Gulag

Among the camp administrators, the confusion was profound. Olga Vasileeva, then working in the Gulag headquarters in Moscow, remembers weeping openly: “I cried and pretty much everyone cried, women and men too, they openly cried.”¹³ Just like millions of their countrymen, the Gulag’s employees were crying not only for their dead leader, but also out of fear for themselves and their careers. Khrushchev himself wrote later that “I wasn’t just weeping for Stalin. I was terribly worried about the future of the country. I already sensed that Beria would start bossing everyone around and that this could be the beginning of the end.” ¹⁴

By “the end,” of course, he meant the end for himself: surely the death of Stalin would bring on a new round of bloodletting. Fearing the same, many Gulag bigwigs reportedly had heart attacks, bouts of high blood pressure, and severe cases of fever and flu. Their distress, and their state of complete emotional confusion, had made them genuinely ill. They were literally sick with fear.¹⁵

If prison guards were confused, the new occupants of the Kremlin were not much clearer about what lay in the future. As Khrushchev had feared, Beria, who was barely able to contain his glee at the sight of Stalin’s corpse, did indeed take power, and began making changes with astonishing speed. On March 6, before Stalin had even been buried, Beria announced a reorganization of the secret police. He instructed its boss to hand over responsibility for the Gulag to the Ministry of Justice, keeping only the special camps for politicals within the jurisdiction of the MVD. He transferred many of the Gulag’s enterprises over to other ministries, whether forestry, mining, or manufacturing.¹⁶ On March 12, Beria also aborted more than twenty of the Gulag’s flagship projects, on the grounds that they did not “meet the needs of the national economy.” Work on the Great Turkmen Canal ground to a halt, as did work on the Volga–Ural Canal, the Volga–Baltic Canal, the dam on the lower Don, the port at Donetsk, and the tunnel to Sakhalin. The Road of Death, the Salekhard–Igarka Railway, was abandoned too, never to be finished.¹⁷

Two weeks later, Beria wrote a memo to the Presidium of the Central Committee, outlining the state of the labor camps with astonishing clarity. He informed them that there were 2,526,402 inmates, of whom only 221,435 were actually “dangerous state criminals,” and he argued in favor of releasing many of those remaining:

Among the prisoners, 438,788 are women, of which 6,286 are pregnant and 35,505 are accompanied by children under the age of two. Many women have children under the age of ten, who are being raised by relatives or in children’s homes.

Among the prisoners, 238,000 are elderly—men and women above fifty years of age—and 31,181 are juveniles below the age of eighteen, mostly sentenced for petty theft and hooliganism.

About 198,000 prisoners living in camps suffer from serious, incurable illnesses, and are completely incapable of work.

It is well known that prisoners in camps . . . leave their relatives and intimates in very difficult situations, frequently breaking up their families, with seriously negative effects, lasting for the rest of their lives.¹⁸

On these humane-sounding grounds, Beria requested that an amnesty be extended to all prisoners with sentences of five years or less, to all pregnant women, to all women with young children, and to everyone under eighteen—a million people in all. The amnesty was announced on March 27. Releases began immediately.¹⁹

A week later, on April 4, Beria also called off the investigation into the Doctors’ Plot. This was the first of the changes visible to the general public. The announcement appeared, again, in Pravda: “The persons accused of incorrect conduct of the investigation have been arrested and brought to criminal responsibility.”²⁰