In some camps, there were no medical personnel at all; and in the women’s compound at Elgen (a Yakut word meaning “dead”), the professional experience of the local medical orderly was limited to that of veterinary assistant on a collective farm.
By 1938, the prison population had reached half a million, a level maintained only by constant new arrivals in the face of a death rate of 25 percent. Of the estimated 12 to 15 million killed by the labor camps as a whole, Kolyma was responsible for about one fifth. One of the camps, the Serpentinnaya, existed exclusively for mass executions, and in 1938 some 28,000 prisoners there were shot. This, writes Solzhenitsyn, was more than “the total executions throughout the Russian Empire for the whole of the last century of Tsarist rule.”754
As if all this were not hellish enough, in the punitive camps for special punishment the annual mortality rate was reported to exceed 30 percent. There were even rumors of a mysterious camp where men had to work in mines under the floor of the Arctic Ocean, and lived twenty-four hours a day underground. “Not one of the inmates has ever come out alive,” it was said. “Every day the great elevators bring up a number of corpses for burial.”755 Who knows what went on beyond the known horrors that are already beyond comprehension? In April 1990, a photographer for a Magadan museum, visiting a campsite 780 miles northwest of Magadan, found skulls “with the bone sliced through, for which there is no explanation.”756
To Siberians, European Russia was the mainland. To the denizens of Kolyma, an island within an island, the mainland was Siberia. It was almost impossible to escape. Every unit was accompanied by wolfhounds, and anyone slipping away soon fell into the taiga’s fatal grip. Most of the northern camps were separated from the country as a whole by vast stretches of empty marshland, sparsely inhabited by tribal hunters such as the Chukchi, Yakut, and Samoyed. As in days of old, they welcomed wanderers, served them green tea, and sometimes offered their women to them at night, but (to alleviate their own desperate circumstances) most had also come into the unofficial employ of the Secret Police. While a guest was being regaled, a courier sped to the nearest post, and soon agents would appear on dogsleds to make an arrest.
In 1942, camp authorities got sacks of vitiated white flour, cartons of Spam, and a huge new bulldozer from the United States courtesy of the “Lend-Lease” program extended to Russia during World War II by the Allies. The flour and Spam (served up in infinitesimal quantities) scarcely improved the prison diet, and was additionally resented as tasteless. But the barrel of American machine grease for the bulldozer, wrote Varlam Shalamov, an inmate, was “immediately attacked by a crowd of starving men who knocked out the bottom on the spot with a stone.”757 The first thing the American bulldozer was used for was to dig a mass grave.
In this way, by the mid-1940s, Magadan had established itself, with a population of 70,000, as one of Siberia’s “miracle towns.”
Foreign apologists of Stalinism sometimes went to extraordinary lengths to paint an idyllic picture during these years of camp life. In one particularly grotesque attempt from 1944, the author, George Borodin, claimed that:
There is all the difference in the world between the Tsarist convict toiling in the mines of Nerchinsk and the Soviet convicts working on, say, the Dudinka-Norilsk Railway in Arctic Siberia. To start with, the fact they are in this part of the world at all is purely incidental. Conviction does not automatically carry with it transportation to Siberia...
The offenders are condemned by one of the courts of Soviet Russia – those courts which, incidentally, have roused so much admiration in Harold Laski. They are then assigned to one or other of the prison camps then in being. When the men arrive, they are given accommodation, not in cells but in huts or tents – accommodation that is neither worse nor better than that afforded workers on any other pioneer enterprise. From now on, the convict has to make his choice. He has shelter in the hutment. He is given food – a daily peasant ration of soup and bread. With that the responsibility of the State ceases, and everything now depends upon himself and his comrades.
All around him, work is going on. In most cases, as in Siberia, it is pioneer work, work being waged in a spirit of a crusade. The whole atmosphere is charged with an urgency to get it done. The convict has his choice: he may spend the day in sleeping, lazing, and drawing his frugal rations. He may even beg a little extra food if he is that way inclined. But – and this is the point – he may also join the work. No immediate pressure is put upon him, though efforts are made to induce him to see the superiority of work over crime, and the greater pressure comes from those of his fellows who have already volunteered for labor... No hours are imposed on them. They may, if they choose, work only an hour a day or four or five hours a week... Little by little they work more and more hours, drawing larger money, and becoming useful citizens. In their turn they proselytize new-comers. And so the tale goes on... Though when at work the men are free, they are, of course, under surveillance by “administrators,” whose job is rather that of the court missionary than the prison governor... These [also] see to it that there are no untoward incidents. The settlements themselves, too, are guarded. Each is surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, and here and there are guards. But there is nothing exclusive about these precautions. The wire fence is by no means a shutter between the prisoners and the outside world as a prison wall is. On the contrary, at various points the wire fence is pierced by gateways – usually of the turnstile pattern – and local residents wishing to do so pass freely across the settlement. The whole arrangement reminded me of the gates and fences round an English farmer’s fields.758
Perhaps the author really didn’t know what was going on (though elsewhere he shows himself informed about collectivization); certainly Stalin did everything he could to conceal the reality from the West. Yet the truth was undoubtedly known to the German Nazis, who to some degree developed their own concentration camp system from Stalin’s paradigm; and when Hitler said he had learned a lot from the Soviets, there is not much doubt as to what he meant. As Robert Conquest points out, lists of camp clusters were published as early as 1937, and by the mid-1940s numerous survivors, escapees, defectors from the NKVD, released prisoners of war, and so on had reported in sufficient detail on their experiences in articles, letters, and books that by 1947 it was possible for a complete survey of the camp system to be made.
Nevertheless, in a famous incident in 1944, United States Vice President Henry Wallace and Professor Owen Lattimore (representing the Office of War Information) visited Magadan and found much to praise. Wallace described the gold miners at Kolyma as “big husky young men” and “pioneers of the machine age, builders of cities.”759 Lattimore cheerfully compared Dalstroy to the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Tennessee Valley Authority. So far as he could tell, it resembled a public works project under FDR. Wallace described one camp director – a Soviet counterpart of Adolf Eichmann – as “a very fine man, very efficient, gentle and understanding with people”;760 Lattimore in turn was impressed by local greenhouses “where tomatoes, cucumbers, and even melons were grown to make sure that the hardy miners got enough vitamins.”761 Of course, the whole thing was a charade. They never saw a genuine camp, and even the farm they visited, notes Conquest, had “fake girl swineherds, who were in fact NKVD office staff.”762