Despite this industrial triumph, no one was secure. The director of the “Communist University” in Magnitogorsk was preoccupied with deviation hunting, and replaced his Dialectical Materialism teacher four times in one year. Two of those dismissed were taken away by the Secret Police. In the university’s one history course, wrote the young American idealist John Scott, who had joined with initial enthusiasm in the enterprise, “every experience was black or white, trends and tendencies were simplified. Every question had a perfectly definite answer,” yet in the long run no one really knew what that answer was.738 “The managers at Magnitogorsk,” another writer observes, “spent about half their time trying to wheedle the rivets to fulfill the impossible plans decreed from Moscow, the other half trying to devise ideologically correct excuses for falling short. Workers tumbled from blast furnaces because the scaffolding had been stripped for firewood. And as Stalin’s paranoia played itself out in merciless purges... the victims of political repression were stacked atop the victims of cold and deprivation.”739 In the general purge of 1937, a third to a half of the specialists were either shot or deported to camps, and revisiting the city in early 1938, Scott found their replacements as well as the local officials “frightened half out of their wits.”740 Most of Magnitogorsk’s population (now 220,000 strong) still lived in wooden barracks or sod-covered huts, had no sanitation system to speak of, and were decimated by seasonal rounds of typhus, malaria, and other diseases. While the flourishing plant grew ever more productive, its “human resources” declined on rations of cabbage, potatoes, and black bread. “I would wager,” Scott wrote, “that Russia’s battle of ferrous metallurgy alone involved more casualties than the battle of the Marne.”741
The making of Norilsk was worse.
In 1922, copper nickel sulfide ore had been found near the mouth of the Yenisey River, and further geological probing revealed enormous deposits of nickel, copper, cobalt, and coal. Eventually, more systematic testing turned up over half the elements of Mendeleyev’s periodic table, eighteen of which were important for industry. Reserves of polymetallic ore, coal, and natural gas all lay next to one another in the ground, “as if ordained by nature to facilitate large-scale iron and steel production.”742 Although the region’s forbidding cold and isolation clearly rendered the area unfit for ordinary human habitation, in 1935 the NKVD marked off a square of polar tundra for a camp, arrested several hundred mining engineers to supply the requisite technical personnel (since almost no one would go there voluntarily), a few doctors to look after them, arbitrarily charged them all with sabotage and sentenced them to ten years. In the summer of 1936, the first five thousand convicts (selected for youth and strength of constitution) were shipped up the Yenisey with tools, food, and tents.
In this way, industrial development began. The men cleared an area of snow and ice with pickaxes, crowbars, and spades, built barracks, and began to mine. But climatic conditions were so severe that despite uncharacteristically generous rations (by Gulag standards), more than half the men died of exhaustion, exposure, and disease. In 1937, 20,000 new prisoners arrived, and the following year 35,000 more, exceeding the capacity of the barracks and requiring a city of tents. Meanwhile, work had also begun on a narrow-gauge railroad to link Norilsk with the port of Dudinka at the mouth of the Yenisey. Despite the continuous stream of new transports, the inmate population remained virtually constant, since the death rate was so high. Stalin drove everyone, including the overseers, to despair. He needed the non-ferrous metals quickly in his preparations for war, but didn’t have enough hard currency to buy them on the world market. From time to time, the camp’s directors, failing to meet his quotas, were shackled, taken away, and shot.
When Norilsk was only three years old, wrote Karlo Stajner (who was there), its cemetery compared with that of a city that had been in existence for a hundred years.
The new directors realized that an enterprise of such magnitude could not “be pushed to completion by simple terror,” and decided to encourage the technical personnel with material incentives (like edible food), and even allowed political prisoners to work at drawings and calculations in heated rooms.743 This had its effect. By 1942, the rail link to Dudinka had been completed, a refinery and a thermal-electric power station built, the factory’s chimneys were smoking, and the production of nickel could begin. All the mining operations were conducted from open pits located on a high plateau above the city, and the ore was delivered to the smelting plants by inclined tunnels cut into the frozen soil.
Success brought no rewards. The guards arbitrarily shot up to thirty persons a day. The starvation rations were such that anyone who dropped a crumb would carefully pick it up and eat it; some prisoners got up in the middle of the night in order to catch mice and cook them in tin cans. “Once,” recalled Stajner, “as dinner was being served, a young fellow was shoved and spilled his soup. At first, he stood there, perplexed, then he threw himself to the ground and lapped it up like a dog.”744 To ward off scurvy, the prisoners were allowed only an occasional carrot, a bit of sauerkraut, some kvas, or a few drops of oil. And all the time their exhausted constitutions had to contend with the special miseries of an Arctic clime. When the polar blizzards erupted, wrote Stajner, “it felt as if the world was coming to an end. Darkness fell and all you could hear was the shrieking of the storm: ‘Sheee... sheee ... sheee,’ like a thousand devils... It was so cold that I sometimes feared my brain would freeze inside my skull.”745
Hardly a day passed when someone did not deliberately subject his hands or feet to frostbite to get into the infirmary, even at the risk of losing a limb. Self-mutilation with an ax became “popular,” according to Stajner; in the usual procedure, “one of the men would set up a wooden block and position himself, ax in hand; the others stood in line, stepping forward one by one to have two or three fingers chopped off.”746 Eventually, the camp refused to hospitalize such amputees and had a doctor bind them up on the spot.
An alternative way out of the camp (favored by criminals) was murder, since it automatically entailed another trial. More than four hundred murders were committed at Norilsk in one winter alone.
Yet the city grew. Stajner was transferred for a time to Dudinka, where he survived on food stolen from the docks. When he returned a few years later, he found the metal foundry transformed into a huge plant that stretched
as far as the eye could see, with giant chimneys, workshops, sheds, warehouses. A network of railroad tracks covered the entire area, and smoke was billowing from every chimney. Lorries filled with the hot ore tailings were pulled to the slag heap by locomotives. And there were new construction sites where prisoners were digging the earth with the same kinds of tools my friends and I had once used.
Yes, great things had been achieved in Norilsk. But where were the builders of this vast enterprise? Where were Ondratschek, Kerosi, Feldmann, and thousands of other foreign communists who, together with hundreds of thousands of Russians, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Georgians, and members of other nations, raised these mighty structures out of the frozen earth? Were they enjoying the fruits of their labor? No, they were rotting in the mass graves of Norilsk, and most of the men I saw working that day would eventually join them there.747