Gulag

The promise of shorter sentences for harder work may have helped increase worker enthusiasm a bit more. Certainly the MVD keenly supported this policy, and in 1952 even proposed to free large groups of prisoners from three of the largest northern enterprises—the Vorkuta coal mine, the Inta coal mine, and the Ukhtinsky oil refinery—and to employ them as free workers. It seems that even MVD enterprise managers preferred, simply, to deal with free men rather than prisoners.⁵⁶

So great were concerns about the economics of the camps that Beria, in the autumn of 1950, ordered Kruglov to survey the Gulag and uncover the truth. Kruglov’s subsequent report claimed that the prisoners “employed” by the MVD were no less productive than ordinary workers. He did concede, however, that the price of maintaining prisoners—the cost of food, clothing, barracks, and above all guards, now needed in more numbers than ever—far exceeded the costs of paying ordinary free workers.⁵⁷

In other words, the camps were unprofitable, and many people now knew it. Yet no one, not even Beria, dared take any action during Stalin’s lifetime, which is perhaps not surprising. To anyone in Stalin’s immediate entourage, the years between 1950 and 1952 would have seemed a particularly dangerous time to tell the dictactor that his pet projects were economic failures. Although sick and dying, Stalin was not mellowing with age. On the contrary, he was growing ever more paranoid, and was now inclined to see conspirators and plotters all around him. In June 1951, he unexpectedly ordered the arrest of Abakumov, the head of Soviet counter-intelligence. In the autumn of that year, without prior consultation, he personally dictated a Central Committee resolution describing a “Mingrelian nationalist conspiracy.” The Mingrelians were an ethnic group in Georgia, whose most prominent member was none other than Beria himself. All through 1952, a wave of arrests, firings, and executions rolled through the Georgian communist elite, touching many of Beria’s close associates and protégés. Stalin almost certainly intended Beria himself to be the purge’s ultimate target.⁵⁸

He would not have been the only victim of Stalin’s final madness, however. By 1952, Stalin had become interested in prosecuting yet another ethnic group. In November 1952, the Czech Communist Party, now in control of Czechoslovakia, put fourteen of its leaders on trial—eleven Jews among them—and denounced them as “Zionist adventurers.” A month later, Stalin told a party meeting that “every Jew is a nationalist and an agent of American intelligence.” Then, on January 13, 1953, Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, revealed the existence of the Doctors’ Plot: “terrorist groups of doctors,” it was claimed, had “made it their aim to cut short the lives of active public figures in the Soviet Union by means of sabotaged medical treatment.” Six of the nine “terrorist doctors” were Jews. All were denounced for their supposed links to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, whose wartime leadership—prominent Jewish intellectuals and writers— had been sentenced a few months earlier for the crime of promoting “cosmopolitanism.” ⁵⁹

The Doctors’ Plot was a terrible and tragic irony. Only ten years before, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews living in the western part of the country had been murdered by Hitler. Hundreds of thousands more had deliberately fled from Poland to the Soviet Union, looking for refuge from the Nazis. Nevertheless, Stalin spent his final, dying years planning another series of show trials, another wave of mass executions, and another wave of deportations. He may even have planned, ultimately, to deport all Jews resident in the Soviet Union’s major cities to central Asia and Siberia.⁶⁰

Fear and paranoia swept across the country once again. Terrified Jewish intellectuals signed a petition, condemning the doctors. Hundreds more Jewish doctors were arrested. Other Jews lost their jobs, as a wave of bitter anti-Semitism swept across the country. In her faraway Karaganda exile, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg heard local women gossip about packages sent to the post office by people with Jewish names. Allegedly, they had been found to contain cotton balls, riddled with typhus-bearing lice.⁶¹ In Kargopollag, in his camp north of Arkhangelsk, Isaak Filshtinskii also heard rumors that Jewish prisoners were to be sent to special camps in the far north.⁶²

Then, just as the Doctors’ Plot looked set to send tens of thousands of new prisoners into camps and into exile, just as the noose was tightening around Beria and his henchmen, and just as the Gulag had entered what appeared to be an insurmountable economic crisis—Stalin died.

Chapter 23

THE DEATH OF STALIN