There was method to this madness. From the very beginning of his Five-Year Plans, Stalin, in an elaboration of Trotsky’s system of compulsory labor, had striven to assemble a vast forced labor pool that, as one writer put it succinctly, “could be rigidly controlled, employed under harsh environmental conditions, and easily maneuvered from place to place according to need.”701 Hundreds of “corrective labor” camps were established in European Russia, Central Asia, and Siberia, and eventually dotted the hinterland as numerously as the old Cossack forts. In theory, “corrective labor” was supposed to reeducate all those who failed to accept a socialist way of life, but the Gulag (an acronym for the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps) ran a system of lagers, or camps, which in fact were devoted only to the fulfillment of various “plans” and “norms.” Over time, the camps pitilessly took the lives of millions, and many of Stalin’s so-called “socialist achievements” were accomplished with their blood, sweat, and tears.
Stalin’s primary initial challenge, as he saw it, was rapid development without foreign investments. Foreign loans were almost impossible to obtain because the government had ruined its credit by repudiating its foreign debt in 1917. And the loans the government could get (at usurious interest) were small. Since the government had no capital to invest in the new industrialization, it invested human lives. Forced labor became the “fixed capital” of the effort, and the concentration camp the major economic institution of the state. The result was a slave-labor economy.
The theoretical precedent for Stalin’s methods of detention and imprisonment was administrative exile under the tsars. Most political prisoners were sentenced under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of 1927 – an article so broad in its application, Solzhenitsyn noted, that “in all truth, there is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens that could not be punished by its heavy hand.”702 Any mistake (like the misalignment of a pipe in a construction project), or the failure to satisfy an expected result (say, in the delivery of grain) could be seized upon and punished (even with execution) as a crime against the state. Investigations into an explosion in the Tsentralnaya Mine at Kemerovo in September 1936 exposed a whole “nest” of Trotskyites in Western Siberian industry; a series of pit fires in the nearby coal mines of Prokopyevsk likewise turned up evidence of sabotage. Again, any complaint could be considered “anti-state propaganda”; and the mere acquaintance with a foreign language could lead to the charge of espionage. One man was sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor just for studying Esperanto; another, a geologist, for failing to find conjectured deposits of ore. Priests, shamans, or other religious figures, or anyone with ethnic pride unwilling to be homogenized as a “Soviet person,” were automatically guilty of capital crimes.
No one was safe. Indeed, Party faithfuls were among the first to be rounded up – men like Karlo Stajner, a Viennese Communist, who in his idealistic youth had helped establish an underground revolutionary press in Yugoslavia, and was subsequently transferred to publishing duties in Moscow. In 1932, when he came to the Soviet Union, he was, he tells us, “the happiest man on earth. Nothing was more precious to me than the Communist Party…At long last, I was in the land of my dreams.”703 In November 1936, however, he was suddenly arrested, and discovered, to his perplexed surprise, that a large proportion of his fellow political prisoners were actually dedicated Communists like himself. Almost no one knew why they had been taken into custody, and almost everyone was sure it was some absurd mistake. In time, they learned that everyone arrested was ipso facto guilty – otherwise, why had they been picked up? After a long pre-trial detention and then a trial that lasted about twenty minutes without benefit of attorney, Stajner was sentenced to ten years “under severe regime.” “Arrests rolled through the streets and apartment houses like an epidemic,” wrote Solzhenitsyn. “Just as people transmit an epidemic infection from one to another without knowing it, by such innocent means as a handshake, a breath, handing someone something, so, too, they passed on the infection of inevitable arrest.”704 Before long, the whole country was covered with labor camps, “as if with a mysterious rash.”705
After sentence, the prisoners were crammed into navy blue Black Marias – prison vans disguised to look like grocery trucks, and often emblazoned with the words “Bread” or “Meat” – and taken to railroad depots or docks. There they were transferred to unheated cattle trucks or “Stolypin cars” – the latter divided into windowless compartments with wire-grating doors – or thrown into the holds of barges, to be carried in torment to their destinations. Some of the prison trains were “virtual cities on wheels,” with fifty or more 60-ton freight cars, carrying six or seven thousand prisoners at a time.706 On top of every car a machine gunner was ensconced in a raised compartment, while searchlights mounted at either end of the train lit it up completely at night.
Even before the camps were reached, transport conditions were such that many perished from starvation or exposure. With four thousand others, for example, Stajner was herded into a freighter designed to carry lumber and taken to Dudinka (at the mouth of the Yenisey) through Arctic seas. “A cattle transport,” he wrote, “would have been organized more humanely. The most elementary necessities, things to which every human being, even a captive, has a right, were lacking; only monsters could have planned something like this. We couldn’t even stretch out on the damp, naked boards.”707 Fights broke out over morsels of food; and in the stormy seas, overflowing barrels of excrement and urine splashed over the prisoners in the hold. Water, moreover, was rationed so sparely that a number of the captives died. “One night,” recalled another eyewitness at Tayshet, “a goods train arrived, crammed with people, in terrible sub-zero temperatures. They opened one carriage, and a whole pack of dogs and soldiers with machine guns came rushing out into the snow. But when they opened the sixth carriage, no one jumped out. When we looked inside, we saw a horrifying picture. Everybody inside was stuck together, frozen solid in batches of two, three, four people... They were just blocks of ice.”708
Sentimentality being cruelty’s obverse side, it seems grotesquely fitting that during this exceptionally savage time some of the Trans-Siberian locomotives were adorned on the front with the tender features of Lenin as a baby. And while prisoners were being transported in veritable torture chambers, Stalin and his henchmen had built for themselves a “Lux Blue Express,” which whisked them to and from their pleasure resorts: