The first requisite [of this specially constructed train] was that no noise of the wheels be heard inside the cars, and that they move smoothly. To achieve this a thick coat of lead was poured over the floor of each car; this was covered with a layer of felt, a layer of cork, another layer of felt, a wooden flooring, and yet another layer of felt. Over this was laid a covering of linoleum, and on top of everything a soft rug. The resulting floor was like a feather bed. The rugs laid in the lounge cars cost 5,000 rubles apiece in a special restricted store in Moscow. They could not have been bought in the open market for 50,000. In testing a car a glass brim-full of water was put on a table in one of the compartments; not a drop must spill on the table during the entire trial run. On the outside the cars were painted a deep azure and the roofs sky blue. The paint was covered with a coat of lacquer and polished until not a rough spot or a scratch could be found.709
Every compartment had its special luxuries. The dining car, for example,
provided a wide selection of exquisite delicacies, a great variety of fruits, and the choicest drinks. Before every trip the conductor passed from compartment to compartment, spraying eau de cologne and putting flowers on the tables. During the journey he brought around fruit, candy and the best cigarettes. The most extravagant whims of the generals, marshals, people’s commissars, secretaries of regional party committees were to be satisfied. Stalin’s car had two bedrooms, a sitting room, an office, another office for his secretary, a compartment for the persons accompanying him, a bathroom, and a kitchen. The walls and all the furniture were of mahoghany….
The NKVD kept two girl agents permanently in the train. It was their duty to strike up an acquaintance with the passengers, engage them in conversations in the dining cars, and generally keep their ears open. They were good looking, always well dressed, knew how to behave in society and were always accessible to the important passengers… There was such an abundance of goods around the train that no one kept any account of them. One could bring home from these trips whole cases of caviar, canned goods, wines, and cigarettes.710
Meanwhile, prison barges choked Siberia’s rivers; “strings of carts rolled endlessly through Novosibirsk Province, flanked by convoy troops, emerging from the snow-bound steppe and vanishing into the snow-bound steppe again”711; and Soviet courts throughout the country continued to mete out arbitrary sentences at forced labor just to fill the prison trains.
“One day Larisa Fedorovna went out and did not come back,” wrote Pasternak of his heroine, in the conclusion to Doctor Zhivago. “She must have been arrested in the street at that time. She vanished without a trace and probably died somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterwards got mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.”712
In Stalin’s slave-labor economy, three types of camp were developed: factory and agricultural colonies; camps for work like lumbering and mining; and “punitive” compounds for the special punishment of prisoners from other camps. The actual development of the Gulag system had begun in 1930 with the reorganization of the Northern Camps of Special Designation, created in the early 1920s for White prisoners of the Civil War. Their core was the camp network on the Solovetsky Islands, where a great monastery fortress had been established in the sixteenth century, and where Ivan the Terrible had once confined leading foes of his own despotic regime. Under the tsars, the monastery had continued to double as a prison until 1905. In its Bolshevik transformation it became the prototype of the camps that followed in its wake. “There was hardly a nationality of Russia, a creed, a profession, a class, or a trend of thought that was not represented at Solovki [the main island],”713 write David Dallin and Boris Nikolayevsky in their classic work on the Gulag, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia:
Socialists, Anarchists, so-called “counterrevolutionists,” that is, former members of the “white” movement and rightist enemies of the regime; common criminals and prostitutes; former tradesmen and Soviet merchants who had trusted the NEP; people sentenced as “spies” (actual spies were shot without ado); clergymen of all denominations, especially the Greek Orthodox; workers guilty of striking and peasants accused of rioting; Soviet officials who had served their country body and soul and had been charged with wrecking; delinquent GPU agents; at the end of the ‘twenties Trotskyites and members of other opposition groups within the ruling party – all were present at Solovki. Very few of them served sentences imposed by regular courts. The function of Solovki consisted not so much in punishing lawbreakers as in terrorizing the population into silence... From the Solovetsky Islands the camps spread back to the mainland and, in the course of a few years, expanded far to the east and south.714
Stalin’s economic “pilot project” had been the building of the Baltic-White Sea Canal, where between 1931 and 1933, 250,000 prisoners had labored on a 168-mile-long strategic waterway to join the lakes of Soviet Karelia by canals to link the White and Baltic seas. In order to hoard its hard currency, the government decided not to purchase the appropriate machinery from abroad, but to build the canal by hand. Pile drivers, normally powered by steam, were driven by people, forced into giant human treadmills; food was rationed according to output; cold and hunger killed up to seven hundred a day. Anyone trying to escape was shot. By the time it opened in August 1933, it had cost over sixty thousand lives.
On the Solovetsky Islands, the main camp industries were lumbering, livestock farming, and the processing of fish; elsewhere, the camps developed as clusters for farming, logging, tanning, railroad construction, port work, mining, making bricks, quarrying stone, constructing roads and aerodromes, building hydroelectric plants, metallurgical combines, and even cities – such as Norilsk, Magadan, and Komsomolsk-on-the-Amur, founded in the middle of a swamp 180 miles north of Khabarovsk. In Vorkuta, coal was mined; on Vaygach Island, zinc; at Yugor Strait, fluorite; on Novaya Zemlya, lead. There were camps and camp clusters in and around Tobolsk, Novosibirsk, Narym, Kemerovo, Tomsk, Barnaul, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Yakutsk, Tayshet, Olekminsk, Chita, Khabarovsk, Nikolayevsk, Vladivostok, Gizhiga, and throughout Sakhalin Island, the Kamchatka and Chukchi peninsulas, and the Kolyma Basin – by no means an exhaustive list. There was no province, it has been said, not only in Siberia but throughout the Soviet Empire, “which did not give birth to its own camp.”715
The result was an “archipelago,” in Solzhenitsyn’s famous description; or (in Karlo Stajner’s) “an actual political state,” with 21 million inhabitants and 800,000 administrative employees. “The structure,” Stajner once explained to a fellow inmate, “is very similar to that of the regular government… There’s a forestry Gulag, a Gulag of roads and bridges, a Gulag of nonferrous metals, a mining Gulag, and so on. Each of these sections has its own boss, and these leaders form a sort of council of Ministers.”716 Stalin, in other words, had “come up with a totally new [economic] system,” that was neither socialistic nor based on private capital, but a slave-labor economy unique unto itself. State investment was minimal. And although prisoners and guards had to be provided for, watchtowers constructed, and so on, the prisoners were often made to build their own camps, and other cost-cutting measures applied. “The experience of all ages and nations demonstrates,” wrote Adam Smith with confidence in the heyday of the Enlightenment, “that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property can have no other interest but to eat as much and to labor as little as possible.”717 Karl Marx, Smith’s theoretical opposite, agreed, noting further that because “the slave had no interest in raising the productivity of labor,” the system was detrimental to a national economy that sought a higher level of development.718