Gulag

Nevertheless, at this stage, the purpose of the camps remained ambiguous. The prisoners were to carry out labor—but to what end? Was labor meant to re-educate the prisoners? Was it meant to humiliate them? Or was it supposed to help build the new Soviet state? Different Soviet leaders and different institutions had different answers. In February 1919, Dzerzhinsky himself made an eloquent speech advocating a role for the camps in the ideological re-education of the bourgeoisie. The new camps would, he said, make use of the labor of those persons under arrest; for those gentlemen who live without any occupation; and for those who are unable to work without being forced to do so. Such punishment ought to be applied to those working in Soviet institutions who demonstrate unconscientious attitudes to work, tardiness, etc. . . . In this way we will create schools of labor.²⁷

When the first official decrees on the special camps were published in the spring of 1919, however, slightly different priorities appeared to take precedent.²⁸ The decrees, a surprisingly lengthy list of rules and recommendations, suggested that each regional capital set up a camp for no less than 300 people, “on the border of the city, or in nearby buildings like monasteries, estates, farms, etc.” They mandated an eight-hour workday, with extra hours and night work allowed only “in agreement with the labor code.” Food packages were forbidden. Meetings with members of the immediate family were allowed, but only on Sundays and holidays. Prisoners attempting escape could have their sentence multiplied by ten. A second attempt could be punished by death—an extremely harsh sentence in comparison with the lax Czarist laws on escape, which the Bolsheviks knew only too well. More important, the decrees also made clear that the work of the prisoners was intended not for their own educational benefit, but to pay for the cost of the camp’s upkeep. Prisoners with disabilities were to be sent elsewhere. The camps were to be self-financing. Optimistically, the camps’ original founders believed that they would pay their own way.²⁹

Thanks to the irregular flow of state financing, those running the camps quickly became interested in the idea of self-finance or at least in making some practical use of their prisoners. In September 1919, a secret report shown to Dzerzhinsky complained that sanitary conditions in one transit camp were “below criticism,” largely because they rendered so many people too ill to work: “During wet autumn conditions they will not be places to collect people and make use of their labor, but will rather become seedbeds for epidemics and other illnesses.” Among other things, the writer proposed that those incapable of work should be sent elsewhere, thereby making the camp more efficient—a tactic that would later be deployed many times by the leadership of the Gulag. Already, those responsible for the camps were concerned about sickness and hunger mostly insofar as sick and hungry prisoners are not useful prisoners. Their dignity and humanity, not to mention their survival, hardly interested those in charge at all. ³⁰

In practice, not all camp commanders were concerned either with re-education or self-financing. Instead they preferred to punish the formerly well-off by humiliating them, giving them a taste of the workers’ lot. A report from the Ukrainian city of Poltava, filed by a White Army investigating commission after the temporary recapture of the city, noted that bourgeois captives arrested during the Bolshevik occupation had been given jobs which were “intended as a way of scoffing at people, trying to lower them. For example, one arrestee . . . was forced to clean a thick layer of dirt from a filthy floor with his hands. Another was told to clean a toilet, and . . . was given a tablecloth in order to do the job.” ³¹

True, these subtle differences in intention probably made little difference to the many tens of thousands of prisoners, for whom the very fact of being arrested for no reason at all was humiliation enough. They probably did not affect prisoners’ living conditions either, which were universally appalling. One priest sent to a camp in Siberia later recalled soup made from entrails, barracks without electricity, and virtually no heat in winter. ³² Alexander Izgoev, a leading Czarist-era politician, was sent to a camp north of Petrograd. On the way, his party of prisoners stopped in the town of Vologda. Instead of the hot meal and warm apartments they had been promised, the prisoners were marched from place to place in search of shelter. No transit camp had been prepared for them. Finally, they were lodged in a former school, furnished with “bare walls and benches.” Those with money eventually purchased their own food in the town.³³