Gulag

There was a certain logic to this arrangement. For one, Dalstroi needed to attract volunteers, especially engineers and marriageable women (there were always shortages of both in Kolyma) and Berzin conducted many recruiting drives in an attempt to persuade “free workers” to emigrate to the region, even setting up offices in Moscow, Leningrad, Odessa, Rostov, and Novosibirsk.²⁸ For that reason alone, Stalin and Berzin may have wanted to avoid associating Kolyma too closely with the Gulag, fearing that the link might frighten away potential recruits. Although there is no direct proof, these machinations may also have been directed at the outside world. Like Soviet timber, Kolyma’s gold would be sold directly to the West, exchanged for desperately needed technology and machinery. This may help explain why the Soviet leadership wanted to make the Kolyma gold fields seem as much like a “normal” economic enterprise as possible. A boycott of Soviet gold would be far more damaging than a boycott of Soviet timber.

In any case, Stalin’s personal involvement with Kolyma was extremely strong from the beginning. In 1932, he actually demanded daily reports on the gold industry, and, as already noted, interested himself in the details of Dalstroi’s exploration projects and quota fulfillments. He sent out inspectors to examine the camps, and required Dalstroi’s leaders to travel frequently to Moscow. When the Politburo allotted money to Dalstroi, it also issued precise instructions as to how the money was to be spent, as it did with Ukhtpechlag.²⁹

Yet Dalstroi’s “independence” was not entirely fictitious either. Although he did answer to Stalin, Berzin also managed to leave his mark on Kolyma, so much so that the “Berzin era” was later remembered with some nostalgia. Berzin appears to have understood his task in quite a straightforward manner: it was his job to get his prisoners to dig as much gold as possible. He was not interested in starving them or killing them or punishing them—only production figures mattered. Under Dalstroi’s first boss, conditions were therefore not nearly as harsh as they became later, and prisoners were not nearly as hungry. Partly as a result, Kolyma’s gold output increased eight times in the first two years of Dalstroi’s operation. ³⁰

True, the first years were fraught with the same chaos and disorganization that prevailed elsewhere. By 1932, nearly 10,000 prisoners were at work in the region—among them the group of inmate engineers and specialists whose skills tallied so beautifully with the task in front of them—along with more than 3,000 voluntary “free workers”—camp workers who were not prisoners.³¹ The high numbers were accompanied by high death rates. Of the 16,000 prisoners who traveled to Kolyma in Berzin’s first year, only 9,928 even reached Magadan alive.³² The rest were thrown, underclothed and underprotected, into the winter storms: survivors of the first year would later claim that only half of their number had lived. ³³

Still, once the initial chaos had passed, the situation did gradually improve. Berzin worked hard to improve conditions, apparently believing, not irrationally, that prisoners needed to be warm and well-fed in order to dig large quantities of gold. As a result, Thomas Sgovio, an American Kolyma survivor, wrote that camp “old-timers” spoke of Berzin’s reign warmly: “when the frost dipped below minus 60 degrees, they were not sent to work. They were given three Rest Days a month. The food was adequate and nutritious. The zeks [prisoners] were given warm clothing—fur caps and felt boots ...”³⁴ Varlam Shalamov, another Kolyma survivor—whose short stories, Kolyma Tales, are among the bitterest in the entire camp genre—also wrote of the Berzin period as a time of excellent food, a workday of four to six hours in winter and ten in summer, and colossal salaries for convicts, which permitted them to return to the mainland as well-to-do men when their sentences were up . . . The cemeteries dating back to those days are so few in number that the early residents of Kolyma seemed immortal to those who came later. ³⁵

If living conditions were better than they would be later, the camp command also treated prisoners with a greater degree of humanity. At that time, the line between the volunteer free workers and the prisoners was blurred. The two groups associated normally; inmates were sometimes allowed to move out of their barracks to live in the free workers’ villages, and could be promoted to become armed guards, as well as geologists and engineers. ³⁶ Mariya Ioffe, an exile in Kolyma in the mid-1930s, was allowed to keep books and paper, and remembered that most exile families were allowed to stay together.³⁷