Gulag

Tupolev, in turn, gave Beria a list of others to recall, among them Valentin Glushko, the Soviet Union’s leading designer of rocket engines, and Sergei Korolev, later to be the father of the Sputnik, the Soviet Union’s first satellite—indeed the father of the entire Soviet space program. Korolev returned to Lubyanka prison after seventeen months in Kolyma, having lost many of his teeth to scurvy, looking “famished and exhausted,” in the words of his fellow prisoners.⁶² Nevertheless, in a report prepared in August 1944, Beria would list twenty important new pieces of military technology invented in his sharashki, and elaborate on the many ways in which they had been of use to the defense industry during the Second World War.⁶³

In some ways, Beria’s reign would have seemed like an improvement to ordinary zeks too. Overall, the food situation did temporarily improve. As Beria pointed out in April 1938, the camp food norm of 2,000 calories per day had been set for people sitting in prisons, not for people working at manual labor. Because theft, cheating, and punishment for poor work reduced even this low quantity of food by as much as 70 percent, large numbers of prisoners were starving. This he regretted, not because he pitied them, but because higher death rates and higher levels of sickness prevented the NKVD from fulfilling its production plans for 1939. Beria requested the drawing up of new food norms, so that the “physical capabilities of the camp workforce can be put to maximum use in any industry.” ⁶⁴

Although food norms were raised, Beria’s regime hardly heralded a re-discovery of prisoners’ humanity. On the contrary, the transformation of prisoners from human beings into units of labor had progressed several steps further. Prisoners could still be sentenced to die in the camps—but not for mere counter-revolutionary tendencies. Instead, those who refused to work or actively disorganized work were to be given “a stricter camp regime, punishment cells, worse food and living conditions, and other disciplinary measures.” “Shirkers” would also receive new sentences, up to and including death.⁶⁵

Local prosecutors began investigations into shirking immediately. In August 1939, for example, a prisoner was shot, not just for refusing to work, but for encouraging others not to work as well. In October, three women prisoners, evidently Orthodox nuns, were accused both of refusing to work and of singing counter-revolutionary hymns in camp: two were shot and the third received an extra sentence.⁶⁶

The years of the Great Terror had also left their mark in another way. Never again would the Gulag treat prisoners as wholly worthy of redemption. The system of “early release” for good behavior was dismantled. In his one known public intervention into the daily operations of the camps, Stalin himself had put an end to early releases, on the grounds that they hurt the economic operations of the camps. Addressing a meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1938, he asked,

Could we not think of some other form of reward for their work—medals, or such like? We are acting incorrectly, we are disturbing the work of the camp. Freeing these people may be necessary, but from the point of view of the national economy, it is a mistake . . . we will free the best people, and leave the worst.⁶⁷

A decree to this effect was issued in June 1939. A few months later, another decree eliminated “conditional early release” for invalids too. The number of sick prisoners would rise correspondingly. The main source of incentive for hardworking prisoners now was to be the improvement of “supplies and food”—as well as the medals Stalin thought would be so appealing. By 1940, even Dalstroi had begun to hand them out.⁶⁸

Several of these initiatives ran counter to the laws of the time, and actually encountered resistance. The chief prosecutor, Vyshinsky, and the People’s Commissar of Justice, Richkov, both opposed the liquidation of early release, as well as the imposition of the death sentence for those accused of “disorganizing camp life.” But Beria, like Yagoda before him, clearly had Stalin’s support, and he won all of his battles. From January 1, 1940, the NKVD was even granted the right to take back some 130,000 prisoners who had been “loaned” to other ministries. Beria was determined to make the Gulag really and truly profitable.⁶⁹