Chapter 4
The Gulag
Nikolai Averianov was 11 years old when his parents were subjected to ‘dekulakization’. In his deposition for Memorial, the human rights organization which investigates political repression in the USSR, he then describes the process of being deported from the Mordovia region to the Bogatovsk region in northern Siberia.
My father, Pyotr Averianov, was arrested at night in April, 1932, and taken to who knows where. Afterwards they arrested my mother, Varvara, in May on the night before Easter and threw us seven children, including me, out of the house. They sat us four older children on two horses, tied us up with reins so we wouldn’t run away, and put the three smaller ones to bed with no clothing.
Along with several other families, he was locked in a railroad car in which, after several days’ travelling, people lost their minds and starved to death. After stopping in Tomsk to pull out a few corpses, the train carried on until it reached its final destination, where the ‘kulaks’ were introduced to their ‘special settlement’:
From Tomsk they took us to a pier, loaded us onto a barge, and we sailed up the Chulym River. I don’t remember how long we travelled. They unloaded us onto a pier, and we walked about three kilometres to the village of Pesochnoe in Bogatovsk Region. Two of the children in our family, Nastia and Vania, died on the way there. They abandoned us there, ‘Live as you like!’
(Frierson and Vilensky, Children of the Gulag, p. 104)
By contrast with the Nazi camps, which are imprinted on the world’s consciousness through images, films, testimonies, and trial records, the Gulag remains, even today, hard to imagine. ‘Gulag’, strictly speaking, refers to an administrative institution created in 1929, the department of the OGPU (Unified State Political Administration, replaced by the NKVD/MVD, the forerunners of the KGB) responsible for the camps: the Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps. For contemporaries, ‘Gulag’ referred solely to this authority, not to the camp system. The sites of incarceration that later came to be denominated by the name ‘Gulag’, thanks to Solzhenitsyn’s coining of the term ‘Gulag archipelago’, encompassed prisons, punishment colonies, corrective labour camps, agricultural colonies, and ‘special settlements’. The NKVD tended to use the terms interchangeably. As historian Felix Schnell says, these multiple forms are probably responsible for the fact that the Gulag has no ideal-typical site and to a large extent has no ‘face’ in the way that the Holocaust does. There was no Auschwitz in the Gulag, there are no iconic images like the Arbeit macht frei entrance gate, no immediately recognizable terms which take us to the heart of the matter, such as ‘gas chamber’. Although some of these sites resemble Nazi camps, others, notably the special settlements, were quite different—but all were part of the Gulag (see Figure 4).
4. Map of the Gulags in the USSR.
The differences between the Nazi camps and the Soviet ones are in some ways clear. Tzvetan Todorov, for example, follows David Rousset in noting the different role played by killing in the two systems:
Ironically, it was the Soviets, whose theoretical framework stressed social and historical processes, who allowed ‘natural selection’ to run its course: in the gulag, hunger, cold, and sickness drove the weak to the wall. The Nazis, on the other hand, who claimed to believe in the pseudo-Darwinian doctrine of the ‘survival of the fittest’, used ‘artificial selection’ at Auschwitz and also at Ravensbrück: the SS, their doctors, and guards decided on which prisoners should die and which should be saved. The Soviets sacrificed human lives as if they were worthless, but the Nazis were overcome by a kind of ‘murder madness’.
(Hope and Memory, p. 105)
Or, as Richard Evans reminds us, 90 per cent of inmates survived the Gulag, whereas in the Nazi camps the survival rate was less than half. The fact that in the Stalinist period between 20 per cent and 40 per cent of inmates were released every year has led historian Golfo Alexopoulos to talk of a ‘revolving door’ of arrest and release in the Gulag. In more philosophical vein, former resistance fighter, Buchenwald inmate, and, after the war, underground communist courier Jorge Semprun argues that ‘the Russian camps are not Marxist, in the sense that the German camps were Nazi’. Hitler, says Semprun, ‘put his ideas into practice, reconstructing German reality in accordance with them’. By contrast, there were different interpretations of Marxism, and many Marxist theoreticians and movements who opposed Bolshevism claimed allegiance to Marx. Rather than being Marxist, then, the Russian camps ‘are Bolshevik camps. The Gulag is the direct, unequivocal product of Bolshevism.’
Yet in other ways, the differences seem less relevant. Margarete Buber-Neumann, a survivor of both camp systems, said that ‘It is hard to know which is less humanitarian—gassing people in five minutes, or taking three months to crush them with hunger’ (cited in Todorov). Besides, some of the Soviet camps have a greater claim to be thought of as ‘a different planet’ than do the Nazi camps, which were often in or on the edge of heavily populated towns, and which were certainly well integrated into the local economies. Inmates of Soviet prisons in or near cities were not allowed to work, because the possibility of escape was feared to be too great. But many of the camps and ‘special settlements’ were different: they were remote and escape was unlikely to succeed, though that did not stop people trying in large numbers. Places like Kolyma, physically isolated from the rest of the Soviet Union (until the 1970s accessible only by plane or, between April and December, by ship) and climatically shock-inducing, were much more thoroughly removed from the outside world. The mortality rate at Kolyma until 1949 was 30–40 per cent of the inmates annually; in some even more remote camps such as Chukotka or Indigirka it could reach as high as 80 per cent. The statistics are, understandably, hard to establish, with some scholars finding it hard to believe that more than half the Kolyma camp population died each year, but recent research makes the claim seem credible.
The tradition of transportation to remote regions as a form of punishment long predated the Bolshevik Revolution but the origins of the Gulag as a system of camps administered by the NKVD lies in the 1923 decision to use the Solovetski Islands in the Barents Sea as concentration camps. Two decisions taken in 1929 and 1930 were decisive for the growth of the Gulag out of the existing penal system. In June 1929, the Politburo’s resolution ‘On the Use of Prison Labour’ allowed the OGPU to develop existing labour camps and to build new ones in mineral-rich areas. And in April 1930, the subsequent memorandum issued by Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars), ‘On the Status of Corrective-Labour Camps’, extended the repressive camp apparatus. By 1931 the OGPU was overseeing the special settlements as well as the prison camps.
The camps established on the Solovetski Islands—known as Solovki—set a dangerous precedent on the one hand and indicated the need for more thoughtful administration on the other. Described by one escapee in his 1926 account as ‘an Island Hell’, Solovki was in its first years a place where the prisoners were more or less abandoned, with bleak results. Under former prisoner Naftali Frenkel, the camp complex was given a more economically productive direction, thus laying the foundations for the slave labour economy in the Soviet Union. Following the Solovki debacle and the turn to Frenkel’s experiments with slave labour, the Soviet authorities turned more to the idea of making the camps economically useful. Projects such as the building of the White Sea–Baltic Canal of 1931 embodied this aim. As historian Andrei Sokolov explains, the Gulag was envisaged as a ‘magic wand’ but, as the authorities soon discovered, they ‘needed equipment, skilled labour, experienced specialists, and better working qualifications, all of which raised the cost of maintaining the Gulag’. Despite various schemes to pay workers and to bribe them with promises of reduced sentences for overfilling quotas, the Gulag was never productive. Indeed, such schemes tended to backfire as the best workers were released.
Perhaps the most notorious of the ‘camps’ was the Kolyma region in the Soviet Far East. Here the city of Magadan was the administrative centre of a region of nearly three million square kilometres, which reached from the Lena River to the Bering Strait, an area larger than Western Europe. Magadan’s camps existed because of the area’s gold reserves. Kolyma, according to Solzhenitsyn, was ‘the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag’. Dal’stroi, Magadan’s penal branch, was the largest entity in the labour camp system; as historian David Nordlander writes, its name, an acronym for the Far Northern Construction Trust, was ‘a calculated euphemism for a ruthless organisation whose wide array of functions made it the omnipotent overlord in the Soviet northeast’.
Dal’stroi was founded in November 1931 and Stalin appointed the experienced Latvian camp director Eduard Petrovich Berzin as its head. Despite the façade of oversight by official bodies, Dal’stroi was effectively under Berzin’s and Stalin’s direct control. The growth in camps and the ability of the NKVD, headed by Yagoda in Moscow, to keep tight hold of the purse strings and thus of what was happening there despite the vast distance from the Kremlin, ensure that Magadan has justifiably been referred to as the ‘capital of the Gulag’. Berzin’s own death by shooting in August 1938 completes the Gulag script. As the ‘capital of the Gulag’, Magadan’s operations spread over enormous distances and included some of the most infamous names of the Gulag, particularly Kolyma. The growth in prisoner numbers in Magadan mirrored the spectacular growth of the Gulag as a whole: from 9,928 in 1932 to 190,503 in September 1940.
A similar process occurred elsewhere. Vorkuta, in the Arctic north-east of Russia, became the site of one the largest camp complexes, holding about 75,000 prisoners in 1950. Coal mining began in Vorkuta in 1931 when a group of thirty-nine prisoners was sent to the uninhabited region for that purpose; it soon grew into a massive camp complex, particularly in 1937–8 as victims of the Great Terror arrived in large numbers and thus as ‘political enemies’ replaced ‘colonists’. Although prisoners were sent there to be ‘reformed’, their deaths in appalling conditions meant that the reality was far grimmer than the authorities had anticipated. Ukhtpechlag camp was, according to the inspectors’ own reports, ‘exceptionally appalling’. By the end of 1937, Ukhtpechlag held nearly 60,000 prisoners in an area of over 700,000 square kilometres. It was split into four separate camps in May 1938. But the term ‘camp’ should not conjure up an image of a small, enclosed institution. One of the four camps, Vorkutlag, occupied a vast space in which the small population was not properly divided (‘zonified’) between prisoners and non-prisoners and in which the civilian administration was more or less indistinguishable from the camp administration. Even during the war, when control over the prisoners was tightened, not all sections of Vorkutlag had been enclosed behind barbed wire (see Figure 5).
5. Vorkuta industrial concentration camp complex, 160 km above the Arctic Circle, with Gulag camp of coal mine nos 9–10 in the foreground and coal mine ‘Kapitlanya’ on the horizon, 1955.
Similar observations could be made about the other major Stalinist-era camps, such as Noril’sk or Karaganda. They covered huge areas, were divided into a number of separate penal institutions, and often there was little real distinction between the prisoner and non-prisoner zones. Yet that is not to say that the camps were not brutal; the stories and memoirs of Varlam Shalamov, Eugenia Ginzburg, Gustaw Herling, and others leave us in no doubt as to the terrible conditions in which people lived and worked, and died in huge numbers. Even when prisoners were left unescorted, a situation Shalamov depicts in his story ‘Dry Rations’, there was little chance of escape as these camps were so remote. ‘The geography of the Archipelago was a solid obstacle to escape attempts—those endless expanses of snow or sandy desert, tundra, taiga’, as Solzhenitsyn writes. Prisoners did escape from the camps but parts of the Vorkuta complex were remote enough to justify Solzhenitsyn’s claim.
These remote camps and labour colonies are the ones on which our image of the Gulag has been based. They are the places of Solzhenitsyn’s ‘archipelago’ where the guards suffered only marginally less than the prisoners and conditions were exceptionally harsh. Just getting to the camps was life-threatening; the story of Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky’s forty-five-day trip from Moscow to Abez, where he would work as an administrator at the Sevpechlag camp, near Vorkuta, is hair-raising, involving boat journeys across the White Sea and Barents Sea, and a river boat down the Pechora River which had to be abandoned as the river unexpectedly froze, meaning the journey had to be completed on foot. Although these were not death camps, huge numbers died from overwork and starvation as the prisoners were considered expendable and easily replaceable; mass shootings occurred too on an ad hoc basis. And although there was no Auschwitz, forestry camps such as Tomasinlag have been described by historian Oleg Khlevniuk as ‘provisional death camps’ because of the appalling conditions and correspondingly high death rate. The case of the island camp Nazino, in the River Ob, 800 km north of Tomsk in Western Siberia, is well documented and especially cruel. Here over 10,000 ‘political enemies’ from Moscow and Leningrad were dumped in 1933, left to fend for themselves. Nicolas Werth’s description of it as Cannibal Island is more than apt.
Not all Soviet concentration camps were located in remote regions, however. Some of the main camps in the Western Siberia region, for example, were located within the city limits of Tomsk and Novosibirsk. Novosibirsk’s largest factory complex, Combine No. 179, was partly built with prisoner labour, as was the Chkalov Aviation Factory. In many of these cases, and indeed in some of the remote camps, the boundaries between camps and the regular population were porous. Jacques Rossi, who spent twenty-five years in Soviet camps, wrote that the Gulag was ‘the most precise embodiment of the state that created it. It was not a mere slip of the tongue to say that a freed zek [inmate] had been transferred from the “small” zone to the “large” one’ (cited in Ivanova). Given that the Gulag has so often been depicted as Soviet society in miniature, it is perhaps hardly surprising that the two to some extent merged into one another. Although recent popular histories of the Gulag tend to follow the Cold War script, describing it as an archipelago of isolated sites of atrocity, this is to overlook the findings of post-Cold War scholarly research. This has discovered by contrast that the term ‘Gulag’ covers a multiplicity of heterogeneous sites which were not all separated from the outside world. Certainly there were very isolated camps to which being sent was tantamount to a death sentence. But elsewhere, particularly in the special settlements—which were, as one historian notes, half way between freedom and the concentration camp—the situation was different and the characteristics of some of the Gulag’s institutions challenge our understanding of what a concentration camp is.
Throughout the Gulag, the phenomenon of ‘de-convoyed’ prisoners—who were authorized to move unescorted outside the camp zone—permitted interaction between inmates and those ‘outside the zone’ to a surprisingly large extent. Indeed, according to historian Wilson Bell, ‘in some parts of the Gulag, such as Vorkuta, it was quite common for prisoners to live outside of the [camp] zone, and the borders between camp and city frequently shifted’. These ‘dezoned’ prisoners (i.e. those who lived outside the zone), thanks to their living arrangements and their intermediate social and economic status, ‘blurred the line between prisoners and non-prisoners’. In 1942, 2,743 prisoners in Vorkuta, nearly 10 per cent of the total, were living outside the ‘zone’. Many freed inmates stayed in the area and worked in the camps as ‘free’ labourers, as Eugenia Ginzburg did in Magadan after her release in the late 1940s. The terminology is misleading: in fact released inmates, like the rest of the ‘free’ Soviet population, could not normally choose where they lived. That is why many of them, lacking alternatives, ended up working as camp administrators or guards. That is also why the city of Vorkuta, for example, exists: established as a company town in 1943, centred mainly on coal mining (in 1975, it contained the largest coal mine in Europe), its inhabitants are to a large extent descendants of former zeks and their guards; ‘a strange citizenry indeed’, as Alan Barenberg notes. Barenberg, the historian of Vorkuta, argues that Vorkuta is an example of a company town where ‘many former prisoners successfully reintegrated themselves into Soviet society’. The same was true for the special settlers across the Soviet Union: over time, following the gradual dismantling of the special settlements after Stalin’s death, the special settlers’ children and grandchildren lost the sense of their parents’ and grandparents’ suffering and became ordinary Soviet citizens.
The reports on deconvoyed and dezoned prisoners reveal a host of fears on the part of the authorities. A 1935 report from Dmitlag bemoaned the fact that unescorted prisoners ‘use the lunch break to wander round town, go to town bathhouses, make various purchases, etc. under the pretence of partaking of medical treatment or social activity in the departments of the administration of construction and the camp’ (cited in Bell). Another report into several Western Siberian camps from 1952 was unimpressed by the fact that ‘Several de-convoyed prisoners, taking advantage of the disorder [in the camps], freely visit population centres and drink and associate with citizens’ (cited in Khlevniuk). Nevertheless, these categories of prisoners were permitted to exist because they served useful purposes; their status made them more willing to aid the regime in key industries—many were specialists in engineering, for example—and smoothed the passage between incarceration and release. At the very least, their presence indicates a lack of resources for building proper camps to house them. This situation changed in Vorkuta after 1945, when the whole camp complex was enclosed, but dezoned prisoners continued to exist, the status being granted to skilled workers as a privilege or simply as patronage, distributed at the whim of the camp directors. Former Gulag administrator Mochulsky describes the prisoners allowed to move around without an armed escort, the ‘permanent railwaymen and road foremen’, as ill-fed and living in difficult circumstances, especially given the harsh Arctic climate and the fact that ‘these prisoner-railwaymen of the Gulag knew what kinds of punishment awaited them if there were an accident and they were blamed’. Nevertheless, he notes that ‘Despite everything, they still preferred to “hang on” to this work, since it was familiar to them and it provided them the possibility of resting a little from the cruel camp regime.’
Many of the inhabitants of the city of Vorkuta, which grew up alongside the camp, were former dezoned prisoners who stayed because their labour was in demand. In the period of de-Stalinization, the geography of the camp and the city was altered so that sections of the camp from which the barbed wire had been removed simply became part of the ‘outside’—the ‘zone shrank’ and the city expanded. Here we see how the Gulag and Soviet society at large morphed into one another. These were not ‘two worlds’ and as the concentrationary world shrank so it was absorbed by the outside space until the point at which the Gulag, which never ceased to exist in the Soviet Union’s lifetime, became less and less relevant for the Soviet economy and more and more like a regular penitentiary system.
An important example of the merging of the ‘small zone’ and the ‘large zone’ was the black market trading and the creation of informal networks to enable survival by bypassing official channels, known as blat. This phenomenon might have represented a deficiency of the camp system (especially from the NKVD’s point of view) but it was important for the Soviet economy, whose rigidity was otherwise stifling. The Gulag was, as Bell writes, ‘an integrated part of the community, of Soviet society’. Indeed, some historians argue that even the distinction between ‘small’ and ‘large’ zones does not capture the extent to which the Gulag was inseparable from Soviet society. Russian historian Galina Ivanova, for example, argues that ‘The territory of the “small zone” essentially coincided with the territory of the Soviet Union.’ If that was the case then clearly a variety of interactions could occur that would have been unthinkable in the case of Nazi camps. The latter were very much part of local economies and brought all manner of economic, sexual, and social opportunities for locals and guards alike; but opportunities for inmates to have contact with outsiders were severely limited.
Just as we are now better informed about the development of the Nazi camps over time, so it is necessary to distinguish different phases of deportation to the Gulag corresponding to different phases of Stalinist terror. The deportations of 1929–30 coincided with the ‘dekulakization’ programme and filled the camps with farmers and peasants. In 1930–1, of the two million peasants deported, more than half a million were dead, had escaped, or had disappeared. The Great Terror of 1937–8—which remains largely and incorrectly synonymous with the Gulag in the popular imagination—destroyed the careers and lives of huge numbers of communists, as the paranoid dynamic of unmasking ‘plots’ and ‘bourgeois wreckers’ brought fear and terror to the heart of the Communist Party. As many as 1.6 million ‘enemies of the people’ or ‘counter-revolutionaries’ were arrested in that period, though few had actually done anything to justify the accusations—and their spouses and children, also deported in huge numbers, certainly had not. The last potential sites of opposition to Stalin were eliminated but in the process the Soviet Union’s military and economic experts were also decimated.
Before the war, a new phase of deportations occurred as Moscow’s paranoia extended to national groups. In 1935, Poles, Finns, and Balts were deported from the Soviet Union’s ‘sensitive’ western borders to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, or Siberia. In 1937, ‘suspect’ peoples who inhabited Soviet border regions or areas of Eastern Europe occupied by the Soviets were deported: Finns, Poles, Romanians, Ukrainians, Balts, Koreans, Iranians, and others, all victims of Soviet paranoia about enemies within. The whole population of Soviet Koreans—172,000 people—was deported to Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan on suspicion of collaborating with the Japanese, a claim which under normal circumstances would rightly have been dismissed as absurd. The war, of course, did nothing to quell this paranoia. The Volga Germans were deported in 1941; half a million Chechens and Ingush were deported in 1943–4 as ‘Nazi collaborators’, as were Kalmyks, Karachays, Balkars, and Crimean Tatars. The Volga Germans, like the Crimean Tatars, were never permitted to return home. Finally, later in 1944, border communities around the Black Sea, including Bulgars, Greeks, and Armenians, were deported, as were Turks and Kurds along the border with Turkey and Iran.
Many of these groups of people—up to 50 per cent of whom were children—were dumped in inhospitable areas of Siberia or Kazakhstan and left to fend for themselves; others were sent to existing camps and settlements. Whole communities were devastated, as this testimony concerning Chechen suffering indicates:
Adzhigulsum Adzhimambetova’s husband had been seized by the fascists. She was left with three children, one girl and two boys. Her family starved just as ours did. No one gave them either material or moral support. As a result the daughter died of starvation to begin with, and then the two sons, both on the same day. The mother was so weak with hunger she could not move. Then the owner of the house threw the two little infant corpses out onto the street, on the edge of an irrigation canal. Some Crimean Tatar children dug little graves and buried little ones. How can I speak of this? I can hardly even bear to remember it.
(Frierson and Vilensky, Children of the Gulag, p. 294)
Wartime conditions in the already crowded camps were appalling and new deportees suffered greatly. The period of the war and not that of the Great Terror was the most deadly for the Gulag’s inhabitants: in 1942 and 1943 about a fifth of all inmates died: more than 400,000 people. This fact once again indicates how the Gulag mirrored conditions in Soviet society in general: the war brought immense hardship to Soviet citizens, who were killed in far greater numbers than anywhere else in Europe. Their suffering was unimaginable to Americans, for whom the war never reached their shores after Pearl Harbor. Coercive labour measures were especially severe in the Soviet Union as factories were evacuated to the east, women and young workers replaced men, and hours worked were exceptionally long, with the reward being food and clothing rationing, highly restrictive living conditions, and stringent punishments for infractions in order to enforce labour discipline. If the number of Gulag inmates had halved by 1944, that was because one million were released to work in war-related industries and some two million died on the front, many as members of so-called ‘penal battalions’, that is to say, as cannon fodder. The focus of the camps themselves was on their economic usefulness to the war effort in a way that greatly exceeded previous efforts to extract use-value from the inmates. Many members of the ‘punished peoples’ were used in this way, as were some four million POWs, who were forced to work in a ‘special contingent’ (speckontingent). The distinction between Gulag inhabitants and ‘free’ labourers was, as Schnell notes, blurred more during the war than at any other time previously.
After the war the Gulag grew again. Returning Soviet POWs who had survived the murderous captivity of German camps—some three million died in gruesome conditions—were immediately deported to ‘verification’ and ‘filtration’ camps, from where they were usually either sent into exile or returned into society after a few months. Hundreds of thousands of people were deported from lands reconquered from the Nazis or newly incorporated into the Soviet Union: the Baltic States, Western Ukraine, Bessarabia, Western Belarus. By 1950 there were some 2.8 million camp inmates and in 1953, when Stalin died, still at least 2.5 million, some 11 per cent of whom were working without guards. The late 1940s/early 1950s were thus the years when the Gulag reached its greatest size. Yet economically speaking the Gulag was unprofitable and labour productivity reached a mere 50–60 per cent of civilian equivalents. Beria released 1.5 million inmates three weeks after Stalin’s death, using the opportunity to put into place a long-held MVD aim to cut the Gulag’s costs by removing from its purview petty criminals and recidivists and to make the camp system less of a drain on the economy. Yet the Gulag as such was not dismantled, even after Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ denouncing Stalin’s crimes in 1956; in fact, although the department called ‘Gulag’ was closed down in 1957, the camp system existed until the end of the USSR itself.
Yet it did change. Hundreds of thousands of inmates were released, especially ‘politicals’ and members of ‘punished peoples’. Some received full rehabilitation. Yet the Gulag carried on incarcerating people, though after 1956 they generally knew why they had been arrested. Apart from common criminals, political and religious dissidents were at most risk. When Avraham Shifrin published his First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union in 1980, the book, presented like a regular tourist guide, included a section on ‘extermination camps’. What this meant was not Treblinka-like facilities, but places where prisoners were forced to work with dangerous machines such that they ‘face a virtually certain death’. Despite the Cold War tone, the book documents the still vast extent of the prison network, especially the cruel use of psychiatric prisons for people who protested against Soviet policies or demanded the right to leave the country. Only after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and initiated the policy of glasnost was it possible to begin to speak openly about the Gulag, although the decades of silence were not easily broken and many have remained afraid to speak even since the demise of Soviet communism.
The Soviet leadership continued to believe in its rhetoric of ‘re-education’ until the end. ‘You have been brought here to enable you to reform yourselves—to realise your crimes, and to prove by honest, self-sacrificing work that you are loyal to socialism and to our beloved Stalin. Hurrah, Comrades!’, as Vladimir Petrov and his fellow deportees were greeted on their arrival in Kolyma. Solzhenitsyn regarded such slogans as mockery and many prisoners certainly felt the same, but it is not clear that they were in fact meant as such. In the early 1930s the Soviets published books and newspapers celebrating ‘socialist labour’ inside the camps and special settlements, just as they did outside them and abroad in various languages. So too did the Nazis, with articles in the German press showing how Dachau was reforming its degenerate inmates. The difference was that after such publications were banned for the general Soviet public in the late 1930s, the Soviets continued to celebrate forced labour as a way of ‘re-forging’ the prisoner in camp newspapers inside the camps themselves. Articles celebrating Stakhanovism amongst the workers and socialist construction were common. As historian Steven Barnes says, the Soviets chose—they certainly had the means—not to create a ‘truly genocidal institution’ in the Gulag. Although mortality rates were high, the camps were used for forced labour to keep the economy going in a way—albeit highly unproductive—that the Nazi camps did not, at least until the crisis of the Third Reich’s war led to the Nazis’ reluctant decision to use camp labour. The Gulag spanned the length of the Soviet Union and lasted as long as the USSR did because transportation to remote regions was, as human geographer Judith Pallot notes, both a process of ‘regulation by exclusion’ and ‘a means of delivering labour to places where it was needed’. And if administrators like Mochulsky started to question the value of the Gulag later on in life, speaking of ‘the monstrous inventions of the Stalinist regime’, at the time of his service (1940–6) there is no doubt that he accepted the need for the railway being built between Kotlas and Vorkuta and the wisdom of using ‘fascists’ and ‘criminals’ to do so.
Remarkably, some survivors even look back on their years in the Gulag with something approaching nostalgia or pride. Sira Stepanovna Balashina, for example, came from a family deported as kulaks in 1930 from Kurgan oblast (region) in south-western Siberia to Perm oblast in the Urals. Both her parents and her sister died in the famine of 1932–3 and Sira alone remained, spending her life working in the forest. When interviewed about her experiences at the age of 92 in 2004, Balashina recalled that she worked hard and well, and as a consequence was rewarded with the Medal for Valiant Labour during the war and, when she retired, the Medal for a Veteran of Labour. Despite being officially freed from forced labour shortly after the war, Balashina remained in Perm and continued to work in the forest. As her interviewers, Gheith and Jolluck, note, the medals ‘confirmed her identity as a contributing Soviet citizen. Balashina’s pride in her medals shows that rather than reject the values of the system that had repressed her, she internalised them.’ One historian found that of the children of deportees she interviewed, ‘only a few expressed strong anti-Soviet attitudes regarding the repression or destruction of their parents’ lives’. Some even became party members and played an active role in public life. Perhaps when one considers that children being brought up in the Gulag played games such as ‘searching for and uncovering enemies’ or ‘hot pursuit’, this attitude becomes more comprehensible. The fact is, though, that many of the former special settlers became what historian Kate Brown calls the Soviet Union’s ‘hereditary underclass’, who were never able to get rid of the feeling that they were second-class citizens.
Prisoners in the Gulag could survive for many years, if circumstances permitted it; there was life in the Gulag. Furthermore, there was a constant stream of prisoners being released, showing that ‘redeemability, at least for some segment of the prisoner population, was never totally abandoned’ (Barnes). German political prisoners did sometimes survive twelve years—the duration of the Third Reich—in the Nazi camps, but these were very few in number. In the Gulag, the border between camp and the ‘large’ zone was not fixed and the phenomenon of de-convoyed prisoners has no equal in the Nazi case. If Dachau epitomizes the concentration camp, then many of the Gulag’s sites of incarceration other than the prisons and corrective labour camps do not exactly meet the criteria. Historian Nicolas Werth writes that the Gulag was ‘a world where administrative chaos, sloppiness, indifference, chance and neglect seem to have played a more important role than any systematic intention to exterminate’. In other words, Arendt seems to be right: the Soviet camps represent purgatory where the Nazi ones represent hell.
And yet, there is another way of seeing this issue. In terms of numbers, far more people suffered in the Gulag than in the Nazi camps: an average of 2.5 million annually, with a peak of 2.8 million in 1950, meaning somewhere in the region of 20 million Soviet citizens passed through the camps between 1928 and 1953, about one-third political prisoners and 10–15 per cent criminal recidivists. At least 1.6 million people died in the Gulag and probably more than one million died during transportation. More important, particularly during the Stalinist period, the difference between inside and outside the camps was one of degree; according to Nordlander, ‘events behind the barbed wire in many respects encapsulated the key realities of Stalinism’. Most ordinary workers endured appalling working conditions, poor standards of housing and food, and the constant threat of hunger, terror, and punishment. Under collectivization, peasants and farmers were not free to move where they chose until the 1970s and in many cases ‘the peasants’ living standard was no different or even lower than the living standard of the deported “kulaks” ’ (Khlevniuk). The Gulag ‘mirrored the day-to-day functioning of Soviet society’, as Bell puts it. As Andrey Vyshinski, the main prosecutor of the Great Terror trials, explained, ‘All Soviet penal policy is based on a dialectical combination of the principle of repression and compulsion with the principle of persuasion and re-education … The two-in-one-task is suppression plus re-education of anyone who can be re-educated’ (cited in Barnes). This applied to Soviet society in general, not just the Gulag, and the recent focus of historians on the permeability of the Gulag should be not be understood as downplaying the phenomenon but as indicating the extent to which the Soviet Union as a whole was brutalized. Where the Nazis sought to model the Volksgemeinschaft on the barracks, the Soviets dreamed of society as repressive factory.
With searing honesty, Gustaw Herling recalls his ‘horror and shame of a Europe divided into two parts by the line of the Bug, on one side of which millions of Soviet slaves prayed for liberation by the armies of Hitler, and on the other millions of victims of German concentration camps awaited deliverance by the Red Army as their last hope’. Yet there was a crucial difference between the Nazi camps and the Gulag: what we now call the Holocaust. The death camp broke with human experience in a way that the Gulag, however brutal, did not. Recent scholarship on the Holocaust has tended to turn our focus away from the death camps, reminding us (quite rightly) that nearly half of the six million Jewish victims were killed by face-to-face shooting in pits in Eastern Europe or were starved to death in the ghettos. Auschwitz only became fully operational when the Holocaust was at its end, when the Jews of Hungary were deported in spring 1944: the images we recognize from Birkenau are from this period. Nevertheless, there is a reason why Auschwitz has become the symbol of the Holocaust and of the capacity for evil in general: it is the clearest instantiation of the intent to kill that human beings have yet devised.