Gulag

Even among the POWs, however, there were special cases. Perhaps because the NKVD was handing out sentences to Soviet slave laborers and POWs— people who had, in fact, committed no crime whatsoever—the authorities invented a new kind of sentence for actual war criminals: people who had allegedly committed real crimes. As early as April 1943, the Supreme Soviet declared that the Red Army, in the course of liberating Soviet territory, had uncovered “acts of unheard beastliness and horrific violence, carried out by German, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, and Finnish fascist monsters, Hitlerite agents, as well as by spies and traitors among Soviet citizens.” ⁷¹ In response, the NKVD declared that sentenced war criminals would receive fifteen-, twenty-, or even twenty-five-year sentences, to be spent in specially designed lagpunkts. The lagpunkts were duly built in Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Kolyma, the three harshest northern camps. ⁷²

With a curious linguistic flourish, and an ironic sense of history that may well reflect the involvement of Stalin himself, the NKVD named these lagpunktsusing a term taken from the penal history of Czarist Russia: katorga. The choice of this word would not have been accidental. Its resurrection, which echoed the resurrection of Czarist terminology in other spheres of Soviet life (military schools for officers’ children, for example), must have been intended to distinguish a new sort of punishment for a new sort of un-reformable, dangerous prisoner. Unlike the ordinary criminals condemned to ordinary punishment in the corrective labor camps of the Gulag, katorga prisoners could never hope to be reformed or redeemed, even in theory.

The revival of the word certainly seems to have caused some consternation. The Bolsheviks had fought against katorga but now they were reinstating it like the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, who forbade animals to drink alcohol, and then began drinking whiskey themselves. Katorga was also reinvented just as the world was beginning to discover the truth about the Nazi concentration camps. The use of the word eerily suggested that Soviet camps resembled “capitalist” camps a bit more than the Soviet authorities let on.

Perhaps this is why General Nasedkin, the Gulag’s wartime boss, commissioned, at this time, a history of Czarist katorga, and passed it on to Beria, at his request. Among other “explanatory notes,” the history painstakingly attempts to explain the difference between Bolshevik katorga, Czarist katorga, and other forms of punishment in the West: in the conditions of the Soviet Socialist state, katorga— exile with forced labor—as a punishment method is based on a different principle than it was in the past. In Czarist Russia and in bourgeois countries this harsh criminal punishment was inflicted upon the most progressive elements in the society . . . in our conditions, katorga allows us to cut down on the high number of death sentences, and focuses on especially dangerous enemies...⁷³

Reading the instructions issued to describe the new regime, one wonders whether some of those assigned to katorga might not have preferred the death sentence after all. Katorga convicts were separated from other prisoners by high fences. They received distinct, striped uniforms, with numbers sewn on to the back. They were locked into their barracks at night, and the windows of the barracks were barred. They worked longer hours than ordinary prisoners, had fewer rest days, and were forbidden from carrying out any sort of work other than hard labor, at least for the first two years of imprisonment. They were carefully guarded: each group of ten prisoners was assigned two convoy guards, and each camp was told to deploy a minimum of five dogs. Katorga prisoners could not even be moved from one camp to another without the specific agreement of the Gulag administration in Moscow.⁷⁴

Katorga prisoners also seem to have become the mainstay of a brand-new Soviet industry. In 1944, the NKVD claimed, in a list of its economic achievements, to have produced 100 percent of the Soviet Union’s uranium. “It is not difficult,” writes the historian Galina Ivanova, “to deduce who it was that mined and processed the radioactive ore.” ⁷⁵ Prisoners and soldiers would also build the first Soviet nuclear reactor in Chelyabinsk, after the war. “At that time, the whole building site was a camp of sorts,” remembered one worker. On the site, special “Finnish” cottages would be built for the German specialists who were also drafted to work on the project.⁷⁶