The Bolsheviks, as Dallin and Nikolayevsky observe, found
a way out of this apparent impasse.719 Marx had naively assumed that a slave must receive the subsistence minimum of rations below which neither life nor work is possible. Now it was found that a differential could be introduced in food rations in slave labor camps and that the smallest ration, i.e., that allowed to “slackers” and “shirkers” and in general to inefficient laborers, might well fall below the minimum required for subsistence. Moreover, this deliberate undernourishment would of itself compel all in the labor camps to do their utmost for the national economy.
The plain threat of starvation, that is, became the main incentive to productivity; at the same time, it deliberately led by stages through ever lower levels of nutrition (since to work well you have to have strength) to progressive debilitation and death. Everyone suffered from deficiency diseases like scurvy and pellagra, from undernourishment, swelling of the feet, face, and eventually the abdomen, and in the northern camps, from frostbite and gangrene. To keep the system going, these laborers had to be replaced. As one camp doctor told a victim in 1949: “You are not brought here to live but to suffer and die... If you live... it means that you are guilty of one of two things: either you worked less than was assigned you or you ate more than was your proper due.”720
Because terror and repression made any kind of economic enthusiasm almost impossible in the economy at large, the camps were perhaps the only enterprises that brought in any gain. Their profits subsidized industrial plants and farms, and financed the cost of grandiose projects like BAM (the Lake Baikal-Amur Railroad), big hydroelectric power plants, the Southern Siberian railway line from Chelyabinsk via Abakan to the Mongolian border, and a great northern line projected along the Arctic coast. Part of the camp profits accrued through an elaborate system of plunder. Every time someone was arrested, he forfeited his entire estate. All his hard cash was confiscated, and millions more poured into the government coffers through the sale of his possessions – jewelry, rugs, clocks, whatever – left behind. Once prisoners arrived in camp, relatives naturally tried to send them money or other items to alleviate their situation. Most of this in turn was automatically appropriated by the Secret Police. One Soviet writer tells us (thinking to impress) that “the working men of Siberia” contributed 13.5 billion rubles to the government during World War II alone, “along with a huge quantity of gold, silver, platinum, and millions of items of great value.”721 Incrementally (given the number of victims) the proceeds indeed were astronomicaclass="underline" in 1928, there were 30,000 people in the camps; by 1931, nearly 2 million; by 1934, about 5 million; then in 1937-38 alone (the year of the Great Terror) 7 million more were added to the rolls. No one really knows how many millions joined them in subsequent years, as forced labor became not only the basis of the economy but numerically the main social class: the inmate was the new proletarian in the Utopian classless state. “Well, I agree this isn’t socialism,” one victim remarked to another in discussing their situation. “But we don’t have private capital. So what is it?” His companion replied: “...Only the devil knows what it is.”722
In approaching the horrors of the Gulag, one must brace as against those of the Nazi concentration camps. So terrible were they that by comparison the exile system of the tsars seems positively humane. That is not to say that the sufferings of tsarist exiles were not great; nor are they lessened by the cruelties of another age. But with all the injustices the tsars allowed, there were sometimes great and tender mercies in the application of the laws. Mass murder had not yet blighted humanity’s capacity to feel in proportion, by taking all proportion away: capital punishment was still regarded as a frightful thing, and hunger strikes often overcame the malice of the authorities rather than spurring them on to more sadistic deeds. Solzhenitsyn among others has shown in the most terrifying way how enormously evil has increased in modern times, with the idea of the secular perfection of a “mass man.”
In Dostoyevsky’s hard-labor camp at Omsk, floggings were sometimes fatal, but otherwise the regime was comparatively mild. Each convict was allowed numerous private effects, could keep domestic animals, enjoyed Sundays, feast days, and even his own name day as days of rest, was fed (if not always well) at least above the starvation level, could occasionally go into town to buy tobacco, tea, or beef; and on Christmas Day might even be served goose and suckling pig. Moreover, the work itself was such that Dostoyevsky could feel it as his “salvation,” since it got him out of the barracks, relieved his nervous tension, and strengthened his physical health. Except for about a dozen political prisoners, all the convicts had also actually committed some crime – horrendous crimes, too, like infanticide.
On Sakhalin, those doing heavy road work or toiling in the mines received up to 56 ounces of bread, 14 ounces of meat, and 8 3/4 ounces of cereal a day; and at Akatui, the worst of the tsarist hard-labor prisons, 43 ounces of bread and 7 ounces of meat – six to seven times the daily Gulag norm. As for the work itself, the Decembrist prisoners in Nerchinsk had a daily quota of 118 pounds of ore to mine and load, whereas those in Kolyma had a norm into the thousands. And if it wasn’t met, the brigade had to remain for as long as it took, “in the woods by the light of searchlights,”723 sometimes barely returning to camp to eat dinner and breakfast together before they went out again into the woods. At Norilsk, those quarrying stone for roadmaking even in the midst of blizzards were granted only one ten-minute warm-up break in the course of a twelve-hour shift.
Under the Bolsheviks, the “pure moral weapon” of the hunger strike was designated “a continuation of counterrevolutionary activity in prison,” and in mid-1937 the prison administration absolved itself of any responsibility for resulting deaths. Torture also became normal in interrogation, and anyone over the age of twelve was liable to execution as an adult. Then the state found it suitable to take the relatives of its “enemies” as hostages, and ultimately even to execute them, if it wished. In the exile system, a real distinction had been made between the common criminal and the political exile; and as Leo Deutsch, a convicted terrorist, remarked in 1903, “Every official, high or low, knows well that he cannot go beyond a certain point with [politicals], and that he must behave with courtesy.”724 In the Gulag, all this was reversed. Actual criminals were more leniently treated, indeed, became lords of the camps; they were the elite, and as a rule, enjoyed privileged positions as orderlies or trusties. Among them, most politicals were like lambs thrown to the wolves.
Under the tsars, moreover, the death penalty had been an exceptional measure, and even between 1876 and 1904, when revolutionary terrorism was at its height, only 486 people were executed, or an average of 17 per year, including criminals. From 1905 to 1908, the number dramatically increased to 45 a month, but was as nothing compared to what ensued. After the Bolsheviks took power, by 1938 the annual average reached 28,000 or more. And “by early 1939,” one historian tells us, “at least one in 20 of the population had been arrested; some 8 million were being held in prisons and camps, where 90 percent of them would die. Two million inmates had already died in the previous two years, not counting another million that had been executed.”725 In just one camp cluster during the year of the Great Terror, fifty thousand prisoners were “tied up with wire like logs, stacked in trucks, driven out to a selected area, and shot.”726 Prisoners were also shot to “check epidemics”; others herded into barges and sunk in the Arctic seas.