When the plight of Soviet prisoners was brought up before the United Nations, Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan declared that “there were no labor camps in Russia and the prisoners there were so well provided for that English and American workers had every reason to envy them.”763
Boris Pasternak once suggested (through a character in Doctor Zhivago) that World War II came to the Soviet people at first almost like a breath of fresh air compared to the inhuman power of Stalin’s Lie.
The Germans attacked on June 22, 1941, and advanced rapidly on three main fronts: through Minsk and Smolensk due east, on to Moscow; in the north, across the Baltic states toward Leningrad; and toward Kiev in the Ukraine. Over the next five months 322 large industrial enterprises were dismantled and evacuated into Western Siberia from the Donets Basin to prevent their falling into German hands. Hundreds of thousands of skilled workers went with them as the Kuzbas became the forge of the Soviet war effort, and Omsk, Novosibirsk, and other cities developed into industrial giants remote from the threatened frontiers. They turned out warplanes, tanks, and tractors and produced the fuels, weaponry and other military equipment, including the spare parts and replacements, necessary to sustain Stalin’s divisions in the field. By 1945, Siberia accounted for 21 percent of the country’s steel, 18 percent of its cast iron, and 32 percent of its coal.
Stalin was also determined to reestablish Russia as a Far Eastern power, and in anticipation of war with Japan doubled the industrial output of his eastern provinces between 1937 and 1940. Forty Russian divisions were stationed in the region, to guard against an attack from the Japanese forces in Korea and Manchuria.
It was Stalin’s professed belief that Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War had left “grave memories in the minds of our peoples. It was a dark stain on our country. Our people trusted and awaited the day when Japan would be routed and the stain wiped out.”764 Since then, Russia had been further humiliated. In September 1931, the Japanese had invaded and conquered Manchuria, incorporating it with other Chinese territory into the puppet state of Manchukuo. Russia relinquished control of the Chinese Eastern Railway, but Stalin had every intention of taking it back. Other disputed territory was also on his list. In a top-secret dispatch to President Roosevelt, Averell Harriman (U.S. ambassador to Russia at the time) described a meeting he had with Stalin on the night of December 14, 1944:
[Stalin] went into the next room and brought out a map. He said that the Kurile Islands and lower Sakhalin controlled the approaches to Vladivostok, that he considered that the Russians were entitled to protection for their communications to this important port and that “all outlets to the Pacific were now blocked by the enemy.” He drew a line around the southern part of the Liaotung Peninsula, including Port Arthur and Darien [Dalny], saying that the Russians again wished to lease these ports and the surrounding area. Stalin said further that he wished to lease the Chinese Eastern Railway.765
Japan’s impending defeat in 1945 provided Stalin with the opportunity he sought. In the final days of the conflict, the Soviets poured thousands of troops into Manchuria, took many prisoners of war, and seized millions of dollars’ worth of raw materials and Japanese industrial equipment. They also invaded and took southern Sakhalin; reacquired the four disputed Kurile Islands of Habomai, Shikotan, Kunashiri, and Etorofu; and upon the unconditional surrender of Japan (September 2, 1945) concluded a treaty with the Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, which gave the Russians effective control of the Chinese Eastern Railway, Port Arthur, and Darien. (After the Chinese Communists came to power in 1951, however, the Soviets agreed to yield these acquisitions to the new regime.)
During World War II, Siberia itself never became a significant battlefield. An occasional German cruiser prowled the Arctic coast, Allied food depots on Novaya Zemlya were shelled, there was Lend-Lease aid, and from 1942 to 1945 Soviet and American pilots worked together to ferry American warplanes from Alaska through Siberia to the German front. Dozens of gravestones scattered along the route from the Yukon to the Yenisey bear names in both Russian and English of the fliers who lost their lives.
One of the few German plans for an attack on Siberia was called “Operation Wunderland,” in which a German battleship was to land a party on Dikson Island at the mouth of the Yenisey, overcome the local garrison, destroy the power station, and explore routes of invasion behind Soviet lines. In 1942, the twenty-eight guns of the battleship Admiral Scheer were trained on the Arctic settlement, but to the astonishment of the Germans, Russian shore artillery and the light guns of the cruiser Dezhnev beat off the attack.
No one was released from the camps during the war, and a promised amnesty after it applied only to criminals. In 1948, Stalin ordered all former political prisoners still alive rearrested, usually without even the formality of a new charge.
In Siberia at that time, however vast (a whole new mountain range was discovered as late as 1936), it seemed impossible to find refuge anywhere from Stalin’s police. The experience of one small, industrious Baptist community, originally exiled to Siberia in 1907 by the tsar, is a striking case in point. The Baptists, led by one Nikifor, had settled near Achinsk, farmed and raised livestock, practiced their faith, and with rare good fortune, had survived World War I, the Revolution, and the Civil War intact. But then, writes Stajner, “the drive for collectivization began. This, too, would have been acceptable to them, for they were used to collaborative farming; but when one day an agitator came into the village to talk about the poisonous nature of religion, people started to get upset; and when their prayerhouse was turned into a clubhouse (which no one went to), the peasants decided to move elsewhere.”766 After careful preparation, the entire community – nearly two hundred men, women, and children – set off with their livestock, tools, household goods, and some provisions. They went deep into the forest, marching for ten days almost without rest, and on a meadow by the side of a river built their new homes. Improvising to supply their needs, they made thread out of hair and needles out of bone, found an herb that served as a salt substitute, fueled their lamps with resin, and made their clothes out of hides. For more than twenty years they lived and prospered in almost complete isolation, and didn’t even hear about World War II until six years after it was over. Then one day, recalled Nikifor,
in the winter of 1951, our dogs started to bark louder than usual. We were frightened, because we realized it couldn’t be the wild animals which sometimes came close to the village. Eventually, the barking stopped and we calmed down. A week later – we happened to be in the prayerhouse – the dogs started barking like crazy again. Some people came rushing in so scared they couldn’t say anything; all they could do was point out the door. Outside was a detachment of soldiers on skis. We stood facing each other without talking for a few moments; there the soldiers were, and here was I with four other men and my only daughter. One of the soldiers came up to us and asked who was our leader. I told him we didn’t have a leader, that we were all equal, that our only leader was God. When I said this, one of the soldiers laughed.767
The villagers were interrogated for three weeks, accused of making contact with American spies by radio (the radios were never found), taken to Achinsk, and sentenced to twenty-five years at hard labor. All their children were taken away to special camps.