The previous chapter described how secrecy threw sand into the machine of the Soviet state by burdening the officials’ working lives with complex procedures. The story of this chapter is a case study in how a sudden intensification of the regime of secrecy had a similar effect by making the officials severely afraid of new penalties. The new secrecy law of 1947 applied everywhere across the Soviet state, not just to the administration of health science, where the shock originated, and it reduced state capacity everywhere, including in completely unrelated branches of the state. We will show this by looking at what happened in the Gulag system of labor camps.[182]
In 1947 the Gulag was already completely secret, and the new law made no difference to that. What the law did in the Gulag, as elsewhere, was make everybody much more frightened of accidentally letting slip details about their work, even when the people they were dealing with were other state officials, and even when their mutual business was carrying out plans that were previously authorized and made compulsory by government legislation.
A few days after the new secrecy law of 1947 was enacted, the leaders of the Gulag issued a new list itemizing the Gulag’s secrets. First on the list was: “The location of corrective-labor and verification-filtration camps, colonies, deportation prisons, and other Gulag subsections.”[183]
This was not new; the location and identification of labor camps were secret long before 1947. They had become secret in stages, rather than all at once. In 1922, Moscow’s three labor camps belonging to the Chief Administration for Compulsory Projects were no secret: their phone numbers were published in the telephone directory.[184] As of 1927, a comprehensive list of Soviet state secrets did not mention labor camps. It did classify as “secret,” under “matters of a military nature,” “The dislocation in toto of every category of institution and establishment (for example,... all institutions of higher learning..., all warehouses, etc.).”[185] So, under these rules, a comprehensive list of labor camps would have been classified, but labor camps were not singled out as a special case, and it was not forbidden to reveal the location of any particular forced labor facility. In the early 1930s the Soviet media published various accounts of life behind the wire. The writer Maksim Gor’kii contributed idealized stories about life in the labor camps of the Solovetskii islands, the Moscow suburb of Liubertsy, and the White Sea canal project.[186] At this time, therefore, although the censorship was now fully operational, the existence of particular labor camps was still not secret, although reports of conditions were heavily sanitized.
By the 1930s, however, the fact that something was not listed as secret did not mean that anyone could freely know it or repeat it. The statistics of forced labor were secret de facto at this time, as well as the laws governing the use of the laborers.[187] A particular factor is that the early 1930s were the time of the Great Depression in the world economy. An international outcry developed against the Soviet export of commodities produced by forced labor such as timber and gold.[188] This set off a self-reinforcing cycle: foreign opinion became more suspicious of the Soviet uses of forced labor, so the Soviet state (which did have something to hide) became more secretive, and this strengthened foreign suspicions.
After the Depression the campaign against Soviet exports died away, but there was no return to openness. Official propaganda of the benefits of “corrective labor” ceased. The works on the subject that were previously published were banned, and some authors were arrested. By 1937, concealment was total.[189] There were no more stories of conditions in the Gulag until 1962, when a window was opened briefly for Alexander Solzhenitsyn to publish his fictional account of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, set in an unnamed Siberian labor camp. Then the window closed again, and the full facts were suppressed for another quarter century.[190]
An illustration of the utter secrecy under which the labor camps had fallen can be found in the beginning of the end of the Gulag. Stalin died on 5 March 1953. On 28 March, on the initiative of its first deputy chairman and interior minister Lavrentii Beria, the USSR Council of Ministers ordered the Ministry of the Interior to transfer most forced labor camps and colonies to the Ministry of Justice.[191] Within a few weeks, hundreds of establishments and millions of lives had changed hands.
For the handover to take place, Justice Ministry officials had to receive some sort of account of the camps and colonies for which they were suddenly responsible. Of many questions they might have had, the first was surely: Where are they? What are they called?
In fact, camps were everywhere—not just in the Arctic and in Siberia, as many once supposed. In Moscow the secretariat of Gulag (the interior ministry chief administration of labor camps) compiled lists and maps. There appears to have been one list and one map for each of the 150 or so provinces and republics of the Soviet Union at the time. Every map was drawn in pen and pencil by an anonymous hand. Roads, railways, rivers, and coasts were traced. Installations were symbolized and place names were artfully lettered.[192]
For the historian, the inference is unmistakable: the Gulag had no printed maps. Why not? It is true that the Soviet Union was not a rich country, and maps that were accurate enough to be useful were not cheap to produce and reproduce. But were they so costly as to be beyond the country’s means? Absolutely not.
In fact, Russia had a long tradition of print cartography. According to the website of the Russian National Library, map printing “began and came of age” in Russia already in the eighteenth century.[193] In Russian history, when maps were needed, they were produced. Alexander I created the Imperial Army corps of topographers in 1812. In 1914 the Russian Army entered World War I with a stock of 30 million printed maps of the border districts of the empire and its neighbors. In 1941 the Red Army’s early retreats cost it a stockpile of too million maps.[194] By this time, topographical units fully equipped with map stores and printing facilities were embedded in the Red Army’s mobile formations. After the chaos of 1941, much of the war was fought over vast interior spaces of the country that prewar thinking had considered invulnerable. Despite this, each major operation saw the printing of many millions of maps of various scales and their distribution to the troops, including specialized maps for different branches of the armed forces.[195]
182
The scale, scope, organization, and conditions of Soviet forced labor have been an important focus of research in formerly secret Russian archives since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Significant histories and documentary collections on Soviet forced labor are now available, written in English and Russian from various disciplinary perspectives. In the English language see Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag; Applebaum, Gulag; Bacon, Gulag at War; Barnes, Death and Redemption; Bell, Stalin’s Gulag at War; Gregory and Lazarev (eds), Economics of Forced Labor; Khlevniuk, History of the Gulag. By contrast, this chapter has a narrow focus on forced labor as a business and how this business was affected by the secrecy governing the location and identification of labor camps. Closely related to that focus is research on the concealed existence and location of the Soviet “closed” cities, as discussed by Siddiqi, “Atomized Urbanism.”
183
Hoover/GARF, R-9414/1/335, 11-12 (“List of questions of the work of the GULAG of the USSR MVD and its peripheral organs that are state secrets [gosudarstvennaia taina],” signed by acting Gulag chief Dobrynin, 17 June 1947). Applebaum, Gulag, no, notes that “subsection” was an internal codeword for a labor camp. On 10 December 1951, USSR interior minister Kruglov issued a similar “List of questions of special importance [osoboi vazhnosti] about the GULAG of the USSR MVD, correspondence about which should be classified ‘top secret (special file),’” in Russian, sovershenno sekretno (osobaia papka) (Hoover/GARF, R-9414/1/335,71-72). Items 2 and 3 were “The location and information about numbers of the Gulag contingents engaged in the construction of especially important closed special construction projects of Glavpromstroi” (a reference to the newly founded Soviet atomic weapons industry) and “Summative information on the location of corrective labor camps and colonies and transit prisons of the USSR MVD.” Item no. 1 was “Summative information on the overall number of the contingent of prisoners maintained in all MVD camps (including special camps) and colonies, their physical condition and labor utilization”; this was the second item in the 1947 list.
184
“Vrozhdennyi terror: v 1922 godu v odnoi Moskve rabotali 9 kontslagerei,” 2 September 2021, https://newizv.ru/news/society/02-09-2021/vr0zhdennyy-terror-v-i922-godu-v-odnoy-moskve-rabotali-9-kontslagerey. The article reports the work of “journalist and historian” Vladimir Tikhomirov and provides scanned pages from Vsia Moskva, the city phone directory for 1922, as evidence.
185
Quoted by Bone, “Soviet Controls,” 81-83. “Dislocation” is evidently a too-literal translation of the Russian dislokatsiia, which generally means just “location.”
186
Liubertsy: Davies, Crisis and Progress in the Soviet Economy, 36. Solovetskii islands and White Sea Canaclass="underline" Applebaum, Gulag, 59-62 and 80-82.
190
Bacon, Gulag at War, surveys the pre-1991 literature. The most reliable clues to the size of the Gulag were contained in secret sections of the Soviet national economic plan for 1941, seized by German forces during World War II and later published in the United States. The 1941 plan was exploited by Jasny, “Labor and Output in Soviet Concentration Camps” (published in 1951) for an evaluation that turned out remarkably close to the figures revealed in the 1990s. Even today, aspects of Gulag life remain controversial. This is more because the archival records can be interpreted in different ways than because they are withheld. See Nakonechnyi, “Factory of Invalids.”
192
Hoover/GARF, R-9414/1/119 to 205 contain these documents (also catalogued in Kozlov and Mironenko, Istoriia, vol. 7, 94). Some are dated before 1953, evidence of the preparation prior to Stalin’s death. Beria is known to have planned the reform of the Gulag but could not go ahead while Stalin lived (Tikhonov, “End of the Gulag”).
193
See “Russian Maps and Atlases in the National Library of Russia,” http://www.nlr.ru/eng/coll/maps/rus_map.html.