Gulag

By the end of the war, the food rations of war prisoners and criminal prisoners were nearly the same, as were the barracks they inhabited and the work they did. Like zeks, POWs worked in construction, in mines, in manufacturing, in road and railway building.⁵⁴ Like zeks, some of the better-educated POWs found their way into the sharashki, where they designed new military aircraft for the Red Army.⁵⁵ To this day, residents of certain districts of Moscow speak with pride of the apartment blocks they inhabit, supposedly finished to a higher standard by meticulous German prisoners of war.

Also like zeks, the war prisoners eventually became the recipients of a Soviet-style “political education.” In 1943, the NKVD began organizing “anti-fascist” schools and courses in the POW camps. The courses were intended to persuade the participants to “conduct the battle for the ‘democratic’ reconstruction of their countries and uproot the remains of fascism” on returning home to Germany, Romania, or Hungary—and, of course, to prepare the way for Soviet domination.⁵⁶ Many former German POWs did indeed wind up working in the new police force of communist East Germany.⁵⁷

But even for those who demonstrated their new loyalty, the return home would not come quickly. Although the USSR repatriated a group of 225,000 prisoners, mostly sick or injured privates, as early as June 1945, and although others continued steadily to return home after that, complete repatriation of the Soviet Union’s POWs took more than a decade: 20,000 remained in the USSR in 1953, when Stalin died.⁵⁸ Stalin, still convinced of the efficacy of state slavery, looked upon the prisoners’ labor as a form of reparation, and considered their long captivity to be wholly justified. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s—and indeed after, as the Wallenberg case illustrates—Soviet authorities continued to cloak the issue of captive foreigners in confusion, propaganda, and counter-propaganda, releasing people when it suited them, denying all knowledge of their existence when it did not. In October 1945, for example, Beria wrote to Stalin asking him to authorize the release of Hungarian war prisoners in the run-up to Hungarian elections: the Americans and British had released their war prisoners, he added, implying that the Soviet Union looked bad for not having done so.⁵⁹

The fog persisted for decades. In the first few years following the war, envoys from all over the world kept pressing Moscow with lists of their citizens who had disappeared during the Red Army’s occupation of Europe, or had, for one reason or another, fallen into POW or Gulag camps. Answers were not always easy to come by, since the NKVD itself did not necessarily know of these prisoners’ whereabouts. Eventually, the Soviet authorities set up special commissions to find out how many foreigners were still in captivity in the USSR, and to examine the case for releasing them.⁶⁰

Complex cases could take years to resolve. Jacques Rossi, a French communist born in Lyon, sent to the camps after a few years of teaching in Moscow, was still trying to get home in 1958. At first refused an exit visa to France, he tried to get one to Poland, where, he told the authorities, his brother and sister lived. That too was refused.⁶¹ On the other hand, the authorities did also sometimes abruptly lift all of their objections, and unexpectedly allowed foreigners to go home. At one point in 1947, at the height of the postwar famine, the NKVD unexpectedly released several hundred thousand war prisoners. There was no political explanation: the Soviet leadership reckoned, simply, that it did not have enough food to keep them all alive. ⁶²

Repatriation did not flow in only one direction. If large numbers of West Europeans found themselves in Russia at the end of the war, equally large numbers of Russians found themselves in Western Europe. In the spring of 1945, more than 5.5 million Soviet citizens were outside the borders of the Soviet Union. Some of them were soldiers, captured and imprisoned in Nazi POW camps. Others had been drafted into slave-labor camps in Germany and Austria. A few had collaborated during the German occupation of their country, and had retreated with the German army. Up to 150,000 were “Vlasovites,” Soviet soldiers who had fought—or, more often, had been forced to fight—against the Red Army under the command of General Andrei Vlasov, a captured Russian officer who had turned against Stalin and fought with Hitler, or in other pro-Hitler, anti-Stalin Wehrmacht brigades. Some, strange though it sounds, were not Soviet citizens at all. Scattered throughout Europe, most notably in Yugoslavia, there were also anti-communist émigrés: White Russians, that is, who had lost their fight against the Bolsheviks and settled in the West. Stalin wanted them back too: no one was to be allowed to escape Bolshevik retribution.