Gulag

On a few occasions, prisoners in camps close to the front line had the opportunity to put their patriotism into practice. In a report he intended as a contribution to the history of the Great Motherland War, Pokrovsky, a former employee of Soroklag, a camp in the Karelian Republic, near the Finnish border, described an incident which took place during the camp’s hasty evacuation:

The column of tanks was growing closer, the situation was becoming critical, when one of the prisoners . . . jumped up into the cabin of a truck, and began driving as fast as possible toward the tank. Slamming into the tank, the prisoner-hero was destroyed, along with the truck—but the tank also stopped and burst into flames. The road was blocked, the other tanks turned around in the opposite direction. It saved the situation, and made possible the evacuation of the rest of the colony.

Pokrovsky also described how a group of more than 600 freed prisoners, stranded in the camp by the lack of trains, voluntarily threw themselves into the work of building the defenses of the city of Belomorsk:

All of them agreed with one voice, and immediately formed themselves into working brigades, delegating brigadiers and foremen. This group of freed prisoners worked on the defenses for more than a week, with exceptional zeal, from early morning until late evening, 13 to 14 hours every day. The only thing they demanded in return was that someone conduct political talks with them, and give them information about the situation on the front line. I fulfilled this task conscientiously.¹³

Camp propaganda encouraged such patriotism, and generally gathered pace during the war. As elsewhere in the Soviet Union, there were poster campaigns, war films, and lectures. Prisoners were told “we would now have to work even harder, since every gram of gold we dug out would be a blow against facism.”¹⁴ Of course, it is impossible to know whether this sort of propaganda worked, just as it is impossible to know whether any propaganda ever works. But the Gulag administration did perhaps take this message more seriously when the Gulag’s production capacity suddenly became vital to the Soviet war effort. In his pamphlet on re-education, “Return to Life,” the KVCh officer Loginov wrote that the slogan “All for the Front, all for Victory” found a “warm echo” in the hearts of those working behind the front lines in the camps of the Gulag: “The prisoners, temporarily isolated from society, doubled and tripled the pace of their work. Selflessly working in factories, building sites, woodlands, and fields, they threw all of their highly productive work into speeding up the defeat of the enemy at the front.”¹⁵

Without a doubt, the Gulag did make an industrial contribution to the war effort. In the first eighteen months of the war, thirty-five Gulag “colonies” were converted to the production of ammunition. Many of the timber camps were put to work producing ammunition cases. At least twenty camps made Red Army uniforms, while others made field telephones, more than 1.7 million gas masks, and 24,000 mortar stands. Over one million inmates were put to work on the construction of railways, roads, and airfields. Whenever there was a sudden, urgent need for construction workers—when a pipeline gave way or a new rail route had to be constructed—the Gulag was usually called in to do it. As in the past, Dalstroi produced virtually all of the Soviet Union’s gold.¹⁶