for work at especially physical and dangerous projects. At other times, the punished prisoner was locked up twenty-four hours a day without working. All punished prisoners received a reduction in their food ration, but those who were prohibited from working saw their food supply cut even more severely. Those who did continue to work were transported to and from the work site under an enhanced armed guard. They were also subject to more intense searches before reentering the camp. Penalized prisoners were denied all manner of prisoner privileges, including correspondence, the receipt of packages, smoking, singing, and visitation with relatives.157

Gulag authorities placed the highest priority on the guarding of punished prisoners. Central camp authorities demanded that every Karlag camp subdivision allocate “the very best workers” of their division for the administration of the internal prisons. They were supposed to subject camp inmates in the penalty institutions to intensive educational work in order to return them as soon as possible to the general camp population. Until that time, they were to be strictly isolated from their fellow prisoners.¹⁵⁸

When the penalty facilities of individual camp subdivisions failed to eliminate camp disorders, central authorities ordered the construction of special penalty camp divisions. In August 1937, the deputy people’s commissar of internal affairs issued an order on improving discipline in the camps and strengthening the battle with “the especially negative elements who are systematically violating camp order.” In response, Karlag ordered the construction of a central penalty camp point at the Dubovka mine. Prisoners could be transferred to the penalty division for up to six months on the order of Karlag’s chief and up to a year with the assent of central Gulag’s director. During that period, punished prisoners were placed on the camp’s penalty ration, denied the right to earn time off their sentence for good work performance, refused visits and correspondence with family, and only allowed to work under armed guard. A six- or twelve-month sentence in the penalty division on the penalty ration could well be a death sentence. Prisoner rations were always barely enough to survive, and any substantial reduction of those rations could easily be fatal, especially over any extended period. An internal prison was built to house for up to thirty days those prisoners who continued to violate the camp rules while in the camp’s central penalty division. At the same time, prisoners who exhibited exemplary behavior and conscientious attitudes toward their work could be released from the penalty institutions early.¹⁵⁹

Transfer to a penalty camp division often was a much less formal process than that identified above. Every camp rather naturally had certain subdivisions where the work was harder, the climatic conditions were more severe, and the general atmosphere was more brutal. Camp memoirists frequently wrote about transfer from one camp subdivision to another as a means of punishment without being certain whether such camp divisions were formally considered penalty divisions. Thus, Ginzburg recalls her transfer to Izvestkovaia, the reputed “last circle” of Kolyma’s version of Dante’s Inferno. “I was the first political to find herself in that lepers’ colony. . . . Presumably [the warden’s] idea was that I should be made to realize that my unprecedented action had put me on a level with common criminals. Not until a year later did I learn that she had banished me to Izvestkovaya for no more than one month, for—of course—a purely reeducative purpose.”160 At other times, the punishment of prisoners merely took the form of removal from privileged positions. Petrov remembers his disagreement with a camp employee during his Kolyma period as a prisoner living outside the camp zone. As punishment, he was immediately sent from Magadan to the goldfields.¹⁶¹

Gulag authorities thus utilized the vast array of camps and subcamps to maintain discipline plus compel reeducation, but they also used frequent transfer from institution to institution (within an individual camp and between camps) to tear asunder the prisoner’s important networks of assistance, which often made survival possible.¹⁶² In this way, Gulag authorities sought to undermine patronage networks, criminal organizations, and nationalist groups. Not only were such organizations perceived as a potential threat through organized resistance; the mere existence of alternative means of survival outside official Gulag channels threatened official control of the entire system. Yet the constant upheaval had unintended consequences. Rather than tearing apart prisoner society, it actually contributed to the creation of a broad community of Gulag residents. Transferred prisoners carried their experiences from institution to institution, contributing to the uniformity of prisoner society across the Gulag. While the authorities sought to minimize these problems by performing transfers at night and without forewarning, they could only prevent prisoners from carrying material belongings to their next institution. Memories of experiences were not left behind.¹⁶³ The recurrent transfer of prisoners as punishment would return to haunt the Gulag in the early post-Stalin era, when transferred prisoners carried Gulag rebellion from one camp to another.

When all penalty measures had been used and a prisoner continued to disobey camp rules, labor camp authorities were authorized to transfer them to a prison. An NKVD regulation from 1935 mandated the transfer to prisons of camp inmates “carrying out active counterrevolutionary activity and receiving an additional sentence in the camp for this.” Transfer also applied to “malicious bandits who had escaped multiple times, who tried to continue these activities in the camps, and who had been convicted for this.” Finally, camp authorities were to transfer to prisons “the malicious uncorrected element who disorganizes camp life.” Transfer to prisons was an extraordinary measure only to be used when all other measures had been exhausted. Such transfers required the consent of central Gulag authorities. Transfers were initiated by a camp’s Third Department, which gathered all compromising material on the prisoner for review by the camp director. If the camp chief agreed with the proposal to transfer the inmate to a prison, the materials were sent to central Gulag for review.164

Reward, Release, and death

A system of reward existed alongside the system of punishment. Rewards offered a stimulus to higher labor productivity and maintenance of camp discipline. These rewards could take the form of monetary bonuses, an improvement in living conditions, transfer to lighter camp regimes, visitations with relatives, the receipt of packages and correspondence, and an early release. Prisoners were even given a wage at various times and places in Gulag history. Typically, the form of payment was little more than a notation in a prisoner’s account, which they may or may not have been able to cash in at the end of their sentence. Sometimes, as an additional reward, a prisoner would be allowed to use a small amount of their account to purchase items at a camp commissary, or send some or all of the money to their family.¹⁶⁵

Visits with relatives were, according to Karlag’s 1935 chief Linin, “one of the highest forms of rewarding the inmate for his work and behavior in the camp . . . not only in production but also in daily life.” Any prisoner who requested a visit underwent a thorough evaluation to determine their worthiness for such a reward. The entire reward process formed a significant element in the ongoing individualized evaluation of the Gulag prisoner. In this, wrote Linin, the camp’s subdivisions were failing seriously. In the evaluations, they had written comments such as “relationship to labor is good, a shock worker, disciplined, actively participates in societal work, etc.” Yet, he complained, they wrote this way about prisoners who had been in the camp for quite a long time and about prisoners who had been there “ONE month and even less.” They had even written the same remarks about prisoners who had been convicted of committing crimes while in the camp, had received a new sentence, and were sitting in one of the camp’s internal prisons. Linin sternly warned that the continuation of this system of “rubber-stamping evaluations” would lead to criminal charges “FOR CONSCIOUS TIES WITH AND SUPPORT OF PRISONERS.”¹⁶⁶

Far and away the most important reward that a prisoner could ever receive was release. In any given year during the period 1934–53, 20 to 40 percent of the Gulag population was released. No year saw the release of fewer than 115,000 inmates, and the number of released could reach one-half million and more.167 Like other practices, release was tied to the redemptive tasks of the Gulag. Numerous decrees of the Gulag authorities authorized early release to prisoners who distinguished themselves through their work record. Galina Aleksandrovna Semenova was arrested on November 29, 1937, as a result of her husband’s arrest on March 15 of the same year. Writing years later about her experience in Karlag, she asked, “You might raise the question of how I was freed early on March 22, 1944—two years before the end of my term? They freed me for successful engineering work and behavior.”¹⁶⁸

Such practices were typical in the Gulag. For example, at Belomor, an order dated March 8, 1932, authorized rewards (including early release) for “inventions and rationalisation measures.” For evaluation, the nature of the invention or measure was to be recorded, along with the inventor’s name, his qualification, the position he held, and “a report on his general efficiency and behaviours.”¹⁶⁹ This measure again illuminates the dual purpose of labor: productivity and reform. The criteria for early release included increases in productivity, but also the individual’s personal qualities and attitude. Belomor tells us that 12,484 prisoners were freed on completion of the canal “as people who were entirely reformed” and that 59,516 people had their sentences reduced as “active workers on the construction.”¹⁷⁰

Most releases occurred as a routine part of the expiration of a prison term. The bureaucratic detail involved in keeping track of the sentences and expiration dates of sentences for large prisoner populations was certainly no small matter. For instance, in 1939 alone, releases for the expiration of a sentence or other reasons totaled 223,600 from corrective labor camps and 103,800 from corrective labor colonies.¹⁷¹

Regulations required camp authorities to provide their subdivisions with lists of prisoners subject to release for the completion of their sentence at least two months prior to their scheduled release date. The subdivision was then required to check the list against its own records and report any discrepancies. At the time of their release, most Karlag prisoners were sent back to the “liberation point” at the Dolinka camp division. There, their files were thoroughly reviewed again, personal belongings were returned (if they still existed), and the prisoners’ individual financial accounts were settled (what portion, if any, of prisoners actually received wages on their release and how much is still unclear). The Soviet Union had a number of “regime points”—that is, areas that required special permission in order to live in them. Comprised of the largest Soviet cities and border regions, former prisoners were typically forbidden from living in or even passing through such areas. No list of these areas was to be published, however. Prisoners could only be informed verbally of the location of these forbidden zones. Consequently, one of the last orders of business prior to prisoners’ release was to ask where they planned to live, at which time they were informed whether they were allowed to live in their place of choice. Prisoners were provided with a brief document attesting to their release, given travel documents, and allowed to take documents with them attesting to their completion of training in industrial specialties. Otherwise, prisoners were not allowed to take any documents with them on their release. Those of military age were informed of their obligation to register with the military commissariat in their new place of residence. Prisoners subject to exile were informed of their return to exile.172

We learn from Ginzburg and other memoirists that those released were often refused permits to return to their native region. Frequently, the released prisoners were forced to remain in the area of their former camp, usually working in the same industries they had as prisoners. Ginzburg was even forced to carry with her “Form A,” which detailed her criminal past, her camp term, and that she had been released subject to deprivation of civil rights for five additional years.¹⁷³ Nonetheless, she was also hired to teach in a local preschool, where she was “required to cultivate not only the feeling of love for the Soviet homeland but also the feeling of hatred for its enemies.”¹⁷⁴

Many camp subdivision directors, intentionally or not, often held prisoners past the completion of their sentence. Karlag authorities complained about the problem on many occasions.¹⁷⁵ It remains unclear whether camp authorities were trying to keep the extra working hands around longer, or whether they simply did not want to devote the resources necessary to keeping track of the end of prisoner sentences, especially with the complicated system of earning credit toward early release.

Other than serving out their term in full, many prisoners throughout the Gulag’s history earned early release. The primary method for gaining an early release was through a system known as “accounted working days.”¹⁷⁶ Under this system, each day in which a prisoner completed 100 percent or more of the daily labor norm counted as more than one day toward the completion of their sentence. The exact regulations governing early release constantly changed. In November 1931, for example, Gulag director Kogan ordered that sentence reductions for “prisoner–shock workers” should be increased. First-category prisoner–shock workers would henceforth earn three days toward the completion of their sentence for every two days of labor, instead of the previous four days for three days of labor. Second-category prisoners saw their credits increase from five for four to four for three.¹⁷⁷

Significantly, to earn the highest rate of return on accounted working days, prisoners not only had to perform extraordinarily in labor production but also had to show themselves as active participants in the “social-cultural work of the camp.”178 Prisoners could build up a substantial credit toward early release under the accounted working day system, but the balance was always tenuous, and any or all of it could be taken away as punishment for violations of camp discipline. Accounting extra days toward early release was suspended during any period that a prisoner spent in a penalty division, even if the prisoner continued to perform productive labor during that period.¹⁷⁹ Furthermore, as with all Gulag practices, accounted working days were introduced in a differentiated fashion. For prisoners sentenced to imprisonment for espionage, terror, sabotage, and treason against the motherland, and also for former members of counterrevolutionary parties and groupings, prisoners of foreign birth, and those sentenced for counterrevolutionary offenses, the practice of accounted working days could only be used with explicit permission from central Gulag authorities and in no cases prior to the end of their first year of imprisonment. Even if they were granted accounted working days, the credits were given at the lowest rate of all prisoners. First-category prisoners from working-class and other acceptable Soviet backgrounds earned a higher rate of return on their accounted working days than second-category prisoners who had been from faulty class or political backgrounds, and had previously been denied voting rights (lishentsy).¹⁸⁰ Prisoners could earn even higher rates for being prisoner–shock workers or Stakhanovites.¹⁸¹ The system of accounted working days was a major paperwork operation, as each prisoner’s file would be filled during each quarter with evaluations and tallies of the days they had earned toward the completion of their sentence.¹⁸²

Early release could also be earned by petition, sometimes in response to particular decrees from central camp authorities issued to ease camp overcrowding. Sometimes the type of outstanding prisoner who received early release was granted more complete reentry into Soviet society than would a prisoner who had completed their entire camp term. Hence, in 1933, the OGPU decreed that “in exceptional circumstances and in relation only to especially outstanding shock workers, who had proven through actions their rejection of their criminal past, who had actively participated in the cultural and social life of the camp, and who had overfulfilled their production targets,” application for early release could include a request for a certificate giving them the right to receive a passport to live in restricted areas of the Soviet Union requiring a passport. Every truly outstanding prisoner–shock worker, regardless of their crime, was eligible for this privilege, although only those convicted of everyday and official crimes could apply to live in border regions.¹⁸³ Even more important for prisoners whose families lived in exile while they were in camps, those who earned release under these conditions earned the release of their families from internal exile as well.184

Early release was always used for propaganda inside the camps. Group releases were announced at roll calls, in production meetings, and during educational sessions. On January 28, 1935, fourteen Karlag prisoners were released early and one prisoner had his sentence reduced after the camp leadership petitioned to central Soviet authorities on their behalf. In the directive read aloud to the rest of Karlag’s prisoners, the authorities noted that the commutation of the sentences for these reforged prisoners showed “that only collective shock work, active participation in social-mass work, and exemplary behavior in daily life will lead to early release.” Additionally, they continued, “in relation to those who have not yet recognized their shameful past, who have not yet started on the path of correction, and continue in their persistent obduracy to interfere with the socialist state as it constructs the great foundation of socialism, they will be subjected to the strictest measures.”¹⁸⁵

Finally, early release occurred as a result of mass amnesties. These will be discussed in greater detail in the chapters that follow, as the major Gulag amnesties took place during the war, immediately after the war, and after Stalin’s death.

The exact opposite, of course, could always be true. Prisoners were frequently sentenced to additional camp terms or even execution for consistent failure to complete work norms, refusal to work, self-mutilation as a means of avoiding work, and other violations of camp discipline. The tie between labor performance and behavior in the camps was thus directly related to the question of survival, release, or retention in the camps for longer periods of time.¹⁸⁶

The practice of conditional early release, in all its manifestations, created certain economic problems for the camps. While on the one hand, it served as a stimulus toward an increase in labor productivity, it also resulted in the release of the most productive inmates. As the war grew ever closer, this seemed to be ever more of a problem. In 1938, Stalin had personally stepped in to end the practice of earning accounted working days toward early release, arguing, “We are acting poorly, we are disturbing the work of the camp. Freeing these people is, of course, necessary, but from the point of view of the national economy, this is bad. . . . [W]e will free the best people, and leave the worst.”¹⁸⁷ Stalin’s intervention was a clear violation of a long-established Gulag practice that had tied redemption and therefore release with high labor productivity. Several high authorities including Chief Prosecutor Vyshinsky opposed the move, although in vain. While this move was clearly based primarily on economic considerations, it was not the only factor, as attested by a decree that quickly followed, ending early release for invalids as well.188 Even from the economic point of view, the end of accounted working days was a mixed bag, and Gulag authorities would move for a limited reinstatement of the system after the war as a way to increase labor output.¹⁸⁹ After the end of conditional early release and the system of accounted working days in 1939, stimulus to increase labor output was to be limited to the provision of extra food and supplies, monetary bonuses, and transfer to an easier camp regime for good performance. The failure to fulfill norms or active interference in the completion of labor norms, it was ordered, had to be dealt with strictly, and the punishments run from worsened material conditions of life in the camps all the way to the imposition of the death penalty.¹⁹⁰ As such, the provisions of the decree ending early release continued to tie access to the means of survival in the camps to labor performance.

Survival until release was a difficult matter indeed. The significant portion of releases over the life of the Gulag should not obscure the tremendous death rates. Looking at just the years 1930 to 1939 in relation to the numbers of prisoners and deaths in labor camps alone, the figures are striking in several ways. First, no clear trend can be discerned in prisoner deaths, in either absolute or relative terms. In the prewar era, the most lethal year was 1933 (the year of the great famine that wreaked such incredible destruction throughout the Soviet Union), when better than 15 percent of the camp population died (over sixty-seven thousand prisoner deaths). While 1934 saw the death of just over 5 percent of the camp prisoner population, and about 4.3 percent of the combined camp and colony population, the number dropped to fewer than 4 percent in the camps (2.75 percent in the combined camps and colonies) in 1935 and less than 2.5 percent in the camps (2.1 percent in the combined camps and colonies) in 1936. In 1937, deaths began to increase again, just topping 3 percent in the camps (and 2.2 percent in the camps and colonies combined) and jumping almost threefold during the terror year of 1938 to over 9 percent in the camps (and 5.4 percent in the camps and colonies combined). The next year saw the death rate plunge again to under 4 percent and it would go even lower in 1940 before the outbreak of war brought the deadliest years in Gulag history.¹⁹¹

The numbers are striking, if not surprising, in many ways. First, prisoners clearly died at significantly higher percentages in the camps than in the colonies. This is not startling, given that the camps were in the more remote geographic locations, had prisoners with longer sentences, and thus had more prisoners who were excluded from privileged positions and practices like early release. Given that this was the prisoner contingent considered most dangerous and least redeemable, the higher death rates among labor camp prisoners is consonant with the general operation of the system. Second, the figures show that death rates in the Gulag followed the larger events inside the Soviet Union. As such, the highest death rates of the 1930s are unsurprisingly found during the years of famine and the Great Terror. World War II will lead to a further shock in the system, with death rates unheard of in other years while the war was going against the Soviet Union, and these death rates would turn around along with the fortunes of the war. Further, the figures are striking for the different trend found with prisoner escapes. Throughout the 1934–39 period, escapes declined in both absolute and relative figures. The jump in the death rate in 1938 could be explained in part by the chaos of a rapidly growing camp population and the raging of the Great Terror, yet that chaos did not cause a corresponding rise in the number of escapes. Rather, the different trajectories of death and escape during this period provide additional evidence that Gulag authorities cared far more about the elimination of escapes than the elimination of death.192

One major objection to the volume Belomor is its complete refusal to discuss the death of prisoner laborers working on the canal. Only once does a death creep into the narrative, and then only briefly and as a result of a freak accident.¹⁹³ Yet inside the camps, death was understood as part and parcel of the operation of the system. One photograph in the International Memorial Society’s collection reveals a great deal. In the photograph, we see a propaganda graveyard created by one camp’s cultural-educational apparatus. This pretend grave site, marked “the graves of the lazy,” shows the presumed fates of prisoners Mavlanov, Gaziev, and Pazorenyi. Each prisoner’s grave is marked with his name and a percentage: “Mavlanov 22%,” “Gaziev 30%,” and “Pazorenyi 48%.” The implication was clear. For those who failed to fulfill their work norms, the graveyard was their inevitable fate.¹⁹⁴ Gulag authorities were unembarrassed about the tie between the failure to fulfill labor norms and death. In fact, they announced as much publicly to their prisoners. Such an attitude allowed Gulag authorities and local camp officials to exploit their prisoners mercilessly, constantly pushing for prisoners to be forced into the heaviest forms of labor regardless of their state of health. It was apparent that excessive deaths among the prisoner population were never to be judged too harshly.¹⁹⁵

It is not coincidental that the memoirists who have made us all so familiar with life in the Gulag were all able in one fashion or another to avoid the hardest of physical labor. Moreover, we find that a substantial portion of the memoirists spent their time in the postwar Gulag, where they would ultimately be released in the broad amnesties of the mid-1950s. Edward Buca survived by selling goods and using the profits to bribe useful officials. Joseph Scholmer was able to parlay a camp job as a doctor into additional money to purchase food. Solzhenitsyn spent a portion of his sentence in the first circle, a sharaga or sharashka where scientific knowledge brought improved conditions and easier work. The need to avoid general-assignment work was pressed on Solzhenitsyn by a fellow inmate at a transit prison and has been acknowledged by one memoirist after another as the key element in their survival. Yet survival was also strongly a function of a prisoner’s allies in the camp—alliances built along the matrices of prisoner identity.

•  •  •  •  •

The Gulag’s practices had largely been established by the end of the 1930s. Practices had been set up and even codified in a detailed set of regulations in 1939 for constructing and running Gulag institutions. They defined the line between survival and death in the Gulag system, tying prisoner survival to measures of reeducation. Even the population of the camps seemed to undergo a certain stabilization with the decline of the Great Terror and end of the practice of early release. No longer could prisoners earn extra credit toward an early release for fulfilling their work norms. Rather, all prisoners were required to serve their entire sentence. But the combination of detailed regulations governing the camps and a stabilized workforce only appeared to stabilize the camps. The extremely close connection between life in the Gulag and life outside the Gulag guaranteed that this stabilization would be short-lived, lasting only until the next shock wave of Soviet history.

A prisoner culture and society emerged in the 1930s as each prisoner sought to negotiate these practices in an effort to survive. Although this culture and society would also undergo significant changes with the onset of total war, many of the categories that defined prisoner society had been established during the 1930s, bearing striking resemblances to social identities in the Soviet Union at large.