Russia's War

by Richard Overy

  It was food that kept the system going. The quantities were low, the food was often adulterated and its supply unpredictable, but the regime made strenuous efforts to avoid the mistakes which had led to revolution in 1917. A comprehensive system of ration standards was introduced in July 1941. They were not uniform. Children and elderly dependants got very little, around 700 calories a day; those who worked literally at the coalface got over 4,000. Most ordinary workers got between 1,300 and 1,900, well below what was needed to sustain the interminable routine of work with efficiency, but enough to keep it going.5

  Very soon the population found ways to supplement the monotonous diet of grey bread, potatoes and perhaps a quarter pound of meat and fat a week. The Government gave permission to set up urban gardens. By 1942 there were over five million of them, by 1944 over sixteen million, sown in parks and public gardens or in long ribbons beside the roads to the cities.6 How workers found the time to play part-time peasant is hard to understand. Even more extraordinary was the yield: by 1944 they supplied one-quarter of the country's potato crop. ‘Digging for victory’ became an everyday part of urban life. So too did pilfering. Food shortages created a crime wave across Russia. The gardens were difficult to guard; food stores were regularly looted. In 1943 600,000 ‘social controllers’ were appointed to stand guard over food supplies or to report thieves to the authorities. Food theft carried the death penalty.7

  Another source of food was the black market. The authorities turned a blind eye to the food trade. Anything left after the fixed state quotas – around 90 per cent of production on the collective farms – was left to the peasants to sell at any price they could get. They gathered at the city food markets, selling food openly at more than twenty times what it had cost in 1941. An American visitor at the Moscow central market in 1944 found that a kilo of bread cost almost the equivalent of a week's wages. The whole covered area was a gigantic bazaar, crowded with Muscovites eager to barter. Women sold honey or flowers at vastly inflated prices; one old lady offered a calf's head ‘with the hair on and glassy eyes open’, infested with flies; other women, defying Communist morality, offered the farmers sex in exchange for food, ‘big, strapping girls… all fixed up with lipstick, red shoes, red ribbons in their hats, their eyelashes smeared with stove blacking’.8

  Few ordinary Russians could afford the prices unless they had something precious to trade with. For many workers the factory, for all its forbidding, exhausting routine, became a source of nourishment and warmth. Canteens provided a warm meal at least once a day. Nurseries were built so that mothers could work. Factories set up their own farms and stored food to reward the workers. Bonuses for work above the norms were paid in food, since money meant little in the market-place. For the new wave of wartime Stakhanovites – and there were many – consistent high performance earned a place at the special tables in the canteens reserved for exceptional workers, who got exceptional diets. Workers who volunteered to give blood regularly for the medical services at the front got a month's salary, a three-course meal, 500 grams of butter or sugar and an extra ration card. In Moscow alone up to 300,000 people gave blood. Thousands who did not qualify for food cards gave blood to keep alive – blood for food, food for blood.9

  The Soviet home front kept going, despite the massive losses on the battlefield, the shattered families, the stream of refugees and migrants, the constant struggle for food and necessities, the tough regimen of labour. It was an extraordinary collective achievement for a system that was widely regarded in the West as primitive and fragile, dominated by the heavy hand of state planning. In the chaotic circumstances of the early months of war the regime resorted to emergency measures and hectic improvisation, which worked more effectively than the desperate military measures, in part because civilian officials, unlike military ones, did not have to account to a military commissar for every move. Slowly a more settled and centralized planning system was installed. It was based on that of the peacetime economy, which proved readily adaptable to the peculiar circumstances of wartime organization.10 The Five-Year Plans had familiarized officials and producers with national planning and the allocation of resources. It is unlikely that any other system would have succeeded in extracting either the food or the weapons, given the conditions that existed after the invasion. Planning did not work perfectly. In Kuibyshev at times workers were given chocolate instead of bread until they grew sick of it; the coveted meat ration sometimes turned out to be pickles or jam, or whatever the city authorities had to spare.11 But on balance the ability of a shrunken economy, with severe shortages of food, materials and labour, to out-produce its seemingly more prosperous and productive enemy can be explained only by the corresponding ability of the Soviet state to keep a grip on its scarce resources and their allocation.

  The more sinister face of state power was never very far away. The Gulag prisons beckoned for any act of dissent or negligence, for the theft of a ration card or food or the ‘sabotage’ of production targets. The network of camps was drawn into the war effort along with the rest of Soviet society. They provided, as they had done in the 1930s, a ready supply of captive workers for state projects.12 Until the opening of Soviet archives in the 1980s the nature and extent of the system were open to speculation, though the recollections of its victims long ago revealed the cruel price of Soviet slavery. Now a great deal more is known about the details of the system itself. The Gulag (the name is an acronym of Main Directorate of Corrective Labour Camps) controlled only a fraction of the slave labour force. High wartime death rates from malnutrition and disease and the release of some of the inmates reduced the number of Gulag prisoners in its fifty-three camps from 1.2 million in 1942 to 660,000 in 1945.13 For prisoners on short sentences there was a separate ‘labour colony¹ organization that by 1945 held 850,000 prisoners, in conditions often worse than those of the Gulag. The NKVD prison population added another quarter of a million. The largest group consisted of deportees who were resettled in Siberia or Kazakhstan, a total of 1.4 million. The total of these and all other categories of forced labour was 4.3 million in 1942, falling slightly to 3.9 million in 1945; they were held in a total of 131 camps and colonies, and 1,142 smaller branch camps, in which conditions were often poorer from lack of effective supervision.14

  These figures on the size of the camp labour force are substantially below the older estimates, which ranged from 10 million to 20 million, but the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the more modest sums. As they stand the statistics are bleak enough. They do not cover all of those who passed into and out of the camp system at some time between 1941 and 1945. During the war years 2.4 million were sent to the Gulag and 1.9 million were freed. These figures make clear that a substantially larger number of people experienced prison life at some time during the war than the figures on the size of the prison population at any one time suggest. Nor do the figures on those inside the camps indicate the numbers who died in transit, who were killed deliberately, or who perished from the cold, hunger or disease. The official figures show 621,000 deaths in the Gulag.15

  This is the tip of an iceberg whose exact size may never be known. The labour colonies had a higher death rate than the Gulag camps for most of the war. In 1942 the death rate reached 27 per cent, against a figure of only 2.4 per cent in the first half of 1941.16 Most died from malnutrition and disease. The millions deported to Siberia suffered particular hardships. They were packed in railroad cars with little or nothing to eat and drink; the bodies of those who died were unceremoniously dumped beside the railway track. When they arrived they were left in open fields, behind wire, with no more than tents to shelter them. Death came from neglect rather than from murder. Violent death was, by the war period, more unusual. In the camps death was meted out for insurrection or camp crime. The toughest criminals were sent to the camps along with political prisoners; they formed a kind of mafia in the prison, intimidating, murdering and robbing other inmates. Genuine dissidents always ran a risk. In 1942 the NKVD was
ordered to murder all prisoners suspected of Trotskyite sympathies, though how many were actually killed remains unknown.

  The camp and colony population came from all parts of the Soviet Union and all walks of life. The majority were ethnic Russians, almost two-thirds in 1944.17 Many were genuine criminals and sociopaths. Some were genuine dissidents in the eyes of the regime, like the artillery officer and future novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or the engineer Dmitri Panin, both of whom have left vivid accounts of life inside the camps. But most were innocent of any crime, political or otherwise. They were peasants unable to fill grain quotas, workers who failed to keep time, thousands who were guilty of nothing more dangerous than conversations with foreigners. Women who fraternized with Westerners at the transit ports for Lend-Lease goods or with the foreign legations in Moscow found themselves classified as spies and swelled the growing number of women in the camps and labour colonies. For the regime the nature of the deviancy did not matter a great deal. The camps came to be seen as a convenient source of emergency labour. When one harassed Gulag official was asked for more workers he replied, ‘What are we to do? The fact is we haven't as yet fulfilled our plans for imprisonments. Demand is greater than supply.’18

  The descriptions of camp life all reveal an unbroken cycle of deprivation and wretchedness. Though thousands died from the effects of cold, poor diet and disease, they were not extermination camps like Auschwitz. The NKVD had separate ‘execution camps’ where prisoners were kept whose fate was the standard bullet in the back of the neck. The object of the labour camps was to use the raw labour power of the unfortunate inmates to carve out quarries, dig canals and roads or work in mines in areas so remote and frozen that no one else would work there. For many this meant a slow death. In 1943 a new category of heavy labour (katorga) was introduced for the worst offences. Heavy labour meant twelve-hour shifts with no rest days and small quantities of potatoes and soup. According to one estimate these conditions were bad enough to kill off 28,000 prisoners sent to the Vorkuta mines in their first year of operation.19

  Camp life was primitive and brutal. Prisoners lived in wooden barracks, which were often poorly heated. They slept in bunks on crude bedding stuffed with straw or wood shavings, set in tiers of two or three. They were summoned at five o'clock in the morning for roll call. They then set off in work details dressed in crude boots and jerkins. In winter, when the temperature seldom rose above minus thirty degrees, they were inadequately clothed. Food was poor and served at irregular intervals. Twelve-hour shifts were worked without a meal. Prisoners stole or bartered for extra food. A curious residual trade flourished in the camps among prisoners and between prisoners and guards. In the evening there was a second roll call; the counting continued until all those who had become sick, died, escaped or simply fallen asleep beyond waking were satisfactorily accounted for. When the dead were carried out of the camp gate in makeshift coffins, the guards in Panin's camp drove a bayonet through the head of each corpse to ensure that no one feigning death should escape. The routine of prison life was repeated day in, day out. In most of the prisoners it produced a dull resignation. At the end of a day in his camp, Solzhenitsyn's anti-hero Ivan Denisovich did not know ‘whether he wanted freedom or not… Freedom meant one thing to him – home. But they wouldn't let him go home.’20

  During the war the camp population became an emergency source of labour, shifted from one project to another and from one ministry to another, as the need dictated. There was no alternative to work. A refusal to work brought public beatings and no rations. A third refusal was met by a death sentence, carried out in the sight of the other camp inmates. Only a serious illness – not merely the debilitation brought on by the tough routine – brought exemption, but a serious illness was likely to be fatal. As a result opponents of the regime found themselves compelled to work for the victory of a system they wished to see destroyed. This placed them in fresh danger, for the camps reproduced on a smaller scale the system of arbitrary terror which had put them there in the first place. Camp informers and agents provocateurs were paid in food and favours to denounce their fellow-prisoners for slacking or sabotage.

  One of these ‘double victims’, the engineer Dmitri Panin, found himself in a situation reminiscent of a Kafka novel. An indiscreet critic of the regime, Panin was denounced by an acquaintance in 1939, and arrested and incarcerated in the Vyatka labour camp. As an educated technician he found himself in charge of the camp machine shop, where he was responsible for inspecting the camp's engineering output. Despite his hatred of the regime, he was scrupulous in checking the quality of the goods his workshop produced, since any mistake might have landed him or some other worker in the punishment cells. When the first order came in for casings for anti-personnel mines he supervised the change-over to war production and had the first machine running in twenty-four hours.21 Every day the camp commandant visited Panin to ask whether the production quota had been met, demanding detailed explanations when it was not. Panin realized that he would be held responsible for any mistake. He continued to introduce improvements and speed up production, but finally he fell foul of a camp director named Yevko, a former member of the secret police, whose attempt to introduce an unsuitable machine into the workshop was vetoed by Panin. A few months later Panin was arrested with twenty-seven other prisoners as an ‘insurrectionist’, having been betrayed to the unsympathetic Yevko by several camp informers with grudges against him. He was arrested by armed men and held with almost nothing to eat in a punishment cell. Production at the workshop declined. Panin defended himself as a valuable expert: ‘I am only a prisoner, but I nevertheless set up our war-production line and got it moving.’ It made no difference. He was accused and convicted of a range of implausible crimes and given ten years' katorga . (Convicted with him was a former lighthouse-keeper who had been imprisoned in the first place on the unlikely charge that he was spreading anti-Soviet propaganda from his isolated look-out.) He nearly starved in the punishment block and survived a murder attempt by a deranged serial killer with whom he was forced to share a cell, before being transported to the notorious Vorkuta mines after the war's end.22

  The camps made a formidable contribution to the war effort, thanks in part to men like Panin. The Gulag camps produced approximately 15 per cent of all Soviet ammunition, including 9.2 million anti-personnel mines and 25.5 million large-calibre shells; they produced uniforms, leather goods, 1.7 million gas masks and large quantities of food. Over 2 million prisoners were used on railways and roads, in mines and lumber plants. They were a new breed of serf – mere objects, unfree and expendable, passed from one hand to another for their labour alone, as many of their grandfathers had been.23

  During 1944, as each German-occupied territory fell to the Soviet advance, Stalin began to exact a terrible revenge upon the millions of Soviet people who were accused of collaboration with the fascist enemy – reviving the spirit and practices of the civil war. The axe fell not only on those individuals who had worked for the German authorities or fought in military units organized by the German army, many of whom were executed out of hand, but on whole nations. Stalin had never been a friend to the many non-Russian peoples. Ever since the early 1920s, when as Commissar for the Nationalities he used brute force to unite them under Russian Communist rule, Stalin had entertained a deep distrust of nationalism. Never one to embrace half-measures, Stalin used the war as an opportunity to settle scores with any nationality whose loyalty he doubted.

  The first victims were the Volga Germans. They were Russians of German descent who had settled on the reaches of the Volga river several centuries before. They were no longer ‘Germans’ in any real sense, but to Moscow their German roots were enough to condemn them. In August 1941 Soviet parachutists dressed in German uniforms were dropped among the villages of the Volga German Autonomous Region. They asked to be hidden until the German invaders arrived. Where villagers complied the NKVD wiped out the inhabitants: the test of loyalty had been failed. On
28 August 1941 the area was formally abolished and the population of more than 600,000 was deported to western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan, on the grounds that they constituted an army of ‘wreckers and spies’, although only nine cases had been brought by the security authorities against Volga Germans since the beginning of the war. 24 In all, over 948,000 Soviet citizens of German descent from all over the Soviet Union were sent east, loaded into the familiar cattle cars for a long, airless, foodless trek, and discarded in open country, where they were compelled to fight hunger and the elements with nothing more than the small bundles of possessions they had been allowed to bring.25 They were only casually supervised by the NKVD. Thousands died from the familiar killers, hunger, cold and disease. One letter from a woman exiled to the Kirghiz steppe betrays the full horror of the deportations:

  ... [T]here is nothing but grey emptiness. We live in a hut. The sun burns terribly; when it rains the hut leaks, all our things are wet. We sleep on the ground. We work all day till we fall. We have been forced to work on the dungheaps, mixing dung by hand with fertilizer eight hours a day, even during the worst heat. The only reward once every ten days is a kilo of black, sour flour.26

  The exiles lived under a regime that was less rigid and brutal than the camps, but one that was paradoxically more fatal.