The Gulag Played an Integral Role in the construction of the Soviet system during the 1930s, and was bound to play a similar one in the reconstruction and reconfiguration of the postwar system. The Gulag followed hard on the heels of the Red Army as it conquered Nazi forces, reclaiming the occupied territories and making new claims throughout Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union emerged triumphant from the war it had so much dreaded and so long expected. Victory, however, came at a tremendous price. Millions and millions of Soviet people died. Millions of others experienced non-Soviet social systems, saw parts of Europe, and were transformed by their experiences at the front. New territories were annexed and then reannexed, bringing with them peoples and societies with distinct political and social backgrounds. The economy was thoroughly wrecked. Rebuilding Soviet society and the Soviet economy required as massive an effort as building that society and economy in the first place.
Remaking this world was a huge task, and the Soviet state approached it with experience and tools developed over nearly thirty years. The Gulag itself was one major weapon in the battle to reshape Soviet society in the wake of the mass transformative experience of total war. The Gulag had already existed as a mass social institution for some fifteen years, and it continued to refine and apply its practices designed to guard as well as shape the boundaries between Soviet society and its internal enemies. The postwar decade saw the Gulag reach its extremes in both population and the radical nature of the brutalities in the camps.
One tricky issue for the victorious Soviet Union was how to deal with those Soviet citizens who had lived, sometimes for several years, under Nazi occupation. In a polity fixated on the effects of the social environment on individuals, the potential for contamination of its citizens in the occupied territories from contact with the ideology and life practices of the Nazi occupier caused tremendous concern. As one camp political worker in Kazakhstan put it, “Tens of millions of people lived in the territories temporarily occupied by the German fascists. Many were driven into fascist forced labor in Germany. All were deprived of honest Soviet information. We must work with these people; we must discuss with them the policies of our [Communist] Party and the policies of the Soviet state.”1 Red Army soldiers who had spent time in Nazi POW camps were similarly suspect for not giving their life for the cause, their exposure to Nazi ideology, and their potential contacts with Andrei Vlasov’s collaborationist Russian Liberation Army.
The official Soviet approach toward these citizens combined suspicion with a need to differentiate the honest from the enemy. The attitude is well stated in an October 22, 1945 letter on the return of Soviet citizens deported to Germany for forced labor. The letter to Vyacheslav Molotov from the chief of staff of the partisan movement and the first secretary of the Belarusian Communist Party, Panteleimon Ponamerenko, reads in part:
Returning along with the deported Soviet citizens are former policemen, volunteers of the penal detachments and other German henchmen, who escaped to Germany with the retreat of the German army. The local population—workers, kolkhozniki and white collar workers—greet the repatriated citizens with a feeling of warmness and care, giving help in the reconstruction and adjustment of their lives. The returning . . . henchmen face the hatred of the Belorussian people, who have not forgotten the horrors of German occupation and the mean, treasonous activities of these traitors.2
The suspicious yet differentiated approach is clear. Some of those returning were honest people, but many others were “German henchmen.” For the latter, the Soviet people, it was said, rightly expressed their hatred. Expressions of hatred for alleged collaborators were no doubt quite genuine. In the wake of the ferocious battle with the Nazis, Soviet soldiers and veterans were not in the mood to compromise with or feel compassion for those perceived to be their enemies. Kopelev recalls his moving field prison being overtaken by columns of soldiers shouting, “Where are you taking them? Hang ’em on the spot!”3 The question for the Soviet state was how to delineate the honest Soviet citizens from the German henchmen.
Even before the war had ended, Soviet authorities created a system of filtration camps through which Soviet citizens in the occupied territories and Red Army soldiers who had spent time in POW camps passed. The word “filtering” describes precisely the mandate of these camps. They were to filter suspect Soviet populations to determine who had passed cleanly through the experience of occupation or capture, and who had compromised themselves by collaboration while under occupation or in a POW encampment. The war had become the new defining moment in Soviet history, and the actions of a Soviet citizen during the war defined whether they were worthy or not of the now-august status of Soviet citizen and victor. The filtration camps then carried out a particular version of the Gulag project of defining a Soviet citizen from an internal enemy among a population suspect merely because they had survived under Nazi occupation or in Nazi captivity. Soviet citizens and veterans passing through the filtration camps were either released or arrested, and then transferred to the Soviet secret police organs, where a further determination was made as to the appropriate sentence for their crimes.
According to one estimate, during the war and postwar periods, approximately 6 million Soviet citizens passed through the filtration camps and at least 500,000 were sent to the Gulag.4 Indeed, not every Soviet citizen and army veteran who passed through the filtration camps was ultimately arrested. As Beria noted in a letter to Stalin and Molotov, 932,000 people had been detained for verification as of January 8, 1944, of whom 583,000 were military and 349,000 were civilian. They were detained for offenses including disorganized retreat from the field of battle, destroying or losing party cards, being in enemy prisons, and violations of the regime established for areas near the front. Document issues were by far the most common reason for detention. Of these 932,000 filtration camp prisoners, a total of 80,000 were then arrested for violations ranging from desertion to treason to regular criminal offenses.5 The filtration camps continued to operate into the postwar era, focusing mainly on the verification of Soviet citizens repatriated from Europe. In January 1946, as their operations began to wind down, the filtration camps were transferred to the Gulag’s administrative control.6 In 1946, 228,000 people passed through the filtration camps. By mid-January 1947, only 29,000 remained inside.7
Throughout their existence, even though their inmates often remained for only a short period until their wartime activities were verified, the filtration camps operated similar to other Gulag camps. Filtration camp inmates were forced to work and were subjected to political propaganda work.8 Most important, the very purpose of the filtration camps served as the initial arbiter of the wartime activities of individual Soviet people. Those passing the test were released; those failing it were sent ever deeper into the Gulag’s throat for a further determination of their suitability for reintroduction into postwar Soviet society.
In the Gulag proper, the immediate end of the war led to a small reduction in population as a result of a July 7, 1945 amnesty issued in celebration of victory.9 In 1945, the population of corrective labor camps fell from 716,000 at the beginning of the year to 601,000 in early 1946. The amnesty was a temporary measure, though, as evidenced by the release in 1945 of 337,000 camp inmates compared to 152,000 released in 1944 and 116,000 released in 1946. The downward trend in camp populations was short-lived as the rate of camp growth turned sharply upward in 1946, reaching growth levels unknown since 1937–38.10 The camp population jumped from 601,000 at the start of 1946 to 809,000 in 1947 and 1.1 million in 1948. Similar trends can be seen even more sharply in the corrective labor colonies.11 Meanwhile, the official figures for deaths in camps and colonies continued the significant downward trend evident since the middle of the war. Only the effects of the postwar Soviet famine temporarily reversed the downward trend in 1946–47. The total camp deaths (excluding colonies) dropped from 249,000 in 1942 to 167,000 in 1943, 61,000 in 1944, 49,000 in 1945, and 18,000 in 1946. The downward trend was reversed in 1947, when camp deaths rose to 36,000. The total deaths of colony prisoners in each year were similar, although the temporary spike here came in 1946 rather than 1947: 56,000 in 1944, 37,000 in 1945, 73,000 in 1946, and 32,000 in 1947.12
In line with long-established practices, counterrevolutionary criminals were excluded from the postwar amnesty. As Solzhenitsyn angrily put it, the postwar amnesty was “for deserters, swindlers, and thieves. And Special Camps for the 58’s. And the closer the war came to its end, the more and more cruel did the regimen for the 58’s become.”13 The amnesty applied to those with sentences shorter than three years. For those with longer sentences, their terms of detention were cut in half. This provision, however, did not apply to those sentenced for “counterrevolutionary crimes, for stealing socialist property (the law of 7-VIII-1932), banditism, counterfeiting, murder and robbery.” The amnesty also excluded recidivists.14 Consequently, the relative weight of the politicals in the prison camp population rose in 1945. While overall prisoner populations dropped in 1945, the counterrevolutionary population grew from 289,000 or 41 percent of the camp population on January 1, 1945, to 334,000 and 60 percent on January 1, 1946.15 As was typical, Gulag authorities complained of the increased difficulty in isolating a prisoner contingent that was made up of a higher proportion of so-called especially dangerous inmates. They attempted to improve the readiness of the guard for their job by removing the elderly, invalids, and women who had taken so many of these positions in the war years, and replacing them with demobilized Red Army soldiers.16
In the following years, the total number of counterrevolutionary prisoners failed to keep pace with the growth of the total prisoner population, for two main reasons. First, two 1947 decrees discussed below dramatically increased the number of nonpolitical inmates given long sentences. Second, the approaching ten-year anniversary of the terror led to the release of a number of counterrevolutionary prisoners given ten-year sentences during those bloody years. As a result, in 1947, the total number of counterrevolutionary prisoners in camps dropped even as the total prison camp population exploded. On January 1, 1947 and 1948, respectively, counterrevolutionary prisoners in camps totaled 428,000 or 54 percent of the camp population and 416,000 or 38 percent.17
And so following a brief spell of postwar amnesty, the Gulag population grew rapidly. Camps were overcrowded, and more prisoners kept arriving. On January 1, 1946, Karlag had an official capacity of 51,000 inmates but held 61,000, making it the fourth-largest camp in the entire Gulag system.18 By August 1948, on the eve of a massive transfer of prisoners to the newly constructed special camps, the Karlag population had grown to 74,000. Karlag’s population growth continued to outpace its capacity, affecting the conditions of camp life directly. Year after year, Karlag added new barracks and zones for its prisoners, but construction failed to keep up with population growth, leading to a reduction of the already-meager living space per prisoner.19 Even after 1948, when the creation of special camps soon siphoned off a significant share of the Karlag population, prisoner overcrowding did not improve, since several Karlag subdivisions were also stripped away to form the new special camps.20
The Gulag as a whole continued to grow after the creation of the special camps, as new convictions greatly outpaced releases. The primary cause was a pair of laws issued in 1947. In the immediate postwar era, the Soviet Union suffered yet another famine. In one respect at least, the Soviet response to the famine drew on an earlier playbook. During the famine of the early 1930s, Soviet authorities issued the notorious law of August 7, 1932 on property theft that brought large numbers of arrests for relatively minor incidents of theft. The postwar famine brought two equally notorious decrees on June 4, 1947 that pushed the Gulag population to its highest levels in the institution’s entire history. The decrees on theft of state, social, and individual property provided long terms of punishment (up to twenty-five years) for relatively minor incidents of theft. From 1947 to 1952, at least 20 percent of all court convictions fell under the June 4, 1947 decree. Over half of those convicted under the June 4, 1947 edict were peasants. The charges under these laws, even among all the injustice in the Soviet penal system, seem particularly outrageous in their lack of proportionality between crime and punishment. Just a few examples will suffice: collective farmers were given as much as a five-year sentence for stealing as little as 850 grams of rye, an invalid war veteran was given seven years in the camps for stealing 600 grams of pork to feed his four children between the ages of one and eleven, and a war widow with three children and working in a pasta factory received a seven-year sentence for stealing 800 grams of dough.21
The total camp and colony population peaked in 1950 at just over 2.5 million. The real quantitative leap, though, was made during 1947. On January 1, 1947, the camp and colony population was 1.7 million. By January 1, 1948, the figure had risen to 2.2 million, and it hovered between 2.2 and 2.6 million until the mass releases began after Stalin’s death in March 1953.22 The jump in Gulag population was largely attributable to the June 4, 1947 decree, as indicated by the lack of a corresponding leap in the numbers of prisoners sentenced for counterrevolutionary crimes.23 On January 1, 1951, over a million Gulag prisoners were in camps or colonies for convictions under the June 4, 1947 decrees, with more than 600,000 of those spending their sentences in corrective labor camps and more than 400,000 in corrective labor colonies.24 As prisoners were sent to corrective labor camps if they had sentences longer than three years, the vast number of convicts under these decrees housed in labor camps indicates the severity of the punishment and the length of the sentences handed out for such thefts.
For Solzhenitsyn, the “mocking” slogans greeting the postwar amnesty “smear[ed on] the internal archways and walls of the camps. . . . ‘For the broadest amnesty we shall respond to our dear Party and government with doubled productivity’” were worse than the exclusion of the political prisoners.25 The Gulag cultural-educational apparatus continued to operate in high gear after the war’s end. Just as in Soviet society at large, the postwar period was met not with relaxation but with more campaigns—this time for rebuilding the ruined Soviet economy.26 The Gulag continued to grind away at its economic tasks, engaging a growing portion of the Soviet workforce in comparatively expensive and unproductive work. Party workers in the Kazakh Republic administration of corrective labor camps and colonies (Kazakh UITLK) openly discussed their difficult financial situation and appeared especially vexed at the inability of their operations to turn a profit.27 Gulag authorities made many attempts in the postwar period to make their system economically efficient. They tried to step up their political agitation of both their own staff and the prisoners themselves. They undertook a massive reorganization of camp life and the camp economy with the introduction of the special camps. They introduced specific changes in camp regime such as the introduction of paying prisoners for productive work. Still, none of these efforts could overcome the inherent unproductiveness of forced labor or the incredible costs associated with isolating prisoners from Soviet society. Just like in previous decades, the one move toward economic efficiency that was never contemplated was the reduction of the camps’ militarized guard, surveillance apparatus, or supervisory staff. As a Kazakh UITLK party member who worked in the camp’s internal police division put it, “Once again [I must] repeat, that it is necessary not only to review indices of productive significance, but we must also pay attention to the guarding of state criminals and the tightening of the regime in the [camp and colony] subdivisions.”28 Thus, despite all the efforts, the Gulag continued to stand out for its economic inefficiency even in a world of inefficient Soviet economic institutions, if only because it was not in the first instance an economic institution.
Nonetheless, economic productivity was always at the forefront of cultural-educational activity. The basic tasks of agitation work among Karlag prisoners in the postwar period were described as:
The popularization of the battle of the laborers of our motherland for the restoration, the further development and the consolidation of socialist society, the explanation and study of the decisions of the Party and government, questions of the international situation, the policies of the Party and government in the sphere of the battle for peace, the exposure of the aggressive tendencies of the instigators of a new war, the policies of the struggle for a strengthening of the friendship of peoples and the further consolidation of the position of the new democratic countries.29
The postwar period required a turn toward the future. Victory was not allowed to slide into complacence. The first order of the postwar era, “a new historical stage,” was the task “placed before the entire Soviet people, before every enterprise and institution, and that means also before our camps and colonies,” to complete the Five-Year Plan and reconstruct the Soviet economy.30 Contemplating these tasks in peacetime conditions, the chief of Karlag’s cultural-educational apparatus wrote in late 1945 of a transition away from themes of the heroic activities of the Soviet people at the front and in the rear toward “episodes of the self-labor of our motherland’s toilers working for the liquidation of the consequences of war.” Above all, this work focused on the slogan “Complete Ahead of Schedule the Five-Year Plan for Reconstruction of the Economy” along with the celebrations of the twenty-eighth anniversary of the “Great October Revolution” and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the formation of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR).31 The chief lesson of the victory lay in the importance of prewar preparation, and the Soviet Union must immediately concern itself with preparations for the next war—a cause that seemed all the more pressing as the cold war heated up.
The cult of the war had definite ramifications for the postwar Gulag. Soviet society in the postwar period was increasingly viewed through the prism of the war experience. This was specifically encouraged among camp employees. Party meetings of Gulag workers ritualistically began with paeans to the war victory, especially to the significance of prewar preparations for the country’s defense.32 The focus on prewar preparations, of course, was intended to concentrate the necessary energies of the country on the postwar economic reconstruction and serve as a cautionary tale for the unfolding cold war. Kazakh UITLK Komsomol organizations often spoke with the war on their minds, calling their members to greatness in the name of Komsomol legends “Aleksandr Matrosov, Zoia Kos’modem’ianskaia, Oleg Koshevoi and hundreds of other young heroes” of the war.33
Having passed through the crucible of war, Soviet authorities and much of Soviet society were in no mood to compromise with their enemies. Consequently, Gulag prisoners were typically painted with the broad brush of the term fascist. The Russian Liberation Army, the Vlasovites who fought against Soviet forces, and the Ukrainian partisan armies, the Banderites who continued to fight bloody battles with the Soviet government well into the postwar period, tainted the political prisoner population in the eyes of Soviet authorities, society, Gulag employees, and even other Gulag inmates. Common criminals frequently tossed off the term fascist in reference to the counterrevolutionaries, emphasizing their own honesty and pro-Soviet loyalties.34
The important cult of action, of participation in battle, was also used to define the political criminals as outside the boundaries of true Soviet citizenship. When Kopelev attended his second trial in December 1946, he recalled one bit of testimony in particular: “There’s no denying, he’s [Kopelev’s] an educated man, very educated. Wore out the seat of his pants reading books while others like us spent their lives working and fulfilling five-year plans and fighting the kulaks and enemies of the people.”35 The testimony played on popular conceptions of the educated as afraid of getting involved and getting their hands dirty. Even though Kopelev himself had been in the army, the testimony also played on his Jewishness in accord with the popular perception that Jews had sat out the war in Central Asia. The charges against Kopelev are especially ironic given that Kopelev himself was an active collectivizer.36
Mass political education was also frequent, if not ubiquitous. In the first quarter of 1947, the twenty-seven subdivisions of Karlag saw the publication of twenty-six hundred editions of twenty-one wall newspapers. The papers’ main theme was tracking the progress of labor competition among camp prisoners and propagandizing for high labor productivity. Popularizing the methods of work of highly productive prisoners and criticizing, often through caricature or rhyme, the poor work of those refusing to labor was described as a key element in reclaiming a number of individuals from the ranks of the slackers and malingerers. Prisoner correspondents informed the camp press of problems in production and daily life.37
Even when Gulag employees talked about prisoner “labor utilization” as their “most important task,” their understanding of this task was profoundly political. Raising prisoner labor productivity involved primarily the “mobilization” of prisoners, and teaching them a “conscientious attitude toward labor” through “mass cultural-educational work and the organization of labor competition.”38 Stalin was quoted on the subject from his speech at the party plenum in 1937, when he noted, “In life . . . in practice, politics and economy [khoziaistvo] are indivisible.”39
The same was true in the political education of the camp workers themselves. Party and Komsomol functionaries were warned not to follow the improper path that relegated education to a secondary place behind production. Defects in educational work would lead to poor military discipline among the camp and colony employees.40 Poor educational work was blamed for all kinds of negative events in the camps. As they quoted from Stalin, “In order to build, you must know. In order to know, you must learn.”41 Hence, poor mass education work was blamed for the suicide of a female armed guard after she contracted a venereal disease.42 A lack of educational work was blamed for guards falling asleep at their posts.43 Poor Komsomol education of young guards was faulted for such negative activities as “cohabitation and ties with prisoners.”44 Low-quality political education work was the cause when a guard allowed prisoners to move about without a convoy, live with the prisoners, accept things from them, and drink with them, all of which led to two group escapes.45 As the head of the Kazakh UITLK political department summed it up, “Practice has shown that in those camp subdivisions where organizational-party, propagandist and mass-political work is shabby . . . there exists an atrophy of vigilance, mass escapes of state criminals, low production indices, manifest failures in economic activity, and large material losses in economy.” In contrast, he continued, good party practices led to good local camp work.46
The exhortation to increased labor productivity was not left to political propaganda alone. On August 1, 1950, Gulag authorities reintroduced the payment of salaries to Gulag prisoners.47 In addition, a certain amount of funds was reserved for the payment of bonuses for especially productive laborers. An effort was made to increase the number of products available in the camp commissary, so that prisoners would have somewhere to spend their new earnings. Some experiments were also made in the introduction of better living conditions or even making private rooms available to prisoners for cash payments.48
A Karlag report from early 1951 marked the payment of salaries to prisoners as a big success in increasing their productivity. The third quarter of 1950 saw the number of prisoners failing to fulfill their work norms drop from the figure of 4,330 in 1949 to 2,890. The report also noted an increase in the numbers of record-setting workers completing 200 percent of their daily norms or more. The average prisoner was receiving just over ninety-three rubles per month, although the failure to provide adequate products in the camp commissary was undermining the new system.49 But there is no evidence that the introduction of payment for work led to a substantial improvement in the Gulag’s financial condition. The Gulag continued to lumber along in its unwieldy, inefficient ways.
Dolgun was an American employee of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. He was arrested on the streets of Moscow in 1948 and spent nearly a decade in the camps, including many years in the newly created special camps in Dzhezkazgan, then part of the Karaganda region. Dolgun’s memoirs are a careful and important contribution to our knowledge of life in the special camps—a new type of institution that shook up Gulag society and radically changed the way that the Gulag operated.
Prior to the creation of the special camps, most political prisoners understood Gulag society along the lines of Grigori Orlov, one of Dolgun’s prison cell mates. Orlov had experience in the camps and set about educating Dolgun on the ways of survival there. First and foremost, he warned Dolgun to be careful of the “common criminals.”
They are truly very tough boys, Alex. They are organized all over the Soviet Union. They have their own code of rules . . . and if you find yourself in a camp where political prisoners and common criminals are mixed, be careful, because [they] live by stealing from the politicals. [They] call the political prisoners “fascists,” you know, and they call themselves urki. . . . They consider themselves loyal Soviet citizens who happen to live by a different code, by the way. They think all the politicals are enemies of the people. . . .
And the politicals?
Entirely different! Entirely different! Every political is convinced of his own innocence and convinced of every other political’s guilt. They have no street experience in cooperating for survival. . . . They distrust each other. They are completely incapable of organizing, you see. So they are the perfect victims for the urki.50
As Dolgun’s experience and this chapter show, this binary opposition that neatly divided the camp population into politicals and criminals, if it ever fully existed, began to break down in the postwar period. Tensions within the criminal world came to the fore, and the politicals started to lose their timidity as the combination of a new type of postwar political and the creation of a new type of camp almost completely free of professional criminals allowed them to find a voice.
The key year in this postwar radicalization of the Gulag was 1948. During that year, two primary events changed the face of the Gulag in ways that reverberated into the post-Stalin era. First, Soviet authorities established a subset of the corrective labor camp system dubbed special camps. The special camps were designed to isolate so-called especially dangerous state criminals from the rest of the camp inmates. Second, for the first time, Soviet authorities explicitly created permanent punishments. The term of exile for all nationalities deported during the war was officially extended permanently during that year. All prison camp inmates who were or would have been subject to isolation in the special camp system, even those inmates who had already been released, were also subject to permanent exile on the completion of their terms in labor camps. The first of these two policy changes—the introduction of the special camps—was integral to the evolution of the political prisoner/common criminal axis of Gulag identity. The second—the introduction of permanent exile for the deported nationalities and released special camp inmates—was relevant particularly for national identities in the postwar Soviet Union and Gulag.
In February 1948, Minister of Internal Affairs Kruglov wrote to Stalin about the work of the Gulag. His report gives us a good picture of the Gulag’s state on the eve of the creation of the special camps. On January 1, 1948, the Gulag held 2.2 million prisoners in sixty-three independent corrective labor camps and over a thousand corrective labor colonies. During 1947, this population had experienced a huge growth spurt, rising by nearly one-half million or 28 percent.51 While the overall Gulag population grew, the number of prisoners sentenced for counterrevolutionary crimes, those typically understood as political prisoners, dropped some 25,000 to a total of 545,000, or 26 percent of the total Gulag population.52
While the Gulag population grew significantly, its duties remained the same. As Kruglov wrote, “One of the serious tasks, standing before the GULAG . . . , is the reeducation of prisoners, for which political- educational work is carried out in camps and colonies, set in the first place towards their enlistment in active participation in socially-useful labor and compliance with the established camp regime.”53 The Gulag’s practices remained essentially unaltered; socialist competition, tying food norms to labor output, labor education, and the practice of earning credit toward early release through fulfillment and overfulfillment of labor norms were all credited as decisive elements in prisoner reeducation.54
The counterrevolutionary portion of the overall camp population had become smaller, but a major change in the lives of many of them was about to strike. On February 21, 1948, the USSR Council of Ministers issued its order to organize a system of special camps with strict regimes to hold especially dangerous state criminals. According to the implementation directive of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), this category was defined as “spies, saboteurs, terrorists, Trotskyites, rightists, Mensheviks, SRs, anarchists, nationalists, white emigrants and participants in other anti-Soviet organizations and groups and those presenting danger by their anti-Soviet ties and enemy activities.”55 Most important, special camps were forbidden from housing prisoners sentenced for any crimes other than those listed.56 Even allowing special camp prisoners to work in the same location as general camp prisoners or non-MVD employees was in fact forbidden.57 For the first time in Gulag history, a substantial number of political prisoners were held separately from their criminal counterparts.
According to the initial decree, special camps were to be established immediately in Kolyma, the far north, Noril’sk, Vorkuta, Karaganda, and the Mordovian autonomous republic. New special camps were also to be built in 1949 in the Irkutsk and Bratsk regions. The new camps were quickly filled with prisoners transferred from regular camps. Local MVD and Ministry of State Security (MGB) deputy directors, local prosecutors, and camp deputy directors in charge of surveillance were ordered to review the prisoners in their locality to determine which inmates were subject to transfer to a special camp or special prison. A central commission reviewed the individual prisoner files to make a final decision on transfer. Among prisoners whose crimes fit the criteria for transfer, only the most severely ill invalids or prisoners whose terms were due to expire in 1948 were to be left in regular camps. Even these prisoners, however, had to be isolated from other regular camp prisoners and placed under stricter guard so as to preclude the possibility of their escape. Regular camps were given an eight-month window in which to complete the transfers. All future penal sentences were to include a statement on whether the prisoner should be held in a special prison, special camp, or general camp.58
Once prisoners were sent to a special camp or special prison, the camp gate closed behind them. It was not possible for a prisoner to earn transfer from a special camp to a regular one. On the other hand, even special camp prisoners were allowed release at the conclusion of their sentence. Yet release from special camps was only partial, as all prisoners on release from special camps were subject to exile under MGB auspices in the Kolyma region, no less than fifty kilometers north of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the Krasnoiarsk and Novosibirsk oblasts, or the Kazakh Republic excluding the Alma-Ata, Gur’ev, south Kazakhstan, Aktiubinsk, eastern Kazakhstan, and Semipalatinsk oblasts.59
Special camps held a prisoner population, then, that to a large degree lacked hope. Few of their inmates had short sentences. For example, in December 1952, only 0.8 percent of special camp inmates had sentences shorter than five years, while 48 percent had sentences longer than ten years and 29 percent had a sentence of twenty-five years.60 Incredibly long camp sentences combined with the prospect of only partial release after their sentence’s conclusion created a sense of hopelessness among this portion of the camp population—a major factor in the wave of uprisings in special camps after Stalin’s death.
In the Karaganda region, there were ultimately four different special camps. The first, largest, and longest lasting, authorized by the original order on special camps, was Steplag. Officially known as “special camp no. 4,” it was originally built on the site of the Spasozavodkii POW camp, formerly the Spassk subdivision of Karlag, for a population of ten thousand prisoners.61 Steplag grew, and soon encompassed and was centered in and around the city of Dzhezkazgan, another former Karlag division and one of its deadliest. Steplag survived for just over eight years, until 1956. Its maximum population was around twenty-eight thousand in 1950, and its main economic activity was mining, especially coal and copper mining.62 The other special camps in the Karaganda region were Peschanyi lager’ (Peschanlag) and Lugovoi lager’ (Luglag), with planned populations in 1950 of seventeen thousand and eighteen thousand, respectively.63 Finally, Dal’nyi lager’ (Dal’lag) was formed in April 1952 in the Ekibastuz coalfields to hold eleven thousand prisoners. Only a portion of Dal’lag was in the Karaganda region, as Ekibastuz—its headquarters—was in the Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan.64 Solzhenitsyn was himself a prisoner in the Ekibastuz special camp from 1950 to 1953. Unfortunately, his individual prisoner file is not in Karaganda’s archival collection.
Dolgun described Steplag’s Dzhezkazgan as “a living hell.” Recalling his train trip to Steplag in 1950, Dolgun tells of the terrain after passing the city of Karaganda: “The grasses began to thin out and there was nothing to see but flat expanses of rock and sand. The guards told us maliciously that it was called Bet Pak Dala, the Dead Steppe, and that we’d all be part of it soon enough.” Dolgun’s train arrived at 3:00 a.m., and the extreme brutality of Dzhezkazgan confronted him immediately.
When we came out, there was nothing but flat rock reaching off into the darkness, and milling dogs pulling at their leashes, and dozens of guards in tropical uniforms. . . . They sat us on the ground and came around to us with file folders and heard our prayers [more on the prisoner prayer below]. Several of us were judged too weak to walk the eleven kilometers to camp and were put into a truck. . . . We were unloaded beside a huge stone wall that seemed to stretch for a half a mile in each direction. There were watchtowers and barbed wire on the top, and a great gate a hundred feet or so from where we were told to sit and wait for the rest of the prisoners, who were marching in convoy from the station. . . . Almost immediately after the sun appeared, there was some noise from inside the gates, and in a moment they swung open. A thin, tired horse appeared, drawing a flat farm wagon with wooden wheels. Ten or twelve corpses were stretched out on the wagon. Somehow I found this normal. I was watching indifferently until the wagon stopped and two guards appeared with axes. Then I felt quite sick. The guards methodically walked from corpse to corpse and swung the axes up and down. Soon each skull was split wide open. The man leading the horse tugged the reins and led it off. Each corpse had a small metal tag wired to a big toe and the metal tags waved back and forth as the wagon moved away across the steppe.65
The special camps were specifically designed to be more isolated, controlled, cruel, and deadly than the regular camps. The special camps operated under an especially strict disciplinary regime, modeled on practices developed since 1943 in the katorga camp divisions. Prisoners in special camps were held in the Gulag’s most remote locations and subjected to its most physically demanding labor. Many prisoners in Steplag’s Dzhezkazgan division worked in copper mines, where they often developed fatal cases of silicosis from breathing copper dust.66 The special camp was the lowest circle of the corrective labor camp hell; the living conditions were worse than anywhere else, isolation was stricter than anywhere else, and its inmates were on the lowest rung of the ladder of potential redeemability.
Strict guard of special camp prisoners in camp zones, on their march to and from work as well as at the workplace, was designed at every instance to preclude the possibility of escape or maintenance of uncontrolled ties with the world outside the barbed wire. Internal surveillance, limits on and strict censorship of correspondence, and the total isolation of the special camp prisoner were all intended to prevent the prisoners from continuing their “enemy work” while in camps. Even those guards and camp employees who would have contact with special camp prisoners were supposed to be specially screened so that only the most politically trustworthy and proven could work in the special camps.67 The enhanced guard and stepped up surveillance was effective, at least initially. From its creation through May 1949, a total of fifteen escapes occurred from a Steplag population of twenty-two thousand. Only three of those escapees had not yet been caught. During the same period, there were no prisoner-on-prisoner murders.68 Yet as we will see later, the special camps would become the locus for the largest incidents of mass prisoner disobedience in Gulag history.
The general emphasis on increased security measures and total prisoner isolation had many specific manifestations that made life in the special camps especially brutal. From the construction of camp zones to the management and marking of the prisoner population, life in the special camps was decidedly different from that in the regular ones. Dmitri Panin recalls his Ekibastuz special camp zone, at the time a part of Peschanlag, in late summer 1950:
Besides the guardhouse—a stone structure with damp, unheated punishment cells—the camp also had a barracks with barred windows which was surrounded by watchdogs and barbed wire. This was the so-called BUR, a special punishment block. All the other barracks also had barred windows and the doors were kept locked throughout the night. . . . The camp and another zone around it were both surrounded by barbed wire. Man-traps consisting of sharp-pointed stakes were set into the ground and tilted at forty-five degree angles in the direction of the prisoner’s living quarters. Between the two barbed-wire fences there was a wire with leashes for specially trained shepherd dogs. A strip of earth just outside the fences was always kept plowed so that anyone trying to escape would leave clear prints on the freshly upturned earth. . . . [A]ll this had a permanently depressing effect on the weaker spirits among us.69
Dolgun describes one special camp zone of Steplag in a similar fashion:
[It] had stone walls two meters thick and nearly six meters high. About one and a half meters from the wall there was a barbed-wire fence almost as high as the wall. Sloping down from the top of the fence on the inside was a kind of tent of barbed wire, which stretched to the ground at a point nine or ten meters from the bottom of the fence. Two and a half meters farther in from the barbed-wire tent was a single thick wire on short posts, marking a forbidden area between the compound and the barbed wire. This area was known as the fire zone, and we were repeatedly told that anyone stepping over the wire into the fire zone would be assumed to be attempting escape and would be shot without warning from the watchtowers. In the space between the wall and the barbed-wire fence another thick wire was strung about five feet above the ground from wall to wall around the camp. Every night German shepherds were leashed to the wire as an additional precaution against escape. . . . Occasionally, it was said, a watchtower marksman had been known to relieve the monotony of his job by shooting down a prisoner who had strayed close enough to the wire for the guard to be able to tell his commanding officer that he had warned him to stop running into the fire zone before he shot him.70
All incidents of shooting required that the local MGB commandant be summoned, but Dolgun wrote that he was known to throw a prisoner’s corpse into the fire zone “to create a legitimate reason for the killing.”71
The similarity of the different camp zones portrayed by Panin and Dolgun is no surprise, as strict regulations governed their construction. Regular barracks were designed for one to two hundred prisoners and were organized by brigades. In stark contrast to regular labor camps, the barrack windows of special camps were equipped with bars and the barrack doors were locked at night. Prisoner movement from barrack to barrack was forbidden.72
For especially malicious and continual violators of the special camp regime, each special camp subdivision was equipped both with a punishment barrack with a general cell for fifteen to twenty prisoners and a separate solitary confinement internal prison. Regulations required that two layers of barbed wire surround the punishment facilities.73 Prisoners in the punishment barracks were led to work daily in handcuffs. They were denied all correspondence and packages. Prisoners in solitary confinement were only allowed to sleep six hours per night and were denied sheets. They were kept in their cells twenty-four hours per day. They were not allowed to go out for work or to smoke. Prisoners were limited to three hundred grams of bread per day along with water. Every third day, they were given a small amount of thin soup. Camp authorities were allowed to sentence a prisoner to solitary confinement for periods up to fifteen days. If prisoners continued to violate the camp regime, they were subject to transfer to special prisons.74
Special camp prisoners were guarded just as strictly on their march to work. Their path was watched by machine guns, and movement of special camp prisoners outside the camp zone without an armed convoy was strictly forbidden.75 Every morning the prisoners were warned of the dire consequences for attempted escape on the march to work: “Prisoners! On the way to the work site you will keep close column. Hands behind your back. One step to the right or one step to the left will be considered an attempt to escape, and the convoy has orders to shoot without warning. Remember! One step to the right, or one to the left!”76
The special camp prisoner population was managed and controlled in a similarly detailed fashion. Male and female special camp prisoners were supposed to be strictly isolated in separate camp zones (though these zones were sometimes adjoined). Prisoners convicted as coconspirators in the same crime were housed in either separate camp subdivisions or entirely separate special camps. They were to be searched on their arrival at a special camp. Prisoners were then medically reviewed and placed in quarantine for at least twenty-one days.77 The medical examination, such as it was, could be the defining factor in a prisoner’s survival of the special camp experience. Dolgun attributes his survival to the fact that his initial Steplag medical examination showed that he “had almost no buttocks. . . . [T]he medical examination . . . consisted almost entirely of having your buttocks squeezed.” He thus managed to avoid work in the copper mines and instead was sent to a rock quarry, where the work was comparatively easier and safer.78
No less than once a week, the camp subdivision staff was ordered to make a full search of prisoners and the camp zone for forbidden items. Prisoners were also individually searched every time they left or reentered the camp zone on their way to and from work. Those prisoners found to possess forbidden items were punished by temporary isolation in the punishment barrack. Collective punishment could apply if forbidden items were discovered in a barrack and the individual owner was not identified.79
Special camp prisoners were allowed to submit a petition for review of their conviction only once a year. They were allowed to receive packages of food and other items from relatives, although this privilege could be removed as punishment. They could also receive money from relatives to be placed in their personal account to be used at the camp commissary. They were limited to seventy-five rubles of expenditures per month, however. Prisoners were only permitted to send one letter per month, although this privilege too could be taken away. They were only allowed to receive letters from their closest relatives. All other letters were to be confiscated, and all correspondence was strictly censored.80
Special camp prisoners were visually marked as distinct from their regular camp counterparts. Regulations required them without exception to wear only clothing issued by the camp and emblazoned with their prisoner number.81 The numbers were painted in large figures, increasing the ability of guards to punish individual violations of camp order even when they occurred at such a distance from the guards that ordinarily they would be unable to determine the offender’s identity.82 As Dolgun recounts, there seemed always to be a guard around to write down a prisoner’s number for violations of the camp regime.83 Regulations required guards and camp staff to use only a prisoner’s number and never their name, although memoirists widely agree that this was not universally practiced.84 Nonetheless, the mere regulation indicates the degree of dehumanization imagined in the special camp regime.
While Gulag attitudes toward cultural-educational activities among the special camp prisoners were ambivalent at best, at some level the practices continued. In September 1950, the MVD and MGB both worked to create a revised set of regulations governing the camp regime in special camps. The organizations, given their responsibilities, had different visions of what the special camps were to be like. The MGB, which was responsible for determining which prisoners were sent to a special camp, recommended that special camp prisoners be as thoroughly isolated as possible. The MVD, which had the task of running the special camps, sought to operate the camps in a fashion more like regular corrective labor camps.85 The two organizations had two particular disagreements reflecting the ambivalence about the level of danger and capacity for redemption of the special camp prisoners. First, the MGB believed that no special camp prisoners should be allowed to work as engineering or technical personnel. Such work in special camps, in the MGB’s view, had to be performed by MVD employees. The MVD disagreed, arguing that such a scheme was too costly. Second, the MGB thought that no cultural-educational activities should be carried out among the special camp prisoners. The MVD disagreed, contending that cultural-educational work increased labor discipline and tightened the camp regime, thus belonging within the menu of options for establishing order in the camps.86 It would seem that the MVD won the argument, as official documentation attests to the continued existence of cultural-educational work and sections in the special camps.87 Dolgun recalls political indoctrination meetings at Steplag “from time to time.”88
Prisoner identity in the postwar Gulag was a complex phenomenon shaken to its core by the radical reorganization of Gulag life. Beyond the physical marking of special camp prisoner identity—the painted numbers and special clothes—inmates were required frequently and repeatedly to recite “the prisoner’s prayer . . . consisting of full name, date of birth, length of sentence, and section of the criminal code under which they have been convicted.”89 Special camp prisoners were therefore forced to declaim their identity in precisely those terms dictated by camp authorities. The guards had their own prayer that ritualistically reemphasized the danger presented by their inmates. As Dolgun writes, a guard coming off duty would shout, “Sentry number forty-one. Post number three. For the defense of the Soviet Union. Guarding terrorists, spies, murderers, and enemies of the people. Sentry forty-one delivers the post.” The replying guard coming on duty repeated the phrase.90 While the recitation of the prisoner prayer compelled the inmate to give a self-declaration of identity in categories chosen by camp authorities, the prisoners themselves used such terms of identity in their relations with one another. Dolgun recalls some of his first meetings with fellow prisoners: “After we had talked for a while, he asked me about my case. That was always the way. . . . And within minutes of any encounter you were always launched on an elaborate version of your prayer. It was credentials. It placed you, so the other person knew who he was dealing with.”91
Nearly all memoirists, and none more so than Solzhenitsyn, write of the significant impact that the special camps had on the lives of political prisoners. As Solzhenitsyn puts it, “In the Special Camps we raised the banner of the politicals—and politicals we became.”92 Dolgun remembers how “many of the prisoners spent their entire free time talking politics and cursing the Soviet system.”93 Many memoirists identified the isolation of political prisoners from common criminals as the key element of this new outlook. Prisoners, according to Solzhenitsyn, were no longer divided into the crude binaries of trusty/worker and nonpolitical/political prisoners. Rather, their social identities became more complex, based on region of origin, religion, people of practical experience, people of learning, and so on. He maintains that in the absence of thieves, the prisoners of special camps began to trust their fellow prisoners and for the first time look at themselves as politicals.94
Solzhenitsyn describes a special camp in his one day in the life of Ivan denisovich. This led one former party member to remark in memoirs sent to the Central Committee in the 1970s about the stark difference between regular and special camps. In the regular camps, he notes, the “thief and gangster world” did anything with the counterrevolutionary prisoners that they could imagine, because they knew that nobody would stand up for the counterrevolutionaries. Life in the special camps was different, because they held only the counterrevolutionaries.95
While a few professional thieves made their way into the special camps, mainly after the commission of crimes in the camps that fell under statutes calling for detention in special camps, they found themselves there in an entirely different position. Thus, Artem Fel’dman tells of a prisoner called “Uncle Vasia” in Steplag’s Kengir division. Uncle Vasia was a former professional thief, a vor v zakone, who had been transferred to Steplag on a twenty-five-year sentence for terror after killing an informer in a regular camp.96 He was in quite a different position in Steplag, though. Rather than ruling over the politicals, as the professional criminals had done in the regular camps, he was initially isolated due to the near total lack of his fellow criminals at Steplag. Consequently, he attached himself to a different group, joining a religious sect as a repentant sinner.97
Some memoirists even indicate that the professional criminals had been politicized to at least some extent during the years following 1948. Dolgun compares his transit camp experiences in 1950 and 1951. During the latter trip, he
was put in a cell with twelve or fifteen older urki [professional thieves]. I was afraid that they would take what little I had left . . . but when they saw the black Dzhezkazgan prison uniform with the numbers they treated me with respect and consideration. They had heard about Dzhezkazgan. They seemed more politically aware in this summer of 1951 than Valentin and his cohort a year ago. We had many thoughtful discussions about the system. They were more cynical. One had SLAVE OF STALIN tattooed on his forehead. STALIN had been partly obliterated but was still legible.98
The removal of a large portion, though not all, of the political prisoners from the general corrective labor camps led to a significant change of atmosphere there as well. Without many of the political prisoners to prey on, the divisions between different groups of criminals became sharper and more violent. The main division was between the so-called thieves and bitches. The former, the vory v zakone (thieves-in-law; hereafter vor or vory) characterized themselves as the “honest thieves.” They lived according to a certain unwritten law—the most important element of which was the categorical refusal to cooperate with camp authorities. On this account they distinguished themselves from the suki, the bitches, who for them were all those willing to cooperate in running the camps.
A criminal acquaintance of Dolgun describes his understanding of the emergence of the bitches. The professional criminals, he notes, had set up a system of cooperation with the camp guards to sell items they had stolen from newly arriving prisoners. The proceeds were split with the guards, to buy good food, tobacco, and other necessities for the criminals. The camp and prison commanders had tried to interfere with the system by punishing the guards, but they had not been successful, so they took a new approach.
They went into the camps and began to terrorize some of the less staunch urki by violence and threats, you know, until they had some of the poor guys so cowed they’d do anything. Then they were very cunning, those bastards. They forced some of these urki to do jobs that were absolutely against the code of the underworld. . . . Anything that helped the prison. You must never help build a prison wall or put up barbed wire. No self-respecting urka will ever do that; the rest would rub him out. So they forced them to break their own unwritten laws, do you see? Forced them to be a foreman in a work project. Absolutely taboo. Every chelovek [person] knows that. Accept a job like that and you’ve practically committed suicide. These were the suki, then. They had to be separated from the rest of the criminals or they’d have been rubbed out fast. The suki are the MVD’s converts. The chestnyagi [the honest thieves], the unconverted, hate their guts. So the MVD always separates the two groups when there’s an etap. They don’t want their precious converts wiped out. All the same the war goes on in camp. Any time a suka is discovered, he usually loses his head. . . . Or [somebody] strangles him. It’s the code.99
The vory maintained their unwritten laws through collective and often bloody punishments. Kopelev remembers the call for the “breaking” of one vor who had been caught cheating a fellow vor at cards:
To be “broken,” in their parlance, was to be found in violation of the thieves’ law and deprived of the rights and privileges of their world. A broken thief lost his natural right to “pluck the pigeons.” . . . [H]e no longer had a right to every other thief’s assistance when in trouble; and, in fact, he was no longer immune to violence or death at the other thieves’ hands. The elders, in this case, refused to break the Bomber, but Goga wouldn’t be mollified, and he was supported secretly by the other minors, who felt that their leaders, in forming a work team, had entered into a compact with the “vipers,” the thieves’ term for the camp authorities.100
The code of conduct for the vory was complex, but the most fundamental element remained the refusal to cooperate with authorities. Serving as an informer was the ultimate violation. As Kopelev’s “Bomber” observes, “A thief cannot squeal on another thief to a viper. If he does, he’s not a thief; he’s a bitch.”101
Most political prisoner memoirists acknowledge a distinction between the honest thieves and bitches. Solzhenitsyn disagrees. “People will object that it was only the bitches who accepted positions, while the ‘honest thieves’ held to the thieves’ law. But no matter how much I saw of one and the other, I never could see that one rabble was nobler than the other. . . . No, you’ll not get fruit from a stone, nor good from a thief.”102
Here, Solzhenitsyn’s self-understanding as a political prisoner and his desire to render the political prisoner/common criminal divide in as clean a fashion as possible led him to dismiss this major rift within the criminal world. In a way, of course, Solzhenitsyn was correct. In regard to their relationship with political prisoners, there was often little practical difference between the two groups. After all, these honest thieves had the right, in Kopelev’s telling, to “pluck the pigeons.” That is, they were explicitly allowed under the “laws” to exploit any prisoner in the camp who was not a member of the vory. These pigeons were often the politicals. Yet even Solzhenitsyn acknowledges that the division was real, even if it lacked significance for the political, when he wrote about the “bitches’ war” during the period after the creation of the special camps.103
Even among those cooperating with camp authorities, there were subtle gradations. Some prisoners served as “informers,” attempting to gather incriminating material from other prisoners to pass on to authorities. Others were the “trusties,” the prisoners holding privileged positions in the camps—such as kitchen workers, barrack supervisors, and the like. While they did not necessarily serve as informants, they maintained control over the camp through their control of access to food, living space, and other necessary elements of survival. As Kopelev writes, “Inside the camp—in the barracks, the yurts, the dining room, the bathhouse, the ‘streets’—our lives were under the direct control of the trusties.” But Kopelev himself maintains that the trusties were somehow not as bad as the informers. Kopelev even befriended a few of the trusties, and it worked to his advantage. When his suit was stolen, his acquaintance trusties, careful not to leave behind bodily marks as evidence of their work, engaged in torturous interrogations to secure its return.104
Kopelev’s friendship with one trusty provided him a particularly interesting inside view of the bitches’ war. In the words of this trusty, “We want order in the camp. That means we must keep the thieves in their place. But they’re pretty strong right now, so we’ve got to move carefully.”105 Kopelev, of course, is not the only memoirist to write of the bitches’ war. Buca recalls the murder of a criminal-made-hut-boss in Vorkuta under the slogan, “Death to the bitches!”106 Yet Kopelev, through his access to this trusty, had a perceptive vantage point on this bitches’ war.
One day the trusty told him:
“Looks to me like you’re scared of me or something. I’m your friend. . . . I don’t care if you’re a Fifty-eighter. I can see through people better than any investigator. . . . I’m no informer for the Oper [the camp police and surveillance department]. I’ve got my own informers. I know things about you that maybe you yourself don’t know. . . . [W]e bitches, as the thieves call us, we’re going to make it hot for the thieves pretty soon. More and more bitches among the new arrivals, did you know that?”
The trusty had it wrong, it seems, as he told Kopelev on a different evening, “Bad business at the BUR [strict regime barrack]. . . . Cut off one of the zek’s heads and stuck it on a pole outside the door. Just like old times.” The trusties, fearing the thieves, refused to go in until the next morning.107
Clearly the bitches’ war raged from camp to camp, as the frequent relocation of prisoners from one camp to another carried this underground battle around the Gulag. As Kopelev describes, another battle happened soon among “two newly-arrived groups—a bunch of thieves and a crew of ‘bitches’ who had tangled in another camp. . . . Sasha [Kopelev’s trusty acquaintance] gave me a lively account of how the combatants hacked away at each other with axes, knives and bits of glass and bashed each other’s heads in with bricks and shovels.”108
The whole situation was driving the trusty mad. “Things were getting worse and worse, he claimed—worse than at the front. At least at the front you know who’s your enemy and who’s your friend, but here you don’t know what to expect, from what quarter. Some night some raggedy-ass kid will lose everything at cards in some barracks and will start betting with blood. You know what that means? He loses, he’s got to pay by spilling blood—the first man he sees when he goes outside the next morning. . . . They tell us to maintain order; they let us have sticks, but what good are sticks against knives, axes, crowbars?”109
The camp’s head doctor gave Kopelev his perspective, asserting, “The camp’s in a state: war between the thieves and the bitches. Two more men killed last night. A trusty strangled in the toilet, stuck his head down in the hole. And the goner beaten to death with the shepherds’ staves by the garbage dump. The trusties have gone berserk, and the commandant’s backing them up.”110
In official camp documentation, specific manifestations of the bitches’ war at Karlag are apparent. While individual incidents are discussed, the bigger picture of the bitches’ war is rarely mentioned. Karlag documentation identifies three criminal groups fighting one another: the vory, the otoshedshie (a splinter group of former vory), and the otkolovshiesia (another splinter group of former vory). While the latter two groups are portrayed as distinct from one another, the line of battle clearly lies between these two groups and the vory. In some cases of prisoner-on-prisoner murder, the participants and/or the victim are identified merely as bandits. It seems likely in these instances that the participants were members of a particular criminal group, but the camp administrators had either been unable to uncover this information or had simply neglected to record it.
On February 21, 1950, a member of Karlag’s “criminal-bandit element” murdered a prisoner “belonging to the category ‘otoshedshie.’” As a result of the effort to stop this incident, a camp employee was inadvertently shot by a camp guard.111 A document from May 1950 notes a number of recent “bandit murders” between vory and otkolovshiesia. In one division medical clinic, four invalid prisoners were killed in one day.112 On May 30, 1950, two so-called bandit prisoners beat another prisoner to death with a piece of iron. At the time, the murdered prisoner was helping camp employees in the barrack get the other prisoners out for work. When the two bandits began their attack, the camp employees fled, leaving their prisoner assistant at the mercy of the attackers. The employees were reprimanded for “cowardice.”113
While in this last case the employees working inside the zone would have been unarmed and their cowardice may have been nothing more than it appeared, in a number of murders the role of the camp employee may have been more sinister. Many cases of prisoner-on-prisoner murder were facilitated by camp employee incompetence so blatant that it may indicate complicity in the murders themselves. Thus, on May 23, Aleksei Gerasimovich Podsokhin was murdered inside the penalty isolator of one Karlag subdivision. Podsokhin was a member of the otoshedshie. He had been placed in the penalty isolator on May 9 for a ten-day term. On May 14, he and other prisoners were caught trying to breech the cell wall. Podsokhin was given another ten-day term in the isolator for this offense. Two of the isolator’s supervisors for unknown reasons transferred Podsokhin into a cell with members of the vory. On May 23, one of the supervisors who reportedly knew of Podsokhin’s membership in the otoshedshie placed a vor, Andreev, in the cell with Podsokhin and left the two alone, whereupon Andreev strangled Podsokhin. The isolator’s supervisors were each given ten days of house arrest for their actions.114
If the isolator supervisors were complicit in this murder, it raises one issue that should be reemphasized. It may seem wrong that camp employees assisted murder committed by a vor, the criminal group supposedly defined by its refusal to cooperate with the camp administration. Nonetheless, cooperation with the camp administration and the establishment of ties with individual camp employees and guards were two different things altogether. Recall the tale of the bitches’ origin as told by Dolgun’s acquaintance. The vory v zakone had established contacts among the guards to facilitate their thefts of property inside the camps. These contacts did not violate the vory laws. Working in the camp administration or serving as an informant—basically serving in any kind of role that would assist the camp—were the types of activity that violated the thieves’ code.
While camp authorities frequently transferred prisoners from one subdivision to another to try to prevent murders, this tactic was generally unsuccessful. In late December 1950, the prisoner Tarasov was transferred out of his camp zone after a serious enmity developed between him and the prisoner-cook Iakovlev from whom Tarasov had been extorting extra food. On January 21, 1951, a nurse sent Iakovlev to Tarasov’s new camp zone so that he could visit a dentist. Tarasov learned of Iakovlev’s arrival and rushed to the dentist’s office, where he stabbed Iakovlev to death with a handmade knife.115
Sometimes, although less often, murders occurred among female prisoners. On February 16, 1951, prisoners Reshtanenko and Ostrikova were murdered inside the zone of a strict regime camp division. On their arrival on February 12 in the strict regime division, Reshtanenko and Ostrikova had informed the head of the zone supervisors that they had a hostile relationship with several of the zone’s prisoners and should therefore be sent somewhere else. They even brought a document with them from an administrator in their previous camp subdivision that attested to the dangers of putting them in the same zone with these other prisoners. The warnings were ignored. On February 16, their adversaries first suffocated Reshtanenko with a sheet and then beat Ostrikova to death with a piece of gridiron. The head of this camp zone was even reportedly aware of many prisoners’ possession of gridiron as early as February 14, but had not performed a search.116 All of these prisoner-on-prisoner murders point to the complete failure of the frequent searches in camps to remove weapons from prisoners.
Some prisoners certainly believed that camp employees were complicit in the commission of prisoner-on-prisoner murders. This belief even led to incidents of mild resistance. On March 28, 1951, a group of vory in a penalty camp division protested the actions of camp staff toward two of their number. These two vory had been placed in confinement cells located in a part of the camp populated by otoshedshie members. The vory raised their voices at the possible murder of these two vory by the otoshedshie. When camp employees went to remove the vory from their cells, they found evidence that the otoshedshie were trying to break into the cells. Order among the vory was only restored after one of the camp supervisors fired his pistol several times, wounding one vor. In response, most of the vory mounted a hunger strike demanding to see the camp’s leading staff.117
The camp authorities’ primary response to the rash of prisoner-on-prisoner murders followed a script that had been rehearsed many times over the years. Prisoners from different criminal groupings were to be isolated from one another in separate camp divisions.118 They also demanded better and more frequent searches of the camp zone for forbidden items. In January 1953, a decree was issued to intensify the battle against criminal behavior inside the camps. All prisoners had to sign a statement that they had been made aware of the new enhanced penalties for crimes committed while in the camps.119 According to Ivanova, fifty-two prisoners were executed for banditry under this law.120
The violence in the camps carried particular weight to the extent that it was a battle against informers. This phenomenon occurred in both regular and special camps. When prisoners reportedly started killing informers, informers reportedly stopped informing. Dolgun even writes of an informal prisoners’ “committee.”
[The] People’s Council of Justice [was] a sort of special soviet that undertook on behalf of the camp as a whole to execute these destructive people. The commonplace saying in camp was, “The stool pigeon walks with an ax at his back,” and it was not just a figure of speech. . . . When a professional was assigned executioner by the People’s Council, consistent with the ethic of audacity among the coloreds [another term for the professional criminals], he would sometimes take the severed head immediately to the nearest guard and say, “Here! I got the dirty stool pigeon. He’s one of yours!” Then he would hand over the head and stoically take his three months in hard punishment.121
Many memoirists note the killing of informers. Panin estimates that forty-five informers were killed in Karaganda in an eight-month period during 1950–51. Fel’dman writes of his arrival at Steplag, when a young frightened prisoner approached and asked that Fel’dman inform “the intelligenty” that he was no stoolie (stukach). A brick from a “Bandera” man (a Ukrainian nationalist) killed this young man in his bunk that very same night.122
As the camp administrators lost their sources of information about prisoners and their weapons of control over prisoners, Panin reports that they sought other means of control, including “clumsy attempts to provoke bloodshed among prisoners of different nationalities.” Still, Panin adds that “we saw through their plan and brought it to nothing. The man in charge of all the camp guards, Lieutenant Mochekhovski, a Chekist who had served with Kovpak’s Red Partisans, worked especially hard to arrange a St. Bartholomew’s Night. We often saw him nosing around in the camp. But for the time being at least, the prisoners were out only for the blood of the informers in their own ranks.”123
The absence of informants, in the appraisal of memoirists, broke down the camp authority structure. By mid-1951, observes Panin, tension in the camp was high. “It was clear that the guards were receiving stronger doses of indoctrination at their political classes.” Yet some prisoners continued to exhibit a new sense of voice, grabbing the rhetoric used against them for so many years and turning it on its head. One prisoner brigade leader “in effect” yelled at the camp administrators the following: “We are the revolutionaries, not you. We’re fighting against your jailhouse fascism. For thirty-four years you’ve been calling yourselves revolutionaries. But it is you who are against us. It is you who are the real counterrevolutionaries. Stuff that in your pipe and smoke it.” Not only did this prisoner speak out; his fellow prisoners also stepped in to prevent his seizure by camp guards.124
Local camp administrations were apparently reluctant to report the dearth of informants to central authorities because they were afraid it would cost them their own jobs.125 Some informants were placed inside the internal camp prison as a method of protecting them from the general camp population. At Ekibastuz, trying to handle the problem locally, some prisoners suspected of killing informers were placed into prison cells with these informers. Other prisoners heard the screams of pain from the subsequent torture of these informer killers. According to Panin, on January 21, 1952, a group of prisoners tried to break into the camp jail to kill the informers taking refuge there. The guards in the watchtowers opened fire. “Most of the prisoners participating in the operation had seen service in the war and they immediately scattered, zigzagging and keeping their heads down, just as they must have done during an attack at the front.” Panin reports that fewer than a dozen were killed.126
After the military veterans’ actions and subsequent shootings, nearly the entire remaining population of Panin’s camp division refused to work the next day, and some three thousand prisoners began a hunger strike. The prisoners demanded the arrival of the Kazakh Republic’s general procurator to investigate the incident and punish those guilty of administering torture in the internal camp prison. They also demanded a halt to such repressive actions. Their strike was weakened, however, because the adjacent camp zone of Ukrainian nationalists did not join the action. The work stoppage and hunger strike lasted five days, until top camp administrators and the republic general procurator agreed to the prisoners’ demands. While the prisoners celebrated, Panin claims that they “could clearly see that it was all bluff and that they would most surely have their revenge.” In just two weeks, revenge was served as interrogators arrived from Karaganda. Gulag authorities shipped hundreds of prisoners off to other camps. While it was a long-established Gulag practice to split up prisoners after incidents of group resistance or misbehavior, in this case the practice truly seemed to backfire. Spreading the prisoners out among the extremely small group of special camps carried news of the hunger strike to every corner of the special camp system. Panin himself saw evidence of the Ekibastuz strike’s fame when he was transferred to Steplag’s Spassk subdivision. In this division known as the “Camp of Death” for its role in camp executions along with its concentration of sick and dying prisoners, Panin recalls, “It gave our hearts a lift to read on the walls of all the toilets, ‘Greetings to the heroes of Ekibastuz!’ or similar inscriptions. . . . The echo of what we had done quickly resounded throughout the Empire of Gulag, eventually making possible the uprisings at Dzhezkazgan, Vorkuta, and elsewhere. All this made great inroads in the slave-holding system in our country.”127 The arrival of prisoners with experience in and news of previous incidents of prisoner resistance was important in the development of the mass post-Stalin uprisings in the special camps.
The continued refusal of access to archival materials on the internal camp surveillance system renders impossible the evaluation of the relation between these murders and the killing of informers reported so widely in memoirs. Frankly, the scale of prisoner-on-prisoner murders even during this period was relatively low, if official statistics are to be believed. In Karlag’s 192 subdivisions, prisoners murdered a total of fifty-one other prisoners in 1949, and another fifty-eight were murdered in sixty-four bandit incidents in 1950.128 Such events, then, were still uncommon, and in 1951, they all but disappeared as prisoner-on-prisoner murders were reduced to seven.129
The particular facts of some of the prisoner-on-prisoner murders potentially fit a pattern in which informers could have been the victims. On January 22, 1951, the five prisoners Chernichkin, Kochetkov, Kilius, Tolkov, and Burgeev at one Karlag subdivision were locked up in the zone’s penalty isolator for stealing the money, food, and belongings of other prisoners. The same night, the prisoners broke into the corridor of the isolator, where they then “created an uproar.” Supervisors in the camp zone heard what was happening and went to open the door of the isolator. They had not realized that the prisoners were already in the corridor, though. When they unlocked the exterior door of the isolator, the prisoners rushed them and ran out into the zone. The camp staff took no measures that night to detain the prisoners and return them to the isolator. Later that night, armed with handmade knives, Chernichkin, Kochetkov, and Burgeev entered the prisoner barracks, stabbing to death the sleeping prisoners Gofman, Tregubenko, and Bezborodov.130 The report does not mention any motivation for the murders. Presumably, these five prisoners had been able to move freely among the zone’s population prior to their detention in the zone’s penalty isolator. They thus could easily have killed these prisoners on other nights. The coincidence of the murders’ timing and their detention in the penalty isolator indicates that their victims were chosen for at least some presumed relationship to their new punishment.
Available official documentation indicates that the “absence” of informants and/or reduction of informing activities noted so frequently in memoirs may have been a figment of the prisoners’ collective imagination. Even if a significant number of stoolie murders occurred, available Gulag documentation provides a numerical picture of surveillance work that looks quite improved in the postwar era. As of July 1947, from a total camp and colony population of just over 2 million, central Gulag officials claimed to have 9,958 “residents,” 3,904 “agents,” and 64,905 informants, plus another 60,225 “anti-escape agent-informants.”131 According to Zemskov, this represented a growth of informers to 8 percent of the total Gulag population from a mere 1 percent in 1940.132 Of course, we cannot exclude the possibility that individual Gulag camps engaged in their own brand of tufta (the ubiquitous prisoner strategy of cheating on fulfillment of norms) when reporting on the numbers of active informants in their camps, and Gulag officials complained of informants who were out of touch with their handlers and were offering no useful information. Despite the numerical growth in the informant apparatus, Gulag officials in the postwar period were unhappy with the poor working of the network, especially in regard to fighting against the theft of socialist property.133
As the 1950s approached, the special camps thrived. By July 1, 1949, seven special camps held 132,000 prisoners, employed primarily in underground mining and other heavy work.134 By January 1, 1950, the total number of special camps grew to nine, with a population of 171,000.135 The total hit 206,000 on January 1, 1951.136 Much of the growth of special camps occurred in the Karaganda region. As Steplag grew, its subdivisions spread far and wide through central Kazakhstan from Ekibastuz to Karaganda to Spassk to Dzhezkazgan. In mid-1949, Steplag included camp subdivisions spread as far as six and eight hundred kilometers (Spassk and Balkhash, respectively) from the camp administration.137 Soon thereafter, some of its subdivisions broke off to form other special camps: Peschanlag “special camp no. 8,” Luglag “special camp no. 9,” and Dal’lag “special camp no. 11.” Of these, only Peschanlag lasted more than two years; Luglag and Dal’lag were soon folded back into the other special camps in the region.138 As of January 1, 1954, Dal’lag, Peschanlag, and Steplag held a total of just over 47,000 prisoners, guarded by 7,300 militarized guards, or one guard for approximately every sixth prisoner.139 While the post-Stalin era was marked by massive instances of special camp prisoner disobedience, on the issue of prisoner escapes, the special camps must be marked as a major success. On February 8, 1954, from a total special camp prisoner population of 209,000, only two instances of prisoner escape without recapture remained outstanding.140
While the battle against escape was typically at the forefront of special camp activity, no document reveals precisely why the introduction of special camps was deemed necessary. Escapes from camps were at all-time lows and declining, so this seems not to be the explanation. By 1948, the counterrevolutionary prisoner population had fallen in both relative and absolute terms, so the special camps cannot be explained as a response to a growth in this part of the camp population. In a February 1949 report, Minister of Internal Affairs Kruglov attributed the creation of the special camps to the rising number of prisoners with long sentences “in conjunction with the abolishment of the death penalty, and also the strengthening of criminal responsibility for embezzlement of state and social property and robbery.”141 Even this explanation, however, is unrevealing. He never makes it clear why a growing camp population, let alone one in which the counterrevolutionary population was declining, necessitated the creation of the special camps.
Nothing indicates that the individual regular camps were clamoring for the creation of special camps. In some respects, existing regular camps even objected to the loss of a portion of their prisoner labor force. Transfers out of regular camps proved burdensome both administratively and economically. In August 1948, Karlag was preparing for the transfer of over seventeen thousand of nearly seventy-four thousand prisoners into special camps and prisons. Karlag worried about meeting its obligations to provide prisoners as contract labor to non-Karlag industries. A “significant portion” of Karlag’s seventeen thousand prisoners contracted out to other industries came from the contingent marked for transfer to special camps. Karlag worried whether its population after these transfers would include enough prisoners in adequate physical condition to meet its obligations to supply laborers. Even if it could provide enough contract laborers, this would leave Karlag without a large enough number of physically fit prisoners to complete its own economic work.142 Between August 1948 and February 1949, the Karlag prisoners dropped in number from seventy-four to fifty-seven thousand, half of whom were classified as physically weak or invalids.143
It seems rather that the origin of the special camps must be understood mostly as a response to external events in the Soviet Union and world shaped by long-term trends in Gulag practice toward an ever-finer sorting of the prisoner population into ever-more-specialized detention institutions. The ongoing bloody battles with the Ukrainian and Baltic partisans, the terror of 1948, fears of a new world war, worries about inmates as a potential fifth column in such a war—all of these events created an atmosphere inside the Soviet Union that demanded no compromise with the internal enemy. The atmosphere, especially in the face of the ban on capital punishment, contributed to the creation of the special camps and the introduction of exile in perpetuity.144 Yet the special camps were also a product of a long-term trajectory of Gulag practice that shaped the particular response to this uncompromising environment.
The creation of the special camps was driven in part by the long-term Soviet drive to sort its population into ever-finer categories. The special camps operated as yet another new circle in Dante’s hell.145 In the 1930s, the entire Gulag system had evolved into a hierarchy of detention that meshed well with a developing hierarchy of redeemability. Individuals deemed more dangerous, and less likely or less desirable for return to Soviet society, were subjected to harsher conditions along with stricter isolation. While execution offered the extreme in the hierarchy, obviously by definition excluding the possibility of return to the Soviet social body, other forms of detention from prisons down to the noncustodial refusal of passports to Soviet villagers and collective farms operated within a continuum of trust. Over the Gulag’s history, Gulag authorities had frequently added new levels at all points in the hierarchy of detention institutions. The sorting of prisoners thus became ever finer, and the introduction of the special camps was just a particularly important event in this extended process. The special camps were not even fundamentally innovative, as they simply expanded on the practices developed since 1943 in the katorga camp divisions.146 The main differences were that special camps operated as independent camp complexes (whereas the katorga divisions had been subdivisions of larger camp complexes) and housed a substantially larger number of inmates.
Finally, the creation of the special camps should also be understood at least in part as an attempt to make labor in the regular camps productive. The existence of the special camps as a potential destination for the most malicious violators of camp discipline could be used as a means to motivate prisoners in regular camps to complete their labor tasks. In this respect, the brutality of special camps directly served a purpose, as news of their conditions spread in the camps throughout the Gulag system. In creating a reputation for brutality, if not in motivating regular camp prisoners to work hard, they were successful. The creation of the special camps, in a much broader but similar fashion to the creation of katorga camp divisions during the war, also sought to protect the health of regular camp prisoners by condemning the most hated and least redeemable Gulag prisoners to labor longer hours in the most dangerous Gulag industries.
Even if the special camps had been created for economic reasons, their operation undercut any positive benefits. The regime in special camps was not economically motivated; it was designed without much regard to cost to prevent escapes and isolate its prisoners completely from Soviet society and regular camp prisoners. The enhanced guard and more elaborate camp zone constructions were expensive, but they were the reasons for the special camps’ existence.
Ultimately the creation of the special camps backfired, as it created a new social atmosphere in both the special and regular camps of the Gulag. While the special camps were successful at preventing escape, starting with the hunger strike at Ekibastuz and extending into the post-Stalin era, the special camps experienced the largest incidents of prisoner unrest in Gulag history.
Memoirs from the postwar Gulag attest time and again to the importance of national identity in the organization of postwar prisoner society. As Fel’dman, a prisoner at Steplag, describes it, the camps had a distinctly multinational hue. Ukrainians, Belarusians, Balts, Chinese, Japanese, Germans, and citizens of the people’s democracies—these were the nations of the Gulag. He even remembers “one black man,” a U.S. Army tank captain captured outside the American section of Germany in his tank and given seven years.147
A number of factors explain the particular significance of national identity during the postwar period. First, Soviet authorities starting in the 1930s and especially during the war had shifted toward a conception of the internal enemy that was defined ever more frequently in national terms. Prisoners and deportees increasingly found themselves in camps or exile not for their class status but rather for their nationality. Nationality became a primary organizing principle of Gulag practice. Second, the integration of the western territories and Baltic states into the Soviet Union brought vast new populations to the Gulag that had spent the interwar period in polities organized on the nation-state principle. Nationalism, often in its integral nationalist form, was a dominant ideology in these regions. Many from these regions who found their way into the Gulag were members of nationalist underground organizations and nationalist partisan armies that had fought fiercely against all comers, including Soviet power, in the name of nationality. Third, postwar Soviet policy, especially starting with Stalin’s famous toast to the Russian people, increasingly operated on the basis of a hierarchy of nationalities that raised primarily the Russian and secondarily the other Slavic nationalities above all others.
Nationality was certainly recognized by camp and colony administrators as an crucial element of camp life to be addressed in the postwar era. As one camp and colony Communist Party functionary in Kazakhstan put it in 1946, “In our ideological work, a large place must be taken by the national question.”148 The exact nature of work on “the national question” was never quite clear. Frequently, when talking about their work, camp and colony party members emphasized the necessity of propagandizing the ideas of “Soviet patriotism.”149 At the same time, the actual practices of camp employees generally privileged Russians over other nationalities.
Gulag prisoners and exiles, struggling for survival, latched on to various forms of community as ways to organize their lives in detention. Nationality in the Gulag worked in a number of different ways—first as a positive tie between prisoners on the basis of which they offered help to one another. According to Scholmer, a German Vorkuta inmate attuned to the national groupings in the Gulag, prisoners working in the kitchens tended to favor their conationals.150 Members of various nationalities attempted to find space to continue some cultural traditions that defined their national existence. Thus, in the mines of Vorkuta, where the camp guards refused to go, Lithuanians reportedly performed religious services.151 Western Ukrainians often refused to speak Russian, preferring their native language.152 These national communities were not, of course, undifferentiated. Scholmer notes that German Nazis generally had less to do with the German Left than with members of other nationalities.153 Nonetheless, for the prisoners in special camps, where the political prisoner/common criminal nexus had broken down, nationality was the primary organizing principle of Gulag society.
Among different groups, national identity operated as a shorthand identity vouching for a prisoner’s character. Buca describes his experiences trying to engage in shadowy business dealings in the camp. One engine driver, approached by Buca, “looked me over carefully, glanced around, and asked me what nationality I was. He seemed relieved when I said I was Polish. . . . ‘Usually you can trust the Poles in a deal.’”154 He faced the same question from some Georgians, who replied, “The Poles aren’t usually double-crossers.”155 In fact, Buca’s Polishness seems to have given him a wider social circle than many prisoners. Usually, he observes, prisoners did not help those of other nationalities, but since there was a shortage of Poles around, he had wider contacts with prisoners of various nationalities than most.156 His depiction certainly implies that the nationalities largely kept to themselves, providing social contacts and resources only for conationals and not for members of other nationality groups.157
Intriguing, though, is that it was the largest and smallest national groupings that failed to find cohesiveness exclusively within their own numbers. For Buca, it was the lack of fellow Poles. Many foreigners in the camps described a similar phenomenon. On the other hand, Russians typically did not form a single, coherent group.158 The population of Russian prisoners was simply too large to make such a grouping effective in organizing systems of mutual assistance in the camp world. After all, if you were in a camp that was largely Russian, how would you decide which Russian you would help because of shared nationality and which you would not? Other factors of prisoner identity like political attitude, region of origin, or veteran status were more likely to structure prisoner society in this case.159 A prisoner’s Russian identity, then, was most likely to come to the fore when dealing with prisoners of a non-Russian nationality.
Panin thus was not terribly focused in his memoir on his position as a Russian in the camps. Rather, he was clearly more concerned with his religious identity. Nonetheless, when evaluating non-Russians, in particular Chechens, he offered an essentialized (though positive) perspective. Of the Chechens behind barbed wire, he writes that “they were reliable, brave and strong-minded people. You didn’t find stool pigeons among their kind. If one did crop up, he was doomed to a short life.”160 Panin was also a great admirer of the uncompromisingly anti-Soviet and proreligious life led by Chechens and Ingush in exile.
The Chechens and the Ingush are closely related Moslem peoples of the Caucasian region. Most of them are determined and courageous. They had at first believed that Hitler would free them from the shackles of Stalinism, and when the Germans were finally driven from the Caucasus, Stalin ordered their resettlement. . . . Many . . . perished. But the Chechens were very tenacious of life and liberty and were thus able to survive this barbarous deportation. Their chief strength lay in their religious faith. They settled down in closely knit communities and in each village the most educated man among them took upon himself the duties of the mullah. They tried to resolve their differences and quarrels by themselves, without resorting to the Soviet courts. Despite government-imposed fines, Chechen girls were not sent to school at all, while the boys went only for a year or two, long enough to master the rudiments of reading and writing. Thus a protest of the simplest kind, made in a direct, palpable manner, enabled the Chechens to win a victory for their nation. Their children were brought up to have some idea of their religion, if no more than the most basic customs. They were taught to hate atheism.161
Panin’s positive evaluation was not shared widely, although his essentialized view of the Chechen and Ingush peoples was. Soviet authorities singled them out among the exiles in Kazakhstan as the most malicious violators of labor discipline and the most likely to refuse to work.162 In 1952, Kazakh authorities requested that the Chechens be deported again, this time to move them to the more distant areas of Kazakhstan. Although the MGB considered the Chechens and Ingush in exile to be “totally incorrigible,” it denied the request, stating that such a move would not “solve the problem.”163 Bloody battles between Russian and Chechen or Ingush prisoners were quite common.
While Buca’s Polish identity provided him with access to other groups, nationality also supplied the organizing principle for much camp antagonism. The great number of non-Russian prisoners blamed the Russians for their plight. The most virulent conflict, according to Buca, was between Russians and Ukrainians. This, of course, mirrored the bloody battles between Soviet NKVD troops and Ukrainian partisan guerrillas that continued for several years into the postwar period. As Buca writes, the Russians regarded the Ukrainians in the camp as Banderites, enemies of the Soviet homeland, aliens who did not deserve to be fed and who should be worked until they dropped dead. He also points to the important role of guards in fomenting these feelings. Guards threw around the term Bandera as a derogatory curse. One morning, Buca recalls the wakeup call, “Up, you fascist bastards! You Bandera dirt! Are you waiting for your fucking mother . . . ?”164 National disputes also occurred among the non-Russian nationalities. According to Scholmer, these disputes often mirrored larger geopolitical rivalries. Thus, he comments on the animosity at Vorkuta between Lithuanians and Poles motivated by the disputed status of Vilnius.165
Numerous memoirists testify to the role of Soviet officials in facilitating animosity among the national groups. Scholmer believes that the camp administration tried to use its Russian population to keep the other nationalities in their place.166 Dolgun remembers the local secret police commander in Dzhezkazgan as “chiefly occupied with creating internal conflict in camp, setting the Ukrainians against the Russians (which was not hard) by spreading rumors and so on, on the divide-and-rule principle.”167
Even when not specifically seeking to foment hatred among the nationalities, the actions of Gulag authorities reinforced the ties of nationality. The strong sense of national identity among Ukrainians was only strengthened by the conscious decision of camp authorities to concentrate Ukrainian inmates in particular camp sections. Buca recalls the prisoners at Peltevna as being 85 percent Ukrainian.168 The Kengir camp division of Steplag, a Karaganda region special camp to be discussed further below, had a population at the time of Stalin’s death that was 72 percent Ukrainian and Baltic nationalist.169 The intense concentrations of Ukrainian prisoners led to persistent feelings that the Ukrainian people had been targeted entirely out of proportion to other Soviet nationalities.
To some extent, the Ukrainians were correct. They had been targeted, if not exclusively for their nationality, then at least for living both in regions that had not been part of the Soviet Union during the prewar period and those areas that were occupied by the Nazis. On both accounts, the Ukrainians, especially those from western Ukraine, were treated as suspect. The same was true of western Belarusian, Baltic, and Bessarabian (now Moldovan) peoples. Not only had these peoples been exposed to non-Soviet ideology during their wartime occupations, raising all the issues of contamination addressed in the filtration camps, but they had also lived outside the Soviet Union in the prewar period in polities operating on very different bases. Furthermore, they had not undergone the intense Sovietization and purification experienced in the Soviet Union during the interwar period. Beyond these issues of socialization and exposure to non-Soviet ideology, the peoples of the western territories and Baltics were also in large numbers participants in nationalist organizations and partisan armies with explicitly anti-Soviet agendas. The bloody battles between Soviet and nationalist partisan forces continued well into the postwar era, and defined Soviet distrust of the peoples from these regions.
The Sovietization of the newly integrated western territories was a critical part of the Gulag story in the postwar era. Between 1944 and 1947, the labor camp population of Ukrainians rose 2.4 times, Belarusians rose 2.1 times, Lithuanians 7.5 times, Latvians 2.9 times, Estonians 3.5 times, and Poles 1.8 times. All of these peoples saw their proportional weight in the total corrective labor camp population rise significantly during this period. In addition, these same nationalities were much more likely to spend their period of imprisonment in corrective labor camps than in corrective labor colonies.170 This certainly indicates that prisoners from among these nationalities were more likely to be handed longer sentences. Distrust on the basis of nationality was not limited to the peoples from the western territories and Baltic republics. The same preponderance of their numbers in corrective labor camps over corrective labor colonies was true for members of deported nationalities, members of nationalities with corresponding non-Soviet nation-states (Soviet citizens who were ethnically Chinese, Mongols, Turks, etc.), and foreigners.
Much as it had during the war, national identity played a particularly important role in shaping postwar exile practices. In 1945, the Council of People’s Commissars codified the legal situation of special settlers. These exiles existed at the margin between the prisoner and the free Soviet citizen. Special settlers were given all the rights of Soviet citizens, except they were not allowed to leave their locality without express permission of the political police organs. The failure to comply with this requirement was treated as escape and punished criminally. The special settlers were required to engage in “socially useful labor,” which was supposed to be organized for them by the local NKVD. They were also required to report any changes in family status (birth, death, or escape) to the local NKVD within a three-day period.171 The living conditions for exiles were still difficult. In 1945, Beria himself wrote to Nikolai A. Voznesenskii, the chair of the state planning agency (Gosplan), about the “extremely difficult daily-living conditions” faced by exiles in the Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek republics. More than twenty-six thousand families had no fit living structure.172
Deportations in the postwar era continued to operate largely on a national basis. From 1945 to 1948, an additional 120,000 Soviet Germans, mostly postwar repatriates from Germany and Austria, were sent into exile.173 They likely had been in territories occupied by the Nazis prior to the mass deportations in 1941. In 1946, Gulag and MVD directives emphasized that any labor camp or colony prisoners due for release who were members of those nationalities deported during the war were only to be released into exile either with their families or at least to those regions where their conationals had been deported.174
The main thrust of postwar ethnic deportations was from the reannexed territories in the Baltic republics, western Ukraine, western Belorussia, and the new Moldovan Republic. Between 1944 and 1947, over a hundred thousand Ukrainians were sent into exile for being members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). In 1945 and 1948, nearly fifty thousand were exiled from Lithuania. Another ninety-five thousand were exiled in 1949 from the three Baltic republics combined, and fifty-seven thousand were exiled from the Moldovan Republic.175 Further postwar national deportations targeted Basmachi (alleged Central Asian nationalists), Poles, Turks, Greeks, Dashnaki (alleged Armenian nationalists), and Iranians.176
These national exiles were all based on a specific combination of class and national factors. Unlike the wartime deportations of Germans, Chechens, Ingush, and others, these postwar deportations were not undifferentiated and were not total. Only a portion of the national populations of these republics was sent into exile. The differentiation was officially based on either alleged membership in nationalist and/or profascist organizations, or class status as a kulak.177
There were two main “nonnational” exile groups in the postwar period: the 16,000 agricultural workers deported for leading “anti-social and parasitic forms of life,” and the nearly 150,000 deported for a term of six years as members of the All-Russian Liberation Army, the Vlasovites.178 When Stalin ordered the release of the latter after six years, all those who were members of any of the deported nationalities were left in exile “permanently.” The remainder were released, with restrictions forbidding them to live in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, border zones, restricted areas, and the western territories—the Baltic republics, the Moldovan Republic, and the western zones of the Ukrainian and Belarusian republics. The individual enterprises in which they had worked in exile were urged to conclude agreements with these exiles to remain in place in their jobs.179
By the postwar era, a sharp distinction had arisen between the treatment of the ever-shrinking number of former kulaks in exile and the national deportees sent into exile during the war. This is especially evident for exile youths. Among the national exiles, children on reaching the age of sixteen were personally placed on the rolls of exiles. For kulak exiles, children under the age of sixteen were released from exile, and on reaching the age of sixteen only a small number were placed on the rolls of exile.180 For the national deportees’ children, placement on the rolls of exiles had become a matter of blood, of parental lineage. For kulak exiles’ children, a presumption of their necessary subjection to exile on reaching the age of majority was not present. This obviously accords with the differing conceptions of enemy status placed on the differing contingents. Being an enemy according to nationality was an inescapable definition, while being an enemy according to class left the potential open for moving away from the parental background. The entire postwar period saw a gradual expansion of the terms under which various exiles from the former kulak contingent could be released. By the time of Stalin’s death, and the ensuing mass releases from camps and exile, few former kulaks were left to be freed. For the national exiles, the postwar period saw the tightening up and extension of their terms of exile forever. Those who had been sent into exile as kulaks yet belonged to any of the nationalities exiled during the war were not subject to release but instead were merely transferred officially on to the rolls of the national deportees.181
Despite the releases of former kulaks from the rolls of special settlers, the combination of the continued postwar exile of nationalities and gradual regularization of exile life to the point that births began to outnumber deaths led the total exile population to reach its maximum only on January 1, 1953, when 2.8 million people lived in internal Soviet exile. By the late Stalin era, new exiles primarily came from indigenous population growth—that is, the new children of exiled peoples officially became exiles themselves.182
The introduction of permanent exile was the second major Gulag historical event in 1948. This was the first official application of any punitive measure other than execution without a theoretical end. Eternal exile first appeared in the resolution on the creation of special camps. All special camp prisoners on their release from special camps were registered as permanent deportees in some of the Soviet Union’s most isolated regions. At least some 37,900 people had been sent into permanent exile after completing their sentence as of May 1953. Moreover, all inmates who had been released since the end of the war but who would now be subject to permanent exile on release were rearrested in order to change their legal status. Over 20,000, particularly among those arrested in 1937 and released after ten-year sentences, were rearrested for the purpose of placing them in permanent exile.183 Many of them were not rearrested until 1949—a year that Ginzburg calls the “twin brother of 1937.”184 While the bloodiness of 1948 and 1949 were no match for their 1937 and 1938 cousins, these rearrests affected many people who had become Gulag inmates in the earlier terror. As Ginzburg writes of her 1949 rearrest, “They confronted me with no new charges. They required no ‘confessions.’” They had been rearrested “merely in order to have our status regularized to that of permanent, lifelong exile by a decision of the MGB’s Special Conference.” Ginzburg herself was limited to living and moving about within a seven-kilometer radius of Magadan and was under the open surveillance of the MGB, to whom she was required to report twice a month for life.185
Ginzburg’s story is similar to many others. Vasillii Nikoforovich Lazarev, a former member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, had been arrested during the terror. He was released on September 7, 1946, and returned to Kazan, where he was allowed to register and live in nearby Vasil’ev. Lazarev was rearrested in July 1949. An MGB representative specifically told him that they had no new evidence against him, but had nonetheless decided to exile him to Krasnoiarsk.186 The same happened to Nikolai M. Busarev, who was told that his second arrest was based on the same crimes as his first arrest. He was sent for lifelong exile into the far north.187
Yet intriguingly, permanent exile—an official declaration that a person could never be fully reintegrated into Soviet society—did not imply that a person had been totally removed from society. Perhaps the most surprising part of Ginzburg’s story was the arrival of an agitator five years after her deprivation of rights ended, but while she was still in permanent exile. The agitator wanted to make sure that Ginzburg got out and voted. She said:
“I want first of all to congratulate you . . . and to welcome you back with all my heart to the family of the workers. . . . ” She was a Stalinist of the effusively emotional variety. She simply oozed enthusiastic benevolence, and a fervent desire to induct me, a heathen, into that harmonious world in which she lived so fruitfully. She spoke to me more or less in the manner in which gentle, patient missionaries doubtless address primitive African tribesmen.188
Even as a permanent deportee, Ginzburg was a subject to be reclaimed by some fervent Stalinist for the “family of the workers.” Of course, her status as a permanent exile revealed that she could not be fully integrated into that family.
In late 1948, permanent exile was extended to many of the deported nationalities. On November 26, 1948, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued its decree detailing the criminal penalties for escape from exile of any peoples deported during the war. The nationalities deported during the war were now officially informed that their exile was permanent. Anyone among these national exiles who escaped (that is, who left their region of exile without permission) was subject to a twenty-year term in Gulag camps. All those subject to permanent exile were required to sign an affidavit attesting that they understood that their term of exile extended forever and that they faced twenty years in camps for escape.189 In June 1949, the permanent exile status was extended to Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians exiled in 1949.190 In April 1950, those exiled as members of the OUN were subjected to permanent exile.191
When their exile was made permanent, over five thousand adult OUN exiles lived within the bounds of Kazakhstan, most in the Karaganda region. According to official reports, not one of the five thousand refused to sign the affidavit on their permanent exile and criminal liability for escape. Informers and political police reported on the “moods” of the OUN members about this momentous change in status. They ran the gamut. Some meekly accepted their situation. One woman reportedly said, “If they resettled us from western Ukraine to Karaganda, then it means we must live and be employed here and submit to the laws of Soviet power.” Another woman echoed the comments, “I thought that after two to three years I would return to western Ukraine, but now as much as there is a law on us staying here forever, we must live and work here. If you escape, they will nonetheless capture and convict you.” Some even expressed more positive evaluations of life in Karaganda, especially since their pre-Soviet western Ukraine had ceased to exist. The arrival of collective farms in western Ukraine came in for particular abuse. “Here in Karaganda we live much better [than in the Stanislav region], we should call on our families to move from western Ukraine to Karaganda.” Or another woman commented, “If they let us leave Karaganda, there would nonetheless be no reason to go to the western Ukraine, where they are now organizing kolkhozy. It is better to live here and work in industry than to enter a kolkhoz.”192
Others had more decidedly negative attitudes. Hopes that external events, especially a war between the United States and the Soviet Union, would intervene and change their position were common. “Soon there will be war, we will fall under the power of America and only this will relieve us from exile.” Another asked, “Why don’t England and America start a war with the Soviet Union? What are they waiting for?” Some expressed their plan to return to western Ukraine anyway. “I did not kill anyone in Ukraine, I did not steal, therefore, I shall leave after my six-year term, despite whatever laws, I will leave for western Ukraine.” These declarations of “anti-Soviet moods” were turned over to the organs of the MGB for investigation.193
Some of the exiles from the Baltic republics sent to other regions were even more virulently anti-Soviet. As an informant reported, one Estonian woman spoke with excitement about the war in Korea. “It’s good that the Americans bomb all the cities and villages of North Korea. . . . They should at the same time bomb the cities and villages of the Soviet Union and destroy the Communists. I hate the Communists such that if the Americans today started to bomb us, then I would be prepared to die if only they destroyed the Communists for how they torment us.”194
The training of a keen ear on the international situation for events that could alter their status was common in the camps as well. Solzhenitsyn remarked on the eagerness in a transit prison about reports from Korea. Rumors abounded that “Stalin’s blitzkrieg had miscarried. The United Nations volunteers had by now been assembled. We saw in Korea the precursor, the Spain, of the Third World War.”195 War, the prisoners hoped, could bring a new fate, perhaps their release, or even the overthrow of the Soviet government itself. Scholmer also noted that prisoners were constantly talking about war and what would happen if it were to come. They asked Scholmer repeatedly whether the Allies had tried to save Nazi camp prisoners after the war.196
Prisoners’ focus on the international arena was no surprise. On the one hand, during the war they had already seen how international events of such a magnitude could directly affect camp life. On the other hand, the international situation was a constant subject of discussion in the Soviet world. The cold war was echoed not only in the prisoners’ hopes but also in the camp employees’ discussions of their work. Conversing about the coming election campaign of 1948, the chief of the political department of Kazakhstan’s Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies (UITLK) reminded his local party workers that the “socialist power [derzhava] was moving forward to communism as the vanguard of all progressive humanity in the struggle with the forces of the black reaction led by American imperialism and its lesser partner the English bourgeoisie. . . . Our country stands as the herald of peace, freedom and the national independence of all peoples.”197 Or as he said following the attack on the journals Zvezda and leningrad,
The bourgeois world does not like our successes both inside our country and in the international arena. . . . The question of socialism has become the order of the day in many countries of Europe. The imperialists do not like this. . . . In these conditions, the task of ideological education consists not only in answering blow for blow all of these heinous smears and abuses leveled at our Soviet culture, but also to lash out and attack boldly bourgeois ideology. . . . The spiritual riches of our people are no less important than the material riches.198
A knowledge of foreign affairs, or at least a knowledge of the official Soviet version of foreign affairs, had always been a requirement for a good Communist. This was no less true in the postwar era. Criticisms of party political education in the Gulag system included those “who could not speak about what is happening now in Paris, events in China, and other international questions.”199
Karaganda continued to serve as a deportation locale for many exiles in the postwar period. As of March 25, 1949, the region held 111,000 exiles, including 30,000 men, 42,000 women, and 39,000 children under the age of sixteen. The major statistical categories were based largely on the exile contingents—that is, with whom or for what reason these people were sent into exile. The largest group consisted of Soviet Germans and their families, comprising over 57 percent of the region’s total. The second largest, encompassing nearly 35 percent of the exiles in Karaganda, were those exiled from the northern Caucasus, an overwhelming proportion of whom were Chechen. The final large groups were those sent into exile for particular reasons, mostly former members of the OUN, former members of the Russian Liberation Army (listed as Vlasovites), and Poles exiled in 1936.200 While the numbers of class-based exile groups like former kulaks were small in the Soviet Union as a whole by 1949, they were entirely absent in the Karaganda region. The overall breakdown by contingent for the Kazakh Republic, where over 828,000 exiles were being held in 1949, is roughly similar to that in Karaganda, with the exception of a sizable 3.5 percent from among those exiled from the Georgian Republic. No former kulaks remained in exile in the Kazakh Republic.201
The totals had changed little by 1952, when the exiles in the Karaganda region numbered 130,000, including 42,000 children under the age of sixteen. Germans, Chechens, Ukrainians, and Ingush continued to occupy, respectively, the four largest national groups of exiles in the region. The total exile population of the Kazakh Republic in early 1952 was over 940,000.202 The main growth in the number of exiles in Karaganda and Kazakhstan during the 1949–52 period seems to be an indigenous population growth of the exile community itself—that is, new births were added to the roll of exiles faster than deaths removed names from the rolls.
Reviewing data on the locations of individual special settlements in the Karaganda region reveals only the slightest evidence for concentrating exiles from a particular contingent or nationality group in one location. For the most part, the exiles were freely mixed with one another. Since the exiles of Karaganda region fell almost exclusively into four contingents (Germans, northern Caucasians, former OUN members, and Poles), however, and the vast majority of those were either German or Chechen, the special settlements were overwhelmingly comprised primarily from these groups.203 The concentration of just a few exile groups in the Karaganda region should temper any argument that Soviet authorities were attempting to break national groups apart and thus destroy their national identities. Living mostly around their conationals, these peoples maintained their cultures, languages, and national identities. If Soviet authorities had truly wanted to denationalize these peoples, they would have been better off trying to disperse them widely among existing populations of other nationalities.
Finally, anti-Semitism in the postwar Gulag highlights some elements of national identity behind the barbed wire. The history of anti-Semitism, official and unofficial, in the postwar Soviet Union has been well documented. From the destruction of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, to the barely veiled anti-Semitism of the anticosmopolitan campaigns and the indications of a major purge of Soviet Jews emerging from the “doctors’ plot” at the end of Stalin’s life, anti-Semitism became a ubiquitous element of postwar Soviet life. The same was true of the Gulag.
Officially at least, the immediate postwar era continued to see denunciations of outbursts of anti-Semitism.204 Nevertheless, the increasing interconnections between Soviet identity and Russian, or at least Slavic, identity became quite obvious. In Kopelev’s presentation, Soviet and Russian identity are so inseparable that he almost unproblematically identifies himself as Russian, despite being “officially” Jewish. After complaining bitterly about being placed in a cell with Germans, another prisoner called out, “We’ve got some Russians here too.” Of this, Kopelev notes, “It’s interesting how meeting your own kind in a political prison calms you down and brings you out of yourself.” Kopelev reflexively sees the self-proclaimed Russian as his “own kind” without considering for a moment whether his “own kind” meant Russian specifically, or whether by Russian he was simply referring to Soviet or at least non-German.205 Later, Kopelev even denies much real significance to his Jewishness as part of his identity as a Soviet man. He was interrogated about his complaints of Soviet commission of brutalities against Germans. You are “too kind,” he was told, yet, “Still, you’re a Jew. How can you love the Germans? Don’t you know what they’ve been doing to the Jews?” Kopelev responded, “What is ‘love’? I hate the Fascists not as a Jew—I haven’t had much occasion to be reminded of that—but as a Soviet man, a Kievite, a Muscovite, and, above all, as a Communist. And that means my hate cannot find expression in rape or pillage.”206
Despite Kopelev’s self-understanding as Soviet (or perhaps Russian) first and Jewish second, his fellow prisoners and Gulag authorities thought differently. Scholmer recalls the arrival of official anti-Semitism in Vorkuta, where Pravda suddenly became popular in the camp. The guards began making anti-Semitic remarks. Political officers engaged in anti-Semitic discussions while reviewing the latest Pravda articles with prisoners in the barracks, and anti-Semitic comments became common in the mess hall and at work. Thus it is clear that anti-Semitism extended well beyond camp officials themselves. Scholmer opined that “anti-Semitic feeling in the camps at Vorkuta is more intense than it ever was even among the anti-Semitic German middle classes under Hitler. The Jews in these camps are living side by side with many of their most brutal persecutors.” He singled out the Ukrainian prisoner population as especially prone to anti-Semitism.207
The doctors’ plot had specific ramifications in the Gulag. Fel’dman recalls, “After the doctors’ plot, the camp administration decided that all Jews were terrorists, therefore they began to blame Jewish youth for recent murders.”208 Ginzburg specifically recalls the doctors’ plot as bringing anti-Semitism to Kolyma. “Until then,” she writes, “we had been, as far as the authorities were concerned, a single, uniform mass.”209
In the postwar Gulag, nationality had risen to the forefront as both an organizing principle for prisoners’ and exiles’ construction of their own societies and networks of relationships, and a primary means by which Soviet authorities defined their enemies. The postwar Gulag saw the introduction of populations with committed and explicit anti-Soviet nationalist ideologies. Soviet practices intensified national identities among the prisoners and exiles.
As we have seen, many Red Army veterans and Soviet partisans passed through filtration camps, and then found their way into the Gulag. Even though they all carried the potential taint of collaboration with the enemy, they occupied a high place in Gulag society, just as they did in postwar Soviet society. Shumuk remembers a fight in a prison cell. His opponent, indignant, yelled: “Do you know who I am? . . . I’m a ‘repeater.’ I’ve been sentenced three times, saw all the labour camps of Russia, and then was taken from the camps and transferred to Kovpak’s detachment, behind German lines. I was with Kovpak [the legendary Soviet Ukrainian partisan commander] until he reached the Carpathian mountains, and here you’ve dared to raise your hand against me!”210 The outburst speaks to two of the most important elements of Gulag status in the postwar period: being a repeater with long camp experience, and being a former Soviet partisan. It also speaks to the pride and sense of entitlement felt by those veterans.
Gulag authorities and guards had an ambivalent attitude toward those with army experience. The ambivalence arose from significant uncertainty about the nature of prisoners’ wartime activities. Were they Soviet patriots or traitorous Vlasovites? Furthermore, the assertiveness of military veterans was a potential threat to order in the Gulag society. Consider again the indignant tone of the Kovpak partisan. “Don’t you know who I am?” he cried. The boldness of the veteran has been noted throughout postwar Soviet society. These people had risked their lives in defense of the Soviet Union, and had a corresponding sense of entitlement and empowerment.
Kopelev recalls a scene played out in front of his prison train in Gorky. Two drunken locals were being shooed away by the train’s guards. “And who are you?” cried one of the drunken men. “I fought for the Motherland.” On the same train platform, it became apparent that imprisoned Soviet veterans called forth the same ambivalence from Soviet citizens as they did from Gulag guards. A disabled veteran hobbled up to the train, “Vlasovites, eh? We spilled our blood, and you, you rats, you worked for the Fritzes. To the gallows—all of you.” Yet two women approached with a completely different response to the prisoners. One of the women asked the prisoners if any had been “front-liners.” A guard came to send the ladies on their way, but they soon returned with arms full of food, shouting, “Hey, boys, front-liners—catch!” The train commander approached the ladies, warning them that they could be shot for such actions. They finished throwing the food, as one said, “They’re from the front! Whom did you ever fight? . . . Who’re you going to fire at—women? And for what—for showing a little mercy? Who are you—Germans?” At this point, the disabled veteran who had just harangued the prisoners as Vlasovites approached the guards, saying, “Go ahead, shoot me, riffraff, if you dare! I’ll flatten you with this crutch! I captured Warsaw, fuck your mother!”211
Kopelev himself felt this sense of entitlement based on his own involvement in the Soviet military. After his arrest, he was tossed in a cell with Germans. This was an affront to his sense of dignity. “‘Don’t you know there are Fritzes in here?’ I bawled; I swore; I was furious. ‘I’m a Soviet officer! I won’t be humiliated like this!’”212
The ambivalence on the part of Gulag employees toward Red Army veterans was pronounced. On the one hand, Gulag practices often were designed specifically to remove any dignity from former Red Army officers. Buca recalls civilians entering his barracks and asking for Red Army officers, who were then forced to carry out the “shit bucket” as a reminder that they were now prisoners and nothing more.213 Yet in spite of the hostility to imprisoned veterans, whether on account of their presumed role as traitors during the war or assertiveness in places of imprisonment, where authorities expected passivity of their prisoners, Red Army veterans were also frequently granted privileges over their civilian or non-Russian fellow prisoners. Solzhenitsyn himself remembers his appointment as a camp foreperson as based on his officer experience in the army during the war.214
The prisoners themselves held frontline soldiers in high regard and with high expectations, although Solzhenitsyn regards them as abject failures. Writes Solzhenitsyn, “High hopes were placed in the front-line soldiers when they arrived—they would go after the stoolies! Alas, the military reinforcements were a disappointment to the camp warriors.”215
Red Army and/or partisan veteranship presented certain difficulties as itself an organizing principle of group identity. After all, some veterans really were traitors of one sort or another. Some had in fact fought with Vlasov’s army, and other had in actuality cooperated with the Nazis in POW camps and under occupation. For the proud, honest war veteran, it was impossible to know for sure if the other veterans in the camp were also honest veterans or whether they had fought against you on the other side. Nonetheless, something of a “community of warriors” did develop among those who had fought during the war, even among those who had fought against one another.
In the early 1950s, the Gulag system—now fully developed and at its population peak—continued to grind away. A report on Karlag’s work for 1951 emphasized the camp’s now-familiar primary objectives: the tightening of the camp regime, the isolation and guard of prisoners, and through the tightening of the regime, the completion of the camp’s economic tasks.216 Party conferences, meetings of the camp activists, political education meetings of camp employees—the protocols developed over twenty years of Karlag’s history continued unabated. Prisoner-on-prisoner violence and violations of the camp regime were down significantly in 1951, while escape attempts were essentially unchanged, and were still blamed on a lack of vigilance among the guard and the particularities of agricultural work.217 Karlag had definitely run out of ingenuity in problem solving. The “solution” proposed for every problem identified in various reports from 1952—and none of the problems were new—merely rehashed long-established practices. The morale and vigilance of the guard was inadequate, so they had to have political meetings of the officers and party-Komsomol conferences among the rank and file, and they had to improve their living conditions as well as organize cultural and sporting events for them.218 Escapes were (as always, no matter the figures) too frequent, so they had to review the prisoners living outside the zone to remove those sentenced for especially dangerous crimes.219
In some respects, the Gulag operated more efficiently than ever. By the early 1950s, the Gulag held its all-time largest populations of prisoners and exiles. The system continued a losing battle for economic efficiency, but this battle had been waged since its first days. Prisoner deaths and prisoner escapes had reached historic lows despite the burgeoning camp population. There was no particular crisis.
Some camps were even celebrating their “success.” In 1952, Karlag celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the founding of its educational camp point (lagpunkt “Uchebnyi Kombinat”) for the preparation of agricultural specialists. During those twenty years, the camp point’s director bragged, they had trained over ten thousand specialists ranging from veterinarians and agrotechnicians to tractor drivers and bookkeepers. These former delinquents had, he continued, “found their place as citizens of the great country of socialism—the USSR.” In every part of Karlag, educational camp point trainees worked as specialists, “expiating their guilt before socialist society” while assisting in “the transformation of the wild Karaganda steppe into an advanced, cultured, enormous agricultural enterprise.”220
Still, Gulag society had changed significantly in the postwar period. New prisoner populations of war veterans, nationalist guerrillas, and peoples with significant life experience outside the Soviet Union provided a potentially combustible mix. The isolation and concentration of many of these prisoners in a small number of special camps raised even further the potential explosiveness of the population. The Gulag was a political institution, though, and it was only the death of the system’s founder that would set off the explosions.