Gulag

The bitches in prisons and camps were indeed truly terrible for ordinary prisoners. They faithfully served the prison directors, worked as foremen, commandants, brigade leaders. They behaved like beasts towards ordinary workers, fleeced them of their possessions, took their clothes down to the last thread. Bitches were not only informers: they would also carry out murder in accordance with the camp directors. The lives of prisoners living in camps run by bitches was very difficult indeed.

Yet this was the postwar era, and the politicals were no longer defenseless in the face of such harassment. In Zhigulin’s camp, a group of ex–Red Army soldiers managed first to beat up the retinue of the much-hated bitch leader of the lagpunkt, and then to kill the leader himself, by attaching him to one of the woodcutting machines. When the rest of the bitches locked themselves up in the barracks, the politicals sent them a message: decapitate the man’s deputy, show us his head through the window, and then we won’t kill the rest of you. They did it. “Obviously their lives were more important to them than the head of their leader.” ⁴⁰

The open warfare became so nasty that even the authorities eventually grew tired of it. In 1954 the MVD proposed that camp commanders designate “separate camps for the incarceration of recidivists of specific types,” and ensure the “separate incarceration of prisoners” under threat from others. The “isolation of hostile groups from one another” was the only way to avoid widespread bloodshed. The war had been started because the authorities wanted to gain control over the thieves—and it was brought to an end because the authorities lost control of the war. ⁴¹

By the early 1950s, the Gulag’s masters found themselves faced with a paradoxical situation. They had wanted to crack down on the criminal recidivists, the better to increase production and ensure the smooth functioning of camp enterprises. They had wanted to isolate counter-revolutionaries, in order to prevent them from infecting other prisoners with their dangerous views. By tightening the repressive noose, however, they had made their task more difficult. The rebelliousness of the politicals and the wars of the criminals hastened the onset of an even deeper crisis: finally, it was becoming clear to the authorities that the camps were wasteful, corrupt, and, above all, unprofitable.

Or, rather, it was becoming clear to everyone except Stalin. Once again, Stalin’s mania for repression and his dedication to the economics of slave labor dovetailed so neatly that it was hard for contemporary observers to say whether he raised the number of arrests in order to build more camps, or built more camps in order to accommodate the number of arrestees. ⁴² Throughout the 1940s, Stalin insisted upon giving even more economic power to the MVD—so much so that by 1952, the year before Stalin’s death, the MVD controlled 9 percent of the capital investment in Russia, more than any other ministry. The Five-Year Plan written for the years 1951 through 1955 called for this investment to more than double.⁴³

Once again, Stalin launched a series of spectacular, attention-grabbing Gulag construction projects, reminiscent of those he had supported in the 1930s. At Stalin’s personal insistence, the MVD constructed a new asbestos production plant, a project that required a high degree of technological specialization, precisely the sort of thing the Gulag was bad at providing. Stalin also personally advocated the construction of another railway line across the Arctic tundra, from Salekhard to Igarka—a project that became known as the “Road of Death.”⁴⁴ The late 1940s were also the era of the Volga–Don, the Volga–Baltic, and the Great Turkmen Canals, as well as the Stalingrad and Kuibyshev hydroelectric power stations, the latter the largest in the world. In 1950, the MVD also began the construction of a tunnel, and a railway line, to the island of Sakhalin, a project which would require many tens of thousands of prisoners.⁴⁵