A note of 6 August from Moscow office chief Slobodkin of the MVD supply administration to Gulag chief Dobrynin widens the frame.[201] Slobodkin reported a general breakdown in the settlement of invoices to labor camps for equipment and medical supplies. Bank officers were rejecting payments across the board on the grounds that the payer was insufficiently identified. Bank records had not been updated to correspond with depositors’ mailbox numbers.
Slobodkin warned Dobrynin to anticipate a problem when considering how to update the bank records. Under MVD regulations, it was prohibited to extract and copy information from secret documents. If the document that Gulag now provided to Gosbank was a list of camps by mailbox number, it would be labeled “top secret” or “secret,” making it illegal for the bank to extract and copy the necessary information. Slobodkin asked Dobrynin “not to delay a solution.”
Time passed, but the mismatch between rules and realities persisted. On 9 March 1950, a year after the problem first arose, Volzhlag chief Kopaev reported his anxieties to Gulag secretariat chief Chirkov.[202] The root of the problem, he suggested, was a clash between two MVD decrees. Decree no. 001542-1945 gave every camp a letter-coded designation and letter-coded stamps and seals to authorize releases and correspond with private persons. Decree no. 00249-1949 issued stamps and seals giving camps’ full designations, for correspondence with state organizations and state counterparties, and to authorize and notarize financial documentation. One problem arose in mailing nonsecret correspondence to other government agencies. The letter inside was written on paper headed by the full name of the camp. The envelope, which could be seen by anyone, carried the sender’s mailbox number and town. Put the two together and you had access to a state secret—the concordance between the camp’s full and conventional designations. Similarly, an order issued to an external supplier bore the camp’s mailbox number, while the authorizing seal gave its full name. Similar issues arose in dispatching products and making payments. Someone in the secretariat wrote in the margin: “Comrade Rozenberg. We need to speed up agreement on the draft decree. 17 March 1950.”
Recall MVD war supplies administration chief Gornostaev, who wrote first to deputy interior minister Obruchnikov in April 1949. He appears in the file twice more, the second time more than a year later, on 24 July 1950, writing to new deputy interior minister Serov.[203] He began by reminding Serov that the matter was not new. MVD decree no. 0035-1949, he continued, did not cover the addressing of rail and river shipments and bank transfers. At present this could be done only by revealing the full names of camps. The MVD war supplies administration had made proposals, Gornostaev complained, but the matter remained unresolved. “Given that the disclosure of the full designation of MVD camps, building sites, and colonies, and their location is impermissible,” he concluded, “I ask for your instructions to accelerate the resolution of this question.”
Who t Is to Be Done?
Overlapping with the sequence of complaints were the first moves toward a possible resolution. In May 1949, Gulag second administration deputy chief Nikulochkin reported to Gulag chief Dobrynin that the allocation of mailbox numbers to camps had given rise to unanticipated difficulties with suppliers and bank officers.[204] He proposed a round of consultations with counterparties to identify solutions. But consultations would involve the exchange of information, which required high-level authorization. Nikulochkin asked Dobrynin to authorize the Gulag’s financial section chief to visit Gosbank, its transport section chief to visit the transport ministry, and its quartermaster general to visit the ministry of communications.
These visits evidently took place. On 1 July 1949, MVD transport section chief Zikeev reported back that the transport ministry did not need to know details of senders other than mailbox numbers (the report does not discuss the problem of recipients).[205] The MVD transport section could provide the transport ministry with a daily matrix of shipments by line of origin and destination. The mailbox numbers of camps had to be known to the MVD transport section in Moscow, its local suboffices along the railway lines, and the station masters. This system already applied to shipments from special-purpose construction projects, i.e., the secret labor camps of the interior ministry’s administration for industrial construction, Glavpromstroi.
Six weeks later, on 21 September, Gulag acting chief Bulanov proposed two options to deputy interior minister Chernyshov.[206] He began by reviewing the current situation: orders for food, clothing, building materials, equipment and machinery, pharmaceuticals, and published materials were breaking down. The orders went to suppliers as top secret, and so were being rejected and returned unfilled. Suppliers required full addresses to fill orders. But to provide these addresses openly would disclose state secrets. The first option that Bulanov proposed to Chernyshov was to assimilate relations between Gulag establishments and civilian counterparties to the rules that the interior ministry had recently (6 August 1949) applied to the military formations of its internal security troops. In effect, every camp would be reclassified as a troop unit (voiskovaia chast’) of the MVD. A second option was to reregister every camp with suppliers and banks as an “MVD facility” (ob'ekt MVD) with a mailbox number. Either way, private correspondence would continue to go via existing mailbox numbers.
Bulanov’s memo is followed in the file by two options for interior minister Kruglov to consider. The first option took the form of a draft decree “On the introduction of new designations of corrective labor camps.” The draft approved the nomenclature “MVD facility, mailbox number XXXX.”[207] It authorized camp chiefs to communicate in top secret their true addresses to deposit holders and railheads, and it required them to prepare new stamps and seals incorporating the new nomenclature.
The second option, a draft decree “On the procedure for maintaining correspondence of corrective labor camps and formalization of their documentation on business and financial operations,” was provisionally dated November 1949 and so was most likely prepared separately. It approved another nomenclature, “troop unit no. XXXX,” for all camps except those of Glavpromstroi.[208] According to this draft decree, Gosbank account holders would register only the troop unit number; orders for goods would specify the unit number and railway line and station. This draft decree gave authorizations and requirements to camp chiefs that were similar to the one before, and it covered the complexities of secret and private correspondence in more detail.
At this point the MVD second special section stepped in and became responsible for carrying the matter forward. On 26 November, second special section chief Filatkin wrote to Gulag chief Dobrynin asking for comments on a revised draft decree “On the procedure for maintaining correspondence,” etc. This document is not in the file, but it was evidently a revision of the option that sanctioned the renaming of camps as “troop units” (the title given is the same but with a few extra words).[209] Dobrynin wrote back to Filatkin on 7 December with minor amendments and corrections to the list of camps. Dobrynin and Filatkin jointly sent the agreed composite to Kruglov for signature on 30 December.