Gulag (62 page)

Similar atrocities took place all across the border regions. In the wake of the Soviet withdrawal, the NKVD left about 21,000 prisoners behind and freed another 7,000. In a final burst of violence, however, departing NKVD troops and Red Army soldiers murdered nearly 10,000 prisoners in dozens of Polish and Baltic towns and villages—Wilno (Vilnius), Drohobycz, Pinsk.
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They shot them in their cells, in the courtyards of their jails, in nearby forests. As they retreated, NKVD troops also burned down buildings and shot civilians, sometimes murdering the owners of the houses in which their own troops had been quartered.
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Farther from the border, where there was more time to prepare, the Gulag attempted to organize proper prisoner evacuations. Three years later, in his long and pompous summation of the Gulag’s war effort, the Gulag’s wartime boss, Viktor Nasedkin, described these evacuations as “orderly.” The plans had been “worked out by the Gulag in coordination with the relocation of industry,” he declared, although “in connection with the well-known difficulties of transport, a significant proportion of the prisoners were evacuated on foot.”
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In fact, there had been no plans, and the evacuations were conducted in a panicked frenzy, often while German bombs were falling all around. The “well-known difficulties of transport” meant that people suffocated to death in overcrowded train cars, or that falling bombs destroyed them before they reached their destination. One Polish inmate, Janusz Puchi
ski, arrested and deported on June 19, escaped from a burning train full of prisoners, along with his mother and siblings:

At a certain moment, there was a strong explosion and the train stopped. People began escaping from the wagons . . . I saw that the train stood in a deep ravine. I thought I would never get out of there. Airplanes were screaming over my head, my legs seemed to be made of cotton. Somehow I climbed out, and began running to the woods, about 200–250 meters from the tracks. When I’d made it, I turned around, and saw that behind me, in the open space, there were crowds of people. At that moment, the next group of planes arrived and began shooting into the crowds ...
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Bombs also hit a train carrying the inmates of Kolomyja prison, killing some of the prisoners but allowing nearly 300 to escape. Convoy guards captured 150 of them, but later set them free again. As they themselves explained, they had nothing to feed the prisoners and nowhere to keep them. All of the jails in the area had been evacuated.
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The experience of being on a prisoner train during an air raid was relatively unusual, however—if only because prisoners were rarely allowed on the evacuation trains at all. On the train leaving one camp, the families and the baggage of camp guards and administrators took up so much space that there was no room for any prisoners.
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Elsewhere, industrial equipment took priority over people, both for practical and propaganda reasons. Crushed in the West, the Soviet leadership promised to rebuild itself east of the Urals.
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As a result, that “significant proportion” of prisoners—in fact, the overwhelming majority—who Nasedkin had said were “evacuated on foot,” endured long forced marches, descriptions of which sound hauntingly similar to the marches undertaken by the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps four years later: “We have no transport,” one guard told an echelon of prisoners, as bombs fell around them. “Those who can walk will walk. Protest or not—all will walk. Those who can’t walk—we will shoot. We will leave no one for the Germans . . . you decide your own fate.”
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Walk they did—although the journeys of many were cut short. The rapid advance of the Germans made the NKVD nervous, and when they became nervous, they started shooting. On July 2, the 954 prisoners of the Czortków jail in western Ukraine began their march to the east. Along the way, the officer who wrote the subsequent report identified 123 of them as Ukrainian nationalists and shot them for “attempted rebellion and escape.” After walking for more than two weeks, with the German army within 10 to 20 miles, he shot all those still alive.
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Evacuees not killed were sometimes hardly better off. Nasedkin wrote that “the apparat of the Gulag in the frontline regions was mobilized to ensure that evacuating echelons and transports of prisoners had medical-sanitary services and nourishment.”
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Alternatively, here is how M. Shteinberg, a political prisoner arrested for the second time in 1941, described her evacuation from Kirovograd prison:

Everything was bathed in blinding sunlight. At midday, it became unbearable. This was Ukraine, in the month of August. It was about 95 degrees [Fahrenheit] every day. An enormous quantity of people were walking, and on top of this crowd hung a hazy cloud of dust. There was nothing to breathe, it was impossible to breathe . . .

Everyone had a bundle in their arms. I had one too. I had even brought a coat with me, since without a coat it is hard to survive imprisonment. It’s a pillow, a blanket, a cover—everything. In most prisons, there are no beds, no mattresses, no linen. But after we had traversed 20 miles in that heat, I quietly left my bundle by the side of the road. I knew that I would not be able to carry it. The vast majority of the women did the same. Those who didn’t leave their bundles after the first 20 miles left them after 130. No one carried them to the end. When we had gone another 10 miles, I took off my shoes and left them too . . .

When we passed Adzhamka I dragged behind me my cell mate, Sokolovskaya, for 20 miles. She was an old woman, more than seventy years old, completely gray-haired . . . it was very difficult for her to walk. She clung to me, and kept talking about her fifteen-year-old grandson, with whom she had lived. The last terror in Sokolovskaya’s life was the terror that he would be arrested too. It was difficult for me to drag her, and I began to falter myself. She told me to “rest a while, I’ll go alone.” And she immediately fell back by 1 mile. We were the last in the convoy. When I felt that she had fallen behind, I turned back, wanting to get her—and I saw them kill her. They stabbed her with a bayonet. In the back. She didn’t even see it happen. Clearly, they knew how to stab. She didn’t even move. Later, I realized that hers had been an easy death, easier than that of others. She didn’t see that bayonet. She didn’t have time to be afraid ...
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In all, the NKVD evacuated 750,000 prisoners from 27 camps and 210 labor colonies.
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Another 140,000 were evacuated from 272 prisons, and sent to new prisons in the east.
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A significant proportion of them—though we still do not know the real numbers—never arrived.

Chapter 20

“STRANGERS”

Willows are willows everywhere

Alma-Ata willow, how beautiful you are, draped in glowing
white frost.
But should I forget you, my withered willow in Warsaw’s
Rozbrat Street,
Let my hand wither as well!

Mountains are mountains everywhere
Tian Shan, before my eyes, sails upward into a purple
sky . . .
But should I forget you, the Tatra peaks I left so far behind,
The Bialy brook, where my son and I daydreamed colorful
sea voyages . . .
Let me turn into Tian Shan stone.
If I forget you
If I forget my hometown . . .

—Alexander Wat, “Willow Trees in Alma-Ata,” January 1942 1

FROM THE GULAG’S INCEPTION, its camps had always contained a notable number of foreign prisoners. These were, for the most part, Western communists and Comintern members, although there were also a handful of British or French wives of Soviet citizens, as well as the odd expatriate businessman. They were treated as rarities, as curiosities, yet nevertheless their communist origins and their previous experience of Soviet life seemed to help them fit in with other prisoners. As Lev Razgon wrote:

They were all “ours” because they had either been born or grown up in the country or else come to live there of their own free will. Even when they spoke Russian very badly or did not speak it at all, they were ours. And in the melting pot of the camps they quickly ceased to stand out or appear in any way different. Those of them who survived the first year or two of camp life could thereafter only be distinguished among “us” by their poor Russian.
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Quite different were the foreigners who appeared after 1939. With no warning, the NKVD had plucked these newcomers—Poles, Balts, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Moldavians—out of their bourgeois or peasant worlds after the Soviet invasion of multiethnic eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and the Baltic states, and then dumped them, in large numbers, into the Gulag and the exile villages. Contrasting them with “our” foreigners, Razgon called them “strangers.” Having been “swept from their own country to the far north of Russia by an alien and hostile historical force which they could not comprehend,” they were instantly recognizable by the quality of their possessions: “We were always alerted to their arrival in Ustvymlag by the appearance of exotic items of clothing among our criminal inmates: the shaggy tall hats and colored sashes of Moldavia and, from Bukovina, embroidered fur waistcoats and fashionable close-fitting jackets with high, padded shoulders.”
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Arrests in the newly occupied territories had begun immediately after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland, in September 1939, and continued after the subsequent invasions of Romania and the Baltic states. The NKVD’s goal was both security—they wanted to prevent rebellion and the emergence of fifth columns—and Sovietization, and they therefore targeted people whom they thought most likely to oppose the Soviet regime. This included not only members of the former Polish administration, but also traders and merchants, poets and writers, wealthy peasants and farmers— anyone whose arrest seemed likely to contribute to the psychological breakdown of the inhabitants of eastern Poland.
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They also targeted refugees from German-occupied western Poland, among them thousands of Jews fleeing Hitler.

Later, the criteria for arrest became more precise, or, at least, as precise as any Soviet criteria for arrest ever became. One document of May 1941, concerning the expulsion of “socially foreign” elements from the Baltic states, occupied Romania, and occupied Poland, demanded, among other things, the arrest of “active members of counter-revolutionary organizations”—meaning political parties; former members of the police or the prison service; important capitalists and bourgeoisie; former officers of the national armies; family members of all of the above; anyone repatriated from Germany; refugees from “former Poland”; as well as thieves and prostitutes.
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Another set of instructions, issued by the commissar of newly Sovietized Lithuania in November 1940, said deportees should include, along with the categories above, those frequently traveling abroad, involved in overseas correspondence or coming into contact with representatives of foreign states; Esperantists; philatelists; those working with the Red Cross; refugees; smugglers; those expelled from the Communist Party; priests and active members of religious congregations; the nobility, landowners, wealthy merchants, bankers, industrialists, hotel and restaurant owners.
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Anyone who broke Soviet law, including the laws prohibiting “speculation”—any form of trade—could be arrested, as could anyone who attempted to cross the Soviet border to escape into Hungary or Romania.

Because of the scale of arrests, the Soviet occupation authorities quickly had to suspend even the fiction of legality. Very few of those seized by the NKVD in the new western territories were actually put on trial, jailed, or sentenced. Instead, the war once again brought about a revival of “administrative deportation”—the same procedure, instigated by the Czars, that had been used against the kulaks. “Administrative deportation” is a fancy name for a simple procedure. It meant that NKVD troops or convoy guards arrived at a household and told its inhabitants to leave. Sometimes they had a day to prepare, sometimes a few minutes. Then trucks arrived, took them to train stations, and off they went. There was no arrest, no trial, no formal procedure at all.

The numbers involved were enormous. The historian Alexander Guryanov estimates that 108,000 people in the territories of eastern Poland were arrested and sent to the camps of the Gulag, while 320,000 were deported to exile villages—some of which had been founded by kulaks—in the far north and Kazakhstan.
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To this must be added the 96,000 prisoners arrested and the 160,000 deported from the Baltic states, as well as 36,000 Moldavians.
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The combined effect of the deportations and the war on the demographics of the Baltic states was shocking: between 1939 and 1945, the Estonian population declined by 25 percent.
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The history of these deportations, like the history of the deportations of the kulaks, is distinct from the history of the Gulag itself, and, as I have said, the full story of this wholesale movement of families cannot be told in the context of this book. Yet it is not completely separate either. Why the NKVD chose to deport one person, sending him to live in an exile village, and why they chose to arrest another person, sending him to live in a camp, is often difficult to understand, as the backgrounds of the deportees and the arrestees were interchangeable. Sometimes, if a man was sent to a camp, then his wife and children were deported. Or if a son was arrested, then his parents were deported. Some arrestees served camp sentences, and afterward went to live in an exile village, sometimes with their previously deported family members.

Aside from their punitive function, the deportations fit neatly into Stalin’s grand plan to populate the northern regions of Russia. Like the Gulag, the exile villages were deliberately placed in remote areas, and they appeared to be permanent. Certainly NKVD officers told many of the exiles that they would never return, even making speeches as the exiles boarded the trains, congratulating the “new citizens” on their permanent emigration to the Soviet Union.
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In the exile villages, local commandants frequently reminded the new arrivals that Poland, now divided between Germany and the Soviet Union, would never exist again. One Russian teacher told a Polish schoolgirl that Poland’s revival was about as likely “as it is that hair will grow out of your hands.”
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Meanwhile, in the cities and villages they had left, the new Soviet officials confiscated and redistributed the exiles’ property. They converted their houses into public buildings—schools, hospitals, maternity homes—and gave their household goods (whatever had not been stolen by the neighbors or the NKVD) to children’s homes and nurseries.
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The deportees suffered just as much as their countrymen who had been sent to labor camps, if not more so. At least those in camps had a daily bread ration and a place to sleep. Exiles often had neither. Instead, the authorities dumped them in virgin forest or in tiny villages—in northern Russia, in Kazakhstan, and in central Asia—and left them to fend for themselves, sometimes without the means to do so. In the first wave of deportations, convoy guards forbade many to take anything with them, no kitchen goods, no clothes, no tools. Only in November 1940 did the administrative body of the Soviet convoy guards meet and reverse this decision: even the Soviet authorities realized that the deportees’ lack of possessions was leading to high death rates, and they ordered guards to warn deportees, as noted earlier, to take enough warm clothes to last for three years.
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Even so, many of the deportees were mentally and physically unprepared for lives as foresters or
kolkhoz
farmers. The landscape itself seemed alien and terrifying. One woman described it in her diary, as she first saw it from the train: “We are being carried through this endless space; such a flat and huge land with only a few scattered human settlements here and there. Invariably, we see squalid mud huts with thatched roofs and small windows, dirty and dilapidated, with no fences and no trees ...”
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Upon arrival, the situation usually worsened. Many of the exiles had been lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers, and merchants, accustomed to living in cities or towns of relative sophistication. By contrast, an archival report, dated December 1941, describes exiles from the “new” western territories living in overcrowded barracks: “The buildings are dirty, as a result of which there is a high incidence of disease and death, especially among children . . . most exiles have no warm clothes and are unused to cold weather.”
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The suffering, in the months and years that followed, only grew, as one unusual set of records testifies. After the war, what was then the Polish government-in-exile commissioned and preserved a collection of children’s “memoirs” of the deportations. They illustrate, better than any adult account could, both the culture shock and the physical deprivation experienced by the deportees. One Polish boy, age thirteen at the time of his “arrest,” wrote the following account of his months in deportation:

There was nothing to eat. People ate nettle and swelled up from it and they left for the other world. They rushed us to the Russian school compulsively because they didn’t give bread when you didn’t go to school. They taught us not to pray to God that there is no God and when after the lesson was over we all got up and started praying, then the commander of the settlement locked me up in the tyurma [prison].
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Other children’s stories reflect their parents’ trauma. “Mama wanted to take her own life and ours so as not to live in such torment, but when I told Mama that I want to see Dad and I want to return to Poland, Mama’s spirit rose again,” wrote another boy, age eight at the time of his arrest.
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But not all women’s spirits did rise again. Another child, age fourteen at the time of his deportation, described his mother’s attempted suicide:

Mommy came to the barracks, took a rope, a little bread, and went into the woods. I held my Mommy back in her grief she hit me with the rope and went away. A few hours later they found Mommy on a spruce tree, Mommy had a rope around her neck. Under the tree stood some girls, Mommy thought it was my sisters and wanted to say something but the girls raised up a rumpus to the commandant who had taken an axe in his belt and he chopped down the spruce . . . Mommy already crazy grabbed the commandant’s axe and struck him in the back, the commandant fell to the floor . . .

On the next day they took Mommy to a jail 200 miles away from me. I understood that I had to work and I continued to haul timber. I had a horse that was falling over together with me. I hauled timber for one month and then I got sick and could not work. The commandant notified the seller that he should not give us bread but the seller had an understanding for children and he gave us bread secretly . . . soon Mommy came from jail her feet frozen her face wrinkled ...
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But not all mothers survived either—as another child wrote:

We came to the settlement and on the second day they drove us to work we had to work from dawn to night. When payday came for 15 days 10 rubles was the top pay so that in two days it was not even enough for bread. People were dying from hunger. They ate dead horses. This is how my mommy worked and got a cold because she had no warm clothing she got pneumonia and was sick for 5 months she got sick December 3. April 3 she went to the hospital. In the hospital they did not treat her at all if she had not gone to the hospital maybe she would still be alive she came to the barracks at the settlement and died there was nothing to eat and so she died of hunger April 30, 1941. My mommy was dying and I and my sister were at home. Daddy was not there he was at work and my mommy died when Daddy came home from work then mommy died and so my Mommy died of hunger. And then the amnesty came and we got out of that hell.
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