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Stalin and Yezhov did not always send outsiders from Moscow to carry out such jobs. To speed up the process across the country, the NKVD also organized troikas, operating inside the camps as well as outside them. A troika was just what it sounds like: three men, usually the regional NKVD chief, the Chief Party Secretary of the province, and a representative of the prosecutor’s office or of the local government. Together, they had the right to pass sentence on a prisoner in absentia, without benefit of judge, jury, lawyers, or trial.46
Evgeniya
in 1939, under Beria’s watchful eye, the first prisoners began working in Kolyma’s uranium mines with virtually no protection against radiation.59
Tupolev, in turn, gave Beria a list of others to recall, among them Valentin Glushko, the Soviet Union’s leading designer of rocket engines, and Sergei Korolev, later to be the father of the Sputnik, the Soviet Union’s first satellite—indeed the father of the entire Soviet space program. Korolev returned to Lubyanka prison after seventeen months in Kolyma, having lost many of his teeth to scurvy, looking “famished and exhausted,” in the words of his fellow prisoners.
On the one hand, from the middle of the 1920s—by the time the machinery of the Soviet repressive system was in place—the Soviet government no longer picked people up off the streets and threw them in jail without giving any reason or explanation: there were arrests, investigations, trials, and sentences. On the other hand, the “crimes” for which people were arrested, tried, and sentenced were nonsensical, and the procedures by which people were investigated and convicted were absurd, even surreal.
Robert Robinson, one of several black American communists who moved to Moscow in the 1930s, later wrote that “Every single black I knew in the early 1930s who became a Soviet citizen disappeared from Moscow within seven years.”2
Of the 394 members of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in January 1936, only 171 remained in April 1938. The rest had been shot or sent to camps, among them people of many nationalities: German, Austrian, Yugoslav, Italian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Baltic, even English and French. Jews appear to have suffered disproportionately. In the end, Stalin killed more members of the pre-1933 German Communist Party Politburo than did Hitler: of the sixty-eight German communist leaders who fled to the Soviet Union after the Nazi seizure of power, forty-one died, by execution or in camps.
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Viktor Abakumov, the wartime head of Soviet counter-intelligence.
By 1939, telling a joke, or hearing one, about Stalin; being late for work; having the misfortune to be named by a terrified friend or a jealous neighbor as a “co-conspirator” in a nonexistent plot; owning four cows in a village where most people owned one; stealing a pair of shoes; being a cousin of Stalin’s wife; stealing a pen and some paper from one’s office in order to give them to a schoolchild who had none; all of these could, under the right circumstances, lead to a sentence in a Soviet concentration camp.
Elinor Lipper, a Dutch communist who had come to Moscow in the 1930s, was living in 1937 in the Hotel Lux, a special hotel for foreign revolutionaries: “every night a few more persons vanished from the hotel . . . in the morning, there would be large red seals pasted on the doors of a few more rooms.”
A Soviet proverb also has it that “Thieves, prostitutes and the NKVD work mostly at night.”
Sofia Aleksandrova, the ex-wife of the Chekist Gleb Boky, was discouraged from taking a summer coat with her when the NKVD came to take her away (“it’s warm tonight and we’ll be back within an hour, at most”), prompting her son-in-law, the writer Lev Razgon, to ponder the strange cruelty of the system: “What was the point of sending a middle-aged woman in not very good health to prison, without even the tiny bag of underclothes and washing things that an arrested person has always been allowed to take with him since the time of the Pharaohs?”
Still others had no trial at all: they were sentenced in absentia, either by an osoboe soveshchanie—a “special commission”—or by a troika of three officials, rather than by a court. Such was the experience of Thomas Sgovio, whose investigation was completely perfunctory. Born in Buffalo, New York, Sgovio had arrived in the Soviet Union in 1935 as a political émigré, the son of an Italian American communist who had been forcibly deported to the Soviet Union from the United States for his political activities. During the three years he lived in Moscow, Sgovio gradually became disillusioned, and
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The evidence against him includes a list of what was found during his first body search: his trade union membership book, his telephone and address book, his library card, a sheet of paper (“with writing in a foreign language”), seven photographs, one penknife, and an envelope containing foreign postage stamps, among other things. There is a statement from Captain of State Security, Comrade Sorokin, testifying that the accused walked into the U.S. Embassy on March 12, 1938. There is a statement from a witness, testifying that the accused left the U.S. Embassy at 1:15 p.m. The file also
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The operation began with NKVD Order 00485, an order that set the pattern for later mass arrests. Operational Order 00485 clearly listed the sort of person who was to be arrested: all remaining Polish war prisoners from the 1920–21 Polish-Bolshevik war; all Polish refugees and emigrants to the Soviet Union; anyone who had been a member of a Polish political party; and all “anti-Soviet activists” from Polish-speaking regions of the Soviet Union.57 In practice, anyone of Polish background living in the Soviet Union—and there were many, particularly in the Ukrainian and Belorussian border
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In the late 1930s, Lefortovo became so overcrowded that the NKVD opened an “annex” in the Sukhanovsky monastery outside Moscow. Officially named “Object 110,” and known to prisoners as “Sukhanovka,” the annex acquired a horrific reputation for torture:
One Russian prisoner, Boris Chetverikov, kept sane for sixteen months in solitary by washing his clothes, the floor, the walls—and by singing all the opera arias and songs that he knew.10 Alexander Dolgun was kept in solitary during his interrogation too, and managed to keep his head by walking: he counted the steps in his cells, worked out how many there were to a kilometer, and started “walking,” first across Moscow to the American Embassy—“I breathed in the clear, cold, imaginary air and hugged my coat around me”—then across Europe, and finally across the Atlantic, back home to the United
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These crowded conditions had a particularly harsh effect on those under interrogation, whose entire lives were being subject to intense, hostile questioning every night, and whose days nevertheless had to be spent in the company of others. One prisoner described the effects: The whole process of the disintegration of personality took place before the eyes of everyone in the cell. A man could not hide himself here for an instant; even his bowels had to be moved on the open toilet, situated right in the room. He who wanted to weep, wept before everyone, and the feeling of shame increased his
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Buber-Neumann wrote that “until you got used to it, the night was worse than the day. Try to sleep at night under strong electric light—prisoners are not allowed to cover their faces—on bare planks without even a straw sack or a pillow, and perhaps without even a blanket, pressed against your fellow prisoners on either side.”
the zeks were first transported to the trains in trucks whose very design spoke of the NKVD’s obsession with secrecy. From the outside, the “Black Ravens,” as they were nicknamed, appeared to be regular heavy-goods trucks. In the 1930s, they often had the word “bread” painted on the sides, but later more elaborate ruses were used. One prisoner, arrested in 1948, remembered traveling in one truck marked “Moscow Cutlets” and another labeled “Vegetables/Fruits.”4
The very old and the very young suffered the most. Barbara Armonas, a Lithuanian who had married an American, was deported along with a large group of Lithuanians, men, women, and children. Among them was a woman who had given birth four hours earlier, as well as a paralyzed eighty-three-year-old who could not be kept clean—“very soon everything around her was stinking and she was covered by open sores.” There were also three babies:
Some days were very hot, and the heavy smell in the cars was unbearable and a number of people fell sick. In our car, one two-year-old boy ran a high fever and cried constantly because of pain. The only help his parents could get was a little aspirin which someone gave to them. He grew worse and worse and finally died. At the next stop in an unknown forest the soldiers took his body from the train and presumably buried him. The sorrow and helpless rage of his parents was heartbreaking. Under normal conditions and with medical attention he would not have died. Now, no one even knew for sure
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One Polish woman remembered that “They feed only those who work, but because there are more prisoners than work, some die of hunger . . . Prostitution flowers, like irises on Siberian meadows.” 42
Once past the Japanese coast, prisoners were sometimes allowed up onto the deck in order to use the ship’s few toilets, which were hardly adequate for thousands of prisoners. Memoirists variously recall waiting “2 hours,” “7 or 8 hours,” and “all day” for these toilets.
If one of us dared to raise her head, she was greeted by a rain of fish heads and entrails from above. When any of the seasick criminals threw up, the vomit came straight down upon us.” 53
To Glink’s knowledge, no one was ever punished for rape on board these ships.
Of the 1,402 people sent on echelon SK 950, 1,291 arrived: 53 had died en route, 66 had been left in hospitals along the way. On arrival, a further 335 were hospitalized with third- or fourth-degree frostbite, pneumonia, and other diseases.
On the entrance into one of the Kolyma lagpunkts “hung a plywood rainbow with a banner draped over it which read: ‘Labor in the USSR is a Matter of Honesty, Glory, Valor and Heroism!’”
a labor colony in the suburbs of Irkutsk with the banner: “With Just Work I Will Pay My Debt to the Fatherland.”
Immediately afterward, the prisoners underwent one of the most critical procedures in their lives as inmates: selection— and segregation into categories of worker. This selection process would affect everything from a prisoner’s status in camp, to the type of barrack he lived in, to the type of work he would be assigned to do. All of which might, in turn, determine whether he would live or die. I
compared the selection process he went through in 1946 to a slave market: Everyone was ordered to the courtyard and told to strip. When your name was called you appeared before a medical team for a health inspection. The exam consisted of pulling the skin of your buttocks to determine the amount of muscle. They determined your condition of strength by the muscle content, and if you passed you were accepted and your documents were put in a separate pile. This was done by women in white coats, and they had little choice from this group of living dead. They chose the younger prisoners, regardless
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This clash between what the Gulag administration in Moscow thought the camps were supposed to be, and what they actually were on the ground— the clash between the rules written on paper, and the procedures carried out in practice—was what gave life in the Gulag its peculiar, surreal flavor.
If a prisoner stole clothes, tobacco, or almost anything else and was discovered, he could expect a beating from his fellow prisoners, but the unwritten law of the camp—and I have heard from men from other camps that it was the same everywhere—was that a prisoner caught stealing another’s bread earned a death sentence.147
glance through the Guide to the System of Corrective-Labor Camps in the USSR , the most comprehensive listing of camps to date, reveals the existence of camps organized around gold mines, coal mines, nickel mines; highway and railway construction; arms factories, chemical factories, metal-processing plants, electricity plants; the building of airports, apartment blocks, sewage systems; the digging of peat, the cutting of trees, and the canning of fish.
Whereas in German camps, work was often designed, according to one prominent scholar, to be “principally a means of torture and abuse,” Soviet prisoners were meant to be fulfilling some aspect of the camp’s production plan.
The cloth to wrap up the feet could not be secured tightly, meaning that toes were thereby exposed to frost.” As a result of wearing these shoes, he did indeed get frostbite— which, he reckoned, saved his life, as he was no longer able to work.32
Moscow kept statistics on accidents, and these occasionally provoked irate exchanges between inspectors and camp commanders. One such compilation, for the year 1945, lists 7,124 accidents in the Vorkuta coal mines alone, including 482 that resulted in serious injury and 137 that resulted in death. The inspectors laid the blame on the shortage of miners’ lamps, on electrical failures, and on the inexperience of workers and their frequent rotation. Angrily, the inspectors calculated the number of workdays lost due to accidents: 61,492.44
One archival document lists the following repetoire of an NKVD singing and dancing ensemble, which was touring the camps: The Ballad of Stalin The Cossack Meditation on Stalin The Song of Beria The Song of the Motherland The Fight for the Motherland Everything for the Motherland The Song of the NKVD Warriors The Song of the Chekists The Song of the Distant Frontier Post The March of the Border Guards64
For people shocked and disoriented by their rapid transition from useful citizen to despised prisoner, the experience of “seeing the light” and rejoining Soviet society may have helped them make a psychological recovery from their experiences, as well as providing them with the better conditions that saved their lives. In fact, this question—“Did they believe in what they were doing?”—is actually a small part of a much larger question, one which goes to the heart of the nature of the Soviet Union itself: Did any of its leaders ever believe in what they were were doing? The relationship between
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“In our camps, you were expected not only to be a slave laborer, but to sing and smile while you worked as well. They didn’t just want to oppress us: they wanted us to thank them for it.”
it is a curious fact that quite a number of shtrafnye izolyhateri—“punishment isolaters,” or (using the inevitable acronym) SHIZO
Aino Kuusinen, for example, was in a Potma lagpunkt whose commander built a special punishment barracks for a group of deeply religious women who “refused to work in the fields and spent their time praying aloud and singing hymns.” The women were not fed with the other prisoners, but instead received punishment rations in their own barracks. Armed guards escorted them twice daily to the latrine: “From time to time the commandant would visit their quarters with a whip, and the hut resounded with shrieks of pain: the women were usually stripped before being beaten, but no cruelty could dissuade
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At about the same time, Dalstroi set up a punishment lagpunkt , which became, by the late 1930s, one of the most notorious in the Gulag: Serpantinnaya—or Serpantinka—located in the hills far to the north of Magadan.
At the top of the camp hierarchy were the commanders, the overseers, the warders, the jailers, and the guards. I deliberately write “at the top of” rather than “above” or “outside” the camp hierarchy, for in the Gulag the administrators and guards were not a separate caste, apart and aloof from the prisoners. Unlike the SS guards in German concentration camps, they were not considered immutably, racially superior to the prisoners, whose ethnicity they often shared. There were, for example, many hundreds of thousands of Ukranian prisoners in the camps after the Second World War. There were
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More often, cruelty was not so much sadism as self-interest. Guards who shot escaping prisoners received monetary rewards, and could even be granted a vacation at home. Guards were therefore tempted to encourage such “escapes.” Zhigulin described the result: The guard would shout at someone in the column, “Hey, bring me that plank!” “But it’s across the fence . . .” “Doesn’t matter. Go!” The prisoner would go, and a line of machine-gun fire would follow him.79
the loot for their doggish service.”86 During the war, guards called almost all political prisoners “fascists” or “Hitlerites” or “Vlasovites” (followers of General Vlasov, who deserted the Red Army and supported Hitler).
In the end, nobody forced guards to rescue the young and murder the old. Nobody forced camp commanders to kill off the sick. Nobody forced the Gulag bosses in Moscow to ignore the implications of inspectors’ reports. Yet such decisions were made openly, every day, by guards and administrators apparently convinced they had the right to make them.
urki, the Soviet Union’s professional criminal caste,
They were the cream of the criminal world: murderers, sadists, adept at every kind of sexual perversion . . . without wasting any time they set about terrorizing and bullying the “ladies,” delighted to find that “enemies of the people” were creatures even more despised and outcast than themselves . . . They seized our bits of bread, snatched the last of our rags with our bundles, pushed us out of the places we had managed to find .
And no wonder: the thieves-in-law had a culture very different from that of the average Soviet citizen. Its origins lay deep in the criminal underground of Czarist Russia, in the thieves and beggars guilds which controlled petty crime in that era.8 But it had grown far more widespread during the first decades of the Soviet regime, thanks to the hundreds of thousands of orphans—direct victims of revolution, civil war, and collectivization—who had managed to survive, first as street children, then as thieves. By the late 1920s, when the camps began to expand on a mass scale, the professional
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