THE GULAG AT WAR

STUDIES IN SOVIET HISTORY AND SOCIETY

General Editors: R. W. Davies, Emeritus Professor of Soviet Economic Studies, and E. A. Rees, Lecturer in Soviet History, both at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham

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R. W. Davies FROM TSARISM TO THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY: Continuity and Change in the Economy of the USSR (editor) SOVIET HISTORY IN THE GORBACHEV REVOLUTION

Jonathan Haslam SOVIET FOREIGN POLICY, 1930-41 (three volumes) THE SOVIET UNION AND THE POLITICS OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN EUROPE, 1969-87

Ronald I. Kowalski THE BOLSHEVIK PARTY IN CONFLICT: The Left Communist Opposition of 1918

Nicholas Lampert and G'bor T. Rittersporn (editors) STALINISM: Its Nature and Aftermath

Silvana Malle EMPLOYMENT PLANNING IN THE SOVIET UNION: Continuity and Change

Catherine Merridale MOSCOW POLITICS AND THE RISE OF STALIN: The Communist Party in the Capital, 1925-32

David Moon RUSSIAN PEASANTS AND TSARIST LEGISLATION ON THE EVE OF REFORM: Interaction between Peasants and Officialdom, 1825-55

E. A. Rees THE SOVIET COMMUNIST PARTY IN DISARRAY: The XXVIII Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (editor) STATE CONTROL IN SOVIET RUSSIA: The Rise and Fall of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, 1920--34

Nobuo Shimotomai MOSCOW UNDER STALINIST RULE, 1931-34

J. N. Westwood RUSSIAN NAVAL CONSTRUCTION, 1905-45

The Gulag at War Stalin's Forced Labour System in the Light of the Archives

Edwin Bacon

--MACMillAN

in association with the PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

© Edwin Thomas Bacon 1994, 1996

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WI P 9HE.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Published by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

First edition 1994 Reprinted (with alterations) 1996

ISBN 978-0-333-67510-6 ISBN 978-1-349-14275-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-14275-0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 05 04 03 02 01

5 4 3 2 I 00 99 98 97 96

Contents

List of Tables

Preface to the 1996 Reprint

Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Glossary

Introduction

Gulag Studies

2 New Revelations

3 Origins and Development

4 Gulag Administration

5 Forced Labour Establishments

6 How Many Prisoners?

7 Labour Use and Production

8 Life in the Gulag at War

Appendix A: Additional Tables

Appendix B: Administrative Structure of the Gulag during the War Years

Notes and References

Index

v

vii

ix

xii

xiii

XIV

XV

6

23

42

64

82

101

123

145

163

171

172

189

List of Tables

1.1 Estimates of the Gulag population around the outbreak of war lO

2.1 Number of prisoners in Gulag corrective labour camps and colonies (on 1 January each year) 24

2.2 The Gulag camps: inflow and outflow 1934-4 7 28 2.3 Population of the Gulag labour settlements

(on I January each year) 30 5.1 Camp formation and dissolution, June 1941 to July 1944 87 5.2 Evacuation of NKVD prisons by January 1942 91 5.3 Camps, colonies, and camp subdivisions, 1944-4j 91 5.4 Population of NKVD Special Camps (Verification and

Filtration Camps), January 1945 95 5.5 Gulag camps existing throughout the war 99 6.1 Soviet citizens of German nationality in Gulag camps,

31 December 1942 108 6.2 Arrests under state procuracy and NKVD directive

no. 221, June 1941 to April 1942 109 6.3 Prisoner movement devoted to intra-Gulag transfers,

1942 (%) 113 6.4 Turnover ratio in the Gulag camps, 1942 113 6.5 Distribution of prisoners added to the Gulag camp

system, 1942 (%) 114 6.6 Sources of prisoners entering the Gulag camps,

1942 (% of those entering) 116 6.7 Destinations of prisoners leaving the Gulag camps,

1942 (% of those leaving) 116 6.8 Forced labour in the Soviet Union, 1942--45 (millions,

annual average) 121 7.1 Distribution of Soviet workforce, 1942--45 (millions,

annual average) 125 7.2 Gulag camp workforce not working, October 1941 to

January 1942 (%) 128 7.3 Physical classification of prisoners in Gulag camps,

1 Jam,ary 1942 (%) 130

vii

viii List of Tables

7.4 Gulag camp workforce in productive labour, November 1941 to January 1942 (%) 131

7.5 Gulag workforce engaged in productive labour, by administration, 1942-44 (fourth quarter each year, %) 132

7.6 Gulag agricultural production, 1941 and 1944 (thousands of tons) 139

7.7 Livestock on Gulag agriculturai establishments, 1941, 1943-45 (thousands) 140

7.8 NKVD output of selected raw materials and products, 1941-44 144

8.1 Indicators of medical care in Gulag camps and colonies, 1941, 1943 and 1944 (on 1 January) 149

8.2 Mortality rates in Gulag camps and colonies, 1941-44 (% of annual average population) 149

8.3 Female Gulag prisoners, 1941-45 (% of total) 151 8.4 Gulag population by age, 1940 and 1943 (%) 151 8.5 Nationality of prisoners in the Gulag camps, 1941-45,

1 January (% of total) 153 8.6 Offences of which Gulag inmates and personnel were

convicted within the camps, June 1941 to June 1944 157

A.l Camps of the Main Administration of Railway Construction (GULZhDS), 1942-44 163

A.2 Camps of the Main Administration for Camps of Industrial Construction (Glavpromstroi), 1942-44 164

A.3 Camps of the Main Administration for Camps of the Mining and Metallurgical Industry (GULGMP), 1942-44 165

A.4 Camps of the Administration for Camps of the Timber Industry (ULLP), 1942-44 165

A.5 Camps of the Dal'stroi; Osobstroi; Main Administration of Road Construction (GUShosDor), 1942-44 166

A.6 Camps of the Administration of Corrective Labour Colonies (upravlenie ispravitel'no-trudovykh kolonii -UITK), 1942-44 166

A.7 Gulag camps inflow, 1934-47 167 A.8 Gulag camps outflow, 1934-47 167 A.9 Intra-Gulag camp transfers, 1934-47 168 A.10 Gulag camps inflow and outflow, 1942 168 A.ll Labour-use of Gulag camp workforce by managerial

administration, 1940-44 (%) 169 A.l2 Gulag prisoners contracted out to other People's

Commissariats (Narodnyi kommissariat- NK), 1943-44 170

Preface to the 1996 Reprint

The preface to the hardback edition of The Gulag at War set out in brief the work's raison d'etre. At the end of the Soviet period the archives of the Stalinist forced labour system opened up to a greater degree than ever before. Given the level of secrecy previously surrounding the Gulag, and the debate which flourished in the absence of official material, even a limited opening of the archives was significant. The Gulag at War drew its original material from the 'in-house' accounts of the Secret Police concerning, in particular, the role and organisation of the labour camps during the Second World War.

The preface then set out the advantages and limits of the archival material. First, the process of new historical revelation could be carried forward. Second, however, the over-optimistic hopes of some scholars that most matters of dispute would somehow be settled was unrealistic. It is to these two issues that the preface to the 1996 reprint addresses itself further.

Since the first edition, the opportunity has presented itself to combine two avenues of research which had previously been pursued almost separately - forced labour and war losses. Through the preparation of a conference paper1, it became apparent that the figures were now available to state clearly that, during the Second World War, the Gulag incarcerated significantly more Soviet citizens than did the enemy. Whereas around five and three-quarter million Soviet prisoners of war fell into German hands, 2 well over seven million individuals served time in Soviet forced labour establishments between 1941 and 1945.

According to the Gulag archives, 4.7 million individuals were at some point in a Gulag camp or colony between June 1941 and June 1944,3 with at least a further 350 000 added by the War's end.4 In addition there were at least a million, and perhaps double that, in Gulag Labour Settlements over the same period,5 and half a million coming straight from Nazi control into Verification and Filtration Camps. 6 These totals do not include those in NKVD prisons nor those sentenced to forced labour without deprivation of liberty. To put this in context, the Soviet Union suffered huge losses during the same years. Military losses alone amounted to some 8.7 million, according to the findings of a Soviet General Staff Commission announced in 1990.7

In a time of great externally-afflicted hardship and an economically detrimental labour shortage, the Soviet authorities maintained a forced

ix

X Preface to the 1996 Reprint

labour network which in toto imprisoned more Soviet citizens than did the enemy. The new material presented here brings to light this fact and examines the rationale with which the Soviet authorities justified the maintenance of such a system to themselves. Which brings us to the second point identified above - the limitations of the new revelations.

A critic of The Gulag at War argued that it failed to treat the archival materials presented with sufficient scepticism. 8 Of course, scepticism is not easy to quantify, and, in devoting much space to exposing the undercounting of many glasnost' -era archive-based articles, these pages are by no means unquestioning with regard to the official Soviet accounts. Therein though is the point. As well as using archival data to increase our knowledge of events per se, the information used here 'presents the official perception of the camp network' .9 The way the Soviet authorities perceived and justified the evil of the Gulag system is inherently interesting. Furthermore, if the devil is in the detail, then this work's survey of the administrative structures of the vast forced labour system is likewise of value in revealing the official, almost bureaucratic, conception of the system which is evident in archival material. The very limitations of the archival material are of import. In itself it does not do justice to the labour-camp experience. It does, however, stand alongside other material to increase our knowledge of the brutal phenomenon which was Stalin's Gulag.

EDWIN BACON Birmingham, January 1996

1. E. T. Bacon 'The Contribution of the GULAG during the Second World War', Annual Conference of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham. Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, 23-25 June 1995.

2. John Barber and Mark Harrison The Soviet Home Front (Longman, 1991) p. 41. 3. GARF f. 9414 op. 1 d. 68 1.8. 4. V. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhipelag: glazami pisatelya i statistika', Argumenty i fakty 45 ( 1989)

pp. 6-7. 5. There were 930 221 on these settlements in January 1941 (seep. 30). If they experienced

the same turnover rate as camps and colonies during the war, then 2.4 million individuals passed through them. However, their nature and war-use suggests that the turnover of inmates was far slower than in the general camp network.

6. Table 6.8, p. 122. There may be an element of double-counting if this figure is simply added to the number in the camps and colonies during the war, as of course many of the returnees passed through Verification and Filtration Camps into the Gulag proper. However, it seems that around half of these camps' inmates went back into the armed forces, rather than into the Gulag (p. 94).

Preface to the 1996 Reprint xi

7. For a detailed assessment of these fmdings, see: Edwin Bacon 'Soviet Military Losses in World War Two' The Journal of Slavic Military Studies Vol. 6/4 (December 1993) pp. 613-33.

8. Michael Jakobson Europe Asia Studies Vol. 47/6 (September 1995) p. 1060. 9. Seep. 2.

Preface

Throughout the Stalin era and beyond, the Gulag system of forced labour blighted the Soviet Union. Millions were incarcerated in its camps; some eventually to be released, many to die behind wire. For decades histories of the camp system have relied on the experiences of those who suffered within them for their main source of information. These accounts have been supplemented with diverse, tangentially relevant, officially sanctioned Soviet publications, from which historians could attempt to deduce further conclusions about the nature of forced la­bour in the USSR.

All of this time, the archives of the Gulag remained closed. The official records came, in their absence, to represent something of an ultimate arbiter of historical debates regarding the Gulag. When they were open, it was presumed, answers would be had.

With the decline and eventual collapse of the Soviet empire from the late 1980s onwards, the archives of the Gulag have opened: first to selected Russian historians, and latterly to a few Western scholars. The Gulag at War is largely the fruit of research carried out in the 'special section' of the Moscow State Archives over Christmas and New Year 1992-93.

The Gulag records kept in these archives constitute a vast amount of material, of which only a small proportion has contributed to the present work. Attention has been concentrated on overviews of the Soviet forced labour system, and on the years 1941 to 1945 in particu­lar. It was also possible to peruse what amounted to an official 'potted history' of the Gulag's early years.

The sources surveyed for this book provide, therefore, much new information regarding the nature of the Soviet forced labour system. Of course, any expectation that the opening of the archives would some­how answer all questions regarding the Gulag was always unrealistic. Much information remains to be reclaimed from the central state archives alone, and it is only to be hoped that the restricted access still in force is loosened further in the coming years. Nonetheless, the present work begins the process of new historical revelation. It furthers our knowl­edge of a phenomenon, the evil of which no archive could ever hide.

EDWIN BACON

xii

Acknowledgments

A debt of gratitude is owed to many people whose assistance and ad­vice made this book possible.

The research contained herein is a contribution to the project 'So­viet production, employment, and the defence burden 193 7 and 1941-1945' (Principal investigator: Dr Mark Harrison), funded by the Leverhulme Trust. I am grateful in particular to Mark Harrison for his advice and encouragement.

Valuable advice and assistance have also been forthcoming from Seth Axelrod, Robert Conquest, Bob Davies, John Keep, Arfon Rees, Derek Spring, and Carl Van Dyke. In Moscow I benefited greatly from the help provided by Nikolai Simonov, Oleg Khlevnyuk, Sergei Mironenko, Dina Nokhotovich, Andrei Sokolov, and Viktor Zemskov.

I am grateful to my parents for their encouragement and interest. Most of all, thanks are due to my wife for her consistent support. Were it not for its inappropriate subject matter, this book would have been dedicated to Deborah.

E. T. B.

xiii

List of Abbreviations

GARF (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv rossiskoi federatsii) Clavpromstroi

GPU GULag (Giavnoe upravlenie lagerei) GULGMP

GULZhDS

GUShosDor

ITL NKYust NKVD (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennykh del) OGPU OITK

Osobstroi

RGAE (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki) RSFSR

Sovnarkom UITLK

ULLP

UOR

State Archive of the Russian Federation Main Administration of Industrial Construction Camps State Political Administration Main Administration of Camps

Main Administration of Camps of the Mining and Metallurgical Industry Main Administration of Railway Construction Camps Main Administration of Road Building Camps Corrective Labour Camp People's Commissariat of Justice People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs Unified State Political Administration Department of Corrective Labour Colonies (local) Administration of Special Construction Camps Russian State Archive of the Economy

Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Council of People's Commissars Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies (republican) Administration of Timber Industry Camps Guard and Regime Administration

xiv

Glossary

delo fond krai list ob/ast'

opis' spetskontingent

NKVD

spetsperese/enets} trudposelenets spetsposelenets

ssyl'noposelenets

ssyl'nyi

voennosluzhashchie vysyl'nyi

zek - pl. zeky (acronym for 'ZK', an abbreviation of zaklyuchennyi)

dossier (of archival documents) collection (of archival documents) territory (administrative subdivision of the RSFSR) page region (administrative subdivision of a Union Republic or a krai) list (of archival documents) A term used to define a category of the population in Soviet census compilation. There is some debate over the categories of inmate, settler, and NKVD staff included. In the war period the meaning of the term was altered, and those sent to 'verification and filtration camps' formed what then became termed the spetskontingent. These terms are synonymous; spetsperese/enets was the term employed before 1934, trudpose/enets was used between 1934 and 1944, and from 1944 onwards spetsposelenets was the official term. These were people sent to labour settlements, i.e. to a specified location and work, sine die, with no right to leave or vote, and no passport. They were required to report regularly to the authorities. Convict exiled sine die, but allowed to live at liberty in a restricted area. An exile (ssylka - exile as a state). Told where to live, for a specified term, with no right to work. Received state benefit. servicemen An exile (vysy/ka- exile as a state). Told where not to live, and was otherwise free. prisoner

XV

Introduction

It is something of a historical irony that the phenomenon with which Stalin is perhaps most widely identified - forced labour and repres­sion - should have been so little known for so long. So little known, that is, in the detailed and comprehensive manner which would give a fuller understanding of its complex structure; not just to be aware that the Gulag system of forced labour camps existed, was extensive, horrific, and claimed millions of victims, but to know also such perhaps more mundane minutiae as its administrative structure, economic significance, internal subdivisions, and personnel policy .1

For decades, the details of the Soviet forced labour system have been hidden by state secrecy. What was revealed came as much by means of memoirs and literary works as through the writings of histo­rians. Even such fundamentals as the number of prisoners in the Gulag, which may strike the layman as a relatively simple issue, have been the subject of monumental historical detective work, with attendant controversy. Without the records kept by those who ran the forced labour camps themselves - which remained locked in the Moscow ar­chives - scraps of evidence from all manner of diverse sources were used to build up a coherent picture of the Gulag system. Now, how­ever, the archives are opening.

The aim of the present work is to make a further contribution to our knowledge of forced labour in the Soviet Union as it existed under Stalin, by drawing on the archival records kept by the Gulag auth­orities themselves. Detail upon detail of the vast Soviet forced labour system, its personnel, prisoners and intrinsic principles were recorded by the clerks of the Soviet secret police. Marked 'Top Secret', much of this information has for decades been locked away in the 'special fund' of the state archives in Moscow. Only since the late 1980s have Russian scholars published selected data from this source. Only in the past year or so ( 1992-93) have a few Western scholars been allowed to see some of these archives. Access remains restricted.

The further contribution to our knowledge of the Gulag which the present work offers draws on these long-secret Gulag archives. It rep­resents only the edge of the fringes of such material. Limited time in these restricted archives meant that much remained unseen, and many details are still to be disclosed. Nonetheless, the material selected and

2 Introduction

collected enables our understanding of the Soviet forced labour sys­tem to be furthered.

Within the central aim of expanding our knowledge of the Soviet forced labour system, several specific goals can be identified. First, in order to add something new, it is desirable to know what has gone before. An assessment is therefore offered of the state of 'Gulag studies' in the West before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This assessment represents a case-study of history writing where evidence is scarce. Here the debate between different schools of thought con­centrated on how much verifiable history could be drawn from the sources available. Whilst the possible source-base was comparatively wide in terms of quantity, it was narrow in terms of type. Much had to be made of memoir material, in the absence of anything more than tangentially relevant in the form of official documentation.

The work undertaken by scholars in the West kept the Soviet labour camp system at the forefront of academic debate. Their research drew on and evaluated the writings of memoirists and literati, who them­selves had placed and kept the horror of the Gulag in the domain of public knowledge.2 Unfortunately the spread of such a public aware­ness in the Soviet Union remained severely restricted by censorship well into the 1980s. After 1985, however, Soviet scholars were in­creasingly encouraged to write about such horrors by the surge of popular interest in history - and particularly in the history of the Stalin years - initiated largely in the press and literary journals, and boosted by the relative freedom of Gorbachev's glasnost' policy.

Much of the material thus written was not substantively new knowl­edge, and was often based on literary memoirs and Western historical works.3 That it was new to the public domain in the USSR was .sufficient to arouse great interest both domestically and internationally. Towards the end of the 1980s, however, a number of Soviet papers and journals began to publish original data on the size and role of the Gulag. This information was gathered by the small, select band of Russian histori­ans who were granted access to the state archives. An evaluation of the nature and validity of such revelations is the second identifiable goal of the present work, and is undertaken in Chapter 2.

Following the opening chapters' survey of previous academic re­search on Soviet forced labour, new archival information is introduced and constitutes the bulk of the remaining chapters. This information presents the official perception of the camp network, which held sway for most of the communist era. Most of the archival material appears here for the first time. It is taken from the special fund of the State

Introduction 3

Archive of the Russian Federation and thus, in contrast to memoir material, was written or recorded by state officials (employees of the Gulag) for other state officials (chiefly, their superiors in the NKVD or the govemment).4

From this source it is possible to present in Chapter 3 an account of the development of the forced labour system in the Soviet Union from 1920 through to 1960, when the documents in question were trans­ferred from the Ministry of the Interior to the central state archives. Light is thereby shed on the state's perceptions of the camps and their tasks. Further detail shows the place of the Gulag in the administra­tive structure of the state, and the shifting subordination of different parts of this network to various ministries.

A historiographical survey, accompanied by an account of the de­velopment of the Gulag structure, constitutes something of a broad­brush approach. Such has been the common mode of study in previous historical surveys of the forced labour system. However, so great is the amount of material held in the central state archives of the Russian Federation, that a deeper study requires temporal limits in order to cover all aspects of the Gulag in some detail and yet remain manage­able, readily achievable, and accessible. Consequently, in the present work the period of the Second World War serves as a case-study, within which different aspects of the camp system (the numbers and backgrounds of prisoners, the economic tasks and achievements, the camp conditions, and the effectiveness of camp security) can be more closely investi­gated. The more general narrative concerning the history of the forced labour system in the 1920s and 1930s establishes the fundamentals of the Gulag, as seen by memoirists and historians, and - for the first time - as seen by the Soviet authorities themselves. On this founda­tion, the details of the Gulag at war can be more readily understood.

If the Gulag system was at its most extensive roughly in the two decades from the mid-thirties to the death of Stalin in 1953, then the Great Patriotic War represents a neatly definable and fairly compact timespan in the middle of that period. The present work, therefore, makes a new contribution to the socio-economic history of World War II. The crisis and demands of war also provide a heightened demon­stration of the effects of the vast labour camp network on the Soviet state's economy, society and morale.

Of course the war years do not represent the sort of typical period usually deemed necessary for a case-study. However, the unique as­pects of Gulag life in wartime do not detract from the value of their study. First, there is in any case no 'typical' period in the Gulag's

4 Introduction

existence; from de-kulakisation through the Great Purges to the unrest in the camps during the early 1950s, events always set particular years apart. Second, the overview of the development of labour camps pre­sented in the earlier chapters facilitates recognition of the peculiarities of the war period and places them in context.

A question which has long vexed historians of the Stalin years is whether the motives behind the establishment of a forced labour sys­tem the size of the Gulag were chiefly economic or coercive. Empha­sis on the Second World War highlights this issue, as during this period human resources were stretched to the limit, and yet the perceived demands of state security were also of great import. The decade of the thirties had seen the Soviet Union undergo rapid industrialisation, driven forward by an authoritarian regime seeking to mobilise and develop largely by central directive. During the 1930s, therefore, the ever in­creasing contingent of forced labourers had been written into economic plans as a productive labour resource with a particular role in the ex­ploitation of natural resources in remote, climatically inhospitable regions.5

Nonetheless, were the aim of Stalin's terror simply to provide an economic resource for the state, then the physical destruction of po­tential labourers by means of execution and ill treatment in the camps would scarcely have been so rife. Clearly the coercion or removal of possible and actual oppositionists also motivated the instigators of ter­ror. Study of the war years demonstrates both the Gulag's role as a vital source of human resources - particularly evident in the conscrip­tion of many inmates into the armed forces - and the fact that even with the need for manpower at its peak, there were those inmates for whom the Soviet state's primary intention was isolation and death.

Previously the role of forced labour in the USSR during the war years has not received detailed attention from historians of either So­viet forced labour or of the Soviet war effort, due mainly to the lack of available information.6 In this area particularly, new sources can significantly add to our knowledge of the system of labour camps which were a blight on the vast territories of the Soviet state, and on the lives of millions of its inhabitants. Whilst the USSR was a key player in the allies' offensive, which would end Germany's occupation of most of mainland Europe and thereby reveal the horrors of Nazi concentra­tion camps, on Soviet soil a long-standing network of camps was main­tained at a high level of population and organisation, and then expanded further as the war came to an end and in the years thereafter.

Less than half a decade after the end of World War II, the Soviet forced labour system incarcerated and exploited more inmates than ever

Introduction 5

before. In the new information available from the archives, there is a danger that we may lose sight of the human lives which the statistics represent. The suffering involved in the Gulag system cannot be quantified. However, such numerical data as have been released in recent years and are added to in the present work, though perhaps seeming impersonal, are a valuable addition to the historian's under­standing of forced labour in the Soviet Union.

1 Gulag Studies

The study of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union is inseparable from the assessment of state terror. In account after account of these years, which took up a rough third of the time allotted in history to that particular manifestation of Russian Empire, repression and brutality underlie the analysis. During these years the USSR underwent remarkable mod­ernisation and industrialisation, made a contribution to the defeat of the Nazis in World War II which can scarcely be overstated, and emerged as one of the two post-war superpowers destined to shape the next four decades of global affairs. Despite the achievements of this time, however, state terror remains perhaps the single phenomenon with which Stalin is most closely associated.

This was never meant to be the case. For decades, the Soviet au­thorities attempted to hide the Gulag forced labour system from out­side observers. 1 Even with official secrecy and censorship, however, the Gulag camps could not be totally hidden from observers in the West, as former inmates wrote memoirs and oblique references to forced labour were detected in Soviet publications. Nonetheless, these sources failed to provide sufficient indisputable information to settle the po­litico-academic debates amongst Western intellectuals regarding the nature and scope of the forced labour system in the USSR.

Whilst both sides in these debates protested that they simply sought the truth, the perception was that ideological supporters of the Soviet regime played down the extent of the Gulag and its brutalities, whereas opponents exaggerated them. So far as Gulag population estimates were concerned, the hawk went high and the dove low. The mechanics of the debate often concerned the reliability, or otherwise, of the material available. In the 1980s, these arguments were refined and sharpened on both sides, with the exchanges between Conquest, Rosefielde and Wheatcroft dissecting the existent evidence, and taking 'Gulag stud­ies' to the limits of their pre-archive knowledge.

1. A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL OVERVIEW

The brutalisation of countless human lives under the system of govern­ment presided over by Stalin must be evident in any objective ap-

6

Gulag Studies 7

praisal of the period. This general view of the Stalin era's historical legacy, however, needs two specific annotations of particular import to the question of the Gulag, or forced labour system. First, it must be noted that state repression existed in the Soviet Union both before and after Stalin. Though he nurtured and encouraged it more than any other, he did not beget it. Under Stalin, the scale of repression exceeded anything known before or since, and its impact was heightened still further by the increasingly arbitrary selection of victims from amongst the populace. Nonetheless, from the October revolution of 1917 on­wards the development of the Gulag system had been underway, and of course exile and forced labour had long been implements of the tsarist order. Nor was Stalin personally so much the sustainer of the system that it collapsed when death withdrew his upholding hand. In fact, the use of forced labour camps as an instrument of punishment for those opposed to the Soviet regime continued up to the early 1990s, although by this time the millions of inmates had become hundreds or even tens.2

Second, despite the fact that history remembers the Stalin years per­haps primarily for the terror, the lack of detailed and undisputed knowl­edge about the extent and the mechanisms of repression long left a gap in our understanding of this period. At root this omission repre­sented a measure of success for the policy of secrecy, camouflage and partial disclosure adhered to by the Soviet authorities. It was in neither the domestic nor international interests of the USSR that the existence or extent of the labour camp system be widely known. The image of a progressive state, free of the exploitation of man by man, was scarcely reflected in the Gulag, and a Soviet citizenry more fully cognisant of its penal system would be less inclined to believe or support their rulers in the supposed advance toward true communism. In the West, diplo­matic and trade relations would be harmed roughly relative to the scope of knowledge about the camps, and intellectual and socio-political backing for the Soviet regime could be expected to face a similar set-back.3

Of course masking the extent of the Gulag was manifestly easier than hiding its very existence. Nonetheless, a number of Western ob­servers were, from the vantage point of hindsight, too ready to play down the horrors of Soviet 'corrective' labour. For example, in 1944 the US Vice-President, Henry Wallace, spent three days in the Soviet far east, where he was shown the mines and their workers, which pro­duced much of value to the allied war effort. The mines were in fact prison camps and the workers were either prisoners or NKVD officers playing the role of workers. However, all signs that this was the case

8 The Gulag at War

were removed, and Wallace published a glowing report of his trip, for which he later apologised.4

There are numerous other examples of Western observers who played down or denied the existence of the labour camp system; some from political motives, some from a genuine - if naive - belief that no such system existed. From the historiographical point of view, however, such writings reflect the key tension between memoir material and official data. The absence of the latter and the prevalence of the former in the decades following Stalin's death raised questions not only about the specifics of the Gulag itself, but about the nature of historical evidence.

Memoirs concentrate, by their very nature, on individual experiences. If accepted as trustworthy, such narratives reveal the treatment of a given individual at a given time in a given camp. Their historical value is limited in so far as individuals, especially prisoners writing of their captors and captivity, cannot also be objective in their assessments of historical circumstances in which they were themselves involved. In­deed, many would doubt the proposition that there exists such a phe­nomenon as objective history. If, however, a number of individuals give substantially similar accounts, based on experiences at different times in different camps, then a fuller and more reliable picture of the camp system emerges, albeit with some remaining reservations regard­ing objectivity.

It was the latter circumstance - of a consistent, grimly depressing picture becoming apparent from a variety of memoir sources - which held true in the West after the Second World War in relation to the Soviet camp system. Leaving aside the predictable denials and coun­ter-denials amongst political and intellectual dilettanti, this circumstance created difficulties for historians. s On the one hand, it was argued that the use of memoirs resulted in a one-sided history restricted in scope. In order to gain an understanding of the entire forced labour system in the context of the Soviet state, more infonnation was needed than could be found in or discerned from selective memoir materials. Using such infonnation, it may have been possible to reach reliable conclusions with regard to the nature of the forced labour experience, but the sys­temic questions of extent, economic significance, organisational methods, political control, and ideological foundation all remained subject to conjecture.

On the other hand, the historian must deal with the material avail­able. With an absence of reliable primary statistical data relating to the Gulag, the infonnation contained in memoirs and other accounts assumed great significance. Apparently minor details, such as the number

Gulag Studies 9

of newspapers distributed to prisoners in the RSFSR, Ukraine and Belorussia in 1931, were used as a basis for estimating the forced labour population. Attempts were made to draw together former in­mates' recollections and create a survey of the entire Gulag structure based on more than simply a single testimony, for example, the debriefing of a number of Polish ex-prisoners during the war by Sylvester Mora and Peter Zwiemak.7 Of course, such methodologies produced ques­tionable results. However, it could be argued that a questionable result was better than no result at all, and historians had a duty to fill in as best they could the gaps left in the history of the Soviet Union.

Of all the unanswered questions regarding the Gulag, the issue of the magnitude of the Soviet system of forced labour under Stalin caused most debate in academic circles since the Second World War. The continued maintenance of state secrecy by the authorities in the USSR allowed a wide range of methodologies and results to flourish. In 194 7, Viktor Kravchenko, who worked as a head of an armaments depart­ment in the RSFSR Sovnarkom during the war, declared that twenty million was the figure commonly accepted amongst his colleagues for the number of forced labourers in the Soviet Union during the war.8

The next year, N. S. Timasheff estimated, from a calculation of the number of people disenfranchised in the USSR elections of 1937, that forced labourers at the end of that year numbered 2.3 million.9

These two figures, published shortly after the Second World War, marked the upper and lower boundaries of subsequent Western esti­mates. They also demonstrated the recurring feature of different meth­odological approaches to this question. The highest estimates for the population of the Gulag system are those based on personal experi­ence. From reports of Poles imprisoned in the Gulag at the beginning of the war, a list of camps and their estimated populations was com­piled, with a total of fifteen million prisoners being arrived at for 1940-42.10 A similar estimate of some twelve to fourteen million camp inmates was given by Colonel Andreev, a former camp guard inspector. 11

Lower totals for the forced labour population of the USSR came from those using a methodology based on the size of the Soviet economy. Notable amongst these was the work of Naum Jasny. In 1951 a copy of the Soviet economic plan for 1941 was published in the USA. This confidential plan had found its way into German hands during the war, and thence into the possession of the American Council of Learned Societies. On the basis of NKVD production figures in the plan, Jasny arrived at a tentative estimate of 3.5 million for the planned size of the forced labour workforce in 1941. 12

10 The Gulag at War

Table l.l Estimates of the Gulag population around the outbreak of war

Gulag population

2.3 million (Dec 1937)

Up to 3.5 million ( 1941)

4-5 million (1939)

5.5-9.5 million (end 1938)

9.6 million (June 1941)

10.6 million ( 1941)

12-14 million (1940-41)

15 million (1940-42)

20 million (wartime)

Source

N .S. Timashetf, American Journal of Sociology, 54 (1948) pp. 148-55

Naum Jasny, Journal of Political Economy, 59!5 (1951) pp. 405-19

Stephen G. Wheatcroft, Soviet Studies, 33/2 (1981) p. 286

Robert Conquest, Soviet Studies, 43/5, (1991) p. 951

Unpublished German pre-war estimates, in Dallin and Niko1aevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia (London, 1948) p. 86

Steven Rosefielde, Soviet Studies, 33/1 (1981) p. 65

Colonel Andteev, cited in S. Swianiewicz, Forced Labour and Economic Development (Oxford, 1965) p. 29

Mora and Zwiernak, in Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia (London, 1948) p. 62

Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom (London, 1947) p. 406

Methodology

Calculation of disenfranchised population

NKVD production figures in 1941 plan

Evaluation of census and employment data

NKVD figures to 1937 Census Board, with subsequent arrest and death estimates

Reports of German economists from visits to the USSR after 1939

Based on Mora and Zwiemak (La Justice sovietique (Rome, 1945)), and annual mortality

Based on personal experience as camp guard inspector

Calculated from reports of former prisoners

Based on estimates current during work as a Sovnarkom head of department

Gulag Studies 11

2. THE DEBATE OF THE 1980s

As time progressed, the range of figures thrown up by the debate on the extent of forced labour narrowed. Throughout the 1980s a series of articles in academic journals - particularly the work of Conquest, Rosefielde and Wheatcroft - kept the issue raging. 13 This transatlantic exchange of views took place chiefly in the British journal Soviet Studies and the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Slavic Review. It presented a thorough and seemingly exhaustive investigation of possible methodologies and results. Here again, though, if the complexities of the debate can be reduced to a single issue, the argument repeatedly turned to the question of sources, and the reliability of estimates made on the basis of memoir, semi­official, or official but tangential material.

In broad terms a distinction can be made between those who more readily started from official Soviet demographic and industrial data, and those who gave more credence to the estimates of emigres and former inmates of the camps. The former backed camp population figures lower than those accepted by the latter. No consensus was ever an­nounced, and the debate remained vigorous. However, the results ar­rived at fell within the range of the highest and lower estimates of the earlier period; that is, they were above Jasny and below Andreev.

(a) Rosefielde

Steven Rosefielde began the debate in the early 1980s with two arti­cles. The first considered the economic significance of the Gulag; the second assessed the estimates of the forced labour population's size between 1929 and 1956.14 The thrust of Rosefielde' s first article was that the causes and consequences of the rapid industrialisation experi­enced in the Soviet Union during the period of the first five-year plan had long been inadequately explained, and further, that the publication of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago necessitated and facilitated a to­tal rethink of the process of industrialisation; a rethink which took more account of the role of forced labour, and particularly of the stat­istical distortions especially prevalent in data from the Gulag system.

Rosefielde started, then, from what he termed the 'standard inter­pretation' of the period 1928-33, which regarded the rapid industriali­sation of these years as an economic success, although acknowledging and condemning the brutality engaged in to ensure such success. Even the most stringent Western estimates judged that industrial durable output

12 The Gulag at War

all but doubled in these years, at the expense of a relatively modest decrease in the production of consumer goods. This interpretation was, Rosefielde asserted, fundamentally challenged by Solzhenitsyn's claim that false reporting grossly distorted the official production figures underpinning the standard interpretation. Solzhenitsyn rightly stated that false reporting existed throughout the Soviet economy. He argued fur­ther, however, that it was particularly present amongst forced labourers, as a direct contribution to their survival. 15 On the premise that much of the reallocation of agricultural workers into the industrial workforce was achieved by means of arrest and incarceration in the Gulag, rather than by urbanisation, Rosefielde concluded that the achievements of the first five-year plan had been both overstated, and inadequately explained in terms of their human costs.

The second of these two opening shots in the eighties' debate sought to assess the reliability of estimates of the Gulag population, and in doing so to provide some evidence for the claim in the first article that prisoners comprised almost a third of the non-agrarian civilian workforce in industry and construction (excluding services) in the Soviet Union of 1933. The latter article, however, was far more wide-ranging than the former, and dealt with the era from the beginning of the Stalinist industrialisation drive to the de-Stalinisation of 1956.

Evidence from a variety of sources was used in what Rosefielde termed a 'juridical approach' to the analysis of the forced labour popu­lation. This evidence was derived from the sort of information dis­cussed earlier, that is, memoir material and tangentially relevant official information. The juridical approach, however, demanded a more thor­ough delineation of these categories. They were therefore classified into five groupings: primary documentation, published secondary ma­terial, official testimony, zek testimony, and circumstantial socio-econ­omic evidence. 16

The 'primary documentation' evaluated by Rosefielde has, in the present work, gone under the designation 'tangentially relevant'. In other words, it consisted of documentation from which inferences could be drawn, and not of tables from which forced labour population figures could be read. This fact in itself should not prejudge the accuracy of the estimates drawn from such a source, but it does almost guarantee differing interpretations of equal plausibility and often across a fairly wide range.

One of the pieces of 'primary evidence' considered and largely dis­counted by Rosefielde was the 1941 Soviet economic plan, a copy of which was captured by the Nazis during the Second World War. In

Gulag Studies 13

1951 'The State Plan of the Development of the Economy of the USSR in 1941' was published in the USA. 17 This plan, consisting solely of tables, cannot be used as primary evidence of the number of prisoners in the Gulag, as it gives no specific statistics on this question, and is in any case a plan before the event, not a balance sheet after. It can, however, form a basis for estimating the number of forced labourers in various branches of production, a use to which it was put by Naum Jasny. 18 Jasny arrived at a figure of 2.9 to 3.5 million for the number of prisoners planned in 1941, an estimate remarkable both at the time, for its very low level in comparison with numbers ten times as great which were then common, and now, for its relatively close correlation with the figures recently offered by Russian historians working in the Soviet archives. 19

The evidence of the 1941 Plan, as assessed by Jasny, showed that the Gulag workforce was to make a significant contribution to the national economy. Such an interpretation was not really a matter of dispute, and the definition of 'significant' can vary to fit a range of estimates. There is some evidence that Jasny's methodology produced figures which perhaps erred on the low side.20 Rosefielde too believes that Jasny may well have understated the extent of forced labour, as the latter had believed greatly exaggerated even the lowest estimates put forward by Dallin and Nikolaevsky in their seminal work on the Gulag camps, and was thus motivated to disprove them.

Rosefielde offered two further examples of 'primary evidence'. The first was an index of prison output in the RSFSR from 1930 to 1931, published in the leading Soviet legal journal Sovetskaya yustitsiya. In order for this to be a useful basis for estimating the camp population of the USSR, assumptions of proportionality between the growth of prisons and camps had to be made, the ratio of camp labour to camp output had to be constant and, finally, the growth in prisoner numbers had to take place at the same rate in the non-Russian republics as in the RSFSR. Furthermore, a base figure from which to extrapolate sub­sequent totals based on the output growth rate series needed to be found from a different source. Ingenious as such calculations undoubt­edly were, the opportunity for error increased with each assumption and with each insertion of data from a different source. There seems to be a strong proportionality between the complication of calculation and the tenuous nature of the result. If this was primary evidence, then the paucity of data available in the early 1980s is very evident.

The final piece of such evidence was a census of Polish citizens released from confinement in the Soviet Union in t 941. In respect of

14 The Gulag at War

quantifying the forced labour population, this source was rightly said to be useful only to 'glean an impression of the scale of internment' .21

Official Testimonies It is difficult to perceive what made one source any more primary than the other. With regard to official testimony, the state of material available in the early 1980s is apparent from the examples given by Rosefielde. The testimonies which he used were given by those seem­ingly in a position to make a fair stab at estimating a figure for the extent of the forced labour population, and the results arrived at could be said to roughly coincide, allowing for peaks and troughs through the thirties and the forties, and differing definitions of forced labour. Such allowances alone, however, suffice to ensure that the figures given are fallible.

Rarely do personal testimonies give precise dates, and so it is difficult to assert, as Rosefielde tentatively did, that the figure given by the former camp guard inspector Colonel Andreev of fifteen to twenty million in the camps in 1939 was confirmed by that of Viktor Kravchenko, who stated that during his wartime work as an RSFSR Sovnarkom Head of Department 'twenty million became the accepted estimate'.22 First, the years concerned do not precisely coincide, and are anyway only rough dates. Second, the figures given make no claim to precision. Both estimates smack of a desire to illustrate the horrific scale of the Soviet forced labour network by use of a large number, rather than an attempt at precise quantification of the Gulag's population.

Third, the key question of definitions arises. There were various forms of forced labour in the Soviet Union under Stalin, of which the Gulag camps were the most significant. Nonetheless, it may be the case that imprecise estimates of the forced labour population include those exiled to special settlements and those sentenced to forced la­bour without loss of liberty, a sentence that was usually carried out at the normal place of work of the convicted person. The precise definition of the types of forced labour being considered remains germane to the significance of the estimate offered.

Prisoners' Testimonies Of all personal testimonies given, those of the prisoners themselves gain perhaps the most sympathy. They were on-the-spot observers of the labour camp phenomenon, and as such were in an ideal position to observe and report the details of camp life and death. However, as Rosefielde observed, their very proximity to the system led to accusa­tions of bias. The implication of many who would question the valid-

Gulag Studies 15

ity of zek testimony was that if anyone had a reason to exaggerate the extent of the Gulag system, it was the inmates themselves. Although harsh, the judgement of such critics nevertheless undermined the credi­bility of prisoners' estimates of the Gulag's extent.

It is not necessary, however, to question the trustworthiness of the ex-zeky in order to question the reliability of their estimates. Individual inmates simply did not find themselves in positions to estimate the size of the entire forced labour workforce throughout the extensive territories of the Soviet Union. Rosefielde again argued, with some justification, that it nonetheless behoves a historian to use available data, rather than to ignore them and choose the option of silence. Con­sequently he stressed the merits of those population estimates taken from collating the experiences of numerous prisoners. Of these, the best known was that of Mora and Zwiernak, two Polish officers who, on the basis of interviews with former Polish inmates of the Gulag, estimated that in the early forties there were some nine million vic­tims in the Soviet camp system. Even such an apparently comprehen­sive survey, however, did not have any means of confirming its estimates for the average number of prisoners per camp (a key component in the working out of the total) and, perhaps more significantly, there was no means of knowing whether the number of camps identified made up all, half, or even a third of the entire system.

Circumstantial Evidence The final type of evidence considered by Rosefielde was less able to provide an accurate assessment of the Gulag's population than the forms of testimony and documentation already assessed. It was 'circumstan­tial evidence', and proceeded from the assumption that the estimates arrived at from the aforementioned sources had a broad reliability.23

The aim of such evidence was to show that the facts of Soviet history made possible a forced labour population rising from five to twelve million in the decade from the early 1930s.

First, the events of those years were briefly considered: the imple­mentation of Article 58 of the Criminal Code, with its wide definition of crimes against the state; the collectivisation campaign, along with its emphasis on dekulakisation; arrests following the Kirov murder in 1934; the Great Purge of 1936-38; the occupation of new territories to the west in accordance with the carve-up of nations agreed in the Nazi­Soviet Pact of 1939; the arrest of suspect nationalities during the war years; the imprisonment of Soviet soldiers and civilians liberated from the Nazis. All of these, Rosefielde argued, provided more than ad­equate scope for the amassing of a labour camp population of the

16 The Gulag at War

magnitude suggested. Furthermore, this belief was backed up by a consideration of the demographic data available for the years in ques­tion, again with the conclusion that such 'circumstantial evidence' sup­ported the figures given.

Of all such 'circumstantial evidence', the most elusive concerned the issue of common sense, and what seemed right. It has been fairly frequently stated that estimates of the Gulag population above a cer­tain level cannot be correct because, to cite Jasny as an example, 'figures of fifteen to twenty million in concentration camps [imply] that nearly a third, or more of adult males are behind the bars' .24 Few would now argue for figures of that magnitude, and most would intuitively concur with the view that to suggest that, at a given time, a third of all adult Soviet males were deprived of their liberty defies belief. From such an apparently solid viewpoint, however, springs the impossible ques­tion of where the line of credulity should be drawn. Implicit in Jasny's statement lay the idea that some lower, unspecified level of repression could be more readily accepted as plausible. Rosefielde rightly as­serted that 'whether these magnitudes appear high is a matter of taste'.25

In other words, there is no objective measure of how much a society can take in this regard.

The implication that the imprisonment of a certain proportion of the population is socio-economically untenable seems self-evidently the case, but what that proportion might be remains unproven. Similarly, the socio-economic symptoms which may develop as the crucial point nears would seem to be - primarily - fear, an increase in the female com­ponent of the workforce, and a heightening of repression; all symp­toms shown by Stalin's Soviet Union. Yes, a third of the male population under some form of forced labour is not plausible. But to dismiss es­timates on the grounds of subjective plausibility is to use a method­ology as open to prejudiced interpretation as any yet considered.

The opening submissions of the debate on forced labour which flourished in academic circles in the 1980s have been considered in some detail. By means of this, the types of evidence available have been presented, and a start has been made in considering their strengths and weak­nesses. Rosefielde considered that the evidence which he collected together was able - and he continued his legal analogy - to 'confirm beyond reasonable doubt that forced labour in the Soviet Union oc­curred on a scale consistent with the estimates of various authorities

Gulag Studies 17

such as Conquest, Swianiewicz, Dallin and Solzhenitsyn'.26 Broadly, these scholars supported figures of around eight to twelve million zeky at the height of the terror. The lack of precision reflected the paucity of available source material, and the conclusion was drawn that, 'until the KGB opens its files to independent scholars ... estimates of forced labor will remain contestable' .27 The opening of such files in the late 1980s and early 1990s has shown Rosefielde's estimates to be higher than the officially recorded totals.

By the time Rosefielde returned specifically to the discussion of forced labour some six years later, the conclusions summarised above had been subjected to rigorous scrutiny. 28 Whatever the exact scale of the phenomenon of the Gulag, it was certainly of sufficient scope to have a significant bearing on most socio-economic topics in the his­tory of the Stalin era. Consequently the debate had widened not sim­ply in terms of participating academics, but also in terms of the range of issues which became linked to the central question of camp popula­tion. The debate had itself been sparked into life by an attempt to reconsider the economic development strategy pursued in the USSR under Stalin. 29 Onto the economic analysis, a substantial body of de­mographic research had been grafted. Such demographic assessments of the 1930s were principally concerned with ascertaining whether excess mortality in the Soviet Union over those years was compatible with camp population estimates on the scale supported by Rosefielde's con­clusions. Inevitably, therefore, the related issues of collectivisation and famine deaths in the early thirties had become necessary adjuncts to an increasingly complex dispute.

Leaving aside the intricacies of calculating excess mortality, Rosefielde's 1987 foray into the debate - with the rather wearied sub-title 'A Final Reply to Critics' - dealt with specific accusations of the mishandling or omission of certain pieces of evidence. Whilst admitting some errors and rebuffing other charges, his conclusion remained little changed from that of earlier years. Even with the determined scrutiny of some of the Western world's most expert Sovietologists, it is clear that the available array of contradictory 'facts' was insufficient to be recon­ciled into a 'right answer'. Personal judgement added or subtracted millions to or from the camps in the historiography of the period.

(b) Wheatcroft

The case against the position taken by Steven Rosefielde had been most consistently argued by Stephen Wheatcroft, who persisted in replying

18 The Gulag at War

in print throughout the decade to the assertions made by Rosefielde. Wheatcroft's first major contribution to the debate immediately fol­lowed Rosefielde's investigation of the then current state of evidence regarding the Gulag population.30 His conclusion was that 'Rosefielde's series [of camp population figures] should not ... be taken seriously'. 31

Such an academically damning conclusion was based on two forms of argument. First, Wheatcroft provided his own account of Gulag stud­ies in the West over the preceding years. Second, specific criticisms were offered regarding several detailed aspects of Rosefielde's work.

Wheatcroft's historiographical survey confirmed the familiar story of contradictory 'evidence', noting that many scholars refused to be drawn into the numbers issue, as they believed that it was impossible to make meaningful estimates of the size of the labour camp popula­tion. As for Rosefielde's assertion that the case for figures of around ten million at the end of the 1930s had been proved 'beyond reasonable doubt', Wheatcroft questioned this by listing half a dozen experts whose work alleged otherwise. From amongst this number, those willing to provide an estimate- namely, Timasheff, Jasny and Bergson- settled at a figure of around three and a half million for the end of the thirties.32

From a broad historiographical survey, Wheatcroft turned to a criti­cal assessment of Rosefielde's second article. Of the latter's 'primary official documents' - a term which was described with some justification as 'very misleading' - he paid most attention to Rosefielde's index of prison output. Unfortunately what already appeared a somewhat weak tool for estimating the number of forced labourers in the USSR was enfeebled still further by Wheatcroft's assessment. First, it was noted that the prison output index referred to did not, as was claimed, repre­sent the total output of RSFSR prisons in 1930-31, but rather the out­put of a more specific, administratively distinct sub-group of penal institutions, those administered by the People's Commissariat of Jus­tice of the RSFSR (NKYust RSFSR). The role of these places of confinement - which dealt mainly with lesser offenders - declined as the more significant camp network of the OGPU expanded from the early thirties. Consequently Rosefielde's assumption of proportional­ity between the growth of 'prisons' (or, more precisely, the establish­ments of the RSFSR People's Commissariat of Justice) and camps did not stand; instead, the OGPU camps grew much faster. Such a sce­nario allowed for a larger growth in camp inmate numbers than that claimed by Rosefielde, which was certainly not Wheatcroft's view. As a result, Wheatcroft challenged a second assumption of proportional­ity, namely that the ratio of camp labour to camp output must be con-

Gulag Studies 19

stant. It was argued instead that the labour-to-output ratio improved significantly over the period in question, and therefore an increase in output did not prove a corresponding increase in workforce. The two corrections made to Rosefielde' s assumptions offset each other in their effect on the total camp population derived from the series.

This detailed case-study of the NKYust output series argument serves as an example of the complexity of debate over what was from the outset only a tangentially relevant piece of information. The deeper the source was probed, the less fruitful it became. Again the question of how to deal with specific types of evidence lay at the heart of the issue. Rosefielde preferred, given the limited data available, to make 'the simplest assumptions compatible with them' .33 Wheatcroft showed, by an insistence on a more strictly verifiable approach, that the evi­dence available did not prove what was claimed. It remained a matter of debate whether it was better to use a broad brush, embracing bold assumptions and subjective testimonies in an imprecise total estimate, or instead to narrow down sources to those that could be empirically verified to one's satisfaction, arriving at a smaller total.

A refusal to accept subjective reports - Rosefielde's 'official testi­monies' - and a persistence in exploring the possible interpretations of tangential information characterised Wheatcroft's analysis. He noted that former Soviet officials may have been 'less than objective' in their accounts of the Gulag system, and he subjected the methodologies based on prison newspaper distribution and the 1939 census to detailed scrutiny. With regard to the former, doubt was cast on the figures used, which differed between their original and secondary sources, and on whether these figures in fact referred to the Gulag system. 34 As for the 1939 census, Wheatcroft's survey, whilst avoiding any reference to the fact that the census data were falsified, demonstrated how new information had enabled a range of different estimates of forced labour to be made by calculating the residual between Soviet census figures and non-census employment data. The details are exhaustive. The sim­ple conclusion was that Soviet statisticians more than succeeded in their aim of disguising the size of the forced labour population.

(c) Conquest

The third major participant in the 1980s' debate was Robert Conquest, whose own pioneering work had been discussed by both Rosefielde and Wheatcroft. Although critical of elements of both of these schol­ars' work, the weight of Conquest's arguments came down largely on

20 The Gulag at War

the side of Rosefielde's estimates rather than Wheatcroft's. The de­bate can once again be viewed on two levels.35 First, there were argu­ments over the reliability and use of certain specifically identified pieces of evidence. Second, Conquest widened the discussion to identify the differing approaches taken towards what source material was available.

The first level of analysis, as ever, dwelt on the detail of particular information which had been used either to construct or to support forced labour statistics. Once again the question of the validity of using the 1939 census became an issue, with Wheatcroft's response the follow­ing year querying Conquest's largely accurate, and typically frank de­scription of it as a 'fake'. 36

Of interest as a further short case-study in source use is the discus­sion of what Conquest termed 'a single piece of crude evidence', that is, the discovery of 9000 corpses at Vinnitsa in 1943. According to the International Medical Commission these corpses were the remains of prisoners executed in 1938. On this much at least, there was agree­ment between Conquest and Wheatcroft. Beyond that, however, the differing use of this one scrap of information demonstrated admirably the different approaches possible.

The Conquest argument ran as follows. It was unlikely that these were the only executions in the area. Let us assume, though, for the sake of caution, that they were. Then, if so many were shot in a prov­ince with a population of one million, similar proportions executed across the USSR would give a pan-Soviet total of one and a half mil­lion executed. The possibility that Vinnitsa had an exceptionally high number of executions must be allowed, and so the USSR total could be reduced to a million. From here camp population figures for the number of prisoners sent into the Gulag could be deduced using a firmly based estimate that 10-11 per cent of sentences were to death. Therefore about nine million were sent to camps. 37

The Wheatcroft response contended that the existence of well over a hundred other similar execution sites across the Soviet Union seemed unlikely, and that the figure of 10 per cent of sentences being execu­tions was an exaggeration on the part of the emigres who were its source. In other words, the claim that a single verifiable event in a single Ukrainian oblast' could be assumed to have been roughly re­peated across most of the Soviet Union lacked proof.38

The first of these approaches cannot be strictly verified without a far wider and firmer source-base than was available. 39 The second approach does not need verification per se as it represents merely a negation of the first argument. Throughout the eighties' debate those

Gulag Studies 21

in favour of the first, 'broad brush' approach were more prepared to base their conclusions on what their opponents labelled 'guesses handed down from subjective sources'.40 They gave weight to what might strictly be termed subjective factors, such as the reliability of witnesses and the authority of accumulated impressions from memoirs. Conquest pointed to the 'truly responsible' character and scientific mind of Andrei Sakharov, a source for Party arrest data, as a compelling reason for assigning high probability to the information supplied by him. He ar­gued, too, that accumulated impressions represented evidence of a sub­stantial nature, which may have been less readily expressible than statistical data but was worthy of greater attention than that merited by the occasional expose of a methodological error backed up by 'so­phistical algebra' .41 To Wheatcroft's implication that there was a dif­ference between 'literary and propagandist works' and 'serious historical work', Conquest's riposte was that a reliance on 'unofficial' publica­tions was at least preferable to dependence on false or non-existent official publications. 42

Supporters of the second approach emphasised that the picture was not as clear as a broad brush painted it. Verifiable evidence for the higher estimates of many historians and authors was lacking, and what evidence there was required a more unemotional and objective treat­ment than it had yet received. 43 However, it represents a slight oversimplification to state that this second approach saw the question of Gulag population statistics as wholly insoluble. Beyond their ap­proach to evidence, the second crucial distinction of this position was the belief that the Gulag population was far lower than Conquest, Rosefielde, et al. suggested. Figures of three to five million (rather than eight to twelve million), it was argued, could be fitted more con­vincingly into official demographic, employment and production data, and so the onus was therefore on those who made a case for higher figures to prove it more cogently from less subjective sources.

The mid-l980s also saw the publication of J. Arch Getty's 'Origins of the Great Purges', which offered a revisionist approach to the causes of the Party purges in the thirties.44 This work was not specifically concerned with the Gulag, but rather with the politics of intra-Party purges across a five-year time span. Nonetheless, it came firmly down on the side of the second approach to source use, criticising those historians 'eager to write and accept history-by-anecdote' .45 With re­gard to estimating the total number of victims, Getty claimed that he would make no attempt, as the lack of convincing data made such estimates subjective. Furthermore, he impartially referred the reader to

22 The Gulag at War

the on-going debate between Rosefielde, Conquest and Wheatcroft.46

Nonetheless, on the next page comes the statement that in the mid-1930s 'many thousands of innocent people were arrested, imprisoned, and sent to labor camps. Thousands were executed'. Such an asser­tion, from a historian aware of the various estimates available, came down firmly on the side of the lowest estimates. If taken literally, it brought camp population estimates down to an absurd and unsupportably low level. Conquest responded by arguing that observations of this ilk amounted to a rejection of the evidence that had already been presented.47

3. CONCLUSIONS

The above summary illustrates the stances of the main participants across the great Gulag debate of the 1980s, and highlights the issues on which the argument turned. It may be claimed by some that the central issue was not so much the nature and use of evidence, but rather what that evidence proved. Certainly there is reason in this objection. A state­ment of truth has more value than consideration of the various paths supposedly leading to the same goal. In this case, however, it would be unwise to side with one approach or the other without considering the new revelations revealed more recently from the archives of the former Soviet Union, which fall firmly in the lower range of esti­mates. Furthermore, it has been possible to discern a gradual 'de-po­larisation' in the views of several scholars over recent years, along with a corresponding move toward more compatible figures.48

Looking forward to the eventual opening of Soviet archives, Rosefielde stated in 1980 that, 'until the KGB opens its files to independent schol­ars ... estimates of forced labor will remain contestable' .49 As such official files began to be made available at the end of that decade, Western academics from both sides of the debate seemed to back off a little from previous definitive claims. Wheatcroft and Conquest agreed with each other; the former arguing that, 'Much more serious work is needed before we approach a definitive answer to the problem of the scale of repression and excess mortality', the latter affirming that his estimates 'remain rough .... adjustments are inevitable'.50 It would per­haps be disingenuous of the debate's participants to expect adjudica­tion, as all those considered agreed on one central fact: in the 1980s the evidence was not available for a final estimate of the population of Soviet forced labour camps.

2 New Revelations

The debate of the 1980s and before flourished in the absence of data from the Soviet archives revealing the size of the Gulag population. With the advent of the policy of glasnost' in the USSR in the late eighties this situation changed, and some of the past crimes of the Soviet state began to be discussed in various publications. The Gulag had incarcerated millions of people in the decades of its existence. Most of its victims found themselves in the camps during the Stalin era, and revelations from these years were particularly encouraged under the new openness. However, the degree of glasnost' allowed under Gorbachev remained limited, and those who brought forth revelations from the archives did so at the behest of the Communist Party. A clear stance was taken against the range of estimates which had ap­peared in the West over many years. Therefore revelations often took the form of polemic or pedantry, and begged questions which went unanswered. 1

Nevertheless, from 1989 onwards detailed archival data began to be published, which claimed to be annual statistics of the forced labour system.2 These data gave figures for the numbers of forced labourers, which were lower even than the lowest of earlier estimates. The new information of Table 2.1, however, is not the final word in the 'Great Gulag Debate'. Although far more open than its predecessors, the Gorbachev regime did sometimes deliver only a 'half glasnost". whereby previously secret subjects were placed in the public domain but the information revealed about them was not the full picture. This was the case with regard to the figures presented in Table 2.1, as a number of categories of forced labourers went unmentioned, and their numbers remained undisclosed.

This chapter concentrates on the flaws and discrepancies within the new information provided by Russian scholars in the Gorbachev years and beyond. The intention is to bring the survey of Gulag studies be­gun in the previous chapters up to date, before new archival material is introduced in the subsequent chapters. 3 Many of the issues raised here, therefore, will be returned to later in the present work. The nature of the topic demands a critical evaluation of the information released in Russia during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Nonetheless, behind the substantial and less substantial quibbles expressed below, the work

23

24 The Gulag at War

Table 2.1 Number of prisoners in Gulag corrective labour camps and colonies (on 1 January each year)

Year In corrective In corrective %in %in labour camps labour colonies camps colonies Total

1934 510 307 510 307 1935 725 483 240 259 75 25 965 742 1936 839 406 457 088 65 35 I 296 494 1937 820 881 375 488 69 31 I 196 369 1938 996 367 885 203 53 47 I 881 570 1939 1 317 195 355 243 79 21 1 672 438 1940 1 344 408 315 584 81 19 I 659 992 1941 l 500 524 429 205 78 22 I 929 729 1942 1415 596 361 447 80 20 1 777 043 1943 983 974 500 208 66 34 1 484 182 1944 663 594 516 225 56 44 1 179 819 1945 715 506 745 171 49 51 I 460 677 1946 600 897 956 224 39 61 1 703 095 1947 808 839 912 704 47 53 1 721 543 1948 1 108 057 1 091 478 50 50 2 199 535 1949 1216361 1 140 324 52 48 2 356 685 1950 1 416 300 1 145 051 55 45 2561351 1951 1 533 767 994 379 61 39 2 528 146 1952 1 711 202 793 312 68 32 2 504 514 1953 1 727 970 740 554 70 30 2 468 524

Sources: V. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhipelag Gulag: glazami pisatelya i statistika', Argumenty ifakty, 45 (1989) pp. 6-7; A. N. Dugin, 'Gulag: Otkryvaya arkhivy', Na boevom postu (Moscow, 27 December 1989) pp. 3-4.

of the Russian scholars given perrmsston to work in the secret ar­chives of the Soviet state proved to be valuable - if tentative - first steps away from decades of secrecy. Their disclosures came from genuine official documents. At last the archives were opening.

Perhaps the first question which had to be asked with regard to the archival data revealed by Russian scholars, and presented in Table 2.1, was whether they were genuine. The statistics summarised in the table came from documents found in the Central State Archive of the Octo­ber Revolution.4 It was charged by A. V. Antonov-Ovseenko, whose own estimates of prison and camp inmates for 1938 stood at some sixteen million, that these documents were false and untrustworthy.5

New Revelations 25

Such a charge, however, was vigorously refuted by V. N. Zemskov, the Soviet academic at the forefront of the spate of archival revela­tions. He argued that it would be impossible for whole archive collec­tions to be falsified, otherwise each camp would have been required to have two administrative offices, one producing genuine records, and one false.

This argument was based on the view that the central authorities must have had a correct record of the manpower available to them in the labour camps, and Zemskov noted that the figures which he re­vealed coincided with the evidence of documents signed by Yezhov, Beria and Stalin. 6 Robert Conquest has stated, though not in direct relation to these figures, that 'it is as easy to fake impressive tabula­tions as to invent a single figure'. 7 There is wisdom in his caution. In the case of the figures presented in Table 2.1, however, their detail suggested from the start that they came from genuine archival docu­ments, and subsequent examination of the documents in question by the present author has confirmed this impression. Genuine and im­pressive as the new figures were, though, the story which they told remained incomplete and unclear.

1. COVERAGE OF THE NEW DATA

The reasons for questioning such figures as those presented in Table 2.1 varied. First, there was the question of whether they gave com­plete coverage of the forced labour system. The release of the new information considered here served in one sense actually to erect a barrier to assessing the size of the Gulag. The academic debates which took place in the West in the eighties and before usually referred to 'forced labour', 'the Gulag' and 'the camps' almost interchangeably, whereas the nature of the new revelations made the precise termin­ology of an archival revelation crucial.

The new terminological complications ushered in along with these glasnost' -era revelations became apparent early on. When the new ar­chival information was first released, a table of remarkably low figures was given for the camp population. 8 For example, around 1.5 million was the number given for camp inmates at the beginning and end of 1941, whereas even the lowest Western estimate was more than dou­ble this figure, and most others were significantly higher.

Subsequently, a new set of figures was released. These were, for many of the years cited, around twice as large as the previous camp

26 The Gulag at War

figures. 9 The explanation was that this second set of figures referred to Gulag camps and colonies (Table 2.1 ). The distinction between the two categories was not explained within most of the articles in ques­tion. According to the explanation of A. N. Dugin, however, the dif­ference was in the category of inmate sent to the colonies. Those of 'less social danger', that is, with sentences of less than three years in length, went into colonies rather than camps.

Whether there was any substantive difference between the camps or colonies apparent to the inmates of these establishments went unmentioned in the revelations. In fact the distinction between camps and colonies seems to have been largely an administrative one, with colonies being those forced labour camps not under the direct control of the central Gulag authorities, but managed instead by the local NKVD organs. 10

'Corrective Labour Colonies' seem to have been administered locally, rather than by the central Gulag authorities. They were more likely to perform industrial tasks than were the camps, and the limited com­parative data available regarding mortality in camps and colonies sug­gest that during the Second World War, colony conditions were of a lower standard than those in camps. 11

To confuse the issue even further, within the category of camps there existed a managerial administration called the Administration of Cor­rective Labour Colonies, which managed some thirteen colonies during the war years. 12 The population of these establishments was included in the camp totals, as they made up part of the main group of forced labour establishments under the direct control of the central Gulag administration.

For ease in understanding later analysis, it is important to maintain the distinction between the two categories under discussion here. To recap, therefore, the revelations from Russian scholars in the late 1980s distinguished between 'camps' and 'colonies'. The establishments in­cluded in both of these categories would in the general sense be re­ferred to as forced labour camps. The distinction found in the archives is based on administrative subordination, with 'colonies' being under the control of local NKVD organs known as Administrations of Cor­rective Labour Camps and Colonies (UITLK - upravlenie ispravitel' no­trudovykh lagerei i kolonii) and Departments of Corrective Labour Colonies (OITK - otdel ispravitel' no-trudovykh kolonii). Throughout the present work these will be referred to as OITK/UITLK colonies. 13

Included under the 'camps' category were forced labour establishments belonging to the Gulag managerial sub-group, the Administration of Corrective Labour Colonies (UITK - upravlenie ispravitel' no-trudovykh

New Revelations 27

kolonii). Despite the similarity in names, therefore, UITK establish­ments formed a part of the camps total, whereas UITLK/OITK estab­lishments made up the colonies total.

The newly released archival data went into some detail with regard to not only the total population of the Gulag, but also the inflows and outflows of the camps over various periods (Appendix A, Tables 7-9). The broad inflow/outflow data of these tables raised still further questions of definition, which rendered problematic the application of these data for ascertaining the total throughput of prisoners in the camps.

The figures given in 1989 - and cited in the appendix tables - re­ferred to camps only. Therefore the throughput of colony prisoners remained undisclosed. Furthermore, the categories from which the to­tal inflow and total outflow were calculated included those added to the Gulag camps 'from [other] camps of the NKVD' and those 'leav­ing ... into [other] camps of the NKVD'. These prisoners can scarcely be said to have been added to or left the forced labour contingent.

Using the inflow and outflow statistics revealed at the end of the eighties, 10 388 323 inmates were added to Corrective Labour Camps from 1934 to 1947.14 Adding the 510 307 already in these camps in 1934 gives a total of 10.9 million repressed in such camps 1934-47. However, the number of prisoners 'added ... from [other] NKVD camps' in these years was 2 838 033. If this is removed from the total, then 8.1 million were repressed in the Gulag camps over this period (Table 2.2).

These data, however, refer only to camps. A reliable estimate of the number of inmates entering the colonies each year is difficult to ob­tain. Nevertheless, something around four and a half million would seem feasible. Between 1935 and 1947, camps made up 65 per cent of the camp and colony population total (Table 2.1 ). Assuming that they also made up 65 per cent of the inflow - excluding 'inflow' from within the NKVD camp system - then total inflow into camps and colonies would have been 11.6 million, and inflow into colonies alone, 4.1 million. Therefore, with the addition of 1934 totals, this leaves an estimate of around twelve and a quarter million for the number of people repressed in camps and colonies between 1934 and 1947.

A key issue, then, with regard to acceptance of the information coming to light at the end of the 1980s, was whether there were other cat­egories of forced labourer yet to be revealed. If the population of forced labour camps - as announced in 1989 - turned out not to include a huge category of zeky due to an ill-explained and largly pedantic dis­tinction between camps and colonies, then the suspicion that other groups of prisoners remained unannounced was inevitably nurtured. According

28 The Gulag at War

Table 2.2 The Gulag camps: inflow and outflow 1934-47

Camps on Total inflow Totul oujlow Year 1 January to camps from camps

1934 510 307 593 702 378 526 1935 725 483 524 328 410405 1936 839 406 626 069 644 594 1937 820 881 884 811 709 325 1938 996 367 1 036 165 715 337 1939 1 317 195 749 647 722 434 1940 1 344 408 1 158 402 I 002 286 1941 1 500 524 1 343 663 l 428 591 1942 1 415 596 806 047 1 221 905 1943 983 974 477 175 797 555 1944 663 594 379 589 327 677 1945 715 506 423 917 555 524 1946 600 897 636 188 428 246 1947 808 839 748 620 449 402

Note: The inflow and outflow figures include those entering Gulag camps 'from NKVD camps' and those leaving 'to NKVD camps'. For a breakdown of these figures, see Appendix A, Tables 7-9.

Source: V. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhipelag Gulag: glazami pisatelya i statistika', Argumenty i fakty, 45 (1989) pp. 6-7.

to Antonov-Ovseenko, there were indeed other categories of zek. 15 He stated that the Gulag supplied workers to such sectors as the Main Administration for Railway Construction and the Main Administration for Road Building, and argued that the number of prisoners working on such construction, as well as in mines, quarries, industrial enter­prises and logging camps, ran into millions. 16

This question of the amount of construction work performed by the NKVD for other organisations had been a crucial point in the forced labour estimates of the 1950s. Jasny had stated that if evidence were found of the NKVD carrying out a great deal of construction work for other organisations, then 'this ... would have destroyed my estimates of the number of inmates' } 7 David Redding, in a critique of Jasny's work, asserted that 'the NKVD undoubtedly performed construction work on a substantial scale for other organizations'. 18 The views of Redding and Jasny, based on the 1941 Soviet economic plan, neither supported nor undermined the Antonov-Ovseenko claim that the Gulag supplied millions of labourers to other government organisations. First, Jasny and Redding confined their debate to construction work, whereas

New Revelations 29

Antonov-Ovseenko mentioned mining, quarrying, industrial labour and logging as tasks performed for other bodies.

Second, the 1941 Plan had never proved itself of great use in pro­viding detail on the Soviet system of forced labour. Although the docu­ment was designed for official use rather than public consumption, sensitive information on the camp system was nonetheless not made known to all those many officials concerned with economic planning. The best that could be done with this document was to draw conclu­sions based on interpretations of NKVD data within it. Jasny, Redding and others had carried out such work, and it was inconclusive. Fur­thermore, the 1941 Plan was by definition a statement of intent before the event, not a statement of fact. Consequently the assertions of Antonov­Ovseenko could not be disproved using the evidence of past work. Without further access to the archives, the revelations of the glasnost' era and beyond remained open to the charge that they gave only a partial revelation of the extent of the Gulag, and omitted 'millions' from other categories.

Antonov-Ovseenko's claims that millions of prisoners worked for extra-Gulag forced labour administrations - and must therefore be added to the totals presented by Russian scholars at the end of the eighties -are shown in the present work to be inaccurate. The Main Administra­tions which he named did indeed exist, as did other similar bodies. Furthermore, they relied on forced labour for their workforce. How­ever, they did not represent a stock of forced labourers to be added to the Gulag total, but existed rather within the Gulag system itself. Their totals, which. as Antonov-Ovseenko correctly claimed, ran into mil­lions, are already included in the data of Table 2.1. 19

Aside from the claims of Antonov-Ovseenko for a vast category of prisoners to be added to the figures revealed from the archives by Soviet scholars, there were other categories of prisoner whose place in the statistics remained open to conjecture. It may be the case, for example, that execution camps did not come under the control of the Gulag. If Katyn serves as an example, such prisoners came under the First Special Department (Spetsotdel) of the NKVD. Even within the Gulag there may have been categories of prisoner not included in the data of Table 2. I. Solzhenitsyn made a distinction between Corrective Labour Camps, whose populations are reported in the revelations of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Special Camps, which were not mentioned in the glasnost'-era revelations.20

A further, numerically more significant, category to be aware of are the spetsposelentsy.21 These 'special settlers' were forcibly deported

30 The Gulag at War

Year

1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945*

1949

Table 2.3 Population of the Gulag labour settlements (on l January each year)

Population of labour settlements

1 317 022 I 142 084 l 072 546

973 693 1 017 133

916 787 877 651 938 552 997 513 930 221 911 716 724 498 669 687 652 818

2 300 223

Ratio of labour-settlement population to camp

and colony total (%)

101 79 77 47 56 60 48 51 49 57 45

98

* The total quoted for 1 January 1945 is actually for 1 December 1944.

Sources: V. N. Zemskov, 'Spetsposelentsy - po dokumentatsii NKVD-MVD SSSR', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 11 (1990) pp. 6 and 10; and 'Kulatskaya ssylka nakanune i v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2 (1992) pp. 15, 21 and 23.

from their homes, sent to mainly remote areas, lived and laboured in a location which was often fenced or wired off, and consisted of a higher proportion of women and children than the camps and colonies. They also came under the control of the Gulag, and it would seem entirely justifiable to add their number to any total of forced labourers in the USSR during the Stalin years. The lack of a complete series of figures for spetsposelentsy precluded such an addition for the entire period covered by Table 2.1. However, new figures became available for 1932-45 and 1949 (Table 2.3), through the revelations presented by the Russian historian Viktor Zemskov in the early 1990s. These figures showed that the population of the labour settlements for the years available was on average 64 per cent of that of the camps and colonies total.

As far as the extent of other categories of forced labourer was con­cerned, again much remained to be revealed. Possible clues to the size of individual execution camps were chillingly provided in the glasnost'

New Revelations 31

years by the discovery of mass graves, such as those at Kuropaty in Belarus and Bykovna in Ukraine. The Soviet government estimated the number of bodies at the former to be 30 000, and at the latter, 50 000. The Memorial Society gave figures of 150 000 and 200 000 respectively _22

These figures suggested the size of individual execution camps, not the extent of any such network. However, the debate of the 1980s analysed in Chapter I included a discussion between Conquest and Wheatcroft with regard to the significance of a mass grave numbering some 9000 victims discovered at Vinnitsa in Ukraine in 1943. Conquest based Gulag population figures of around nine million on the assump­tion that such places of execution existed in most provinces of the USSR, though perhaps on a smaller scale.23 Wheatcroft doubted this.

Of course the discovery of further mass graves does not prove the case either way. Conquest's case relied heavily on executions making up around lO per cent of all sentences, an estimate the reliability of which was also doubted by Wheatcroft. Furthermore, it may be argued that the mass graves discovered pointed to large-scale executions in western USSR, and not across the Union as a whole. Nevertheless, the graves discovered at Kuropaty and Bykovna showed that the Vinnitsa executions were actually on a smaller scale than those elsewhere, de­spite Conquest's allowance, for the sake of caution, that they may have been exceptionally large. If his methodology is allowed to stand, then the estimate of Gulag population arrived at must increase still further.

There still remained at least one further category of zek to add to the total in Soviet camps around the time of the Second World War. During the final stages of the war in particular, many Soviet citizens liberated from Gennan control by the Red Army were sent to 'verification and filtration camps'. Servicemen who had fallen into enemy hands, civil officials in occupied areas, and males of call-up age in these territories all formed part of what then became termed the spetskon­tingent.24 Those imprisoned in these special camps did not appear in the statistics cited for Gulag population, and yet they still contributed to the war effort, and at the end of the war some 160 969 men desig­nated spetskontingent were working for various industrial narkomaty. 25

Clearly there was a good case for asserting that the new information revealed from the archives did not include every category of zek. and therefore understated the extent of forced labour in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. However, it must be noted that the significant number of 'special settlers' shown in Table 2.3 were not hidden by the Russian historians at the forefront of the new revelations. Viktor Zemskov

32 The Gulag at War

acknowledged their existence and gave some figures for their number. The difference was, however, that he distinguished them from prison­ers, and thereby the headline total of forced labourers was reduced.26

Whilst there clearly was much to distinguish a settler from a camp inmate, in terms of the manner of their captivity and their relative freedom within the confines of regimented lives, at root both were captive workers deprived of their liberty by the Soviet regime. As for the other categories mentioned above, the number of those in 'verification and filtration camps' was not of a magnitude to raise the overall total by several million, and the 'millions' which Antonov-Ovseenko said were forced to labour for other Main Administrations were already included within the statistics.27

It seems reasonable to assert, then, that the new information brought out of the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) by Rus­sian historians at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s was of great significance but was not yet the final word on the extent of forced labour. Across the numerous articles covering this data there was a broad consistency throughout fairly detailed sets of figures. The occasional discrepancy arose, but in the necessarily impersonal terms of overall quantitative analysis these differences were negligible. 28

The most substantial of these internal discrepancies was in the figures for prison population. Both V. N. Zemskov and A. N. Dugin presented such figures and cited their source as being the state archives, and yet the average monthly total of prison inmates as given by these scholars differed by as much as forty thousand, with no discernible pattern to the discrepancies.29 These differences have, however, been credited to the fact that the monthly averages were taken on different dates each month, and the high rate of prisoner turnover was thus reflected in differing figures. 30

2. OTHER ARCHlY AL SOURCES

Although the new archival information shown in Table 2.1 is detailed and internally consistent, other new revelations came to light in the early 1990s which suggested that the extent of the forced labour sys­tem under Stalin was far greater than allowed for by the revelations considered above. This new evidence fell into two different types. First,

New Revelations 33

there were other official data revealed from the archives in the past few years, particularly census figures. Second, there were numerous statements from knowledgeable sources which were beginning to show some consistency. This latter source was not simply made up of infor­mation from former inmates and officials with no real basis from which to arrive at their estimates, but was information from those such as Nikolai Viktorovich Grashoven, an official of the Russian Ministry of Security heading a commission for rehabilitation, with access, at some point, to archival dataY

The results of the 1937 census in the Soviet Union provided one ar­chival point of reference for evaluating forced labour statistics, sepa­rate from the source of those statistics themselves. The census results were suppressed, along with their compilers, at the time of their calcu­lation, as population growth of the magnitude predicted failed to ma­terialise. Subsequently a false, but more politically correct, population figure was announced in the 1939 census. In the latter years of the 1980s, however, some of the data from the 1937 census were brought out of the Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE).

According to an article by archive director V. V. Tsaplin, the final population figure arrived at in January 1937 was 162 003 225.32 The census authorities, in reporting this finding to their political masters, noted that this figure was the total 'including the Red Army and NKVD contingents' _33 Also enumerated, though, was the size of the population excluding voennosluzhashchie (servicemen), a total of 156.9 million people. 34 Tsaplin' s reading of the archival information led him to state that the term voennosluzhashchie covered the Red Army and the camp guards, together totalling about two million in 1937,35 leaving 3.1 million remaining to reach the total population 'including the Red Army and NKVJ;>. contingents'. He then said that the most feasible explanation was that these three million-plus unaccounted-for people were the number 'in places of imprisonment' .36 If the prison population on 1 February 1937 was 545 000,37 then that would leave around two and a half mil­lion in other places of imprisonment, that is, in Gulag camps and colonies - a figure over twice the size of the 1.2 million cited in Table 2.1 for the camps and colonies populations on this date.

The calculation of the Gulag size by the above method was not the only alternative offered by the archive revelations. Also revealed was a precise figure of 2 653 036, compiled for inclusion in the census, as

34 The Gulag at War

the size of the 'special contingent of the NKVD' at the end of January 1937. Stephen Wheatcroft, commenting on the Tsaplin article, stated that this special contingent (spetskontingent) included 'labour camp inmates, labour colony inmates, exiles, special migrants, labour camp guards, etc.'. 39 This seems to have been a misreading of the source, as Tsaplin, in building up the census figures from the 156.9 million ex­cluding servicemen, added this special contingent total to his two mil­lion servicemen, which, he stated, already included the labour camp guard figures.

With regard to the key question of the NKVD special contingent, Yu. A. Polyakov, V. B. Zhiromskaya and I. N. Kiselev based their definition of this category on instructions issued during the 1939 cen­sus.40 According to these, the contingent was divided into three groups. Group A was, broadly, the NKVD border guards and internal troops, plus auxiliary staff. Group B consisted predominately of the Gulag staff, and group C was the number detained by the NKVD in camps, colonies, prisons and Gulag labour settlements. A series of detailed figures for regions and republics was presented by these authors, which gave a total all-Union figure for groups B and C combined of 2 389 570 in 1937, and an approximation of 270 730 for group A.41 These figures together added up to just over Tsaplin's total of 2 653 036. However, Polyakov eta/. included in their total a far wider group of people than Tsaplin, who counted the NKVD guards elsewhere, as servicemen. Furthermore, Polyakov et a/. estimated that up to 25 per cent of the groups B and C total of 2 389 570 was made up of NKVD guards, leaving an estimate as low as 1.8 million for the inmates of 'camps, prisons, and labour settlements' in January 1937.42 V. N. Zemskov argued, however, that the guard contingent made up only 6 per cent of the total for groups B and C, leaving over 2.2 million inmates.43

The conclusion of Polyakov et a/. was negated still further when it was demonstrated that by no means all of the labour-settlement popu­lation was included in the special contingent category of the 1937 census. The 2 389 570 who made up the NKVD special contingent in 1937 included all prisoners in camps, colonies and prisons, but only a pro­portion of those people living within the Gulag labour settlement zones. The total number of prisoners in prisons, camps, colonies and Gulag labour settlement zones in 1937 came to 2 658 156.44 Therefore a significant proportion of labour-settlers were not included in the spe­cial contingent in 1937. The only explanation offered for the partial inclusion of labour-settlers in the NKVD special contingent category came from V. N. Zemskov. He stated that the settlers had been counted

New Revelations 35

as ordinary free people with the full rights of citizens 'in accordance with the Constitution of the USSR adopted on 5 December 1936'.45

In fact the constitution in question made no reference to forced labour. Furthermore, the description of the period as being, in Zemskov's words, 'a peak of liberalisation of the labour exile regime', and therefore con­ducive to the favourable reclassification of labour-settlers, is scarcely a universally held opinion.46 Others would assert, along with A. L. Unger, that 'the coincidence in time between the adoption of the con­stitution and the terror of the so-called Great Purge is too striking to go unmentioned'. 47 Zemskov 's explanations also failed to clarify why, by his reckoning, over half of the settlers were in fact included in the special contingent. Such an apparently arbitrary splitting of the same category of people into NKVD chattels and citizens with full rights seems a highly unlikely procedure for the census compilers to accept.

Working from the same archives, often down to the last page, there­fore, differing conclusions about the exact size and make-up of the NKVD special contingent were reached. Despite their differing final totals, Polyakov et a/. and Zemskov agreed that camp guards were included within the special contingent. Tsaplin, on the other hand, stated that the servicemen total of two million referred to Red Army person­nel and the camp guards.

One way to tidy up this anomaly would be to accept that Tsaplin mistook border guards for camp guards, as Polyakov and his co-au­thors referred also to a population total document which stated that it included the Red Army and NKVD border guards. This seems the most likely explanation. A figure of 1 682 569 is available for the number in the Red Army in 1937.48 To accept both Tsaplin's joint Red Army­plus-camp-guards total of about two million and the Red Army total of 1 682 569 would leave around 300 000 camp guards. However, the only definite figure available for the guard contingent in peacetime shows this number to have been extremely unlikely. So many camp guards would mean a prisoner-guard ration of three to one, whereas in January 1941 there was one guard for around every eleven prisoners.49

The figures offered by others, with at least some background in official or archival sources, covered longer time periods. As early as June 1987, economist Nikolai Shmelev reported that a figure of 17 million for the number passing through labour camps between 1937 and 1953 had been cited by Khrushchev.50 This figure came at a time when 'half glasnost'' was in operation, and Gorbachev was still talking of 'thou­sands' of Stalin's victims.

Since 1987, zek totals around Shmelev's figure were cited in various

36 The Gulag at War

places. In 1990 a letter was published in the refonnist weekly Argumenty i fakty from Olga Shatunovskaya, a former camp inmate and member of a commission set up by the presidium of the Central Committee in 1960 to investigate the death of Sergei Kirov _5I In this letter, Shatunovskaya stated that the commission possessed a report from the KGB detailing the number of people repressed between 1935 and 1941. This apparently gave a figure of 19 840 000 repressed, of whom seven million were said to have been shot. When Shatunovskaya was again able to see the commission's documents in 1989 this report was missing.

There is a remarkable similarity between the statements of Shatunovskaya and more recent revelations from Nikolai Viktorovich Grashoven, the head of the Russian Ministry of Security commission for rehabilita­tion, who stated that statistics in the KGB archives showed some eighteen million Soviet citizens to have been repressed in the decade 1935-45, of whom seven million were executed. 52 Of course much hinges on Grashoven's use of the term 'repressed', which is somewhat impre­cise. However, its context implied that he was referring to those sen­tenced to a term of imprisonment or to execution, and therefore those subjected to the various forms of internal exile then functioning were not included. 53 A similar figure was offered by Dmitrii Volkogonov in May 1991, when he stated that 'from 1929 to 1953 ... 23.5 million people were repressed. Of these a third were shot' .54

The figures mentioned above showed a reasonable consistency in their totals, matched only by the evident inconsistency in the periods covered. The fact that between them they covered various portions of the period from 1929 to 1953 made it impossible, however, to recon­cile them as a definitive alternative figure. The figures of Shatunovskaya and Grashoven came nearest to such a reconciliation. Both mentioned KGB reports detailing 7 million shot and 18 to 19.8 million repressed. Shatunovskaya was quoting figures and dates from memory, and so the discrepancies in dates could be explained as an error in recollec­tion. Such an explanation, though, might undermine the validity of her statement as a whole. Whatever the difficulties in reconciling these figures, there is at least common ground in that each one asserted a total in excess of that shown in Table 2.1.

3. RECONCILIATION OF SOURCES

The deficiencies of the new data presented in Table 2.1 lie in the fact that full coverage of the forced labour system seemed to be lacking,

New Revelations 37

and other archival and archive-related sources gave differing figures. The discrepancies pointed out, however, are not of the magnitude that might be imagined from a casual glance, and a degree of reconcilia­tion is possible.

First, the figures of 1 to 2.5 million Gulag inmates presented in Table 2.1 should not be simply compared alongside the 17 to 20 mil­lion suggested by other recent revelations from Russia. It must be re­membered that the latter totals are not figures for the number of forced labourers at any given time, but rather they represent the number of people who had been repressed over a certain period.

Using the inflow and outflow statistics of Table 2.2, it can be worked out that from 1934 to 1947, 10 388 323 inmates were added to Correc­tive Labour Camps. Adding the 510 307 already in these camps in 1934 gives 10.9 million repressed in such camps 1934-47. Table 2.2, however, refers only to camps. Using the colony estimate obtained above,55 then around twelve and a quarter million people were repressed in camps and colonies 1934-47.

The absence of throughput data for the rest of the Stalin era creates problems in extending the analysis. However, the Gulag population growth between 1947 and 1952 was on a par with that experienced between 1936 and 1941. Over the first six-year period, growth in the camps and colonies total was around seven million, in the second, eight million. The total number added to forced labour in 1936--41 - ex­eluding the intra-Gulag transfers and including an estimate of colony growth representing 35 per cent of the whole - was roughly six mil­lion. A similar number of new prisoners in the period 1947-52 would arrive at an estimate for the total number repressed in Gulag camps and colonies, in the years 1934-52 of over eighteen million.

Such a total is not out of place next to Shmelev's 17 million for labour camps from 1937 to 1953 and Volkogonov's estimate of 23.5 million repressed of whom a third were shot in the period 1929-53, although it still falls a little short of the Grashoven and Shatunovskaya figures.

Further reconciliation of Grashoven and Shatunovskaya with the revelations outlined in Table 2.1 can be achieved by subtracting from the totals of the former all or a proportion of those people executed. It is not known how many of those reported in 1989 as outflow from camps were executed. 56 Presumably, too, a proportion of those executed were never sent to labour camps or colonies. Therefore, accepting the figure of seven million shot over an imprecise period, means that if around five million were shot without passing through the camps, there is no contradiction between the two sets of figures.

38 The Gulag at War

Such analysis, aimed at moving towards the reconciliation of official and unofficial data, thus far excludes the wider demographic issues of how the number of deaths claimed by Shatunovskaya, Grashoven and others could be fitted into the wider picture of the Soviet population in the turbulent Stalin years. So many million excess deaths occurred with such a diverse range of causes that there are difficulties in fitting the various estimates for famine, terror and war deaths into the popu­lation totals now available for the Stalin period.

Between the two official population censuses of 1926 and 1939, it is estimated that around ten million excess deaths occurred.57 If, as seems likely, most of these can be accounted for by the famine of 1933, then Shatunovskaya's claim that seven million people were ex­ecuted between 1935 and 1941 seems impossible to reconcile with these data. Grashoven extends the period for this many executions to in­clude the war years. Between 1941 and 1945 the Soviet population suffered around 25 million excess deaths, and placing seven million executions within the huge 1935-45 population deficit is somewhat easier. Even in this case, however, one would expect most of the ex­ecutions to have taken place around 1938, which still leaves Grashoven's figures with the same problem as was faced by Shatunovskaya's.

Obviously attempts at reconciling the newly available data are based on estimates not pure facts. However, such reconciliation goes some way towards moving the debate on Soviet forced labour statistics away from its traditional two-camp politicized stance. The figures of Zemskov et al. need not be dismissed as total propaganda by those who more readily accept the revelations of Grashoven and Shatunovskaya. The data of the former may simply be assessed as valuable but incomplete.

4. LIVING CONDITIONS, ECONOMIC TASKS AND WARTIME

The new information revealed about the Gulag from the end of the eighties onwards did not solely concern population figures, but also dealt with conditions in the camps and the contribution of the camp system to the national economy of the USSR. They began to provide some sort of statistical underpinning to the descriptions by former in­mates - long in the public domain through memoir materials - of the rigours and tortures of camp life. The outline presented in this chapter

New Revelations 39

of the revelations published by Soviet scholars under Gorbachev's policy of glasnost' does not aim at studying areas such as the living condi­tions in the camps or the economic aspects of the Gulag in depth. Later chapters tackle that task. It is revealing, however, to know first of all the extent and nature of knowledge in print by the early 1990s, before adding to it with new revelations. One should note, though, that the archival sources of the revelations meant that the extent of such horrors was most likely underplayed. The archives were written in the main by Gulag officials, who were keener to boast to superiors of achievements in using prisoners effectively, rather than of abuses, maladministration and deadly living conditions.

Undoubtedly a political motive played a significant role in both the building up of the camps, and also in their maintenance during the war. However, in the USSR during the war many political stances were laid aside when set against the overwhelming need for victory.58 Therefore the forced labour population must have had a predominantly economic role to play in the war effort. The new data underpinned this interpre­tation, giving details of the involvement of the NKVD in a variety of production and construction tasks. In terms of an overall picture, though, the new figures still left the contribution of forced labour to the na­tional economy of the USSR a little sketchy; the output totals of the NKVD contingent in its key areas of activity were unavailable.

The Gulag had come into being as an instrument of isolation for criminals and counter-revolutionaries, but quickly became an important branch of the national economy, without which the centrally planned exploitation of eastern and northern regions would have been practically impossible. 59 At a meeting of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 25 August 1938, the question of the early release of those labour camp prisoners who had worked exceptionally well was considered. Stalin, whilst recognising the desirability of some sort of 'reward' for such inmates, was reluctant to actually release his best workers, remarking that, 'from the point of view of the state economy, it would be a bad thing ... we'll be left with the worst ones' .60

All prisoners had to work, except for invalids and those deemed unfit for labour. Of the latter, it was revealed, there were some 73 000 in 1940, or 4.4 per cent of the Gulag population. No similar figures were released for the war period itself in the revelations of the early 1990s, although the present work reveals such data.61 Nonetheless, it was apparent that the Gulag bosses experienced difficulties in main­taining a workforce fit enough to complete the tasks required during the difficult war years.

40 The Gulag at War

The average output per worker of the Gulag inmates was also no doubt lessened somewhat during the war by the growth in the propor­tion of female and under-age prisoners. In 1941 women made up only 7 per cent of the inmates, a figure which had risen to 26 per cent by July 1944. The relative number of minors in the Gulag was far less significant statistically, but nonetheless showed an increase from 0.22 per cent in 1942 to 1.05 per cent in 1944.62

The greater part of the Gulag effort within the war economy was in activities under the direct control of the NKVD. In 1940, the NKVD fulfilled 13 per cent of the volume of capital work in the Soviet economy, 63 and between 1941 and 1944 a total of over 2 million pris­oners were reportedly involved in NKVD supervised construction.64

Figures were also made available for the output of NKVD prisoners involved in production, rather than construction.

As well as the work carried out under the auspices of the NKVD, it was acknowledged in the new revelations that Gulag workers were also put to work for other organisations. From the beginning of the war to the end of 1944 the NKVD contributed about 3 billion roubles into state funds, received from other narkomaty for the use of forced labour; a figure approximately 0.5 per cent of total government rev­enue over the same period.65 The archival revelations revealed that by mid-1944, some 225 000 Gulag inmates were involved in this work.

6. CONCLUSIONS

The new information of the late 1980s and 1990s provided a first glimpse into the sort of data held in the archives of the Gulag. It raised a number of issues, came down firmly on the side of the lower popula­tion estimates, and gave an array of disparate figures concerning vari­ous aspects of camp life. Limited details of mortality rates, rations, evacuation, living space and labour tasks were all revealed,66 and Rus­sian historians began to provide some understanding of the Gulag as seen from the point of view of official data. However, the presenta­tion of this new information was unfortunately notable for a lack of depth in analysis, and a polemical stance against the work of memoir­ists and Western scholars which too often dominated the presentation of the revelations, and - as perusal of the documents concerned by the current author has made clear - seemed on occasion to drive the choice of what should or should not be cited.

The information revealed was scarcely analysed by the historians

New Revelations 41

revealing it. Rather, archival information was simply presented, and often lacked the context which a more complete awareness of memoir material would have provided. Too often, also, an array of archival tit-bits was presented, with no particular aspect of the revelations be­ing pursued in depth. The sources of much of the material presented in this manner are identical to the ones used in the present work. It is now apparent that greater detail is available in the Gulag archives than could ever have been presented in the few relatively short articles by the small number of Russian historians granted special permission to work there. Their work represented the first steps in the opening of the archives of the Gulag.

3 Origins and Development

In order to facilitate a fuller understanding of the archival information presented concerning the Gulag in the war years, an overview of Gulag studies in the West and in Russia over the decades since the Second World War has been given in the opening chapters. This survey has concentrated on the use of different types of source material, and the problems encountered and progress made as the archives began to open. The focus has been on academic publications of the 1980s and early 1990s. However, to complete the background to a study of Soviet forced labour around the war years, a grounding is necessary not only in Gulag studies, but also in the origins and aims of Stalin's camp system itself. Such is the function of this chapter.

The history of the Gulag up to World War II that is presented here is taken partly from what has long been known through memoirs and historical writings. In the main, however, newly opened archives pro­vide the source of the information used, thereby making possible for the first time an account of the establishment of the Gulag which is based on official Soviet perceptions.

l. ORIGINS

The rise of the forced labour camp system in the USSR was not com­prehensively chronicled in any history book published by the Soviet state. It has been left to Western and dissident historians to gather details from various sources, and thereby to publish short accounts of how the vast Gulag archipelago grew out of a revolution through which the workers would supposedly lose their chains. The story has there­fore been somewhat sketchy. The archival sources used in the present work, however, contain official Soviet accounts of the rise of the Gulag, written for internal use within state and NKVD circles. With reliance on these new sources, and an awareness of previous accounts pub­lished in the West, the ideological and pragmatic factors driving the growth of Soviet forced labour can be seen more clearly than before.

In two Western accounts, David Dallin made much of the fine words which the revolutionary leaders of October 1917 used in regard to 'the withering away of excesses' .1 The basic cause of crime, in Marxist

42

Origins and Development 43

theory, was not the immoral impulse or selfish craving of criminal individuals, but rather the exploitation of the masses. Therefore the theory was that crime would begin to vanish in the more harmonious, post-revolutionary state. Accordingly, the harsh punishments of the tsarist years - and most, if not all, of the Bolshevik leadership had suffered imprisonment - would give way to more enlightened re-education. An early document of the People's Commissariat of Justice promised that 'prisons will be made to serve for correction, not punishment' .2

Looking back some thirty years after the revolution, Dallin reflected on how 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'. In the immediate post-revolution years, the Bolshevik leadership was faced not with an increasingly harmonious society, but rather with Civil War, Western counter-revolutionary intervention, and the struggle to survive as a state. Nor, despite the theory, was the struggle simply a matter of the Bol­sheviks leading the masses against their oppressors. Elections to the Constituent Assembly, which was forcibly dissolved by the govern­ment in January 1918, returned a majority for the Right SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries). The Bolsheviks were in effect imposing a minority government on Russia.

Faced with the upheaval of civil war, the new Russian leadership saw a necessity for strong measures to be taken against opponents and criminals. One element in the struggle was the setting up of concen­tration camps. This much has long been acknowledged in Western his­tories of Soviet forced labour. Concentration camps were apparently in existence in mid-1918, and put on a formal basis by decrees of September 1918 and April 1919.3

The term 'concentration camp' commonly brings forth images of the Nazi extermination camps of World War II. However, when used by Soviet archivists with reference to the camps set up shortly after the revolution, it meant simply camps enclosed by wire and guarded. Here opponents of the new regime could be 'concentrated', without trial, and perhaps put to useful tasks. The term had first been used for similar camps set up by Spanish troops in Cuba in 1896. Recent ar­chival revelations have confirmed the speed with which the Bolshevik authorities accepted the need for these labour camps. Minutes of NKVD meetings in 1919 and 1920 have been made available, at which the organisation of forced labour camps in Moscow, Petrograd and the surrounding areas was discussed.4 By August 1919 the Presidium of the Moscow City Soviet found it necessary to pass a resolution estab­lishing a directorate of Moscow concentration camps. 5

The early 1920s apparently saw many of these camps abolished. Of

44 The Gulag at War

sixty-five camps in existence in 1922, twenty-three remained a year later.6 With the abolition of the camps centred around Petrograd, Mos­cow and other non-peripheral areas came the further build-up of sev­eral camps in the far north region of Archangel, where the infamous Solovetsky Island camps were set up in the monasteries situated there. Again, these camps have been described by historians and memoirists in the West, although there has been some confusion concerning their precise dates and designations. According to Dallin, the first true Cor­rective Labour Camp, as opposed to concentration camp, was estab­lished on the Solovetsky islands in 1923. However, it is known that forced labour existed in Soviet Russia from its very earliest days. A decree of January 1918 had ordered that prisoners perform tasks necessary to the state. 7

The distinction between the two types of prisoner labour may well be somewhat pedantic, consisting no doubt of either a revision of ad­ministrative classification or a theoretical decision to regard such la­bour not as forced for the benefit of the state, but as provided for the correction of the prisoners. There may also have been a distinction based on the type of labour required of prisoners. Inmates of prisons the world over performed tasks deemed necessary by the state, from sewing mailbags to cultivating allotments. The labour conditions at Solovetsky, however, were of an entirely different order. Whatever the confusion over classification of the Solovetsky camps, the conditions were intolerable. Many died, 8 but some lived to tell the tale in a report to the Presidium of the USSR in December 1926.9

Such, then, is the picture of the early years of Soviet labour camps available from an overview of Western works on the topic. However, although no such summary was published in the USSR, there do exist in the archives unpublished surveys of the development of the camp system. For example, one such overview can be found in the lectures given by the Head of the Gulag, Nasedkin, to the Higher School of the NKVD in 1945-46, and another survey of the development of the forced labour system is given in the foreword to the archive section from which much of the information used in the present work was taken. 10

According to the NKVD school lectures, the organisation of correc­tive labour camps had its roots in 1920. Although concentration camps were already in existence by then, on the initiative of Felix Dzerzhinsky a new institution was created, and distinguished from other concentra­tion camps by its designation as a 'special concentration camp' .11

The first 'special concentration camp' was organised at the former

Origins and Development 45

monastery of Solovetsky, and became known by the initials SLON, 'Solovetsky Camp of Special Designation'. With the organisation of similar institutions elsewhere in the same region, it seems that the meaning of the acronym was changed in order to cover the expansion. SLON later came to stand for 'Northern Camps of Special Designation'Y The word slon is also the Russian for 'elephant', an appropriate meta­phor for the powerful, elephantine structure into which the forced la­bour system was evolving.

In the Solovetsky monastery were incarcerated, and isolated from the outside world, members of counter-revolutionary movements of various types. The archive noted in particular the imprisonment of 'White Guardists and reactionary clergy' on Solovetsky Island. 13 Memoir sources, too, spoke of 'hostile class elements' being imprisoned in what was colloquially known as Solovki. 14

Although the Solovetsky special concentration camp was named as a precursor of future corrective labour camps, the archive notes that the use of forced labour 'as a method of re-education' did not begin until 1926. It was at this point, it was claimed, that the labour of prisoners on Solovetsky Island and at some camps in the Kemsky region of Karelia began to be used in agriculture, forestry and the fishing industry .15 It has been shown above, however, that prisoner labour had been used from the outset of the Soviet regime, and at first sight the declaration in the archives that it was not until 1926 that forced labour was used as a means of re-educating prisoners seems to be a miscon­ception or, at best, mere semantics. Nonetheless, there must have been good reason for the archive source - in this case the wartime head of the Gulag himself - to declare that 1926 saw the true birth of a forced labour network which eventually spread over the entire Soviet Union.

Existent memoir material may well shed some light on the signifi­cance of the year 1926 in the development of the Gulag. Boris Sapir was a prisoner in the Northern Camps from 1923 until his escape in 1 926. According to his memoirs, the mid-1920s did mark an upgrade in the significance of forced labour. Before that time, the labour to which prisoners had been assigned served simply to meet the internal needs of the camp, or perhaps a network of camps. In the mid-1920s, however, a qualitative shift occurred, and prisoners began to labour on behalf of the state. In other words, the output of prisoners left the camp network and became a contribution to the wider national economy.

Sapir suggests that this change spearheaded the development of hard labour 'into a widespread system'. Furthermore, he 'credits' the achieve­ment of such a development to a Hungarian prisoner, Naftaly Aranovich

46 The Gulag at War

Frenkel. Having been. arrested and sentenced to exile and forced la­bour, Frenkel submitted a plan for the reorganisation of production to the camp officials, who saw its organisational potential and entrusted him with its implementation. 16 Solzhenitsyn, however, rejects the idea that Frenkel was somehow the man who invented the Gulag. He ar­gues that although Frenkel was instrumental in persuading the auth­orities, and Stalin himself, of the possibilities of forced labour expansion, the basic idea had long been in place. Here, too, the archival informa­tion may prove enlightening, as the implication that 1926 was the year when forced labour took its place in national economic policy means that this shift pre-dates Frenkel's move to Solovetsky in 1927.

2. EXPANSION

If forced labour by prisoners underwent some sort of qualitative change in the eyes of the authorities in 1926, it was not until the end of the decade that a substantial quantitative change occurred. In 1929 the RSFSR People's Commissars of Justice and Internal Affairs (Yanson and Tolmachev respectively) along with the Deputy Chief of the OGPU (Unified State Political Administration), Henrikh Yagoda, submitted a proposal for reform of penal policy to the Council of People's Com­missars.17 Noting the expense and overcrowding of the prison system, they suggested that all prisoners serving terms of three years or more be used to colonise the northern regions and exploit the natural re­sources there. The Council of People's Commissars gave the go-ahead to this suggestion, and it was subsequently considered by the Polit­buro in May 1929.

As a result of the Politburo's interest (which was no doubt not en­tirely unconnected to the introduction of the policy of forced collec­tivisation and mass dekulakisation) a commission was set up, consisting of the authors of the original suggestion, with the addition of the RSFSR Procurator, Krylenko, and the USSR People's Commissar for Labour, Uglanov. Within only six weeks, on 27 June, the report of this com­mission was presented and accepted, and the OGPU, with the support of the :RSFSR Peoples' Commissariat of Justice, began to put its pro­gramme into action.

Soon a special decree of the OGPU required the organisation of a group of 'Northern Camps of Special Designation' in the former Komi­Zyryanskii oblast'. These camps had their administrative centre in the town of Ust' -Sysol'sk, and their task was to exploit the natural re-

Origins and Development 47

sources of the regions around the Ukhta and Pechora rivers. A funda­mental preliminary requirement for such exploitation was the building of railways and roads in the region. 18 Although not detailed by name in the archive source, memoir evidence names two specific rail-build­ing camps set up in the frozen tundra, namely SevZhelDorlag (be­tween Kotlas and the Pechora River) and Pechorlag (between the Pechora River and Vorkuta). 19

By the middle of 1930, the network of new Corrective Labour Camps was already fairly extensive. The Northern Camps held some 41 000 prisoners. In the Far Eastern camps around 15 000 were occupied by the building of the Boguchinskii railway, as well as by fishing and forestry. The Vyshersky camps, which were chiefly involved in chemical, paper and timber production, confined a further 20 000. There were 24 000 prisoners in the Siberian camps, and 40 000 in the oldest of the Solovetsky camps, building the road from Kern' to Ukhta.20

The spread of the forced labour network from its northern base and across the Soviet Union at the end of the twenties and beginning of the thirties has been likened by more than one observer to the growth of cancer's malignant cells.21 Such a simile is not surprisingly absent from the archival account of camp growth in this period. Otherwise, however, the official version of how labour camps spread east and south coincides well with Solzhenitsyn's account in Arkhipelag Gulag, at the same time as providing a little more precision in terms of dates.

Continuing their survey of the Gulag's development, the archives report that during 1929 and 1930 a number of other OGPU camps were organised. These were not all in the same region, nor did they all have the same tasks. A logging camp was set up at Vyshersk. In Siberia and Kazakhstan, prisoners were formed into 'camps with an agricultural profile', and a number of other camps were set up, at Syzran in the more developed and more populous Volga region and in other unspecified places. The archival source makes no claim to be listing the full complement of camps developed at the tum of the decade and, if those named are not to be considered a random choice, it seems that the archivist's aim consisted of showing the variety of tasks and loca­tions which were touched by the developing forced labour system.

3. DEVELOPING GULAG IDEOLOGY

As the growth of the Soviet labour camp system gathered pace, there still existed a concern amongst its architects for ideological justification.

48 The Gulag at War

That the campaign against the kulaks could be rationalised as a vital thrust of class warfare no doubt provided the assurance to the perpetrators of dekulakisation that the means were adequately justified by the end. Similarly an attempt was made to fit the Bolshevik ideals of the abol­ition of prisons and a new, non-bourgeois judicial system into the con­text of the rapid expansion of forced labour camps. A memorandum can be found in the Russian State Archives from the then Deputy Head of the OGPU, Henrikh Yagoda, to members of a judicial commission. Yagoda was apparently concerned that the system of camps develop­ing at the end of the 1920s failed to meet these ideological objectives.

The whole point of passing prisoners to us is the destruction of prisons, and it is clear that under the present system their liquidation will take years, for the camp as such is worse than prison. 22

Y agoda believed that camps were like prisons chiefly in that they continued the 'hypocrisy necessary to bourgeois society' that prison­ers could be corrected by confinement and by the curtailment of sen­tences for good behaviour. His proposed solution to this perceived dilemma, however, casts doubt on whether it was ideological or econ­omic concerns which were really motivating him. Yagoda declared that 'it is necessary to convert the camps into colonising settlements'. He suggested what might, to a casual reader, seem to be a penal idyll. Under the proposed changes all prisoners would eventually be trans­ferred to settlements. At first, though, selected convicts would be sent to various regions to construct huts - two to three hundred per settle­ment. They could send for their families, and also:

in their free time, when the forestry work is over ... they will breed pigs, mow grass, and catch fish. At first they will live on rations, and later at their own expense.

It does not, of course, take much reading between the lines to see Yagoda's penal idyll as the sort of high mortality, low morality scheme under which so many suffered during the ensuing decades. Quite why a prisoner should want to invite his family to join him with no shelter and only a temporary promise of rations in the frozen, and - for good reason - largely uninhabited wastes of Siberia does not come under scrutiny in Y agoda' s memorandum. Instead there is the ideologically tempting promise that 'out of the settlements will grow proletarian mining towns'. There is, too, the more significant argument that 'co­lossal natural resources - oil and coal - exist there'.

What Yagoda proposed did not come to fruition in quite the form

Origins and Development 49

outlined. He was not talking about the special settlements to which exiles were sent; these already existed and the memorandum distinguished their inhabitants from the prisoners to be involved in the new scheme. Nor did the ideological volition which ostensibly lay behind the pro­posal see any outworking in the dissolution of the state prison system. The economic arguments, on the other hand, clearly had growing cur­rency in official circles. The Soviet Union had to industrialise. There were vast natural resources available, and the use of forced labour to exploit them was a temptation that, to the great loss of millions of its inhabitants, the Soviet state failed to spurn.

An economic engine drove the formation of the Gulag as Stalin's push for industrialisation gathered momentum. In his famous speech to in­dustrial managers in February 1931, Stalin gave the Soviet state ten years in which to catch up with the West or be crushed. Judicial ideol­ogy was subsumed within this overwhelming priority. That the devel­opment of the forced labour network owed more to economic requirements than the need to correct, punish or even remove perceived criminals and enemies of the state has long been acknowledged by most observ­ers. The temporal coincidence of industrialisation and collectivisation served to provide a boost to the available supply of prisoners, through the arrest and deportation of the richer peasants.

The Gulag administration's own perception of the roots of their or­ganisation stopped short of an admission that their task was purely economic. It was emphasised to Gulag officers at the NKVD school that they were not simply glorified foremen charged with overseeing timber production; rather they were on the cutting edge of the battle for communism. 'The Gulag is not an economic trust, but an organ of the NKVD', declared their Chief.23 His declaration was backed up by a quotation from the RSFSR Corrective Labour Codex, which stated that the Main Administration of Camps was:

during the period of transition from capitalism to communism, to defend the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist construction which it had accomplished from encroachment by class enemies and violation by the declassed element and unstable elements amongst the workers. 24

Nonetheless, the more detailed explanation provided for the growth of the camp network makes no mention of an increase in opposition to

50 The Gulag at War

the regime nor a rising rate of crime. It does, however, note the per­ceived economic desirability of constructing camps in various regions. In 1931 the Ukhto-Pechorskii Corrective Labour Camp was tasked with the 'exploration and mining of oil and coal resources in the Ukhtinskii and Pechorskii regions'. 25 Similarly, the Ust'vymskii Corrective La­bour Camp was set up to build a road between Syktyvkar and Ukhta. Many other camps were erected in the early 1930s, but only a few of the best known were singled out for reference in the archival summa­ries used in the present work.26 Consistently, economic tasks dictated, of course, the location of camps. In the midst of an industrialisation campaign organised by central planners with the oversight of an in­creasingly dictatorial political leadership, it is only a small step to conclude that the economic tasks assigned to the NKVD influenced the number of inmates in the camps to a greater extent than the size of the camp population influenced the setting of plan targets.

Clearly production targets must have been set with reference to the size of the Gulag population. Such a procedure first involved predict­ing the camp population several years ahead, thus creating the need for a predicted increase in the number of inmates to be realised, whether a sufficient number of 'crimes' were committed or not. Second, a high prisoner mortality rate, particularly in the more remote regions, neces­sitated a constant inflow of replacements in order to simply maintain population levels. Against the background of a plan-centred industri­alisation campaign, coupled with the increasing possibility that those officials whose organisations failed to meet their targets would suffer some form of repression, the motives for the NVKD to tailor arrests to fit economic needs are apparent.

The tension between economic, political and ideological factors with regard to the growth of forced labour can be discerned throughout the 1930s. As the need for workers was constant - both to increase the stock of forced labourers and to make up for the millions who died in the camps - then it seems not entirely unreasonable to assume that victims were simply arrested in order to maintain the thriving camp network. However, to this simple view must be added the question of both the possible political motives behind the purges, and the ideo­logical/moral questions which were still raised in some quarters.

Accepting that inmates had to be found in order to fill the camps, and thus to fulfil the NKVD's output plan, does not necessarily mean that random arrests took place. In other words, assuming that, say, 30 000 more zeky were needed, then a town with the requisite number of adult males was not simply trawled. Although in the purest econ-

Origins and Development 51

omic sense such a move might have been the speediest and most cost­effective method of providing the necessary labour! Evidently, arrests did not take place in such a straightforward manner.

Despite the assertion of the present work that it was economic re­quirements which underlay the rapid development of the Gulag sys­tem, clearly other factors also played key roles. The arrests of the 1930s, for example, were made to serve political as well as economic purposes; if citizens were to disappear into the Gulag, then let there at least be a semblance of legality, and let those perceived to be existent or embryonic oppositionists be taken. Furthermore, there was a social element to arrests, which amounted to a cleansing operation, removing particular groups from Soviet society.

In considering the various motives behind the mass arrrest of the early 1930s, Stalin's decree of 7 August 1932 demonstrated the con­flicting elements present within the mechanics of expanding forced labour. In August 1932, Stalin personally signed a law 'On the de­fence of the property of state enterprises, collective farms, and coop­eratives, and the strengthening of social ownership'. Under this law, theft of 'state property' was punishable by death or, in mitigating cir­cumstances, ten years imprisonment (which, in practice, meant forced labour). Convictions stuck and sentences were passed for the 'theft' of very small amounts of property. The law thus gained the nickname amongst peasants of the 'five stalks law'. 27

The 'five stalks law' resulted in mass arrests - some 55 000 in less than six months.28 At such a temporal remove from the circumstances surrounding the introduction of this law, it seems that the harsh pun­ishments meted out under its terms did not usually fit the crimes com­mitted. The central aim of the law was ostensibly to strengthen the hand of those requisitioning grain from the peasants in order to pre­vent urban famine. If the workers' priority over the peasantry - and the consequent mass starvation of the peasantry in certain regions -was somehow accepted as justifiable in the fight for socialism, then the 'five stalks law' might just about have been said to serve its purpose.

From the point of view of expanding the forced labour network, however, the law seems almost ideal. In the four years following its introduction, some 127 000 were apparently imprisoned under its terms.29

Similarly harsh later edicts had similar effects. On 26 June 1940, a decree on the switch to a seven-day working week introduced rigorous new laws on absenteeism and tardiness. To arrive at work twenty-one minutes late became a criminal offence. By 1 January 1941, 28995 people had been sent to the Gulag under this decree alone, and further

52 The Gulag at War

decrees on desertion (under which over 15 000 servicemen had been sentenced to between five and ten years corrective labour by February 1941), absenteeism in defence industries, and absenteeism in educa­tional institutes were introduced by the end of 1940.30 Although the Gulag can be seen to have derived economic benefits from such de­crees, key industries in the Soviet economy lost vital labour resources to forced labour establishments through arrests.

For the Soviet regime, the expansion of forced labour was a desir­able result rather than the raison d' etre of these laws. If the provision of Gulag inmates had been the sole aim of the decree of August 1932, then fewer of those sentenced under its terms would have been ex­ecuted. The same argument applies throughout the period of Stalin's terror. Clearly if the repression of perceived opponents to the regime was driven entirely by the need to supplement the forced labour workforce, then there would have been far fewer executions.

To accept that stocking the Gulag did not represent the sole aim of Stalin's terror is not, however, to negate the statement that economic needs drove the expansion of the Gulag system of forced labour. Rather, the two aspects can be seen to have worked together. The NKVD -like any other Commissariat - was given plan targets to meet. The atmosphere of terror prevailing in the USSR meant that managers were especially fearful of failing to meet their targets, and consequently sought to gain the materials necessary to reach the planned output level. Un­like other commissariats, the major 'materiel' required for the NKVD to reach its targets was forced labour. Furthermore, the resource in most demand from the NKVD by other commissariats was also forced labour. The central means by which the NKVD could both enhance its supply relations with other commissariats and fulfil its own plan were gained by sentencing more victims to forced labour, and so the motiv­ation behind the development of arrest quotas is evident.

The question of ideological justifications for forced labour was indi­rectly addressed in the Stalin constitution of 1936, with its statement of the obligation of all citizens to perform socially useful labour. This statement was used by state officials as a justification for the Gulag. All citizens, even those deprived of their freedom, had to work if they were so capable.31

Despite these attempts at ideological and legal justification, it is indisputable that many people were sent to the camps without even

Origins and Development 53

the full enactment of what passed for a trial in Stalin's Soviet Union. Figures from the Leningrad procuracy in 1935 - the year which fol­lowed Kirov's assassination, and saw a consequent purging of 'former people' in Leningrad society - show that 40 per cent of cases tried by the local NKVD troika were heard in the defendant's absence. In the remaining sixty per cent of cases the NKVD officials spent an average of three minutes examining the accused.

These figures are cited in a secret order from the State Prosecutor, A. I. Vyshinskii. Although a man not renowned for his close adher­ence to the letter of the law, even he felt obliged to demand that the procedure be tightened up.32 Whether Vyshinskii's order reflected his true opinion or was simply a political move is not clear. Amy Knight asserts that Vyshinskii 'epitomized the dualism between law and ter­ror. While campaigning publicly for a restoration of rule by law, he actively encouraged the abuse of procedural norms by the state secur­ity agencies and prosecuted members of the Procuracy who drew at­tention to these abuses'. 33

4. SUBORDINATION

As the camp system grew, so its administrative subordination under­went a series of changes. However, throughout the Stalin years and beyond, the frequency of shifts in the designation of camps, colonies, prisons and settlements was matched by the constancy of their tasks.

In the years immediately following the October revolution of 1917, responsibility for prisons and corrective labour institutions lay in the hands of the 'Punitive Department' (Karatel'nyi otdel) of the People's Commissariat of Justice (NKYust). This department was formed in May 1918, but later changed its name to the more ideologically correct Central Corrective Labour Department. However, the work of the NKYust was duplicated to some extent by the existence in the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) of a Main Administration of Forced Labour.

In June 1922, therefore, the Council of People's Commissars passed a motion to concentrate the management of all places of imprisonment in the hands of one body. Consequently, on 12 October 1922, with the agreement of the People's Commissariat of Justice and the NKVD, their respective departments were merged into the Main Administra­tion of Places of Imprisonment, which came under the control of the RSFSR NKVD. Even with this merger, however, there was a certain amount of duplication of roles in the management of corrective labour.

54 The Gulag at War

As well as the camps of the Republican NKVD organisations, there continued to exist camps under the auspices of the GPU (State Politi­cal Administration), which became the OGPU (Unified State Political Administration) attached to the Council of People's Commissars with the formation of the USSR in 1923. As the GPU, the Political Admin­istration had been a department within, and therefore subordinate to, the RSFSR NKVD. However, the OGPU's All-Union status greatly enhanced the standing of the Political Administration.

The OGPU thus became an independent body covering the entire Soviet Union, with its own commissariats in the republics. It acted largely independently of the normal criminal procedures, and devel­oped the network of camps and other places of detention under its control. These had been inherited from the GPU's forerunner, the Cheka, where they had also existed as establishments separate from the rest of the penal system. Even with the formalising of Soviet policy on forced labour, with the adoption by the RSFSR of a Corrective Labour Code in 1924, the OGPU camps maintained their status as an all-Union body and the camps under their control received no mention in the code. A clause specifically identifying the OGPU camps as existing outside the constraints of a formal code was removed from its first draft, thus eliminating any impression that Soviet forced labour camps were not all as well ordered as it may have seemed.34

The existence in the Soviet Union during the 1920s of various sepa­rate categories of forced labour serves to confuse attempts to charac­terise or quantify the labour camp system. The forerunner of the Gulag per se was essentially the OGPU camp network, which expanded rap­idly from its northern base following the Politburo decision of June 1929. Nevertheless, in 1926 the RSFSR Criminal Codex acknowledged the existence of two types of forced labour in the federation - camps and colonies - under RSFSR not OGPU control.35 These establish­ments were not fully merged with the Gulag system as a whole until 1934, when they came under the ultimate control of the central Gulag authorities, though usually remaining directly subordinate to local NKVD departments or administrations of forced labour camps and colonies.36

Throughout the 1920s the republican NKVD camps and 'places of general imprisonment' existed separately from the OGPU camps. The former were more formally bound by judicial norms and criminal codes than the latter, which dealt largely with perceived opponents of the regime. In the republican establishments prisoners serving a sentence of less than three years were kept.

The increased use of prisoners on the national economic front as the

Origins and Development 55

industrialisation drive began in the late 1920s led to conflict between the Republican NKVDs and the OGPU. By 1930 the RSFSR NKVD had reached agreements with several economic organs to provide labourers from its colonies for work on their projects. Prisoners therefore sup­plied timber to metallurgical plants in the Urals and to railway con­struction sites in the north, as well as being used for a range of other industrial tasks, such as mining, the fabrication of building materials and tar production. Attempting to capitalise on the growing role played by NKVD prisoners in the economy, and faced with the shift of the colonies onto a self-financing basis, the Deputy Head of the RSFSR NKVD, Shirvindt, requested, in a letter to the USSR Council of People's Commissars, that the obligatory transfer of all prisoners serving a sen­tence of over three years to the OGPU be stopped. He argued that instead a proportion of these zeky should remain under NKVD control.

Shirvindt's proposal received broad support in the Council of Peo­ple's Commissars, and it was decided that the republican NKVD col­onies and factories should be able to hold all those prisoners with sentences over three years that they could employ. The OGPU reacted strongly to the whittling away of their prerogatives, and immediately appealed to Stalin. With Stalin's intervention the decision was reversed and, as if to assert his commitment to the expansion of the OGPU's influence, the Republican NKVDs were disbanded at the end of 1930.37

As a result of the demise of the NKVD organisations, the control of their places of imprisonment passed to the republican People's Com­missariats of Justice.

The primacy of the OGPU over its rivals for control of forced la­bour was increasingly manifest during the 1920s and early 1930s, and the defeat of attempts by the RSFSR NKVD to develop a greater role for its more formalised network - with its closer links to the Commis­sariat of Justice - served to confirm the growing influence of the OGPU camps in Soviet economic and political life. The increasing import­ance of these camps had already been demonstrated on 24 April 1930, when the OGPU set up an Administration of Camps (Upravlenie Lageryami, or ULag), within its own administrative structure and therefore also attached to the Council of People's Commissars.

On 15 February the following year this body was renamed the Main Administration of Camps of the OGPU (Glavnoe upravlenie /agerei). The acronym formed from this new name was GULag - the first use of the word which Solzhenitsyn was to make famous in his three volume 'experiment in literary investigation' The Gulag Archipelago (Arkhipelag Gulag).38

56 The Gulag at War

With the expansion of the forced labour network continuing apace, the Gulag began to take responsibility not only for more and more camps, but also for different types of forced labour, including those people exiled to outlying areas of the Soviet Union as part of the process of dekulakisation. The 'class war' against the more prosperous peasantry during the collectivisation campaign led to millions of such victims having their land and property seized, and being forced into exile. Recent Russian estimates put the number of people forced into 'Special Set­tlements' in the remote regions of the USSR at 1.8 million during 1930-31 alone. 39 The classification of these exiles complicates the estimation of total figures for those in the Gulag. However, there is now no room for doubt that the 'special settlers' must be included in any total of forced labourers in the Soviet Union. In July 1931 the OGPU was given responsibility for the labour use of these exiles.

The process of gathering the different types of forced labour under the control of a single organisation continued with the administrative reforms of the security police in 1934. The changes of July 1934 meant that the OGPU was renamed the Main Administration of State Secur­ity (GUGB), and subsumed by the newly created All-Union NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs). To this latter organisa­tion were transferred the functions of not only the OGPU but also the regular police and criminal investigation organs.40 On the surface, there­fore, it would seem that the OGPU's power was being reined back by subordination to a wider body concerned with 'normal' policework and not just with political repression and forced labour. In reality, how­ever, the reform worked in the opposite way. Yagoda, who had been made head of the OGPU before the merger, was put in charge of the new NKVD. In effect the OGPU took control of all policing, under its new guise of the NKVD.

With regard to the administration of forced labour, the reforming of the NKVD meant not only more name changes (although of course these took place, in fact they took place twice in 1934), but also the inclusion of another category of zek, the exiles in the labour settle­ments, under the control of the Gulag. In June 1934, as part of the process of reorganising the policing bodies, the Gulag was renamed the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Labour Settle­ments, under which title it became a branch of the NKVD.41 Strictly speaking, therefore, the name Gulag (Main Administration of Camps) was only the official title of the forced labour network for three years, from February 1931 to June 1934. Nonetheless the acronym stuck, and was used on official records thereafter; no doubt partly due to a desire

Origins and Development 57

for some constancy amongst the seemingly never-ending stream of administrative changes, and partly due to the difficulty involved in constructing a manageable acronym from the new titles given!

In October 1934 a further change of name occurred. 42 This redesignation signified the inclusion of the forced labour establish­ments formerly under the control of the republican People's Commis­sariats of Justice. The thrice renamed Main Administration of Camps, Labour Settlements and Places of Imprisonment now took under its purview, therefore, some 548 establishments containing 212 000 pris­oners from the RSFSR Peoples' Commissariat of Justice alone.43 The figures for the number of prisoners gained from the establishments of other republics of the Soviet Union are as yet unavailable. The changes of 1934 clearly had their administrative advantages in the consolida­tion of forced labour under a single body. David Dallin argued, too, that the removal of control over some prisoners from the Commis­sariat of Justice, with its relatively more open framework of formal legal responsibilities, aimed at placing the forced labour system away from the eyes of foreign observers.

In the middle 'thirties, when the flow of books and speeches on the advantages of the Soviet penal system ceased, the last of the prisons and camps still under control of the Department of Justice were turned over to the silent NKVD . . . Apparently all gaps, leaks, and loop­holes of information had been tightly stopped up.44

For the next four years the administrative subordination of the forced labour system remained unchanged, as its workload continued to in­crease. The purges of 1936-38 - known as the Yezhovshchina, after Yagoda's successor as Head of the NKVD, N. I. Yezhov- brought a further influx of inmates into the camps. By the end of 1938, how­ever, Yezhov had been removed, and was replaced by Lavrentii Beria. At the same time as these top-level manoeuvres were taking place, the organisation which shall continue to be referred to here as the Gulag became, by a decree of the NKVD on 28 October 1938, the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Labour Settlements. The reference to 'places of imprisonment' had been removed, and os­tensibly this suggests that prisons and colonies were no longer to be administered alongside camps and settlements. However, no further evidence is at hand to corroborate this conclusion, and it may simply have marked a shake-up of the camp's governing structure as part of the manoeuvres to remove Y ezhov.

Whatever the precise meaning of the 1938 change of name, it is

58 The Gulag at War

clear that the administrative subordination of the forced labour system underwent further reform in 1940 and 1941, which reversed the pre­vious trend of bringing most of the forms of forced labour under one Main Administration. During these two years a number of the Admin­istrations and Departments within the Gulag became Main Administra­tions in their own right. They were therefore elevated to become independent parts of the NKVD USSR, rather than simply sub-sec­tions of the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Labour Settlements, which became the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies in February 1941.

The creation of distinct Main Administrations for camps in each of the major productive areas of the forced labour system did not, how­ever, leave the central Gulag administration redundant. Instead, the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies re­tained the administrative functions in relation to those camps and colonies that had been placed under the managerial authority of the new bodies as regards the use of forced labour.45

This distinction is crucial to an understanding of the workings of the Soviet forced labour system after 1940. The five new Main Ad­ministrations, formed in 1940 and 1941 and delineated according to the type of work they carried out, took responsibility for the economic use of forced labour in these specific areas. However, most of the services and obligations that were commonly required across the forced labour network, and that bore no relation to the type of work carried out or the marketing of the product produced, were still organised and coordinated by the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Labour Settlements. The latter organisation continued, therefore, to organise the guarding of prisoners, the supply of goods to the camps, surveillance of prisoners and staff, prisoner registration, provision of medical care, cultural and educational work, veterinary services, the forced labour inspectorate, the Gulag Political Department, and the selection and placement of personnel.46

The first group of zeky to be administratively separated off and placed at the disposal of an independent Main Administration of the NKVD were those working on railway construction; not that it made the slightest difference to the prisoners themselves. An NKVD order of 4 January 1940 created the Main Administration of Railway Construction Camps (GULZhDS).47 The reorganisation continued in September, with the formation of the Main Administration for Hydro-electric Construction.48

The division of economic tasks amongst People's Commissariats and Main Administrations did not simply affect the NKVD in these years,

Origins and Development 59

but was part of a wider process of specialisation touching the whole economic apparatus of the USSR in the late 1930s and early 1940s.49

Evidently these administrative changes were judged a success, as they were brought in on a grand scale in February of the following year. The overall body controlling forced labour became known as the Main Administration for Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies - still known as the Gulag in official and unofficial practice. Also estab­lished were:

• Main Administration for Camps of the Mining and Metallurgical Industry (GULGMP); established by NKVD Order 00212. 26 Feb­ruary 1941.

• Main Administration for Camps of Industrial Construction (Glavpromstroi); NKVD Order 00212. 26 February 1941.

• Administration for Camps of the Timber Industry (ULLP); NKVD Order 00212. 26 February 1941. This Administration was upgraded to Main Administration on 4 March 194 7.

• Administration for the Technical Supply of Construction Sites and Camps; NKVD Order 00212. 26 February 1941. (Renamed in July 1941 as the Administration for Material-Technical Supply.)

During the war years, several other managerial administrations were set up within the NKVD which had oversight of forced labour activi­ties. The precise date of the formation of these bodies remains un­clear, but the administrations so formed included: the Main Administration of Road Building (GUShosDor); the Administration of the Fuel Indus­try; the Administration of Special Construction (Osobstroi); and the Main Administration of Aerodrome Construction (GUAS).50

After these new bodies were established as independent parts of the NKVD, the central administration was left, therefore, with control of the administrative and organisational functions required to run a forced labour system the size of the Soviet Gulag. An exception to this pat­tern of placing the economic use of forced labour under the purview of distinct product-based Main Administrations was the treatment of those camps and colonies which did not fit into the areas of responsi­bility of the newly formed bodies. These continued to be managed entirely by the Main Administration for Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies. A special Administration within the Gulag was established to deal with these establishments.51

60 The Gulag at War

From 1941 to the death of Stalin the basic administrative subordina­tion of the forced labour network remained as outlined above, except for the formality of changing the name of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in March 1946. Within this structure there existed many separate departments and administrations, which are identified in the following chapter.

5. TYPE

The overview of forced labour's administrative subordination presented above provides an indication of the complexities of definition and designation which beset studies of the Soviet camp system. Indeed, even to talk of 'camps' in such an all-embracing fashion could lead to confusion when assessing archival documents. Despite the intricacies of their bureaucratic terminology, however, the Soviet archivists them­selves did refer to the Gulag and to camps in the general sense in which these terms have been applied in the West. Convenience dic­tates that such names be used to refer to the entire system of forced labour which existed in the USSR. Nonetheless, beyond the conven­ience of a catch-all phrase, there should be an awareness of the disparate types of labour and labourer referred to.

The central type of forced labour in Stalin's Soviet Union was the Corrective Labour Camp (ITL). These camps are the focus of most of the present work, and of most previous works on the Gulag. They were often grouped together in clusters and their inmates were as­signed to a wide range of tasks, notably forestry, mining and indus·· trial production. To give a description of a typical camp presents problems, as the system existed for so long and over such a vast ter­ritory that temporal and geographical variations alone make the selec­tion of a typical camp fraught with the dangers of oversimplification. To describe the horrors of the first winter in Kolyma would create a different impression from an account of a Vorkuta camp during the rebellions of the early 1950s. Perhaps the best description of camp life in its 'settled' state remains Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

In addition to camps, however, there existed, as outlined in Chapter 2, Corrective Labour Colonies. The distinction between these two types of forced labour seems to have emerged during the 1920s, and was set out in the RSFSR Criminal Codex of 1926.52 Here two forms of im­prisonment were said to exist in Russia: corrective labour camps, and

Origins and Development 61

'places of general imprisonment' or colonies. It has already been noted that the ideological preference of the Soviet regime demanded the aboli­tion of prisons. Of course such an abolition never occurred. Nonethe­less, the 1926 Criminal Codex took a step in that direction by ceasing to use the word 'prison'! In reality prisons existed and colonies existed, and the difference between the two seems to have been imprecise in the earlier years of the decade.

Those incarcerated in 'places of general imprisonment' had sentences of less than three years, and were generally under the control of the republican People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs rather than the OGPU. Prisoners were put to work, and hence their prisons became forced labour colonies. At first sight, the emergence of a clear cat­egory of NKVD labour colonies in the 1920s may appear to back up any claims that prisons disappeared. However, a cursory glance at the memoirs of former prisoners show this to have not been so. Prisons still existed, but increasingly were places of transit, usually for those en route to the camps. The OGPU maintained its own 'special prisons'.53

As mentioned earlier, the existence of two types of forced labour in the Soviet Union serves to complicate attempts to characterise or quantify the labour camp system. Typically, the best known and most graphic memoir material comes from inmates of the OGPU camps. There are several reasons for this. First, political prisoners were handled by the OGPU, and these were invariably members of the educated intelligent­sia. They were, therefore, both capable of recording their experiencs in a striking manner and able to find a ready audience for their re­ports from amongst fellow members of the educated classes. Second, the horrors of the OGPU northern camps in the 1920s were such as to make accounts of events there powerful, vivid and forceful. The tor­tures endured by the inmates of the Solovetsky monastery hold the attention, in all their horror. Furthermore, the types of prisoner held by the OGPU often made their fate of particular interest to various influential groups. For example, the fate of the Trotskyites was fol­lowed by their comrades who remained free. The case, too, of a group of nuns maltreated in the OGPU camps readily became shocking memoir material. 54

In comparison to their counterparts in OGPU camps, inmates held by the Republican NKVD organisations were more likely to be unedu­cated and less socially or politically prominent. They were usually serving shorter sentences, of less than three years, which involved working in an agricultural or industrial colony; not quite the stuff of startling memoirs, even had the inmates been able to present their accounts to a mass

62 The Gulag at War

audience. However tough conditions may have been, they did not compare with the graphically described ordeals undergone at Solovetsky.

Despite the fact, though, that in general most descriptions of Soviet forced labour in the 1920s come from those kept in the OGPU admin­istered camps, when it comes to figures, the Republican NKVD ad­ministration and the People's Commissariat of Justice were always more forthcoming than the OGPU. In the latter half of the 1920s there was much debate in judicial circles seeking a solution to overcrowding in Soviet prisons. By the autumn of 1927 the situation had reached such a level of crisis that an amnesty covering between 80 000 and 125 000 prisoners across the USSR took place. A year later official figures stated that there were 123 000 prisoners in the USSR, compared with 185 000 on 1 January 1927.55 Unofficial figures for January 1927 claimed 198 000 inmates, excluding those under OGPU control.56

As well as camps and colonies, under their various administrative subordinations, forced labour in the Soviet Union also included exiles sent to labour settlements. From the early 1930s these 'special set­tlers' were put at the disposal of the OGPU. In theory they were not inmates of institutions,and the Russian scholar V. N. Zemskov distin­guishes them from prisoners. At the same time, however, the zone of labour settlements within which they lived was usually behind wire, and the exiles were put to work under the administration of the Gulag. On average the size of the labour settler contingent was 64 per cent of the camp and colony population. 57

During the war, new types of forced labour were used by the Gulag authorities. First, prisoners of war were put to work on economic tasks. These POWs do not appear in statistics for the Gulag camps and colonies, as they were kept in their own camps. However, there are reports of German POWs still in Soviet camps, apparently in the same camp groups as Soviet inmates, several years after the war.58 Also during the war, the Department of Special Camps (also known as the Department of Verification and Filtration Camps - Otdel proveryano-fil'tratsionnykh lagerei) was established.59 The Second World War enabled not only the formation of new categories of camps and inmate within the So­viet Union, it also gave the opportunity for the Gulag to be exported. Between 1948 and 1950 there existed the Department of Special Camps in Germany.60 (For detailed discussion of these various types of war­time forced labour, see Chapter 5.)

A final type of forced labourer to be identified is the minor. Under the terms of a Decree of April 1935, children over twelve years old found themselves included under the general penal code, and were subject

Origins and Development 63

to forced Jabour.61 In addition to these 'child criminals', children whose parents were arrested were often subject to either exile along with their parents or incarceration in other NKVD establishments. In September 1939 the Department of Labour Colonies for Minors was set up. This department was abolished in 1943, but that did not mean an end to the imprisonment of children. It signified merely an administrative shift, with the oversight of child zeky becoming the responsibility of either the administration within which they worked or, presumably, if they were interned in an NKVD children's home, the NKVD administration for education.

6. CONCLUSIONS

The archival material disclosed in this chapter enables the presentation of a more rounded account of the Gulag's origins than has previously been possible. It does not, of course, compare with the memoirs of former inmates in the recounting of what life in Soviet forced labour camps was like, but it does reveal key developmental stages in the creation of the Gulag.

According to these archival accounts, Felix Dzerzhinsky initiated the qualitative shift whereby 'Special Concentration Camps' were dis­tinguished from post-revolutionary concentration camps. These camps, established chiefly in northern Russia, shifted their emphasis increas­ingly to forced labour as a contribution to the national economy. At the end of the decade, a proposal by Yanson, Tolmachev and Yagoda signalled a rapid expansion of forced labour, which continued throughout the thirties, driven by both economic and political factors.

From the archives it has also been possible, for the first time, to trace the administrative development of the Gulag. A pattern of con­solidation is therefore revealed, with the forced labour establishments of the OGPU, the republican NKVD, and the People's Commissariat of Justice being subsumed under the all-union NKVD by the mid-1930s. Only when a tightly controlled and centralised forced labour system had been established were groups of camps later divided into manage­rial sub-groups within the NKVD. By the time the German army launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the Gulag formed a closed system in which millions of inmates served penal sentences at the same time as they made significant contributions to the economy of the Soviet state.

4 Gulag Administration

The aim of the present work is to bring to light from the archives of the former Soviet Union aspects of Gulag life and its organisation thus far unknown, by means of a detailed archive-based survey of the period covered by the Second World War. Following the historical and historiographical background presented in the opening chapters, the war years now become our focus.

The Gulag was subordinate to the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) of the USSR, or its equivalent body. 1 The numer­ous name changes and shifts in its precise area of responsibility have been outlined in Chapter 3. The administrative structure within the Gulag was also subject to change over the decades of its existence, although the tasks performed by its various sub-sections remained fairly constant. As a Main Administration of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the Gulag had oversight itself over a number of Ad­ministrations and Departments through which its various functions were directed. The following account of the Gulag's internal structure and functions applies to the period after the reorganisation of 1940 and 1941, when managerial Main Administrations were established within the NKVD to oversee particular areas of economic activity. Appendix B presents a tabular summary of the administrative structure outlined in this chapter.

1. THE GULAG STATE

To control entirely the lives of several million people, with the obliga­tion that they be largely isolated from the free population, meant that in practice the Gulag faced many of the requirements which the govern­ment of a nation-state would have to meet. Security, health care, educa­tion, provision of food, political indoctrination, surveillance - all of these roles exercised by the Soviet government in national life had their Gulag equivalents organised by Gulag departments. In fact, it has been argued that the camp system served as a sort of exaggerated microcosm of the Soviet social system. Within the Gulag was writ large 'the new nexus of privilege, power, exploitation and subordina­tion which had come into being throughout the USSR'. 2

64

Gulag Administration 65

Indeed, the heads of certain Gulag organisations exercised an auth­ority somewhat akin to that of a monarch under the protection of some great empire. For example, the Head of Dal'stroi - the organisation in charge of forced labour in north-eastern Siberia - has been described as 'a potentate whose word was law throughout the vast territories of the North-East' .3 Like any vassal-state relationship, tribute had to be paid, in the form of the output from forced labour. At intervals, too, a reminder would be given of who owed allegiance to whom, as the Gulag official himself might be arrested and replaced.

The image of the Gulag as a state within a state is not a new one.4

Nor does it represent a perfect analogy, as the forced labour network was totally geared to meeting the demands of Soviet economic and internal security policies, and its men-at-arms were charged with re­pelling threats from within rather than from without. Nonetheless, the metaphor is strengthened by the consideration of the administrative bodies within the Gulag, the details of which are contained in the Russian State Archives. Here are set out the tasks and responsibilities of the three Administrations and nine Departments which made up the Gulag's internal structure. Administrations outranked, and indeed contained within themselves, Departments. Departments, however, also existed indepen­dently of Administrations, under the direct control of the Main Ad­ministration, or Gulag.

2. SECURITY AND RECRUITMENT

Clearly the most fundamental and obvious task of an organisation which oversees prisoners is to ensure that they remain prisoners. This basic responsibility was assigned to the Guard and Regime Administration of the Gulag (Upravlenie okhrany i rezhima- UOR). For the fulfilment of its various tasks, the UOR itself divided into six departments. Its personnel considered themselves to be more than simply armed guards. The archival summary of responsibilities described them as 'militarised' rather than 'armed',5 as these were not civilian warders but trained recruits of the NKVD.

The 'regime' part of the Guard and Regime Administration's title referred to the maintenance of everyday order within the Gulag, with particular regard to the isolation of those prisoners who infringed the rules of the camp. In other words, the NKVD guards served also as the police force of this state within a state. This aspect of security work was organised by the Regime and Surveillance Department of the UOR.

66 The Gulag at War

The camps had, like most penal institutions the world over, their own rules and punishments for offenders. Reflecting again the wider Soviet state, however, these camp laws were harsh in the extreme, and involved punishments to match. The major specific offences which met with punishment related to the labour tasks of prisoners. Failure to meet the work norms could mean several days in the punishment cell. Those who shirked work or blatantly refused to perform the labour allotted to them found themselves liable to harsher punishment.

Christians and members of various sects found themselves more prone than most to punishment on such grounds, as they might refuse to work on the sabbath or particular festivals. In the most extreme cases, they might refuse to work at all for a regime which they, with justification, regarded as in the service of Satan. 6 Technically, there­fore, the punishment had nothing to do with the fact that these pris­oners were believers, rather it found justification in the Stalin constitution's apparently laudable declaration that all citizens should perform socially useful labour.

Of course, the guards and camp authorities possessed sufficient in­dependence and power to be able to further abuse the remaining rights and dignities of those already deprived of such by their very incar­ceration. Their role as preservers of the regime, therefore, could be and was exercised arbitrarily at times. Solzhenitsyn declared that pun­ishment was meted out by guards 'for whatever they felt like' .7 Such punishment usually took the form of isolation in a special cell on star­vation rations, or a spell in the Strict Regime Barracks. To serve as a deterrent, these prisons had to surpass the camp itself in terms of liv­ing conditions; not a simple task but achievable nonetheless through heightened discomfort, cold and lack of sanitation. 8

The final measure used by the guards fulfilling the requirement that they maintain the regime was the death penalty. At times in the Gulag's history, execution was common for labour-related 'offences', as well as for 'counter-revolutionary activity' .9 The revolts which flared up in the camps as early as 1942, and particularly in the early 1950s, were also met with, and occasionally prompted by, executions. The vast majority of the time, the guards could act with impunity under the protection of the authorities.

Two transcripts of archival documents relating to 1952 and 1953 show, however, that by then investigations were certainly carried out into cases where firearms had been used by guards. In one case, in September 1952, the investigating tribunal - consisting of the Deputy Head of the First Department of the MVD Prison Administration, Colonel Teplov, and the Deputy Head of the Operational Department of the

Gulag Administration 67

MVD Prison Administration, Colonel Gromov - declared that the shooting of a prisoner in the act of escaping was justified. In the other case, heard in June 1953, the tribunal found an NKVD Sergeant 'criminally responsible' for the shooting of a prisoner involved in a sit-down protest.10

The Service Department of the Guard and Regime Administration was charged with organising the guarding of prisoners, stores and build­ings. This task consisted largely of establishing the service regulations for the guard contingent. In addition, the Service Department bore much of the responsibility for dealing with escapes and escapees. The proce­dure for gathering information on escapes was established by them. They also dealt with the investigation of escapees captured outside the NKVD camps and colonies, and organised the interrogation of these recaptured fugitives. 11

The security of the Gulag, however, was not simply entrusted to the camp guards. Just as society at large had its police and its secret po­lice, so did the forced labour establishments of the Soviet Union. The Operational Department served as the secret police within the domain of the secret police. This department was independent of the UOR, and subordinated directly to the Gulag chief.

Just as the NKVD fulfilled the tasks of the surveillance of the So­viet people at large, within the camps and colonies run by the NKVD themselves the job of directing and controlling the 'Chekist Service' fell to the Operational Department. Similar methods to those used in society as a whole were applied to the forced labour system, and in­formers proliferated amongst the inmates. In the strict and harsh life of a camp, material benefits derived from collaboration with the NKVD could make a vast difference to the relative comfort, or even the sur­vival, of prisoners. All that was required was to keep one's ears and eyes open for information of interest to the authorities. Memoirs tell of the atmosphere of distrust fostered between inmates by the system, and of course quarrels and disputes could be furthered by one party falsely accusing the other of some indiscretion or even capital crime, such as planning an escape.

In addition to surveillance of prisoners, the Operational Department also gathered information on free workers within the Gulag, and on the NKVD personnel themselves. The fact that the Operational Depart­ment existed independently of the Guard and Regime Administration facilitated this task.

The forced labour system provided employment for a sizeable contingent

68 The Gulag at War

of free employees at a comparatively good rate of pay. Medical spe­cialists, administrators, mechanics - all were posts which could be filled by prisoners or free men. Of the free employees, however, many were reportedly ex-prisoners, with nowhere to go on completion of their sentence, and perhaps tempted by the prospect of improved status within their new world of the Gulag. Some former prisoners rose to be Direc­tors of camps, or to even higher positions within the NKVD appara­tusY However high a man's position in Stalin's Soviet Union though, he could never consider himself safe from the surveillance of informers. The work of the Operational Department ensured that prisoners, officials, guards and employees in the Gulag remained under observation.

The role of the Guard and Regime Administration extended beyond the activities of camp guards to their actual recruitment, which was carried out by a Recruitment Department within the Administration. As the Gulag grew to massive proportions, so the need for adequately trained personnel became increasingly acute. In the 1930s the NKVD set up a number of special training schools, which came under the control of the UOR. The organisation of these schools and a variety of training and refresher courses for the officers was the responsibility of the UOR Department of Military Training. This department organised instruction from training of senior officers at special educational insti­tutes, to courses for dog-handlers.

There is evidence that such training for guards did not go to waste even when guards themselves were found guilty of some offence and became prisoners. Under the principle of 'self-guarding', which gave the impression of a further enlightened penal innovation being intro­duced in the USSR, former NKVD men sentenced to terms in the camps were often given the task of watching over their fellow inmates, and indeed were entrusted with arms to assist them. 13

The Recruitment Department conducted the recruitment of privates and junior officers into the camp and colony guard. Its members also organised the distribution of these guards across the Gulag - estimat­ing the number of guards needed for each establishment, and recom­mending the transfer of personnel between posts. However, as this department existed within the UOR, its activities were confined to staffing in the area of activity covered by the Guard and Regime Administra­tion. Recruitment and appointment to all other posts - in other words,

Gulag Administration 69

excluding privates and junior officers in the camp guard - were carried out by a separate Personnel Department, which did not come under the purview of the UOR.

The Personnel Department conducted the selection of personnel and their placement in appropriate posts. It dealt too with transfers, pro­motion, and those cases where employees had to be dismissed. A cor­rect dismissal procedure was laid out for the department to follow. As well as overseeing broad personnel policy for the Gulag, the Person­nel Department also took special responsibility for the appointment of the leading posts, not only with regard to the Gulag itself (using its strict definition as the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies), but also with regard to the still-existent republican camps and colonies, under the OITK/UITLK. As part of its role in organising the recruitment of personnel, the Personnel Department carried out a check of new employees of the Gulag system, in order to confirm their personal and ideological suitability for the task before them.

The two departments within the Guard and Regime Administration which have so far gone unmentioned were the Fire Department and the Air Service Department. The former simply had responsibility for organising and conducting fire prevention and fighting. The latter was charged with exercising control of the air division of the camp net­work, which consisted of planes serving the needs of the Gulag.

3. SUPPLIES

3.1 Rations

The Supply Administration was established in 1942 as a response to the difficulties of war, when the Gulag was required to organise for itself the supply of foodstuffs and industrial goods to camps and colo­nies.14 During the war years in particular, the number of deaths due to malnutrition and disease was particularly high, as rationing affected the entire Soviet Union, and prisoners came very low down the list of priorities.

At other times, too, the norm of hunger became the extreme of fam­ine, when, for example, remote camps were cut off by adverse weather.1s Writing at the end of the war, Professor S. Swianiewicz, a former prisoner who later completed a volume on the economic significance of forced labour, claimed that:

70 The Gulag at War

The general food policy in the camps is to keep the men in a state of semi-starvation, and, by holding out hopes of slightly better food, give them an incentive for doing more work. 16

By the end of the forties, however, it seems that the provision of ra­tions had improved somewhat. Several observers write of the 'Great Hunger' coming to an end around 1948, to be replaced by a lesser hunger, which freed the zeky 'from the urgent day to day worry over food'} 7

Within the Gulag Supply Administration there were - as with the Guard and Regime Administration - six separate departments, which bore responsibility for particular aspects of supply coordination. First, the Planning Department drew up plans of requirements, based on the information provided by the camps and colonies. Of course those run­ning the forced labour establishments would seek to maximise the amount of food and other supplies allocated to their particular establishment. It was therefore the task of the Planning Department to rework the total demands in consultation with the State Planning Commission.

Three further departments had responsibility for the various catego­ries of supply allocated to camps and colonies. The Food Department dealt with the main bulk of rations which came from outside of the camp system, whereas a separate department organised any necessary redistribution of foodstuffs produced from within the Gulag itself. The role of this latter department increased significantly during the war years, when self-sufficiency was more and more urged and forced upon the camps. 18 The Transport and Stores Department was charged with the supply of articles of clothing and domestic utility, as well as or­ganising sewing and repairs of the same. Finally there existed an Au­diting and Instructing Department, which dealt with the financial and economic activities of the Supply Administration.

3.2 Medical Department

One factor of great importance to living conditions in the camps which did not come under the Supply Administration was the provision of medical supplies. This was overseen by a separate department of the Gulag. The Medical Department was charged with ensuring that the population of camps and colonies received an 'appropriate' medical service. 19 Hospitals, medicines and preventive measures were all to be organised for prisoners. Whatever good intentions the Medical Depart­ment may have had, though, the poor rations, unsanitary living condi-

Gulag Administration 71

tions, often severe climactic conditions, and physical demands of la­bour in the camps represented a formidable obstacle to the assurance of prisoners' well-being, even if adequate facilities and medicinal pro­visions had been available.

Poor rations within the camps meant that vitamin deficiency was rife in the Gulag, causing scurvy and pellagra. Various attempts to combat a lack of vitamin C in the diet led to infusions made from pine needles or the leaves of willow trees becoming available, or even com­pulsory, in many camps. Of the former, General Gorbatov records that it was the only 'medicine' available in his camp. The latter became an obligatory 'aperitif' in certain camps for a decade or more, despite having no medicinal value. 20

The harsh winters experienced by camp inmates, combined with poor clothing and excessive physical exertion, contributed further to a low resistance to illness. Pneumonia and frostbite were common, and dis­eases readily transmitted themselves through filthy, crowded barracks. There appears to have been an ambivalent attitude to sickness amongst prisoners. Some memoir material emphasises the strong desire of most inmates to be signed off from work, and perhaps given a permanent role performing one of the less taxing jobs within the camp. Such keenness manifested itself in self-inflicted injuries, and various methods were employed to produce the symptoms of specific diseases. How­ever, a quota for the number of prisoners who could be declared sick apparently operated in many camps, and therefore even the genuinely sick and dying could not be sure of a rest from their labours. Further­more, other memoirs point to the fact that those incapable of hard labour received a cut in rations, which in tum exacerbated illness and often precipitated death. To some prisoners, therefore, working· on through sickness became the preferred option.

The doctors under the control of the Medical Department came from three distinct groups - NKVD doctors, prisoners and free employees. According to one former inmate, writing just after the war, 'on the whole doctors use their powers to make life easier for the prisoners' Y Nonetheless, hampered by a lack of supplies, poor facilities, and the oversight of the camp authorities - with their eyes on economic tar­gets - the scope for compassionate action was limited.

A further obligation of the Medical Department was to keep records of mortality and cases of disease, in order to provide the statistics necessary to assess the state of medical care in the camps.

72 The Gulag at War

3.3 Veterinary Department

In some ways analogous to the Medical Department, there also existed a separate Veterinary Department. The only elucidation that the other­wise self-evident role of the veterinary department requires is to point out that the camp guards included dog-handlers to aid in the control of prisoners and the recapture of escapees. The Gulag possessed horses too, though not in sufficient quantities to assign all heavy work to them. Solzhenitsyn reports one of many acronyms in use in the Gulag as being VRIDLO, meaning 'temporary replacement for a horse' and applied to prisoners engaged in particularly heavy labour.22

Of course the question inevitably arose in memoir material of whether the animals under the control of the Gulag received any better treat­ment than the prisoners. Such a comparison presents difficulties when it comes to empirical verification. Nonetheless, a single case reported in the memoirs of Elinor Lipper tells of a prisoner at Burkhala camp in 1944 who asked to be redesignated as a horse, on the grounds that he would then be given a day off every ten days, as well as his own stable and blanket.23

4. THE ADMINISTRATION OF PRODUCTION

The Gulag administration, as a central body overseeing most of the vast forced labour network which blighted the USSR, organised and controlled most of the common cross-camp requirements. Guards, food, medicines, education, and so on - all were directed and delivered by the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies. However, after the organisational changes of 1940 and 1941, the economic functions in the main areas of forced labour output were put under the control of separate Main Administrations within the NKVD.24 These bodies were the management authorities of the Gulag.

Their task did not consist of looking after the needs of the camps and colonies in terms of such matters as guards and supplies, as the appropriate Administrations handled these issues for the whole of the forced labour system. They concentrated on the use of labour resources. They dealt too with questions of output maximisation, agreements with other People's Commissariats, plan fulfilment and negotiation, and other matters related to the primary, economic function of forced labour.

The major areas of forced labour output identified from the afore­mentioned reorganisation of 1940-41 consisted of industrial construe-

Gulag Administration 73

tion, mining and metallurgical work, railway construction, timber and related products, and road building. Each of these had their own Main Administration of the People's Commissariat of Internal Atfairs to oversee labour use and productivity.25 Within these Main Administrations there existed of course numerous administrations covering distinct groups of camps, and departments with specific tasks. 26 There also existed a mana­gerial administration overseeing the industrial and agricultural colo­nies that existed within the central Gulag camp system. This Administration of Corrective Labour Colonies, however, was not an independent group within the NKVO, but a sub-section of the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies. 27

4.1 The Main Administration of Industrial Construction Camps ( Glavpromstroi)

Formed by NKVD Order on 26 February 1941, the central task of Glavpromstroi consisted of supervising the construction of major in­dustrial concerns. After its formation Glavpromstroi took over some of the tasks which had been under the People's Commissariat of Con­struction.28 It subdivided itself into camp groups, often named accord­ing to the project to which they were assigned. Therefore during the war years there were major concentrations of Glavpromstroi camps under the designation Chelyabmetallurgstroi, as they were involved in the construction of a major metallurgical factory at Chelyabinsk. Similarly, Volgostroi referred to the camps along the River Volga, where zeky were forced to construct a hydroelectric station and to improve the navigational conditions of the river.29

4.2 Main Administration of Camps of the Mining and Metallurgical Industry (GULGMP)

Also established by NKVD Order on 26 February 1941, the Main Administration of Camps of the Mining and Metallurgical Industry carried out the construction of a number of mining and metallurgical enter­prises, and the exploitation of mineral resources. The task of constructing metallurgical enterprises duplicated a role assigned also to the Glavpromstroi. Nonetheless, there existed plenty of scope for duplica­tion as the exploitation of natural resources by the Gulag continued apace. The construction of specific factories may have been allotted to one Main Administration or the other simply on grounds of convenience. Many of the camps under the GULGMP were situated in the east and

74 The Gulag at War

north of the USSR, and so construction in those areas would have more likely been under their control than under Glavpromstroi.

The major coal-mining district under the control of the Main Ad­ministration of Camps of the Mining and Metallurgical Industry was the Vorkuta Basin, which took on great significance during the Sec­ond World War, when the Nazis occupied the Donbass mining region in the Ukraine. With the growth of rail links, coal from this source could be transported to an increasing number of industrial centres in the north of the Soviet Union.

Of the metallurgical resources overseen by GULGMP, the Noril'sk camps in the far north chiefly produced copper and nickel, and the Aktyubinsk group of enterprises in Kazakhstan exploited the chrome ore mined there. The area reportedly possessed 70 per cent of global chrome ore resources, and the Aktyubinsk Kombinat - a forced labour institution - laid claim to being the largest enterprise of its type in the world.

Perhaps the most well-known, or indeed infamous, of all the sub­divisions of the GULGMP was the Far Northern Construction Trust, Dal' stroi. Of all the tales of horrific conditions and brutal treatment within the Gulag, perhaps the worst come from this region in the far north and east of the USSR. The Kolyma region, whence Dal'stroi spread, became a lucrative source of gold for the Soviet Union follow­ing the development of the gold fields by forced labourers in the 1930s. Before the early 1930s, this climatically inhospitable region was sparsely inhabited. In the summer of 1932, however, an influx of forced la­bourers began - most of whom died in the following winter as insufficient resources and opportunity to construct barracks had been given. Of those camps which had been built, many were completely cut off for several winter months without supplies.30

Robert Conquest, who has written a book detailing the horrors of the Dal'stroi region, asserts that 'at the height of its operations, Dalstroy ... was an NKVD agency, coming directly under the Police Ministry in Moscow'.31 Such may indeed have been the case in the 1930s; however, the archival evidence asserts that by the end of the war Dal'stroi had become a part of the GULGMP empire. The terri­tory of this empire occupied the basins of the rivers Kolyma and Indigirka, down to the Sea of Okhotsk and north to the Chukotskoe Sea. From the labour of the prisoners transported to the demesne of Dal'stroi, tin and gold were produced in very significant quantities.32

Gulag Administration

4.3 Main Administration of Railway Construction Camps (GULZhDS)

75

Created by an NKVD order of 4 January 1940, the Main Administra­tion of Camps for Railway Construction took responsibility for the use of forced labour in building the major lines required to exploit fully the labours of their co-workers in the remote regions of the USSR. Consequently the living and working conditions suffered by prisoners in the more remote railway construction camps were extreme; so ex­treme, in fact, that they were even remarked upon by the Head of the Gulag - a man not given to emphasising the sufferings of prisoners -in his lecture to NKVD officers in 1946. General Nasedkin talked, with reference to the building of the Northern-Pechorsky line linking Kotlas to Vorkuta, of • conditions of permafrost, taiga, polar nights, and sparsely inhabited regions . . . which severely curtailed construc­tion productivity' .33

Clearly the construction of a railway line meant that camps could not stay in a fixed location for extended periods of time, a fact which further contributed to a lowering of living standards. As a means of offsetting the necessity to move camp locations frequently, several camps would be set up along the planned route of the railway. More perma­nent camps were also required for the construction of tunnels. In the Far East of the USSR especially, in addition to the climatic conditions which hampered railway construction, the mountainous and barren ter­rain and the absence of any lines of communication further aggravated the difficulties faced. Nonetheless, the work had to continue, and so in such cases the requisite food, tools, and materials arrived at the camps by the painstaking means of packhorses.

4.4 Administration of Timber Industry Camps (ULLP)

Established under an NKVD Order of 26 February 1941, this Admin­istration was upgraded to the status of Main Administration on 4 March 1947. Although there existed in the Soviet Union a People's Commis­sariat of Timber, the Administration of Camps of the Timber Industry was the most significant organisation of timber enterprises in the coun­try.34 Timber camps could be found mainly in the Urals, Siberia, and the northern regions of the Soviet Union, whence around a quarter of the timber produced would be transported to its eventual destination by the simple means of floating it along rivers.

76 The Gulag at War

4.5 Main Administration of Road Construction Camps (GShosDor)

Road building by means of forced labour did not approach the scale of activity and importance of railway construction. The main road cover­ing the six hundred kilometres from Ryazan to Kuibyshev was con­structed with the use of forced labour. In addition to road building, the prisoners under the control of GShosDor also proved of use to the authorities in repairing roads, especially restoring them to use after the destruction of war.

4.6 The Administration of Corrective Labour Colonies (upravlenie ispravitel'no-trudovykh kolonii- UITK)

The UITK differed from the Administrations and Main Administra­tions detailed above, in that it was not an independent body within the NKVD but rather the third of the three Administrations under the con­trol of the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies (the other two being the Guard and Regime Administration and the Supply Administration). However, it performed the same function as the preceding five organisations, as it had managerial responsibility for a group of forced labour establishments under the central control of the Gulag.

The Administration of Corrective Labour Colonies was devoted specifically to the labour colonies within the central camp network. 35

It concentrated on the development of the labour tasks of the colonies, in order to increase their effectiveness in terms of productivity and profitability.

Within the Administration of Corrective Labour Colonies seven separate departments existed, all devoted to different aspects of production. As in the economy as a whole, production had to be expressed in output plans. The Industrial Department and the Agricultural Department worked out production plans for those enterprises within the UITK which op­erated in their respective areas of responsibility. To facilitate both planning and production, there also existed a Technical Department, which oversaw new types of production by UITK enterprises and coordinated the ex­change of information between them, and a Technical Supply Depart­ment, to ensure the supply of technical equipment to the enterprises.

In addition to planning and production within the UITK as it existed, separate departments devoted themselves to matters of the develop­ment of and investment in the network of colonies. A Planning De-

Gulag Administration 77

partment worked out prospective plans for the development of the en­terprises, whilst a Capital Construction Division had oversight of the resources allocated to investment.

Finally, the end products of the colonies came under the control of a Marketing Department. The personnel of this department had reponsibility for ensuring the fulfilment of plans, and preventing a glut of finished goods. They also concluded agreements for the sale of goods produced.

As a productive force the UITK represented, in the words of the Gulag Chief himself, 'one of the largest scale industrial administra­tions of the USSR NKVD' .36 Its output profile developed in eleven main branches of industry, all using forced labour to produce the goods that the consumer bought. The industrial branches of particular importance in terms of labour colony output were: metal-working, wood-working, timber, textiles, knitted garments, hemp and jute products, footwear, leather-working, felt products, clothing, furriery. From these industrial branches, clothing made up 35 per cent of output. 37 After clothing, in order of importance - measured by the volume of output - came fur­niture, and, during the war, ammunition. In comparison with the camps involved in construction of railways and industrial enterprises, and the exploitation of natural resources, the colonies were more often located in the industrial regions of European Russia, and hence it was forced labour establishments of this sort that were at the forefront of the evacu­ation of Gulag enterprises, personnel and prisoners as the Nazi army advanced in 1941.

5. ADMINISTRATION OF IDEOLOGY

5.1 The Cultural and Educational Department

In theory, and in name, the labour camps of the Gulag maintained a corrective impetus, re-educating criminal and anti-Soviet zeky through labour. The Cultural and Educational Department existed to address the practicalities of re-education. However, the task of convincing vic­tims of the Gulag that the Soviet regime represented the cutting edge of a vibrant world revolutionary movement, which would end the ex­ploitation of the proletariat, presented obvious difficulties. The occa­sional political meeting could not hope successfully to re-educate inmates, nor could poorly and selectively stocked camp libraries, although both of these phenomena existed.

78 The Gulag at War

In addition to its re-educational aims, the department also bore re­sponsibility for 'carrying out measures capable of improving living conditions' .38 Unfortunately for the inmates, however, matters of im­port - labour tasks, food provision, medical facilities - came under the control of other departments. Instead, the Cultural and Educational Department involved itself in 'organising cultural relaxation for the contingent in their free time' .39 Thus the department staff presented occasional entertainments, sometimes of a propagandist nature, some­times neutral. The incongruity of these events comes across clearly in the accounts of ex-prisoners:

it is five o'clock in the morning of a gray, rainy, autumn day; the foremen are driving out the hungry men, drenched and angry, clothed in rags and torn boots many of them hardly able to move their feet from exhaustion; and there on the platform near the gates a band is playing a lively march tune.40

The above account, given by Swianiewicz, illustrates magnificently the gap between official and memoir evidence. There clearly existed an entire Gulag department devoted to the cultural and political edu­cation of camp inmates. 'Corrective labour', therefore, - it could be argued - did indeed aim at 'correcting' those whose behaviour had been deemed deviant by the authorities of the Soviet state. Further­more, provision was made for occasional culturally uplifting events to lighten the monotony of a forced labourer's existence. All of this is strictly true. However, it is a verifiable fact which masks a greater truth. It sidesteps the life and death issues of importance to prisoners. It passes over the essence of the Gulag's task from the authorities point of view, that is, its overriding economic motivation.

The economic motivation did in fact underlie most of the work of the Cultural and Educational Department. The talks and entertainments that were occasionally provided involved as a rule exhortations to more intensive labour. Furthermore, the final task with which the depart­ment was reported to be entrusted consisted of directing 'labour com­petition' between prisoners.41 'Collectives' of prisoners were set against each other in the completion of specific tasks, the fastest gaining some status or even reward, but also setting a precedent upon which future work norms could be based. The fact that one brigade member's pro­spective benefits for increased effort depended, too, on the rest of the brigade pulling their weight led to pressure between inmates to fulfil the task, and 'labour competition' thereby represented an economically advantageous policy from the authorities' point of view.

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5.2 The Political Department

Unlike the Cultural and Educational Department, the Political Depart­ment concentrated its efforts on the staff of the forced labour camps and colonies. The political education conducted by the department aimed at ensuring not only understanding and acceptance of the CPSU's raison d' etre, but also personal allegiance to Stalin - though of course no difference between the two tasks would be discerned in the work of the department. The actual wording of the role assigned to the Politi­cal Department called for education of personnel 'in the spirit of com­plete faithfulness to the party of LENIN AND STALIN' (upper case used in the archival document). As a result of the work of the depart­ment, it was intended that every employee should grasp the basic teach­ings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.42

6. PRISONER ADMINISTRATION AND RECORD-KEEPING

The task of registering prisoners and carrying out statistical analysis was fulfilled by the Department of Prisoner Registration and Distribu­tion. Details of zeky were recorded showing the length of sentence, type of crime, labour skills and specialisms, and 'other indicators'. 43

On the basis of such information, inmates were assigned to camps and colonies. This short-term task was supplemented by the planning func­tion performed by the department, which worked out the future distri­bution of prisoners, paying special attention to adequately supplying newly organised camps and colonies with inmates. In short, the Regis­tration Department had a duty to 'fulfil all the work regarding the replenishment of the prisoner workforce'. 44

Reading between the lines of the Department's responsibilities is scarcely required in order to conclude that finding prisoners to fulfil labour planned tasks, rather than assigning tasks to match the number of 'criminals', represented the standard Gulag procedure. It seems that the bureaucratic source of the infamous 'arrest quotas' given to re­gional NKVD authorities was the Department of Prisoner Registration and Distribution.

The final two departments of the Gulag which remain to be men­tioned are the Accounts and Finance Department - whose functions even the normally loquacious archival source declares 'require no spe­cial elucidation '4s - and the Oversight and Inspection Department, which operated as an inspectorate charged with ensuring that the Administrations

80 The Gulag at War

and Departments that made up the forced labour system fulfilled their obligations.

The three Administrations and nine Departments which made up the internal structure of the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies were supplemented by three further bodies: the Gulag Secretariat, the Transport Division, and the Archival Division. Again, these organisations' roles receive no further detailed explanation in the archive, and again their titles provide sufficient information from which to judge their primary functions. The Transport Division took responsibility for organising the transport of goods to corrective labour enterprises and construction sites by rail and water. Between 1940 and 1945 this task was performed by a separate NKVD Department of Rail and Water Transport, but it was then brought back under Gulag control.46

The Archival Division gathered documentary material from across the Gulag administration. These official documents remained in the possession of the NKVD/MVD until June 1960, when, in connection with the abolition of the MVD, they were transferred to the Central State Archive of the October Revolution. They are now held by the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow. Their organisa­tion into fondy was dictated largely with regard to the sector of the administration in which they originated.47 In other words, they were sorted and stored by Administration and Department. The further divi­sion of each fond into opisy depended primarily on the sensitivity of the information in question. Opis' No. 1 would be marked 'secret', opis' No. 2 would not be secret, No. 3 would be secret information from the political department, and No. 4 would be non-secret docu­ments from the political department. The new information used in the present work comes from the section marked 'top secret'.

7. LOCAL ADMINISTRATION

Aside from the main body of camps and colonies, whose common administrative and organisational tasks were directly undertaken by the Gulag, there also existed other camps and colonies which did not come under direct Gulag management. The camps and colonies not under the direct control of the Gulag structure came together under the ad­ministrative purview of the Departments of Corrective Labour Colo­nies/Administrations of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies (OITK/ UITLK), which were in tum subordinate to Republican NKVD au­thorities. These make up the 'colonies' total of Table 2.1.

Gulag Administration 81

In the towns and cities of most regions and districts, in industrial centres and other 'places for the serving of punishments', there existed corrective labour establishments, populated by prisoners serving a term of less than three years set by the criminal code of the appropriate republic. Once again, so far as the inmates were concerned the niceties of administrative subordination bore little significance. The camp regime, living conditions, labour tasks- all scarcely differed from the general state of affairs in the Gulag NKVD camps. In order to manage these forced labour establishments, an Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies came into being whenever:

on the territory of a particular Republic, krai, or oblast' there are a large number of prisoners and a significant quantity of colonies, or on the territory of a Republic, krai, or ob/ast' corrective labour camps are situated, which are not directly subordinated to the NKVD Gulag.48

The clear impression, therefore, is that the use of forced labour out-side of the central Gulag system occurred throughout the Republics and regions of the Soviet Union without necessarily being coordinated by the centre. In other words, whilst the growth of the Gulag per se can be seen as a centre-driven project coordinated with and incorpo­rated into the national economic plan, the local and Republican au­thorities saw, too, the perceived advantages of forced labour.

The policy followed by the Gulag NKVD USSR, at the behest of the country's political leadership, appears to have provided both example and impetus leading to the appearance of semi-independent camps made up of short- to medium-term prisoners meeting the economic needs of their local overseers. The local camps and colonies typically produced similar goods to those produced by the forced labourers under the Gulag Administration of Corrective Labour Colonies, notably clothes and house­hold goods. These local camps often came to rely on the central Gulag administration for support, for example with regard to the recruitment and training of personnel, but nonetheless they were not directly sub­ordinate to the Main Administration.

The almost ad hoc nature of this development can be postulated on the basis of the clear assertion that these local camps and colonies sprang up before an administrative structure, which the central government clearly deemed necessary, could be put into place. It was not that an Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies was created in each region in order to construct and populate these establishments. Rather, an Administration came into being where such forced labour centres were already found.

5 Forced Labour Establishments

Opening archives have revealed some of the complexities involved in the organisation and administration of a vast network of forced labour establishments. Add to these complexities the chaos which the Nazi invasion wrought in Soviet life, and the Gulag at war begins to be revealed as a camp system in a state of flux. At the outbreak of the war, there were fifty-three centrally administered Gulag camp groups in the Soviet Union, and in 1945 the figure was exactly the same. 1

Such a statistic might create the impression of a settled group of camps battling through the crises of war to emerge bruised but intact at the other end. However, these bare data do not begin to tell the full story. Instead, the war years saw great fluctuations in the identity of the Gulag camps, and the number of republican and local forced labour establishments.

Evacuation in the face of the German advance meant that camps were closed or captured, whilst inmates were moved to new or exist­ing camps further east. With the retaking of occupied Soviet territory from 1943 onwards, forced labour camps began to be re-established in these areas. Th.e events of war also gave opportunity for expanding the camp network, through the introduction of Verification and Filtra­tion Camps which held Soviet citizens returning from Nazi occupa­tion, and the export of the Gulag onto German territory, where a system of forced labour camps was established.

Previous works have identified many of the camps of the Gulag, chiefly through the compilation of information from former inmates. 2

Each of these, however, asserted that their list remained incomplete, due largely to the difficulties inherent in naming the thousands of forced labour establishments which existed across the vast territory of the Soviet Union. The former inmates who provided the information for such lists could only name camps of which they were aware, and could only guess what proportion of the whole this represented. Access to archival sources, coupled with a concentration on a limited temporal period, now allows all of the fifty-plus centrally administered camp groups operating in the Soviet Union during the Second World War to be identified in the present work.

82

Forced Labour Establishments 83

A detailed picture of the changes which the war brought, in terms of the number of camps in existence and the number of inmates held therein, will be drawn over the next two chapters, taken from official documents not previously available. This information will show how the war dealt the Gulag a severe blow, halving its population by the end of 1943, only for the number of camps and prisoners to begin to grow again from 1944, helped by the opportunities that the war's end gave the Soviet authorities for the arrest of new inmates.

1. THE NUMBER OF CAMPS

The focus of this chapter falls on the number and type of forced labour establishment existing in the USSR during the Second World War. On one level, it might seem unimportant whether zeky were kept in five thousand, fifty or five separate camps. What mattered was the number of inmates serving sentences of forced labour. Superficially, such an argument has merit. However, a case-study of the Gulag at war offers the opportunity for a more detailed survey of the central camp groups, their economic tasks, and their managerial subordination. A sense can thus be gained of the size and location of camps and colonies.

Solzhenitsyn, in Arkhipelag Gulag, emphasised the ubiquity of the Gulag. In his portrayal of the Soviet Union, the Gulag was always at hand, 'right next to us, two yards away from us' .3 This ubiquitous nature depended to a certain extent on the existence of a large and widespread network of camps and colonies. A great change of mind­set would be required for Solzhenitsyn's infamous archipelago with its 'innumerable islands' to become a finite and relatively low number of camps.4 The archives reveal around one and a half thousand camps and colonies to have been operating in the Soviet Union at the ·end of the war. These were individual forced labour establishments, as op­posed to the fifty-plus Gulag camp groups mentioned above. There were around 700 to 900 separate camps by 1944. In addition to these should be added 400 to 500 colonies, as well as an unknown number of Verification and Filtration Camps.5

Before limited access to the archives was allowed, the total number of camps had been estimated by former inmates. These estimates can now be checked against - or serve as a check of - the archival esti­mates. The difficulties of dealing with subjective impressions in the absence of more formal, official evidence have already been discussed at some length. Such experiential material decreases in reliability as it

84 The Gulag at War

attempts to posit figures across the wider camp system. Consequently, estimates of prisoner and camp numbers taken from memoir material have been open to some criticism, largely based on the fact that former prisoners had no way of knowing with what proportion of the total network of camps they were acquainted.

Mora and Zwiemak's study, published in 1945, offered the names of some thirty-eight camps known to the Polish officers and former inmates on whose information the data of the book were based. This list related to the years 1940 to 1942. The names given, however, did not constitute a comprehensive list, nor was there any suggestion that they did. On the contrary, the authors asserted that outside of the camp clusters identified by their study, there existed 'hundreds' of other camps.6

A list of some 125 named camps operating at the end of the war, to be found in Dallin and Nikolaevsky's Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, offered a more fruitful source with regard to ascertaining the total number of camps in operation in 1945. This list grouped the camps which it revealed in sub-sections according to geographical location. Details of the principal areas of production in which each camp was involved added to the usefulness of the list. Like that of Mora and Zwiemak, the Dallin and Nikolaevsky list remained, however, self-avowedly in­complete: 'This list of over 100 camps is far from complete; a great many small camps all over European Russia could not be included' (my italics).7

Turning to the archival sources, a consideration of the number of camps and colonies during the war years leads to the conclusion that the formal designation 'camp' applied, in its official usage, only to the usually large forced labour camps under the direct control of the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies, in­cluding those overseen by the Gulag Administration of Corrective Labour Colonies. These camps could in fact be better termed camp groups, as they consisted of many subdivisions. For example, the existence of the Saratov railway construction camp containing 30 000 plus inmates did not mean that all of these zeky endured confinement in a single pre­cise location defined by a wire fence. According to memoir material, a group of around 1200 forced labourers would have been imprisoned together in a camp.8 These camps were then clustered to form one camp group.

An example of the designation of forced labour establishments in the Gulag archives is provided by a note to the Deputy Head of the Department of Prisoner Registration and Distribution, Major of State Security Lyamin, from an official of the Personnel Department, Cap-

Forced Labour Establishments 85

tain of State Security Drukker. It states that on 5 January 1945 there existed 53 camps, 475 colonies and 667 camp subdivisions (lagot­deleniya).9

The fifty-three camps would be better described a,s camp groups, containing many separate fenced-off sites under the jurisdiction of each one. All of the camp groups were directly subordinated to the central Gulag authorities. The colonies and lagotdeleniya existed in addition to the fifty-three camp groups, and were not sections within those camp groups - as mistakenly claimed by a Russian historian discussing the same information. 10 Rather, they were forced labour establishments under the purview of the regional or republican NKVD. This being the case, therefore, they should certainly be counted in addition to the total of fifty-three camp groups, with the latter total referring only to the cen­trally managed -Gulag structure.

The evidence for the separate consideration of the lagotdeleniya is twofold. First, analysis of a second documentary source tends to sup­port the thesis that these subdivisions were establishments distinct from the camps of the central Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies. The wording of the document takes the follow­ing form: 11

On 5 January 1945 there are

• Camps 53

• UITLK and OITK 78

• Camp subdivisions (lagotdeleniya) 667

• Colonies 475

(including three camps in the structure of the Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies of the Khabarovsk and Krasnoyar krai and the Irkutsk oblast') 12

The number of lagotdeleniya was recorded separately from the number of camp groups. Immediately after the total of 53 such groups, an explanatory note detailing what was included in this total made no mention of lagotdeleniya. On the contrary, the explanatory note sim­ply demonstrated the fact that the regional NKVD authorities had their own camps which, apart from the three exceptions it was necessary to remark upon here, were not included in the total for Gulag camps.

86 The Gulag at War

Furthermore, the figure for lagotdeleniya comes immediately after details of the local camp Administrations and Departments. The number of administrative organs was given, followed straightaway by the number of lagotdeleniya which they oversaw. Clearly camp subdivisions were smaller than the Gulag camp groups under central administration. It may be that the three UITLK camps included in the first category were large, former camp subdivisions or colonies in the process of being transferred to the Gulag proper.

The second piece of evidence for regarding the lagotdeleniya as a category existing in addition to camp groups is another, still more convincing archival document. In 1944 a lengthy report on the war­time activities of the forced labour system was prepared by the Head of the Gulag, Nasedkin, for his superior, the NKVD chief Lavrentii Beria. This report set out the number of camps in existence on l July 1944.13 The numerical data were preceded by the clear statement that the Gulag exercised overall control over the camps and colonies run by regional and local OITK./UITLK authorities, but direct control only over those Corrective Labour Camps 'immediately subordinate to the Centre'. On the date in question the forced labour network consisted of 56 Corrective Labour Camps (camp groups), and 69 different OITK/ UITLK organisations. Included within the latter organisations were '910 separate camp subdivisions and 424 colonies'.

It is clear, therefore, that a number of the 'camps' included in the total of fifty-plus cited in some archival documents consisted, in fact, of extensive labour camp groups. Furthermore, the camp groups Siblag, Kraslag, Noril'lag, and Karlag were also administrative regions of the Gulag covering large areas of the Soviet Union, as well as being men­tioned in the list of fifty-plus. 14 However, their relatively low populations, coupled with the existence of many other camps in each of the locales covered by these administrative regions, suggests that individual camps or camp groups with these designations shared their names also with the administrative regions. This thesis receives further confirmation from the fact that Dal'stroi, too, was a forced labour administrative region, and a number of distinct camp groups among the fifty-plus official camp group figure were within the Dal'stroi administration. 15

In addition to the camps and colonies under direct central control, there existed hundreds of other smaller camps. They ultimately came under the overall control of the Gulag proper, but they were not directly subordinate to it. Instead they were subordinate to the OITK/UITLK, local Administrations and Departments of forced labour establishments.

Forced Labour Establishments

Table 5.1 Camp formation and dissolution, June 1941 to July 1944

Formed/Re-formed Dissolved

Camp groups

40 69

Source: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.4.

2. EVACUATION

Camps

0/TKs

15 15

UITLKs

11 1

87

During the upheaval of war, camps came and went at a fair rate driven by the need to evacuate, relocate, shift production priorities, and deal with the fluctuations in prisoner numbers caused by ebbs and flows in death and arrest rates. Of the nearly one hundred camps and camp groups listed in Appendix A, only thirty-four recorded populations for 1942, 1943 and 1944 (Table 5.5, pp. 99). In all, from the beginning of the war to mid-1944, forty new forced labour camps or camp groups were established. Over the same period, however, sixty-nine were disbanded.

The figures for fluctuations in camp and OITK/UITLK numbers serve to back up the theory that during the war a slight increase in the de­centralisation of forced labour occurred. A decline of twenty-nine in the stock of centrally managed camps operating found its counterbalance in an increase of ten in the number of local Administrations of Cor­rective Labour Camps and Colonies in existence. As the German army advanced in 1941, prisoners in the centrally managed Gulag camps of the western regions were moved east, where a sizeable proportion were imprisoned in forced labour establishments under the control of the UITLK or OITK of the local NKVD.

In the early stages of the war, camps and colonies underwent evacu­ation from those areas vulnerable to the invading Nazi army. A significant proportion of pre-war camps and colonies had been situated in the western parts of the USSR which were swiftly coming under German or Finnish occupation. The camp based on the White Sea-Baltic canal, along with large northern camps at Monchegorsk, Vytergorsk and the Segezha aerodrome construction camps threatened by Finnish invaders, were the best known of the twenty-seven Corrective Labour Camps and the 210 colonies evacuated.

88 The Gulag at War

According to the wartime Head of the Gulag, Nasedkin, the evacu­ation of the camps was carried out in an organised manner, and 'plans for the evacuation of prisoners were worked out by the Gulag in coor­dination with the relocation of industry, bearing in mind the removal of people, valuable materials, and dismantled equipment'. 16 What this meant in practice was that prisoners came very low in the order of priority when transportation became available.

Furthermore, retrospective archival references to organised plans smack somewhat of overstatement. In reality, no pre-war plans were made for the evacuation of major industrial plants, be they staffed by forced labour or free. Of course, once the need to move out became apparent, then plans were cobbled together, and orders issued. However, the confusion of the evacuation process as a whole has been well docu­mented. From its inception the overriding priority was to salvage as much of the country's painfully created industrial might from the on­slaught of Operation Barbarossa as possible. The struggle to achieve this goal meant that valuable industrial plant clogged the Soviet rail­way network, rolling stock was placed at a premium, and the entire transport system came under great strain with regard to both capacity and manpower. In theory the entire process of industrial evacuation was prioritised and coordinated by the Council of Evacuation. In prac­tice, however, initiative and improvisation often outdid organisation in achieving the successful relocation of factories. 17

Against the background of the unfolding military catastrophe which befell Stalin's Soviet Union in the second half of 1941, the evacuation of industry and its re-establishment in the east became increasingly important not only due to its economic significance, but also because it represented an area of positive achievement when the war in virtually all its other aspects seemed to be moving from setback to disaster to collapse.

Industrial evacuation received priority, and the support of military men and political leadership alike. However, neither the image nor the substance of successful evacuation would have been boosted by pay­ing much attention to the unfortunate zeky in the Wehrmacht's line of advance. There could be no propaganda value in uplifting articles cel­ebrating the removal of camps full of political prisoners to some safe haven in the Urals. Nor did the largely unskilled labour of forced la­bourers represent much of an economic good to be preserved when compared with irreplaceable machinery that could be used in muni­tions manufacture.

As the war progressed, those directing the USSR's industrial policy

Forced Labour Establishments 89

increasingly realised that capital was replaceable, whereas labour was not. Nonetheless, in the immediate aftermath of invasion, prisoners -who, after all, had legs on which to transport themselves - were not a priority when it came to organising evacuative transport. Consequently the overwhelming majority of labour camp prisoners fortunate enough to be evacuated at all made their journeys of a thousand kilometres or so on foot. In all, the archives record that three quarters of a million zeky made up the population of those camps and colonies evacuated. They do not record how many perished en route to their new places of incarceration.

Of course, there was not always time for even the most haphazard of evacuations to be arranged. Whereas millions of ordinary Soviet citizens could and did begin to move eastward of their own accord and often without any official governmental involvement, for the in­mates of forced labour establishments such an option did not exist. Being deprived of their freedom, they were totally reliant on the NKVD authorities, and were the responsibility of the state to a far greater degree than free Soviet citizens who, at least in the crisis and confu­sion of war, could act with a degree of freewill.

The speed of the German advance, and the strain under which the Soviet transport network operated in the early months of the war, meant that repeatedly even goods with economic priority could not be re­moved before the invading army arrived. Inevitably, therefore, the low priority of forced labourers meant that they too were caught up by the Nazi advance. Just as equipment might be smashed rather than allowed to fall into enemy hands, so the NKVD troops were under orders to shoot certain prisoners in the face of the Nazi advance. As early as the first week of the war this policy was put into practice amidst the car­nage of the fall of Lvov. Three thousand Ukrainian political prisoners were massacred by the NKVD, rather than being allowed to fall into German hands. 18

Similar confusion beset the NK VD prison network as attempts were made at evacuation during the latter half of 1941. In early 1941, on the appointment of M. I. Nikol'skii to replace P. N. Zuev as Head of the NKVD Prison Administration, the total number of prisons under the authority of the Administration and the Departments and Sub­Departments of local NKVD organisations was reported as being 712. 19

Of course many of these prisons were situated in areas soon to be occupied by the Nazis, and by the end of June, with the German inva­sion having been launched, a hurried evacuation plan for prisons in the western regions of the USSR had been drawn up. This plan was

90 The Gulag at War

fairly simple, consisting of lists of towns containing prisons, the number of prisoners to be evacuated from these prisons, and their intended destinations in the local NKVD prisons of several different oblasti and Uzbekistan.

The schedule of evacuation, drawn up by the Deputy People's Com­missar for Internal Affairs, Chernyshov, ended with the optimistic de­mand that 567 railway wagons be provided for the transportation of over 16 000 prisoners.20 Perhaps Chemyshov realised that to allow twenty­nine prisoners per truck ignored the difficulties that wartime evacua­tion was causing the railway network, as his next evacuation plan, for the removal of 4000 out of the 5900 prisoners in Latvia, demanded only a hundred trucks.21

According to a report sent by Nikol'skii to Beria a month after the outbreak of war, by 24 July 65 158 prisoners had been evacuated from NKVD prisons in the areas threatened by the Nazi advance. Of these, 36 649 had arrived at their appointed destination, the rest remained 'en route'. 22 However, a number of prisons in Belorussia (Belostok, Grodno, Lomzha and Brest) and Latvia (Kaunas, Mariampol') had not undergone evacuation, leaving their 12 000 inmates to fall into Ger­man hands. A similar fate befell around two and a half thousand pris­oners in the Ukraine, who were left behind as their establishments could only be partly evacuated. In a number of cases the process of clearing out prisoners was abandoned under German shelling. It was reported, though, that all documents and lists of prisoners had either been removed or bumtY

In all, by the end of the year 272 prisons and 141 527 prisoners had reportedly been evacuated. However, over 42 000 prisoners had not been successfully removed from the danger area, and of this latter number around a quarter had been shot by the NKVD guards before the Nazi armies could reach the prisons. An arbitrary death sentence was im­posed rather than allowing politically suspect men to come under Nazi occupation.

3. RECONSTRUCTION

The figures acquired from the two archival documents cited above also provide evidence that towards the end of the war, with the Nazi armies driven from Soviet territory, a consolidation of the camp net­work began. Between July 1944 and January 1945 the number of camps, colonies and camp branches decreased.

Forced Labour Establishments

Table 5.2 Evacuation of NKVD prisons by January 1942

1. Total of evacuated prisons 2. Total of evacuated prisoners 3. Total of prisoners missing for various reasons 4. Of which:

(a) remained in prisons on territory occupied by the enemy (b) freed during evacuation (c) escaped en route during bombing (d) escaped from the evacuation convoy (e) killed en route during bombing (f) killed en route in attempting to escape (g) freed in raids by criminal gangs (h) shot in prisons (i) executed by convoy guards en route (j) illegally shot by convoy guards en route (k) died en route

272 141 527 42676

21 504 7 444

819 264

23 59

346 9 817

674 769

1 057

91

Source: A. N. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty (unpublished, Moscow, 1992) p. 30.

Table 5.3 Camps, colonies, and camp subdivisions, 1944-45

l July 1944 5 January 1945

Camp groups

56 53

Camps

Colonies Camp subdivisions

424 475

910 667

Source: GARF f.94l4 op.1 d.68 1.3; A. N. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty (unpublished, Moscow, 1992) p. 38.

As thoughts turned towards the use of forced labour in post-war reconstruction, so the number of camp branches declined significantly. There are several possible reasons for such a decrease. That inmates were released, whilst the most straightforward of explanations, appears to be unlikely given that the total number of prisoners in Gulag cor­rective labour camps and colonies rose from 1.2 million in January 1944 to 1.7 million in January 1946.24 The possibility exists, though, that the type of prisoner most likely kept in locally subordinate camp branches would be those mobilised for wartime tasks, such as mem­bers of specific 'suspicious' nationalities. For example, at least six­teen separate colonies for mobilised Germans had been set up by the end of 1942, housing over 120 000 inmates. 25 With the war ending,

92 The Gulag at War

such prisoners would have been candidates for release from camps, if not from exile, whilst the central camp network grew from an influx of those Soviet citizens and military men arrested for their contact with the enemy through incarceration in German POW camps, deportation to Germany, or simple occupation.

Other possible explanations for the decline in the number of camp branches at the end of the war include the transfer of prisoners into fully-fledged camps of the Gulag system, as the central authorities sought to reassert control over the forced labourers under OITK/UITLK control, or the redesignation of camp branches as colonies. A combi­nation of all these factors most likely explains the phenomenon.

4. REPATRIATION

As the process of evacuation of NKVD places of imprisonment clearly demonstrated, the events of war caused the number, type and location of forced labour establishments to fluctuate. Not only did the first part of the war, with the Soviet army facing defeat and the economy near to collapse, bring the need for reorganisation of the forced labour system; still further demands were placed on the NKVD when military success began to be achieved and the Nazi retreat commenced.

As early as the end of 1941, the principle had been established that a Soviet soldier who had had contact with the enemy, usually by dint of having been captured, automatically came under suspicion of col­laboration. On 16 August 1941, Stalin's Order No. 270 declared that soldiers allowing themselves to fall into enemy hands were traitors to the Motherland. On 27 December 1941, the NKVD duly established 'Special Camps' in order to hold those returning from behind Nazi lines.26 If the soldier- or indeed any civilian official or male of call­up age - found himself back in Soviet hands, then he underwent a process of verification, in order, theoretically at least, to establish his loyalty or otherwise.

Under an agreement reached between Churchill, Roosevelt and Sta­lin at the Yalta Conference, at the end of the war Soviet citizens -especially soldiers - were repatriated from across Europe and even from the United States, regardless of their own wishes. Accounts of the brutal and perfidious handover of Soviet men and women, aware of the fate to which they were being sent, to Red Army or NKVD troops, sour the history of the allies' wartime cooperation.

Forced Labour Establishments 93

Memoir material repeatedly recounts how guilt was often automati­cally assumed and the victim carted off to a new life of incarceration in the camps of the Gulag. Of course one difficulty with such material is that those to whom nothing untoward occurred were not those who went on to write memoirs. The data assessed below demonstrates that, according to a combination of information from the Soviet army ar­chive and the Gulag archive, at least half of the total number of sol­diers returning from German hands did not in fact enter the Gulag camps and colonies.

According to the Soviet army archives, during the war and after, 2 775 700 Soviet soldiers were repatriated from German control.27 Neither the reported growth in forced labour population (an increase of 600 000 in camps and colonies between 1944 and 1947), nor the reported number of inmates in the NKVD camps set up to receive those returning from Nazi control (see below), approach this total. It is known, however, that around a million of those returning rejoined the Red Army during the war.28 Furthermore, the apparent remaining discrepancy of over one million may be explained if the turnover of prisoners in the Gulag at the end of the war was sufficiently high to match an intake of around a million with a similar number of releases. In 1945 and 1946, 626 000 prisoners were reportedly released from camps and colonies.29

Taking these figures:

Change in Gulag population, 1945-46 = 261 000

Outflow, 1945-46 = 626 000

Deaths, 1945-46 = x

therefore,

Inflow = 261 000 + 626 000 + x

Soldiers returning, 1945-46 = 1 836 00030

therefore,

Inflow < Soldiers returning

[Note: A total for deaths is not available. However, an annual mor­tality rate of 3 per cent is not unlikely for these years. This would mean roughly 100 000 deaths in camps and colonies 1945-46.]

94 The Gulag at War

Even assuming, therefore, that only returning soldiers were added to the Gulag in these years - which would only have been the case if all 'normal' criminal activity and arrests had ceased - almost half of the returning soldiers did not enter the Gulag camps and colonies. Such a figure might be interpreted in some quarters as somehow improving the image of the former Soviet Union. In fact, it should have the op­posite effect.

The Verification and Filtration Camps themselves represented forced labour, to which all returning POWs were subject for the length of time it took before their cases could be investigated. However, the process of investigation did indeed serve as a filter, through which some passed into freedom, and in which others remained, to be used as forced labour in the Gulag proper.

Of course, the number of people incarcerated in these NKVD Spe­cial Camps increased dramatically in 1944 and 1945, as the Soviet advance recaptured previously occupied territory and the Nazi regime, along with its POW camps, collapsed. In February 1945 the NKVD Department of Special Camps changed its name to the Department of Verification and Filtration Camps (Otdel proverochno-fil'tratsionnykh lagerei NKVD), and its network of camps grew.

The NKVD retained its traditional role of organising and maintain­ing the camps and supervising the labour of inmates, who were allot­ted to forced labour in the enterprises of several People's Commissariats, whilst confined in what were theoretically holding camps. The actual process of verification was left in the hands of military intelligence, and in the meantime the NKVD made use of the ever increasing number of inmates. The routine in these camps consisted of a full day's work, with any interrogation being carried out into the night. Even if an inmate's social reliability were eventually to be verified, the NKVD had still gained several months forced labour from him.

No figures are available for the number of camps set up to deal with Soviet citizens returning from Nazi control. However, a sense of the growth in this type of establishment - whose inmates were not included in the figures for the total of Gulag prisoners shown in Table 2.1 - can be gained from data on their population. Between 27 De­cember 1941 and 1 October 1944, 355 000 men passed through these camps, of whom just under two thirds returned to the Red Army. Given

Forced Labour Establishments

Table 5.4 Population of NKVD Special Camps (Verification and Filtration Camps), January 1945

POWs Those serving in enemy armies Police Civilian officials Community leaders

Total

32 483 15 289 9 796 6078 3 590

96 417

95

Source: V. N. Zemskov, 'Gulag (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt)', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 7 (1991) p. 5.

the evident benefits of experienced soldiers being returned to the army in wartime, it is perhaps surprising that only this proportion rejoined the ranks. Of the remaining inmates of the Special Camps, the major­ity stayed under NKVD control in forced labour establishments or were executed. By January 1945 the number of people held in these verification camps reached 96 000; in October of the preceeding year it had been 52 000. (Table 5.4)

The steep rise continued as the war came to an end, with 161 000 inmates reported by the time of the German surrender in May _31 Even with the cessation of hostilities in Europe, however, the network of Verification and Filtration Camps continued to grow, as the NKVD decreed that those who had actually served as Soviet agents behind the German lines, or who had risked their lives in partisan activity against the occupying Nazi forces, should also be imprisoned in this particular manifestation of the NKVD's forced labour network. 32

The phenomenon of the imprisonment in NKVD camps of those who had served the Soviet state as soldiers, agents or partisans is now a well-documented part of the Gulag's history. By the time the special camps set up to receive these victims finally closed down in 1946, the majority of their inmates had passed into the established forced labour camps, colonies and settlements of the NKVD. No comprehensive figures for the precise division of inmates from Verification Camps amongst other NKVD establishments are yet available, though Zemskov states that of the 228 000 passing through these camps in 1946 around 29 000 entered Corrective Labour Camps, with the rest dividing themselves between settlements, colonies and freedom. However, it is reported that of those passing through prisons at the end of the war, nearly 80 per cent went into camps and colonies. 33

96 The Gulag at War

5. THE GULAG IN GERMANY

In addition to the NKVD's forced labour network being expanded by the creation of the category of Verification and Filtration Camps, the events of the end of the war also led to a less well reported and, for some, far more emotive phenomenon, the creation of a Soviet forced labour system including some former Nazi concentration camps in eastern Germany. NKVD camps abroad were not entirely new, as a large holding camp for Soviet citizens living abroad at the war's end was allowed to operate at Beauregard near Paris in 1945-1946.34 Nor was the use of the barracks of former concentration camp sites to house large groups of people entirely unique, as Russian soldiers were held by the Ameri­cans at Dachau near Munich before being forcibly repatriated.35 How­ever, the latter temporary measures resulting from the crisis of war differ from the large-scale and longer lasting establishment of a mini­Gulag, partly utilising the facilities offered by the Nazis' concentra­tion camps.

The NKVD camps in Germany began to be set up in April 1945, and were initially not part of the Gulag. Instead they were placed at first under the NKVD/MVD Department of Special Camps on German Territory, established by Order No. 00315 on 15 April 1945. In all there were nine such camps, and two transit prisons through which inmates passed en route to the USSR and the Gulag proper. The most infamous of locations which became Soviet special camps were the Nazi death camps at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Both of these had seen the massacre of victims, mainly Jews, during the war. Sachsenhausen, in addition, had been the scene of mass executions of Soviet prisoners of war in 1941. Between the middle of August and the middle of October that year an average of around three hundred Soviet soldiers a day were murdered in the Sachsenhausen camp.36

Within five years, Russian soldiers were once more imprisoned there, but this time by their own government.

The full list of forced labour establishments which made up the Gulag in Germany showed camps in the following locations:37 Miihlberg, Buchenwald, Berlin, Bautsen, Ferstenwald, Liebe-Rose, Sachsenhausen, Torgau, Neu-Brandenburg. In addition, there were transit prisons at Torgau and Schrelitse. In the Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen special camps, inmates wore the same striped uniforms as were worn by the former prisoners. The temptation to assert that the concentration camps in eastern Germany simply continued under Stalin as under Hitler is an obvious one, especially given the fact that there were those inmates

Forced Labour Establishments 97

imprisoned under the Nazis who remained in Buchenwald under the Soviets. On a comparison of malfeasance, however, the fate of the post-war inmates did not reach the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. Despite the inference of one rather lurid post-Soviet headline in a Russian weekly, which read, 'How Buchenwald became the NKVD's torture chamber', there are no reports of mass executions in the special camps in Germany. 38 Nonetheless, the mortality rate was reportedly very high due to poor rations and low standards of sanitation, and almost half of the inmates were sick, with the majority of these having contracted tuberculosis or alimentary dysentry.

The inmates of the camps in Germany were a mix of German and Soviet citizens. Of the latter, most were Soviets who had found them­selves in Germany as POWs or deportees from areas of the USSR occupied by the Nazis. The German prisoners, however, were more overtly political prisoners, consisting predominantly of civilians ac­cused of possessing Nazi sympathies, or involvement in espionage or sabotage. However, as had become common in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, a target figure for arrests had to be met and so the net was widened to include, for example, members of socialist parties dissatisfied with the new communist regime, and such 'class enemies' as promi­nent capitalists or dissident journalists. The widening of the net took place alongside a now familiar low level of stringency in the interro­gation and conviction of suspects. There are reports of physical coer­cion, of thousands of teenagers being arrested on the strength of denunciations, and of simple mix-ups in arrest procedures.39

By the time these establishments were transferred to the control of the Gulag in 1948, only three of the original nine camps remained in Soviet hands. These camps, at Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Bautzen contained around 30 000 inmates. 40 In total the Soviets had interned 155 000 in their German 'mini-Gulag', of whom the vast majority -120 000 - were German citizens. Of the roughly 35 000 Soviet citi­zens who suffered in these camps, virtually all the surviving inmates were returned to forced labour in the USSR. All, that is, apart from the fortunate 204 who were set free. 41

6. THE GULAG CORE

It has been shown above that the war years did not make for stability in the Gulag. Camps were evacuated and re-established, new types of camp were set up, and the Gulag was exported to Germany. Nonetheless,

98 The Gulag at War

there did exist a core of camps and camp groups which alone were referred to in the archives as 'Gulag camps'. These camps and camp groups under the direct central control of the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies were divided for economic/ managerial purposes between the various industrial Main Administra­tions of the NKVD.42

A survey of wartime camp population figures by administrative sub­ordination, which was found in the Russian State archives, enables a verification of the fact that the number of Gulag camp groups under the direct central control of the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies in the mid-1940s was just over fifty. From the same source, the names and managerial subordination of these camps were also discovered. Archival data states, for example, that in mid-1944 there were fifty-six camp groups.43 It is now possible to identify these, and other Gulag camps and camp groups existing throughout the war years, along with their managerial subordination. (See Appen­dix A, Tables 1-6.)

Although throughout the war the number of centrally administered camp groups was in the mid-fifties, the identity of these establish­ments was not as constant as this figure might suggest. Only thirty­four camps and camp groups from the Gulag core remained in existence throughout the war. (Table 5.5) In addition to this more constant core of thirty-four camp groups, however, a further fifty-seven are recorded as existing at some stage during the three calendar years covered by the Great Patriotic War.

As can be seen from the range of population figures, some of these camps must in fact have been fairly large clusters of camp subdivi­sions grouped together under a collective name. They were distinguished as the core of the system by being largely dedicated to specific tasks, defined by their managerial subordination and mainly involving con­struction and the exploitation of natural resources. These tasks, how­ever, represent only the principal use to which the labourers were put in their respective camps.

When some of the above-named camps appear in the list compiled by Dallin and Nikolaevsky, the notes for each camp reveal numerous sideline activities. For example, the Vorkutstroi railway construction camp also took part in road construction and coal mining; the North Dvina and Kotlas railway construction camps were involved in the timber and paper industry; and the Kargopol timber camp fulfilled its share of railway construction.44 Furthermore, five of the camps listed had changed managerial subordination by 1944, thereby indicating a

Forced Labour Establishments 99

Table 5.5 Gulag camps existing throughout the war

Camp Population

1942 1943 1944 (Quarter) (1 May) (Quarter)

I . Aktyubinsk kombinat 17 347 (Oct.) 12 146 8 805 (III) 2. Astrakhan 7 139 (IV) 4927 5 329 (IV) 3. Bezymyanka

(Osobstroi) 35 128 (IV) 16 863 7 191 (IV) 4. Bogoslav 16 357 (Oct.) 9 083 11 874 (III) 5. Dzhidastroi 6759 (IV) 5 921 9702 (IV) 6. lnta 6987 (IV) 6206 8 799 (III) 7. lvdel' 17 778 (IV) 12 172 15 535 (III) 8. Karaginsk 43 160 (IV) 39 340 51 279 (IV) 9. Kargopol' 26260 (IV) 22682 17 809 (IV)

10. Kotlas otd. 3 922 (IV) 8 107 4 822 (III) 11. Kraslag (HQ: Kansk) 16 342 (IV) 14 651 12 205 (III) 12. Krasn. affin. zavod 1 945 (IV) 1311 1 086 (IV) 13. Nizhne Amurskii

(HQ: Komsomolsk-na-Amure) 67 742 (IV) 46454 28 073 (III) 14. Nizhne Volga 29 109 (IV) 17 939 8 081 (III) 15. Noril'sk 30953 (IV) 29 803 30399 (III) 16. Primorsk (Dal'stroi) 3 938 (IV) 2 684 4 338 (III) 17. Severnaya Dvina

(HQ: Kotlas) 22 163 (IV) 15 414 7 619 (III) 18. Severnaya Pechora 62 790 (IV) 48 984 27 789 (III) 19. Severoural'sk 9 379 (IV) 8084 6 613 (III) 20. Sevvostochnyi (Dal'stroi) 103 391 (IV) 90 843 79 856 (III) 21. Sevzheldorlag 31 872 (IV) 22 745 12 809 (III) 22. Sibir' 31997 (IV) 28 150 37 761 (IV) 23. Solikamburstroi 7 442 (Oct.) 4 031 2 594 (IV) 24. Sredne-Belskii 4 816 (IV) 4094 4 584 (IV) 25. Svobodnenskii 12 436 (IV) 10494 6 531 (I) 26. Tavda 2 186 (Oct.) 5 080 3 671 (III) 27. Temnikov 15 706 (IV) 12 272 12 736 (IV) 28. Yagry 15 109 (Oct.) 4 719 5 293 (III) 29. Unzha

(HQ: Sukhobezvodnoe) 23 842 (IV) 21 241 19040 (III) 30. Usol'e (HQ: Solikamsk) 26 519 (IV) 20677 23 123 (III) 31. Ust'ym 24 146 (IV) 19 162 13 083 (III) 32. Vostural'sk 12 403 (IV) 11013 8 262 (III) 33. Vyatka (HQ: Volosnitsa) 15 138 (IV) 14 653 12 684 (III) 34. Yansky (Dal'stroi) 1 642 (IV) 1 583 1 384 (I)

Sources: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.l173 11.1-12;; d.1174 11.1-11; d.l175 11.1-9; d.ll77; d.l178 11.1-8; d.l181 11.7 and 3~7; d.1209 11.1-7; d.1210 11.1-10; d.l211 11.1-8; d.1212 11.1-18; d.1213 11.1-13; d.1214 11.1-11.

100 The Gulag at War

certain overlap between the tasks of each administration's camps. Iota, Ukhtozhemsk and Vorkutstroi all changed from being GULZhDS camps to become GULGMP camps, whereas the camps at Rybinsk and Shirokovsk had been placed under the authority of Glavpromstroi, from UITK and GULZhDS respectively.

7. CONCLUSIONS

From archival sources much more is now known about the survival of the Gulag structure during the war. Of the large, centrally adminis­tered camps and camp groups in existence in 1941, only just under two thirds remained in existence throughout the conflict. For the rest of the system, hasty and costly evacuation, or even more costly cap­ture by the Nazis, was the wartime fate. By the end of 1943, however, the re-establishment of camps on formerly occupied territory began to be possible, with forced labour being useful for the rebuilding of battle­damaged roads, railways and factories.

The war's end also brought the establishment in Germany of a net­work of camps; and, on Soviet soil, Verification and Filtration Camps - incorporating forced labour - met those returning from Nazi to So­viet control. The archival figures revealed above show that almost a half of all returning POWs were not subsequently sent from Verification and Filtration Camps into the Gulag proper. Nonetheless, the wartime decline in Gulag population, which is explored in the next chapter, had been reversed by 1944; a reverse that would continue into the next decade.

6 How Many Prisoners?

An overview of the long-running debate concerning the total number of prisoners in the Gulag system during the Stalin years has already been given. In Chapter 1 the Western debate of the 1980s was shown to be inconclusive. The new Soviet/Russian revelations of the late 1980s and early 1990s discussed in Chapter 2 represented the breakthrough for which scholars had been waiting, in that they were based on docu­ments originally kept in the archives of the Gulag. Unfortunately the revelations were poorly presented by those Soviet historians given access to them. A clear stance was taken against the range of estimates which had appeared in the West over many years, and an evidently polemical approach was too often adopted. Therefore both the style and the his­tory-writing skills of those presenting the archival information led to a lack of clarity with regard to the coverage of the figures quoted.

The present work concentrates on the Gulag during the Second World War. In the preceding chapter, shifts in the location, type and number of forced labour establishments were identified. The events of war similarly led to changes in the number and type of inmates kept in the Gulag. By 1943 the population of Soviet forced labour camps and colonies stood at half of its pre-war level, only for it to grow rapidly at the war's end and beyond, reaching an all-time high by the end of the decade (Table 2.1 ). This chapter studies the details of Gulag popula­tion shifts, identifying those for whom the war meant early release, and those for whom it signalled incarceration.

The treatment of different nationalities by the Soviet authorities during World War II involved the release of certain groups (Poles, Czechs and Slovaks) from captivity in the Gulag, and the internment of other nationalities (Germans, Finns and Romanians). Whereas estimates have been given for the numbers of people involved in these wartime re­leases and arrests, the new archival data offer a precise quantification. Similarly, detailed figures now exist which show the number of zeky released during the war to serve in the Red Army.

The availability also of data regarding the numbers moving in and out of the Gulag enables some substance to be given to the bare an­nual totals, facilitating an assessment of the turnover of population and the grounds on which inmates joined or left the Gulag. Such an assessment contributes, then, to a greater understanding of the Gulag's

101

102 The Gulag at War

priority in the war effort and, in comparison with what is known from earlier years, to an estimate of the total number passing through the Gulag. New data presented here allows also an intra-Gulag compari­son of the turnover of prisoners in the various managerial administra­tions. A statistical base can then be given to such matters as might simply be generalisations in memoirs, such as which camps had the highest mortality rate, and whence it was easiest to escape.

In addition to surveying the fall and rise of the Gulag population between 1941 and 1945, the chapter also addresses the controversial issue of the total number of forced labourers incarcerated in the Soviet Union. In keeping with the desire to concentrate on new information -rather than regurgitate and adjudicate on the arguments of previous decades - a forced labour total is offered for the end of the war; that is, the period best covered by the archival data which provides the source base for this study. Nonetheless, the total offered here has a wider application than its temporal limit might suggest. It demonstrates how figures still being offered as official archival totals for the number of Gulag inmates continue to omit certain categories of prisoner. Such figures, based largely on the revelations coming from Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, claim forced labour totals lower than was in fact the case.

1. RELEASES

In July 1944 the head of the Gulag reported to his NKVD superiors that 'the war period was characterised by a gradual reduction in the number of prisoners in the camps and colonies of the NKVD' .1 He was correct, as far as the total number between mid-1941 and mid-1944 was concerned. There had been a fall from 2.3 million inmates in camps and colonies when war broke out, to 1.2 million on I July 1944.2 However, this was no gradual fall, but a dramatic reduction followed by the beginnings of a renewed increase in prisoner numbers which would continue until the end of the decade, eventually surpass­ing the previous high reached in June 1941. By the time the report was made, the lowest wartime level of Gulag population had already been reached, and the numbers had begun to creep up again. The smallest combined camp and colony population thus far reported for the war years in the USSR is 1 179 819 for the beginning of 1944.3 This figure had risen by around 100 000 by the middle of the year, and by a fur­ther 250 000 by the year's end.

How Many Prisoners? 103

The bare annual statistics for the number of Gulag prisoners, such as those presented in Table 2.1, mask both fluctuations within years and the momentous external events which caused them. Such is the case with 1941. As well as the figures shown in Table 2.1, a second figure has been released for the population of the Gulag at the out­break of the Great Patriotic War on 22 June 1941. This figure was 2.3 million, or roughly 400 000 more than at the beginning of the year and 500 000 more than at the end.4 A graph drawn simply from the I January series of figures would have shown a steady decline in 1941, whereas the mid-year figure revealed a remarkably steep increase and subsequent decline.

Before the intervention of Operation Barbarossa, the forced labour population was growing rapidly. The labour laws of the preceding year increased the number of people sentenced to terms of forced Jabour.5

A further factor behind the rapid rise in the camp population in the first half of 1941 was the occupation of new territories by the USSR. Eastern Poland, the Baltics, Western Ukraine, Western Belorussia, part of Moldavia, and Bukovina - all contained people who, in the eyes of the Soviet authorities, were ripe for arrest and deportation. Here there existed a bourgeoisie, intelligentsia, priesthood, and so on, not yet subjected to the 'red terror' which their Soviet counterparts had al­ready suffered, having been part of the USSR for over two decades.

The other side of the June 1941 peak, the decline to I. 78 million by the end of the year, requires still Jess illumination. With the onset of war and the seemingly unstoppable progress of the German army, more men were needed in the Red Army. Therefore, in accordance with the decrees of 12 July and 24 November 1941, 420 000 men were granted early release. In all during the war, some 975 000 left the camps to join the armed forces.6

In the first three years of the war, around 2.9 million prisoners were removed from the camps and colonies of the Gulag, and 1.8 million were added. 7 The main factors behind the overall decline in prisoner numbers during the war were - in order of importance - an increased level of mortality in the forced labour camps, the transfer of inmates to the armed forces, the release of certain nationalities of prisoner, and escapes. From these categories, however, it remains difficult to reach a figure of 2.9 million individual prisoners being removed from the total camp population. Roughly speaking, the military recruitment and the high level of mortality in camps accounted for around a mil­lion each during the war. Escapes and the setting free of Poles, Czechs and Slovaks involved up to another I 00 000. The remaining 800 000

104 The Gulag at War

appear to be made up of what one might term 'phantom removals'. In other words, these were prisoners who never actually ceased to be incarcerated but were simply transferred within the system. The Gulag registration authorities included in its annual total of those 'leaving', categories such as 'leaving for [other] camps' and 'leaving for colo­nies and prisons'. 8 These prisoners could not in any real sense have been said to have been removed from the total pool of forced labourers.

Of the reasons given to account for the reduction in camp and colony population during the war, the most straightforward - in terms of the quantifying, rather than as a comment on the fate of those involved -was simply the release of prisoners or their transfer into the armed forces. The question of mortality rates remains a little more complex, as the available evidence contradicts itself somewhat, albeit within fairly narrow bounds. Difficulties also exist in precisely gauging the number of escapees from forced labour establishments during the war years, and in account­ing for those said to have left the Gulag for 'other' reasons.9

The decision to grant freedom to Polish, Czech and Slovak inmates of the Gulag was jointly made by the Praesidium of the USSR Su­preme Soviet and the State Committee for Defence on 17 August 1941. Consequently, in 1941 and 1942, 43 000 Polish citizens were released along with 'up to 10 000 Czechoslovakian citizens' .10 The majority of these former prisoners were 'encouraged ... to form national units' .11

However, not all Polish prisoners were to be released. A secret memo­randum, dated 18 September 1941, from the Deputy People's Com­missar for Internal Affairs, Kobylov, gave instructions to NKVD and Gulag officials on the release procedure. There were two categories of Pole to be granted freedom. First, Polish citizens in camps and prisons with Soviet passports granted after 17 September 1939, who were sen­tenced for participation in Polish nationalist organisations. Second, all Poles possessing Soviet passports issued after 17 September 1939 who had been sent to Special Settlements or other places of exile. Also spelt out in the circular, however, were three categories of Polish pris­oner to whom freedom must not be granted, namely:

• Polish citizens sentenced after 30 July 1941 for desertion from the Red Army or for other military crimes;

• Polish citizens found guilty of being agents provocateurs in the Polish Communist Party, Komsomol and other organisations affiliated to Comintem;

• Polish citizens convicted of criminal offences (for example, murder, robbery, and so on)Y

How Many Prisoners? 105

Despite the granting of freedom, however, the events of the war meant that those released could not easily return home, even had they wanted to. Most of the men liberated from NKVD control were called up into Polish divisions, leaving their wives and children on Soviet territory, often in some of the most inhospitable regions. A note exists in the archives from a leader of the Polish community in Komi ASSR, to where over 200 000 Poles had been sent in 1940 in order to carry out logging work. The note, sent in 1943, consists of a request passed on to the Head of the NKVD, Lavrentii Beria, for permission to resettle 9000 Poles still remaining in Komi ASSR further south in the Bashkir Autonomous Republic. 13

The largest category of those released from the Gulag during the war consisted of zeky transferred into the army. Within weeks of the German invasion the Soviet leadership recognised the need for the available resources of fighting men to be exploited more fully. This did not mean, however, that any forced labourer who so desired could volunteer and thereby gain release. Other considerations, such as the economic significance of forced labour - heightened by the needs of war - and the desire not to allow soldiers deemed politically or socially unreli­able to join the Soviet army, clearly had to be taken into account. Consequently, decrees of the Supreme Soviet on 12 July and 24 No­vember 1941 allowed for the early release of specific categories of prisoner, so that they could perform military service. Those serving sentences for absenteeism and 'insignificant work-related or economic crimes' became eligible for release, on the condition that they were of call-up age. Under the terms of these decrees, 420 000 former forced labourers entered the Red Army. 14

Those released into the armed forces as a result of the decrees of July and November 1941 represent less than half of the total number of inmates moving from camp to battlefield during the course of the war. Throughout 1942 and 1943 the State Committee for Defence took a series of 'special decisions' mandating the early release of still more forced labourers into the ranks of the Red Army. Once again, the type of crime for which zeky had been sentenced became the primary crite­ria in the selection of those to be released. Consequently, during 1942 and 1943 some 157 000 inmates, found guilty of 'unimportant crimes', moved from the Gulag to the Red Army under the terms of these 'spe­cial decisions'. 15

Between the outbreak of war in June 1941 and the end of 1943, therefore, 577 000 Gulag prisoners were transferred into the ranks of the army by official decrees and decisions. However, in total, 975 000 former inmates of forced labour establishments joined the Red Army

106 The Gulag at War

during the first three years of the war. In addition to those prisoners granted early release into the military, all inmates released from camps and colonies as a result of their term of imprisonment expiring were, where eligible for military service, immediately transferred into the army.

To give a sense of perspective, secret army archives investigated in 1992 by Vladimir Eliseev of the Institute of Military History in Mos­cow were said to have recorded 1.1 million Soviet deaths at Stalingrad alone. 16 This figure is excessive, and the most recent official estimates, taken from the Central State Archive of the Soviet Army, show that it includes those wounded as well as killed. 17 Nonetheless, the defensive and offensive Soviet operations around Stalingrad between 17 July 1942 and 2 February 1943 put out of action, either temporarily or perma­nently, more men than the Gulag contributed to the Red Army during the war.

Although it may be understandable to assume that anyone who had endured the horrors of the Gulag would be most unlikely to fight glo­riously for the regime under which he had suffered, the Gulag camps did release a number of men who went on to heroic feats in the ser­vice of the USSR. Several factors help to explain this. First, during the war the thrust of Soviet domestic propaganda aimed at inspiring the people to fight for Russia and the homeland, rather than for so­cialism and some future Communist never-never land. Patriotism ex­isted amongst former Gulag inmates, not all of whom were either political opponents or innocent citizens whose fate turned them against the re­gime. Second, the war effort, which stretched the human and material resources of the Soviet state to the limit, carried with it a sense of the Russian nation pulling together. Within this sense the hope was nur­tured by many that the war's end would see a less oppressive Soviet Union emerge, where purges and seemingly arbitrary forced labour became things of the past.

Consequently, the motivations existed - quite apart from military and unit morale factors - for certain ex-zeky to distinguish themselves in the service of the motherland, as much as anyone else. Indeed the official report of the Gulag's contribution to the war effort proudly cites the exemplary action of former inmates. Like some penal alma mater extolling the achievements of its old boys, the names of five of those men transferred from camp to army (Matrosov, Breusov, Ostanov, Serzhantov and Yefimov) were made known to the Head of the NKVD himself when they were declared Heroes of the Soviet Union. 18

How Many Prisoners? 107

2. ARRESTS

As has been noted, the first months of the war brought release for a number of prisoners of specific nationalities. However, as Polish and Czechoslovakian citizens received their freedom, so Soviet citizens of particular nationalities were arrested and sent to forced labour estab­lishments. The State Committee for Defence came into being on 30 June 1941, and one of its earliest decisions ordered the mobilisation to forced labour in industry of those Soviet citizens from nationalities in the anti-Soviet bloc - in other words, Germans, Finns and Romanians. In the course of the war the Gulag carried out several mobilisations of these groups, and they were sent to 'the most important NKVD con­struction sites' and to enterprises under other People's Commis­sariats.19 Between January 1942 and July 1944, over 400 000 people from these national groups were put to forced labour. Of these, 220 000 were absorbed within the NKVD system itself, and the remainder al­lotted to other industrial commissariats.

The work of the mobilised nationalities made a significant contribu­tion to the Soviet war effort. Those put to work outside of the NKVD network were mainly employed in coal mining, the oil industry, and the light and heavy metallurgical industries, as well as in the production of weapons and ammunition. Where the 'mobilised contingent' served the NKVD directly, their efforts were concentrated on construction sites. 20

The construction work carried out by mobilised Soviet citizens of German nationality took place in Gulag camps subordinate to various different managerial Administrations. Although situated in the Gulag camps themselves, the 'mobilised Germans' were not included in their population totals. Instead they were counted as a separate contingent.21 By the end of 1942, there were over 120 000 Soviet Germans in Gulag camps.

In addition to those who came under immediate suspicion due to their nationality, there was also a tightening up of state security at the outbreak of war which resulted in tens of thousands being arrested and sent to the Gulag. As soon as the German forces launched their inva­sion, the USSR State Procuracy and the NKVD issued a joint direc­tive, Directive No. 221, dated 22 June 1941.22 By April of the following year, 84 000 had been arrested under its terms and convicted of a wide range of crimes (Table 6.2). Directive 221 did not so much place new offences on the statute book, since convictions under its terms were for misdemeanours which were crimes anyway. Instead, the aim was to arrest those deemed a threat to state security in the new circum-

108 The Gulag at War

Table 6.1 Soviet citizens of German nationality in Gulag camps, 31 December 1942

Camp

Aktyubinsk Bakal'stroi Bogoslavlag Ivdel' Kraslag (HQ: Kansk) Nizhne-Tagil' stroi Saratov Sevzheldorozhnyi Severoural' sk Solikamburstroi Tavdinlag Umal'tinsk Usol'e (HQ: Solikamsk) Volga (HQ: Rybinsk) Vostural' sk Vyatka (HQ: Volosnitsa)

Total

Managerial administration

Glavpromstroi Glavpromstroi Glavpromstroi ULLP ULLP Glavpromstroi GULZhDS GULZhDS ULLP Glavpromstroi Glavpromstroi GULGMP ULLP GULZhDS ULLP ULLP

Source: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.l172 ll.1-16.

Prisoners

I 543 28134 12 758 12 397 5 313 3 737 3 910 5 724 4 262 9 126

464 I 298 6004

16 772 5 252 5 449

122 143

stances of war. For example, nationals of those regions forcibly incor­porated into the USSR under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet pact were particularly vulnerable to arrest under its terms.23

The speed with which the Procuracy and the Commissariat for In­ternal Affairs acted in issuing this directive suggests that it formed part of a contingency plan to be put into action in case of war. Such pre-emptive arrests to remove possible collaborators or opponents of the regime assisted, too, in the replenishment of the labour camps whilst many prisoners were transferred into the army. The same directive also halted the freeing of any prisoners serving sentences for betrayal of the motherland, spying, terrorism, wrecking, banditry, or membership of Trotskyist or Rightist groups. By the middle of 1944, 17 000 in­mates who would otherwise have been freed had been kept in the Gulag under the terms of this directive. 24

A further wartime decree which led to the arrests of thousands of Soviet citizens - this time mainly serving soldiers - was issued by the State Committee for Defence (GKO) on 3 March 1942. GKO Resolu­tion No. 1379, 'On the defence of military property of the Red Army during wartime', aimed to prevent the theft and squandering of mili-

How Many Prisoners? 109

Table 6.2 Arrests under state procuracy and NKVD directive no. 221, June 1941 to April 1942

Crime

Anti-Soviet agitation Socially harmful element Property crimes Other counter-revolutionary crimes Other Banditry Thieves (repeated offence) Hooliganism Socially dangerous elements Infringement of passport laws Members of families Theft of livestock Labour-related crimes Illegal border crossing Treachery and spying Membership of a counter-revolutionary organisation Sabotage and subversive activity Counter-revolutionary agitation with terroristic inclinations Terrorism Misappropriation of socialist property Rebellion and political banditry Military crimes Arrested by special edict

Total

Source: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.ll81 1.5.

Arrests

14 800 13 312 8 520 7 692 7 672 5 282 5 016 3 365 2 863 2 018 1990 1800 1 754 1 605 1 150 1 336 1 046

947 580 532 449 153 152

84034

tary property, and was extremely harshly applied from the moment of its issue. Within scarcely two months, the People's Commissar of Jus­tice, Rychkov, and the Chairman of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, Golyakov, felt sufficiently alarmed by the fierce application of the decree to write a secret memorandum to Stalin, urging greater leniency. 25

In the two months following the announcement of Resolution 1379, 5973 people had been convicted under its terms, of whom 2679 had been sentenced to death. In their memorandum to Stalin, Rychkov and Golyakov cite several of the cases where the death penalty was ap­plied. First, on 7 March 1942 a 25-year-old army driver, K. K. Lagutin, with no previous convictions, was found guilty of taking 1.2 kilograms of sausage from the car in which the representative of the divisional

110 The Gulag at War

supply department transported food. Lagutin was shot. Similarly, on 24 March 1942, Private Maksimov was discovered in possession of purloined food, to wit one chicken and eight lamb kidneys. The food was confiscated and Maksimov was sentenced to death. According to the evidence of the People's Commissar for Justice and the Chairman of the Supreme Court, there were 'many analogous cases'.26

The problem of the overzealous punishment of pilferers could not simply be blamed on the decree of 3 March 1942, and nor did Rychkov and Golyakov seek to do this. Instead they stated that the decree in question had been misunderstood, and that the infamous 'five stalks law' of 7 August 1932 was consequently being enforced with renewed and inappropriate vigour.27 It was under the terms of this law that excesses were taking place. With a glance towards the righting of in­justices, and a clear awareness of the needs of the hour, the authors of the memorandum suggested that those found guilty of infringing the decree on the protection of military property should be sent to the frontline.

Finally, the population of the Gulag during the war was also in­creased by the transfer of enemy prisoners of war from POW camps into the forced labour system. According to Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag authorities selected prisoners to be reclassified as 'war criminals' and therefore, by court order, to be transferred into Gulag camps. As a result, German and Japanese prisoners found themselves in the Gulag.28

3. INFLOW/OUTFLOW

The forced labour population of the Soviet Union did not consist of a static mass of inmates. Inmates entered the camps and inmates left the camps. Many met premature death in the Gulag and, during the Second World War, many were 'released' to meet death on the battlefield. Despite the frequently stated evidence of memoirs that those reaching the end of their sentences often found a supplementary term of forced labour imposed upon them, there were releases from the Gulag camps. There were, too, several thousand successful escapes per annum, alongside the many who died in making the attempt or were recaptured having gained their freedom. In addition to such movement into and out of the forced labour network, there were transfers within it between camps, colonies and prisons.29 The archive information recording the move­ment of prisoners into, out of, and around the Gulag also contains a category made up of prisoners added to or leaving the camps for 'other'

How Many Prisoners? Ill

reasons, distinct from those outlined above. The identity of these rea­sons remains indistinct. Perhaps execution might have been another reason for a prisoner leaving the camps. As for those added to the forced labour population for 'other' reasons, these may have been people arrested and placed directly into the forced labour establishment, with­out passing through other places of imprisonment.

Statistically speaking, the significance of the degree of Gulag pris­oner throughput lies in arriving at a total figure for the number of prisoners in the camp network. Put simply, large cumulative totals of some twenty million forced labourers in the Stalin years can only be reconciled with the archival revelations of ongoing year-by-year totals if there was a relatively high degree of prisoner turnover. As was shown earlier, on the basis of the camp throughput figures for 1934-47, an estimate of those added to camps and colonies over the period 1934-52 can be made, which suggests that over eighteen million inmates endured the camps over those years.30 It is known that even as early as 1940 there were eight million names in the Gulag recordsY

Aside from the invaluable perspective which the prisoner through­put figures add to the grand debate on the Gulag population in the Stalin years, it is now possible to present detailed inflow/outflow figures for a single year during the war. The information gained from an in­vestigation of 1942 enables comparisons to be made between the vari­ous managerial administrations which made up the core of the Gulag structure (Appendix A, Table 10). It enables, too, the number of pris­oners involved in forced labour in the Gulag camps during the first full calendar year of the war to be quantified more adequately than bare annual populations allow.

From the inflow/outflow data to be found in the Gulag archives, the number of prisoners involved in forced labour in the centrally con­trolled camps of the Gulag during 1942 can be calculated. The annual totals show a decline from 1.4 to 1.0 million over the year. More de­tailed scrutiny, however, reveals that almost two million prisoners found themselves in the camps for at least some, if not all, of 1942. There were 1.4 million present on 1 January, and during the year 560 000 were added, not including the 246 000 'added from [other] camps'.32

The exclusion from inflow and outflow statistics of prisoners added from or leaving to other camps was not a procedure carried out by the Gulag archivists themselves. However, it is important to distinguish in this way between what is best termed 'gross' and 'net' inflow/outflow, before drawing too many conclusions from detailed analysis of the movement of prisoners in the Gulag system. When prisoners joined

112 The Gulag at War

the forced labour workforce in a camp, they were recorded as being added even if they had simply come from a neighbouring camp under the same administration. Similarly, the establishment from which they had come reported their transfer as a departure. The greatest propor­tion of intra-camp transferral activity affected the camps of GULZhDS, ULLP and Glavpromstroi (Table 6.3 ).

Note must be made, therefore, of the danger of misrepresenting trends and fluctuations in the data through a failure to take into account the category of those 'added' to and 'leaving' camps in the Gulag system. These data are of interest in their own right, but do not concern the rate of flow into and out of the Gulag camp system, rather the move­ment of prisoners between those camps. For example, a throughput figure found in the Gulag archive claims that 2 421 000 zeky passed through camps and colonies in 1943.33 The beginning and end of year totals, however, show a continued decline in the combined camps and colonies total from 1.5 million to 1.2 million. These figures are more easily reconcilable once it has been noted that the throughput total includes intra-Gulag transfers.

The priorities of war are reflected in both the overall totals for 1942 and the manner in which new inmates of the Gulag system were dis­tributed amongst the task-oriented administrations. All of the managerial administrations within the Gulag experienced a decline in numbers, with the glaring exception of the industrial construction administration, Glavpromstroi, and the marginal level of growth (654 zeky, or 7.5 per cent) experienced by the relatively small Main Administration of Road Building Camps. The population of Glavpromstroi grew by almost 50 per cent over 1942, whilst the Gulag camps as a whole experienced a 28 per cent fall in population from the start of year figure.

The priority given to industrial construction becomes all the more evident when it is noted that Glavpromstroi also lost a greater percent­age of its prisoners than any of the other administrations; a loss that was more than compensated for by the fact that over the year twice as many inmates were added to Glavpromstroi than were present in January 1942.34 Although, therefore, the mean population for Glavpromstroi in 1942 was some 92 000, the number of different individuals incarcer­ated in its camps at some point in 1942 was 197 000, a turnover ratio of 214 per cent. 3s

The priority given to industry during 1942 reveals itself also in the distribution of those added to the Gulag between the various central tasks allotted to camps. Over 40 per cent of those entering the central Gulag system served in the establishments of the Administration of

How Many Prisoners? 113

Table 6.3 Prisoner movement devoted to intra-Gulag transfers, 1942 (%)

Added Leaving

UITK 10.6 8.9 ULLP 43.1 19.9 GULGMP 4.2 5.2 Glavpromstroi 19.5 15.2 GULZhDS 60.9 34.9 Dal'stroi 14.9 7.7 Osobstroi 0.0 3.2 GUShosDor 0.0 0.0

Total 30.6 20.6

Source: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.ll79 11.1-9.

Table 6.4 Turnover ratio in the Gulag camps, 1942

Imprisoned Mean population Turnover(%)

UITK 533319 275 874 193.3 ULLP 335 033 224 017 149.6 GULGMP 101 081 59 374 170.2 Glavpromstroi 197 217 93 873 210.1 GULZhDS 494 573 348 996 141.7 Dal'stroi 178015 134 453 132.4 Osobstroi 83 625 57 631 145.1 GUShosDor 19 619 9003 217.9

Total 1 975 370 1 217 892 162.2

Note: The number imprisoned is the total of prisoners who were in the camps of each administration at any point during the year, not including those added from other Gulag camps, and therefore already counted elsewhere. The total is not the sum of the preceding rows, but an archival figure covering all the camps centrally administered by the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies.

Source: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.1179 11.1-9.

Corrective Labour Colonies, most of which devoted their efforts to the manufacture of armaments and other military equipment. A further 22 per cent of the new inmates joined the Glavpromstroi camps.

Detailed analysis of the movement of prisoners in 1942 sheds fur­ther light on the question of the proportion of prisoners 'freed' to join the Red Army. As was noted above, all those inmates who were released

114 The Gulag at War

Table 6.5 Distribution of prisoners added to the Gulag camp system, 1942 (%)

Added Distribution

UITK 224 726 40.4 ULLP 60790 10.9 GULGMP 36070 6.5 Glavpromstroi 121 382 21.8 GULZhDS 83 345 .15.0 Dal'stroi 16 627 3.0 Osobstroi 2 347 0.4 GUShosDor 10943 2.0

Total 559 774 100.0

Source: GARF f.9414 op.l d.ll79 11.1-9.

due to expiry of their sentence joined the armed forces, unless age or physical condition prevented this. By the end of 1943, the wartime total number of inmates freed from the camps as 'invalids' - in other words they were unfit for either military service or forced labour -had reached 205 000.36 In addition to those leaving the camps at the end of their term, during 1942, as well as in the surrounding war years, many Gulag prisoners were transferred to the armed forces by special decree. According to the data now available, just over 500 000 prison­ers - 42 per cent of the mean camp population in 1942 - were 'set free' during that year. The majority of these, excluding the aged, sick and - for the most part - women, were conscripted.

Release, usually into the armed forces, accounted for the departure of easily the highest proportion of those leaving the camp network during 1942. Almost a million prisoners were recorded as having been freed during that year; this accounts for over half of all those leaving the system. Of the others 'departing' from the camps in that year, over half departed in the sense that they died in the Gulag, and thereby avoided the middleman of battle. Only just over l per cent of depar­tures were due to escapes.

Transfers between the Gulag camps and different types of penal es­tablishments (prisons, republican and regional colonies, and other places of confinement) provide further insight into the replenishment and reorientation of the Gulag forced labour force in the early stages of the war. Unfortunately the otherwise highly detailed inflow/outflow summaries to be found in the archives lump together prisons and local colonies as a single category of source or destination. Of those joining

How Many Prisoners? 115

the camps in 1942, over 94 per cent came from 'Corrective Labour Colonies and prisons'. Similarly, a fifth of all those leaving the cen­trally managed Gulag camps went on to colonies and prisons.

From memoir materials, it is known that most inmates entered the Gulag from a transit prison, and not from a locally managed forced labour colony. Therefore, on the basis of impressions gained from these sources, it seems safe to assert that out of the 94 per cent of new Gulag inmates in 1942 who entered the system from colonies and prisons, the vast majority came from prisons. In other words, these were newly arrested prisoners, not transfers of long-serving zeky from other establishments.

In the same way, it was argued earlier that the war years saw a decentralisation of the forced labour system in the Soviet Union, with the proportion of those held in camps and colonies directly subordi­nated to republican and regional authorities growing at the expense of the camps directly managed by the central Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies; the proportion of the forced labour force held in local colonies grew between 1941 and 1945 from 22 to 51 per cent. 37 Probably, therefore, the majority of those leaving the Gulag camps for 'Corrective Labour Colonies and prisons' were transferred to colonies as part of the above-mentioned reorientation.

Despite the lack of distinction in the archival data between inflow/ outflow from/to colonies and prisons, it is still possible, on the strength of what is already known, to establish that inflow came predominantly from prisons, and that the fifth of total outflow which entered 'colo­nies and prisons' in 1942 mainly involved the transfer of prisoners to locally controlled colonies. The category of inflow recorded as com­ing from 'other places of confinement' presumably refers to prisoners entering the Gulag from military prisons and from the verification camps through which those Soviet citizens returning from German control had to pass.

4. TOTALS

The details of inflow and outflow presented above add statistical weight to the perceptions of observers with regard to such matters as the prioritisation of industry during the war, and the fact that most new inmates arrived in the camps of the Gulag from transit prisons. These particulars also reveal previously shadowy information, for example, the startlingly high turnover of inmates - due largely to the release of

116 The Gulag at War

Table 6.6 Sources of prisoners entering the Gulag camps, 1942 (% of those entering)

Corrective Labour Other places Colonies and prisons of confinement Recaptured Other

UITK 95.9 2.1 0.5 1.6 ULLP 91.0 5.2 1.5 2.2 GULGMP 94.1 3.6 0.8 1.5 G1avpromstroi 95.6 2.6 0.7 l.l GULZhDS 9l.l 3.9 1.7 3.3 Dal'stroi 88.7 9.4 1.7 0.3 Osobstroi 90.1 0.7 5.8 3.4 GUShosDor 98.3 0.7 0.5 0.5

Total 94.2 3.1 0.9 1.8

Source: GARF f. 9414 op.1 d.1179 ll.1-9.

Table 6.1 Destinations of prisoners leaving the Gulag camps, 1942 (% of those leaving)

Corrective Labour Freed Died Escaped Other Colonies and prisons

UITK 25.5 50.7 21.7 0.8 1.3 ULLP 19.9 36.3 42.3 0.8 0.7 GULGMP 36.1 50.9 9.8 2.0 1.2 Glavpromstroi 21.4 44.9 30.7 1.7 1.3 GULZhDS 9.1 64.1 22.6 1.6 2.6 Dal'stroi 12.0 56.3 29.2 2.2 0.3 Osobstroi 6.3 82.2 10.9 0.5 0.0 GUShosDor 17.8 56.4 23.8 1.5 0.5

Total 19.2 52.5 25.7 1.2 1.3

Source: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.l179 ll.1-9.

a substantial proportion of prisoners into the armed forces and the ar­rest of new categories of inmate - which means that far more people passed through the Gulag than might be suspected by a perusal of the year-end totals. The dissection of data goes some way, too, towards confirmation of the view that the war years saw a comparative prefer­ence for the expansion of locally organised camps and colonies, which grew as most of the administrations within the centrally controlled Gulag structure experienced a decline in numbers.

How Many Prisoners? 117

All of this information moves observers in the direction of knowl­edge, where previously supposition ruled. Furthermore, the data con­cerning the movement of prisoners can be used to shed light on still more areas; questions of differing rates of mortality, the frequency of escapes, and the make-up of the forced labour contingent from the point of view of gender, educational level, criminal conviction and age all remain to be discussed. Nonetheless, as will have been noted from earlier discussion of the debates of previous decades, the hottest question in Gulag studies has long been that of total population. A headline figure for forced labour population at a given time can be grasped more readily than detailed throughput calculations and the minutiae of administrative subordination.

It has been the position of the present work that the archival revela­tions of the late 1980s and early 1990s - summarised in Table 2.1 -are genuine but incomplete. On the basis of the understanding of Gulag structure and definitions gained from investigation in the central state archives of the Russian Federation, and set out in the preceeding chapters, it is now possible to attempt an estimate of total forced labour.

4.1 Gulag Camps

The first archive figures cited for the Gulag camp population in the Soviet Union were given at the end of 1989 by Russian historian Viktor Zemskov38 (Table 2.1 ). These figures refer to the core of Gulag camp groups, numbering between fifty and sixty in the war years, which were directly subordinate to the central Main Administration of Cor­rective Labour Camps and Colonies, and were managed by NKVD bodies devoted to specific economic tasks (for example, GULZhDS, ULLP, Glavpromstroi). The population figures given in this category included inmates of the Administration of Corrective Labour Colonies (UITK). A breakdown of the camp totals for l January 1942 and 1943 shows that the UITK population made up a part of the overall camp population total.39 The archival data states that by the end of the war, some 700 000 inmates were in the Gulag camps.40

4.2 Republican and Regional Camps and Colonies

As well as the core of Gulag camps, there existed hundreds of smaller camps, under the direct control of the republican or regional NKVD authorities through Departments of Corrective Labour Colonies, or Administrations of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies (OITK/

118 The Gulag at War

UITLK). These camps and colonies were, of course, ultimately under the control of the central Gulag authorities, and drew on the resources of the Gulag administrative structure. Nonetheless, their population was not included in the Gulag camp total.

The population of these locally subordinated forced labour estab­lishments constitutes what the revelations of Russian scholars in the late 1980s and early 1990s termed 'colonies'. First, the archives have shown that the 'colonies' of the recent Russian revelations cannot have been UITK establishments.41 Their populations do not match. In 1942, for example, when the 'colonies' total of Table 2.1 was rising from 361 000 to 500 000, the average population of the entire UITK ammounted to 250 000.42 Second, although the archives investigated in researching the present work did not reveal a series of figures for OITK!UITLK population, it has been possible to calculate their popu­lation for 1942 and the first seven months of 1943 from mortality rates. These reveal that the average number of prisoners held in lo­cally subordinate camps in 1942 was 404 767, and the corresponding figure for the first seven months of 1943 was 553 515. These figures fit adequately into the annual totals of 'colonies' population offered by Russian historians Zemskov and Dugin (Table 2.1). By the end of the war, around 850 000 inmates were in this category.43

4.3 Special Settlements

The inhabitants of special settlements must be included in the forced labour total. They were forcibly deported - mostly to remote regions -set to specific tasks, policed by NKVD troops, administered by the Gulag authorities, and the settlements were often fenced off. Despite any relative degree of freedom they may have had in comparison with the inmates of camps and colonies, they can scarcely be categorised as anything but forced labour. The archival figures for the number of 'labour settlers' during the war reveal a sizeable contingent of forced labourers to be added to the Gulag total (see Table 2.3).

By early 1945 there were reportedly 652 818 people kept on such settlements; a figure amounting to almost half of the combined camps and colonies total. There exists, however, another figure - reportedly from the NKVD archives - of 2 230 500 people on Special Settle­ments at the beginning of October 1945.44 The two separate spetsposelentsy figures indicate a rise of 1.6 million between Decem­ber 1944 and October 1945.45 This represents a very sharp increase, but is nonetheless feasible, and matches well the settlements total of

How Many Prisoners? 119

2.3 million for 1949 (Table 2.3). Furthermore, the rise can be partly explained by an order of September 1945, sent to the Heads of Verification and Filtration Camps, demanding that they send people of specified nationalities (chiefly Chechens, lngushy, Crimean Tartars and Kalmyks) to Special Settlements.46 From these two figures, therefore, an average population for 1945 of around 1.4 million can be postulated.

4.4 Special Camps/Verification and Filtration Camps

The camps in which Soviet citizens returning from German control were imprisoned - called NKVD Special Camps until February 1945, and thereafter Verification and Filtration Camps - undoubtedly consti­tuted forced labour camps. Here prisoners did not simply sit around awaiting the completion of the verification procedure. Instead, they were put to work on a wide range of tasks, overseen by the NKVD and various industrial People's Commissariats. By the end of the war these camps housed over 160 000 inmates.47 However, the scope of their activities widened after May 1945, and particularly in August and September, when decrees gave them responsibility for a wider range of prisoners.48

4.5 NKVD Camps in Germany

Established on 15 April 1945, the camps of the 'German Gulag' were forced labour establishments not included in the standard category of Gulag camps. It is known that there were nine such camps, and two transit prisons, in this network. Their population, however, cannot be cited in such a clear-cut statement. Overall 155 000 were interned in these camps, and by 1948 there were 30 000 inmates in the three camps which remained.49 Without information regarding the size of the other camps and the turnover of prisoners, any specifically dated total figure is an estimate. However, an end of war total of around 60 000 is fea­sible. A higher total could be argued on the grounds that if three camps could hold 30 000 then nine camps and two prisons may have held more than twice that amount. A lower total could be argued by dint of the fact that over three quarters of those imprisoned in the 'German Gulag' were in fact German citizens, and these could not have been rounded up as early as mid-1945.50 Nonetheless, 60 000 represents a possible compromise estimate.

120 The Gulag at War

4.6 NKVD Prisons

Population of NKVD Prisons, 20 December 1944

Under investigation by the NKVD by the NKGB by Military Intelligence

On the procuracy files On the courts' files For NKVD Special Investigation Convicted (except those sentenced to death) Sentenced to death In transit

Total

53 246 17 468 3 068

50325 28 541 6 321

104 405 4437 4 316

272 127

Source: A. N. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty (unpublished, Moscow, 1992) pp. 37-8.

4. 7 Forced Labour without Deprivation of Liberty

Those sentenced to forced labour without deprivation of liberty were usually sentenced for minor work-related offences, such as absentee­ism, and often served their sentence at their usual place of work. By the end of the war there were around 700 000 in this category.51

By the end of the war, therefore, the categories outlined above totalled around three and a half million. Not included in the end of war total are those Soviet citizens of German nationality 'mobilised' into the Gulag in 1941 and 1942. A total of 120 000 such prisoners for the end of 1942 was cited earlier. However, no similar total has been found for other years. Caution therefore dictates that any of this contingent surviving to the war's end be assumed to have been absorbed into the general camp, colony or settlement population.

The revelations of Russian scholars, reporting from the same ar­chives as were used for the preceding analysis, gave a total of around one and a half million for the number of forced labourers in 1945, compared to around four million identified here. Obviously, the nature of the data available still allows a variety of prisoner totals to be of­fered, depending upon the definition of forced labour used. It might

How Many Prisoners? 121

be argued, for example, that those serving sentences of forced labour without deprivation of liberty could not be included in some overall 'Gulag' total. Nonetheless, even the exclusion of this figure leaves around three million four hundred thousand people deprived of liberty by the NKVD in 1945 - a figure more than double that to be found in the camps and colonies total for the war's end. It must be remem­bered, too, that these totals are for 1945, a year which had the fourth lowest total of camp and colony inmates out of the eighteen years between 1936 and 1953.

Drawing on archival data for all of the categories outlined above, except for the camps in Germany - and splitting the mobilised Ger­mans contingent of 120 000 in December 1942 between 1942 and 1943 - a revised estimate of forced labour in the USSR can be offered. This includes all known camps and colonies (OITK/UITLK, as well as those directly subordinate to the central Gulag authority), special settlements, NKVD prisons, Verification and Filtration Camps, and an estimate of those sentenced to forced labour without deprivation of liberty.

122 The Gulag at War

Table 6.8 Forced labour in the Soviet Union, 1942-45 (millions, annual average)

/942 1943 1944 1945

Camps 1.20 0.82 0.69 0.66 Colonies 0.43 0.51 0.63 0.85 Special Settlements 0.82 0.70 0.66 1.44 NKVD Prisons 0.25 0.21 0.21 0.25 Verification and Filtration Camps 0.14 0.14 0.14 0.16 Mobilised Germans 0.60 0.60 Sub-total 3.44 2.98 2.33 3.36 Forced labour without deprivation of liberty 0.90 0.80 0.70 0.60

Total 4.34 3.78 3.03 3.96

Note: The Verification and Filtration Camps estimate results from the divi­sion of the 421 199 passing through these camps from January 1942 to Oc­tober 1944 between the three years in question. The 1945 figure is that given for the end of the war. (V. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit' -GULAG', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 7 (1991) p. 4.)

Forced labour without deprivation of liberty was being served by 1 264 000 at the start of the war and by 700000 by the middle of 1944 (GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.26). Estimates for the war years assume that the early period saw the most precipitous decline. Consequently the above cautious estimates are used.

Sources: V. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhipelag GULAG: glazami pisatelya i statistika', Argumenty i fakty, 45 (1989) pp. 6-7; A. N. Dugin, 'GULAG: Otkryvaya arkhivy', Na boevom postu (Moscow, 27 December 1989) pp. 3-4; V. N. Zemskov, 'Kulatskaya ssylka nakanune i v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2 (1992) pp. 15, 21 and 23; V. N. Zemskov, 'Zaklyuchennye, spetsposelentsy, ssyl'noposelentsy, ssyl'nye i vyslannye', Istoriya SSSR, 5 (1991); V. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit' -GULAG', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 7 (1991) p. 4; GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.26.; N. F. Bugai, 'K voprosu o deportatsii narodov SSSR v 30-40-kh godakh', Istoriya SSSR, 6 (1989) p. 141.

7 Labour Use and Production

In the last years of the Soviet Union the role of the Gulag in Soviet history began to be discussed in a way which reflected the archives' penchant for seeking out 'positive' aspects of an horrific phenomenon. Despite the difficulties of life in the camps outlined above, the Gulag's contribution to the Soviet war economy was eulogised in official pro­nouncements of this time. The address given by the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, on the forty-fifth anniversary of victory referred to those who, 'despite their own tragic fate, not sparing themselves ... worked for Victory'. Similarly, the historian of the Gulag, V. N. Zemskov, wrote of camps 'packed full of people dedicated to the Communist Party and Soviet power, who during the war ... asked to defend the Motherland, and the ideals of the October revolution and socialism'. 1

Of course, such a rose-tinted gloss too readily played down the sufferings of Gulag inmates during the war. Nonetheless, an acknowl­edgement of the contribution made by forced labourers to the wartime economy of the Soviet Union was long overdue. War makes demands on the human resources of any nation, even one the size of the USSR. As more men were drafted into the armed forces, so the relative de­mand grew for workers who would provide the economic base necess­ary for military success. Consequently, those deemed enemies of the state and incarcerated in the Gulag became an increasingly valuable resource, and yet they continued to suffer from low priority in terms of supplies and rations.

The following analysis demonstrates the increasing demand for forced labourers in the Soviet wartime economy. It shows how at root the growing shortage of human resources was approached no differently from any other shortage, with the Gulag authorities being constantly urged by their superiors to do more with less. Great emphasis was thus placed on the efficient use of the available forced labour contin­gent. The war also brought a shift in the way zeky were used. As military production became increasingly important, so more industrial forced labour establishments were converted to the production of am­munition, and construction tasks were directed by the State Defence Committee. The war also created a greater need for the Gulag to pro­vide more of its own food and other resources, rather than relying on increasingly scarce external supplies. All of these demands were made

123

124 The Gulag at War

against a background of falling Gulag population, a growing propor­tion of inmates unable to work, increasing demands from other non­NKVD Commissariats for forced labourers, and the need to maintain production in the more traditional areas of Gulag work such as con­struction and the provision of raw materials.

1. ECONOMIC ROLE

The existence of an extensive and multi-faceted system of forced labour in the Soviet Union during the Second World War served two major functions perceived by the government to be of benefit to the state. It kept potential or actual opponents of the regime separate from the rest of society, and it provided a large labour force able to contribute to the war effort. These aims were explicitly accepted by the Gulag lead­ership during the war, and were set out clearly in documents of the time. The head of the Gulag stated that:

In accordance with the historical instructions of Comrade STALIN concerning the restructuring of the entire work of the rear onto a war footing and the subordination of its interests to those of the front and the task of organising the rout of the enemy, all the opera­tional and productive activity of the GULAG NKVD USSR was directed towards:

reinforcing the isolation of prisoners and the fight against anti­Soviet elements amongst them;

maintaining the prisoners' physical condition and their fulllabo~r use;

staffing the most important defence construction sites and enter­prises with a work force made up of prisoners;

the utmost intensification of the production of ammunition, am­munition cases, and other defence production, and a widening of our own food-supply base. 2

Although the two functions of the Gulag at war identified above become four points in the hands of the Gulag chief, it is clear that, beyond the call to reinforce security in and through the camps, econ­omic requirements had primacy. The demands of war brought a labour­shortage to the USSR, which represented a crucial brake on the Soviet economy as it shifted into fighting mode. Consequently the mobilisa­tion of more workers, and the reallocation of the existing workforce to

Labour Use and Production 125

those tasks deemed most vital to the war effort, became a fundamental aim of economic planners. The loss of a third of the working popula­tion in the German advances of 1941-42 exacerbated the shortage. 3

Clearly the most obvious need was for soldiers on the frontline. How­ever, for soldiers to fight effectively, the correct balance had to be found and maintained between conscripting men into the army, and ensuring that sufficient manpower remained to produce military goods, foodstuffs and clothing, and to run the transport and supply network. Against this background, the Gulag played a role shot through with contradictions, and as yet largely undocumented.

The central contradiction of the Gulag's part in the Soviet war ef­fort lies in the fact that its prisoners - those deemed at best anti-social and at worst enemies of the people - were of no mean importance when it came to planning the survival of the Soviet state. Those im­prisoned by the NKVD, including 'special settlers', made up a number equivalent to around 8 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce, over the years 1942 to 1945. If workers sentenced to forced labour without deprivation of liberty are included in this number, then the forced la­bour stock made up a number equivalent to over one-tenth of the non­agricultural workforce over these years (Table 7.1 ).

Table 7.1 Distribution of Soviet workforce, 1942-45 (millions, annual average)

1942 1943 1944 1945

Agriculture 24.3 25.5 31.3 36.1 Industry 8.8 9.1 10.3 ll.8 Construction 1.8 1.7 2.1 2.3 Transport, communications 2.4 2.4 3.0 3.6 Trade, catering 1.7 1.7 2.1 2.5 Civilian services 4.8 5.1 6.5 7.7 Military services 11.3 11.9 12.2 12.1

Total 55.1 57.4 67.5 76.1 of which: Forced labourers 3.4 3.0 2.3 3.4

and: Forced labourers (including forced labour without imprisonment) 4.3 3.8 3.0 4.0

Sources: M. Harrison, Soviet Production and Employment in World War 11: A 1993 Update, Soviet Industrialisation Project Series No.35 (CREES, Uni-versity of Birmingham, 1993) p. 22, Table 6.8.

126 The Gulag at War

In a state of great manpower shortage, zeky became an invaluable resource. Their importance to the Soviet infrastructure during the war was emphasised by Viktor Kravchenko, in his recollections of wartime work in the RSFSR Council of People's Commissars. Kravchenko recalls how the Gulag chief, General Nasedkin, received constant demands for forced labour contingents signed by the highest officials in the land, notably Stalin, Molotov and Beria. On one occasion, Kravchenko de­manded the provision of more labourers from a Gulag official, only to be met with the complaint that forced labourers were in too high demand.

The State Defence Committee needs them, Comrade Mikoyan makes life miserable for us, Malenkov and Vosnessensky need workers, Voroshilov is calling for road builders. Naturally everyone thinks his own job is the most important. What are we to do? The fact is we haven't as yet fulfilled our plans for imprisonments. Demand is greater than supply.4

Clearly, therefore, the same forced labourers who were deemed to be the dregs of society were an invaluable economic resource. Hence, the task of ensuring the physical well-being of inmates was tied to the aim of maintaining full labour-use of this resource. The head of the Gulag, in stating this task as a central aim of the forced labour net­work during the war, was making a written acknowledgement of the economic requirements outlined by the Soviet leadership in wartime.

However, in practice, the Gulag evidently failed to meet the de­mands placed upon it. When it came to the provision of food, clothing and medicines, the invaluable resource became once more the lowest of the low. By the end of 1941, even the Gulag records themselves admit that 'a significant part' of the camp workforce were not assured of even 'basic conditions of upkeep', such as some form of heating in the barracks, regular cleaning and adequate rations. 'A significant pro­portion of the camps did not prepare ... for the conditions of autumn and winter' in 1941.5

The proportion of the forced labour population unable to work, mainly due to weakness and disease, grew to record proportions during the war. The mortality rate in the camps was notably higher than the crude death rate across the Soviet Union, never mind the appropriate age­specific death rate, which was no doubt lower, since the Gulag popu­lation excluded the very old and the very young. Forgetting all considerations of morality, from a purely economic point of view the resource of labourers in camps was wasted through a failure to main­tain their physical well-being.

Labour Use and Production 127

2. LABOUR USE

Considering further the priority tasks of the Gulag outlined above, it is apparent that the stated desire for important defence construction and production sites to be staffed by prisoners carried with it an im­plicit limitation. Clearly the available working element of the forced labour stock was insufficient to supply workers to all of the enter­prises of importance to the war effort. Priorities had to be decided upon, and the workforce had to be distributed accordingly. Whereas in the pre-war years consumer goods had been the basic product of forced labour industrial colonies, now military-related goods took their place.6

Those branches of the Gulag concentrating on other areas of produc­tion and construction were maintained, as raw materials and, for ex­ample, railway construction, remained essential. Nonetheless, the majority of new camp inmates found themselves forced into industrial production.7

Within the official record!; of the Gulag, zeky in the centrally ad­ministered Gulag camps were divided into four groups according to their labour-use, or non-use. Such divisions provide the data from which the proportion of the Gulag workforce not working at the height of the wartime labour shortage becomes apparent.

The Gulag authorities assessed the use of prisoners within the Gulag labour-fund by grouping them in the following categories: Group A consisted of all those inmates engaged in productive labour. Group B consisted of inmates employed in service work. This group included prisoners working within the camp administration, kitchens, medical facilities, and so on. Group C consisted of those not working due to sickness and the granting of invalid status. Group D consisted of pris­oners not working 'for other reasons'.

Of the 'other reasons' for not working which contributed to Group D, there are four cited in the camp archives. First, over a third of those in this category were not working due to 'stoppages caused by the camp [authorities]', which could apply to a failure to organise work adequately, or to the redirection of prisoners to tasks of more benefit to the camp authorities than state-prescribed work. Second, a propor­tion of prisoners in Group D were not engaged in any form of work because they refused to work, or they were in punishment cells for some other offence. Third, some inmates were not participating in the designated work at a given time due to a lack of the requisite tools, materials or transport for the task. Finally, the 'other reasons' for not working included 'quarantine or atmospheric conditions'. The placing of potentially infectious prisoners in quarantine seems understandable,

128 The Gulag at War

the place of 'atmospheric conditions' in preventing zeky from working less so. It is difficult to imagine Gulag inmates being given a day off due to snow. However, no doubt at times weather conditions rendered work impossible, or at least made the camp authorities as unwilling to attempt work as the prisoners were.8

A proportion of Gulag prisoners registered on the list of camp in­mates nonetheless did not appear in any of the four groups outlined here. These prisoners - about 10 per cent of the registered Gulag total at the height of the war9 - were not included in the separate labour­fund total from which the labour-use categories A to D were made up. 10 There are two likely explanations for this missing tenth of the workforce. It may have been made up, first, of those Gulag prisoners who were contracted out to other Commissariats, rather than working for the NKVD. These zeky would have been registered in the population of a given forced labour establishment, but would not have partici­pated in the specific tasks assigned to that camp. Second, a proportion of prisoners registered but not part of the labour-fund were probably in transit. There exists, too, the possibility that camp authorities may have attempted to gain extra supplies by keeping the names of prisoners who had died on the list of registered prisoners for as long as possible.

With the onset of war, and the growing need to compensate for the workforce and productive capacity lost under the impact of Operation Barbarossa in the western regions of the USSR, the Gulag authorities expressed ever greater concern at the increase in the size of the non­working contingent of camp inmates. The number of prisoners in Groups C and D grew rapidly in the fourth quarter of 1941. On average in 1940 and 1941 these groups made up 15.8 and 16.4 per cent respec­tively of the prisoner workforce in the NKVD Corrective Labour Camps. The annual averages, however, disguise the end of year rise in 1941, which saw over a quarter of all inmates not working by the December of that year, and 30 per cent not working by January of 1942.

October November December January

Table 7.2 Gulag camp workforce not working, October 1941-January 1942 (%)

16.3 21.4 26.3 29.9

Source: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.1181 1.15.

Labour Use and Production 129

Of particular concern in the early months of the war were those prisoners not working for 'other reasons'. According to the archival sources, some 27.5 million working days were lost in 1941 through this particular phenomenon, with every day nearly 89 000 prisoners falling into Group D. Due to their 'irresponsible attitude ... towards the labour-use of the workforce', camp authorities had made sure that this category of non-workers had gained a firm place in the life of the NKVD construction and industrial camps. Singled out for particular criticism in this respect were the Glavpromstroi camps at Bogoslav and Omsk, the UITK camp at Svobodnensk, and the ULLP camp at lvdel'. In each of these camps the proportion of prisoners in Group D surpassed 8 per cent of the workforce in 1941. 11

The fact that at times over a third of the Gulag forced labour fund was recorded as belonging to non-working groups C and D (See Ap­pendix A, Table 11) did not necessarily mean that the rest of the in­mates were fit for the work demanded of them. The physical condition of prisoners was also recorded by the Gulag authorities, and a significant number of prisoners classified as physically weak existed within the working contingent. Consequently output norms were lowered.

The prisoner well-being classifications consisted of five categories: (i) capable of hard physical labour; (ii) capable of average physical labour; (iii) capable of light physical labour; (iv) certified invalids (non­working); (v) certified invalids (working).

From the first months of the war, with demands for labour becom­ing ever more acute, the leaders of the Gulag sought to squeeze more labour from the human resources available to them. This attempt to tighten up on labour-use had two main thrusts, both of which were based upon the analysis of statistics regarding the forced labour con­tingent, provided by the Department of Prisoner Registration and Dis­tribution. First, a discrepancy became apparent between the categorisation of prisoners according to their physical fitness and the labour-use of the same prisoners. Whereas it was argued above that even the in­mates not included in non-working Groups C and D were not necess­arily fit for the work assigned to them - as a number of them had been classified as unfit for heavy labour - , the Gulag authorities turned this argument around. They considered the statistics for the physical condition of inmates and argued that in fact the camp bosses were being too lenient, and that they were making inadequate use of their labour resources.

The central camp authorities compared the figures on the physical condition of inmates with those on labour-use, and concluded that too

130 The Gulag at War

Table 7.3 Physical classification of prisoners in Gulag camps, 1 January 1942 (%)

Capable of hard physical labour Capable of average physical labour Capable of light physical labour Certified invalids (non-working) Certified invalids (working)

Source: GARF f.9414 op.l d.l181 1.16.

32.9 29.5 25.9 6.7 5.0

many prisoners were being let off work. They stated that the produc­tive labour contingent (Group A) should consist of all those capable of heavy and average labour, as well as 'no less than 50 per cent of prisoners in the third group', that is, those capable of light labourY Comparing the figures presented above in the light of the above state­ment, then in November and December 1941, Group A should have made up 75 per cent of the prisoner stock. Using, as the archival source does, the figures for 1 January 1942, then all of those deemed capable of hard or average labour, plus half of those considered able to per­form light physical work would have added up to this 75 per cent.

Although for 1941 as a whole the percentage of the corrective labour camp prisoner workforce involved in productive labour averaged out at 76 per cent, in November and December 1941 and January 1942 it fell sharply, reaching a low of 62 per cent. Clearly, therefore, there was a shortfall, amounting to over 10 per cent of the Gulag labour force, between those declared capable of at least some form of labour, and those who carried out no productive labour in these months.

The central camp authorities blamed camp bosses for this perceived misuse - or, rather, non-use - of the potential workforce. Such appor­tioning of blame, however, smacks of a distant bureaucracy, under pressure itself, seeking to assert norms of management which were entirely impractical on the ground. Even someone declared capable of 'average labour' may not be able to fulfil the tasks demanded in con­struction, timber, railway or mining camps, let alone those designated capable of only light labour. Furthermore, the demands of the plan no doubt made it difficult to find 'average', as opposed to heavy, labour for 30 per cent of the workforce. In addition, the declaration of a pris­oner as being capable of some form of labour did not somehow vacci­nate him against contracting a disease which would subsequently render him unfit for work! Prisoners of all physical classifications were af­fected adversely by the horrific camp conditions of the war, which

Labour Use and Production

Table 1.4 Gulag camp workforce in productive labour, November 1941-January 1942 (%)

November December January

68.0 65.9 61.8

Source: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.1181 11.16 and 17.

131

were exacerbated over the period in question by the arrival of pris­oner-evacuees from camps in the western USSR.

The second way in which the analysis of statistics directed the auth­orities' campaign for the greater use of available labour resources sprang from a comparison of these data administration by administration. By showing that Gulag industrial administration A used a smaller propor­tion of its prisoner contingent in productive labour than Gulag indus­trial administration B, then pressure could be exerted on B to reach the performance levels attained by A. Similarly inter-camp, as well as inter-administration, comparisons were undertaken.

Pre-war comparisons showed that camps under Glavpromstroi achieved a rate of 84 per cent of all its prisoner labour force involved in pro­ductive work during 1940. At the bottom of the table came the camps of the ULLP (Administration of Camps of the Timber Industry). In these only an average of 73 per cent of the forced labour contingent were engaged in such work over the same period. 13 The difference between these two figures can no doubt largely be accounted for by the difference between living and working conditions in these groups of camps. Most of the timber camps were situated in the far north of Russia. The climate was harsh, the camps' remoteness jeopardised the reliability of their supply systems, and the labour tasks of the inmates involved heavy and dangerous outdoor work. None of these factors, however, received mention in the official report on labour-use. The better performance of particular camps could apparently be put down to 'certain heads of Main Administrations and the heads of Corrective Labour Camps paying the necessary attention to overseeing the labour­use of prisoners'. 14

With the outbreak of war in 1941, the indicators of labour-use re­vealed a decline which became significant by the end of the year. The 1941 average for the proportion of prisoners in Group A was 75 per cent, and the December figure was 66 per cent. Surprisingly, it was the camps of Glavpromstroi which received criticism for their perform­ance, despite - or perhaps because of - their officially lauded labour-use

132 The Gulag at War

Table 1.5 Gulag workforce engaged in productive labour, by administration, 1942-44 (fourth quarter each year, %)

1942 1943 1944

UITK 67.8 73.8 74.9 ULLP 67.0 69.6 72.2 GULGMP 77.7 74.2 77.2 GULZhDS 64.2 68.3 71.8 GUShosDor 68.2 69.3 74.6 Dal'stroi 83.1 77.7 81.6 Osobstroi 71.8 83.6 83.9 Glavpromstroi 68.8 70.2 73.1

Total 69.2 72.3 74.8

Source: GARF f.9414 op.l dd.l773-1778; d.ll91 11.1-11; dd.1209-1214.

figure in the preceding year. By December 1941, Glavpromstroi were able to employ only 57 per cent of their prisoner contingent in pro­ductive labour.

There seems little doubt that the upheaval of war underlies the star­tling decline in Glavpromstroi's ability to force prisoners to fulfil its planned tasks. The Main Administration for Industrial Construction experienced the highest turnover rate of prisoners of any Gulag mana­gerial organisation, and industry-related camps were more likely than others to be located in regions under immediate Nazi threat, and to be caught up in the chaos of evacuation. 15 As a contrast stood the camps of Dal' stroi in the far eastern regions of Russia, far removed from the immediate effects of the war. Even in December 1941, the Dal' stroi chiefs managed to drive 78 per cent of the prisoners under their con­trol to productive forced labour. 16

From the evidence of Table 7.5, it is apparent that 1942 represented the low point for the Gulag administrations in their attempts to max­imise labour-use. An average of under 70 per cent of the forced labour workforce was occupied in productive labour by the fourth quarter of that year. The situation improved slowly but steadily over the next two years, but even the average of three-quarters of the workforce involved in productive labour in the last three months of 1944 did not reach the standards set two years previously by the Gulag authorities.

If, as seems valid, the labour-use data can serve as an indicator of camp conditions, then the harshest camps for the physical well-being of the inmates during the war were the railway construction camps.

Labour Use and Production 133

These camps had the highest proportion of their workforce in Group C - the sick and invalids - in the years 1942 and 1943, and only mar­ginally less than the Glavpromstroi camps in 1944. During 1943, the railway construction camps registered, on average, over a quarter of their workforce in Group C. (For a detailed breakdown of these data, see Appendix A, Table 11.) However, the reliability of labour-use data as an indicator of conditions is not absolute. In camps with a higher proportion of prisoners working than elsewhere, there is the possibil­ity that the regime may in fact have been harsher than in other camps, with sick prisoners being forced to work in cases where other camps may have been more lenient.

The camps with the highest labour-use percentage were those of Dal'stroi, the Far Eastern Construction Trust. Their high percentage can be partly explained by the fact that these camps used less than 4 per cent of their workforce in service work, whereas all of the other major camp groupings consistently allocated between 8 and lO per cent of their workforce to this category. Therefore, when it comes to judging camp conditions from the labour-use data, then the camps of the mining and metallurgical administration (GULGMP) and the in­dustrial colonies (UITK) consistently vied with the Dal'stroi camps for high labour-use and, comparatively, low sickness and invalidity levels throughout the period of the war.

3. SKILLS AND IMPROVEMENT

The labour shortage in the Soviet Union during the war led, as has been shown, to a renewed emphasis on and analysis of the use of the Gulag's prisoner workforce, in order to ensure that as many zeky as possible carried out productive labour. However, the labour shortage did not simply consist of a lack of workers. In particular there existed a shortfall in the number of skilled workers. For much of the Gulag's work, great skill did not constitute a primary requirement. Nonethe­less, the wartime shift of many forced labourers into industrial work, particularly military production, put skills at more of a premium. Con­sequently, the Gulag authorities sought to train selected prisoners in basic construction and production skills. In a report to the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs on the Gulag's contribution to the war effort, the Gulag chief boasted that about 300 000 prisoners had re­ceived such training during the first three years of the war. 17

In terms of increasing the productive potential of the forced labour

134 The Gulag at War

workforce, training represented a positive step. However, the idea that the Gulag during the war played the role of a vocational training net­work for repentant criminals seems far from the truth. The archive sources used in the present work offer the official sanitised version of the Gulag. This is not to say that they are wrong, merely that they do not dwell on the horror of the Gulag at war. One man's vocational training is another man's curt instruction before forced labour on star­vation rations at an industrial construction site. Furthermore, the 300 000 who received this training represent only a small proportion of those incarcerated in the Gulag during the war. 18

Nonetheless, the existence of some form of vocational training indi­cates the efforts of the Gulag authorities to improve their use of the forced labour contingent during the war. As well as this nod in the direction of improving the quality of the workforce, the Gulag intro­duced measures to raise product quality in its enterprises, though of course these only applied to the minority of forced labourers engaged in industrial production. A number of steps were taken towards 'the improvement of the technological process, the introduction of continu­ous production, and the efficient placing of prisoners in the workplace'. 19

Consequently, the cost of goods produced fell during the war; though, as the bulk of the Gulag's industrial output over this period consisted of armaments, it is scarcely surprising that unit production costs dropped when growing economies of scale began to work their effect.

4. MILITARY PRODUCTION

The conversion of NKVD industrial colonies from the production of consumer goods to the production of military-related goods began as soon as war broke out. According to the Gulag chief, ever adept at summoning up a cosy image, it commenced on a base of 'minor in­dustrial corrective labour colonies, of the cottage-industry type, which had been producing blankets, hardware articles, spoons, and other con­sumer goods'. 20 The military-production efforts of the Gulag were con­centrated on ammunition; a fact which partly explained why NKVD Chief, Beria, replaced Voznesensky as the member of the State De­fence Committee in charge of armaments and munitions production in late 1941Y In the first eighteen months of the war, thirty-five NKVD industrial colonies were converted to ammunition production, and of these, fifteen industrial colonies had reportedly begun the large-scale production of M-50 mortars and RGD-33 grenades within the first six

Labour Use and Production 135

weeks of the war. By the end of 1941 these colonies had produced a total of 770 000 mortars and grenades, exceeding their plan target by 38 per cent.

The early months of the war saw a somewhat haphazard, though by no means unsuccessful, conversion to defence production. Seventeen different types of ammunition and ammunition parts - mainly mortar shells of various calibres and a variety of grenades - were produced at colonies across the Soviet Union. There was at first, however, no NKVD Main Administration of Ammunition Production to rank alongside the other managerial administrations and oversee these colonies in a coor­dinated manner. This administrative lack was recognised, and on 18 February 1942 NKVD Chief, Beria, established the Special Depart­ment of Military Production, with the specific task of organising and managing the NKVD enterprises engaged in ammunition manufacture.

By June 1942 the coordination of NKVD military production by the newly formed Department of Military Production facilitated the first of several surges in the production of particular types of equipment. These emphases on key areas of output were conducted largely by means of specialisation and the 'storming' techniques of the industri­alisation drive, whereby impossibly high plan targets would be set, and all resources strained to reach them. Certainly the shift towards the production of 82 mm fragmentation shells in the summer of 1942 followed this pattern.

From the start of the German invasion, shell production had consist­ently fallen below the level required by the military. By the end of 1941, 'a persistent and generalised "shell famine" emerged' .22 In re­sponse to this heavy demand from the front, in July 1942 the Gulag was given the task of increasing its production of 82 mm shells to a million per month; that is, it was required to increase output thirty­three fold. In order to fulfil the 82 mm shell production target, output of other shells and ammunition had to be cut back. Thirteen enter­prises producing 50 mm shells switched to 82 mm, and seven enter­prises were equipped from scratch for the production of 82 mm shells.

Perhaps the biggest potential barrier to the achievement of such plan targets was the lack of capital equipment. The archives report, how­ever, that 1942 saw the stock of the relevant machinery increase by a factor of five from the preceding year. Part of this increase came from the mobilisation of 'internal resources of the NKVD', much of the rest from equipment removed from regions threatened by the advancing Nazi forces and, in particular, from LeningradY A further step to­wards increasing the ammunition output of NKVD enterprises was taken

136 The Gulag at War

with the development of their own foundry base. In order that the requisite types of iron and steel might be on hand, ten foundries, sev­enteen cupola furnaces, and thirty-eight annealing kilns were constructed.

Even with the devotion of massive NKVD resources to a specific task, the second half of 1942 did not see the total target for the pro­duction of 82 mm shells achieved. However, as was noted above, the production target had perhaps deliberately been set impossibly high, and the Gulag was by no means alone in failing to reach economic targets. Certainly, the Gulag records present the twenty-eight fold in­crease in production - to five million shells - during these six months with some pride. By November 1942, the monthly target had been reached, and one million 82 mm shells per month were being contrib­uted to the war effort by the Gulag industrial colonies. As a whole, NKVD ammunition production in 1942 surpassed that of 1941 by a factor of twenty.24

The methods of 1942, with their concentration of resources on a vast increase in the production of a specific type of ammunition in particular demand at the front, became the norm for the rest of the war. All that changed was the specific type of ammunition in demand. In June 1943, the NKVD received orders to increase the production of 120 mm high-explosive fragmentation shells to a quarter of a million per month. Once again a fundamental restructuring of the industrial colonies' work was required. Technical difficulties concerning the casting of larger calibre shells presented particular difficulties, as did the equip­ping of colonies with the requisite machine tools. In the course of the push to increase the production of these shells, over six hundred extra machine-lathes needed to be found, four foundries were refitted, and seventeen new furnaces were constructed. Even with all this effort, however, once more the result was ambiguous. Production of 120 mm high-explosive fragmentation shells rose remarkably, with four times as many being produced in the second half of 1943 as in the first. Such a rate of increase in production nevertheless met only two thirds of the target required.25

Other 'product drives' experienced by the Gulag ammunition indus­try colonies during the war saw efforts being concentrated on hand­grenades, and on the large calibre high-explosive aircraft shell 'FAB-500'. In 1943, NKVD ammunition output grew by 140 per cent compared with the 1942 output, and the rate of growth continued to accelerate into 1944. In all, during the first three years of the war, the NKVD produced 70.7 million units of ammunition, including 25.5 million 82 mm and 120 mm shells, 9.2 million anti-personnel mines, and 100 000

Labour Use and Production 137

aircraft shells.26 Of the total NKVD ammunition output, 15.5 million units were produced in 1942 and 21.7 million in 1943. The rate of output growth continued to rise sharply, and by the end of the first quarter of 1944 the NKVD had produced a further 10 million units.z' Comparisons with the total national output of ammunition (shells, mines and bombs) show that the NKVD produced between 10 and 15 per cent of the Soviet Union's ammunition output in the war years. A direct comparison of figures for the first quarter of 1944 shows that nearly 17 per cent of ammunitions output in the USSR carne from NKVD establishments in these rnonths.28

In addition to producing ammunition, Gulag forced labour establish­ments produced a wide range of other military-related goods. Much is made in the archival sources of the contribution that the timber camps of the ULLP made towards the war effort by the production of the special cases in which ammunition was kept between the factory and the gun. The Gulag also put inmates to work making parts for field telephones, over 1.7 million gas masks, and 24 000 mortar stands. Twenty Gulag enterprises manufactured Red Army uniforms during the war. The Gulag's report to the NKVD Chief in mid-1944 stated that the production of uniforms continued despite needles, spare parts for the machines, and other sewing accessories being in very short supply. These items began to be produced in the NKVD enterprises themselves, a measure which supplied three quarters of the demand.

Even before the outbreak of war, the Gulag colonies had been prac­tically the only suppliers of leather products for productive use to the defence industry. However, the speed of the Nazi advance in 1941 led to the partial evacuation of the main forced labour colony involved in this work, which was situated near Moscow, and to a marked decline in output. Production was subsequently set up at Kungursk. The growth of demand for such leather products, however, could not be satisified, due largely to a sharp decline in the availability of quality leather. Consequently, a leather subsititute began to be used in the production of these parts, freeing fifty tons of quality leather per year for other purposes. 29

5. AGRICULTURE

The economic contribution of the Gulag system of forced labour to the Soviet war effort was not restricted to raw materials and industrial products. The aims of the system - as set out by the Gulag chief and

138 The Gulag at War

presented at the beginning of this chapter - stated that an intensification of defence-related production should be accompanied by 'a widening of our own food-supply base'. 30 To this end, therefore, forced labour­ers were put to work in agricultural labour camps and colonies, and on subsidiary plots attached to larger Gulag concerns. Food was short. Despite the economic importance of the camps outlined above, zeky did not constitute a high priority group when it came to the division of scarce provisions. Therefore the officially stated aim of producing more of the camps' food within the forced labour system itself repre­sented both a rational central decision to optimise the use of available agricultural land, and a natural reaction on the part of the camp auth­orities and inmates to the threat of war-induced famine.

By the middle of 1944, Gulag prisoners worked 441 000 hectares of arable land, divided between 414 agricultural establishments. Amongst these establishments were the camps specifically dedicated to agricul­tural production- the Karaganda, Sredne-Belskii and Sibir' camps under the management of the Administration of Corrective Labour Colonies (UITK). The amount of land sown by forced labourers grew by one and a half times during the war years, from around 250 000 hectares in 1941 to 380 000 hectares in 1944.31 By 1946 it had reached 476 000 hectares. 32 An increase in land sown does not, however, mean that harvests rose in proportion, as the factor of land use needs to be added to the equation. Between 1941 and 1944, therefore, the Gulag auth­orities reported a twofold increase in the quantity of potatoes and other vegetables produced.

Improvements in land use contributed to the rise in the Gulag's agri­cultural output. Autumn ploughing increased, as did the amount of land fertilised for spring sowing. Irrigation, too, became increasingly used, in order to bring idle land under seed. At the Karagandinskii camp there was reportedly a threefold increase in the area of land irrigated. As a result of these and similar efforts, the forced labour authorities claimed that it was possible, by the middle of the war, for the Gulag to meet all the needs of the corrective labour camps and colonies with regard to vegetables, and 80 per cent of the demand for potatoes. To cope with the transport and storage difficulties involved in this mam­moth supply task, some of the vegetables thus produced were sent to the camps in the dried state.

The claim of the camp authorities that the Gulag could meet almost all of the demand for vegetables and potatoes for forced labour camps and colonies requires closer examination. More precisely, it requires demolition. Taken at face value, an unknowledgeable reader of the

Labour Use and Production

Table 1.6 Gulag agricultural production, 1941 and 1944 (thousands of tons)

Grain Potatoes, vegetables Hay

1941

140 203 225

Source: GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.54.

1944 (plan)

211 437 317

139

archive accounts might conclude that prisoners received reasonable rations of vegetables and potatoes stemming from the labours of fellow in­mates. Memoir accounts, however, talk of a situation where 'after the outbreak of the Soviet-German war in 1941, famine became the nor­mal condition in many camps' .33 From such sources it seems that the only form in which most prisoners encountered any vegetables and potatoes was soup.

A glance at the mortality figures for the camps further undermines any lingering impression of the prisoners' demands for these food­stuffs being met over most of the war period. Furthermore, the Gulag agricultural establishments no doubt provided produce for their guards as well as for themselves. Nevertheless, if the plan target for 1944 were reached (see Table 7 .6), and distributed solely amongst prisoners, then the tonnage of vegetables and potatoes grown would have pro­vided just under a kilogram per worker per day.34 The vagaries of transportation and storage, and the inclusion of guards as priority re­cipients of Gulag foodstuffs, would have ensured that such a daily in­take for prisoners remained theoretical.

Forced agricultural labour did not confine itself to arable farming, and during the war years the stock of livestock kept under the aus­pices of the Gulag increased (Table 7.7). The cattle on the forced la­bour farms provided 112 000 tons of milk and 2600 tons of butter in the first three years of the war, and over the same period the archive source reports that 35 per cent of the demand for meat in Gulag camps and colonies was met from their own resources. Finally, the Gulag system also maintained a camp at Astrakhan - as well as eight further colonies and forty-five sub-divisions of camps- occupied in the catching and processing of fish. From these sources, a quarter of the Gulag's demand for fish was satisfied between 1941 and 1944.35

140 The Gulag at War

Table 7.7 Livestock on Gulag agricultural establishments, 1941, 1943-45 (thousands)

1941 1943 1944 1945 (plan) (August)

Cattle 55.6 76.2 80.5 98.0 Pigs 63.2 76.6 78.3 115.0 Sheep 221.2 235.4 272.8 360.0 Horses 26.5 29.7 32.1 31.0

Sources: GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.55; d.77 1.181.

6. CONSTRUCTION

The main areas of construction work carried out by the prisoners of the Gulag during the war were industrial construction and the building of railways, roads and aerodromes. Over a million inmates were in­volved in these latter areas of work alone between 1941 and 1944.36

As in other types of labour activity, the demands of war meant a shift of priority in construction work, and decisions regarding the deploy­ment of forced labour contingents were often taken by the State De­fence Committee. If a particular construction task demanded urgent attention, such as the laying of an oil pipeline from Astrakhan to sup­ply the cracking plant at Saratov in 1943, then forced labourers were drafted in.37

Of direct application to the Soviet war effort, an aircraft factory was constructed at Kuibyshev by Gulag inmates during the war. Several important metallurgical factories also came into being through the efforts of zeky. In December 1941 the People's Commissariat for Construction handed over responsibility for the building of the metallurgical factory at Novo-Tagil' to Glavpromstroi, and its construction was finished by forced labourers during the war. Another metallurgical factory was built by inmates under Glavpromstroi at Chelyabinsk between 1942 and 1944, as were metallurgical combines in Aktyubinsk, Dzhida and Bogoslav. 38

Railway construction during the war also had strategic significance, a fact that was particularly emphasised by the Gulag-constructed Saratov­Stalingrad line. This line played a vital role in the provision of sup­plies and reinforcements to the Red Army during the crucial battle of Stalingrad. In 1943 work commenced on the 500-kilometre line in the far east of the USSR between Komsomolsk and Sovetskaya Gavan'. The length of the line and the two-year projected completion time

Labour Use and Production 141

necessitated the setting up of three separate camps, one starting in the west, one in the east, and one building the half-kilometre-long tunnel through interposing mountains. The Komsomolsk-na-Amur to Sovetskaya Gavan' line was completed on 20 June 1945.39

7. TIMBER

The features of the economic development of various Gulag sectors during World War II which have already been identified, were appar­ent, too, with regard to the output of timber. First, the external supply of timber for NKVD industries and construction - from civilian bodies such as the Peoples' Commissariat for Timber and local forestry organ­isations - disappeared, as the loss of territory to the German armies contributed to a shortage of wood. Consequently the Gulag had to meet its needs from its own resources.

Second, in order to meet the demands of war production, the auth­orities took up all available slack in the system and began to show initiative in the absence of guaranteed support from elsewhere. When new logging camps began to be established during 1941 and 1942, NKVD planners placed them, where possible, alongside forced labour colonies manufacturing wooden or part-wooden products. Consequently the amount of timber being sent by railway diminished. In the logging camps and colonies themselves, 70 per cent of tractors were converted to run on solid fuel, so as to avoid disruption of fuel supplies and halting output. In the camps of the Novosibirsk, Gor'ky, and Sverdlovsk regions, a substitute lubricant obtained by the sublimation of wood was developed.

It may be argued, as in other cases, that the fine-sounding achieve­ments outlined above represent little more than attempts by the head of the Gulag - the author of the archive source for this information -to impress his superiors. There is merit in the case that his presenta­tion of developments in the work of the Administration of Camps of the Timber Industry in these years made a virtue out of necessity. Nevertheless, the Gulag forced labour camps involved in the felling, preparation and conveyance of timber improved their performance with regard to the plan during the war years. In the five years before war broke out, the camps of the ULLP had not once achieved their plan target. Between 1941 and 1944, however, they managed to overfulfil the plan by 7 per cent, with an output of seven million cubic metres of timber.

142 The Gulag at War

8. FORCED LABOURERS WORKING FOR NON-NKVD COMMISSARIATS

As was stated earlier in this chapter, the labour shortage in the Soviet Union during the war years meant that prisoners of the Gulag were an increasingly valuable labour source; too valuable, in fact, to be kept for work in NKVD industries alone. Kravchenko's testimony of his time as a departmental head in the RSFSR Council of People's Com­missariat made it plain that forced labour was demanded and received by a wide range of different bodies.40 However, the use of forced la­bour outside of the NKVD system was not a phenomenon brought about by the exigencies of war. Even in the pre-war years, some 350 non-NKVD enterprises made use of Gulag prisoners. During the war, however, this number almost doubled, and by 1944, 640 enterprises under other commissariats employed a contingent of prisoners.41

The forced labourers under discussion here were not those sentenced to forced labour without deprivation of liberty and assigned to local industry. They were genuine zeky, imprisoned in colonies near to their place of work. They were guarded by NKVD guards, and every effort was made to ensure that the Gulag contingent remained isolated from free workers employed at the same enterprise or on the same construction site. In all, 380 of these special colonies were in action by rnid-1944.

The Gulag prisoners involved in work for other People's Commis­sariats included a disproportionate number of those arrested as mem­bers of suspect nationality groups compared with the Gulag population as a whole. Of the 400 000 Soviet citizens arrested between 1942 and 1944 for belonging to nationalities at war with the USSR, 120 000 were put to work for non-NKVD organisations.42 By the summer of 1943 there were just under 200 000 forced labourers contracted out to over forty different commissariats. The number of prisoners in this category rose to nearly 210 000 in early 1944, but by the summer of that year was once again below the 200 000 mark.43

In the report by Gulag chief Nasedkin, written in 1944, it was claimed that there were 225 000 Gulag prisoners working for other People's Commissariats by the middle of that year. It seems that this claim represented a case of the Gulag boss attempting to impress his su­perior, NKVD chief Beria. A more detailed archival document for the same period show that there were in fact about 30 000 fewer prisoners than was asserted working under such terms. The archival revelations published by Moscow-based historian V. N. Zemskov in 1991 cited the higher total, presumably unaware of the other documents under­mining the reliability of his source.44

Labour Use and Production 143

Amongst the many areas of work into which prisoners were forced, having been leased out by the Gulag, the major tasks saw over 40 000 working in metallurgical industries, 38 000 manufacturing arms and ammunition, 19 000 in the aviation and tank industries, 15 000 in the coal and oil industries, 9000 in the electrical industry, and 9000 in timber production.45 The type of work which these prisoners carried out was largely semi-skilled and unskilled physical labour.

9. CONCLUSIONS

The contribution of the Gulag to the national economy of the USSR during World War II can be seen in the tasks successfully completed by forced labourers over these years. Ammunition made, factories built, raw materials delivered, and railway lines laid; all these were direct inputs into the war effort. When it comes to measuring the economic contribution of the Gulag, more is required than a statement of what was produced. Instead, comparisons need to be made with the produc­tive effort of the non-prisoner sector of the economy. Such compari­sons are not easy, due to the scarcity of economy-wide data for such activities as construction and timber production. Nonetheless, some sense of the scale of Gulag production is possible.

Table 7.1 revealed the size of the forced labour workforce in rela­tion to the workforce of the USSR during the war years. Such a com­parison enables the relative magnitude of the forced labour sector to be understood. It does not, however, reveal much about the actual output of prisoner-labour. If forced labourers of one sort or another made up over I 0 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce in the Soviet Union during the war, it does not necessarily follow that they produced a tenth of the output. The conditions under which forced labourers had to work were scarcely conducive to high output. Poor rations, a lack of medical facilities, and harsh living conditions meant that at times almost a third of camp inmates were not working. Furthermore, the Gulag was notoriously ill-supplied with mechanical equipment to fa­cilitate heavy labour.

Clearly, therefore, any comparison of overall output figures must concentrate on specific areas of economic activity, and consequently suffers from a lack of available data. For example, a 'vital national economic task', forming the 'basic function' of zeky under the control of Dal'stroi in the far east of the USSR, was gold mining.46 The figures for the output of gold remain secret, and all that the Gulag archives have so far revealed is that 'the amount of gold ... on the territory

144 The Gulag at War

Table 1.8 NKVD output of selected raw materials and products, 1941-44

Product

Gold (tons) Tin (tons) Nickel (tons) Coal (tons) Oil (tons) Mortar shells (units)

NKVD

315 14 398 6 511

8 924000 407 000

30200000

USSR NKVD % of national output

11 804 49 400 13.0

441 500 000 2.0 91 300 000 0.5

233 125 400 13.0

Note: Clearly there is some discrepancy in the figures for output of tin. The NKVD share could not have exceeded national output, but we can conclude from these figures that it was probably around 100 per cent of it.

Sources: V. F. Nekrasov, 'Desyat' zheleznykh narkomov', Komsomolskaya pravda, 29 September 1989, p. 4; Narodnoe khozyaistvo SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine 1941-45; Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History, f.71, op.25, d.7882, 1.17-8.

occupied by Dal' stroi makes up a quarter of the potential gold re­serves to be found in all the capitalist countries' .47

Despite the difficulties in obtaining the data necessary for a com­plete comparison of Gulag and non-Gulag output, however, informa­tion obtained from Russian sources since the collapse of the Soviet Union have at least made a partial comparison possible. In Table 7.8 some sense of scale is gained by a comparison of Gulag output with national output for a range of products.

8 Life in the Gulag at War

The particular circumstances of war changed various aspects of the Soviet forced labour system. Administrative and structural changes, a decline in the number of inmates, shifts in economic priorities; all of these have been discussed in preceding chapters. By their very nature, such topics tend towards an impersonal approach which, in contrast to memoir material, pays scant attention to the experiences of individ­uals. The use of official archive material further encourages this tend­ency, as the records of the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies naturally concentrated on pan-Gulag data and de­scription. Nonetheless, the war did of course bring changes to the daily life of individuals in the camp. Furthermore, such changes can be per­ceived from the perusal of archival material.

In previously closed archives, data can be found which give the be­ginnings of a statistical base to memoir material detailing the living conditions endured by inmates of the Gulag. In particular, it is only from such sources that the official attitude to worsening camp condi­tions during the war can be detected. As well as a decline in living standards, changes in the make-up of camp personnel no doubt af­fected the atmosphere of daily life in the camps during World War II. The demands of war meant that, medical and security considerations allowing, many men of call-up age left forced labour establishments for the armed forces. The Gulag guard and inmate contingents alike were affected by this exodus, and the age and gender profile of those who were imprisoned in or guarded Soviet forced labour establish­ments was transformed.

As a result of the circumstances of war, therefore, conditions in the Gulag deteriorated, and the make-up of the guard and prisoner bodies altered. Furthermore, the arrest and release patterns of the war years led to a greater concentration of non-Russian and of more hardened anti-communist prisoners in the camps. Members of nationalities deemed suspect from the point of view of national security were singled out for possible arrest by NKVD Decree No. 221, dated 22 June 1941,1

and when it came to the release of prisoners into the armed forces, those zeky deemed politically unreliable remained in the camps. A com­bination of all these changes in the daily round of camp life, along with the real possibility in the early stages of the war that the Soviet

145

146 The Gulag at War

Union might collapse under the Nazi assault, contributed to a further wartime development in the atmosphere of the Gulag. During these years there was a rise in cases of unrest amongst prisoners, and a consequent tightening of security on the part of the authorities.

This final chapter therefore details the effect of the war on life in the camps, chiefly using official archival material. Of course, the cen­tral records of the Gulag lack the emotive force of memoir accounts, and those seeking to see life in the camps from inside the mind of an inmate must seek elsewhere. 2 Nonetheless, the account given below of growing revolt in the Gulag during the war does draw on memoir material so far unpublished in the West. The final part of the chapter offers a few broad conclusions to the research set forth in the present work, dealing chiefly with the new insights which even limited access to the archives of the Gulag have given, and placing them in the context of the academic discipline of 'Gulag studies'.

1. CONDITIONS

The Soviet people as a whole endured extreme hardships during the Second World War. If labour discipline and rationing were harsh for the population at large, however, they were doubly so in the Gulag. Prisoners in particular suffered from the effects of poor supplies, lack of sanitation, and extremely sub-standard medical provisions. The evi­dence of the archives reveals a number of measures which were taken to improve the conditions of the camps in the war years. Such meas­ures were always couched in terms of not wasting the labour resources which prisoners represented, rather than alleviating their suffering. Furthermore, decrees and directives could be issued far more easily than they could be fulfilled. As far as can be ascertained from the archive sources, they were rarely realised.

The outbreak of war brought the immediate problem for the Gulag of accommodating the three quarters of a million prisoners evacuated from the western regions of the USSR. Their arrival in more easterly camps and colonies led to serious overcrowding, which in turn saw declining standards of hygiene and the increasing incidence of epi­demics. In a retrospective lecture to NVKD guards in 1946, the Gulag Chief, Nasedkin, noted the seriousness of the situation: Urgent meas­ures were necessary to improve the living conditions of prisoners, and to improve their physical well-being.3 These urgent measures took the form of a series of orders and directives issued by the NKVD to the

Life in the Gulag at War 147

heads of camps and colonies ordering them to improve the state of the camp sector. The difficulty came, of course, in finding the means necess­ary to obey these edicts from above, which were not accompanied by promises of increased supplies. One such order, Beria's Directive No.23 of 24 January 1941, instructed those in charge of the local OITK/UITLK corrective labour camps to make sure that there were fewer sick pris­oners, less overcrowding, and a better medical service. As the Gulag chief recalled, 'the People's Commissar [Beria] suggested that ... the conditions of camp life be improved . . . using all local resources for this purpose'. 4

The idea that 'local resources' be exploited outside of the central economic plan was a wartime measure not simply applied to the Gulag. In fact, several low-priority sectors of the economy had been encour­aged to increase output of consumer goods from such resources even before the war, as a method of maintaining supplies in the face of inconsistent and inflexible economy-wide plans. s This emphasis on the use of local resources was therefore not entirely an abrogation of re­sponsibility on the part of the central authorities, as the mobilisation in particular of agricultural resources did indeed produce results.6 None­theless, to a large extent it represented the acknowlegement of a prob­lem without offering much of a solution.

What the archive sources cite as the most significant wartime order on the improvement of camp conditions was issued by Beria's deputy, Kruglov, in 1941. He made the same demands as his superior, with regard to increasing the standard of living conditions in the locally administered camps. Prisoners were to be given hot meals in a dinner break at the enterprise where they worked. Rations were to be increased by 'the local procurement of products, the gathering of wild berries, and the creation of market gardens' .1 The emphasis of the decree fell again on production rather than prisoners, although of course there was to some extent a coincidence of interests. Conditions were to be improved as a reward for those prisoners exceeding work norms, and in order to stimulate highly productive labour.

Evidently, therefore, the central Gulag authorities were aware that conditions in the camps fell short of those suited to maximising the forced labour potential of prisoners; but the measures taken to allevi­ate the situation had limited effect. Nominal rations increased in 1943 and 1944, and decrees granted that workers in the far north should receive rations one third above the norm, and those in defence enter­prises or the oil and coal industries should benefit from rations one quarter above the norm. However, decrees did not find expression in

148 The Gulag at War

reality. The official report on the work of the Gulag during World War II notes that, even with these extra rations, the food norms at the end of the war had a calorific value 30 per cent below that of pre-war rations.8 It makes no mention of the extent to which norms went underfulfilled, but memoirs tell of famine in the camps especially dur­ing 1941 and 1942.9

The Gulag authorities rationed out food according to the amount of work performed by each prisoner. Memoir information regarding the food allocations for various categories in a northern Russian camp during the first winter of the war stated that those prisoners failing to achieve the output norm received thin soup twice a day, and 400 grams (about 14 ounces) of bread per day. This allocation applied to prisoners classified as invalids. For zeky achieving the output norm there was an extra 300 grams of bread, and those overfulfilling the norm received 900 grams of bread and a small piece of fish or meat. 10 Such figures come, of course, from some of the most difficult months of the war. Nonethe­less, there is agreement amongst many memoir sources that it was not until as late as 1948 that the 'Great Hunger' in the Gulag subsided. 11

The living conditions in Soviet forced labour establishments improved marginally as the war progressed, but remained appalling. Decrees and orders urging that camp conditions be improved continued throughout the war. NKVD Decree No. 0033 in 1943 declared that each prisoner should have two square metres of living space, but even this level of prisoner density could not be reached, and over a year after the issu­ing of Decree No. 0033, living space per prisoner was reckoned by the Gulag authorities to stand at 1.8 square metres. 12 In 1944, another NKVD Order, No. 00640, required again that the level of overcrowd­ing be diminished.

Perhaps the starkest measure of living conditions in the camps of the Gulag can be gained from a consideration of the mortality rates recorded in the camp archives, which rose from around 30 per thou­sand before the outbreak of war to a peak of over 250 per thousand in 1942 and 1943 (Table 8.2). Available archive data on Gulag mortality remains sparse and confused. There are differing totals available for the number of deaths administration by administration in 1942, which in turn leads to discrepant annual mortality rates. Furthermore, no fig­ures are yet available for the final year of the war. Nevertheless, in terms of the overall totals, the discrepancies remain relatively small, and the phenomenally high death rate in Gulag camps and colonies during the first three years of the war is evident.

Life in the Gulag at War

Table 8.1 Indicators of medical care in Gulag camps and colonies, 1941, 1943 and 1944 (on 1 January)

Number of hospital beds in Gulag Prisoners sick, % of total Hospital beds, % of sick prisoners

1941

40000 6.7

30.9

1943

165 000 22.0 50.5

1944

18.0

Sources: GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 ll.22-23; Table 2.1.

Table 8.2 Mortality rates in Gulag camps and colonies, 1941-44 (% of annual average population)

1941 1941 1942 1943 1944

149

(Jan-Jun) (Jui-Dec) (Jan-Jul) (Jan-May)

Camps Colonies

3.2 2.4

8.7 12.0

22.2 27.2

25.2 24.2

8.8 10.2

Note: All percentages are calculated from monthly mortality rate data. Of two available archive figures for camp deaths in 1942, the higher (d.ll81 1.21) has been used, as the lower (d.2784 1.87) omits deaths in the Dal'stroi camps. The 1944 figures are calculated from combined camps and colonies death totals January to May. They are expressed as a percentage of the 1 January camps and colonies population, with the overall mortality rate of 9.5 per cent adjusted between the camps and colonies in the average ratio of the preceding three years.

Sources: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.ll81 1.21; d. 1181 1.31; d.2784 11.87-8, 96.

2. INMATES

The number of inmates imprisoned in the various forced labour estab­lishments of the Gulag during the war has been discussed at length in previous chapters. 13 However, the fluctuation in prisoner numbers over these years does not reveal much about the nature of the prisoners who went to make up the millions passing through the camps. Declin­ing annual totals were combined with a high turnover of prisoners. A fall in camp population from 1 416 000 to 984 000 during 1942 does not detail the fact that almost two million prisoners found themselves in the camps for all or part of 1942. Similarly, the combined camps and colonies total for 1943 show a decline from 1.5 million to 1.2 million, but no less than 2 421 000 passed through camps and colonies in that year. 14

150 The Gulag at War

2.1 Gender

As the demands of war meant that an increasing number of eligible inmates were released into the armed forces, so the proportion of re­maining prisoners meeting the requirements for military service fell. One result of the transfer of men into the army was that the propor­tion of women in the camps increased. A second category of prisoners to experience a proportionate increase in their number was that of pris­oners sentenced for crimes which debarred them from military service.

The archives contain several detailed reports from the Head of the Department of Prisoner Registration and Distribution, Captain Granovskii, ennumerating those zeky who were male, between the ages of eighteen and forty, sentenced for non-political crimes, and physically fit for service in the armed forces. The Decrees of 1941 had yielded over 400 000 eligible prisoners for army service. Clearly after this first sweep the proportion of qualified prisoners decreased, and the proportion of women and those sentenced for political crimes increased.

At the beginning of the war, only 8 per cent of camp inmates were women. By 1945 this proportion had risen to 24 per cent. The proportion of women in colonies was higher still, and when these are taken into account, it becomes apparent that women made up 28 per cent of the camps and colonies population in 1945. No series of figures is yet available for the proportion of women amongst those held on Gulag Special Settlements. However, there was certainly a higher female-to­male ratio on these settlements than in camps and colonies, as entire families were often deported there together. A single figure for 1 Oc­tober 1941 shows that women made up 30 per cent of special settlers at that time. 15

2.2 Type of Crime

Similarly, the war years saw a rise in the proportion of prisoners serv­ing sentences for 'counter-revolutionary and other especially danger­ous crimes'. In 1941, 27 per cent of Gulag prisoners fitted into this category. By July 1944 the figure had risen to 43 per cent.

2.3 Age

The fact that a significant percentage of the Gulag population were not deemed eligible for release into the armed forces, coupled with the nature of the work demanded from forced labourers, meant that the

Life in the Gulag at War 151

Table 8.3 Female Gulag prisoners, 1941-45 (% of total)

1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 (1 Jan) (1 Jan) (1 Jan) (1 Jan) (1 Jan)

Camps 7.6 9.2 13.1 18.8 24.0 Colonies 28.1 37.7 38.0

Total 17.3 24.9 28.4

Note: The archives offer other figures which are slightly inconsistent with the trend in Table 8.3. They state that on 1 November 1942 out of 1 050 000 camp inmates, 210 000 (20 per cent) were female, and out of 450 000 colony inmates, 90000 (20 per cent) were female. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.1181 1.13.

Sources: V. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit' - GULAG (istoriko­sotsiologicheskii aspekt)', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 6 (1991) p. 23.

Table 8.4 Gulag population by age, 1940 and 1943 (%)

Age

Under 17/18 17/18 to 50 Over 50 Not known

1 March 1940

1.2 89.1

9.7

1 August 1943

2.2 87.3

8.8 2.7

Note: The figures for 1940 give the percentage of prisoners under 18 on the date in question. For 1943, the percentage under 17 is given.

Sources: V. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit'- GULAG (istoriko­sotsiologicheskii aspekt)', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 6 (1991) p. 14; GARF f.9414 op.l d.ll81 1.53.

prisoner contingent continued to be overwhelmingly dominated by those aged between eighteen and fifty. In 1940, almost 90 per cent of the population fitted into this age range. In 1943 the percentage had scarcely changed, although the small proportion of inmates under the age of seventeen had almost doubled (Table 8.4).

2.4 Nationality

The largest nationality group in the Gulag camps was of course Rus­sians, who, according to figures published by a Russian historian in 1991, made up around 60 per cent of the population throughout the

152 The Gulag at War

war .16 Unfortunately, figures for the division of nationalities in the locally administered OITK/UITLK camps and colonies are not yet available. The data presented, apparently from an archival source, by the Russian historian V. N. Zemskov are used as the basis for the selected percentages shown in Table 8.5. They are the only compre­hensive data available, and as percentages they give an idea of which nationality groups showed proportionate growth in the Gulag during the war. However, the totals which Zemskov offered do not tally with other archival documents.

The main discrepant case in point concerns the number of Soviet citizens of German nationality in the camps during the war. Table 8.5 shows 2 per cent of the Gulag population in January 1943 to have been of German nationality. This is based on a total of 20 000 Ger­mans in the camps at that time. However, other archival sources report a figure of 122 000 Soviet Germans in Gulag camps on the same date (Table 6.1 ). The discrepancy is explained by the fact that those Ger­mans mobilised during the war - the 122 000 - were counted sep­arately from the Gulag camp totals. 17

The difficulty to be found in reconciling two separate archival sources concerning nationalities in the Gulag raises the possibility that other groups, apart from the Soviet Germans, are misrepresented in Table 8.5. Such a possibility cannot be discounted. However, no record has yet been found in the Gulag archives of any other nationality group being counted separately from the camp total. Whether the total fig­ures on which the table is based are sufficiently exact or not, a survey of the nationality data presented nonetheless reveals an increase in the proportion of camp inmates belonging to those nationalities perceived by the authorities as suspect during the war. The proportion of Baits in the camps doubled during 1941, and the number of Romanian in­mates increased threefold. 18

3. GULAG EMPLOYEES

The shortage of labour in the Soviet Union during World War II meant more for the Gulag than a decline in the number of prisoners available for forced labour, and a concomitant increase in the relative import­ance of the prisoner workforce. Guards and other Gulag personnel also became increasingly difficult to come by, as the demands of army call­ups swept away most of the contingent of NKVD guards who had begun the war upholding the regime of camps and colonies across the

Life in the Gulag at War 153

Table 8.5 Nationality of prisoners in the Gulag camps, 1941-45, 1 January (% of total)

1941 1942 1943 1944 1945

Russians 59.0 58.9 61.0 60.9 57.5 Ukrainians 12.6 12.7 11.6 11.1 12.0 Central Asians 6.2 6.9 6.9 6.0 6.0 Belorussians 3.5 3.2 2.6 2.3 2.2 Transcaucasians 2.2 2.1 2.1 2.3 2.3 Jews 2.1 1.6 2.1 2.3 2.0 Poles 2.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.2 Germans 1.3 1.4 1.9 3.0 3.1 Baits 0.6 1.2 1.3 1.3 1.1 Finns 0.2 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 Others 10.3 10.6 9.0 9.2 12.3

Source: v. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit' - Gulag (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt)', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 6 (1991) pp. 17 and 26.

Soviet Union. The camp guards represented choice recruits for the military. They had been placed under the Red Army's Code of Disci­pline before the outbreak of war, albeit only from 11 March 1941.19

Furthermore, the camp guards were, in the words of the archives, the 'militarised defence' of the Gulag. These recruits would need no basic training in military procedure nor in the handling of arms. The pre­war guard contingent consisted of men of prime call-up age, who were all but ready to be thrown into the front line. It can scarcely have been a shock to the Gulag authorities, therefore, to find that during the first eighteen months of the war they lost 93 500 guards to the Red Army. This loss represented 69 per cent of the total contingent of 135 000 guards in 1941. In addition, a further 23 500 Gulag personnel from outside of the guard contingent were drafted into the army be­tween 1941 and 1944.20

As a consequence of the transfer of Gulag employees into the military, the primary task of both the central and local Gulag personnel depart­ments during the war consisted of searching for employees to replace those called up. Given the demand for able-bodied men in the military and in defence-related jobs of higher priority than guarding zeky, the main sources of new recruits were women, and former servicemen invalided out of the armed forces. Without offering a pre-war figure, archival sources state that by the middle of 1944, some 31 per cent of the administrative staff of the Gulag camps and colonies were female. 21

154 The Gulag at War

Even allowing for the recruitment of women and ex-soldiers. the forced labour system of the Soviet Union remained understaffed - ac­cording to its own definition of the word - throughout the war years. An internal investigation into staffing levels on 1 July 1944 declared that the number of unfilled vacancies stood at 13 000, or 15 per cent of the total number of employees. It may be, of course, that the case for new workers was being deliberately exaggerated in the report cited, as it was written within the Gulag administration for the attention of the NKVD heirarchy. Nonetheless, the circumstances of war and the evidence of archives regarding the make-up of Gulag staff make it plain that there was a shortage of staff in the forced labour system during the war.

Of the personnel who were employed in the Gulag system in the first half of the 1940s, 19 per cent were members or candidate mem­bers of the Communist Party or Komsomol. Of the top posts, how­ever, 88 per cent were occupied by Party members. A majority of employees (68 per cent) were of Russian nationality, with the second largest national contingent comprising the 12 per cent of employees who were Ukrainian. The high wartime turnover of staff, as well as prisoners, can be demonstrated from archive data detailing the length of service of employees. Almost 80 per cent of the Gulag staff at the end of the war had joined during the war, and only 8 per cent had served five years or over in their posts, though of course amongst the leading personnel the number of long-servers reached significantly higher proportions, with two thirds of management positions filled by those with more than seven years' NKVD service.

The high intake of new personnel meant that many of the Gulag's wartime employees were ill-prepared for their new tasks, in terms of both physical condition and possession of the requisite skills. During 1943 and 1944, • special schools were organised for the training of staff in the special skills of the camp sector'. These schools, along with other NKVD courses, had trained around 10 000 new recruits within just over a year of their existence, including 2400 senior and middle­ranking guard officers, 3200 junior guard officers, 850 heads of camp sub-divisions, and 2800 members of the Gulag inspectorate.

4. POLICING THE INMATES

In the discussion of the living conditions experienced by Gulag pris­oners, attention has been drawn to the perspective from which the

Life in the Gulag at War 155

authorities viewed such matters as high mortality and the widespread incidence of disease. They were considered in the light of their effect on the central tasks of the forced labour network. The primary tasks, as has been noted, were economic. However, the aims of the Gulag authorities also stressed, before the production and construction tasks of the camp system, the role of the Gulag as a regime to reinforce the isolation of prisoners. This task, too, motivated the improvement of conditions, though clearly not to the same extent as economic targets. Indeed, Beria suggested that if the conditions of the early months of the war were allowed to continue, prisoners might be driven to crimi­nal activities.23

According to the archive sources, from the earliest days of the war, anti-Soviet activity increased amongst those serving sentences in forced labour establishments. Such activity took the form of setting up insur­rectionist organisations, preparing individual or group armed break­outs, conducting fascist agitation, sabotage at the place of labour, and an increase in the number of criminal, as opposed to political, misde­meanours. In order to meet the perceived threat of unrest in the camps, a series of steps were taken. The network of informers existing within the Gulag was widened, and unspecified 'operative measures' were enacted to prevent anti-Soviet and hostile acts from being carried out.24

In January 1942, the Vorkuta camp group experienced the first armed uprising recorded in Gulag history. This revolt originated in a small camp near the town of Ust-Usy in the Komi Republic, and was insti­gated by a group of guards, who then enlisted the support of prisoners. The overall leader of the uprising was the camp chief, and former prisoner, Mark Retiunin, and his position greatly facilitated the seiz­ing of the camp and the overpowering of any opposing guards. Sub­sequently a group of over a hundred rebels made their way towards the town of Kozhva, which was served by a railway, seizing ammunition and provisions from settlements en route. The mutineers were on foot, deep in inhospitable Soviet territory, and faced with the might of the authorities, who sent two armed detachments in pursuit, and even brought in aeroplanes against them. In a series of skirmishes, with high casu­alties reported on both sides, the mutineers were split into ever smaller groups, and by early March all had been killed or recaptured. 25

The precise reasons behind the revolt are difficult to establish, but the events of war clearly lay at the root. After an official investiga­tion, the Gulag authorities concluded that the mutineers aimed to set up a fascist regime and unite the territory which they had seized with that of Germany or Finland. In the camps, on the other hand, it was

156 The Gulag at War

said that Retiunin and his band had instead intended to get to the front in order to fight against the Nazis. A further explanation offered dur­ing the official investigation was that the confusion and fear brought about by news from the front created a sense of impotence amongst prisoners and Gulag guards alike. The defeat of the Soviet Union seemed possible, and rumours circulated that when this possibility became a probability then most of the Gulag prisoners would be shot. Conse­quently, potential insurrectionists felt, first, that they had little to lose in launching an uprising and, second, that the Soviet regime was in a weakened state and therefore vulnerable to organised revolt.

Partly as response to the Vorkuta revolt, an NKVD directive was issued on 20 August 1942, 'On the intensification of counter-revol­utionary manifestations in the NKVD Corrective Labour Camps', which called for the immediate arrest and further isolation within the camps of suspect prisoners. 26 This tightening of internal security relied heavily on informers in the Gulag.

The NKVD network of informers within the camps operated amongst both inmates and staff. At the beginning of the war, the Gulag auth­orities reckoned that almost one in every fifty inmates or employees operated as an informer, or was even a paid member of the security service. Such a ratio did not satisfy the requirements for heightened vigilance which were necessitated by invasion, and the threat of the collapse of the regime. Immediately, therefore, more informers and agents were recruited, usually by means of material enticement, per­haps combined in appropriate cases with an appeal to patriotism in the face of the Nazi threat. Consequently, the archives record that by 1 June 1944, 63 646 - or one in every twelve people in the camps -operated as part of the network of informers.

The work of the camp authorities and their informers led to the in­camp arrest of 150 000 inmates or staff of the Gulag camps and col­onies in the three years following the outbreak of war.27 According to archive sources quoted elsewhere, the total number of prisoners con­victed for offences whilst serving their sentences during the war amounted to 225 877.28 In most of the cases, the offence, though not necessarily the motive, was non-political, such as theft or escaping. Nonetheless, a sizeable proportion - one tenth - of the in-camp arrests were for anti-Soviet agitation (Table 8.6). Fourteen per cent of those arrested were not even prisoners, but camp personnel. In 1943 the number of arrests began to fall, from an average of 4750 per month in 1942 to around 3900 per month. Also from 1943, the incidence of 'counter­revolutionary crimes' as a proportion of the whole fell. 29

Life in the Gulag at War 157

Table 8.6 Offences of which Gulag inmates and personnel were convicted within the camps, June 1941 to June 1944

Escape (attempted and recaptured) Property, financial and labour offences Anti-Soviet agitation Refusal to work Insurrection Sabotage Terrorism Spying

Source: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.35.

43064 21 667 15 082 13 256 6 016 3 920

387 208

To list the offences for which Gulag prisoners and personnel were convicted is not to acknowledge their guilt. Just as millions found them­selves in the Gulag through no fault of their own, so no doubt a fair proportion of those convicted again within the camps were selected as sacrifices to the purposes of the Soviet state, rather than as a result of their own actions. Experts of the Vozvrashchenie (Return) Historico­Literary Society point to the high probability of individuals in various camps being selected for further punishment by officials in Moscow, and then having evidence against them fabricated by informers. 30

At such a temporal and geographical remove from events and from any relevant evidence which remains, the possibility of proving the fraudulence or otherwise of individual cases scarcely exists. Nonethe­less, particular instances do on one level seem to have been convenient for the Soviet regime. For example, the Soviet policy of removing local opposition in the newly acquired Baltic Republics was aided when the former Estonian Defence Minister and his Chief of Staff were found guilty of forming a military-fascist organisation. This case becomes still more suspicious when it is noted that an almost identical charge later led to the executions of former leading Latvian officers in the Noril'sk camp, although of course it may be argued that if any indi­viduals were likely to engage in anti-Soviet activity, these were they.

The first case occurred at the Usol'skii ULLP camp in 1942. Sev­eral leading Estonian military men and political activists in right-wing Estonian parties were found guilty of leading a 150-strong fascist or­ganisation, and of planning an armed uprising, in which the staff of the camp would be imprisoned and then radio contact would be made with German troops. According to the charges brought against these Estonian prisoners. they then intended to ask the Germans to send an

158 The Gulag at War

airborne assault force to their aid.31 The Usol'skii camp was situated at Solikamsk, north-east of Perm' and about 800 miles from the Nazi front line.

The case of the Latvian officers executed at Noril'sk in 1944 was on a much smaller scale, involving thirteen men. These, however, were by no means the only cases of criminal organisations apparently being discovered, and their members executed. In all, between 1941 and 1944, 603 such groups, consisting of 4640 participants, were 'liquidated'.32

In the Tagilstroi camp in 1942, a group of eleven Cossacks was convicted of nationalist insurrection, having - it was claimed - planned an armed breakout and flight to the Transcaucasus and Kazakhstan, where the eleven would carry out agitation amongst the population. As might have been expected, such organisations were also found amongst the mobilised German contingents. At the Chelyabinsk metallurgical combine in 1943, thirty-two Germans were found guilty of belonging to a group bent on insurrection, including the former First and Second Secretaries of the Krasnoyarsk Communist Party. In the same year, thirty-one Romanians found themselves arrested, and almost certainly executed, for belonging to a rebel fascist group, the 'Iron Guard'.

Not all of those found guilty of insurgence, however, belonged to anti-Russian nationalist groups. At the Omsk Corrective Labour Colony No.I in 1944, for example, an organisation called the 'Russian Society for Revenge on the Bolsheviks' was liquidated, and thereby a plan was apparently foiled to break out of the camp, capture the local NKVD headquarters, and then proceed along the River lrtysh to Tobol'sk, rousing anti-Bolshevik feeling amongst the population en route. Nine men were convicted.

As well as foiled insurrections, another important category of in­camp crime highlighted by the Gulag authorities was sabotage and wrecking. As with the prevention of armed uprisings, arrests for at­tempted sabotage often involved the discovery of groups of saboteurs. The executions of seven prisoners at the Aktyubinsk camp in 1943 were said to have put paid to plans for an armed break-out in order to carry out acts of sabotage on the Tashkent-to-Kuibyshev railway line.33

At the Solikamsk camp in 1943, two of the mobilised German forced labour contingent - by the names of Saidel' and Gerin - were con­victed of plotting an explosion in the mines at the Solikamsk potass­ium combine.

The largest category of prisoners rearrested whilst serving their sen­tences consisted of those charged with planning an escape attempt, and those caught after having escaped. The number in the first of these

Life in the Gulag at War 159

categories exceeded the number in the second. The archive figures on the precise number of escapes and escape attempts during the war re­main contradictory, even within the same document. According to the data in Table 8.6, 43 000 prisoners were convicted of escape or at­tempted escape between June 1941 and June 1944. However, the same archival source as that used for the Table 8.6, also claims that in the two years from July 1942 to July 1944, 46 000 escape attempts were uncovered. The discrepancy could be explained if not all potential es­capees were formally convicted, or if they were charged under another category, such as anti-Soviet activity. Perhaps, too, some prisoners took part in more than one escape attempt.

Escape statistics presented elsewhere in the Gulag archives reveal further confusion over the precise number of prisoners able to flee from their places of confinement during the war years. A document compiled by the Gulag Chief, Nasedkin, for the First Special Depart­ment of the NKVD in 1944 gave the following data:34

Escape attempts prevented successful

1942

27 246 19 382 8 072

1943

14 881 12 110 2 777

1944 (Jan-May)

2 800 1 688 1 112

These data are the most comprehensive available on wartime es­capes from the camps and colonies Gulag. However, their total for the number of escapes in 1942 is over three and a half thousand lower than the total given for camps alone in the 1942 throughput data con­sidered elsewhere.35 Clearly the ease, or otherwise, with which zeky could escape from the Gulag during the war must remain unclear de­spite access to official statistics. The archives do not answer all our questions.

* * * CONCLUSIONS

The archival material revealed for the first time in the present work throws a new light on many aspects of the Soviet forced labour sys­tem under Stalin, as well as revealing an area of the social history of

160 The Gulag at War

World War II which has previously received scant attention. From the official prose and statistics of those who ran the Gulag, it has been possible to consider the development of the camp network over several decades - investigating the ideological, social and economic motives driving its expansion and maintenance - as well as to study in more depth the period between 1941 and 1945, ascertaining thereby both the effect of war upon the Gulag and the contribution of forced labourers to the Soviet, and therefore the Allied, victory over the Nazi regime.

With regard to the development of the Gulag system of forced labour, it is apparent that ideology and economic motives both played a vital role. The archival sources repeatedly stated that production and output were not all that the Gulag was concerned with. It was emphasised that 'The Gulag is not an economic trust, but an organ of the NKVD', and the basic tasks of the camp network outlined in Chapter 7 began with a commitment to the isolation of anti-Soviet elements from society.36

Nonetheless, even this repeated assertion, that the Gulag was about more than providing cheap labour for difficult tasks in inhospitable regions, perversely serves to emphasise the importance of the economic tasks of the camp system. The specific denial to NKVD officials that the Gulag was an economic trust, suggests that there was a widely held impression that economic functions were indeed the raison d' etre for the camps. Similarly, the list of four basic tasks, although starting with the penal role of the forced labour establishments, was otherwise made up of labour-related declarations.

The archival sources surveyed in the present work suggest that ideo­logical factors decreased in importance as the size, and economic role, of the Gulag increased. In the late 1920s, Yagoda's proposals for the development of forced labour drew on the Bolshevik ideal of abolish­ing prisons, and the RSFSR Corrective Labour Codex declared that the role of the Gulag was 'to defend the dictatorship of the prolet­ariat . . . from encroachment by class enemies'. 37

However, as the NKVD began to be given ever greater tasks in the economic plans of the 1930s and beyond, so the organisation of forced labour and the conscription of zeky began to be driven by the need for labour resources, despite the fact that other areas of the economy in­evitably suffered from the removal of workers. The archival sources reveal that, by the early 1940s, the administrative reorganisation of the camps into managerial Main Administrations was motivated solely by the desire for economic efficiency.

The demands of war further emphasised the role of forced labour in production and construction. However, throughout these years, depart-

Life in the Gulag at War 161

ments within the Gulag existed with responsibility for the ideological re-education of inmates. Furthermore, the level of executions and deaths in the camps suggests that the simple provision of a large labour force, although the main factor behind the maintenance of the Gulag, existed alongside a more complex array of circumstances involved in the sub­jugation of Soviet society to the ideals and person of Stalin.

In terms of new facts, the details of Gulag administration presented here reveal the complexities behind the organisation of a vast system of forced labour establishments. Through this information, distinctions can now be made between the central core of Gulag camps, with which the bulk of memoir material published over the past few decades was concerned, and the variety of local and republican camps, colonies and settlements which existed across the Soviet Union. Whilst the core of camps and camp groups under the direct central control of the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies consisted of around fifty to sixty during the war years, there were also around a thousand smaller camp subdivisions and colonies. By the end of the war, the population of the latter exceeded that of the former.39

With regard to the events of war, the archival sources reveal stat­istical details behind phenomena already fairly well known, such as evacuation and the release of prisoners into the armed forces. Of par­ticular interest are the data on the number of Soviet soldiers and POWs returning from Nazi control and then being incarcerated in the Gulag. Most of those returning passed through Verification and Filtration Camps, of these it seems that less than half must have gone on into the Gulag proper.40

The opening archives of the former Soviet state also disclose war­time events not mentioned in most histories of World War II. They detail the execution of Baltic leaders in Soviet camps. They provide, too, an account of how the Gulag was exported to Germany, and the former Nazi concentration camps of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen were used by the Soviet authorities after the defeat of the Nazis.

Furthermore, a mass of population and production figures reveal the high turnover of prisoners in Soviet forced labour establishments dur­ing the war, and the contribution of these zeky to the Soviet war effort through such tasks as ammunition production, the construction and repair of factories, railways and roads, and the exploitation of natural re­sources. Although the demands for forced labour in the Soviet economy intensified during the war, as conscription into the armed forces and the German occupation of vast tracts of Soviet territory made human resources ever more scarce, the conditions under which the camps had

162 The Gulag at War

to survive meant that up to a third of the potential workforce was unfit for work at the height of the war.

The question of the conditions faced by prisoners of the Gulag dur­ing the war years has been addressed in several places in the preced­ing chapters, in particular with reference to the nature of memoir material, and to the labour-use of prisoners. In contrast to the memoirs of former prisoners, which often discussed the conditions of incarceration and forced labour, the nature of the source material for the present work did not tend to emphasise the difficulties faced by prisoners. Certainly, official archive material is wholly inferior to memoirs when it comes to recording the emotions of the Gulag. Anguish and despair do not readily lend themselves to the statistics of registration and labour records. Nor did they find an outlet in the 'everything-for-the-Party/plan/front' official prose accounts of Stalin's forced labour network. The feelings of zeky were of little relevance to the record-keepers of the Gulag, and their physical well-being only became germane when it could be translated into working-days lost and workers expiring.

It is in this area of the physical well-being of Gulag inmates, how­ever, that the archive material does hold one advantage over memoirs; it quantifies the negative results of the horrific conditions in the camps by means of disease and mortality data. The memoir can get to the heart of the issue, but official records give cold statistics and measure­ments of scope.41

The archival data on labour-use serve as an example of the sort of information which can be gained from official statistics. From these data, comparisons between different camp groups of the proportion of inmates sick and not working can be gained. The data also divided forced labourers into those capable of heavy, medium or light labour, and those incapable of any work at all.42 From such information, some form of comparative measurement can be applied to impressions of camp life gained from memoirs.

The archival information does not supplant memoir material. It ex­pands upon it. Without the writings of those who endured the Gulag, its horrors would still remain largely unknown. From archives come the data and the impressions of oppressors. They are best considered alongside the accounts and the impressions of the oppressed, in the light of which the archives become an invaluable addition to our under­standing of the Soviet forced labour system.

Appendix A: Additional Tables Table A.l Camps of the Main Administration of Railway Construction

(GULZhDS), 1942-44

Camp Population

1942 1943 1944 (Quarter) (1 May) (Quarter)

1. Altai 1 268 4470 (III) 2. Bureya 37 503 (III) 3. lnta 6987 (IV) 6206 4. Karagandaugol' 1 536 (II) 5. Kotlas otd. 3 922 (IV) 8 107 4 822 (III) 6. Nizhne Amursk

(HQ: Komsomolsk-na-Amure) 67 742 (IV) 46454 28 073 (Ill) 7. Nizhne Volga 29109 (IV) 17 939 8 081 (III) 8. Povorovo 654 (IV) 9. Rozhny 9740 (IV)

10. Saratov 30792 (Oct) 11. Severnaya Dvina (HQ: Kot1as) 22 163 (IV) 15 414 7 619 (III) 12. Severnaya Pechora 62 790 (IV) 48984 27 789 (Ill) 13. Sevzhe1dor1ag 31 872 (IV) 22 745 12 809 (Ill) 14. Shirokovsk 129 15. Soroka 19 298 (I) 16. Stroitel'stvo 107 10 693 (I) 17. Stroitel' stvo 108 5 065 (IV) 18. Ukhta-lzhma 22 385 (IV) 18 772 19. Verkhne-lzhma 4456 (II) 20. Volga (HQ: Rybinsk) 2 250 (IV) 1 176 21. Vorkutstroi 26492 (IV) 25037 22. Vostochnyi 19 046 (IV) 23. Yuzhlag 8 316 (Oct) 8 345

Total 396 510 220 576 119 964

Source: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.ll77; d.l181 1.37; d.1213 11.1-13.

163

164 Appendix A

Table A.2 Camps of the Main Administration for Camps of Industrial Construction (Glavpromstroi), 1942-44

Camp Population

1942 1943 1944 (Oct) (/May) (Quarter)

1. Akhbumlag 2099 I 863 (III) 2. Aktyubinsk kombinat 17 347 (Oct) 12 146 8 805 (III) 3. Bakal'stroi 50 (Oct) I I 4. Bogoslav 16 357 (Oct) 9 083 II 874 (III) 5. Chapaevsk 1465 (III) 6. Che1yabmetallurg. 10 010 (IV) 7. Chemoistochinsk 1 555 8. Khiminsk 2 833 (III) 9. Lobva 2 319 I 921 (III)

10. Nizhne Tagil'stroi 53 700 (Oct) 32 217 11. Oloksk 2 855 (IV) 12. Omsk 7 470 (Oct) 13. Ponyshsk GES 1 256 1860 (III) 14. Rybinsk 22 193 (III) 15. Shirokovsk 3 912 (IV) 16. Solikamburstroi 7 442 (Oct) 4 031 2594 (IV) 17. Sovetskaya Gavan' 1 990 (Oct) 1 370 18. Stroitel'stvo 201 3 233 (Oct) 19. Tagilstroi 18 946 (III) 20. Tavda 2 186 (Oct) 5 080 3 671 (III) 21. Yagry 15 109 (Oct) 4 719 5 293 (III) 22. Zakavkazmetallurg. 8404 (IV) 23. Zavod 8 9686 (Oct)

Total 134 570 15 886 108499

Source: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.ll81 11.7 and 37; d.l212 ll.1-18.

Additional Tables 165

Table A.3 Camps of the Main Administration for Camps of the Mining and Metallurgical Industry (GULGMP), 1942-44

Camp Population

1942 1943 1944 (Quarter) (I May) (Quarter)

I. Bukachacha 4448 (II) 2. Dzhezkagan 11 443 (IV) 9 277 3. Dzhidastroi 6 759 (IV) 5 921 9702 (IV) 4. Gusinoozersk 2 013 (I) 5. lnta 6987 (IV) 6206 8 799 (III) 6. Krasn. affin. zavod 1 945 (IV) 1 311 1 086 (IV) 7. Noril'sk 30 953 (IV) 29 803 30 399 (III) 8. Raichikhinsk 3 304 (IV) 9. Tymyauzsk 2 059 (II) 3 859 (IV)

10. Ukhtoizhemsk 13 366 (III) 11. Umal'tinsk 2445 (IV) 12. Vorkutstroi 24 839 (III)

Total 72 356 52 518 92050

Source: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.ll75 11.1-9; d.1181 1.37; d.1211ll.l-8.

Table A.4 Camps of the Administration for Camps of the Timber Industry (ULLP), 1942-44

Camp Population

1942 1943 1944 (Quarter) (1 May) (Quarter)

1 . Bereznyakov 2035 (IV) 2. Ivde1' 17 778 (IV) 12 172 15 535 (III) 3. Kargopol' 26260 (IV) 22 682 17 809 (IV) 4. Kraslag (HQ: Kansk) 16 342 (IV) 14 651 12 205 (III) 5. Onega (HQ: Plesetsk) 14 920 (II) 6. Severoural'sk 9 379 (IV) 8 084 6 613 (III) 7. Unzha (HQ: Sukhobezvodnoe) 23 842 (IV) 21 241 19040 (III) 8. Usol'e (HQ: Solikamsk) 26 519 (IV) 20677 23 123 (III) 9. Ust'ym 24 146 (IV) 19 162 13 083 (III)

10. Vostural'sk 12 403 (IV) 11 013 8 262 (III) 11. Vyatka (HQ: Volosnitsa) 15 138 (IV) 14 653 12 684 (III)

Total 188 762 144 335 128 354

Source: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.ll74 ll.l-11; d.ll81 1.36; d.1210 11.1-10.

166 Appendix A

Table A.5 Camps of the Dal' stroi; Osobstroi; Main Administration of Road Construction (GUShosDor), 1942-44

Camp Population

1942 1943 1944 (Quarter) (1 May) (Quarter)

I. Aldanstroi (Dal'stroi) 3 298 (IV) 2. Bezymyansk (Osobstroi) 35 128 (IV) 16 863 7 191 (IV) 3. Primorsk (Dal'stroi) 3 938 (IV) 2 684 4 338 (III) 4. Sevvostochnyi (Dal'stroi) 103 391 (IV) 90 843 79 856 (III) 5. Str-vo 1 (GUShosDor) 7 646 5 892 (III) 6. Str-vo 2 (GUShosDor) 4932 (III) 7. Str-vo 3 (GUShosDor) 4 119 (III) 8. Str-vo 4 (GUShosDor) 231 (III) 9. Vyazemsk (GUShosDor) 9540 (IV)

10. Yansky (Dal'stroi) 1 642 (IV) I 583 I 384 (I)

Total 156 937 119 619 107 943

Source: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.ll73 11.6-7; d.l178 11.1-8; d.ll81 1.37; d.1214 11.1-11.

Table A.6 Camps of the Administration of Corrective Labour Colonies (upravlenie ispravitel'no-trudovykh kolonii - UITK), 1942-44

Camp Population

1942 1943 1944 (Quarter) (1 May) (Quarter)

I . Astrakhan 7 139 (IV) 4 927 5 329 (IV) 2. Eniseilag (UITLK Krasnoyar kr.) 14 087 (IV) 3. Kamensk 5 572 4 871 (II) 4. Karaginsk 43 160 (IV) 39 340 51 279 (IV) 5. Khabalag (UITLK Khabar kr.) 22 857 (IV) 6. Novo-Kamensky 9 149 (IV) 7. Rybinsk 30362 (IV) 24 917 8. Sazlag (UITLK Uzbek. SSR) 36464 (IV) 9. Sibir' 31 997 (IV) 28 150 37 761 (IV)

I 0. Sredne-Belskii 4 816 (IV) 4094 4584 (IV) 11. Svobodnensk 12 436 (IV) 10494 6 531 (I) 12. Temnikovsk 15 706 (IV) 12 272 12 736 (IV) 13. Vlaglag (UITLK Primorskii kr.) 15 097 (IV)

Total 243 270 129 766 123 091

Source: GARF f.9414 op.l d.1173 ll.l-12; d.l18l 1.36; d.l209 11.1-7.

Additional Tables 167

Table A.1 Gulag camps inflow, 1934-47

Year From places of Recaptured Other Total imprisonment

1934 445 187 46 752 1 374 493 313 1935 409663 45 988 I 412 457 063 1936 431442 35 891 I 381 468 714 1937 636749 35 460 I 116 673 325 1938 806007 22 679 7 758 836 444 1939 383 994 9 838 7 398 401 230 1940 644927 8 839 6 237 660003 1941 840712 6 528 7 459 854 699 1942 544 583 4984 10 207 559 774 1943 355 728 3 074 4 221 363 023 1944 326 928 1 839 2 394 331 161 1945 361 121 953 2 136 364 210 1946 461 562 I 203 579 463 344 1947 624 345 I 599 I 043 626 987

Total 6 711 037 189 741 54 715 7 553 290

Source: V. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhipelag GULAG: glazami pisatelya i statistika' Argumenty i fakty, 45 (1989) pp. 6-7.

Table A.R Gulag camps outflow, 1934-47

Year To other places Freed Escaped Died Other Total of imprisonment

1934 17 169 147 272 83 490 26 295 I 298 275 524 1935 28 976 211 035 67 493 28 328 2 383 338 215 1936 23 826 369 544 58 313 20 595 I 832 474 110 1937 43 916 364 437 58 264 25 376 2 725 494 718 1938 55 790 279 966 32 033 90 546 16 536 474 871 1939 74 882 223 622 12 333 50502 13 651 374 990 1940 57 213 316 825 II 813 46665 6432 438 948 1941 135 537 624 276 10592 100 997 16 984 888 386 1942 186 577 509 538 II 822 248 877 12 917 969 731 1943 140 093 336 153 6 242 166 967 7 344 656 799 1944 39 303 152 131 3 586 60948 7 590 263 558 1945 70 187 336 750 2 196 43 848 6 105 459 086 1946 99 332 115 700 2642 18 154 9771 245 599 1947 58 782 194 886 3 779 35 668 2 338 295 453

Total 980 091 4 182 135 364 598 963 766 107 906 6 649 988

Source: V. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhipelag GULAG: glazami pisatelya i statistika'. Argumenty i fakty, 45 (1989) pp. 6-7.

168

1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947

Total

Appendix A

Table A.9 Intra-Gulag camp transfers, 1934-47

From NKVD camps

100 389 67 265

157 355 211 486 202 721 348 417 498 399 488 964 246 273 114 152 48 428 59 707

172 844 121 633

2 838 033

To NKVD camps

103 002 72 190

170 484 214 607 240466 347 444 563 338 540 205 252 174 140 756 64119 96438

182 647 153 899

3 141 769

Source: V. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhipelag GULAG: glazami pisatelya i statistika', Argumenty i fakty, 45 (1989) pp. 6-7.

Table A.lO Gulag camps inflow and outflow, 1942

UITK UUP GULGMP G/avpromstroi GULZhDS Dal'stroi GUShos Osobstroi Dor

Present on I January 308 593 274 243 65011 75 835 411228 242 666 8 676 Present on 31 December 243 ISS 173 790 53 737 Ill 911 286 764 141 501 9 330

Total added 251 273 106 756 37 645 150724 213 289 21 811 10943 Added from: camps 26 547 45966 I 575 29342 129944 2 907 prisons, colonies 215 518 55 334 33926 116015 75961 16 868 10 759 other places of confinement 4615 3 184 I 297 3 157 3 253 I 577 75 recaptured I 050 923 301 815 1404 412 52 other 3 543 I 349 546 I 395 2 727 137 57

Total leaving 325 192 210 654 49 516 122 597 345 633 114 254 II 179 Leaving to: camps 28 975 41992 2 573 18 686 120491 6 369 prisons, colonies 75 556 33 534 16965 22 250 20 589 9 992 I 991 freed ISO 236 61254 23 876 46706 144 346 74 258 6310 died 64216 71271 4594 31 913 50843 21 954 2656 escaped 2425 I 379 927 I 728 3 591 I 516 168 other 3 784 I 224 581 I 314 s 773 156 54

Source: GARF f.9414 op.I d.II81 1.21.

Additional Tables 169

Table A.ll Labour-use of Gulag camp workforce by managerial administration, 1940-44 (%)

U/TK ULLP GULGMP Glavpromstroi GULZhDS Dal'stroi Osobstroi Total

1940 (Average) Group A 76.3 72.7 79.7 83.6 76.4 79.4 76.4 Group B 6.5 9.0 7.0 6.8 8.7 6.5 7.8 Group C 8.6 12.4 8.1 5.1 9.0 7.8 9.4 Group D 8.6 5.9 5.8 3.9 5.9 6.3 6.4

1941 (Average) Group A 72.0 73.9 75.9 79.7 74.8 83.4 82.7 76.7 Group B 8.2 8.4 7.8 7.3 8.6 3.8 5.5 7.5 Group C 9.8 12.2 10.7 7.6 11.1 7.3 8.7 10.3 Group D 10.0 5.5 5.6 5.4 5.5 5.5 3.1 6.1

1942 (IV Quarter) Group A 67.8 67.0 77.7 68.8 64.2 83.1 71.8 69.2 Group B 8.3 8.8 6.4 9.1 8.6 3.8 6.0 7.8 Group C 17.8 20.0 11.1 19.9 22.7 9.8 20.7 18.6 Group D 6.1 4.1 4.8 2.2 4.5 3.3 I.S 4.4

1943 (Average) Group A 70.5 64.8 71.6 65.4 60.3 80.5 69.0 68.5 Group B 9.2 8.9 8.0 8.2 9.2 3.9 7.0 8.0 Group C 16.4 22.9 17.3 23.1 26.0 12.9 23.0 20.0 Group D 3.9 3.3 3.1 3.3 4.6 2.7 1.0 3.6

1944 (IV Quarter) Group A 74.9 72.2 77.2 73.1 71.8 81.6 83.9 74.8 Group B 9.0 10.4 8.5 6.7 8.6 3.9 5.6 8.0 Group C 10.2 12.9 11.8 18.7 16.3 12.2 9.6 13.6 Group D 5.9 4.5 2.4 1.5 3.3 2.3 0.9 3.5

Source: GARF f.9414 op.l dd.l773-1778; d.ll81 11.19. 36-38; d.ll91 11.1-11; dd.l209-1214.

170 Appendix A

Table A.l2 Gulag prisoners contracted out to other People's Commissariats, 1943-44

August January June 1943 /944 1944

Aviation industry 23 232 19676 14 867 Ammunitions 17 539 19472 17 896 Armaments II 674 12 150 II 534 Military fleet I 545 840 530 Agriculture 591 320 233 Procurement 470 919 I 108 Mixed state farms 4 953 I 825 I 677 Timber industry 10 195 11 329 8 324 Light industry I 523 I 627 1 616 Local industry I 343 I 818 I 807 Mortar industry 7 240 7 876 8 624 Merchant fleet 874 2 153 I 994 Oil industry 6 318 4 822 4 836 Defence 2 712 646 490 Food industry 12107 12 028 II 077 Communication 3 551 3 690 3 318 Construction 7 633 7 537 6 675 River fleet 2037 I 005 963 Rubber industry 134 84 132 Fishing industry 921 I 472 I 271 Medium machine-building 2467 3 738 3 369 Construction materials 3 258 3 518 4140 Ship-building 456 482 626 Lathe-building 821 I 653 I 513 Tank industry 5 053 3 839 3 873 Heavy machine-building I 322 I 733 I 505 Textile industry 4 347 6057 6447 Coal industry 10400 10808 10 224 Chemical industry 4 190 2 836 2 361 Paper industry 3 339 3 588 3 044 Light metallurgy 13 510 26246 25 538 Heavy metallurgy 12992 14495 14 614 Power stations 6 271 6488 7 076 Electrical industry I 978 I 750 I 758 Meat and milk industry 154 681 436 Local fuel industry 990 927 627 Other 8 170 7 969 7 316

Total 196310 208 595 194 415

Sources: GARF f.9414 op.l d.ll81 1.54: d.l220 1.73.

Appendix B: Administrative Structure of the Gulag during the War Years 1. Administrations

(i) Guard and Regime Administration (upravlenie okhrany i rezhima­UOR) (a) Service Department (b) Recruitment Department (c) Regime and Surveillance Department (d) Department of Military Training (e) Fire Department (f) Air Service Department

(ii) Supply Administration (upravlenie snabzheniya) (a) Planning Department (b) Food Department (c) Transport and Stores Department (d) Trade Department (e) Market Garden Department (f) Auditing and Instructing Department

(iii) Administration of Corrective Labour Colonies (upravlenie ispravitel'no-trudovykh kolonii - U/TK) (a) Industrial Department (b) Technical Department (c) Agriculture Department (d) Capital Construction Division (e) Planning Department (f) Technical Supply Department (g) Marketing Department

2. Departments

(i) Operational Department (ii) Department of Prisoner Registration and Distribution

(iii) Medical Department (iv) Cultural and Educational Department ( v) Veterinary Department

(vi) Oversight and Inspection Department (vii) Political Department of the Gulag

(viii) Personnel Department (ix) Accounts and Finance Department

171

Notes and References

Introduction

1. 'Gulag' is an acronym from the Russian words Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei, meaning Main Administration of Camps. Strictly, the Gulag was a depart­ment of the NKVD (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennykh del- the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the name given to the Soviet secret police at that time. However, it is commonly used to refer to all forced labour establishments in the Soviet Union, whatever their administrative subordination.

2. For an assessment of memoir material written before the end of World War II, the best source remains Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia (London, 1948). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Arkhipelag Gulag (in English, The Gulag Archipelago, 3 volumes (New York, 1973)) is the best known work of 'literary history', detailing the rise of the camp system and the conditions encountered in the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn's sources were his own and fellow prisoners' experiences. Two useful compilations of memoir material are: G. Saunders (ed.), Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition (New York: Monad Press, 1974); and Resistance In The Gulag: Memoirs, Letters, Documents (Moscow, 1992). Lengthier biographical accounts include: E. Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind (New York, 1967); A. V. Gorbatov, Years Off My Life (New York, 1964); E. Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps (London, 1951 ). 1

3. A common source seems to have been Robert Conquest's book The Great Terror. See R. W. Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1989) p. 188.

4. References to archival sources in the present work take two forms: (i) The majority of references identify the precise source of the information in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv rossiskoi federatsii - GARF) by fund (fond), list (opis'), dossier (delo), and page (list). For example, GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.7. (ii) It is not possible to give a full reference for some of the archival information. Such informa­tion is taken from a compilation of archival documents, which came into the author's hands independently of research trips to the archives. This unpublished compilation by Russian historian A. N. Dugin is called Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty (Moscow, 1992). The information contained therein has been seen to be faithful to the original archive docu­ments wherever a check has been possible.

5. N. Jasny, 'Labour and Output in Soviet Concentration Camps', Journal of Political Economy, 59/5 (1951) pp. 405-19.

6. In a recent book-length assessment of the Soviet war effort, John Barber notes, with reference to the population of camps and prisons, that 'Less is known about this group than any other'. J. Barber and M. Harrison, The Soviet Home Front 194/-1945 (London: Longman, 1991) p. 116.

172

Notes and References to pp. 6-11 173

I Gulag Studies

1. In the pre-war years the Soviet authorities admitted the existence of forced labour, but presented it as an enlightened penal policy. The image was one of the correcting of criminals through directing their energies into tasks such as the building of the White Sea Canal, which was triumphantly marked by an official volume published in the 1930s.

2. J-P. Vaudon, 'Last Days of the Gulag?', National Geographic, 177/3 (March 1990) pp. 40-7.

3. As early as the late 1920s and early 1930s, a number of Western nations banned the import of particular goods - notably timber - from the Soviet Union. See: The Duchess of Atholl, The Conscription of a People (Lon­don, 1931) Chapter 14.

4. H. A. Wallace, Soviet Asia Mission (New York, 1945). A fuller account of this episode is given in R. Conquest, Kolyma: the Arctic Death Camps (London: MacMillan, 1978) Chapter 8.

5. For example, the veracity of Viktor Kravchenko's memoirs I Chose Freedom was challenged by French Communists, and the dispute was settled, in Kravchenko's favour, in a court of law.

6. D. J. Dallin and B. I. Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia (London, 1948) p. 54.

7. S. Mora and P. Zwiemak, La Justice sovietique (Rome: Magi-Spinetti, 1945).

8. V. Kravchenk.o, I Chose Freedom (London, 1947) p. 406. 9. N. S. Timasheff, American Journal of Sociology, 54 (1948) pp. 148-55.

10. Mora and Zwiemak, La Justice soviitique, pp. 120-4. Cited in Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, p. 62.

11. Commission Internationale contre le Regime Concentrationnaire, Livre blanc sur les camps de concentration sovietiques (Paris, 1951) p. 102. Cited in: S. Swianiewicz, Forced Labour and Economic Development (Oxford, 1965) p. 29.

12. N. Jasny, 'Labour and Output in Soviet Concentration Camps', Journal of Political Economy, 59/5 (1951) pp. 405-19.

13. Robert Conquest: 'Forced Labour Statistics; Some Comments', Soviet Studies, 34/3 (1982) pp. 434-9; The Great Terror: A Reassessment (London: Pimlico, 1990) Epilogue 'The Terror Today'; 'Excess Deaths and Camp Num­bers: Some Comments', Soviet Studies, 43/5 (1991) pp. 949-52.

Steven Rosefielde: 'The First "Great Leap Forward" Reconsidered: Lessons of So1zhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago', Slavic Review, 39/4 (1980) pp. 559-87; 'An Assessment of the Sources and Uses of Gulag Forced La­bour 1929-1956', Soviet Studies, 33/1 (1981) pp. 51-87; Letter Slavic Review. 41/4 (1982) pp. 766-71; Excess Mortality in the Soviet Union: A Reconsideration of the Demographic Consequences of Forced Indus­trialization 1929-1949', Soviet Studies, 35/3 (1983) 385-409; 'Excess Collectivisation Deaths 1929-1933: New Demographic Evidence', Slavic Review, 43/1 (1984) 83-8; 'New Demographic Evidence on Collectivi­sation Deaths: A Rejoinder to Stephen Wheatcroft', Slavic Review, 44/3 (1985) pp. 509-16; 'Demographic Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR: A Rejoinder to Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver', Slavic

174 Notes and References to pp. 11-19

Review, 45/2 (1986) pp. 300-6; 'Incriminating Evidence: Excess Deaths and Forced Labour Under Stalin: A Final Reply to Critics', Soviet Studies, 39/2 ( 1987) pp. 292-313.

Stephen G. Wheatcroft: 'Steven Rosefielde's Kliuvka' (with R. W. Davies), Slavic Review, 39/4 (1980) pp. 593-602; 'Assessing the Size of Forced Concentration Camp Labour in the Soviet Union, 1929-56', Soviet Studies, 33/2 (1981) pp. 265-95; 'Towards a Thorough Analysis of Soviet Forced Labour Statistics', Soviet Studies, 35/2 (1983) pp. 223-37; 'New Demographic Evidence on Excess Collectivisation Deaths: Yet Another Kliuvka from Steven Rosefielde?', Slavic Review, 44/3 (1985) pp. 505-8; 'More Light on the Scale of Repression and Excess Mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1930s', Soviet Studies, 42/2 ( 1990) pp. 355-67.

Significant contributions have also been made to the debate by Hol­land Hunter, Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver, and Alec Nove.

14. 'The First "Great Leap Forward" Reconsidered', pp. 559-87; 'An As­sessment', pp. 51-87.

15. A. I. Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag, Part 3, Chapter 5. 16. Zek is the acronym for 'ZK', which is an abbreviation of the Russian

word zaklyuchennyi, meaning 'prisoner'. 17. Gosudarstvennyi plan razvitiya narodnogo khozyaistva SSSR na 1941 god,

American Council of Learned Societies Reprints: Russian Series No.30 (1951).

18. Jasny, 'Labour and Output', pp. 405-19. 19. See Table 2.1, p. 24. 20. He estimates that the 1941 plan envisaged 1 172 000 camp inmates being

involved in construction, whereas a recent Russian estimate asserts that Gosplan put the number of prisoners to be involved in construction in 1941 at 1 976 000 (L. Ivashov and A. Emelin (interviewees), 'Gulag v gody velikoi otechestvennoi voiny', Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 1 (1991) p. 19). Equally, however, the latter article states that the NKVD carried out 13 per cent of the volume of capital work in the economy in 1940, and that Gosplan assigned to the NKVD the completion of 1.8 billion (thousand million) roubles worth of capital construction in 1941. This latter sum seems untenably low, as the 1941 Plan envisaged 57 billion roubles worth of capital investments (Jasny, 'Labour and Output', p. 409).

21. Rosefielde, 'An Assessment', p. 58. 22. Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom, p. 406. 23. Rosefielde, 'An Assessment', pp. 64-5. 24. Jasny, 'Labour and Output', p. 405. 25. Rosefielde, 'An Assessment', p. 75. 26. Ibid., p. 76. 27. Rosefielde, 'The First "Great Leap Forward" Reconsidered', p. 560. 28. Rosefielde, 'Incriminating Evidence', pp. 292-313. 29. Rosefielde, 'The First "Great Leap Forward" Reconsidered'. 30. S. G. Wheatcroft, 'Assessing the Size', pp. 265-95. 31. Ibid., p. 286. 32. Ibid., p. 274. 33. Rosefielde, 'Incriminating Evidence', p. 302. 34. According to Wheatcroft, Rosefielde has taken his account directly from

Notes and References to pp. 19-23 175

Dallin and Nikolaevsky, whose figures in tum do not match those in their stated source, Vyshinsky, Ot tyurem k vospitatel'nym uchrezhdeniyam (Moscow, 1934) p.171. (Wheatcroft, • Assessing the Size', pp. 277-8.)

35. Some would argue for a third level of analysis, that is, the political mo­tives of these experts offering, during the Cold War, various estimates of, in effect, the horrors of the Soviet Union. Such analysis represents an unwarranted complicating factor, which would be neither verifiable nor particularly germane to the central issue of this chapter, the nature of the evidence available.

36. Wheatcroft, 'Towards a Thorough Analysis', p. 223. 37. Conquest, 'Forced Labour Statistics', p. 438. 38. Wheatcroft, 'Towards a Thorough Analysis', pp. 228-9. 39. For further discussion of this case, see Chapter 2. 40. Wheatcroft, 'Towards a Thorough Analysis', p. 228. 41. Conquest, 'Forced Labour Statistics', pp. 435-8. 42. Wheatcroft, 'More Light', p. 355; Conquest, 'Excess Deaths and Camp

Numbers', p. 949. 43. Wheatcroft, 'Towards a Thorough Analysis', p. 232; Wheatcroft, 'More

Light', p. 355. 44. Getty argued that the purges were not a planned coherent campaign led

by a monolithic party under an omnipotent leader, but were rather a chaotic voluntarist movement. J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge. 1985).

45. Ibid., p. 5. 46. Ibid., pp. 7 and 223. 47. Conquest, The Great Terror, p. 486. 48. A certain pleasure was taken in placing the estimates of Conquest and

Wheatcroft adjacent to each other in Table 1.1. 49. Rosefielde, 'The First "Great Leap Forward" Reconsidered', p. 560. 50. Wheatcroft, 'More Light', p. 366; Conquest, 'Excess Deaths and Camp

Numbers', p. 951.

2 New Revelations

1. For example: A. N. Dugin and A. Ya. Malygin, 'Solzhenitsyn, Rybakov: tekhnologiya lzhi', Voenno-istoricheskii zhurna/, 7 (1991).

2. The main articles dealing with this data are as follows: A. N. Dugin: 'Gulag: Otkryvaya arkhivy'. Na boevom postu (Moscow,

27 December 1989); 'Govoryat arkhivy: neizvestnye stranitsy Gulaga', Sotsial'no-politicheskie nauki, 7 (1990); 'Stalinizm: legendy i fakty', Slovo, 7 (Moscow, 1990); 'Gulag glazami istorika', Soyuz, 9 (1990).

A. N. Dugin and A. Ya. Malygin: 'Solzhenitsyn, Rybakov: tekhnologiya lzhi', Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 7 (1991).

V. N. Zemskov: • Arkhipelag Gulag: glazami pisatelya i statistika', Argumenty i fakty, 45 (1989); 'Na rabote sorokovye, trudovye', Soyuz, 18 (1990); 'Spetsposelentsy - po dokumentatsii NKVD-MVD SSSR', Sotsio/ogicheskie issledovaniya, 11 (1990): 'Ob uchete spetskontingenta NKVD vo vsesoyuznykh perepisykh naseleniya 1937 i 1939', Sotsiolo­gicheskie issledovaniya, 2 (1991 ); • Arkhivy nachinayut govorit' - Gulag

176 Notes and References to pp. 23-9

(istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt)', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 6 (1991 ); • Arkhivy nachinayut govorit' - Gulag', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 7 (1991); 'Zaklyuchennye, spetsposelentsy, ssyl'noposelentsy, ssyl'nye i vyslannye', Istoriya SSSR, 5 (1991).

3. More detailed assessments of the Russian revelations of the late 1980s and the early 1990s can be found in: E. T. Bacon, 'Glasnost' and the Gulag', Soviet Studies, 44/6 (1992) pp. 1069-86; and 'L'importance du travail force dans l'Union sovietique de Staline', Revue d' etudes comparatives Est-Ouest, 2-3 (1992) pp. 229-49.

4. Zemskov, 'Zaklyuchennye, spetsposelentsy, ssyl'noposelentsy, ssyl'nye i vyslannye', p. 151.

5. A. V. Antonov-Ovseenko, Literaturnaya gazeta, (3 April 1991) p. 3. V. N. Zemskov has in tum suggested that Antonov-Ovseenko's estimate may have been arrived at by the simple misreading of a document in the archives, whereby a decimal point went unnoticed and the 1945 figure of 1.6 million became 16 million.

6. Zemskov, 'Zaklyuchennye, spetsposelentsy, ssyl'noposelentsy, ssyl'nye i vyslannye', p. 151.

7. R. Conquest, 'Excess Deaths and Camp Numbers', Soviet Studies, 43/5 (1991) p. 949.

8. Zemskov, 'Arkhipelag Gulag: glazami pisatelya i statistika', pp. 6-7. 9. Dugin, 'Gulag: Otkryvaya arkhivy'; and 'Gulag glazami istorika'. Dugin

and Malygin, 'Solzhenitsyn, Rybakov: tekhnologiya lzhi'. Zemskov, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit'- Gulag (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt)'; and 'Zaklyuchennye, spetsposelentsy, ssyl'noposelentsy, ssy1'nye i vyslannye'.

10. See Chapter 4, '7. Local Administration'. 11. See Table 8.4, p. 151. 12. See Appendix A, Table 6. 13. See Chapter 5. Also: GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.3. 14. V. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhipelag Gulag: glazami pisatelya i statistika', pp. 6-7. 15. Zek is the acronym for 'ZK', which is an abbreviation of the Russian

word zak/yuchennyi, meaning 'prisoner'. 16. Antonov-Ovseenko, Literaturnaya gazeta (3 April 1991) p. 3. 17. N. Jasny, 'Comments', Journal of Political Economy, 60 (1952) p. 340. 18. A. D. Redding, 'Reliability of Estimates of Unfree Labor in the USSR',

Journal of Political Economy, 60 (1952) p. 338. 19. For details of these bodies see Chapter 4. 20. 'Special Camps' was the designation given to Verification and Filtration

Camps between 1941 and 1944. However, Solzhenitsyn does not appear to have been referring to these camps in his use of the term.

21. These were people sent to labour settlements, i.e. to a specified location and work, sine die, with no right to leave, and no passport. They were required to report regularly to the authorities. According to V. N. Zemskov ('Spetsposelentsy - po dokumentatsii NKVD-MVD SSSR', p. 3) they were known under different terms during the Stalin era; spetsperese/enets was the term employed before 1934, trudposelenets was used between 1934 and 1944, and from 1944 onwards spetsposelenets was the official term. These terms are synonymous.

Notes and References to pp. 31-4 177

22. V. Tolz, 'Publication of Archive Material on Stalin's Terror', Radio Lib­erty Report on the USSR, 2/32 (10August 1990) pp. 14-15.

23. R. Conquest, 'Forced Labour Statistics; Some Comments', Soviet Studies, 34/3 ( 1982), p. 438.

24. Not to be confused with the term spetskontigent as used in the 1930s, when it referred to a census category, which seems to have been largely made up of camp and colony inmates (see Glossary).

25. Zemskov, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit'- Gulag', p. 6. 26. Zemskov, 'Ob uchete spetskontingenta NKVD vo vsesoyuznykh perepisykh

naseleniya 1937 i 1939', p. 75. 27. Antonov-Ovseenko, Literaturnaya gazeta, (3 April 1991) p. 3. 28. For example, the changing figure for the camp population of 1946 quoted

by Zemskov in different articles. In a later table of camp population figures, otherwise identical to Table 2.1, Zemskov gave a figure of 746 871 for 1946. This would result in a camp/colony ratio of 44/56. Zemskov • Arkhivy nachinayut govorit' - Gulag (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt)'. In the broad sweep of necessarily impersonal enumeration, the precise number of camp inmates on I January 1946 is not a crucial statistic, and the very fact that Zemskov himself corrected the first figure to that quoted elsewhere suggests a one-off error rather than an indication of inherent unreliability.

29. Zemskov's figures give annual monthly averages as follows: 1939 -234 620; 1940- 27 619; 1941- 325 169; 1942- 246 513; 1943- 206 655; 1944- 213 799; 1945- 252 075; 1946- 268 684; 1947- 325 097; 1948 - 243 189. (Zemskov, 'Zaklyuchennye, spetsposelentsy, ssyl'noposelentsy, ssyl'nye i vyslannye', Dugin's alternatives are: 1939 - 225 493; 1940 -274 347; 1941- 301 988; 1942- 244 994; 1943- 204 737; 1944-219 281; 1945 - Dugin says the data for this year is incomplete; 1946 - 290 984; 1947- 284 642; 1948- 230 614. (Dugin, 'Govoryat arkhivy: neizvestnye stranitsy Gulaga').

30. Author's conversation with V. N. Zemskov, May 1992. 31. V. Tolz, 'Ministry of Security Official Gives New Figures for Stalin's

Victims', RFEIRL Research Report, 1/18 (1Mayl992) pp. 8-10. 32. V. V. Tsaplin, 'Statistika zhertv stalinizma v 30-e gody', Voprosy istorii,

4 (1989) p. 176. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. Incidentally, a figure of 156 million citizens in the 1937 census

was quoted by A. Antonov-Ovseenko in 1980; see The Time of Stalin (New York: Harper and Row, 1981) p. 207.

35. Tsaplin, 'Statistika zhertv Stalinizma v 30-e gody', p. 176. 36. Ibid. 37. Zemskov, 'Ob uchete spetskontingenta NKVD vo vsesoyuznykh perepisykh

naseleniya 1937 i 1939', p. 75. 38. Tsaplin, 'Statistika zhertv stalinizma v 30-e gody', p. 176. 39. S. G. Wheatcroft, 'More Light on the Scale of Repression and Excess

Mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1930s', Soviet Studies, 42/2 (1990) p. 367 n. 6.

40. Yu. A. Polyakov, V. B. Zhiromskaya and I. N. Kiselev, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit': Polveka molchaniya (Vsesoyuznaya perepis' naseleniya 1937

178 Notes and References to pp. 34-40

g.)', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 8 ( 1990) pp. 30-52. 41. Ibid., pp. 32-5. 42. The omission of colonies from this list must again be assumed to be a

slip, as colonies are certainly included within the authors' definition of the spetskontingent group C.

43. Zemskov, 'Ob uchete spetskontingenta NKVD vo vsesoyuznykh perepisykh naseleniya 1937 i 1939', p. 75.

44. Ibid. 45. Using the figure derived by Polyakov et al. of 1.8 million for the NKVD

spetskontingent minus camp guards, leaves some 800 000 trudposelentsy excluded from the spetskontingent, out of a total of 916 787 trudposelentsy given for 1937. Using Zemskov's 2.2 million figure instead of the 1.8 million leaves around 400 000 excluded. Zemskov, 'Ob uchete spetskontin­genta NKVD vo vsesoyuznykh perepisykh naseleniya 1937 i 1939', p. 75.

46. Zemskov, ibid., p. 75. 47. A. L. Unger, Constitutional Development in the USSR (London, 1981) p. 83. 48. Polyakov et al., 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit'- Gulag' p. 47. 49. There were 135 000 guards in January 1941 (GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68

1.4) and 1.5 million camp prisoners (Table 2.1). 50. V. Tolz, 'Debates over Number of Stalin's Victims in the USSR and in

the West', Radio Liberty Report on the USSR, l/36 (8 September 1989) p. 10.

51. Argumenty i fakty, 22 (1990) pp. 6-7. 52. V. Tolz, 'Ministry of Security Official' pp. 8-10. 53. Ibid., p. 9. For a summary of the types of internal exile operated by the

Soviet regime at this time, see the terms trudposelenets, ssyl'noposelenets, ssyl'nyi, vysyl'nyi in the Glossary.

54. Kuranty (9 May 1991) p. 5. 55. See above, Chapter 2, '1. Coverage of the New Data'. 56. Zemskov's outflow statistics contain a category 'outflow to other places

of imprisonment'. This perhaps refers to execution camps, as well as to other categories of camp (Zemskov, 'Arkhipelag Gulag: glazami pisatelya i statistika'.

57. R. W. Davies, M. Harrison and S. G. Wheatcroft (eds), The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union 1914-1945 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994) p. 77.

58. For example, Russian patriotism became the main rallying call for the populace, rather than the building of socialism.

59. Zemskov, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit' - Gulag (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt)', p. 21.

60. L. lvashov and A. Emelin, 'Gulag v gody velikoi otechestvennoi voiny', Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 1 (1991).

61. See Chapter 7. 62. lvashov and Emelin, 'Gulag v gody velikoi otechestvennoi voiny'. 63. Ibid. 64. Between 1941 and 1944 the average number of workers employed per

annum in industry has been estimated at 8 736 000, and the average number of workers employed per annum in transport, construction, and trade at 7 742 500. (J. Barber and M. Harrison, The Soviet Home Front 1941-

Notes and References to pp. 40-7 179

1945 (London: Longman, 1991) p. 219). 65. Calculated from government revenue figures (M. Harrison, Soviet Plan­

ning in Peace and War 1938-1945 (Cambridge, 1985) p. 149). The an­nual figure for 1941 has been halved here before summation of 1941-44 figures, to approximate a figure from the beginning of the war.

66. For details see Chapter 8, and Bacon, 'Glasnost' and the Gulag', pp. 1069-86.

3 Origins and Development

l. D. J. Dallin, The Real Soviet Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947) Chapter 11; D. J. Dallin and B. I. Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia (London, 1948) p. 54.

2. Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, p. 152. 3. R. Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (London: Pimlico, 1990)

p. 310. 4. GARF f.393 op.l d.l9l.l44; f.393 op.89 d.6l ll.2-3. Documents exhibited

at the US Library of Congress, 17 June-16 July 1992. 5. GARF f.393 op.lO d.l 1.260. Document exhibited at the US Library of

Congress, 17 June-16 July 1992. 6. Conquest, The Great Terror, p. 310; Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced

Labour in Soviet Russia, p. 157. 7. Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, p. 157 n. 5. 8. Some 6000 prisoners are reported to have died, mainly as a result of

epidemics, in 1929-30. Conquest, The Great Terror, p. 310. 9. GARF f.393 op.lO d.l 1.260. Documents exhibited at the US Library of

Congress, 17 June-16 July 1992. 10. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77; GARF f.9414 op.1, Foreword (predislovie). 11. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.67. 12. Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, p. 168. 13. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.67. 14. S. P. Mel'gunov, The Red Terror in Russia (London, 1925) pp. 189-90.

Cited in W. B. Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989) p. 389.

15. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.67. 16. Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, p. 181. Frenkel

subsequently rose to a senior level in the GPU. 17. Dallin asserts that, although Yagoda was formally the Deputy Chief of

the OGPU, 'he was actually already in charge of the agency'. Ibid., p. 212. 18. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.67. 19. A.I. Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag, Part 3, Chapter 3. 20. 0. Khlevnyuk, 'Prinuditel'nyi trud v ekonomike SSSR 1929-1941 gody',

Svobodnaya mysl', 13 (1992) pp. 74-6. 21. A.I. Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag, Part 3, Chapter 3: 'And the malig­

nant cells kept on creeping and creeping.' Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, p. 211: 'From the Solovetski Islands they spread back to the mainland and, in the course of a few years, expanded far to the east and south, infecting, like a growing cancer, new towns, provinces, and regions.'

180 Notes and References to pp. 48-62

22. A. N. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty (unpublished, Mos­cow, 1992) p. 10.

23. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.77 1.70. 24. Cited as from the RSFSR Corrective Labour Codex, GARF f.9414 op.l

d.77 1.70. 25. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.77 1.68. 26. In 1931: Temnikovskii Corrective Labour Camp (I.T.L. - ispravitel'no­

trudovoi lager') in the Mordovskii oblast'; Svirskii I.T.L. in the Leningradskii oblast'. In 1932: Belomorsko-Baltiiskii I.T.L. in Karelia; Severo-Vostochyi I.T.L. in the Kolyma region; Prorvinskii I.T.L. in Kazakhstan; Dmitrovskii I.T.L. in the Moscow oblast'; Baikalo-Amurskii I.T.L. in the Far East.

27. A. Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (London, 1991) p. 302. 28. Ibid. 29. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty, p. 12. 30. A. N. Dugin, 'Gulag g1azami istorika', Soyuz 9 (1990) p. 9. 31. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.70. 32. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty, p. 13. 33. A. W. Knight, The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union, rev.

edn (1990) p. 27. A similar impression is evident in A. Vaksberg, The Prosecutor and the Prey (London, 1990).

34. E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926 (1959) vol. 2 pp. 442-6. 35. A. N. Dugin, Na boevom postu (Moscow, 27 December 1989) p. 4. 36. These were the OITKJUITLK establishments referred to in Table 2.1 and

elsewhere as colonies. For further elaboration, see Chapter 2. 37. Khlevnyuk,'Prinuditel'nyi trud v ekonomike SSSR 1929-1941 gody', p. 76. 38. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty, p. 6. 39. Khlevnyuk,'Prinuditel'nyi trud v ekonomike SSSR 1929-1941 gody', p. 77. 40. Knight, The KGB, pp. 24-5. 41. GARF f.9414 op.1 Foreword (predislovie). 42. GARF f.9414 op.l Foreword (predislovie). 43. Kh1evnyuk,'Prinudite1'nyi trud v ekonomike SSSR 1929-1941 gody', p. 77. 44. Dallin and Niko1aevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, p. 49. 45. GARF f.9414 op.l Foreword (predislovie). 46. For further details see Chapter 4. 47. NKVD Order 0014. GARF f.9414 op.1 Foreword (predislovie). 48. NKVD Order 001159. GARF f.9414 op.l Foreword (predislovie). 49. See M. Harrison, Soviet Planning in Peace and War, 1938-1945 (Cam-

bridge: CUP, 1985) Chapter 1, and Appendix 4. 50. GARF f.9414 op.l d.l181 ll.36-9. 51. The UITK. For details see Chapter 4. 52. A. N. Dugin, 'Gulag: Otkryvaya arkhivy', Na boevom postu, (Moscow,

27 December 1989) pp. 3-4. 53. Dallin and Niko1aevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, p. 160. 54. Resistance In The Gulag: Memoirs, Letters, Documents (Moscow, 1992).

Published by the organisation Vozvrashchenie. 55. Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926, vol. 2, p. 445; Carr, Founda­

tions of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929 (London: Macmillan, 1971) vol. 2, p. 363.

Notes and References to pp. 62-70 181

56. Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, p. 160. 57. See Table 2.2. 58. A. Graziosi, 'The Great Strikes of 1953 in the Soviet Labor Camps in

the Accounts of their Participants: A Review', Cahiers du Monde russe er sovierique, 33/4 (1992) p. 421. See also B. Roeder, Katorga: An As­pect of Modern Slavery (London, 1958).

59. GARF f.9414 op.1 Foreword (predislovie). 60. GARF f.9414 op.l Foreword (predislovie). 61. Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, pp. 84 and 256.

4 Gulag Administration

1. In March 1946 the People's Commissariats were renamed Ministries, and therefore the NKVD became the MVD.

2. R. Conquest, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, (Oxford: OUP, 1979) p. 67.

3. Ibid. 4. This image is the central metaphor in Solzhenitsyn's Arkhipelag Gulag. 5. 'Voenizirovannyi' rather than 'vooruzhennyi'. 6. Resistance In The Gulag: Memoirs. Letters, Documents (Moscow, 1992)

p. 42. Published by the organisation Vozvrashchenie. 7. A. I. Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag, Part 3, Chapter 15. 8. Ibid. 9. Conquest, Kolyma, pp. 54-5.

10. A. N. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty (unpublished, Mos­cow, 1992) pp. 63 and 65.

11. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.74. 12. Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, p. 18. See also,

the career of Naftaly Aranovich Frenkel, Chapter Three. 13. Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, p. 237. 14. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.19. Such a requirement was not made of the

Gulag alone. The breakdown of the food supply network affected the population at large, and 'only combat soldiers and manual workers in the most difficult and hazardous occupations received sufficient rations to maintain health' (J. Barber and M. Harrison, The Soviet Home Front 1941-1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London: Longman, 1991) p. 82). See also W. Moskoff, The Bread of Affliction: the Food Supply in the USSR during World War Two (Cam­bridge, 1990).

15. Conquest, Kolyma, p. 131. 16. Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, p. 9. Appar­

ently Professor Ernst Tallgren, identified as the author of the opening chapter of Dallin and Nikolaevsky's work, was a pseudonym used by S. Swianiewicz. (Stephen G. Wheatcroft, • Assessing the Size of Forced Concentration Camp Labour in the Soviet Union, 1929-56', Soviet Studies, 33/2 (1981) p. 276.)

17. A. Graziosi, 'The Great Strikes of 1953 in the Soviet Labor Camps in the Accounts of their Participants: A Review', Cahiers du Monde russe et sovietique, 33/4 (1992) p. 421.

182 Notes and References to pp. 70-82

18. See Chapter 8. 19. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.78. 20. Conquest, Kolyma, pp. 145-6; Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour

in Soviet Russia, p. 13. 21. Swianiewicz in Dallln and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Rus-

sia, p. 13. 22. A. I. Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag, Part 3, Chapter 2. 23. E. Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps (London, 1951). 24. For details of the structural changes of 1940 and 1941, see Chapter 3. 25. In the case of timber, the overseeing body was an Administration from

1941 to 1947, when it became a Main Administration. 26. Conquest identifies, for example, the Administration of the North-Eastern

Corrective Labour Camps as a sub-section of Dal'stroi. 27. See Appendix B. 28. The responsibility for building the Novo-Tagil' metallurgical factory was

transferred from Narkomstroi to Glavpromstroi in December 1941. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.165.

29. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.165. 30. Conquest, Kolyma, pp. 41-2. 31. Ibid., p. 40. 32. For output details, see Chapter 7. 33. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.171. 34. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.172. The archival source, dated 1946-1947,

simply states this as a fact, without providing detailed figures. 35. As opposed to the OITK/UITLK establishments referred to as colonies

in Table 2.1. 36. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.174. 37. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.176. 38. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.79. 39. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.80. 40. Swianiewicz in Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia,

p. 14. 41. Ibid., p. 80. 42. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.77 1.85. 43. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.77 1.17. 44. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.77 1.78. 45. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.77 1.85. 46. GARF f.9414 op.1 predislovie. 47. The Russian system for storing archival documents groups them in to

funds (jondy), which are further divided into lists (opisy), and dossiers (de/a). The final designation, list, simply refers to a page number.

48. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.77 1.124.

5 Forced Labour Establishments

1. V. N. Zemskov, • Arkhipelag GULAG: glazami pisatelya i statistika', Argumenty i fakty, 45 (1989) pp. 6-7; and 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit' - Gulag', - Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 7 (1991) p. 3.

2. Sylvestre Mora and Pierre Zwiernak, La Justice sovierique (Rome: Magi-

Notes and References to pp. 82-93 183

Spinetti, 1945) pp. 120-4. Cited and translated in Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia (London, 1948) p. 62; A. Shifrin, The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union, 2nd edn, (New York: Bantam Books, 1982).

3. A. I. Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag, Part I, Chapter I. 4. Ibid. V. N. Zemskov claimed that, according to the archives, the Gulag

consisted of 53 camps during the war. He was referring to camp group­ings, rather than to what we would call individual camps. (Zemskov, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit'- GULAG', p. 3).

5. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.3. 6. Mora and Zwiernak, La Justice sovietique, pp. 120-4, Dallin and

Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, p. 62. 7. Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, p. 71. 8. Mora and Zwiernak, La Justice sovietique, in ibid., p. 62. 9. A. N. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty (unpublished, Moscow,

1992) p. 38. 10. Zemskov, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit'- GULAG', p. 3. II. The caveat must be noted that the author's source for this particular docu­

ment was, by necessity, second-hand. Therefore the document is quoted from a typed version of the original document, which has not itself been seen by the author.

12. For details of this Administration, see Chapter 4, and Appendix B. 13. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.3. 14. M. Gilbert, Soviet History Atlas (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,

1979) pp. 31-2. 15. For a list of camps taken from the archives, see Appendix A. 16. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.9. 17. J. Barber and M. Harrison, The Soviet Home Front 1941-1945: A Social

and Economic History of the USSR in World War 1/ (London: Longman, 1991) pp. 128-32.

18. M. Gilbert, Second World War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989) p. 204. For further examples of this policy, see the seven cases cited in Viktor Kravchenko, 1 Chose Freedom (London, 1947) p. 405.

19. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty, p. 25. 20. Ibid., pp. 26-7. 21. Ibid., p. 28. 22. Ibid., p. 28. 23. Ibid., pp. 28-9. 24. A. N. Dugin, 'Gulag: Otkryvaya arkhivy', Na boevom postu (Moscow,

27 December 1989) pp. 3-4. 25. GARF f.9414 op.l d.ll72 ll.l-16. 26. V. N. Zemskov, 'Gulag (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt)', Sotsiologicheskie

issledovaniya, 7 (1991) pp. 4-6. 27. G. F. Krivosheev (ed.), Grif sekretnosti snyat: poteri vooruzhennykh sil

SSSR v voinakh, boevykh deistviyakh i voennykh konfliktakh (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1993) p. 129.

28. Ibid. 29. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty, pp. 45-6. 30. Krivosheev, Grif sekretnosti snyat, p. 129.

184 Notes and References to pp. 95-107

31. Zemskov, 'Gulag (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt)', pp. 4-6. 32. Ibid., p. 6. 33. Ibid., pp. 4-6. 34. Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, p. 293. 35. Ibid., p. 292. 36. Gilbert, Second World War, p. 243. 37. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty, p. 7. 38. I. Shcherbakova, 'How Buchenwald became the NKVD's torture cham-

ber', Moscow News, 23 (4 June 1993) p. 14. 39. Ibid. 40. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty, p. 51. 41. Ibid. 42. See Chapter 4. 43. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.3. 44. Dallin and Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, pp. 62-6.

6 How Many Prisoners?

1. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.7. 2. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.8. 3. Table 2.1. 4. V. F. Nekrasov, 'Desyat' zheleznykh narkomov', Komsomolskaya pravda,

29 September 1989 p. 4; V. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit'­Gulag', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 7 (1991) p. 3; L. Ivashov and A. Emelin, 'Gulag v gody velikoi otechestvennoi voiny', Voenno­istoricheskii zhurnal, 1 (1991) p. 19.

5. See Chapter 3, '3. Developing Gulag Ideology'. 6. Zemskov, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit'- Gulag (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii

aspekt)', p. 24. 7. See Appendix A, Tables 7-9. 8. For example, GARF f.9414 op.l d.l179 1.1. 9. GARF f.9414 op.l d.ll79 1.1.

10. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.11. 11. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.11. 12. A. N. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty (unpublished, Moscow,

1992) p. 123-4. 13. Ibid., p. 125. 14. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.10. 15. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.10. 16. David Hearst 'Skeletons of Stalingrad', The Guardian Europe, 22 Janu­

ary 1993, pp. 14-15. 17. G. F. Krivosheev (ed.), Grif sekretnosti snyat: poteri vooruzhennykh sil

SSSR v voinakh, boevykh deistviyakh i voennykh konjliktakh (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1993) pp. 178-82.

18. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.10. 19. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.25. 20. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.25. 21. GARF f.9414 op.l d.1172 11.1-16. 22. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.43.

Notes and References to pp. 107-19 185

23. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.43. 24. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.43. 25. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty, pp. 30-1. 26. Ibid. 27. See Chapter 3, Developing Gulag Ideology. 28. A. I. Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag, Part 1, Chapter 2. 29. For details of prisoner inflow and outflow, see Appendix A, Tables 7-9. 30. See Table 2.3, and preceding discussion. 31. Zemskov, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit' - Gulag (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii

aspekt)', p. 17. 32. GARF f.9414 op.l d.l179 1.1. The total Gulag camp figures given are

not necessarily the sum of the managerial administration data in Appen­dix A, Table 10. They are from the same archival source, within which the Gulag camp total does not exactly correspond to the sum of the ad­ministration totals, presumably due to the inclusion of camps not under the administrations named but subordinated to other Gulag bodies, such as the Main Administration of Aerodrome Construction.

33. GARF f.9414 op.l d.l181 1.30. 34. GARF f.9414 op.l d.l179 1.5. Including intra-camp transfers. 35. A turnover ratio has been calculated by dividing the total number of

prisoners passing through the camps - not including intra-Gulag trans­fers - by the mean population for 1942.

36. GARF f.9414 op.l d.l181 1.54. 37. V. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhipelag GULAG: glazami pisatelya i statistika',

Argumenty i fakty, 45 (1989) pp. 6-7; A. N. Dugin, 'GULAG: Otkryvaya arkhivy', Na boevom postu (Moscow, 27 December 1989) pp. 3-4; A. N. Dugin, 'Stalinizm: legendy i fakty', Slovo, 7 (Moscow. 1990) p. 23. For a summary and percentage breakdown of their figures, see E. T. Bacon, 'Glasnost' and the Gulag', Soviet Studies, 44/6 (1992) p. 1071.

38. Zemskov, 'Arkhipelag GULAG: glazami pisatelya i statistika', pp. 6-7. 39. GARF f.9414 op.l d.l180 11.1-9. 40. Zemskov, 'Arkhipelag GULAG: glazami pisatelya i statistika', pp. 6-7. 41. To facilitate understanding, it is important to remember the distinction be­

tween UITK camps (centrally administered) and OITK/UITLK colonies (lo­cally administered). This distinction is set out in greater depth in Chapter 2.

42. GARF f.9414 op.l d.l180 1.1; Dugin, 'Gulag: Otkryvaya arkhivy', pp. 3--4.

43. Dugin, 'Gulag: Otkryvaya arkhivy', pp. 3--4. 44. N. F. Bugai, 'K voprosu o deportatsii narodov SSSR v 30-40-kh godakh',

Istoriya SSSR 6 (1989) p. 141. 45. 2 230 500 minus 652 818 (ibid., p. 141; V. N. Zemskov, 'Kulatskaya

ssylka nakanune i v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2 (1992) p. 23).

46. Bugai, 'K voprosu o deportatsii navodov SSSR v 30-40-kh godakh', p. 141. The implication that so many people came from Verification and Filtration camps in the summer of 1945 seems difficult to reconcile com­pletely with the relatively low totals for such camps given in Tables 5.4 and 6.8, and the statement (Zemskov, 'Kulatskaya ssylka nakanune i v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny', p. 6) that 228 000 people were checked

186 Notes and References to pp. 119-36

by such camps in 1946. Nonetheless, it does not directly contradict any of these figures, and Zemskov also states that the scope of the verification camps' work was greatly increased in August 1945 (ibid).

47. V. N. Zemskov, 'Gulag (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt)', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 7 (1991) pp. 4-6.

48. See Chapter 6, section 4.3, and preceding notes. 49. Dugin, Neizvestnyi Gulag: dokumenty i fakty, p. 51. 50. Ibid. 51. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.26.

7 Labour Use and Production

1. L. Ivashov and A. Emelin, 'Gulag v gody velikoi otechestvennoi voiny', Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 1 (1991) p. 14; V. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit' - Gulag (istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt)', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 6 (1991) p. 20.

2. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.2 3. For an account of the economy-wide labour-shortage, see J. Barber and

M. Harrison, The Soviet Home Front 1941-1945, (London: Longman, 1991), Chapter 8.

4. V. Kravchenko, 1 Chose Freedom (London, 1947) pp. 405-6. 5. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.1181 1.17. 6. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.44. 7. See Table 6.5. 8. GARF f.9414 op.l d.ll81 1.18. 9. GARF f.9414 op.l d.1191 1.1.

10. All percentages for prisoners in groups A to D given in this chapter are percentages of the labour-fund total, and not the total of registered pris­oners.

11. GARF f.9414 op.l d.ll81 1.18. 12. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.118l 1.16. 13. GARF f.9414 op.l d.l181 1.16. 14. GARF f.9414 op.l d.ll81 1.15. 15. See Chapter 6. 16. GARF f.9414 op.l d.ll81 1.16. 17. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.13. 18. For example, 300 000 represents only some 15 per cent of those passing

through the Gulag in 1942 alone. 19. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.57. 20. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.45. 21. M. Harrison, Soviet Planning in Peace and War 1938-1945 (Cambridge,

1985), p. 94; Kravchenko, 1 Chose Freedom, p. 404. 22. M. Harrison, Soviet Planning in Peace and War, 1938-1945 (Cambridge,

1985) p. 88. 23. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.46. 24. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.47. 25. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.47. 26. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.44. 27. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.48.

Notes and References to pp. 137-48 187

28. For national figures, see Harrison, Soviet Planning in Peace and War, 1938-1945, pp. 250-2. The figure for Soviet ammunition output in the first quarter of 1944 is 59 737 million units. This comes from an official Soviet history of the Second World War.

29. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.52. 30. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.2. 31. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.54. 32. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.180. 33. D. J. Dallin and B. I. Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia (London,

1948) p. 9. 34. Using the average population figure for 1944 of 1.3 million. Then planned

total harvest of vegetables and potatoes was 437 million kg. 437 000 000 divided by I 300 000 divided by 365 days = 920 grams.

35. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.55. 36. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 l.ll. 37. S. Z. Ginzburg, 0 proshlom - dlya budushchego (Moscow: Politizdat,

1983) p. 250. 38. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 l.l2; GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.165. 39. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 ll.171-2. 40. See pp. 126. 41. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.14. 42. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.25. 43. See Appendix A, Table 12. 44. See Chapter 2. 45. GARF f.9414 op.l d.l220 ll.73-4. 46. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.170. 47. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 l.l70.

8 Life in the Gulag at War

I. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.43. See Chapter 6, 'Arrests'. 2. For example, Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, or

the various sources mentioned in the notes to this present work's Intro­duction.

3. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.87. 4. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.89. 5. M. Harrison, Soviet Planning in Peace and War, 1938-1945 (Cambridge,

1985) p. 205. 6. See Chapter 7. 7. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.89. 8. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.20. 9. See Chapter 7, and D. J. Dallin and B. I. Nikolaevsky, Forced Labour in

Soviet Russia (London, 1948) p. 9. 10. Ibid., p. I 0. 11. A. Graziosi, 'The Great Strikes of 1953 in the Soviet Labor Camps in

the Accounts of their Participants: A Review' Cahiers du Monde russe et sovietique 33/4 (1992) p. 421.

12. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.90; GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.17. 13. See Chapter 6. Also Chapters 1 and 2.

188 Notes and References to pp. 148-62

14. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.ll81 1.30. See Chapter 6 for details. 15. V. N. Zemskov, 'Kulatskaya ssylka nakanune i v gody Velikoi

Otechestvennoi voiny', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2 (1992) pp. 3-26. 16. V. N. Zemskov, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit'- Gulag (istoriko-sotsiologi­

cheskii aspekt)', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 6 (1991) pp. 17 and 26. 17. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.1172 11.1-16. 18. The number of Romanian inmates increased from 300 in 1941 to 1500

in 1942 (Zemskov, 'Arkhivy nachinayut govorit' - Gulag (istoriko­sotsiologicheskii aspekt)', pp. 17 and 26).

19. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.95. 20. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.4. 21. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.4. 22. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.6. 23. GARF f.9414 op.l d.77 1.89. 24. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.33. 25. Resistance In The Gulag: Memoirs, Letters, Documents (Moscow, 1992)

p. 72. Published by the historico-literary society Vozvrashchenie, whose aim is the collection of primary sources concerning the history of the Gulag.

26. Ibid., p. 75. 27. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.35. 28. Resistance In The Gulag, p. 85. 29. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.35. 30. Resistance In The Gulag, p. 85. 31. GARF f.9414 op.l d.68 1.37. 32. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.36. 33. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.68 1.40. 34. GARF f.9414 op.l d.l814 1.30. 35. See Appendix A, Table 10. 36. GARF f.9414 op.1 d.77 1.70; and Chapter 7, '1. Economic Role'. 37. Cited as from the RSFSR Corrective Labour Codex, GARF f.9414 op.l

d.77 1.70. 38. See Chapter 4, 'The Administration of Production'. 39. See Chapter 5, 'The Number of Camps', and Table 2.1. 40. See Chapter 4, 'Repatriation'. 41. See, for example, Table 8.2. 42. See Chapter 7, and Appendix A, Table 11.

Index Andreev, Colonel 9, II, 14 Antonov-Ovseenko, A. V. 24, 28-9, 32 archives I, 23-4, 32-3, 37, 39, 42, 47,

63, 65, 80, 82, 93, ll7, 123, 145, 160, 162

Baltic States 157-8 Belorussia 9, 90, 103 Bergson, A. 18 Beria, Lavrentii 25, 57, 86, 90, 105,

126, 134-5, 142, 147, 155

census data 19, 33 children 30, 40, 62-3, 151 Christians 61, 66 collectivisation 15, 17, 49, 56 Conquest, Robert 6, II, 17, 19-22, 25,

31, 74 CPSU 23, 123, 154 Czechs 101, 104, 107

Dallin, David 13, 17, 42-4, 57 Dugin, A. N. 26, 32 Dzerzhinsky, Felix 44, 63

executions 4, 20, 29-31, 36-8, 52, 66, 89-90, 95-6, 109-11, 158, 161

Finns 87, I 00, 107 forced labour 18-19, 26, 29, 31,

39-40, 45-50, 54, 66, 72-8, 81, 98, 107, 123-44, 161

agriculture 73, 76, 123, 125, 137-40 industrial construction 55, 73, 112,

140-41, 161 industrial production 29, 40, 58,

68, 76-7, 88, 130, 132-3, 142-3, 161

metallurgy 55, 73-4, 107, 143 military production 77, 88, 113,

123-4, 133-7, 143, 161 mining 7, 29, 50, 55, 73-4, 98,

107, 130, 133, 143, 147, 161

non-working prisoners 127-33 oil 50, 107, 147 road building 28, 47, 73, 76, 98,

112, 140-1, 161

timber 29, 47-8, 73, 75, 98, 105, 130, 141-3

transport 125

Germans 91, 97, 101, 107, 152-3, 158 Germany 62, 96-7, 100, ll9, 155 Gorbachev, Mikhail 2, 23, 35, 39, 123 Gulag

colonies 24, 26-7, 34, 37, 54, 59-61, 69, 76-7, 79, 83, 85, 92, 95, 114-18, 127, 133, 138, 147, 150, 152, 161

conditions 26, 38-9, 50, 58, 66, 69-71, 74-5, 78, 81, 97, 102-4, 114, 117 126, 130-3, 139, 143, 145-9, 162

escapes 67, 102-4, 110, 117, 158-9 extent I, 6, 9-22, 24-38, 51-2, 54,

56, 62, 79, 82-5, 90-l, 100-22, 161 guards 34-5, 58, 65-9, 72, 79, 139,

145, 152-9 ideology 47-50, 52-3, 69, 77--9,

124, 160 origins 3, 7, 39, 42-63 prisoner throughput 27-8, 37, 93,

101-15, 149 releases 101-6 revolts 155-8 structure 26, 56-60, 64, 72-80,

85-6, 161

industrialisation 6, 11-12, 49, 50, 55, 88

Japanese llO Jasny, Naum 9, 11, 13, 16, 18, 28-9 Jews 96

Kazakhstan 74 KGB see secret police Khrushchev, Nikita 50

Latvia 90

Malenkov, G. M. 126 memoirs I, 3, 6, 8, ll, 14, 40, 45, 47,

61, 63, 71, 78, 83-4, 93, liS, 126, 139, 146. 162

189

190 Index

Moldavia 10 Molotov, V. M. 126

Nasedkin, General 44, 7!5, 86, 88, 102, 124, 126, 142, 146, 1!59

NKVD see secret police

OGPU see secret police

Poles 9, 13, IS, 84, 101, 104-S, 107, 1!53

prisons 13, 18, 34, 43, 46, 48-9, !53, !57, 61, 89-90, 110, 114-IS, 120

railways 28, 47, SS, !58, 73-S, 84, 88-90, 98, 100, 130, 132, 140-1, 161

Redding, David 28-9 Romanians 101, 107, 1!52, 1!58 Rosefielde, Steven 6, 11-22 RSFSR 9, 13, 18, 46, !57, 60, 126,

142, 160

Sakharov, Andrei 21 secret police 18, 26, 29, 36, 43, !54-6,

61-4, 67-8, 92, 94, 12!5 servicemen IS, 31, 33-4, 92-4, 101,

103-6, 113-14, 119, 12!5, 14!5, ISO, 1!53

Shatunovskaya, Olga 36-8 Slovaks 101, 104, 107 Solovetsky camp 44-6, 61-2 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 11-12, 17, 29,

4fr7, ss. 60, 66, 72, 83, 110 Soviet Union

economic plans 9, 12-13, 28-9, S9, 72

Far East 7 legal policy 42-3, 46, S2-S, !57 special settlers 14, 29-32, 34-S, 49,

!56, 62, 118-19, ISO, 161

Stalin, I. V. 1-2, fr7, 14, 23, 2!5. 3!5, 39, 46, 49, Sl, S5, 60, 92, 124, 126, 161

Swianiewicz, S. 17, 69, 71, 78

terror 6, 7, IS-16, 21, 38, 52-3, 57, 106

Timashett: N. S. 9, 18 Tsaplin, V. V. 33-S

Ukraine 9, 20, 31, 74, 89-90, lOS, 1S3-4

Uzbekistan 90

Volkogonov, D. A. 3fr7 Vorkuta 60 Vorozhilov, K. E. 126 Voznesensky, N. A. 126, 134 Vyshinsky, A. I. !53

western observers 6-8, 23, 40, 57, 101 Wheatcroft, Stephen 6, I I, 17-22,

31, 34 women 30, 40, 114, ISO-I, 153 World War II 3, 6, 12, 2!5~. 31,

38-40, 43, 59, 63-4, 69, 73-4, 7fr7, !52-3, 82-3, 87, 98, 102-5, 123, 134-7, 140, 143, 146, 152-3, ISS-8

evacuation 82, 87-90, 131, 146, 161 Nazi-Soviet Pact IS POWs IS, 31, 62, 77, 82, 92-7,

100, 161 repatriation 92-S, 100

Yagoda, G. G. 46, 48, !57, 63, 160 Yezhov, N. I. 2!5, 27

Zemskov, V. N. 24-S, 28, 30, 32-S, 62, 117, 123, 144, 152