What did count was the system’s ever more numerous officials –administrative and operational – at central and local levels. Like every other bureaucracy, this one displayed a strong appetite for growth. At the beginning of 1940 the Gulag’s administrative structure was inspected by a brigade of officials from the Finance Commissariat, who concluded that the apparatus was excessively bulky.[2] The Gulag was therefore ordered to create a commission to review its structure and personnel, with the help of the inspectors from Finance. It emerged from this review that the Gulag’s central administration contained 33 departments employing 1,697 staff, to which should be added ancillary units. In total, the Gulag had 44 directorates and departments, 137 sections, and 83 offices – some 264 structural units that were oversized and duplicated each other’s work. The brigade proposed cuts, mergers and other organizational changes that would make it possible to abolish 511 posts or 30 per cent of the total. The supply agencies in Moscow and Leningrad were to effect similar reductions, cutting 110 posts. The brigade wished to reduce the current number of administrative units from 264 to just 143, and the workforce from 1,696 to 1,186. They also wanted the local structures, with their 4,000 administrators and operatives, inspected, simplified and slimmed down. The report’s charts and lists indicate an enormously complex system. We do not know what, if anything, changed in the light of its proposals.
There is no doubt that had it not been for the outbreak of war, the Gulag’s apparatus would have carried on growing. The number of prison camps contained in the major regional units, invariably referred to by a geographical term, stood at 528 at the beginning of 1941, justifying further expansion of the Moscow-based directorates and their officials and personnel in the field. Like any other administration, they found all kinds of excuses for creating new offices – supplies, finances, coordination – with the connivance of those who benefited from the labour camps. And there was a noticeable tendency to create new agencies in Moscow or some other desirable large city, ‘where they would have a good time without bothering at all about the camps’ – the words of a State Control commission rather bewildered by what it discovered. It added that all these functionaries had nothing to do in Moscow, where there were already plenty of them.
However gruesome its function, any administration can engage in business as usual. This administration wanted to be like any other. The fact is, however, that it found itself heading a gigantic industrial empire.
THE MVD AS INDUSTRIAL AGENCY
In 1940, the Finance Commissariat received reports and memos on each of its industrial and other branches of economic activity from the NKVD (which, like all the other commissariats, subsequently took the title of ministry and became the MVD, or Ministry for Internal Affairs). In its case, this was probably the first occasion. Here the complex administrative system we have just referred to becomes even more intricate. Forty-two agencies filed reports, but only two units pertained to the Gulag’s camps and colonies. All the rest were industrial directorates (paper, timber, fuel, agriculture, etc.). The reports were composed in the habitual idiom of an industry ministry planning its finances, costs, budgets, labour force and, of course, output.[3]
This activity shrank during the war on account of a reduction in the number of prisoners – zeks – many of whom were mobilized, frequently in ‘punishment battalions’ assigned the most dangerous offensives. Those who survived joined the ranks of ordinary units and were ‘rehabilitated’. Many were hardened criminals, and it is easy to imagine how they behaved towards civilians in territories liberated from the Germans and, a fortiori, in areas conquered from them. Not a few of them were condemned to death or returned to the camps.
As a direct producer or subcontractor, the Gulag began to boom again after the war (see Appendix 1). Here I shall simply summarize the NKVD’s operation as an ‘industrial agency’, basing myself on the reliable source of Marta Kraven and Oleg Khlevniuk.
Once the decision was taken to use the labour of camp inmates for economic tasks, the NKVD (renamed the MVD) became a key component of Stalinism. In 1952 its investments, which amounted to 12.18 billion roubles (9 per cent of gross domestic product), surpassed those of the petrol and coal ministries combined. Gross output of MVD industry was estimated at 17.18 billion roubles in February 1953 – only 2.3 per cent of the country’s total production. But it was the leading producer of cobalt and pewter and was responsible for a third of nickel production and a significant percentage of gold, wood and sawn timber (12–15 per cent). The plan for the early 1950s enhanced its weight and one of Stalin’s last orders related to cobalt output.[4]
Scrutiny of the meticulous and regular reports on production, finance and manpower leaves no room for doubt as to the prosperity of this booming economic complex. However, a few sentences complaining about ministries not paying up – making it impossible to feed inmates properly – set one thinking. In fact, this huge, peculiarly archaic industrial-police conglomerate was, despite some advanced branches, in deep crisis. The working and living – dying – conditions of zeks could not sustain genuine industrial expansion. Sooner or later, one way or another, the system would have to be abandoned. We can get a realistic picture of the camps’ problems from a report by Beria himself to Molotov in 1940.[5]
According to this report, the camp labour force, employed in constructing enormous factories, railways, port facilities and ‘special sites’ (for defence needs), or logging and producing timber for export, was not used to the full because the inmates were fed too little and clothed too badly to face the difficult climatic conditions. As of 1 April 1940, 123,000 exhausted inmates were unable to work for want of sufficient food and some tens of thousands of others were idle for lack of adequate clothing. These conditions were creating tension in the camps and entailed losses. The reason was that party and government directives about improving food and clothing supplies were not heeded by the Trade Commissariat. Worse still, every quarter, food and clothing supplies were actually dwindling. Eighty-five per cent of the stipulated flour and cereals were supplied, but as for the rest only half materialized, and barely a third in the case of clothing. Hence the growing number of sick and idle inmates.
The norms themselves require examination. Daily expenditure per zek was estimated at 4.86 roubles, whereas the plan projected 5.38 roubles.[6] Evidently, then, targets were not being met. But had they been, what would they have amounted to? We can only make some indirect estimates here. The cost of an armed guard was 34 roubles a day – six times more than an inmate. Since we do not know the precise date of this statistic, we can use a reference-point closer to 1940: a German general who was a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp cost 11.74 roubles a day in 1948 and he did not have to work.
Inadequate food and clothing, hard, unpaid labour, hunger and illness – these rendered many zeks unfit for work. Some – the more daring and desperate among them – refused to do so. To this must be added high internal crime and mortality rates, not to mention the phenomenon of dokhodiagi – prisoners at the end of the road who were now nothing but human wrecks. Against this backdrop, the Gulag’s administration emerges as an utterly obscene complex. It was a rather opulent empire – a state within a state – with its complicated economic interests, its secret police, its intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies, its educational and cultural activities. The MVD was also in charge of the regular police, border guards, recording demographic data and population transfers, and aspects of local government. In short, it was a classic product of the Soviet administration’s propensity for size and centralization. Viewed from above, the simplest way of running this highly centralized system was to have administrative pyramids supervising a plethora of agencies under the auspices of a single head, flanked by four or five deputies. The idea would have made some sense if the agencies had been less inflated, or if they had possessed simpler organizational structures. As it was, the reliance on ‘pyramids’ was a very costly illusion, threatening the power hub itself with paralysis.
3
RGAE, 7733, 36, 218, LL. 330–50 – a report delivered to the Finance Commissariat at the start of 1940.
4
Marta Kraven and Oleg Khlevniuk, ‘Krizis ekonomiki MVD – konets 1940kh-1950e gody’,