From Solzhenitsyn we may draw their epitaph:
We divide, we multiply, we sigh, we curse. But still and all, these are just numbers. They overwhelm the mind and then are easily forgotten. And if someday the relatives of those who had been shot were to send one publisher photographs of their executed kin, and an album of those photographs were to be published in several volumes, then just by leafing through them and looking into the extinguished eyes we would learn much that would be valuable for the rest of our lives. Such reading, almost without words, would leave a deep mark on our hearts for all eternity.727
Those transplanted as “special settlers” to agricultural, factory, or other work colonies did not fare much better in the end. The climate alone of the Northern Siberian settlements was enough to kill Central Asians, and one eyewitness paints a most pathetic picture of their fate:
Brought from the subtropical climate of their homelands to the coldest regions in the world, they died like flies. All their vital forces were numbed as soon as they went out into the terrible cold. They stood motionless, their arms crossed, their bowed heads hunched between their shoulders, waiting for the end. They made no response at all to orders and curses. Blows were useless – it was as hopeless as asking tin soldiers to bestir themselves... they simply stopped functioning.728
Around Kuznetsk in Western Siberia, deportees lived in holes dug out of the ground, which they covered with boards; other dwellings consisted of earthen pits supported by wooden poles and low plank ceilings covered by dry clay and manure. People crawled in and out of them. One German Communist, married to a Russian, was arrested in June 1938 and sentenced to five years of “corrective labor” in Siberia’s southern steppes. “We lived in clay huts,” she recalled, “with thousands of lice, bugs, and fleas, fully on the level of the Kazakh nomad but without his mutton steak and kumis; we spent the short hours of the night lying on wooden boards or on the ground, without straw sacks, without blankets, only to line up for work at sunrise... How one learns to hate the pitiless Siberian sun, to hate every morning that it rises.”729 In settlements to the north, wrote another, people were driven to “eat the bark of trees and grasses. Children, women and old men run and grovel around in the forest and feed like animals or wild beasts.”730
During World War II the camps were swelled by deported armies of “socially hostile” Poles, various minorities, and thousands of German and Japanese prisoners of war. Whole peoples (or large proportions of them), such as the Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, Kalmucks, and Volga Germans, were forcibly transplanted to join their ranks. As a snapshot in time, it is known that in October 1946, 126,423 special settlers were sent to the Kemerovo district, 112,316 to that of Krasnoyarsk, 35,381 to the Altai, 92,968 to Novosibirsk, 83,276 to Tomsk, 56,611 to Tyumen, and 44,767 to Omsk. Natives like the Oroks on Sakhalin who found themselves under Japanese occupation and obliged to serve in their military or at various strategic installations were also arrested, and (in an inexcusable act of treachery) up to 1 million fugitives from the Soviet Union were returned to the Soviets by Allied authorities after the war. If the Russian Empire, in Lenin’s description, was “a prison house of nations,”731 the Soviet Empire became its concentration camp. “For every nation exiled, an epic will someday be written,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “on its separation from its native land, and its destruction in Siberia. Only the nations themselves can voice their feelings about all they have lived through: we have no words to speak for them, and we must not get under their feet.”732
From 1928 to Stalin’s death in 1953, the life of Siberia was bound up with the Gulag, when the majority of the population in effect lived in one kind of prison compound or another, or behind barbed wire. Soviet and pro-Soviet books and articles celebrated the great building up of Siberia since the Revolution, and extolled the pioneering exuberance exemplified by the overnight creation of populous new towns. Even Western surveys sometimes spoke admiringly of how “entire cities rose in the wilderness” with an “uprush of towns on an ultra-American scale.”733 The truth behind this picture is that any forced-labor camp with a population above five thousand constituted a town, and that the fastest growth of “towns” occurred not in industrial areas but in the far north and east because that was where most of the large labor camps were placed. In 1926, Eastern Siberia had a total urban population of only 891,000; within thirteen years it had more than tripled, and even in regular towns the majority comprised “special settlers” or other deportees. Eighty percent of the population of Ust-Kem, for example, were exiles, half of them Germans from the Ukraine. This clarifies the reality behind a simple statistical boast (such as appeared in an encyclopedia as late as 1968) that “the number of people in the workforce in Siberia increased three and one-half times during the first Five-Year Plan.”734 A fuller appreciation of the phenomenon can be had by looking closely at two touchstone achievements: Magnitogorsk and Norilsk.
Founded in 1929, Magnitogorsk, one writer tells us,
instantly became the symbol of the revolutionary transformation of society that the October Revolution had promised. At the site of an iron-ore deposit just beyond the southern tip of the Urals, as far to the east of Moscow as Berlin is to the west, the Soviet government decided to build not just a steel plant, but one that rivaled (indeed that was modeled after) what was then the largest and technologically most advanced steel plant in the world, the Gary (Indiana) Works of the US Steel Company. When completely finished, the “Soviet Gary” was to produce as much steel annually as the entire Soviet Union had produced in the year before the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan!... Brigades of young enthusiasts from every corner of the Soviet Union arrived in the summer of 1930 and did the groundwork of railroad and dam construction necessary before work could be begun on the plant itself... The first dam across the Ural River was finished the sixth of April, 1931, and the lake began to fill up. Within two years it was five miles long and assured an adequate water supply to the city and plant for the first half of the construction work.735
Meanwhile, the brigades of young enthusiasts had been fleshed out with tens of thousands of compulsory laborers and deportees, including 18,000 kulaks, thousands of Bashkir, Tatar, and Kirghiz shepherds, and up to 35,000 criminals. Most of the kulaks, from Kazan and its environs, had been “shipped like cattle to Magnitogorsk at the point of bayonets in closed box cars in which a small window had been cut”736; they were fed only black bread, and forced to use a hole in the floor as a latrine. Upon arrival, they were taken under guard to the city’s outskirts and bivouacked in nothing but tents through the winter, when the temperature often fell to -40 degrees. By spring, almost every child in these families had died, and a large proportion of the rest had perished from exposure and malnutrition.
By the following winter, barracks had been constructed to replace the tents, but they were so overcrowded that the normal advantages of shelter were lost. Meanwhile, new arrivals took the place of the four to five thousand dead. The Central Asians among them lived in a part of Magnitogorsk known as “Shanghai,” which consisted of “a collection of improvised mud huts huddled in a sort of ravine overlooking the railroad yards.”737 These semi- and unskilled workers furnished the labor power needed to dig foundations, wheel concrete, shovel slag, and do the other heavy work necessary in making the biggest steel combinat in Europe in the middle of the barren Ural steppe. By 1932, the plant was producing pig iron; and by 1933, steel. Four years later it was approaching full-scale production, and during World War II, it turned out half the steel used to make Soviet tanks.