Gulag

Without a doubt, the katorga prisoners included many genuine Nazi collaborators and war criminals, including those responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews. With such people in mind, Simeon Vilensky, a Kolyma survivor, once warned me not to be too convinced of the innocence of everyone who was in the Gulag: “These were people who would have been in prison, should have been in prison, under any regime.” As a rule, other prisoners shunned convicted war criminals, and were even known to attack and beat them.⁷⁷

Nevertheless, of the 60,000 prisoners condemned to katorga by 1947, quite a few had been sentenced on more ambiguous grounds.⁷⁸ Among them, for example, were thousands of Polish, Baltic, and Ukrainian anti-Soviet partisans, many of whom had fought against the Nazis before turning around to fight against the Red Army. By doing so, all of them believed they were fighting for their own national liberation. According to a document on underage katorga prisoners, sent to Beria in 1945, these partisans included Andrei Levchuk, accused of joining the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), one of the two main anti-Soviet partisan groupings in Ukraine. While in their service he allegedly “took part in the murder of innocent citizens and the disarming of Red Army soldiers and the appropriation of their possessions.” At the time of his arrest in 1945, Levchuk was fifteen years old.

Yaroslava Krutigolova was another such “war criminal.” Also a member of an OUN partisan group—she served as a nurse—she had been arrested at the age of sixteen.⁷⁹ The NKVD also picked up a woman of German origin who had worked as a German translator for Soviet partisans. Hearing that she had been arrested for “aiding and abetting the enemy,” the leader of her partisan brigade made a special journey, away from the front lines, to testify on her behalf. Thanks to him, she received a ten-year katorga instead of twenty-five.⁸⁰

Finally, the ranks of katorga prisoners included Alexander Klein, a Red Army officer who was captured by the Germans, yet managed to escape and make his way back to a Soviet division. Upon his return, he was interrogated, as he later recounted:

Suddenly the Major raised himself sharply, and asked, “Can you prove that you are Jewish?”

I smiled, embarrassed, and said that I could—by taking off my trousers.

The Major looked at Sorokin, and then again turned to me.

“And you are saying that the Germans didn’t know that you are a Jew?”

“If they had known, believe me, I wouldn’t be standing here.”

“Ach, you yid mug!” exclaimed the dandy, and kicked me in the lower stomach so hard that I suddenly gasped hard for breath and fell.

“What are these lies? Tell us, you motherfucker, with what mission were you sent here? Who are you involved with? When did you sell yourself? For how much? How much did you give yourself for, you creature for sale? What is your code name?”

As a result of this interrogation, Klein was first sentenced to death. He was then reprieved—and given a twenty-year katorga. ⁸¹

“There were all kinds of people in the camps, especially after the war,” wrote Hava Volovich later. “But we were all tormented just the same: the good, the bad, the guilty, and the innocent.” ⁸²

If, during the war years, millions of foreigners entered the Gulag against their will, at least one foreigner arrived voluntarily. The war may have provoked new paroxysms of anti-foreigner paranoia among the Soviet leadership; but it was also thanks to the war that a senior American politician visited the Gulag, for the first and only time. Henry Wallace, Vice President of the United States, made a trip to Kolyma in May 1944—and never even knew that he was visiting a prison.