Gulag

FROM THE GULAG’S INCEPTION, its camps had always contained a notable number of foreign prisoners. These were, for the most part, Western communists and Comintern members, although there were also a handful of British or French wives of Soviet citizens, as well as the odd expatriate businessman. They were treated as rarities, as curiosities, yet nevertheless their communist origins and their previous experience of Soviet life seemed to help them fit in with other prisoners. As Lev Razgon wrote:

They were all “ours” because they had either been born or grown up in the country or else come to live there of their own free will. Even when they spoke Russian very badly or did not speak it at all, they were ours. And in the melting pot of the camps they quickly ceased to stand out or appear in any way different. Those of them who survived the first year or two of camp life could thereafter only be distinguished among “us” by their poor Russian.²

Quite different were the foreigners who appeared after 1939. With no warning, the NKVD had plucked these newcomers—Poles, Balts, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Moldavians—out of their bourgeois or peasant worlds after the Soviet invasion of multiethnic eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and the Baltic states, and then dumped them, in large numbers, into the Gulag and the exile villages. Contrasting them with “our” foreigners, Razgon called them “strangers.” Having been “swept from their own country to the far north of Russia by an alien and hostile historical force which they could not comprehend,” they were instantly recognizable by the quality of their possessions: “We were always alerted to their arrival in Ustvymlag by the appearance of exotic items of clothing among our criminal inmates: the shaggy tall hats and colored sashes of Moldavia and, from Bukovina, embroidered fur waistcoats and fashionable close-fitting jackets with high, padded shoulders.”³

Arrests in the newly occupied territories had begun immediately after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland, in September 1939, and continued after the subsequent invasions of Romania and the Baltic states. The NKVD’s goal was both security—they wanted to prevent rebellion and the emergence of fifth columns—and Sovietization, and they therefore targeted people whom they thought most likely to oppose the Soviet regime. This included not only members of the former Polish administration, but also traders and merchants, poets and writers, wealthy peasants and farmers— anyone whose arrest seemed likely to contribute to the psychological breakdown of the inhabitants of eastern Poland.⁴ They also targeted refugees from German-occupied western Poland, among them thousands of Jews fleeing Hitler.

Later, the criteria for arrest became more precise, or, at least, as precise as any Soviet criteria for arrest ever became. One document of May 1941, concerning the expulsion of “socially foreign” elements from the Baltic states, occupied Romania, and occupied Poland, demanded, among other things, the arrest of “active members of counter-revolutionary organizations”—meaning political parties; former members of the police or the prison service; important capitalists and bourgeoisie; former officers of the national armies; family members of all of the above; anyone repatriated from Germany; refugees from “former Poland”; as well as thieves and prostitutes.⁵

Another set of instructions, issued by the commissar of newly Sovietized Lithuania in November 1940, said deportees should include, along with the categories above, those frequently traveling abroad, involved in overseas correspondence or coming into contact with representatives of foreign states; Esperantists; philatelists; those working with the Red Cross; refugees; smugglers; those expelled from the Communist Party; priests and active members of religious congregations; the nobility, landowners, wealthy merchants, bankers, industrialists, hotel and restaurant owners.⁶

Anyone who broke Soviet law, including the laws prohibiting “speculation”—any form of trade—could be arrested, as could anyone who attempted to cross the Soviet border to escape into Hungary or Romania.