Gulag (70 page)

Once again, Stalin launched a series of spectacular, attention-grabbing Gulag construction projects, reminiscent of those he had supported in the 1930s. At Stalin’s personal insistence, the MVD constructed a new asbestos production plant, a project that required a high degree of technological specialization, precisely the sort of thing the Gulag was bad at providing. Stalin also personally advocated the construction of another railway line across the Arctic tundra, from Salekhard to Igarka—a project that became known as the “Road of Death.”
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The late 1940s were also the era of the Volga–Don, the Volga–Baltic, and the Great Turkmen Canals, as well as the Stalingrad and Kuibyshev hydroelectric power stations, the latter the largest in the world. In 1950, the MVD also began the construction of a tunnel, and a railway line, to the island of Sakhalin, a project which would require many tens of thousands of prisoners.
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This time, there was no Gorky to sing the praises of the new Stalinist constructions. On the contrary, the new projects were widely considered wasteful and grandiose. Although there were no open objections to these projects in Stalin’s lifetime, several, including the “Road of Death” and the tunnel to Sakhalin, were aborted within days of his death. The sheer pointlessness of these feats of crude manpower had been well understood, as the Gulag’s own files prove. One inspection carried out in 1951 showed that an entire 52 miles of far northern railway track, constructed at great expense and at the cost of many lives, had not been used for three years. Another 230 miles of similarly costly highway had not been used for eighteen months.
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In 1953, yet another inspection, carried out on the orders of the Central Committee, showed that the cost of maintaining the camps far exceeded any profits made from prison labor. In 1952, in fact, the state had subsidized the Gulag to the tune of 2.3 billion rubles, more than 16 percent of the state’s entire budgetary allocation.
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One Russian historian has noted that MVD memos to Stalin concerning expansion of the camps often began with the phrase “in accordance with Your wishes,” as if to emphasize the writer’s subtle objections.
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The Gulag’s Moscow bosses were well aware of the spread of dissatisfaction and unrest within the camps too. By 1951, mass work refusals, carried out by both criminal and political prisoners, had reached crisis levels: in that year, the MVD calculated that it had lost more than a million workdays due to strikes and protests. In 1952, that number doubled. According to the Gulag’s own statistics, 32 percent of prisoners in the year 1952 had not fulfilled their work norms.
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The list of major strike and protest actions in the years 1950 to 1952, kept by the authorities themselves, is surprisingly long. Among others, there was an armed uprising in Kolyma in the winter of 1949–50; an armed escape from Kraslag in March 1951; mass hunger strikes in Ukhtizhemlag and Ekibastuzlag, in Karaganda, in 1951; and a strike in Ozerlag in 1952.
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So bad had the situation become that in January 1952, the commander of Norilsk sent a letter to General Ivan Dolgikh, then the Gulag’s commander in chief, listing the steps he had taken to prevent rebellion. He suggested abandoning large production zones where prisoners could not receive enough supervision, doubling the number of guards (which he conceded would be difficult), and isolating the various prisoner factions from one another. This too would be difficult, he wrote: “given the great number of prisoners who belong to one or other of the rival factions, we would be lucky if we could simply isolate the leaders.” He also proposed to isolate free workers from prisoners at production sites—and added, finally, that it would be quite useful to release 15,000 prisoners outright, since they would be more productive as free laborers. Needless to say, this suggestion implicitly threw the entire logic of forced labor into doubt.
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Higher up the Soviet hierarchy, others agreed. “Now we have need of first-class technology,” conceded Kruglov, then-boss of the MVD: clearly, the third-class technology found in the Gulag was no longer considered sufficient. A Central Committee meeting of August 25, 1949, even dedicated itself to the discussion of a letter received from an educated prisoner, identified as Zhdanov. “The most important deficit of the camp system is the fact that it relies upon forced labor,” Zhdanov wrote. “The real productivity of prison labor is extremely low. In different working conditions, half as many people could do double the work that prisoners do now.”
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In response to this letter, Kruglov promised to raise prisoner productivity, chiefly by bringing back wages for high-performing prisoners, and reinstating the policy of reducing sentences for good work performance. No one seems to have pointed out that both these forms of “stimulation” had been eliminated in the late 1930s—the latter by Stalin himself—precisely on the grounds that they reduced the profitability of the camps.

It hardly mattered, since the changes made little difference. Very little of the prisoners’ money actually reached their pockets: an investigation carried out after Stalin’s death showed that the Gulag and other institutions had illegally confiscated 126 million rubles from prisoners’ personal accounts.
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Even those tiny amounts of money which did come into the prisoners’ possession were probably more disruptive than helpful. In many camps, criminal bosses set up collection and protection systems, forcing prisoners further down the hierarchy to pay for the privilege of not being beaten or murdered. It became possible to “purchase” easier trusty jobs with cash as well.
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In political camps, prisoners used their new wages to bribe guards. Money also brought vodka into the camps, and later drugs as well.
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The promise of shorter sentences for harder work may have helped increase worker enthusiasm a bit more. Certainly the MVD keenly supported this policy, and in 1952 even proposed to free large groups of prisoners from three of the largest northern enterprises—the Vorkuta coal mine, the Inta coal mine, and the Ukhtinsky oil refinery—and to employ them as free workers. It seems that even MVD enterprise managers preferred, simply, to deal with free men rather than prisoners.
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So great were concerns about the economics of the camps that Beria, in the autumn of 1950, ordered Kruglov to survey the Gulag and uncover the truth. Kruglov’s subsequent report claimed that the prisoners “employed” by the MVD were no less productive than ordinary workers. He did concede, however, that the price of maintaining prisoners—the cost of food, clothing, barracks, and above all guards, now needed in more numbers than ever—far exceeded the costs of paying ordinary free workers.
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In other words, the camps were unprofitable, and many people now knew it. Yet no one, not even Beria, dared take any action during Stalin’s lifetime, which is perhaps not surprising. To anyone in Stalin’s immediate entourage, the years between 1950 and 1952 would have seemed a particularly dangerous time to tell the dictactor that his pet projects were economic failures. Although sick and dying, Stalin was not mellowing with age. On the contrary, he was growing ever more paranoid, and was now inclined to see conspirators and plotters all around him. In June 1951, he unexpectedly ordered the arrest of Abakumov, the head of Soviet counter-intelligence. In the autumn of that year, without prior consultation, he personally dictated a Central Committee resolution describing a “Mingrelian nationalist conspiracy.” The Mingrelians were an ethnic group in Georgia, whose most prominent member was none other than Beria himself. All through 1952, a wave of arrests, firings, and executions rolled through the Georgian communist elite, touching many of Beria’s close associates and protégés. Stalin almost certainly intended Beria himself to be the purge’s ultimate target.
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He would not have been the only victim of Stalin’s final madness, however. By 1952, Stalin had become interested in prosecuting yet another ethnic group. In November 1952, the Czech Communist Party, now in control of Czechoslovakia, put fourteen of its leaders on trial—eleven Jews among them—and denounced them as “Zionist adventurers.” A month later, Stalin told a party meeting that “every Jew is a nationalist and an agent of American intelligence.” Then, on January 13, 1953,
Pravda
, the Communist Party newspaper, revealed the existence of the Doctors’ Plot: “terrorist groups of doctors,” it was claimed, had “made it their aim to cut short the lives of active public figures in the Soviet Union by means of sabotaged medical treatment.” Six of the nine “terrorist doctors” were Jews. All were denounced for their supposed links to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, whose wartime leadership—prominent Jewish intellectuals and writers— had been sentenced a few months earlier for the crime of promoting “cosmopolitanism.”
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The Doctors’ Plot was a terrible and tragic irony. Only ten years before, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews living in the western part of the country had been murdered by Hitler. Hundreds of thousands more had deliberately fled from Poland to the Soviet Union, looking for refuge from the Nazis. Nevertheless, Stalin spent his final, dying years planning another series of show trials, another wave of mass executions, and another wave of deportations. He may even have planned, ultimately, to deport all Jews resident in the Soviet Union’s major cities to central Asia and Siberia.
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Fear and paranoia swept across the country once again. Terrified Jewish intellectuals signed a petition, condemning the doctors. Hundreds more Jewish doctors were arrested. Other Jews lost their jobs, as a wave of bitter anti-Semitism swept across the country. In her faraway Karaganda exile, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg heard local women gossip about packages sent to the post office by people with Jewish names. Allegedly, they had been found to contain cotton balls, riddled with typhus-bearing lice.
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In Kargopollag, in his camp north of Arkhangelsk, Isaak Filshtinskii also heard rumors that Jewish prisoners were to be sent to special camps in the far north.
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Then, just as the Doctors’ Plot looked set to send tens of thousands of new prisoners into camps and into exile, just as the noose was tightening around Beria and his henchmen, and just as the Gulag had entered what appeared to be an insurmountable economic crisis—Stalin died.

Chapter 23

THE DEATH OF STALIN

For the last twelve hours the lack of oxygen became acute.
His face and lips blackened as he suffered slow strangulation.
The death agony was terrible. He literally choked to death as
we watched. At what seemed to be the very last moment, he
opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room.
It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry, and full of
fear of death . . .

—Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, describing her father’s final moments
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IF, IN THE 1930S, many Soviet prisoners believed the Gulag was a great mistake, a vast error which had somehow been hidden from the kind gaze of Comrade Stalin, by the 1950s few harbored such illusions. The attitude, remembered one camp doctor, was straightforward: “The vast majority knew and understood what the man was made of. They understood that he was a tyrant, that he held a great country under the tip of his finger, and that the fate of every prisoner was somehow linked to the fate of Stalin.”
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Throughout the last years of his life, political prisoners hoped and prayed for Stalin’s demise, discussing his death constantly, if subtly, so as not to attract the attention of informers. People would sigh and say, “Ah, Georgians live a long time,” which managed to convey a wish for his death without actually committing treason. Even when he grew sick, they were still cautious. Maya Ulyanovskaya heard the news of what was to be his final illness from a woman she knew to be an informer. She responded carefully: “So? Anyone can get sick. His doctors are good, they will cure him.”
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When his death was finally announced, on March 5, 1953, some maintained their caution. In Mordovia, the politicals studiously hid their excitement, which they feared might earn them a second sentence.
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In Kolyma, women “diligently wailed for the deceased.”
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In one Vorkuta lagpunkt, Pavel Negretov heard the announcement read aloud in the camp dining hall. Neither the commander who read out the notice of death, nor any of the prisoners, said a word. “The news was greeted with a tomb-like silence. Nobody said a thing.”
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In a Norilsk
lagpunkt
, prisoners assembled in the courtyard, and solemnly heard the news of the death of the “great leader of the Soviet people and of free human beings everywhere.” A long pause followed. Then a prisoner raised his hand: “Citizen Commander, my wife sent me some money, it’s in my account. I have no use for it here, so I would like to spend it on a bouquet for our beloved leader. Can I do that?”
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But others openly rejoiced. In Steplag, there were wild cries and yells of celebration. In Vyatlag, prisoners threw their caps in the air and shouted “Hurrah!”
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On the streets of Magadan, one prisoner greeted another: “I wish you great joy on this day of resurrection!”
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He was not the only one overwhelmed by religious sentiment: “There was a light frost, and it was very, very quiet. Soon the sky would be turning blue. Yuri Nikolaevich held up his arms and with passion declared, ‘To Holy Russia let the cocks crow! Soon it will be daylight in Holy Russia!’”
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Whatever they felt, and whether they dared to show their feelings or not, most prisoners and exiles were immediately convinced that things would change. In exile in Karaganda, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg heard the news, began to tremble, and put her hands over her face so that her suspicious workmates could not see her joy. “It’s now or never. Everything’s got to change. Now or never.”
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In another Vorkuta
lagpunkt
, Bernhard Roeder heard the announcement on the camp radio while putting on his mining gear:

There were exchanges of furtive glances, hatred flaring up triumphantly, words stealthily whispered, excited movement—soon the hall was empty. Everyone rushed to pass on the good news . . . No work was done in Vorkuta that day. People stood together in groups, chatting excitedly . . . we heard the guards on the watchtowers phoning one another agitatedly, and, soon afterwards, the first drunks brawling.
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Among the camp administrators, the confusion was profound. Olga Vasileeva, then working in the Gulag headquarters in Moscow, remembers weeping openly: “I cried and pretty much everyone cried, women and men too, they openly cried.”
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Just like millions of their countrymen, the Gulag’s employees were crying not only for their dead leader, but also out of fear for themselves and their careers. Khrushchev himself wrote later that “I wasn’t just weeping for Stalin. I was terribly worried about the future of the country. I already sensed that Beria would start bossing everyone around and that this could be the beginning of the end.”
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By “the end,” of course, he meant the end for himself: surely the death of Stalin would bring on a new round of bloodletting. Fearing the same, many Gulag bigwigs reportedly had heart attacks, bouts of high blood pressure, and severe cases of fever and flu. Their distress, and their state of complete emotional confusion, had made them genuinely ill. They were literally sick with fear.
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If prison guards were confused, the new occupants of the Kremlin were not much clearer about what lay in the future. As Khrushchev had feared, Beria, who was barely able to contain his glee at the sight of Stalin’s corpse, did indeed take power, and began making changes with astonishing speed. On March 6, before Stalin had even been buried, Beria announced a reorganization of the secret police. He instructed its boss to hand over responsibility for the Gulag to the Ministry of Justice, keeping only the special camps for politicals within the jurisdiction of the MVD. He transferred many of the Gulag’s enterprises over to other ministries, whether forestry, mining, or manufacturing.
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On March 12, Beria also aborted more than twenty of the Gulag’s flagship projects, on the grounds that they did not “meet the needs of the national economy.” Work on the Great Turkmen Canal ground to a halt, as did work on the Volga–Ural Canal, the Volga–Baltic Canal, the dam on the lower Don, the port at Donetsk, and the tunnel to Sakhalin. The Road of Death, the Salekhard–Igarka Railway, was abandoned too, never to be finished.
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Two weeks later, Beria wrote a memo to the Presidium of the Central Committee, outlining the state of the labor camps with astonishing clarity. He informed them that there were 2,526,402 inmates, of whom only 221,435 were actually “dangerous state criminals,” and he argued in favor of releasing many of those remaining:

Among the prisoners, 438,788 are women, of which 6,286 are pregnant and 35,505 are accompanied by children under the age of two. Many women have children under the age of ten, who are being raised by relatives or in children’s homes.

Among the prisoners, 238,000 are elderly—men and women above fifty years of age—and 31,181 are juveniles below the age of eighteen, mostly sentenced for petty theft and hooliganism.

About 198,000 prisoners living in camps suffer from serious, incurable illnesses, and are completely incapable of work.

It is well known that prisoners in camps . . . leave their relatives and intimates in very difficult situations, frequently breaking up their families, with seriously negative effects, lasting for the rest of their lives.
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On these humane-sounding grounds, Beria requested that an amnesty be extended to all prisoners with sentences of five years or less, to all pregnant women, to all women with young children, and to everyone under eighteen—a million people in all. The amnesty was announced on March 27. Releases began immediately.
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A week later, on April 4, Beria also called off the investigation into the Doctors’ Plot. This was the first of the changes visible to the general public. The announcement appeared, again, in
Pravda
: “The persons accused of incorrect conduct of the investigation have been arrested and brought to criminal responsibility.”
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The implications were clear: Stalinist justice had been found wanting. Secretly, Beria made other changes as well. He forbade all secret police cadres from using physical force against arrestees—effectively ending torture.
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He attempted to liberalize policy toward western Ukraine, the Baltic States, even East Germany, reversing the policies of Sovietization and Russification which, in the case of Ukraine, had been put in place by Nikita Khrushchev himself.
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As far as the Gulag was concerned, on June 16 he laid all of his cards on the table, openly declaring his intention to “liquidate the system of forced labor, on the grounds of economic ineffectiveness and lack of perspective.”
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To this day, Beria’s motives for making these rapid changes remain mysterious. Some have tried to paint him as a secret liberal, chafing under the Stalinist system, longing for reform. His party colleagues suspected he was trying to garner more power for the secret police, at the expense of the Communist Party itself: ridding the MVD of the cumbersome, expensive burden of the camps was simply a way of strengthening the institution. Beria also might have been trying to make himself popular among the general public as well as among the many former secret police who would now return from distant camps. In the late 1940s, he had made a practice of re-hiring such ex-prisoners—virtually guaranteeing their loyalty. But the most likely explanation for Beria’s behavior lies in his superior knowledge: perhaps more than anyone else in the USSR, Beria really did know how uneconomic the camps were, and how innocent most of the prisoners were. After all, he had been supervising the former, and arresting the latter, for much of the previous decade.
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Whatever his motives, Beria moved too quickly. His reforms disturbed and unsettled his colleagues. Khrushchev—whom Beria vastly underestimated—was the most shaken, possibly because Khrushchev may have helped organize the investigations into the Doctors’ Plot in the first place, possibly because of his strong feelings about Ukraine. Khrushchev may also have feared that he would sooner or later figure on Beria’s new list of enemies. Slowly, through use of an intensive whispering campaign, he turned the other Party leaders against Beria. By the end of June, he had won them all over. At a Party meeting, he surrounded the building with loyal troops. The surprise succeeded. Shocked, stuttering, and stammering, the man who had been the second most powerful person in the USSR was arrested and removed to prison.

Beria would remain in prison for the few months left of his life. Like Yagoda and Yezhov before him, he occupied himself by writing letters, pleading for mercy. His trial was held in December. Whether he was executed then or earlier is unknown—but by the end of 1953 he was dead.
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The Soviet Union’s leaders abandoned some of Beria’s policies as quickly as they had been adopted. But neither Khrushchev nor anyone else ever revived the large Gulag construction projects. Nor did they reverse Beria’s amnesty. The releases continued—proof that doubts about the Gulag’s efficiency had not been limited to Beria, disgraced though he might be. The new Soviet leadership knew perfectly well that the camps were a drag on the economy, just as they knew that millions of the prisoners in them were innocent. The clock was now ticking: the Gulag’s era was coming to an end.

Perhaps taking their cue from the rumors emanating from Moscow, the Gulag’s administrators and guards adjusted to the new situation too. Once they got over their fears and their illnesses, many guards changed their behavior almost overnight, relaxing the rules even before they had been ordered to do so. One of the commanders of Alexander Dolgun’s Kolyma
lagpunkt
began shaking prisoners’ hands and calling them “comrade” as soon as news broke of Stalin’s illness, even before the dictator had been officially declared dead.
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“The camp regime weakened, became more human,” recalled one prisoner.
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Another put it somewhat differently: “The guards didn’t show the sort of patriotism they had shown when Stalin was alive.”
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Prisoners who refused to do a particularly strenuous, unpleasant, or unfair task were no longer punished. Prisoners who refused to work on Sundays were no longer punished.
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Spontaneous protests broke out—and the protesters were not punished, either, as Barbara Armonas remembered:

Somehow this amnesty changed the basic discipline of the camp . . . One day we came from the fields in a rainstorm; we were completely soaked. The administration sent us to the baths without letting us first go to our rooms. We disliked this for we wanted to be able to exchange our wet clothing for dry things. The long line of prisoners began to protest by screaming and shouting insults, calling the administration “chekists” and “fascists.” Then we simply refused to move. Neither persuasion nor threats had any effect. After an hour of silent battle the administration gave in and we went to our rooms to pick up dry clothes.
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