Gulag

Less than four years ago the workers of the world won their first victory, the victory against Nazi totalitarianism, after a war which was waged with the greatest sacrifices—waged against the Nazis’ policy of enslavement of all people whose countries they had invaded . . .

However, in spite of the Allied victory, the world is perturbed to a very high degree by communications which seem to indicate that the evils we have fought to eradicate, and for whose defeat so many have died, are still rampant in various parts of the world ...²⁹

The Cold War had begun.

Life within the camp system often mirrored and echoed life in the greater Soviet Union—and this was never more true than during the final years of the Second World War. As Germany crumbled, Stalin’s thoughts turned to a postwar settlement. His plans to draw central Europe into the Soviet sphere of influence solidified. Not coincidentally, the NKVD also entered what might be described as its own expansive, “internationalist” phase. “This war is not as in the past,” Stalin remarked in a conversation with Tito, recorded by the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas. “Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own social system as far as his army can reach.”³⁰ Concentration camps were a fundamental part of the Soviet “social system,” and as the war drew to a close, the Soviet secret police began to export their methods and personnel to Soviet-occupied Europe, teaching their new foreign clients the camp regimes and methods they had now perfected at home.

Of the camps created in what was to become the “Soviet bloc” of Eastern Europe, those set up in eastern Germany were perhaps the most brutal. As the Red Army marched across Germany in 1945, the Soviet Military Administration immediately began to construct them, eventually setting up eleven of these “special” concentration camps—spetslagerya— in all. Two of them, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, were located on the site of former Nazi concentration camps. All of them were under the direct control of the NKVD, which organized and ran them in the same manner as it ran the camps of the Gulag back at home, with work norms, minimal rations, and overcrowded barracks. In the famine-wracked postwar years, these German camps seem to have been even more lethal than their Soviet counterparts. Nearly 240,000 mostly political prisoners passed through them during the five years of their existence. Of these, 95,000—more than a third—are thought to have died. If the lives of Soviet prisoners were never particularly important to the Soviet authorities, the lives of German “fascists” mattered even less.

For the most part, the inmates of the East German camps were not high-ranking Nazis or proven war criminals. That sort of prisoner was usually taken back to Moscow, interrogated, and put directly into the Soviet POW camps or the Gulag. The spetslagerya were meant instead to serve the same function as the Polish and Baltic deportations: they were designed to break the back of the German bourgeoisie. As a result, they contained not leading Nazis or war criminals but judges, lawyers, entrepreneurs, businessmen, doctors, and journalists. Among them were even some of the very few German opponents of Hitler, whom the Soviet Union—paradoxically— also feared. Anyone who had dared to fight the Nazis, after all, might also dare to fight the Red Army.³¹

The NKVD interned a similar sort of person in the Hungarian and Czechoslovakian prison camps, set up by the local secret police services, on Soviet advice, after the Communist Party consolidated power in Prague in 1948, and in Budapest in 1949. Arrests were carried out with what has been described as a “caricature” of Soviet logic: a Hungarian weatherman was arrested after reporting “an influx of icy air coming from the northeastern direction, from the Soviet Union” on the day that a Soviet division arrived in Hungary; a Czech businessman wound up in a camp after his neighbor accused him of referring to “that imbecile, Stalin.” ³²