Glavnoe Upravlenei Lagerei. These three Russian words have become synonymous with death. When translated the words mean The Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Labor Settlements giving us the acronym GULag. From the rise of the Bolsheviks in 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1991, the camp system would be used to intimidate and suppress political dissent for seventy-four years. Though at first it started out as a place for criminals to reform their ways through the use of “beneficial” labor, despots would eventually use it as a tool to put down political dissent. Through the use of torture, forced labor, poor living conditions, and out right murder over 2,000,000 people died; and that’s a rough estimate since not all of the documentation of the camps have been found, if any existed at all. While the Nazis had their camps for seven years, the Bolsheviks had theirs for seventy-four.
Forced labor. The concept is simple: force political enemies and criminals to do the jobs you do not want to do as a punishment. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics followed this concept to the fullest extent. The very founder of the USSR, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, had considered the use of forced labor as a corrective means of imprisonment against criminals, and especially his enemies (“Gulag” 5):
“…‘dictatorship of the proletariat’…had much in common with a dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party…this left little room for other political parties: those that were not outlawed for supporting the Whites or…staging a revolt were harassed and intimidated by arrests during the Civil War and forced into self-liquidation in the early 1920s.” (“Revolution” 80)
After Karensky’s republic fell in the October of 1917 giving rise to the Bolsheviks; chaos reigned over the country, large areas of the country were not under the Bolsheviks control, areas like Siberia, southern Russia, Caucasus, Ukraine, the Urals, and the Volga region. (“Revolution” 67) Many different groups banded together in an attempt to form their own governments to challenge the Bolsheviks, like the short lived Volga Republic or the government established by Admiral Kolchak in Siberia. (“Revolution” 67, 66) It was so decentralized that a legion of 30,000 Czech soldiers was able to go across the entire country to Vladivostok before getting on a boat and returning to Europe, fighting the Bolsheviks throughout their entire journey. (“Revolution” 66-67) Though the Bolsheviks were technically in charge they still had to compete for power with many different groups: the White Army, the Anarchists, the Social Democrats, the Green Army, etc. (“Gulag” 4 and 13) (“Revolution” 68) The civil war was long and bloody with heavy casualties on all sides, an estimated 14,512,824 people died, however, records are incomplete. (“Russian Civil War”)
In order to combat political enemies the Bolsheviks, in the December of 1917, created the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage; the Cheka in Russian; Lenin’s secret police, and ancestor of the KGB. (“Gulag” 9) (“Revolution” 69) (“Dictators” 180) The Cheka initially was formed in order to “control the outbreak of banditry, looting and raiding of liquor stores that followed the October seizure of power.” (“Revolution” 69) However, it eventually went beyond its normal duties and became a “…security police, dealing with anti-regime conspiracies and keeping watch on groups whose loyalty was suspect…” (“Revolution” 69) It achieved these goals through the use of mass arrest, summary justice, executions, and hostage taking. (“Revolution” 69)
“The local Soviet…surrounded a part of Nevsk Prospekt, Petrograd’s main shopping street, arrested everyone without a Party card or a certificate proving they worked for a government institution, and marched them off to a nearby barracks.” (“Gulag” 11)
According to Bolshevik figures, in 1918 and the first half of 1919 the Cheka shot at least 8,389 persons without trial, and 87,000 were arrested. (“Revolution” 69) The criminal system at this time was divided into two systems: “Special” and “Ordinary” (“Gulag” 12) The “Special” system was devoted entirely to “politicals” or political enemies/prisoners while the “Ordinary” system was devoted to the normal criminal fraternity. In short: the Cheka became a terror organization similar to the Czarist secret police.
The first forced labor camp system the Bolsheviks constructed, and the one that would become the model for the GULag system in the years to come, was the Northern Camps of Special Interest, SLON in Russian. (“Gulag” 20) The first camp of this system was the small archipelago of islands in the White Sea known as Solovetsky. (“Gulag” 20)
Solovetsky wasn’t a labor camp, in so far as the prisoners were meant to do productive labor, as much as it was a death camp. Living and working conditions were horrific, bordering those in Auschwitz, with abusive guards and tasks that were either meaningless or cruel. “…prisoners work[ing] [on] cutting trees, with no breaks, no respite, and little food. Desperate for a few days’ rest, they cut off their hands and feet.” (“Gulag” 23) As Solzhenitsyn once wrote: “Slave-driving had become a thought out system.” Guards would leave people naked in old, unheated church bell towers in the winter, their hands and feet tied behind their backs. Prisoners would be sent naked to go to the baths in freezing weather 2 kilometers away. Prisoners were deliberately given rotten food or denied medical attention. Prisoners were given pointless tasks such as moving snow to one place to another with bare hands. (“Gulag” 23) “…guards had…forced 128 prisoners to work in the forest all night in the winter in order to fulfill the [quota].” (“Gulag” 36) By 1925, 6,000 prisoners had been sent to Solovetsky, and of those 6,000 prisoners about 1,500 died in the winter of 1925-26. (“Gulag” 22-23) The attitudes and brutalities of the guards there are best vocalized by the camp commander Comrade A. P. Nogotev, who said to a new wave of prisoners in the 1920s:
“As you know, there is no Soviet authority, only Solovetsky authority. Any rights that you had before you can forget. Here we have our own laws.” (“Gulag” 22)
Or even better exemplified by the comment of one camp boss to a prisoner when she asked why they were doing meaningless tasks, he responded: “I don’t need your work, I need your suffering.” (“Gulag” 221).
After Lenin died in 1924 Stalin completely reorganized the system, renaming the Cheka into the Obedinennoe Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie, or the Unified State Political Administration, the OGPU. He also combined the “ordinary” system and the “special” system into one (“Gulag” 50), as well as removing the camps from judicial scrutiny. (“Gulag” 53) George Kitchin wrote:
“A secret telegram was [sent] from…Moscow, instructing us to liquidate our camp completely in three days and to do it in such a way that didn’t leave evidence…”
Several thousand prisoners were marched out of the forest. Kitchin believes that more than 1,300 prisoners died in this and other overnight evacuations. (“Gulag” 61) Another example of the attempt at removing the camps from the record was a change in an OGPU contract with a Karelian woodcutting business so that it appeared that no prisoners worked there. 12,090 prisoners were “removed” from OGPU camps. (“Gulag” 61) In order to further divert attention from themselves the Soviets removed the phrase konstlager, concentration camp, from all public statements and replaced it with ispravitelno-trudovye lagerya, corrective-labor camps. (“Gulag” 60) The GULag camps were also removed from all maps. (“Gulag” 101) The Soviets also commissioned authors to write pieces of fiction or plays that portrayed the positive aspects of camp life. One of these authors was Nikolai Pogodin who wrote the play Aristokraty, a comedy about the building of the White Sea Canal. At the end of the play there is a stirring piece of musical propaganda in which the prisoners recount the tales of their lives and how they had reformed their lives of crime/corruption through forced labor:
“I was a cruel bandit, yes, stole from the people, hated to work, my life was black like the night. But then they took me to the canal; everything past now seems a bad dream. It is as if I were reborn. I want to work, and live and sing…” (“Gulag” 69)
However, the play was later banned in 1937 for unknown reasons. (“Gulag” 100)
From there, the camps and “special” projects got progressively worse in a spiral of corruption and abuse. From the digging of the 141-mile long White Sea canal where prisoners did construction with homemade tools (“Gulag” 64) to Uranium mines in Kolyma where workers worked with no protection from radiation. (“Gulag” 110) This corruption and abuse culminated in the paranoia and mass death during the Great Terror, or the Ezhovshchina as it was known by the Russians (“Dictators” 183), of 1937-38. The thing that best summarizes the intentions of the Ezhovshchina are NKVD orders 00446 and 00447 which instructed the NKVD to: “Put an end once and for all to the foul subversive work against the foundations of the Soviet state.” (“Dictators” 184) The Ezhovshchina was so large that between July 1937 and November 1938, the secret police had arrested 335,513 people. (“Gulag” 183) A total of 1,344,923 people were killed, sent to camps, or exiled. (“Dictators” 195) 88% of all executions and 35% of all arrests made between 1930 and 1953 occurred during the Ezhovshchina. (“Dictators” 194) By the end of the Ezhovshchina there were 1,800,000 prisoners in the camp system. (“Gulag” 113) But factory workers and kulaks, “rich” peasants, were not the only ones that were targeted. Party officials and even the very founders of the GULag were subjugated to persecution. Secret Police Chief Genrikh Yagoda was shot in 1938. Matvei Berman, a GULag boss between 1932 and 1937, was arrested in December 1938. Mikhail Goskin was arrested for making “unreal plans” for a railway line. Isaak Ginzburg was arrested for creating “special conditions” for prisoners. Alexander Polisonoy was arrested for making “impossible conditions” for armed guards. (“Gulag” 96-97) And the man who replaced Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov, was later shot in 1940. (“Gulag” 108) But the Ezhovschchina was also an attempt to get rid of “old Bolsheviks” (i.e. anyone who had joined the party before 1917) to allow more room for younger members. 69% of all those purged were over the age of forty and only 6% were under thirty. (“Dictators” 201) About 40% of all party members had joined since 1937, nearly a million in 1939 alone. By 1946 one in three Party members had joined before 1940. (“Dictators” 140)
The reasoning behind the construction of the GULag is complex and involves much speculation. Perhaps Lenin really did want reforms for the better and that he really truly did believe that forced labor could be used as a corrective means. It may be, perhaps, that when he realized that more people opposed him than supported him (i.e. Admiral Kolchak, the Volga Republic) he saw the institution of SLON as a way to remove not only the vragi naroda, enemies of the people, but also the kontriks, or counter-revolutionaries. (“Gulag” 101) This mentality may have been passed on to his protégés Zimoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin. Stalin took this lesson to heart, using the camp system to systematically eliminate both his direct political enemies (Trotsky, Zimoviev, Kamenev, Ryutin, etc.) and his indirect political enemies (members of the lower classes that may be either closeted or open anarchists, Trotskyites, social democrats, etc.) through a series of purges; the largest of which known as the Ezhovshchina of 1937-38.
The reasoning is, in short: Paranoia. Paranoia is the reason why these camps existed. Paranoia at the possibility of being overthrown in the same manner they had overthrown the Czar in 1917. Some of this paranoia may have been a result of outside influences such as British, Japanese, Czech, and American soldiers making incursions in Russian territory and creating a fear of “capitalist encirclement”. (“Revolution” 63, 66, 67)As well as internal threats that were best exemplified in the reactions of the peasants after the first attempt at collectivization and renewed class warfare in 1928. After the first bout resulted in near economic collapse and depression, millions of peasants resisted the Soviet attempts at collectivization in an undeclared civil war between 1928 and 1930. During this time there were 13,794 acts of terror in 1930 alone, as well as 1,198 murders, and 5,720 attempted murders mostly directed at party activists. (“Dictators” 41) Farmers also attempted to kill off their livestock in order to avoid government control; between 1928 and 1933 the population of cattle fell 44%, sheep by 65%, and horses by over half. (“Dictators” 41) And on top of all of that, there were 13,000 riots or demonstrations in 1930 alone involving more than 2.4 million peasants. (“Dictators” 41-42) This most certainly rattled Stalin’s confidence in his regime. As a result the following year the Soviets tried, once again, to collectivize the farms but this time through force. Over 2 million farmers were deported to the labor camps and another 2 million were deported within their own region. (“Dictators” 42) As a result of the near failure on the part of Stalin, in March of 1932 a Central Committee candidate by the name of Martem’ian Ryutin and a group of supporters wrote a 200-page document titled “Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship.” Several months later, in September, Ryutin called for all party members to get the country “out of the crisis and dead end” through “the liquidation of the dictatorship of Stalin and his clique”. Everyone who participated with Ryutin was expelled from the party in October of the same year, Stalin called for Ryutin to be shot, though the Politburo disregarded Stalin’s request. (“Dictators” 42) However, Ryutin was later executed in 1938 after the “Kirov Law’; which allowed the secret police to arrest, try, and execute terrorist suspects in absentia; was passed. (“Dictators” 53)
All of this combined most definitely would have made Stalin believe that enemies constantly surrounded him, and it was that paranoia that would eventually lead to the Ezhovschchina of 1937-38.
Another answer to the question of why the GULag camps were constructed may be that Stalin wanted to get the very best people under government control. From 1931 onwards, Stalin pressured the Politburo to allow him to control the arrests of technical experts:
“…the very first group of prisoners sent to the new camps in the Kolyma gold fields included seven…mining experts, two labor organization experts, and one…hydraulic engineer…the OGPU…arrest[ed] one of the Soviet Union’s top geologists on the eve of a[n]…expedition to build a camp near the oil reserves of the Komi Republic…” (“Gulag” 55)
It is hard to believe that the arrests these experts were merely a coincidence.
All in all, the camps of the Soviet Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Labor Settlements were all part of an intricate ballet as Stalin outmaneuvered his opponents to cement his own personal power in the hearts and minds of the Soviet people by removing any and all forms of political dissent from the party line.
REFERENCES:
o Applebaum, Anne. Gulag. New York, Toronto. 2003
o Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Rusian Revolution. Oxford, New York, Toronto, Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Karachi, Petaling, Jaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Cape Town, Melbourne, Auckland, Berlin, Ibadan. 1982.
o Overy, Richard. The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia. New York, London. 2004
o “Russian Civil War” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Civil_War
