In the given climate, it was well-nigh impossible to interfere with a monster like the MVD. Yet at the same time, problems were piling up in the Gulag’s empire – notably in its administration. Theft, embezzlement, false reporting, criminal treatment of zeks (beatings, even killings) – all these were facilitated by the remoteness of the camps and the secrecy surrounding them. The plentiful supply of cheap labour rendered the MVD careless about its efficient employment. The general tendency to expand bureaucracy and the surplus of cadres bred irresponsibility. The MVD wished to be the spearhead of the ‘building of communism’ vaunted by Stalin’s propaganda, which consisted in covering the country with massive construction sites that were useless and expensive in equal measure. But other central government agencies, such as the Finance Ministry, Gosplan, the Prosecutor General, or inspectorates (e.g. the Mining Inspectorate), were not blind. They kept appealing to the government to eliminate the secrecy that shrouded so much irresponsibility and inefficiency, and so many serious violations of the law. Maybe they were aware of the report by Kruglov, Internal Affairs Minister, stating that the cost of a zek, however low, was still superior to the value of what he produced. According to the minister, the only way to achieve a balanced budget was to extend the working day and increase labour norms. Such a conclusion is comment enough on Kruglov’s expertise.
The party and state leadership, the Prosecutor General, the presidency of the Supreme Soviet, and many other leading figures were by now well aware of how things stood. They, like numerous party and state institutions, received a flood of letters from zeks containing complaints, appeals, accusations, political criticisms and denunciations. And to cap it all, honest party members in post in the camps or neighbouring regions, and even some camp administrators conscious of their responsibilities, secretly forwarded desperate letters and reports about the terrible living conditions endured by inmates, their exhaustion, and the mortality rate. Thus the problem was not a lack of information: the government was informed of the situation down to the smallest details. At the top, however, the prevailing philosophy was ‘So what?’ Or worse still, the situation was contemptuously shrugged off: they’re feigning it all, malingering…
As in other spheres, however, we observe a certain unrest heralding changes. Even at the height of Stalinism, it began spontaneously and surreptitiously in government agencies. Everyone knew that the low labour productivity of zeks was a major problem, discussed by the government. An extended, interesting analysis by a zek had reached the Central Committee. It demonstrated that prison labour was wasted and that the administration displayed not the least concern for productivity. Its author – a certain Zhdanov – proposed that camps be retained only for dangerous criminals; all other convicts should serve their sentences in their own workplaces as obligatory but free labour. Kruglov attempted to refute these arguments (and those of other letters cited in their support), but soon most heads of MVD production branches requested authorization to pay prisoners a partial wage in order to improve their productivity. In some camps, prisoners even began to receive a full wage. And on 13 March 1950 the government decided that a form of payment should be universally introduced.
While the MVD continued to trumpet its achievements as if nothing had happened, many economic officials realized that the camps were incapable of employing zek labour efficiently and that relying on such manpower was becoming a drain on resources. MVD ‘planning’ had an eerie quality to it: even though it paid the zeks next to nothing, it was in deficit. Given this anomaly, the economic system, in order to progress, had to acknowledge the superiority of civilian industry employing wage-labour. The police component of the industrial system was not only inefficient, it was moribund. Like its begetter, it was on course for self-destruction and threatened to take the whole edifice with it. This was evident to many administrators, economists and politicians, some of whom understood that lancing this boil was a precondition for reviving the system.
The search for ways to ‘resuscitate’ the forced-labour sector, by motivating its manpower, began even before Khrushchev’s arrival in power. Different camp administrators had tried out modest changes with the utmost discretion, well before the gravity of the problem and the need to intervene had been acknowledged at the top by the Finance and Justice ministries, Gosplan, and their opposite numbers in the party apparatus. Some offered zeks a reduction in their prison terms – for example, one day in exchange for three days’ productive labour. This practice had existed before the war, but was abolished in 1939. By 1948 it was being restored in many branches. And on 19 January of that year, the deputy head of Gosplan, Kosiachenko, deemed it worthy of consideration in a letter to Molotov.[7]
Whether as a consequence of this or not, a more radical reform was set in train. Prison terms were cancelled altogether and detainees were employed in their jobs as free wage-earners. In April 1952 the Council of Ministers studied these measures and issued a decree liberating some prisoners before the end of their sentences, on condition that they carried on working for MVD ventures as wage-earners. The MVD itself began to prefer to deal with relatively free manpower, thereby acknowledging the inefficiency of forced labour. Various partial changes were implemented in different sites with high numbers of zeks, and it became apparent that the next step was the total abolition of forced labour.
THE NEW ‘DESIGNS’ FOR DAL’STROI (NOVEMBER 1948)
One of the pilots for this was the enormous Dal’stroi MVD complex in the Far Eastern province, where 120,000 zeks worked. A wage, as well as other measures intended to stimulate productivity, had been introduced. Under pressure from the Ministry of Non-Ferrous Metals, Dal’stroi played a pioneering role in this transition. Those in charge of the Volga-Don Canal soon emulated them – unless they adopted the same approach at the same time. The Dal’stroi complex became fully self-financing and its procedures spread almost everywhere.[8]
According to Kraven and Khlevniuk, the ‘thaw’ of the Khrushchev period, already adumbrated in these moves, would have happened anyway, quite independently of the calculations and manoeuvrings of leaders at the top. The reason for the ‘de-gulagization’ (my term) was the crisis of the Gulag and its forced labour. By now, the MVD was finding it difficult to cope with the camps. The latest waves of arrests had brought with them many recalcitrant opponents – in particular, experienced military officers – in addition to hardened criminals. Refusal to work occurred on a mass scale and former officers were masters in the art of neutralizing informers and secret agents in the camps, undermining a proven system of espionage and making it increasingly difficult to recruit new informers. Moreover, there was a shortage of guards, at the very moment when acts of insubordination – even rebellion – were on the increase (the first of them occurred in 1942). The MVD sought to keep all this secret, despite the flood of letters of protest sent to Moscow, which it met with stubborn denials. But criticism and condemnation were now coming from guards themselves, as well as from prosecutors, at a point when the MVD was requesting more armed guards from the government in order to reinforce the camp regime – a confession of its inability to cope. In 1951, the number of ‘refusals to work’ climbed to a million days in 174 camps, colonies and other penal institutions. The bankruptcy of the Gulag, both as an economic and a penal organization, was irremediable.[9]