Gulag

The hysteria did not last. In November 1938, the mass shootings came to an abrupt halt, both in the camps and in the rest of the country. Perhaps the purge had gone too far, even for Stalin’s tastes. Perhaps it had simply achieved what it was meant to achieve. Or perhaps it was causing too much damage to the still-fragile economy. Whatever the reason, Stalin told the Communist Party Congress of March 1939 that the purge had been accompanied by “more mistakes than might have been expected.” ⁴⁸

No one apologized or repented, and almost no one was ever punished. Just a few months earlier, Stalin had sent a circular to all of the NKVD bosses, complimenting them for “inflicting a crushing defeat on espionage-subversive agents of foreign intelligence services” and for “purging the country of subversive, insurrectionary, and espionage cadres.” Only then did he point out some of the “deficiencies” in the operation, such as the “simplified procedures for investigation,” the lack of witnesses and corroborating evidence.⁴⁹

Nor did the purge of the NKVD itself come to a complete halt. Stalin removed the alleged author of all these “mistakes,” Nikolai Yezhov, from office in November 1938—and sentenced him to death. The execution took place in 1940, after Yezhov had pleaded for his life, just like Yagoda before him: “Tell Stalin that I shall die with his name upon my lips.” ⁵⁰

Yezhov’s protégés went down along with him, as had Yagoda’s cronies a few years earlier. In her prison cell, Evgeniya Ginzburg noticed one day that the prison regulations pasted to the wall had been removed. When they were replaced, the space in the top left-hand corner, which had read “Approved. Yezhov, Commissar-General for State Security,” had been pasted over with white paper. But the changes did not end there: “First the name Weinstock [the prison commander] was painted over and Antonov substituted; then Antonov went, and in his place it read: Chief Prison Administration. ‘That’ll save them from changing it again,’ we laughed.”⁵¹

The productivity of the camp system continued to spiral downward. In Ukhtpechlag, the mass shootings, the increased number of sick and weak prisoners, and the loss of prisoner specialists had forced the camp’s output to drop precipitously from 1936 to 1937. In July 1938, a special Gulag commission was called upon to discuss Ukhtpechlag’s massive deficit.⁵² The productivity of the Kolyma gold mines also fell. Even the huge influx of new prisoners failed to bring up the overall quantity of gold mined to levels comparable with those in the past. Before being deposed, Yezhov himself called for more money to be spent updating Dalstroi’s old-fashioned mining technology—as if that were the real problem.⁵³

Meanwhile, the commander of Belbaltlag—the one who had bragged so proudly of his success in ridding the camp’s administrative staff of political prisoners—complained of the current “urgent need for administrative and technical personnel.” The purge had certainly made the camp’s technical staff politically “healthier,” he wrote carefully, but it had “increased its deficiencies” as well. In his fourteenth camp division, for example, there were 12,500 prisoners, of which only 657 were nonpoliticals. Of these, however, most had very severe criminal sentences, which also disqualified them from work as specialists and administrators, while 184 were illiterate—leaving only 70 who could be used as clerks or as engineers.⁵⁴

Overall, the turnover of the NKVD camps, according to official statistics, dropped from 3.5 billion rubles in 1936 to 2 billion rubles in 1937. The value of the camps’ gross industrial production also dropped, from 1.1 billion rubles to 945 million rubles.⁵⁵

The unprofitability and vast disorganization of most camps, as well as the increasing numbers of sick and dying prisoners, did not go unnoticed in Moscow, where extremely frank discussions of camp economics took place during meetings of the central Gulag administration’s Communist Party cell. At a meeting in April 1938, one bureaucrat complained of the “chaos and disorder” in the Komi camps. He also accused the Norilsk camp commanders of producing a “badly designed” nickel factory, and of wasting a great deal of money in consequence. Given the amount of money that had been spent setting up new forestry camps, grumbled another administrator, “We could have expected more. Our camps are organized unsystematically. Major buildings were constructed in the mud, and now have to be moved.”

By April 1939, the complaints worsened. At the northern camps, there was a “particularly difficult situation with food supplies,” which led to “an enormous percentage of weak workers, an enormous percentage of prisoners who couldn’t work at all, and a high death rate and illness rate.”⁵⁶ In that same year, the Council of People’s Commissars acknowledged that up to 60 percent of camp prisoners suffered from pellagra or other diseases of malnutrition.⁵⁷