Gulag

In the same way that Auschwitz has become, in popular memory, the camp which symbolizes all other Nazi camps, so too has the word “Kolyma” come to signify the greatest hardships of the Gulag. “Kolyma,” wrote one historian, “is a river, a mountain range, a region, and a metaphor.”²⁰ Rich in minerals—and above all rich in gold—the vast Kolyma region in the far northeastern corner of Siberia, on the Pacific coast, may well be the most inhospitable part of Russia. Kolyma is colder than Komi—temperatures there regularly fall to more than 49 degrees Fahrenheit below zero in the winter—and even more remote.²¹ To reach the camps of Kolyma, prisoners traveled by train across the entire length of the USSR—sometimes a three-month journey—to Vladivostok. They made the rest of the trip by boat, traveling north past Japan, through the Sea of Okhotsk, to the port of Magadan, the gateway to the Kolyma River valley.

Kolyma’s first commander is one of the most flamboyant figures in the history of the Gulag. Eduard Berzin, an Old Bolshevik, had been commander of the First Latvian Rifle Division, which guarded the Kremlin in 1918. Later, he helped to crush the Social Revolutionaries, Lenin’s socialist opponents, and to unmask Bruce Lockhart’s “British plot.”²² In 1926, Stalin gave Berzin the task of organizing Vishlag, one of the very first large-scale camps. He took to the job with enormous enthusiasm, inspiring a historian of Vishlag to speak of his reign there as being the height of the Gulag’s “romantic period.”²³

The OGPU built Vishlag at the same time as the White Sea Canal, and Berzin seems to have very much approved of (or, at least, enthusiastically paid lip service to) Gorky’s ideas about prisoner reform. Glowing with paternalistic goodwill, Berzin provided his inmates with film theaters and discussion clubs, libraries and “restaurant-style” dining halls. He planted gardens, complete with fountains and a small zoological park. He also paid prisoners regular salaries, and operated the same policy of “early release for good work” as did the commanders of the White Sea Canal. Not everyone benefited from these amenities: prisoners who were deemed poor workers, or who were simply unlucky, might be sent to one of Vishlag’s many small forestry lagpunkts in the taiga, where conditions were poor, death rates were higher, and prisoners were quietly tortured and even murdered. ²⁴

Still, Berzin’s intention, at least, was that his camp appeared to be an honorable institution. All of which makes him seem, at first glance, an odd candidate to become the first boss of the Far Northern Construction Administration—Dalstroi—the “trust,” or pseudo-corporation, which would develop the Kolyma region. For there was nothing particularly romantic or idealistic about the founding of Dalstroi. Stalin’s interest in the region dated from 1926, when he sent an envoy engineer to the United States to study mining techniques.²⁵ Later, between August 20, 1931, and March 16, 1932, the Politburo discussed the geology and geography of Kolyma no less than eleven times—with Stalin himself contributing frequently to the discussions. Like the Yanson commission’s deliberations on the organization of the Gulag, the Politburo conducted these debates, in the words of the historian David Nordlander, “not in the idealistic rhetoric of socialist construction, but rather in the practical language of investment priorities and financial returns.” Stalin devoted his subsequent correspondence with Berzin to questions about inmate productivity, quotas, and output, never touching on the ideals of prisoner reform.²⁶

Kolyma, 1937

On the other hand, Berzin’s talent for creating rosy public images may have been precisely what the Soviet leadership wanted. For although Dalstroi would later be absorbed directly into the Gulag administration, in the beginning the trust was always referred to—in public—as if it were a separate entity, a sort of business conglomerate, which had nothing to do with the Gulag at all. Quietly, the authorities founded Sevvostlag, a Gulag camp which leased out convicts to the Dalstroi Trust. In practice, the two institutions never competed. The boss of Dalstroi was also the boss of Sevvostlag, and nobody had any doubt about that. On paper, however, they were kept separate, and in public they appeared to be distinct entities. ²⁷