Rudolf Gotman was born in 1922 to a Lutheran German family from the Crimea. The Gotmans were categorized as ‘kulaks’ and exiled to the wilderness near Arkhangelsk in 1931. When the war broke out Rudolf was picked up by the NKVD as a ‘German national’ (in fact his ancestors had lived in Russia since 1831) and sent to work in the coal mines of the Donbass. There he was conscripted by a labour brigade made up of a hundred young men from ‘German’ families and sent to work in a food-processing factory in Solikamsk, in the northern Urals. In the autumn of 1942, the men were sent to a nearby logging camp to fell timber. They lived in barracks, slept on wooden benches, and were given starvation-level rations. Made to work in freezing temperatures, more than half the brigade members died in the first winter. The NKVD guards, who supervised the brigade, showed no mercy for the ‘German’ boys and called them ‘Fascist scum’. Rudolf survived by virtue of the fact that he was injured and taken to hospital: otherwise he would have died from exhaustion. He remained in the labour army for the next fourteen years. He worked in factories, Soviet farms and construction sites and was even sent to the Caucasus to build dachas for Stalin, Molotov and Beria. He did not receive any pay until 1948, and was not allowed to leave the labour army until 1956, as part of the general amnesty for Gulag prisoners.59
It was not just ‘non-Russians’ who were rounded up by the labour army. Former ‘kulaks’ were also vulnerable to conscription. Ivan Bragin from the Suksun region in the Urals was mobilized by the labour army in the autumn of 1943, ten years after he had been exiled as a ‘kulak’ to a ‘special settlement’ attached to the pulp-and-paper mill at Krasnokamsk near Perm. Almost blind from the chemicals used at the mill and semi-paralysed with rheumatic pains, Ivan was sent to work at a logging camp near Kotlas. Conscription was a punishment for complaining after he had not received his full ration at the mill. Unable to cope with the heavy labour at the logging camp (he could barely see the trees he was meant to cut), Ivan soon fell ill in the freezing temperatures. ‘My legs have swollen up,’ he wrote to his family in Krasnokamsk. ‘They are so big that I cannot even put my trousers on.’ The food in the camp was very bad and not sufficient to maintain his strength. The work was terribly hard. One day in the autumn of 1943 Ivan collapsed from exhaustion. He was taken to a hospital, where he slowly recovered. In January 1944, Ivan wrote to tell his family that his feet were ‘showing signs of life at last’. He was hopeful that he would soon be released from the hospital and that as an invalid he would be allowed to return to his family. It was a treacherous winter journey from Kotlas to Suksun, 1,000 kilometres away, and Ivan was afraid to leave before the spring, in case he became ‘dizzy from the frosty air and fell down on the ice’, but he was determined to walk back once he had regained his strength. ‘All I need is a pair of large felt boots and I shall come home.’ Ivan was released from the labour camp in February 1944, long before he was fit to begin his long journey. He never made it home. A few hundred metres from the hospital he slipped and fell on the icy road and froze to death.60
Ivan Bragin and his family, 1937
Gulag labour also played an important part in the wartime economy, producing perhaps 15 per cent of all Soviet ammunition, a large proportion of the army’s uniforms and much of its food. The population of the camps declined during 1941–3, as half a million prisoners were released to ‘redeem their guilt’ by fighting at the front, but from the end of 1943 it increased sharply, as the Soviet army swept across the territories abandoned by the Germans and the NKVD units, which followed in its wake, arrested hundreds of thousands of people suspected of collaborating with the enemy or of supporting nationalist insurgencies opposed to the Soviet regime. The exploitation of this Gulag labour force became more intense during the war. In mines and logging camps, prisoners were driven to the brink of death to increase fuel supplies, while rations were reduced to the bare minimum required to keep them alive. In 1942, the rate of mortality in the Gulag labour camps was a staggering 25 per cent – that is, one in every four Gulag workers died that year.61
Alongside the logging camps and mines, a new type of Gulag economy developed in the war, one in which prison labour was attached to factories and construction sites in large-scale industrial zones (Gulag cities) under the control of the NKVD. The Norilsk complex in the Arctic Circle is a good example of this new type of industrial development. The Norilsk region’s huge reserves of nickel, platinum and copper were discovered by geologists in the 1920s, but the first large survey was not carried out until 1930, when the precious ores became essential to the programme of industrialization. Norilsk contained about a quarter of the world’s known deposits of nickel (used in the production of high-grade steel) and over one-third of its reserves of platinum. The natural conditions of the region were highly favourable for mining and processing these ores because of the large deposits of coal, which served as a power supply for smelting and transportation to the Kara Sea. But the region was virtually uninhabitable. Winter temperatures dropped to minus 45 degrees. There were almost constant snow blizzards. It was dark for several months a year. And then in the summer the ground turned into marshland, and human beings were eaten by the mosquitoes. No labourers would go to Norilsk of their own accord.
In 1935, the development of the region was handed over to the Gulag administration of the NKVD, which had a growing reputation for managing large-scale building projects in remote regions where the civilian ministries were reluctant to operate (the Ministry of Heavy Industry, which was responsible for metallurgy, had refused to take on the Norilsk project). The Norilsk camp and mining complex were dug from the permafrost by 1,200 Gulag prisoners using only pickaxes and wheelbarrows. By 1939, the number of prisoners had risen to 10,000, though many more had died in the meantime. The Gulag administration in Moscow became impatient with the slow progress. In 1939, the first director of Norilsk, Vladimir Matveyev, was arrested and sent to a labour camp for fifteen years. He was replaced by Avraam Zaveniagin, the dynamic former head of the mining complex at Magnitogorsk. The appointment was a sign of the importance which the regime attached to the project at Norilsk. The military demand for high-grade steel made the nickel of Norilsk vitally important in the war. Norilsk’s work regime intensified. From 1941 to 1944, Group A prisoners (who worked in production or construction) had less than three days off each month (many former prisoners do not recall any days off work at all); all the prisoners worked eleven-hour shifts; and fewer days were lost through bad weather (during snowstorms they would walk to work by holding on to ropes). Zaveniagin introduced a system of incentives and rewards – better living quarters, clothes and food rations, even small monetary rewards – for ‘Stakhanovite’ prisoners who exceeded their norms (about one in five in 1943). He also increased the number of free workers and ‘volunteers’ (there were about 10,000 by the end of the war) by offering them managerial and specialist positions. But the biggest growth took place in the number of prison labourers, which reached 100,000 by 1944.62
Prisoners were brought to Norilsk from all corners of the Soviet Union, especially from Ukraine, the northern Caucasus and the Baltic region, where the mass arrests of ‘nationalists’ and ‘collaborators with the enemy’ were largely motivated by the need to supply the Gulag with labour. The long journey to Norilsk began by train to Krasnoiarsk, the capital of the Siberian administrative region in which Norilsk was located, 2,000 kilometres to the south of the labour camp. From Krasnoiarsk the prisoners were brought by steamboat on the Yenisei River to Dudinka, the port for the Norilsk complex, and then transported to the camp by rail. The Arctic wilderness around Norilsk was so remote that there was no need to build a fence for the labour camp. No prisoner in his right mind would think of trying to escape, and no one ever did (although there were tales about escapes across the Arctic Sea to Alaska, 5,000 kilometres away).63
Vasilina Dmitruk was fifteen when she was sent to Norilsk. Born into a large peasant family in the Ternopol region of western Ukraine, she was one of several dozen w
omen accused of supporting the Ukrainian nationalist partisans and rounded up by the NKVD units attached to the Red Army after the recapture of her village in 1943 (the young men were all conscripted by the Red Army). Taken to the local town, the girls were beaten by their Russian NKVD interrogators until they
Norilsk Labour Camp and Mining Complex (Gorlag) Based on a map drawn by Leonid Konovalov, a prisoner of Norilsk, in 1949. Konovalov’s map is unreliable in teh numjbering of the camp zones, and the ‘execution area’ may not have been as large as the prisoners imagined it. (source: MM, f. I, op.I, d. 242)
confessed to ‘treason against the motherland’ (a charge which many of them could not understand because they did not speak Russian). They were then tried (again in Russian) by a military tribunal, which sentenced them to ten years in Norilsk. They were put to work on the construction of the Norilsk aerodrome. Despite the freezing temperatures, their only shelter was a large tent, which they shared with several hundred other young Ukrainian women, who had been brought to Norilsk in a similar fashion.64
Anna Darvina was sixteen and studying at a school in the town of Uiar, 120 kilometres east of Krasnoiarsk, when she was rounded up as a ‘voluntary labourer’ and sent to Norilsk. She was one of about a thousand so-called ‘Komsomol volunteers’ who were brought to Norilsk by force from the Krasnoiarsk region in September 1943. ‘A large crowd met us at the station in Norilsk. There was a choir and an orchestra,’ Anna remembers.
It was cold when we stepped out of the train. We had left in our sandals, but there was already snow on the ground. The people were very poor. They were dressed in rags. But they gave us blankets and felt boots. They thought that we were volunteers. They had been told that we were the orphans of soldiers who had been killed in the war. But in fact all of us had been captured and sent by the military, without any choice on our part. There was a war, and the military needed all of us, however weak, as labourers.65
Semyon Golovko was eighteen when he came to Norilsk in 1943. He was born in the Stavropol region of the northern Caucasus, the second of eleven children in a Cossack family which was categorized as ‘kulak’ and lost all its property during collectivization. Semyon’s father and older brother were both killed in the Red Army near Smolensk in June 1941. As the oldest surviving male, Semyon was left in charge of his family. He gave up school and went to work as a tractor driver on a collective farm to support his mother and the other nine children. In September 1942, as the Germans overran the northern Caucasus, Semyon joined the Red partisans, but he was captured by the Germans, who forced him to join their auxiliary police (Schutzmannschaft) by threatening to shoot his family. Four months later, the area was recaptured by the Red Army. Semyon was arrested as a ‘collaborator with the enemy’ and sent to Norilsk. He worked in various mines and factories and soon became a brigade leader and even a Stakhanovite. He won several medals for his contribution to the war effort as a Gulag labourer.66
Olga Lobacheva, a leading mineralogist, was sent to Norilsk in 1944. Following the arrest of her husband in 1938, she was sentenced to eight years for ‘counter-revolutionary agitation’ and ultimately ended up in a labour camp in Siberia. While in the camp, she gave birth to a son who was sent to an orphanage. In the autumn of 1943, Olga was drafted as a specialist by the NKVD and assigned to the Norilsk mines. For six weeks she was imprisoned in Marinsk, 350 kilometres west of Krasnoiarsk, where a whole convoy of geologists and other mining specialists was gradually assembled from the labour camps of Siberia. Transferred to Krasnoiarsk for the long journey north, Olga was declared unfit to travel by a medical commission (she had pneumonia) and was sent to the Taishet labour camp, 400 kilometres to the east. Taishet was known by prisoners as the ‘camp of death’ because it was full of invalids and old people who were left to die. Shortly after her arrival in Taishet, Olga was drafted once again by the NKVD. Despite her pneumonia, she was reassigned for immediate transfer to Norilsk. She travelled in a convoy of engineers, electricians, metallurgists and builders, flying from Krasnoiarsk in a special NKVD plane to speed up the arrival of these specialists. Olga worked as a geological researcher in the technical sector, where she was reunited with many of her friends from university.67
Among those friends was Elizaveta Drabkina, the young girl who had recognized her long-lost father Sergei Gusev, the Bolshevik revolutionary, in the canteen of the Smolny Institute in October 1917. Elizaveta had been arrested as a ‘Trotskyist’ in December 1936 and sentenced to five years in the Iaroslavl jail. In 1939, her sentence was extended to fifteen years, and she was sent to serve them in the Norilsk labour camp. For the first three years she worked in the coal mines, but then she was transferred to the technical sector, where she was employed as a translator of imported books and manuals. Elizaveta worked like a real Stakhanovite, from genuinely patriotic commitment. She felt that she was contributing to the Soviet economy through her work in the labour camp. Between 1941 and 1945 she appealed to join the army at the front on four separate occasions. Her appeals were denied, but Elizaveta was nonetheless rewarded for her industry with a room in the zone for specialists. She lived there with her husband, Aleksandr Daniets, the son of a repressed Bolshevik, who had been arrested in 1938. They had previously been friends in Leningrad. Their former neighbours from Norilsk recall them as a quiet couple with a dog. Drabkina was deaf, the result of an accident in the mines, and this made it hard for them to socialize. They had a small circle of friends with whom they formed a Marxist study group – the works of Marx and Lenin were available in the camp’s library – but they were suspicious of outsiders. In 1945, a member of their circle was arrested and later executed for ‘counterrevolutionary agitation’. Suspecting that their circle had been infiltrated by a prisoner working for the NKVD, they closed down their study group and went underground, meeting their friends secretly on the road to the graveyard when they walked their dog. Elizaveta and her husband were both fluent in several languages. When they were at home, they spoke in French to protect themselves against unwanted listeners in the next room.68
4
Some time at the end of the 1940s Akhmatova was walking with Nadezhda Mandelshtam in Leningrad when she suddenly remarked: ‘To think that the best years of our life were during the war when so many people were being killed, when we were starving and my son was doing forced labour.’ For anyone who suffered from the terror of the 1930s, as Akhmatova had done, the war must have come as a release. As Pasternak would write in the epilogue of Doctor Zhivago (1957), ‘When the war broke out, its real horrors, its menace of real death, were a blessing compared with the inhuman power of the lie, a relief because it broke the spell of the dead letter.’ The relief was palpable. People were allowed to act in ways that would have been unthinkable before the war. By necessity, they were thrown back on their own initiative – they spoke to one another and helped each other without thinking of the political dangers to themselves; and from this spontaneous activity a new sense of nationhood emerged. The war years, for this reason, would come to be recalled with nostalgia. They were remembered as ‘a period of vitality’, in the words of Pasternak, as an ‘untrammelled, joyous restoration of the sense of community with everyone’.69
For the writer Viacheslav Kondratiev, that feeling of belonging was the defining feature of the time:
We are proud of those years, and this nostalgia for the front stirs all of us, not because they were the years of our youth, which is always recalled with fondness, but because then we felt ourselves to be citizens in the truest sense of the word. It was a feeling which we did not have before or afterwards.70
The renewed sense of personal and collective responsibility was evident, especially in the period from 1941 to 1943, when the infrastructure of the Stalinist regime had virtually collapsed as a result of the German invasion, and people had to rely on their own resources and make their own decisions about how to act. The historian Mikhail Gefter, then an army doctor, describes these years as a period of ‘spontaneous de-Stalinizatio
n’:
Before our eyes – a person subject to the whim of fate, unexpectedly, in the face of death, finds the freedom to take command of himself… As an eye-witness and a historian I can attest: in ’41 and ’42 there were a multitude of situations and decisions that constituted a process of spontaneous de-Stalinization… We remained Russian, Soviet, but in those years the universal human spirit also entered into us.
For Ada Levidova, who spent the war years working in a medical institute, this spontaneous de-Stalinization was reflected in a shift of power from the Party officials, who formally controlled the hospital, to the doctors and nurses: ‘There were far too many instances when a crucial life-and-death decision needed to be made by the people on the job, without authorization from the authorities, when we had to act, or improvise, without regard for the official rules.’71
People had a sense of being needed by the war effort. They felt that they could make a difference. From this feeling of involvement they derived a sense of civic freedom and individual responsibility. Hedrick Smith records a conversation in the house of a Jewish scientist in the early 1970s. The scientist had said that the war was ‘the best time of our lives’ and explained to his shocked friends:
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