Gulag (11 page)

But there would be other sources of prisoners too. For in 1929, the Soviet regime also accelerated the process of forced collectivization in the countryside, a vast upheaval which was in some ways more profound than the Russian Revolution itself. Within an incredibly short period of time, rural commissars forced millions of peasants to give up their small landholdings and to join collective farms, often expelling them from land their families had tilled for centuries. The transformation permanently weakened Soviet agriculture, and created the conditions for the terrible, devastating famines in Ukraine and southern Russia in 1932 and 1934—famines that killed between six and seven million people.
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Collectivization also destroyed— forever—rural Russia’s sense of continuity with the past.

Millions resisted collectivization, hiding grain in their cellars or refusing to cooperate with the authorities. These resisters were labeled kulaks, or wealthy peasants, a term which (much like the definition of “wrecker”) was so vague that nearly anyone could qualify. The possession of an extra cow, or an extra bedroom, was enough to qualify some distinctly poor peasants, as was an accusation from a jealous neighbor. To break the kulaks’ resistance, the regime revived, in effect, the old Czarist tradition of the administrative deportation order. From one day to the next, trucks and wagons simply arrived in a village and picked up entire families. Some kulaks were shot, some were arrested and given camp sentences. In the end, however, the regime deported most of them. Between 1930 and 1933, over two million peasant kulaks were exiled to Siberia, to Kazakhstan, and to other underpopulated regions of the Soviet Union, where they lived out the rest of their lives as “special exiles,” forbidden to leave their exile villages. A further 100,000 were arrested, and wound up in the Gulag.
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As famine kicked in, helped by poor rainfall, more arrests followed. All available grain was taken out of the villages, and deliberately denied to kulaks. Those caught stealing tiny amounts, even to feed their children, also ended up in prison. A law of August 7, 1932, demanded the death penalty, or else a long camp sentence, for all such “crimes against state property.” Soon afterward, the “gleaners” appeared in the camps: peasant women who had picked up leftover grain in order to survive. They were joined by others, such as the hungry people who received ten-year sentences for stealing a pound of potatoes or a handful of apples.
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These laws explain why peasants formed the vast majority of prisoners in Soviet camps throughout the 1930s, and why peasants would remain a substantial part of the prison population until Stalin’s death.

The impact of these mass arrests on the camps was enormous. Almost as soon as the new laws came into effect, camp administrators began to call for a rapid and radical overhaul of the entire system. The “ordinary” prison system, still run by the Commissariat of the Interior (and still far larger than Solovetsky, which was run by the OGPU) had remained overcrowded, disorganized, and over-budget throughout the previous decade. Nationally, the situation was so bad that at one point the Commissariat of the Interior attempted to reduce inmate numbers by sentencing more people to “forced labor without deprivation of freedom”—assigning them jobs but not locking them up—thereby relieving the strain on the camps.
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As the pace of collectivization and the strength of repression picked up, however—as millions of kulaks were evicted from their homes—such solutions began to seem politically inopportune. Once again, the authorities determined that such dangerous criminals—enemies of Stalin’s great drive for collectivization—required a more secure form of incarceration, and the OGPU prepared to build one.

Knowing that the prison system was deteriorating as fast as prisoner numbers were rising, the Politburo of the Communist Party set up a commission in 1928 to deal with the problem. Ostensibly, the commission was neutral, and contained representatives of the Interior and Justice Commissariats, as well as the OGPU. Comrade Yanson, the Commissar of Justice, was placed in charge of it. The commission’s task was to create “a system of concentration camps, organized in the manner of the OGPU camps” and its deliberations took place within clear limits. Despite Maxim Gorky’s lyrical passages about the value of labor in the reformation of criminals, all of the participants used fiercely economic language. All expressed the same concerns about “profitability” and spoke frequently about “rational use of labor.”
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True, the protocol written up after the commission meeting of May 15, 1929, records a few practical objections to the creation of a mass camp system: camps would be too difficult to set up, there were no roads leading to the far north, and so on. The Commissar of Labor thought it was wrong to subject minor criminals to the same punishment as recidivists. The Commissar of the Interior, Tolmachev, pointed out that the system would look bad abroad: the “White Guard emigrants” and the bourgeois foreign press would claim that “instead of building a penitentiary system intended to reform prisoners through corrective labor, we’ve put up Chekist fortresses.”
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Yet his point was that the system would
look
bad, not that it
was
bad. No one present objected on the grounds that camps “of the Solovetsky type” were cruel or lethal. Nor did anyone mention the alternative theories of criminal justice of which Lenin had been so fond, the notion that crime would disappear along with capitalism. Certainly no one talked about prisoner re-education, the “transformation of human nature,” which Gorky had lauded in his essay on Solovetsky and which would be so important in the public presentation of the first set of camps. Instead, Genrikh Yagoda, the OGPU’s representative on the committee, put the regime’s real interests quite clearly:

It is already both possible and absolutely necessary to remove 10,000 prisoners from places of confinement in the Russian republic, whose labor could be better organized and used. Aside from that, we have received notice that the camps and jails in the Ukrainian republic are overflowing as well. Obviously, Soviet policy will not permit the building of new prisons. Nobody will give money for new prisons. The construction of large camps, on the other hand—camps which will make rational use of labor—is a different matter. We have many difficulties attracting workers to the North. If we send many thousands of prisoners there, we can exploit the resources of the North . . . the experience of Solovetsky shows what can be done in this area.

Yagoda went on to explain that the resettlement would be permanent. After their release, prisoners would stay put: “with a variety of measures, both administrative and economic, we can force the freed prisoners to stay in the North, thereby populating our outer regions.”
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The idea that prisoners should become colonists—so similar to the Czarist model—was no afterthought. While the Yanson commission was holding its deliberations, a separate committee of the Soviet government had also begun to investigate the labor crisis in the far north, variously proposing to send the unemployed or Chinese immigrants to solve the problem.
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Both committees were looking for solutions to the same problem at the same time, and no wonder. In order to fulfill Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, the Soviet Union would require huge quantities of coal, gas, oil, and wood, all available in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the far north. The country also needed gold in order to purchase new machinery abroad, and geologists had recently discovered gold in the far northeastern region of Kolyma. Despite freezing temperatures, primitive living conditions, and inaccessibility, these resources had to be exploited at breakneck speed.

In the then-fierce spirit of interministry competition, Yanson initially proposed that his own commissariat take over the system and set up a series of forestry camps in order to increase the Soviet Union’s export of timber, a major source of foreign currency. This project was put aside, probably because not everyone wanted Comrade Yanson and his judicial bureaucrats to control it. Indeed, when the project was suddenly revived, in the spring of 1929, the Yanson commission’s conclusions were slightly different. On April 13, 1929, the commission proposed the creation of a new, unified camp system, one which eliminated the distinction between “ordinary” and “special” camps. More significant, the commission handed direct control of the new unified system straight to the OGPU.
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The OGPU took control of the Soviet Union’s prisoners with startling speed. In December 1927, the Special Department of the OGPU had controlled 30,000 inmates, about 10 percent of the prison population, mostly in the Solovetsky camps. It employed no more than 1,000 people, and its budget hardly exceeded .05 percent of state expenditure. By contrast, the Commissariat of the Interior’s prison system had 150,000 inmates and consumed .25 percent of the state budget. Between 1928 and 1930, however, the situation reversed itself. As other government institutions slowly gave up their prisoners, their prisons, their camps, and the industrial enterprises attached to them, the number of prisoners under OGPU jurisdiction swelled from 30,000 to 300,000.
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In 1931, the secret police also took control of the millions of “special exiles”—mostly deported kulaks—who were effectively forced laborers, since they were forbidden to leave their assigned settlements and workplaces under pain of death or arrest.
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By the middle of the decade, the OGPU would control all of the Soviet Union’s vast prisoner workforce.

In order to cope with its new responsibilities, the OGPU reorganized its Special Department for camps and renamed it the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Labor Settlements. Eventually, this unwieldy title would be shortened to the Main Camp Administration or, in Russian,
Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei.
Hence the acronym by which the department, and ultimately the system itself, would be known: GULAG.
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Ever since the Soviet concentration camps first came into existence on a grand scale, their inmates and their chroniclers have argued about the motives that lay behind their creation. Did they come about haphazardly, as a side effect of collectivization, industrialization, and the other processes taking place in the country? Or did Stalin carefully plot the growth of the Gulag, planning in advance to arrest millions of people?

In the past, some scholars have claimed that no grand design lay behind the camps’ founding. One historian, James Harris, has argued that local leaders, not bureaucrats in Moscow, led the drive to build new camps in the Ural region. Forced to comply with the impossible requirements of the Five-Year Plan on the one hand and facing a critical labor shortage on the other, the Ural authorities increased the pace and cruelty of collectivization in order to square the circle: every time they removed a kulak from his land, they created another slave laborer.
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Another historian, Michael Jakobson, argues along similar lines that the origins of the mass Soviet prison system were “banal”: “Bureaucrats pursued unattainable goals of prison self-sufficiency and inmate re-education. Officials sought manpower and funds, expanded their bureaucracies, and tried to meet unrealistic goals. Administrators and warders dutifully enforced rules and regulations. Theorists rationalized and justified. Eventually, everything was reversed or modified or abandoned.”
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Indeed, if the Gulag’s origins were haphazard, that would not be surprising. Throughout the early 1930s, the Soviet leadership in general, and Stalin in particular, constantly changed course, implemented policies and then reversed them, and made public pronouncements deliberately designed to disguise reality. It is not easy, when reading the history of the era, to detect an evil master plan designed by Stalin or anyone else.
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Stalin himself launched collectivization, for example, only to change his mind, apparently, in March 1930, when he attacked overzealous rural officials who had become “Dizzy with Success.” Whatever he meant by this pronouncement, it had little effect on the ground, and the destruction of the kulaks continued unabated for years.

The OGPU bureaucrats and secret police who planned the expansion of the Gulag also seem, initially, to have been no clearer about their ultimate goals. The Yanson commission itself made decisions, and then reversed them. The OGPU also conducted policies which seemed contradictory. Throughout the 1930s, for example, the OGPU declared frequent amnesties, intended to end overcrowding in prisons and camps. Invariably, the amnesties would be followed by new waves of repression, and new waves of camp construction, as if Stalin and his henchmen were never quite sure if they wanted the system to grow or not—or as if different people were giving different orders at different times.

Similarly, the camp system would go through many cycles: now more repressive, now less so, now more repressive again. Even after 1929, when the camps had been set firmly on the path of economic efficiency, a few anomalies remained in the system. As late as 1937, for example, many political prisoners were still kept in jails where they were explicitly forbidden to work—a practice that would seem to contradict the general drive for efficiency.
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Nor were many of the bureaucratic changes terribly meaningful. Although the formal division between secret police camps and nonsecret police camps did come to an end in the 1930s, a vestigial division remained between “camps,” supposedly designed for more dangerous and political criminals, and “colonies,” for petty criminals with shorter sentences. In practice, the organization of work, food, and daily life at both camps and colonies was very similar.

And yet—there is also now a growing consensus that Stalin himself had, if not a carefully designed plan, then at least a very firm belief in the enormous advantages of prison labor, which he maintained until the end of his life. Why?

Some, like Ivan Chukhin, a former secret policeman and historian of the early camp system, speculate that Stalin promoted the Gulag’s overambitious early construction works in order to build up his own prestige. At this time, he was still just emerging as the leader of the country after a long and bitter power struggle. He may have imagined that new industrial feats, achieved with the help of prison slave labor, would help him secure his power.
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