The paradoxes are unavoidable: the much-bruited struggle against enemies of the people was in fact a conspiracy organized by a government that knew full well it was committing illegalities on a mass scale. And this government intended to keep secret the errors it had made. Some changes were, of course, needed to reassure the deeply demoralized and frightened elites. They were sometimes made in public, sometimes through more discreet channels. Not unlike the persecutions, however, the ‘retreat’ had to be controlled. Getting the balance right required great skill. Stalin’s close lieutenants admired his mastery – or said they did.
Stalin had reason to be satisfied after the purges. Now that most of the old cadres had been exterminated, he finally possessed a new system: his own. Many of those who had failed to be transported by admiration for him, or who considered him a traitor to the cause, had been destroyed. The ruling elite had been almost entirely renewed; society as a whole now seemed subdued. All of Stalin’s acolytes, old and new, were cowed; the Politburo as a ruling body was virtually stripped of power. As we have seen, Stalin henceforth worked with a small group of sometimes just four people. The others had no information about ‘secret matters’ – and most things were secret. The party’s leaders, hitherto briefed on a whole range of issues by regular bulletins, stopped receiving them. And the Central Committee, although sometimes summoned to ‘debate’ questions that had already been settled, lost its importance as well.
11
THE CAMPS AND THE INDUSTRIAL EMPIRE OF THE NKVD
The documents we are now going to focus on should make the scope and character of the camps and forced labour, and their organic connection with the Stalinist system, more tangible. Here there was no ‘retreat’. We shall try to outline what might be called the NKVD’s ‘economic empire’, briefly summarizing its main features and trends.
Students of the justice and prison systems during the 1920s (the NEP period) know that camps were intended to be a more humane form of detention than the ‘cages’ in what were called prisons: labour in conditions approximating to a normal workplace was considered the best means of re-educating and rehabilitating people. At the time, conditions in the camps were far from rigorous, with the exception of those that held political prisoners – notably on the Solovki Islands on the White Sea, which was the sole camp under the jurisdiction of the GPU. Serious criminals were, of course, closely guarded, but some of those detained worked in the camp during the day and returned home for the night. Courts sought to limit prison sentences, opting instead for penalties of ‘obligatory labour’ (prinud-roboty) – sometimes mistranslated in the West as ‘forced labour’. The expression in fact meant keeping the same job, but paying a fine deducted at source for the term fixed by the sentence. The penal system was being experimented with; and the literature and debates on crime and punishment were public and innovative.
However, the liberalism of the NEP period in penal policy suffered from an objective limit: too little meaningful work for the re-education of prisoners. The country had a high unemployment rate and the unemployed had to have priority in access to work.
All this came to end in the 1930s, even if liberal notions lingered on for some time. Judges and criminologists fought a losing battle against the camps becoming an instrument of punishment through labour (in fact, forced labour), thereby losing their original purpose of re-education through labour. The new trend was a ‘side effect’ of hyper-industrialization. The labour of prisoners was easy to mobilize, cheap to exploit, subject to firm discipline – and not too difficult to replenish. The erstwhile liberals – still present in the Justice and Labour Commissariats (the latter was soon wound up) – fought in the government and party to prevent the prison system from relapsing into penal servitude. But the centre was set on its course – even if it resembled a quagmire in these years. The respite of sorts occasionally offered by the government involved no change in policy, but simply its consolidation and coordination.
The NKVD and its secret police inevitably became interested in playing a key role in the country’s industrialization and they spearheaded the transformation of the prison system into an enormous industrial sector under their administrative control. Obviously, convicts were to furnish the manpower, so they had to be supplied in the maximum numbers possible. Mere policing was not a source of glamour for the NKVD. But as soon as industrialization became the national ethos, the NKVD could hope to see its prestige enhanced by assuming an important role in economic development thanks to the Gulag. As for the Politburo, if it did not initiate this new line, it was certainly very interested in it. The Justice Commissariat lost its responsibility for penal institutions, which were gradually turned over to the NKVD. The process was completed in 1934.
Here we must go into some detail about a complex administrative situation. Officially, it was the NKVD that absorbed the secret police proper, the OGPU. But in these years, ‘security’ was never what it seemed. In fact, it was the GPU component – renamed the GUGB[1] that took over the whole NKVD from the inside, with its head assuming control of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. This complication serves to illustrate the confusing character of Soviet administrative practices.
To oversee the prison system – camps, colonies, prisons – a new administrative agency was created, called Gulag (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei), or General Camp Directorate. It also ran prisons and colonies for petty criminals and juvenile delinquents. A separate agency within it was responsible for people sentenced to terms of exile and isolation in resettlement colonies – kulaks, for example. This is just the start of the story. Around and in conjunction with the Gulag, the NKVD created a sizeable network of industrial administrative agencies for the construction of roads, railways and hydro-electric dams, mining and metallurgical enterprises, forestry, and the development of the Far East region (the Dal’stroi). Research and engineering projects in weapons production, including atomic weapons, were set up in special prison camps – the so-called sharashki – containing top specialists, among them Tupolev (planes) and Korolev (rockets).
The first NKVD showpiece was the construction of the White Sea Canal, launched with much fanfare in 1931–2 as the feat of dedicated prisoners and their chaperons, the secret police. These odes to Soviet labour and the working masses concealed a quite different reality: the work was done by unpaid workers stripped of all rights – in short, by slave labour.
Around the same time, confidential reports informed leaders about the headlong growth of the still rather young Gulag and the significance of its major construction projects. In 1935 the total number of prisoners listed on the supply rolls reached almost a million. Among the major projects were the construction of railways (in the Trans–Baikal region, along the Ussuri River, on the Baikal-Amur line); a series of canals, one of which connected Moscow and Volga; and numerous factories, sovkhozy and sawmills. Over time, the reports became more elaborate. In 1936, a map of the Gulag was drawn up. It identified sixteen sites with the term lager’ attached to their names (Dmitrovskii lager’, Ukhto-Pecherskii lager’, Baikalo-Amurskii lager’, etc.). Those were not actual prison units, but central administrative hubs with prison establishments – camps and colonies – mushrooming around them. Each such centre had a representative of the Prosecutor’s Office attached to it, sometimes assisted by a few aides. But despite their substantial salaries, their presence made no difference to what went on in the camps.
1
The GUGB –