Gulag (12 page)

Stalin may also have been inspired by an older historical precedent. Robert Tucker, among others, has amply demonstrated Stalin’s obsessive interest in Peter the Great, another Russian ruler who deployed massive serf and prison labor to achieve enormous feats of engineering and construction. In a speech to a Central Committee plenum, made just as he was getting ready to launch his industrial program in 1928, Stalin noted admiringly that

When Peter the Great, conducting business with the more advanced countries in the West, feverishly built mills and factories to supply the army and strengthen the defenses of the country, it was a special sort of effort to
leap
clear of the confines of his backwardness.
³⁵

The italics are mine: they emphasize the link between Stalin’s “Great Turning Point” and the policies of his eighteenth-century predecessor. In the Russian historical tradition, Peter is remembered as both a great and a cruel leader, and this is not thought to be a contradiction. After all, nobody remembers how many serfs died during the building of St. Petersburg, but everybody admires the city’s beauty. Stalin may well have taken his example to heart.

Yet Stalin’s interest in concentration camps need not have had a rational source at all: perhaps Stalin’s obsessive interest in vast construction projects and toiling teams of forced laborers was connected, somehow, to his particular form of megalomaniacal madness. Mussolini once said of Lenin that he “is an artist who has worked in men as others have worked in marble or metal.”
³⁶
This description may be better applied to Stalin, who literally enjoyed the sight of large numbers of human bodies, marching or dancing in perfect synchronization.
³⁷
He was captivated by the ballet, by orchestrated exhibitions of gymnastics, and by parades featuring giant pyramids built out of anonymous, contorted human figures.
³⁸
Like Hitler, Stalin was also obsessed with the cinema, particularly Hollywood musicals, with their enormous casts of coordinated singers and dancers. He might have derived a different but related form of pleasure from the vast teams of prisoners who dug canals and built railway lines at his bidding.

Whatever his inspiration, whether political, historical, or psychological, it is clear that from the Gulag’s earliest days, Stalin took a deep personal interest in the camps, and exerted an enormous influence on their development. The crucial decision to transfer all of the Soviet Union’s camps and prisons away from the ordinary justice system and into the hands of the OGPU, for example, was almost certainly made at Stalin’s behest. By 1929, Stalin had taken a great personal interest in this institution. He took an interest in the careers of the top secret policemen, and oversaw the construction of comfortable houses for them and their families.
³⁹
By contrast, the prison administration of the Interior Commissariat was very much out of his favor: its leaders had backed Stalin’s opponents in the bitter, internal Party factional fighting of the time.
⁴⁰

Everyone who took part in the Yanson commission would have known all of these details perfectly well, which might have been enough to persuade them to put the prisons in the hands of the OGPU. But Stalin also intervened directly in the Yanson commission’s deliberations. At one point in the tangled deliberations, the Politburo actually reversed its original decision, declaring its intention to take the prison system away from the secret police once again, and put it back in the hands of the Commissariat of the Interior. This prospect outraged Stalin. In a 1930 letter to his close collaborator, Vyacheslav Molotov, he denounced this idea as an “intrigue” orchestrated by the Commissar of the Interior who is “rotten through and through.” He ordered the Politburo to implement its original decision, and shut down the Commissariat of the Interior altogether.
⁴¹
Stalin’s decision to give the camps to the OGPU determined their future character. It removed them from ordinary judicial scrutiny, and placed them firmly in the hands of a secret police bureaucracy whose origins lay in the mysterious, extralegal world of the Cheka.

While there is less hard evidence to support the theory, it may also be that the constant emphasis on the need to build “camps of the Solovetsky type” came from Stalin as well. As mentioned earlier, the Solovetsky camps never were profitable, not in 1929, not ever. In the June 1928–June 1929 working year, SLON still received a 1.6-million-ruble subsidy from the state budget.
⁴²
Although SLON might have appeared more successful than other local businesses, anyone who understood economics knew that it hardly competed fairly. Forestry camps which employed prisoners would always appear more productive than regular forestry enterprises, for example, simply because the latter’s peasant employees only worked in the winter, when they were unable to farm.
⁴³

Nevertheless, the Solovetsky camps were
perceived
to be profitable—or at least Stalin perceived them to be profitable. Stalin also believed that they were profitable precisely because of Frenkel’s “rational” methods—his distribution of food according to prisoners’ work, and his elimination of needless “extras.” Evidence that Frenkel’s system had won approval at the highest levels is in the results: not only was the system very quickly duplicated around the country, but Frenkel himself was also named chief of construction on the White Sea Canal, the first major project of the Stalin-era Gulag, an extremely high post for a former prisoner.
⁴⁴
Later, as we shall see, he was protected from arrest and possibly execution by intervention at the very highest level.

Evidence of interest in prison labor can also be found in Stalin’s continuing interest in the intimate details of camp administration. Throughout his life, he demanded regular information about the level of “inmate productivity” in the camps, often through specific statistics: how much coal and oil they had produced, how many prisoners they employed, how many medals their bosses had received.
⁴⁵
He was particularly interested in the gold mines of Dalstroi, the complex of camps in the far northeastern region of Kolyma, and demanded regular and precise information about Kolyma’s geology, Dalstroi’s mining technology, and the precise quality of the gold produced, as well as its quantity. To ensure that his own edicts were carried out in the more far-flung camps, he sent out inspection teams, often requiring camp bosses to make frequent appearances in Moscow as well.
⁴⁶

When a particular project interested him, he sometimes got even more closely involved. Canals, for example, seized his imagination, and it sometimes seemed as if he wanted to dig them almost indiscriminately. Yagoda was once forced to write to Stalin, politely objecting to his boss’s unrealistic desire to build a canal using slave labor in central Moscow.
⁴⁷
As Stalin took greater control of the organs of power, he also forced his colleagues to focus their attention on the camps. By 1940, the Politburo would discuss one or another of the Gulag’s projects almost every week.
⁴⁸

Yet Stalin’s interest was not purely theoretical. He also took a direct interest in the human beings involved in the work of the camps: who had been arrested, where he or she had been sentenced, what was his or her ultimate fate. He personally read, and sometimes commented upon, the petitions for release sent to him by prisoners or their wives, often replying with a word or two (“keep him at work” or “release”).
⁴⁹
Later, he regularly demanded information about prisoners or groups of prisoners who interested him, such as the west Ukrainian nationalists.
⁵⁰

There is also evidence that Stalin’s interest in particular prisoners was not always purely political, and did not include only his personal enemies. As early as 1931, before he had consolidated his power, Stalin pushed a resolution through the Politburo which allowed him enormous influence over the arrests of certain kinds of technical specialists.
⁵¹
And—not coincidentally—the pattern of arrests of engineers and specialists in this earlier era does suggest some higher level of planning. Perhaps it was not sheer accident that the very first group of prisoners sent to the new camps in the Kolyma gold fields included seven well-known mining experts, two labor-organization experts, and one experienced hydraulic engineer.
⁵²
Nor, perhaps, was it mere chance that the OGPU managed to arrest one of the Soviet Union’s top geologists on the eve of a planned expedition to build a camp near the oil reserves of the Komi Republic, as we shall see.
⁵³
Such coincidences could not have been planned by regional Party bosses reacting to the stresses of the moment.

Finally, there is a completely circumstantial, but nevertheless interesting body of evidence suggesting that the mass arrests of the late 1930s and 1940s may also have been carried out, to some degree, in order to appease Stalin’s desire for slave labor, and not—as most have always assumed—in order to punish his perceived or potential enemies. The authors of the most authoritative Russian history of the camps to date point out the “positive connection between the successful economic activity of the camps and the number of prisoners sent to them.” Surely it is no accident, they argue, that sentences for petty criminal activity suddenly became much harsher just as the camps were expanding, just as more prison laborers were urgently needed.
⁵⁴

A few scattered archival documents hint at the same story. In 1934, for example, Yagoda wrote a letter to his subordinates in Ukraine, demanding 15,000 to 20,000 prisoners, all “fit to work”: they were needed urgently in order to finish the Moscow–Volga Canal. The letter is dated March 17, and in it Yagoda also demanded that the local OGPU bosses “take extra measures” to ensure that the prisoners had arrived by April 1. Where these 15,000 to 20,000 prisoners were supposed to come from was not, however, clearly explained. Were they arrested in order to meet Yagoda’s requirements?
⁵⁵
Or—as historian Terry Martin believes—was Yagoda simply struggling to ensure a nice, regular inflow of labor into his camp system, a goal which he never in fact achieved?

If the arrests were intended to populate the camps, then they did so with almost ludicrous inefficiency. Martin and others have also pointed out that every wave of mass arrests seems to have caught the camp commanders completely by surprise, making it difficult for them to achieve even a semblance of economic efficiency. Nor did the arresting officers ever choose their victims rationally: instead of limiting arrests to the healthy young men who would have made the best laborers in the far north, they also imprisoned women, children, and old people in large numbers.
⁵⁶
The sheer illogic of the mass arrests seems to argue against the idea of a carefully planned slave-labor force—leading many to conclude that arrests were carried out primarily to eliminate Stalin’s perceived enemies, and only secondarily to fill Stalin’s camps.

Yet, in the end, none of these explanations for the growth of the camps is entirely mutually exclusive either. Stalin might well have intended his arrests both to eliminate enemies and to create slave laborers. He might have been motivated both by his own paranoia and by the labor needs of regional leaders. Perhaps the formula is best put simply: Stalin proposed the “Solovetsky model” of concentration camps to his secret police, Stalin selected the victims—and his subordinates leaped at the opportunity to obey him.

Chapter 4

THE WHITE SEA CANAL

Where mossy cliffs and waters slumbered
There, thanks to the strength of labor
Factories will be built
And towns will grow.
Smokestacks will rise up
Under the Northern skies,
Buildings will shine with the lights
Of libraries, theaters, and clubs.

—Medvedkov, a White Sea Canal prisoner, 1934
¹

IN THE END, only one of the objections raised during the meetings of the Yanson commission caused any further concern. Although they were certain that the great Soviet nation would overcome the lack of roads, although they had few qualms about using prisoners as slave laborers, Stalin and his henchmen remained exceptionally touchy about the language foreigners used to describe their prison camps abroad.

In fact—contrary to popular belief—foreigners in this era described Soviet prison camps rather frequently. Quite a lot was generally known in the West about the Soviet concentration camps at the end of the 1920s, perhaps more than was generally known at the end of the 1940s. Large articles about Soviet prisons had appeared in the German, French, British, and American press, particularly the left-wing press, which had wide contacts among imprisoned Russian socialists.
²
In 1927, a French writer named Raymond Duguet published a surprisingly accurate book about Solovetsky,
Un Bagne en Russie Rouge
(
A Prison in Red Russia
), describing everything from the personality of Naftaly Frenkel to the horrors of the mosquito torture. S. A. Malsagov, a Georgian White Army officer who managed to escape from Solovetsky and cross the border, published
Island Hell
, another account of Solovetsky, in London in 1926. As a result of widespread rumors about Soviet abuse of prison labor, the British Anti-Slavery Society even launched an investigation into the matter, and wrote a report deploring the evidence of scurvy and maltreatment.
³
A French senator wrote a much-quoted article based on the testimony of Russian refugees, comparing the situation in the Soviet Union to the findings of the League of Nations’ slavery investigation in Liberia.
⁴

The White Sea Canal, northern Russia, 1932–1933

After the expansion of the camps in 1929 and 1930, however, foreign interest in the camps shifted, moving away from the fate of the socialist prisoners, and focusing instead on the economic menace which the camps appeared to pose to Western business interests. Threatened companies, and threatened trade unions, began organizing. Pressure grew, particularly in Britain and the United States, for a boycott of cheaper Soviet goods allegedly produced by forced labor. Paradoxically, the movement for a boycott clouded the whole issue in the eyes of the Western Left, which still supported the Russian Revolution, particularly in Europe, even if many of the leaders were uncomfortable about the fate of their socialist brethren. The British Labor Party, for example, opposed a ban on Soviet goods because it was suspicious of the motives of the companies promoting it.
⁵

In the United States, however, trade unions, most notably the American Federation of Labor, came out in support of a boycott. Briefly, they succeeded. In America, the Tariff Act of 1930 prescribed that “All goods . . . mined, produced or manufactured . . . by convict labor or/and forced labor . . . shall not be entitled to entry at any of the ports of the United States.”
⁶
On that basis, the U.S. Treasury Department banned the import of Soviet pulpwood and matches.

Although the U.S. State Department failed to support the ban, which lasted only a week, discussion of the issue continued.
⁷
In January 1931, the Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. Congress met to consider bills “relating to the prohibition of goods produced by convict labor in Russia.”
⁸
On May 18, 19, 20, 1931,
The Times
of London printed a series of surprisingly detailed articles on forced labor in the Soviet Union, concluding with an editorial condemning the British government’s recent decision to grant diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. Lending money to Russia would, the editorialists wrote, put “more power into the hands of those who are openly working for their overthrow and for the destruction of the British Empire.”

The Soviet regime took the threat of boycott very seriously indeed, and a number of measures were taken to prevent it from disrupting the flow of hard currency into the country. Some of these measures were cosmetic: the Yanson commission finally dropped the expression
kontslager
, or “concentration camp,” from all of its public statements, for example. From April 7, 1930, all official documents described Soviet concentration camps as
ispravitelno-trudovye lagerya
(ITL), or “corrective-labor camps.” No other term would be used in the future.
⁹

Camp authorities made other cosmetic changes on the ground, particularly in the timber industry. At one point, the OGPU altered its contract with Karellis, the Karelian woodcutting concern, so that it appeared as if prisoners were no longer being employed. At that time, 12,090 prisoners were technically “removed” from OGPU camps. In fact, they kept working, but their presence was disguised beneath the bureaucratic shuffle.
¹⁰
Once again, the Soviet leadership’s main concern was appearances, not reality.

Elsewhere, prisoners working in the logging camps were actually replaced with free workers—or, more often, with exiled “settlers,” kulaks who had no more choice in the matter than prisoners.
¹¹
According to memoirists, this switch sometimes happened virtually overnight. George Kitchin, a Finnish businessman who spent four years in OGPU camps before he was freed with the help of the Finnish government, wrote that just prior to the visit of a foreign delegation,

A secret code telegram was received from the head office in Moscow, instructing us to liquidate our camp completely in three days, and to do it in such a manner that not a trace should remain . . . telegrams were sent to all work posts to stop operations within twenty-four hours, to gather the inmates at evacuation centers, to efface marks of the penal camps, such as barbed-wire enclosures, watch turrets and signboards; for all officials to dress in civilian clothes, to disarm guards, and to wait for further instructions.

Kitchin, along with several thousand other prisoners, was marched out of the forest. He believed that more than 1,300 prisoners died in this and other overnight evacuations.
¹²

By March 1931, Molotov, then Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, felt confident that there were no prisoners left working in the Soviet forestry industry—or at least no visible prisoners—and he invited all interested foreigners to visit and see for themselves.
¹³
A few had already been: the Communist Party archives of Karelia record the presence, in 1929, of two American journalists, “Comrade Durant and Comrade Wolf,” American contributors to TASS, the Soviet news agency, as well as “radical newspapers.” The two were welcomed by a rendition of the
Internationale
, the workers’ anthem, and Comrade Wolf promised to “tell the workers of America how the workers of the Soviet Union live and how they are creating a new life.” It was not to be the last such staged occasion.
¹⁴

Yet although pressure for a boycott had collapsed by 1931, the Western campaign against Soviet slave labor had not been wholly without effect: the Soviet Union was, and would remain, very sensitive to its image abroad, even under Stalin. Some, among them the historian Michael Jakobson, now speculate that the threat of the boycott might even have been an important factor behind another, larger shift in policy. The logging business, which required a great deal of unskilled labor, had been an ideal way to make use of prisoners. But wood exports were one of the Soviet Union’s main sources of hard currency, and they could not be put at risk of another boycott. Prisoners would have to be sent elsewhere—preferably somewhere where their presence could be celebrated, not hidden. There was no lack of possibilities, but one in particular appealed to Stalin: the construction of a vast canal, from the White Sea to the Baltic Sea, across a landscape largely composed of sheer granite.

In the context of its time, the White Sea Canal
—Belomorkanal,
in Russian, or
Belomor
, for short—was not unique. By the time construction began, the Soviet Union had already begun to execute several similarly grand, similarly labor-intensive projects, including the world’s largest steelworks at Magnitogorsk, huge new tractor and automobile works, and vast new “socialist cities” planted in the middle of swamps. Nevertheless, even among the other offspring of the gigantomania of the 1930s, the White Sea Canal stood out.

For one, the canal represented—as many Russians would have known—the fulfillment of a very old dream. The first plans to build such a canal had been drawn up in the eighteenth century, when Czarist merchants were looking for a way to get ships carrying timber and minerals from the cold waters of the White Sea to the commercial ports of the Baltic without making the 370-mile journey through the Arctic Ocean, down the long coast of Norway.
¹⁵

It was also a project of extreme, even foolhardy ambition, which is perhaps why no one had tried it before. The canal required 141 miles to be dug, five dams, and nineteen locks. Soviet planners intended to build it using the lowest possible technology, in a pre-industrial, far northern region which had never been properly surveyed and was, in Maxim Gorky’s words, “hydrologically terra incognita.”
¹⁶
All of this, however, may have been part of the project’s appeal to Stalin. He wanted a technological triumph—one the Old Regime had never managed—and he wanted it as fast as possible. He demanded not only that the canal be built, but also that it be built within twenty months. When completed, it would bear his name.

Stalin was the chief promoter of the White Sea Canal—and Stalin specifically wanted the canal to be built with prison labor. Before its construction, he furiously condemned those who questioned whether, given the relatively light volume of traffic in the White Sea, such an expensive project was really necessary. “I’m told,” he wrote to Molotov, “that Rykov and Kviring want to squelch the matter of the Northern Canal, contrary to the Politburo’s decisions. They should be taken down a peg and given a slap on the wrists.” During a Politburo meeting at which the canal was discussed, Stalin also wrote an angry, hastily scribbled note, which speaks of his belief in inmate labor: “As for the northern section of the canal, I have in mind relying on the GPU [prison labor]. At the same time we must assign someone to calculate yet again the expenses in building this first section . . . Too much.”
¹⁷

Nor were Stalin’s preferences kept secret. After the canal’s completion, its top administrator credited Stalin both for his “bravery” in undertaking to build this “hydrotechnical giant,” and for the “wonderful fact that this work was not completed by an ordinary workforce.”
¹⁸
Stalin’s influence can also be seen in the speed with which the construction began. The decision to begin building was made in February 1931, and, after a mere seven months of engineering work and advance surveying, the work began in September.

Administratively, physically, even psychologically, the first prison camps associated with the White Sea Canal were an outgrowth of SLON. The canal’s camps were organized on the SLON model, used SLON’s equipment, and were manned by SLON’s cadres. As soon as it began, the canal’s bosses immediately transferred many inmates from SLON’s mainland camps and from the Solovetsky Islands to work on the new project. For a time, the old SLON and the new White Sea Canal bureaucracies may even have competed to control the project—but the canal won. Eventually, SLON ceased to be an independent entity. The Solovetsky kremlin was re-designated a high-security prison, and the Solovetsky archipelago simply became another division of the Belomor–Baltiiskii [White Sea–Baltic] Corrective-Labor Camp, known as “Belbaltlag.” A number of guards and leading OGPU administrators also moved from SLON to the canal. Among them, as noted, was Naftaly Frenkel, who managed the daily work of the canal from November 1931 until its completion.
¹⁹