Gulag

If greater regimentation and stricter rules immediately followed the declaration of war, so did chaos. The German invasion proceeded with shocking speed. In the first four weeks of Barbarossa, nearly all of the 319 Soviet units committed to battle were destroyed.²⁰ By the autumn, Nazi forces had occupied Kiev, besieged Leningrad, and appeared to be on the verge of capturing Moscow too.

The western outposts of the Gulag were overwhelmed in the very first days of the war. The authorities had closed the remaining barracks on the Solovetsky Islands in 1939, and had transferred all prisoners to mainland prisons: they considered the camp to be too close to the Finnish border. ²¹ (In the course of the evacuation and the later Finnish occupation, the camp’s archive disappeared. It was probably destroyed, according to standard procedures, but rumors, never substantiated, claim that all of the papers were stolen by the Finnish army and are still hidden in a top-secret government vault in Helsinki.²²) The authorities also instructed Belbaltlag, the camp which ran the White Sea Canal, to evacuate its prisoners in July 1941, but to leave its horses and cattle behind for the Red Army. There is no record of whether the Red Army managed to make use of them before the Germans got there.²³

Elsewhere, the NKVD simply panicked, and nowhere more so than in the recently occupied territories of eastern Poland and the Baltic states, where the jails were overflowing with political prisoners. The NKVD had no time to evacuate them, yet could hardly leave “anti-Soviet terrorists” in German hands either. On June 22, the very day of the German invasion, the NKVD began to shoot the inmates in the prisons of Lwów, the Polish-Ukrainian city near the German-Soviet front line. While they were carrying out the operation, however, a Ukrainian-led uprising engulfed the city, forcing the NKVD to abandon the prisons altogether. Emboldened by the sudden absence of guards and the sound of nearby artillery fire, a group of inmates in Brygidka prison, in the Lwów city center, smashed their way out. Others refused to leave, fearing the guards might be waiting outside the gates, hoping for just such an excuse to kill them.

Those who remained paid for their mistake. On June 25, the NKVD, reinforced by border guards, returned to Brygidka, freed the “ordinary” criminal prisoners—and machine-gunned the remaining political prisoners in their underground cells. The cars and trucks on the street above drowned out the noise of the shooting. The inmates of the city’s other prisons met a similar fate. Altogether, the NKVD killed about 4,000 prisoners in Lwów, and left them in mass graves which they barely had time to cover with a light layer of sand.²⁴

Similar atrocities took place all across the border regions. In the wake of the Soviet withdrawal, the NKVD left about 21,000 prisoners behind and freed another 7,000. In a final burst of violence, however, departing NKVD troops and Red Army soldiers murdered nearly 10,000 prisoners in dozens of Polish and Baltic towns and villages—Wilno (Vilnius), Drohobycz, Pinsk.²⁵ They shot them in their cells, in the courtyards of their jails, in nearby forests. As they retreated, NKVD troops also burned down buildings and shot civilians, sometimes murdering the owners of the houses in which their own troops had been quartered.²⁶

Farther from the border, where there was more time to prepare, the Gulag attempted to organize proper prisoner evacuations. Three years later, in his long and pompous summation of the Gulag’s war effort, the Gulag’s wartime boss, Viktor Nasedkin, described these evacuations as “orderly.” The plans had been “worked out by the Gulag in coordination with the relocation of industry,” he declared, although “in connection with the well-known difficulties of transport, a significant proportion of the prisoners were evacuated on foot.”²⁷

In fact, there had been no plans, and the evacuations were conducted in a panicked frenzy, often while German bombs were falling all around. The “well-known difficulties of transport” meant that people suffocated to death in overcrowded train cars, or that falling bombs destroyed them before they reached their destination. One Polish inmate, Janusz Puchiski, arrested and deported on June 19, escaped from a burning train full of prisoners, along with his mother and siblings: