Gulag

Because of the scale of arrests, the Soviet occupation authorities quickly had to suspend even the fiction of legality. Very few of those seized by the NKVD in the new western territories were actually put on trial, jailed, or sentenced. Instead, the war once again brought about a revival of “administrative deportation”—the same procedure, instigated by the Czars, that had been used against the kulaks. “Administrative deportation” is a fancy name for a simple procedure. It meant that NKVD troops or convoy guards arrived at a household and told its inhabitants to leave. Sometimes they had a day to prepare, sometimes a few minutes. Then trucks arrived, took them to train stations, and off they went. There was no arrest, no trial, no formal procedure at all.

The numbers involved were enormous. The historian Alexander Guryanov estimates that 108,000 people in the territories of eastern Poland were arrested and sent to the camps of the Gulag, while 320,000 were deported to exile villages—some of which had been founded by kulaks—in the far north and Kazakhstan. ⁷ To this must be added the 96,000 prisoners arrested and the 160,000 deported from the Baltic states, as well as 36,000 Moldavians.⁸ The combined effect of the deportations and the war on the demographics of the Baltic states was shocking: between 1939 and 1945, the Estonian population declined by 25 percent.⁹

The history of these deportations, like the history of the deportations of the kulaks, is distinct from the history of the Gulag itself, and, as I have said, the full story of this wholesale movement of families cannot be told in the context of this book. Yet it is not completely separate either. Why the NKVD chose to deport one person, sending him to live in an exile village, and why they chose to arrest another person, sending him to live in a camp, is often difficult to understand, as the backgrounds of the deportees and the arrestees were interchangeable. Sometimes, if a man was sent to a camp, then his wife and children were deported. Or if a son was arrested, then his parents were deported. Some arrestees served camp sentences, and afterward went to live in an exile village, sometimes with their previously deported family members.

Aside from their punitive function, the deportations fit neatly into Stalin’s grand plan to populate the northern regions of Russia. Like the Gulag, the exile villages were deliberately placed in remote areas, and they appeared to be permanent. Certainly NKVD officers told many of the exiles that they would never return, even making speeches as the exiles boarded the trains, congratulating the “new citizens” on their permanent emigration to the Soviet Union.¹⁰ In the exile villages, local commandants frequently reminded the new arrivals that Poland, now divided between Germany and the Soviet Union, would never exist again. One Russian teacher told a Polish schoolgirl that Poland’s revival was about as likely “as it is that hair will grow out of your hands.”¹¹ Meanwhile, in the cities and villages they had left, the new Soviet officials confiscated and redistributed the exiles’ property. They converted their houses into public buildings—schools, hospitals, maternity homes—and gave their household goods (whatever had not been stolen by the neighbors or the NKVD) to children’s homes and nurseries.¹²

The deportees suffered just as much as their countrymen who had been sent to labor camps, if not more so. At least those in camps had a daily bread ration and a place to sleep. Exiles often had neither. Instead, the authorities dumped them in virgin forest or in tiny villages—in northern Russia, in Kazakhstan, and in central Asia—and left them to fend for themselves, sometimes without the means to do so. In the first wave of deportations, convoy guards forbade many to take anything with them, no kitchen goods, no clothes, no tools. Only in November 1940 did the administrative body of the Soviet convoy guards meet and reverse this decision: even the Soviet authorities realized that the deportees’ lack of possessions was leading to high death rates, and they ordered guards to warn deportees, as noted earlier, to take enough warm clothes to last for three years.¹³

Even so, many of the deportees were mentally and physically unprepared for lives as foresters or kolkhoz farmers. The landscape itself seemed alien and terrifying. One woman described it in her diary, as she first saw it from the train: “We are being carried through this endless space; such a flat and huge land with only a few scattered human settlements here and there. Invariably, we see squalid mud huts with thatched roofs and small windows, dirty and dilapidated, with no fences and no trees ...” ¹⁴