In short, Stalin’s bureaucracy was certainly capable of supplying printed maps when required. It was demand, not supply, that prevented their production. If the Gulag had no printed maps, it is because they were not wanted. The production and distribution of printed maps of the Gulag could only have widened the circle of people with access to the identity and location of labor camps, which were among the top state secrets of the time.
The labor camps of the Gulag were not self-sufficient. They received deliveries of food, fuel, and equipment from outside suppliers. They provided civilian facilities with products such as timber, ores and minerals, and other materials and foodstuffs. This required them to undertake everyday transactions with a wide range of civilian counterparties: suppliers and purchasers, the railways that delivered supplies and took them away, and the state banking system that held an account for each camp and recorded debits and credits for camp purchases and receipts.
In 1949, bilateral transactions between the Gulag and its civilian environment began to break down. Reading between the lines, one gathers that the breakdown remained partial; it would have become complete only if all those involved from top to bottom had stuck rigidly to formal rules. Instead, a complete breakdown was avoided to the extent that officials resorted to working around the rules or ignoring them to some degree.
A gap between rules and realities was not unique to this moment or this context. Generally, rigid adherence to rules might have made the entire Soviet system unworkable. All Soviet managers were compelled to break rules for the sake of their job, even those who aimed to do only just enough to be left alone to “sleep peacefully.”[196] They were used to an environment in which rules came into conflict with realities. Their skill lay in knowing which rules they could break and how much they could get away with.
The evidence of our story is that Soviet managers saw the gap between secrecy rules and realities as particularly dangerous. It produced more than the usual amount of fear. For this reason, while they were willing to work around the rules to some extent, they also took steps to insure themselves against the potentially severe legal consequences of doing so. Insurance involved two things, both directed at their superiors. One was prompt disclosure of the illegal actions they were being forced to undertake; this implicated their superiors in joint responsibility either for rule breaking or for the plan breakdown that would follow from working to rule. The other was to invest significant time and effort in lobbying superiors for the rules to be adapted to reality.
The practical issue started from the designation of labor camps’ names and addresses. Labor camps were given different designations for different purposes. Specifically, every camp had a “full” or “effective designation” (polnoe or deistvitel’noe naimenovanié) and one or more “conventional designations” or code names (uslovnoe naimenovanié).
The camp’s code name was for nonsecret use, most commonly in providing release certificates to prisoners at the end of their terms, in enabling personal correspondence between prisoners and their relatives, and in the personal correspondence of camp officers and hired employees. The sole purpose of the code name was to avoid disclosing the full name and address. For that reason, it was also essential to avoid disclosing the concordance between code names and full designations.
An example is Volzhlag, also known as Volgolag (and before that Vol-gostroi). Volzhlag was opened in 1946 and transferred in April 1953 to the Yaroslavl’ provincial Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) administration.[197] Its full name was Volzhskii ITL MVD (the Volga Corrective Labor Camp of the Ministry of Internal Affairs). Its full address was “Perebory village, Rybinsk ward [raiori], Yaroslavl’ province [oblast’].” Volzhlag also had a unique telegraphic address, “Volga.”
Unique letter codes were issued to every camp under MVD decree 001542 of 25 December 1945. For Volzhlag, high in the Russian alphabet, the letter code was “E”. Camps lower down the list had codes with two or three letters. Camps were issued with letter-coded stamps (shtampy) and seals (pechati) to certify releases and correspond with persons such as prisoners’ relatives, Gulag officers, and hired employees. Stamps were articles of convenience that substituted for typed or printed letterheads. Circular seals were more important: they gave legal force to signed original documents. At this time, meanwhile, camps continued to use their full designations in correspondence with state organizations and state counterparties. They were also issued with stamps and seals giving full designations to authorize and notarize such correspondence and financial documentation under MVD decree no. 00249 of 29 April 1949.
Finally, mailbox numbers were issued under MVD decree 0035 of 15 January 1949; these were for use in all nonsecret correspondence to avoid fuller identification.[198] For Volzhlag, the mailbox address was “Shcherbakov town, mailbox no. 229.”
Things Fall Apart
Our story begins on 15 February 1949, when Gulag third administration chief Volkovyskii forwarded a letter to second administration legal department chief Liamin. The letter was from Moldavian deputy interior minister Babushkin to Gulag chief Dobrynin in Moscow.[199] It reported that the local oil industry distributor was refusing orders for fuel from the local Gulag administration. The reason: these orders were classified secret, as they had to be, given that the delivery address was a state secret. But under the Soviet Union’s new secrecy regime, the fuel supplier was entitled to accept secret orders only from military units. The camps of the Moldavian Gulag were not military units, so their orders were returned without being met. The same difficulty was affecting supplies of meat, grain, and other food products to the camps, and so was “demoralizing the work of supply.”
A related issue emerged with a letter of 7 April from MVD war supplies administration chief Gornostaev to deputy interior minister Obruchnikov.[200] MVD decree no. 0035-1949 (already mentioned above) ordered that labor camps’ nonsecret correspondence should use mailbox numbers as the only form of designation. This created the following problem. Gos-bank, the state bank, held its depositors’ full names and addresses, not their mailbox numbers. Gosbank was now refusing transfers to or from the settlement accounts of labor camps based on identification by mailbox number, because this did not match the account details that it held. But full designations were now a state secret that could not be disclosed to Gosbank—although Gosbank already held this information in the account details. Payments were being held up, and there was a risk of penalty charges for setting up transfers incorrectly.
196
The expression, a direct translation from Russian, was adopted by Berliner, Factory and Manager, 156.
197
The Memorial website entry under “Volzhskii ITL MVD” at http://www .memo.ru/history/nkvd/gulag/r3/r3-63.htm provides these and following details.
198
Mailbox numbers were first issued, apparently, in 1939, to enable camps to subscribe to periodical publications without revealing their full addresses. Hoover/ GARF, 9414/1/21,1.49 (Gulag chief Filaretov, decree dated 16 January 1939).