Gulag

In order for a healthy young man, beginning his career at the gold-face in the clean, cold air, to turn into a “goner,” he needed only a period of twenty to thirty days of sixteen-hour workdays, without days off, coupled with systematic starvation, tattered clothes, nights in 60 degrees below zero of cold in a canvas tent full of holes . . . out of entire brigades which began the gold-mining season, not a single person would survive, except the brigadier himself, the brigade orderly, and a few of the brigadier’s personal friends.³⁷

Conditions also worsened because the number of prisoners rose, in some places with astonishing rapidity. The Politburo had, it is true, tried to prepare in advance for the influx, instructing the Gulag in 1937 to begin the construction of five new timber camps in the Komi region, as well as more “in the remote areas of Kazakhstan.” To hasten construction, the Gulag had even received an “advance of 10 million rubles” to organize these new camps. In addition, the People’s Commissariats of Defense, Health, and Forestry were ordered to find 240 commanding officers and political workers, 150 physicians, 400 medical attendants, 10 eminent forestry specialists, and “50 graduates of the Leningrad Academy of Forest Technology” to work in the Gulag—immediately.³⁸

Nevertheless, the existing camps once again overflowed with new recruits, and the overcrowding of the early 1930s repeated itself. At a lagpunkt built for 250 to 300 people in Siblag, the Siberian forestry camp, a survivor guessed that the actual number of prisoners in 1937 surpassed 17,000. Even if the real number were only a quarter of that, the overestimate indicates how crowded it must have felt to be there. Lacking barracks, prisoners built zemlyanki, dugouts in the earth; even those were so crowded that it was “impossible to move, without stepping on someone’s hand.” Prisoners refused to go outside, for fear of losing their place on the floor. There were no bowls, no spoons, and huge lines for food. A dysentery epidemic began, and prisoners died rapidly.

In a later Party meeting, even Siblag’s camp administration solemnly remembered the “terrible lessons of 1938,” not least for the “number of working days lost” in the crisis.³⁹ Throughout the camp system, the number of fatalities officially doubled from 1937 to 1938. Statistics are not everywhere available, but death rates are presumed to be much higher in those far northern camps—Kolyma, Vorkuta, Norilsk—where political prisoners were sent in large numbers.⁴⁰

But prisoners did not die only from starvation and overwork. In the new atmosphere, the incarceration of enemies quickly began to seem insufficient: better that they cease to exist altogether. Thus, on July 30, 1937, the NKVD issued an order on the repression of “former kulaks, thieves, and other anti-Soviet elements”—an order that contained execution quotas for Gulag prisoners as well as others.⁴¹ Thus, on August 25, 1937, Yezhov signed another order calling for executions of inmates being held in the high-security political prisons. The NKVD, he said, must “finish within two months the operation for the repression of the most active counter-revolutionary elements . . . those sentenced for spying, diversion, terrorism, revolutionary activity, and banditry, as well as those sentenced for being members of anti-Soviet parties.”⁴²

To the politicals, he added the “bandits and criminal elements” operating in Solovetsky, which by that time had been converted into a high-security political prison as well. The quota for Solovetsky was stated: 1,200 inmates still imprisoned on Solovetsky were to be shot. A witness recalled the day some of them were called away: