Gulag

Above all, however, two differences between the systems strike me as fundamental. First, the definition of “enemy” in the Soviet Union was always far more slippery than the definition of “Jew” in Nazi Germany. With an extremely small number of unusual exceptions, no Jew in Nazi Germany could change his status, no Jew inside a camp could reasonably expect to escape death, and all Jews carried this knowledge with them at all times. While millions of Soviet prisoners feared they might die—and millions did—there was no single category of prisoner whose death was absolutely guaranteed. At times, certain prisoners could improve their lot by working in relatively comfortable jobs, as engineers or geologists. Within each camp there was a prisoner hierarchy, which some were able to climb at the expense of others, or with the help of others. At other times—when the Gulag found itself overburdened with women, children, and old people, or when soldiers were needed to fight at the front—prisoners were released in mass amnesties. It sometimes happened that whole categories of “enemies” suddenly benefited from a change in status. Stalin arrested hundreds of thousands of Poles, for example, at the start of the Second World War in 1939—and then abruptly released them from the Gulag in 1941 when Poland and the USSR became temporary allies. The opposite was also true: in the Soviet Union, perpetrators could become victims themselves. Gulag guards, administrators, even senior officers of the secret police, could also be arrested and find themselves sentenced to camps. Not every “poisonous weed” remained poisonous, in other words—and there was no single group of Soviet prisoners who lived with the constant expectation of death.⁵⁵

Second—as, again, will become evident in the course of this book—the primary purpose of the Gulag, according to both the private language and the public propaganda of those who founded it, was economic. This did not mean that it was humane. Within the system, prisoners were treated as cattle, or rather as lumps of iron ore. Guards shuttled them around at will, loading and unloading them into cattle cars, weighing and measuring them, feeding them if it seemed they might be useful, starving them if they were not. They were, to use Marxist language, exploited, reified, and commodified. Unless they were productive, their lives were worthless to their masters.

Nevertheless, their experience was quite different from that of the Jewish and other prisoners whom the Nazis sent to a special group of camps called not Konzentrationslager but Vernichtungslager— camps that were not really “labor camps” at all, but rather death factories. There were four of them: Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Majdanek and Auschwitz contained both labor camps and death camps. Upon entering these camps, prisoners were “selected.” A tiny number were sent to do a few weeks of forced labor. The rest were sent directly into gas chambers where they were murdered and then immediately cremated.

As far as I have been able to ascertain, this particular form of murder, practiced at the height of the Holocaust, had no Soviet equivalent. True, the Soviet Union found other ways to mass-murder hundreds of thousands of its citizens. Usually, they were driven to a forest at night, lined up, shot in the skull, and buried in mass graves before they ever got near a concentration camp—a form of murder no less “industrialized” and anonymous than that used by the Nazis. For that matter, there are stories of Soviet secret police using exhaust fumes—a primitive form of gas—to kill prisoners, just as the Nazis did in their early years.⁵⁶ Within the Gulag, Soviet prisoners also died, usually not thanks to the captors’ efficiency but due to gross inefficiency and neglect.⁵⁷ In certain Soviet camps, at certain times, death was virtually guaranteed for those selected to cut trees in the winter forest or to work in the worst of the Kolyma gold mines. Prisoners were also locked in punishment cells until they died of cold and starvation, left untreated in unheated hospitals, or simply shot at will for “attempted escape.” Nevertheless, the Soviet camp system as a whole was not deliberately organized to mass-produce corpses—even if, at times, it did.