Gulag

The Czech camps did not last either: they reached their peak in 1949, and began shrinking after that, before vanishing altogether. The Hungarian leader Imre Nagy liquidated his country’s camps immediately following Stalin’s death, in July 1953. The Bulgarian communists, on the other hand, maintained several hard-labor camps well into the 1970s, long after the mass system of Soviet camps had been disbanded. Lovech, one of the cruelest camps in the Bulgarian system, operated from 1959 until 1962.⁴¹

Perhaps unexpectedly, the Gulag’s export policy had its most enduring impact outside of Europe. In the early 1950s, at the height of the era of Sino-Soviet collaboration, Soviet “experts” helped set up several Chinese camps, and organized forced-labor brigades at a coal mine near Fushun. The Chinese camps—laogai—still exist, although they scarcely resemble the Stalinist camps they were set up to emulate. They are still labor camps—and a sentence in one of them is often followed by a period of exile, just as in Stalin’s system—but the camp commanders seem to be less obsessed with the norms and central work plans. Instead, they concentrate on a rigid form of “re-education.” Prisoners’ atonement, and prisoners’ ritual abasement before the Party, seem to matter to the authorities as much, if not more, than the goods that the prisoners manage to produce. ⁴²

In the end, the details of daily life in the camps of the Soviet satellite states and allies—what they were used for, how long they lasted, how rigid or disorganized they became, how cruel or liberal they remained—all depended on the particular country and its particular culture. It was, it turned out, relatively easy for other nations to alter the Soviet model to meet their own needs. Or perhaps I should say it is relatively easy. The following quotation, from a collection published in 1998, describes an even more recent experience in a concentration camp, in the last remaining communist country on the Eurasian landmass:

On my very first day—at the age of nine—I received a quota. The first work I had to carry out was to walk to the mountain and collect firewood and bring back a large load to the school. I was told to repeat it ten times. It took two or three hours for a round trip from the mountain to the school with a load of wood. Unless you finish it you can’t go home. I worked through the night and by the time I had finished it was after midnight and I fell to the ground. Of course, other children who had been there longer could do it faster . . .

Other types of work included collecting gold from sand, using a net in the river (shaking and washing it in the river). This was much easier; sometimes you would be lucky and meet the quota earlier, and then you could play just a little, rather than tell your teacher you had already met the quota ...⁴³

The writer Chul Hwan Kong defected from North Korea in 1992. He had previously spent ten years, along with his entire family, in Yodok punishment camp. One Seoul human rights group estimates that about 200,000 North Koreans are still being held in similar prison camps, for “crimes” such as reading a foreign newspaper, listening to a foreign radio station, speaking to a foreigner, or in any way “insulting the authority” of North Korea’s leadership. About 400,000 are thought to have died as prisoners in such camps.⁴⁴

Nor are the North Korean camps confined to North Korea. In 2001, the Moscow Times reported that the North Korean government was paying off its debts to Russia by sending labor teams to work in heavily guarded mining and logging camps across isolated parts of Siberia. The camps—“a state within a state”—contain their own internal food distribution networks, their own internal prison, and their own guards. Some 6,000 workers were thought to be involved. Whether they were being paid or not was unclear— but they were certainly not free to leave. ⁴⁵

Not only was the idea of the concentration camp general enough to export, in other words, but it was also enduring enough to last to the present day.

Chapter 22

THE ZENITH OF THE CAMP–INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

At seventeen—we loved to study.

At twenty—we learned to die.

To know that if we are allowed to live

That means nothing has happened, just yet.

At twenty-five—we learned to exchange

Life for dried fish, firewood and potatoes . . .

What was left to learn at forty?