Gulag

Yet the camps themselves were no caricature. In his memoir of Reczk, the most notorious Hungarian camp, the Hungarian poet Gyorgy Faludy sketches a portrait of a system which seems almost an exact copy of the Gulag, right down to the practice of tufta and the starving Hungarian prisoners searching for wild berries and mushrooms in the woods.³³ The Czech system also had a special feature: a set of eighteen lagpunkts, grouped around the uranium mines of Yachimov. In retrospect, it is clear that political prisoners with long sentences—the equivalent of the Soviet katorga inmates— were sent to these mining camps in order to die. Although they worked extracting uranium for the new Soviet atomic bomb project, they were not given special clothing or any form of protection at all. The death rates are known to have been high—though how high, exactly, is still unknown.³⁴

In Poland, the situation was more complicated. By the end of the war, a significant proportion of the Polish population were living in a camp of some kind, whether a displaced persons’ camp (Jews, Ukrainians, former Nazi slave laborers), a detention camp (Germans and Volksdeutsche, Poles who had claimed German ancestry), or a prison camp. The Red Army set up some of its POW camps in Poland, filling them not only with German prisoners but also with members of the Polish Home Army, on their way to Soviet deportation. In 1954, 84,200 political prisoners were still incarcerated in Poland as well.³⁵

There were also camps in Romania, in Bulgaria, and—despite his “anti-Soviet” reputation—in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Like the central European camps, these Balkan camps began by resembling the Gulag, but over time began to differ. Most had been set up by local police, with Soviet advice and guidance of some kind. The Romanian secret police, the Securitate, seem to have been working under the direct orders of their Soviet counterparts. Perhaps for that reason, the Romanian camps most closely resemble the Gulag, even to the extent that they carried out absurd, overambitious projects of the sort Stalin himself favored in the Soviet Union. The most famous of these, the Danube–Black Sea Canal, appears to have served no real economic function at all. To this day, it is every bit as empty and deserted as the White Sea Canal which it so eerily resembles. A propaganda slogan declared that the “Danube–Black Sea Canal is the tomb of the Romanian bourgeoisie!” Given that up to 200,000 people may have died building it, that may have indeed been the canal’s real purpose. ³⁶

The Bulgarian and Yugoslav camps had a different ethos. Bulgarian police appear to have been less concerned with the fulfillment of a plan and more interested in punishing the inmates. A Bulgarian actress who survived one of the camps later described being beaten nearly to death after collapsing from the heat:

They covered me with old rags and left me alone. The next day everyone went to work, while I was locked up for the entire day with no food or water or medication. I was too weak to get up, due to my bruises and all that I had endured the day before. I’d been brutally beaten. I was in a coma for fourteen hours, and survived by a miracle.³⁷

She also witnessed a father and son being beaten to death in front of one another, merely to satisfy the sadistic pleasures of those doing the beating. Other survivors of Bulgarian camps describe being tormented by heat, cold, hunger, and physical abuse.³⁸ The location of these more southerly camps also brought other sorts of suffering: among the most infamous Yugoslav camps was one built on the Adriatic island of Saint-Gregoire, where water was scarce and the main torment was thirst.³⁹

Unlike the Gulag, the majority of these camps did not last, and many had closed even before Stalin’s death. The East German spetslagerya were in fact disbanded in 1950, mostly because they contributed to the deep unpopularity of the East German Communist Party. To improve the new regime’s image—and to prevent more Germans from escaping to the West, which was then still possible—the East German secret police actually nursed prisoners back to health before their release, and provided them with new clothes. Not all were let go: those deemed the most serious political opponents of the new order were, like the Poles arrested in this era, deported to the Soviet Union. Members of the spetslagerya burial battalions appear to have been deported as well. Otherwise, they might have exposed the existence of the camps’ mass graves, which were not located and exhumed until the 1990s.⁴⁰