At the same time, this is a book about life in the Gulag, and for that reason it tells the story of the camps in two ways. The first and third sections of this book are chronological. They describe the evolution of the camps and their administration in a narrative fashion. The central section discusses life in the camps, and it does so thematically. While most of the examples and citations in this central section refer to the 1940s, the decade when the camps reached their apex, I have also referred backward and forward— ahistorically—to other eras. Certain aspects of life in the camps evolved over time, and I felt it was important to explain how this happened.
Having said what this book is, I would also like to say what it is not: it is not a history of the USSR, a history of the purges, or a history of repression in general. It is not a history of Stalin’s reign, or of his Politburo, or of his secret police, whose complex administrative history I have deliberately tried to simplify as much as possible. Although I do make use of the writings of Soviet dissidents, often produced under great stress and with great courage, this book does not contain a complete history of the Soviet human rights movement. Nor, for that matter, does it do full justice to the stories of particular nations and categories of prisoner—among them Poles, Balts, Ukrainians, Chechens, German and Japanese POWs—who suffered under the Soviet regime, both inside and outside the Soviet camps. It does not explore in full the mass murders of 1937–38, which mostly took place outside the camps, or the massacre of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn and elsewhere. Because this is a book intended for the general reader, and because it does not presume any specialized knowledge of Soviet history, all of these events and phenomenon will be mentioned. Nevertheless, it would have been impossible to do all of them justice in a single volume.
Perhaps most important, this book does not do justice to the story of the “special exiles,” the millions of people who were often rounded up at the same time and for the same reasons as Gulag prisoners, but who were then sent not to camps but to live in remote exile villages where many thousands died of starvation, cold, and overwork. Some were exiled for political reasons, including the kulaks, or rich peasants, in the 1930s. Some were exiled for their ethnicity, including Poles, Balts, Ukrainians, Volga Germans, and Chechens, among others, in the 1940s. They met a variety of fates in Kazakhstan, central Asia, and Siberia—too wide a variety to be encompassed in an account of the camp system. I have chosen to mention them, perhaps idiosyncratically, where their experiences seemed to me especially close or relevant to the experiences of Gulag prisoners. But although their story is closely connected to the story of the Gulag, to tell it fully would require another book of this length. I hope someone will write one soon.
Although this is a book about the Soviet concentration camps, it is nevertheless impossible to treat them as an isolated phenomenon. The Gulag grew and developed at a particular time and place, in tandem with other events—and within three contexts in particular. Properly speaking, the Gulag belongs to the history of the Soviet Union; to the international as well as the Russian history of prisons and exile; and to the particular intellectual climate of continental Europe in the mid-twentieth century, which also produced the Nazi concentration camps in Germany.
By “belongs to the history of the Soviet Union,” I mean something very specific: the Gulag did not emerge, fully formed, from the sea, but rather reflected the general standards of the society around it. If the camps were filthy, if the guards were brutal, if the work teams were slovenly, that was partly because filthiness and brutality and slovenliness were plentiful enough in other spheres of Soviet life. If life in the camps was horrible, unbearable, inhuman, if death rates were high—that too was hardly surprising. In certain periods, life in the Soviet Union was also horrible, unbearable, and inhuman, and death rates were as high outside the camps as they were within them.
Certainly it is no coincidence that the first Soviet camps were set up in the immediate aftermath of the bloody, violent, and chaotic Russian Revolution either. During the Revolution, the terror imposed afterward, and the subsequent civil war, it seemed to many in Russia as if civilization itself had been permanently fractured. “Death sentences were meted out arbitrarily,” the historian Richard Pipes has written, “people were shot for no reason and equally capriciously released.”18 From 1917 on, a whole society’s set of values was turned on its head: a lifetime’s accumulated wealth and experience was a liability, robbery was glamorized as “nationalization,” murder became an accepted part of the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this atmosphere, Lenin’s initial imprisonment of thousands of people, simply on the grounds of their former wealth or their aristocratic titles, hardly seemed strange or out of line.
By the same token, high mortality rates in the camps in certain years are also, in part, a reflection of events taking place throughout the country. Death rates went up inside the camps in the early 1930s, when famine gripped the entire country. They went up again during the Second World War: the German invasion of the Soviet Union led not only to millions of combat deaths, but also to epidemics of dysentery and of typhus, as well as, again, to famine, which affected people outside the camps as well as within them. In the winter of 1941–42, when a quarter of the Gulag’s population died of starvation, as many as a million citizens of the city of Leningrad may have starved to death too, trapped behind a German blockade. 19 The blockade’s chronicler Lidiya Ginzburg wrote of the hunger of the time as a “permanent state . . . it was constantly present and always made its presence felt . . . the most desperate and tormenting thing of all during the process of eating was when the food drew to an end with awful rapidity without bringing satiety.”20 Her words are eerily reminiscent of those used by former prisoners, as the reader will discover.
It is true, of course, that the Leningraders died at home, while the Gulag ripped open lives, destroyed families, tore children away from their parents, and condemned millions to live in remote wastelands, thousands of miles from their families. Still, prisoners’ horrific experiences can be legitimately compared to the terrible memories of “free” Soviet citizens such as Elena Kozhina, who was evacuated from Leningrad in February 1942. During the journey, she watched her brother, sister, and grandmother die of starvation. As the Germans approached, she and her mother walked across the steppe, encountering “scenes of unbridled rout and chaos . . . The world was flying into thousands of pieces. Everything was permeated with smoke and a horrible burning smell; the steppe was tight and suffocating, as if squeezed inside a hot, sooty fist.” Although she never experienced the camps, Kozhina knew terrible cold, hunger, and fear before her tenth birthday, and was haunted by the memories for the rest of her life. Nothing, she wrote, “could erase my memories of Vadik’s body being carried out under a blanket; of Tanya choking in her agony; of me and Mama, the last ones, trudging through smoke and thunder in the burning steppe.” 21
The population of the Gulag and the population of the rest of the USSR shared many things besides suffering. Both in the camps and outside them, it was possible to find the same slovenly working practices, the same criminally stupid bureaucracy, the same corruption, and the same sullen disregard for human life. While writing this book, I described to a Polish friend the system of tufta—cheating on required work norms—that Soviet prisoners had developed, described later in this book. He howled with laughter: “You think prisoners invented that? The whole Soviet bloc practiced tufta.” In Stalin’s Soviet Union, the difference between life inside and life outside the barbed wire was not fundamental, but rather a question of degree. Perhaps for that reason, the Gulag has often been described as the quintessential expression of the Soviet system. Even in prison-camp slang, the world outside the barbed wire was not referred to as “freedom,” but as the bolshaya zona, the “big prison zone,” larger and less deadly than the “small zone” of the camp, but no more human—and certainly no more humane.
Yet if the Gulag cannot be held totally apart from the experie
nce of life in the rest of the Soviet Union, neither can the story of the Soviet camps be fully separated from the long, multinational, cross-cultural history of prisons, exile, incarceration, and concentration camps. The exile of prisoners to a distant place, where they can “pay their debt to society,” make themselves useful, and not contaminate others with their ideas or their criminal acts, is a practice as old as civilization itself. The rulers of ancient Rome and Greece sent their dissidents off to distant colonies. Socrates chose death over the torment of exile from Athens. The poet Ovid was exiled to a fetid port on the Black Sea. Georgian Britain sent its pickpockets and thieves to Australia. Nineteenth-century France sent convicted criminals to Guyana. Portugal sent its undesirables to Mozambique.22
The new leadership of the Soviet Union did not, in 1917, have to look quite as far away as Greenland for a precedent. Since the seventeenth century, Russia had its own exile system: the first mention of exile in Russian law was in 1649. At the time, exile was considered to be a new, more humane form of criminal punishment—far preferable to the death penalty, or to branding and mutilation—and it was applied to a huge range of minor and major offenses, from snuff-taking and fortune-telling to murder. 23 A wide range of Russian intellectuals and writers, Pushkin among them, suffered some form of exile, while the very possibility of exile tormented others: at the height of his literary fame in 1890, Anton Chekhov surprised everyone he knew and set off to visit and describe the penal colonies on the island of Sakhalin, off Russia’s Pacific coast. Before he left, he wrote to his puzzled publisher, explaining his motives:
We have allowed millions of people to rot in prisons, to rot for no purpose, without any consideration, and in a barbarous manner; we have driven people tens of thousands of versts through the cold in shackles, infected them with syphilis, perverted them, multiplied the number of criminals . . . but none of this has anything to do with us, it’s just not interesting ...24
In retrospect, it is easy to find, in the history of the Czarist prison system, many echoes of practices later applied in the Soviet Gulag. Like the Gulag, for example, Siberian exile was never intended exclusively for criminals. A law of 1736 declared that if a village decided someone in its midst was a bad influence on others, the village elders could divide up the unfortunate’s property and order him to move elsewhere. If he failed to find another abode, the state could then send him into exile.25 Indeed, this law was cited by Khrushchev in 1948, as part of his (successful) argument for exiling collective farmers who were deemed insufficiently enthusiastic and hardworking.26
The practice of exiling people who simply didn’t fit in continued throughout the nineteenth century. In his book, Siberia and the Exile System, George Kennan—uncle of the American statesman—described the system of “administrative process” that he observed in Russia in 1891:
The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime . . . but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is “prejudicial to public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility,” he may be arrested without warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may then be removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and there be put under police surveillance for a period of from one to ten years.27
Administrative exile—which required no trial and no sentencing procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime. In the early days, many of these were Polish noblemen who objected to the Russian occupation of their territory and property. Later, exiles included religious objectors, as well as members of “revolutionary” groups and secret societies, including the Bolsheviks. Although they were not administrative exiles—they were tried and sentenced—the most notorious of Siberia’s nineteenth-century “forced settlers” were also political prisoners: these were the Decembrists, a group of high-ranking aristocrats who staged a feeble rebellion against Czar Nicholas I in 1825. With a vengeance that shocked all of Europe at the time, the Czar sentenced five of the Decembrists to death. He deprived the others of their rank, and sent them, in chains, to Siberia, where a few were joined by their exceptionally brave wives. Only a few lived long enough to be pardoned by Nicholas’s successor, Alexander II, thirty years later, and to return home to St. Petersburg, by then tired old men. 28 Fyodor Dostoevsky, sentenced in 1849 to a four-year term of penal servitude, was another well-known political prisoner. After returning from his Siberian exile, he wrote The House of the Dead, still the most widely read account of life in the Czarist prison system.
Like the Gulag, the Czarist exile system was not created solely as a form of punishment. Russia’s rulers also wanted their exiles, both criminal and political, to solve an economic problem that had rankled for many centuries: the underpopulation of the far east and the far north of the Russian landmass, and the Russian Empire’s consequent failure to exploit Russia’s natural resources. With that in mind, the Russian state began, as early as the eighteenth century, to sentence some of its prisoners to forced labor—a form of punishment which became known as katorga, from the Greek word kateirgon, “to force.” Katorga had a long Russian prehistory. In the early eighteenth century, Peter the Great had used convicts and serfs to build roads, fortresses, factories, ships, and the city of St. Petersburg itself. In 1722, he passed a more specific directive ordering criminals, with their wives and children, into exile near the silver mines of Daurya, in eastern Siberia.29
In its time, Peter’s use of forced labor was considered a great economic and political success. Indeed, the story of the hundreds of thousands of serfs who spent their lives building St. Petersburg had an enormous impact on future generations. Many had died during the construction—and yet the city became a symbol of progress and Europeanization. The methods were cruel—and yet the nation had profited. Peter’s example probably helps explain the ready adoption of katorga by his Czarist successors. Without a doubt, Stalin was a great admirer of Peter’s building methods too.
Still, in the nineteenth century, katorga remained a relatively rare form of punishment. In 1906, only about 6,000 katorga convicts were serving sentences; in 1916, on the eve of the Revolution, there were only 28,600.30 Of far greater economic importance was another category of prisoner: the forced settlers, who were sentenced to live in exile, but not in prison, in underpopulated regions of the country, chosen for their economic potential. Between 1824 and 1889 alone, some 720,000 forced settlers were sent to Siberia. Many were accompanied by their families. They, not the convicts laboring in chains, gradually populated Russia’s empty, mineral-rich wastelands.31
Their sentences were not necessarily easy ones, and some of the settlers thought their fate worse than that of the katorga prisoners. Assigned to remote districts, with poor land and few neighbors, many starved to death over the long winters, or drank themselves to death from boredom. There were very few women—their numbers never exceeded 15 percent—fewer books, no entertainment.32
On his journey across Siberia to Sakhalin, Anton Chekhov met, and described, some of these exiled settlers: “The majority of them are financially poor, have little strength, little practical training, and possess nothing except their ability to write, which is frequently of absolutely no use to anybody. Some of them commence by selling, piece by piece, their shirts of Holland linen, their sheets, their scarves and handkerchiefs, and finish up after two or three years dying in fearful penury . . .” 33
But not all of the exiles were miserable and degenerate. Siberia was far away from European Russia, and in the East officialdom was more forgiving, aristocracy much thinner on the ground. The wealthier exiles and ex-prisoners sometimes built up large estates. The more educated became doctors and lawyers, or ran schools.34 Princess Maria Volkonskaya, wife of the Decembrist Sergei Volkonsky, sponsored the building of a theater and concert hall in Irkutsk: although she had, like her husband, technically been deprived of her rank, invitations to her soirées and private dinners were ea
gerly sought after, and discussed as far away as Moscow and St. Petersburg. 35
By the early twentieth century, the system had shed some of its previous harshness. The fashion for prison reform which spread through Europe in the nineteenth century finally caught up with Russia too. Regimes grew lighter, and policing grew laxer.36 Indeed, in contrast to what came later, the route to Siberia now seems, if not exactly pleasurable, then hardly an onerous punishment for the small group of men who would lead the Russian Revolution. When in prison, the Bolsheviks received a certain amount of favorable treatment as “political” rather than criminal prisoners, and were allowed to have books, paper, and writing implements. Ordzhonikidze, one of the Bolshevik leaders, later recalled reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, Plekhanov, William James, Frederick W. Taylor, Dostoevsky, and Ibsen, among others, while resident in St. Petersburg’s Schlüsselberg Fortress. 37 By later standards, the Bolsheviks were also well-fed, well-dressed, even beautifully coiffed. A photograph taken of Trotsky imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1906 shows him wearing spectacles, a suit, a tie, and a shirt with an impressively white collar. The peephole in the door behind him offers the only clue to his whereabouts.38 Another taken of him in exile in eastern Siberia, in 1900, shows him in a fur hat and heavy coat, surrounded by other men and women, also in boots and furs.39 All of these items would be rare luxuries in the Gulag, half a century later.
If life in Czarist exile did become intolerably unpleasant, there was always escape. Stalin himself was arrested and exiled four times. Three times he escaped, once from Irkutsk province and twice from Vologda province, a region which later became pockmarked with camps.40 As a result, his scorn for the Czarist regime’s “toothlessness” knew no bounds. His Russian biographer Dmitri Volkogonov characterized his opinion like this: “You didn’t have to work, you could read to your heart’s content and you could even escape, which required only the will to do so.”41
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