Gulag

This time, there was no Gorky to sing the praises of the new Stalinist constructions. On the contrary, the new projects were widely considered wasteful and grandiose. Although there were no open objections to these projects in Stalin’s lifetime, several, including the “Road of Death” and the tunnel to Sakhalin, were aborted within days of his death. The sheer pointlessness of these feats of crude manpower had been well understood, as the Gulag’s own files prove. One inspection carried out in 1951 showed that an entire 52 miles of far northern railway track, constructed at great expense and at the cost of many lives, had not been used for three years. Another 230 miles of similarly costly highway had not been used for eighteen months. ⁴⁶

In 1953, yet another inspection, carried out on the orders of the Central Committee, showed that the cost of maintaining the camps far exceeded any profits made from prison labor. In 1952, in fact, the state had subsidized the Gulag to the tune of 2.3 billion rubles, more than 16 percent of the state’s entire budgetary allocation.⁴⁷ One Russian historian has noted that MVD memos to Stalin concerning expansion of the camps often began with the phrase “in accordance with Your wishes,” as if to emphasize the writer’s subtle objections.⁴⁸

The Gulag’s Moscow bosses were well aware of the spread of dissatisfaction and unrest within the camps too. By 1951, mass work refusals, carried out by both criminal and political prisoners, had reached crisis levels: in that year, the MVD calculated that it had lost more than a million workdays due to strikes and protests. In 1952, that number doubled. According to the Gulag’s own statistics, 32 percent of prisoners in the year 1952 had not fulfilled their work norms.⁴⁹ The list of major strike and protest actions in the years 1950 to 1952, kept by the authorities themselves, is surprisingly long. Among others, there was an armed uprising in Kolyma in the winter of 1949–50; an armed escape from Kraslag in March 1951; mass hunger strikes in Ukhtizhemlag and Ekibastuzlag, in Karaganda, in 1951; and a strike in Ozerlag in 1952.⁵⁰

So bad had the situation become that in January 1952, the commander of Norilsk sent a letter to General Ivan Dolgikh, then the Gulag’s commander in chief, listing the steps he had taken to prevent rebellion. He suggested abandoning large production zones where prisoners could not receive enough supervision, doubling the number of guards (which he conceded would be difficult), and isolating the various prisoner factions from one another. This too would be difficult, he wrote: “given the great number of prisoners who belong to one or other of the rival factions, we would be lucky if we could simply isolate the leaders.” He also proposed to isolate free workers from prisoners at production sites—and added, finally, that it would be quite useful to release 15,000 prisoners outright, since they would be more productive as free laborers. Needless to say, this suggestion implicitly threw the entire logic of forced labor into doubt.⁵¹

Higher up the Soviet hierarchy, others agreed. “Now we have need of first-class technology,” conceded Kruglov, then-boss of the MVD: clearly, the third-class technology found in the Gulag was no longer considered sufficient. A Central Committee meeting of August 25, 1949, even dedicated itself to the discussion of a letter received from an educated prisoner, identified as Zhdanov. “The most important deficit of the camp system is the fact that it relies upon forced labor,” Zhdanov wrote. “The real productivity of prison labor is extremely low. In different working conditions, half as many people could do double the work that prisoners do now.” ⁵²

In response to this letter, Kruglov promised to raise prisoner productivity, chiefly by bringing back wages for high-performing prisoners, and reinstating the policy of reducing sentences for good work performance. No one seems to have pointed out that both these forms of “stimulation” had been eliminated in the late 1930s—the latter by Stalin himself—precisely on the grounds that they reduced the profitability of the camps.

It hardly mattered, since the changes made little difference. Very little of the prisoners’ money actually reached their pockets: an investigation carried out after Stalin’s death showed that the Gulag and other institutions had illegally confiscated 126 million rubles from prisoners’ personal accounts. ⁵³ Even those tiny amounts of money which did come into the prisoners’ possession were probably more disruptive than helpful. In many camps, criminal bosses set up collection and protection systems, forcing prisoners further down the hierarchy to pay for the privilege of not being beaten or murdered. It became possible to “purchase” easier trusty jobs with cash as well.⁵⁴ In political camps, prisoners used their new wages to bribe guards. Money also brought vodka into the camps, and later drugs as well.⁵⁵