The Soviet Century By Moshe Lewin - 14

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Immediately after Stalin’s death, the changes were accelerated and the inevitable decision to destroy the very basis of the MVD’s system of forced labour was finally taken. On 18 March 1953 the Prime Minister, Malenkov, transferred most of the MVD’s industrial directorates to civilian ministries, while the penal establishments, with their inmates, reverted to the Justice Ministry, restoring the pre-1934 situation. On 27 March a further decree freed 1 million detainees out of a total of 2.5 million. During the same month, the order was given to discontinue several major MVD projects: the Turkmenistan grand canal, the Volga-Baltic network of canals, several hydro-electric dams and major irrigation systems. These enormous construction sites – especially the canals – used huge quantities of forced labour and, in its reports, the MVD continually prided itself on its role in such chimerical wonders, which pandered to Stalin’s penchant for the gargantuan. Khlevniuk surmises that higher governmental circles must have realized that such projects were ruinously expensive. And it was for the same reason that as early as 1950 Beria, responsible for the MVD in his capacity as Deputy Prime Minister, had envisaged reforming the huge ministry. But as long as Stalin was alive, no one dared put the issue on the official agenda. The only thing to do was to let factors inducing spontaneous decay do their work, as well as the courageous protests of unjustly imprisoned people. Only with Stalin’s death were many of these glorious ventures liquidated as useless for economic development, dealing a decisive blow to the forced-labour system.

We now know a lot more about the number of Gulag inmates and other relevant data. 10 For a long time, wild speculation raged over the issue, sometimes giving rise to amazing exaggerations. We shall leave it to the authors of such hyperbole to explain what purpose they served. In addition to the human losses attributable to the camp system, we are now in a position to tackle another question statistically: namely, the number of political arrests per year for virtually the whole pre- and post-Stalinist periods, as well as the sentences imposed on the accused.

The toll in human life due to events such as the famines, the forced exile of the kulaks, and other calamities is more difficult to quantify precisely and uncontroversially. The best way of assessing it is via demographic studies that calculate excess deaths for the relevant periods. Such studies encompass all the events and political measures that might have caused such deaths. They also allow us to identify losses caused not by increased mortality, but by reduced birth rates. These are losses too. Yet the unborn cannot be directly included among the regime’s victims, since they did not endure the terror. Readers can refer to the statistics and other data provided in the appendices.

I shall restrict myself to synthesizing the statistical material available for the period from 1921 to mid-1953 (the details can be found in Appendix 1 ). 11 Over the course of these thirty-three years, the total number of arrests for primarily political reasons (the charge of ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’) was 4,060,306 persons. Of these, 799,455 were sentenced to death; 2,634,397 were sent to camps, colonies and prison; 423,512 were banished – in other words, either forbidden to reside in some specified place ( vysylka ) or deported to a particular settlement ( ssylka); and 215,942 fell into the category of ‘others’. Given the enormous increase in the number of arrests from 1930 onwards, we may legitimately separate the figures for 1921–9 from the specifically Stalinist toll. In 1929, the number of arrests, already higher than in the previous year, reached 54,211 and included 2,109 death sentences. But it was not of the same order as the figure for the subsequent year, which leapt to 282,926 and included 20,201 death sentences.

We also possess other data, calculated by the KGB under Khrushchev, for the period 1930–53: 3,777,380 people had been arrested for ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ and the number of death sentences was around 700,000 – the majority during the 1937–8 purges.

The intensity of the persecution, the criminalization of activities hitherto regarded as legal, and the inflation in the number of utterly fictitious crimes are no doubt good indicators of the degree of ‘social peace’ enjoyed by the system and the level of composure that prevailed in the state. Notwithstanding a surge in repression in 1928, and especially 1929, the total for 1921–9 is inferior – or just slightly superior – to that for 1930 alone.

In the first half of 1953, the repressive apparatus was suddenly checked and the figures become comparatively low: 8,403 arrests, with 198 death sentences, 7,894 prison sentences of various sorts, 38 exile or deportation sentences, and 273 ‘others’. At Stalin’s death, 600,000 political prisoners were still detained in camps or prisons. By the end of 1954 the figure had fallen to 474,950. On Khrushchev’s initiative, the regime had begun to review the Stalinist policy of terror.

According to some estimates, between 1934 and 1953 about 1.6 million inmates, including common-law prisoners, died in captivity. Mortality was somewhat higher among political prisoners, of whom half a million died in these twenty years. Thus, over a period of thirty-three years, around 4 million people were sentenced for political crimes and 20 per cent of them shot – the overwhelming majority from 1930 onwards.

Detailed calculation of Stalin’s other victims is more difficult, but there are nevertheless reliable data. In 1930–2, some 1,800,000 peasants regarded as kulaks were exiled to the so-called ‘resettlement areas for kulaks’ ( kulakskaia ssylka ) supervised by the secret police. At the beginning of 1932, only 1,300,000 were still there: the remaining half a million had died, fled, or been released after review of their sentences. Between 1932 and 1940, these ‘kulak settlements’ registered 230,000 births and 389,521 deaths; 629,042 people had escaped, of whom 235,120 were caught and returned to their settlement. From 1935 onwards, birth rates exceeded mortality rates: between 1932 and 1934 there were 49,168 births and 271,367 deaths, but between 1935 and 1940 181,090 births were recorded as against 108,154 deaths. 12

Without going into details, we might add that the great majority of kulaks did not perish. Most fled their villages and scattered throughout the country among Russians or Ukrainians. They got themselves hired on the major projects of the five-year plan, which were constantly short of labour and ready to accept anyone without asking too many questions. The exiles gradually had their rights restored to them and their case was closed. Some went into the army, while others were simply rehabilitated. By 1948 the kulak resettlement colonies under police surveillance had been closed.

We are thus dealing with a significant number of victims of the terror – a mass that there is no need to inflate, manipulate or falsify. It remains to add to the toll a further sad category: demographic losses in the broad sense. In order to sort out the complicated picture for the period 1914–45, we must turn to a specialist in historical demography: Robert Davies. 13 The figures here concern the history of the Russian population for the whole period. But the Stalinist phase within it is clearly distinguished.

In Russia–USSR, two world wars and a civil war occasioned greater demographic losses (or population deficits) than elsewhere. These are measured both by ‘excess deaths’ – from violence, famine and epidemics – and by ‘birth deficit’, due to a temporary drop in birth rates. For the First World War and the Civil War, excess deaths are estimated at 16 million and the birth deficit at some 10 million. For the Second World War, the corresponding figures are 26–27 million and 12 million.

Stalinist industrialization also led to excess deaths in peacetime of the order of 10 million or more, many of them during the 1933 famine. Thus, total population loss for 1914 to 1945 from premature deaths and birth deficits amounted to 74 million: 26 million in 1914–22, 38 million for 1941–5, and 10 million in the peacetime years. Davies furnishes no figures for the birth deficit for this last period, but his work does aid us to have done with the fictitious body-counts in which anything goes as long as the record of ‘communism’ is drenched in ever more blood. When, for example, 80 million corpses are laid at its door, we might wonder: why not twice as many?