Gulag

Perhaps most important, this book does not do justice to the story of the “special exiles,” the millions of people who were often rounded up at the same time and for the same reasons as Gulag prisoners, but who were then sent not to camps but to live in remote exile villages where many thousands died of starvation, cold, and overwork. Some were exiled for political reasons, including the kulaks, or rich peasants, in the 1930s. Some were exiled for their ethnicity, including Poles, Balts, Ukrainians, Volga Germans, and Chechens, among others, in the 1940s. They met a variety of fates in Kazakhstan, central Asia, and Siberia—too wide a variety to be encompassed in an account of the camp system. I have chosen to mention them, perhaps idiosyncratically, where their experiences seemed to me especially close or relevant to the experiences of Gulag prisoners. But although their story is closely connected to the story of the Gulag, to tell it fully would require another book of this length. I hope someone will write one soon.

Although this is a book about the Soviet concentration camps, it is nevertheless impossible to treat them as an isolated phenomenon. The Gulag grew and developed at a particular time and place, in tandem with other events—and within three contexts in particular. Properly speaking, the Gulag belongs to the history of the Soviet Union; to the international as well as the Russian history of prisons and exile; and to the particular intellectual climate of continental Europe in the mid-twentieth century, which also produced the Nazi concentration camps in Germany.

By “belongs to the history of the Soviet Union,” I mean something very specific: the Gulag did not emerge, fully formed, from the sea, but rather reflected the general standards of the society around it. If the camps were filthy, if the guards were brutal, if the work teams were slovenly, that was partly because filthiness and brutality and slovenliness were plentiful enough in other spheres of Soviet life. If life in the camps was horrible, unbearable, inhuman, if death rates were high—that too was hardly surprising. In certain periods, life in the Soviet Union was also horrible, unbearable, and inhuman, and death rates were as high outside the camps as they were within them.

Certainly it is no coincidence that the first Soviet camps were set up in the immediate aftermath of the bloody, violent, and chaotic Russian Revolution either. During the Revolution, the terror imposed afterward, and the subsequent civil war, it seemed to many in Russia as if civilization itself had been permanently fractured. “Death sentences were meted out arbitrarily,” the historian Richard Pipes has written, “people were shot for no reason and equally capriciously released.”¹⁸ From 1917 on, a whole society’s set of values was turned on its head: a lifetime’s accumulated wealth and experience was a liability, robbery was glamorized as “nationalization,” murder became an accepted part of the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this atmosphere, Lenin’s initial imprisonment of thousands of people, simply on the grounds of their former wealth or their aristocratic titles, hardly seemed strange or out of line.

By the same token, high mortality rates in the camps in certain years are also, in part, a reflection of events taking place throughout the country. Death rates went up inside the camps in the early 1930s, when famine gripped the entire country. They went up again during the Second World War: the German invasion of the Soviet Union led not only to millions of combat deaths, but also to epidemics of dysentery and of typhus, as well as, again, to famine, which affected people outside the camps as well as within them. In the winter of 1941–42, when a quarter of the Gulag’s population died of starvation, as many as a million citizens of the city of Leningrad may have starved to death too, trapped behind a German blockade. ¹⁹ The blockade’s chronicler Lidiya Ginzburg wrote of the hunger of the time as a “permanent state . . . it was constantly present and always made its presence felt . . . the most desperate and tormenting thing of all during the process of eating was when the food drew to an end with awful rapidity without bringing satiety.”²⁰ Her words are eerily reminiscent of those used by former prisoners, as the reader will discover.