Gulag

For more specific references, both to camps and to the activities of their inhabitants, the NKVD devised an elaborate code which could be used in open telegrams. A document from 1940 listed these code names, some bizarrely creative. Pregnant women were to be referred to as “Books,” and women with children as “Receipts.” Men, on the other hand, were “Accounts.” Exiles were “Rubbish,” and prisoners undergoing investigation were “Envelopes.” A camp was a “Trust,” a camp division a “Factory.” One camp was code-named “Free.” ²⁰

Language used inside the camps changed too. Until the autumn of 1937, official documents and letters frequently referred to camp inmates by profession, referring to them simply as “lumberjacks,” for example. By 1940, an individual prisoner was no longer a lumberjack, but just a prisoner: a zaklyuchennyi, or z/k, in most documents—pronounced zek.²¹ A group of prisoners became a kontingent (“contingent,” or “quota”), a bureaucratic, depersonalized term. Nor could prisoners earn the coveted title of Stakhanovite: one camp administrator sent an indignant letter to his subordinates ordering them to refer to hardworking prisoners as “prisoners, working as shock-workers” or “prisoners, working according to the Stakhanovite methods of labor.”

Any positive use of the term “political prisoner” had, of course, long since disappeared. Privileges for the socialist politicals had ended with their transfer from Solovetsky in 1925. But now, the term “political” went through a complete transformation. It included anyone sentenced according to the infamous Article 58 of the prison code, which included all “counter-revolutionary” crimes—and it had thoroughly negative connotations. The politicals—sometimes called “KRs” (counter-revolutionaries), kontras, or kontriks— were more and more often referred to as vragi naroda: “enemies of the people.”²²

This term, a Jacobin epithet first used by Lenin in 1917, had been revived by Stalin in 1927 to describe Trotsky and his followers. It began to have a wider meaning in 1936 after a secret letter—“of Stalin’s authorship,” in the view of Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin’s Russian biographer—went out from the Central Committee to the Party organizations in the regions and republics. The letter explained that while an enemy of the people “appeared tame and inoffensive,” he did everything possible to “crawl stealthily into socialism,” even though he “secretly did not accept it.” Enemies, in other words, could no longer be identified by their openly professed views. A later NKVD boss, Lavrenty Beria, would also frequently quote Stalin, noting that “an enemy of the people is not only one who commits sabotage, but one who doubts the rightness of the Party line.” Ergo, an “enemy” could mean anybody who opposed Stalin’s rule, for any reason, even if he did not openly profess to do so. ²³

In the camps, “enemy of the people” now became an official term used in official documents. Women were arrested as “wives of enemies of the people” after an NKVD decree of 1937 made such arrests possible, and the same applied to children. Officially, they were sentenced as “ChSVR”: “Member of the Family of an Enemy of the Revolution.”²⁴ Many of the “wives” were incarcerated together in the Temnikovsky camp, also known as Temlag, in the republic of Mordovia, central Russia. Anna Larina, the wife of Bukharin, the disgraced Soviet leader, remembered that there “We had become equals in our troubles—Tukhachevskys and Yakirs, Bukharins and Radeks, Uboreviches and Gamarniks: ‘Misfortune shared is half misfortune!’”²⁵

Another Temlag survivor, Galina Levinson, remembered that the camp’s regime had been relatively liberal, perhaps because “we didn’t have sentences, we were just ‘wives.’” The majority of women in the camp, she noted, were people who until then had been “absolutely Soviet people,” and were still convinced that their arrests were due to the machinations of some secret, fascist organization within the Party. Several occupied themselves writing daily letters to Stalin and the Central Committee, complaining angrily about the plot being conducted against them.²⁶

Aside from its official uses, “enemy of the people” had also, by 1937, evolved into a term of abuse. From the time of Solovetsky, the camps’ founders and planners had organized the system around the idea that prisoners were not human, but rather “units of labor”: even at the time of the building of the White Sea Canal, Maxim Gorky had described the kulaks as “half-animals.”²⁷ Now, however, the propaganda described “enemies” as something even lower than two-legged cattle. From the late 1930s, Stalin also began publicly to refer to “enemies of the people” as “vermin,” “pollution,” and “filth,” or sometimes simply as “weeds” which needed to be uprooted. ²⁸