Gulag

But this sort of chaotic mistreatment was not reserved only for prisoners. At crucial moments of the civil war, the emergency needs of the Red Army and the Soviet state overrode everything else, from re-education to revenge to considerations of justice. In October 1918, the commander of the northern front sent a request to the Petrograd military commission for 800 workers, urgently needed for road construction and trench digging. As a result, “a number of citizens from the former merchant classes were invited to appear at Soviet headquarters, allegedly for the purpose of registration for possible labor duty at some future date. When these citizens appeared for registration, they were placed under arrest and sent to the Semenovsky barracks to await their dispatch to the front.” When even this did not produce enough workers, the local Soviet—the local ruling council—simply surrounded a part of Nevsky 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. Later, the women were released, but the men were packed off to the north: “not one of the thus strangely mobilized men was allowed to settle his family affairs, to say goodbye to his relatives, or to obtain suitable clothing and footwear.”³⁴

While certainly shocking to the pedestrians thus arrested, that incident would have seemed less odd to Petrograd’s workers. For even at this early stage in Soviet history, the line between “forced labor” and ordinary labor was blurred. Trotsky openly spoke of turning the whole country into a “workers’ army” along the lines of the Red Army. Workers were early on forced to register at central labor offices, from where they might be sent anywhere in the country. Special decrees were passed prohibiting certain kinds of workers—miners, for example—from leaving their jobs. Nor did free workers, in this era of revolutionary chaos, enjoy much better living conditions than prisoners. Looking from the outside, it would not always have been easy to say which was the work site and which the concentration camp.³⁵

But this too was a harbinger of what was to come: confusion would beset the definitions of “camp,” “prison,” and “forced labor” for most of the next decade. Control over penal institutions would remain in constant flux. Responsible institutions would be endlessly renamed and reorganized as different bureaucrats and commissars attempted to gain control over the system.³⁶

Nevertheless, it is clear that by the end of the civil war, a pattern had been set. Already, the Soviet Union had clearly developed two separate prison systems, with separate rules, separate traditions, separate ideologies. The Commissariat of Justice, and later the Commissariat of the Interior, ran the “regular” prison system, which dealt mainly with what the Soviet regime called “criminals.” Although in practice this system was also chaotic, its prisoners were kept in traditional prisons, and its administrators’ stated goals, as presented in an internal memorandum, would be perfectly comprehensible in “bourgeois” countries: to reform the criminal through corrective labor—“prisoners should work in order to learn skills they can use to conduct an honest life”—and to prevent prisoners from committing further crimes.³⁷

At the same time, the Cheka—later renamed the GPU, the OGPU, the NKVD, and finally the KGB—controlled another prison system, one that was at first known as the system of “special camps” or “extraordinary camps.” Although the Cheka would use some of the same “re-education” or “reforging” rhetoric within them, these camps were not really meant to resemble ordinary penal institutions. They were outside the jurisdiction of other Soviet institutions, and invisible to the public eye. They had special rules, harsher escape penalties, stricter regimes. The prisoners inside them had not necessarily been convicted by ordinary courts, if they had been convicted by any courts at all. Set up as an emergency measure, they were ultimately to grow larger and ever more powerful, as the definition of “enemy” expanded and the power of the Cheka increased. And when the two penal systems, the ordinary and the extraordinary, eventually united, they would unite under the rules of the latter. The Cheka would devour its rivals.