Gulag

There were some curious exceptions to the general destruction. For Stalin not only had control over who was arrested, but he also sometimes decided who would not be arrested. It is a curious fact that, despite the deaths of nearly all of his former colleagues, Naftaly Frenkel managed to evade the executioner’s bullet. By 1937, he was the boss of BAMlag, the Baikal–Amur railway line, one of the most chaotic and lethal camps in the far east. Yet when forty-eight “Trotskyites” were arrested in BAMlag in 1938, he was somehow not among them.

His absence from the list of arrestees is made stranger by the fact that the camp newspaper did attack him, openly accusing him of sabotage. Nevertheless, his case was mysteriously held up in Moscow. The local BAMlag prosecutor, who was conducting the investigation into Frenkel, found the delay incomprehensible. “I don’t understand why this investigation was placed under ‘special decree,’ or from whom this ‘special decree’ has come,” he wrote to Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet Union’s chief prosecutor: “If we don’t arrest Trotskyite-diversionist-spies, then whom should we be arresting?” Stalin, it seems, was still well able to protect his friends.¹²

Perhaps the most dramatic 1937 camp-boss saga was one that occurred toward the end of that year, in Magadan, and began with the arrest of Eduard Berzin, the Dalstroi boss. As Yagoda’s direct subordinate, Berzin ought to have suspected that his career would soon be shortened. He ought also to have been suspicious when, in December, he received a whole new group of NKVD “deputies,” among them Major Pavlov, an NKVD officer who ranked higher than Berzin himself. Although Stalin often introduced soon-to-be-disgraced officials to their successors in this manner, Berzin showed no sign of suspecting anything. When the ominously named SS Nikolai Yezhov pulled into Nagaevo Bay, carrying his new team, Berzin organized a brass band to welcome them. He then spent several days showing his new “staff” the ropes—although they virtually ignored him—before boarding the SS Nikolai Yezhov himself.

Upon reaching Vladivostok, he proceeded, quite normally, to take the Trans-Siberian Express for Moscow. But although Berzin left Vladivostok as a first-class passenger, he arrived a prisoner. Just 70 kilometers outside Moscow, in the town of Aleksandrov, his train ground to a halt. In the middle of the night of December 19, 1937, Berzin was arrested on the station platform—outside the capital, so as not to cause a fuss in central Moscow— and driven to Lubyanka, Moscow’s central prison, for interrogation. He was quickly indicted for “counter-revolutionary sabotage-wrecking activities.” The NKVD accused him of organizing a “spy-diversionist Trotskyist organization in Kolyma,” which was allegedly shipping gold to the Japanese government and plotting a Japanese takeover of the Russian far east. They also accused him of spying for England and Germany. Clearly, the Dalstroi boss had been a very busy man. He was shot in August 1938 in the basement of Lubyanka prison.

The absurdity of the charges did not detract from the deadlines of the case. By the end of December, Pavlov, working quickly, had arrested the majority of Berzin’s subordinates. I. G. Filippov, the boss of the Sevvostlag camp, provided, under torture, an extensive confession which implicated virtually all of them. Confessing that he had “recruited” Berzin in 1934, he admitted that their “anti-Soviet organization” had planned to overthrow the Soviet government through the “preparation of an armed uprising against Soviet power in Kolyma . . . the preparation and accomplishment of terrorist acts against the leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet government . . . the encitement of the native population . . . and the encouragement of widespread wrecking,” among other things. Berzin’s chief deputy, Lev Epshtein, subsequently confessed to “gathering secret intelligence for France and Japan while conducting sabotage, diversion and wrecking.” The chief medical doctor at the Magadan polyclinic was accused of having “connections with alien elements and doubledealers.” By the time it was over, hundreds of people who had been associated with Berzin, from geologists to bureaucrats to engineers, were either dead or had themselves become prisoners.¹³