Gulag

The Great Terror was not responsible for all of these problems, of course. As noted, even Frenkel’s forestry camps, so admired by Stalin, had never actually made a profit.⁵⁸ Prison labor had always been—and would always be—far less productive than free labor. But this lesson had not yet been learned. When Yezhov was removed from power in November 1938, his replacement as NKVD chief, Lavrenty Beria, almost immediately set about altering camp regimes, changing the rules, streamlining the procedures, all in order to put the camps back where Stalin wanted them: at the heart of the Soviet economy.

Beria had not—yet—concluded that the camp system itself was unproductive and wasteful by its very nature. Instead, he seemed to believe that the people in charge of the camp system had been incompetent. Now he was determined to turn the camps into a genuinely profitable part of the Soviet economy, this time for real.

Beria did not, then or later, release large numbers of unjustly accused prisoners from camps (although the NKVD released some from jails). The camps did not, then or later, become any more humane. The dehumanization of “enemies” continued to permeate the language of the guards and camp administrators until Stalin’s death. The mistreatment of political prisoners, indeed of all prisoners, continued: in 1939, under Beria’s watchful eye, the first prisoners began working in Kolyma’s uranium mines with virtually no protection against radiation.⁵⁹ Beria changed only one aspect of the system: he told camp commanders to keep more prisoners alive, and to make better use of them.

Although the policy was never clear, in practice Beria also lifted the ban on “hiring” political prisoners with engineering, scientific, or technical skills to work in technical positions in the camps. On the ground, camp commanders were still wary of using political prisoners as “specialists,” and would remain so until the Gulag’s demise in the mid-1950s. As late as 1948, different branches of the security services would still be arguing about whether or not political prisoners should be forbidden from holding jobs as specialists, some arguing that it was too politically dangerous, others claiming the camps would be too difficult to run without them. ⁶⁰ Although Beria never fully resolved this dilemma, he was too intent on making the NKVD into a productive part of the Soviet economy to allow all of the Gulag’s most important scientists and engineers to lose their limbs to frostbite in the far north. In September 1938, he began organizing special workshops and laboratories for prisoner scientists, known by prisoners as sharashki. Solzhenitsyn, who worked in a sharashka, described one—a “top-secret research establishment, officially referred to only by a code number”—in his novel The First Circle:

A dozen prisoners were brought from the camps to this old country house on the outskirts of Moscow, which had been duly surrounded by barbed wire . . . at that time, the prisoners did not know exactly what kind of research they had been brought to Mavrino to do. They were busy unpacking stacks of crates which two special goods trains had delivered, securing comfortable chairs and desks for themselves, and sorting equipment . . . 61

Initially, the sharashki were christened the “Special Construction Bureaus.” Later, they were known collectively as the “Fourth Special Department” of the NKVD, and about 1,000 scientists would eventually work in them. In some cases, Beria personally tracked down talented scientists, and ordered them brought back to Moscow. NKVD agents gave them baths, a haircut, a shave, and a long rest—and sent them off to work in prison laboratories. Among Beria’s most important “finds” was the aviation engineer Tupolev, who arrived at his sharashka carrying a bag with a hunk of bread and a few pieces of sugar (he refused to give them up, even after being told the food would improve).