Gulag

An indignant official order, of February 25, 1940, complained not only that sick and incapacitated prisoners had been put on trains to the northern camps—which was in itself forbidden—but also that many more had not been fed or given water, had not been given clothes appropriate to the season en route, and had not been accompanied by their personal files, which had therefore gone missing. Prisoners arrived in camps, in other words, where no one knew their crime or their sentence. Out of 1,900 prisoners sent in one transport to the far north in 1939, 590 were of “limited work capacity” upon arrival, being either too weak or too ill. Some had only a few months left to serve of their sentences, and some had finished them altogether. Most were without warm clothes and “poorly shod.” In November 1939, another 272 prisoners, none of whom had winter coats, were driven a distance of 500 kilometers in open trucks, as a result of which many fell ill and some later died. All of these facts were reported with suitable outrage and anger, and negligent guards were punished.⁵⁹

Numerous instructions regulated the affairs of the transit prisons as well. On July 26, 1940, for example, an order described the organization of transit prisons, explicitly demanding their commanders to construct baths, parasite disinfection systems, and working kitchens.⁶⁰ No less important were the safety and security of Dalstroi’s prison fleet. When, in December 1947, dynamite exploded on two of the ships moored in Magadan’s harbor, resulting in 97 deaths and 224 hospitalizations, Moscow accused the port of “criminally negligent behavior.” Those held responsible were tried and received criminal sentences.⁶¹

The Gulag’s bosses in Moscow were well aware of the horrors of prisoner boat travel. A report by the prosecutors’ office inspectorate in Norilsk in 1943 complained that prisoners who arrived by boat—they came up the Yenisei River on barges—were “frequently in poor physical condition . . . of the 14,125 prisoners who arrived in Norilsk in 1943, about 500 were hospitalized in Dudinka [the Norilsk port] on the first or second day after their arrival; up to 1,000 were temporarily unable to work, as they had been deprived of food.”⁶²

Despite all of the bluster, the transport system changed very little over time. Orders were sent out, complaints were made. Yet on December 24, 1944, a convoy arrived at Komsomolsk station in the far east in what even the deputy prosecutor of the Gulag system thought was an execrable condition. His official account of the fate of “echelon SK 950,” a train composed of fifty-one wagons, must stand as some kind of low point, even in the nightmarish history of Gulag transport:

The prisoners arrived in unheated wagons which had not been prepared for prisoner transport. In each wagon, there were between 10–12 bunks, on which no more than 18 people could fit, yet there were up to 48 people in each wagon. The wagons were not supplied with enough cannisters for water, as a result of which there were interruptions in water supply, sometimes for whole days and nights. The prisoners were given frozen bread, and for 10 days got none at all. The prisoners arrived dressed in summer uniforms, dirty, covered in lice, with obvious signs of frostbite . . . the sick prisoners had been rolled onto the wagon floors, without medical help, and had died there and then. Corpses were kept in the wagons for long periods . . .

Of the 1,402 people sent on echelon SK 950, 1,291 arrived: 53 had died en route, 66 had been left in hospitals along the way. On arrival, a further 335 were hospitalized with third- or fourth-degree frostbite, pneumonia, and other diseases. The convoy had, it seemed, traveled for sixty days, twenty-four of which they had spent not moving, sitting on side tracks “due to poor organization.” Yet in this extreme case, the leader of the echelon—one Comrade Khabarov—received nothing more than a “censure with warnings.” ⁶³