Gulag

The implications were clear: Stalinist justice had been found wanting. Secretly, Beria made other changes as well. He forbade all secret police cadres from using physical force against arrestees—effectively ending torture.²¹ He attempted to liberalize policy toward western Ukraine, the Baltic States, even East Germany, reversing the policies of Sovietization and Russification which, in the case of Ukraine, had been put in place by Nikita Khrushchev himself.²² As far as the Gulag was concerned, on June 16 he laid all of his cards on the table, openly declaring his intention to “liquidate the system of forced labor, on the grounds of economic ineffectiveness and lack of perspective.”²³

To this day, Beria’s motives for making these rapid changes remain mysterious. Some have tried to paint him as a secret liberal, chafing under the Stalinist system, longing for reform. His party colleagues suspected he was trying to garner more power for the secret police, at the expense of the Communist Party itself: ridding the MVD of the cumbersome, expensive burden of the camps was simply a way of strengthening the institution. Beria also might have been trying to make himself popular among the general public as well as among the many former secret police who would now return from distant camps. In the late 1940s, he had made a practice of re-hiring such ex-prisoners—virtually guaranteeing their loyalty. But the most likely explanation for Beria’s behavior lies in his superior knowledge: perhaps more than anyone else in the USSR, Beria really did know how uneconomic the camps were, and how innocent most of the prisoners were. After all, he had been supervising the former, and arresting the latter, for much of the previous decade.²⁴

Whatever his motives, Beria moved too quickly. His reforms disturbed and unsettled his colleagues. Khrushchev—whom Beria vastly underestimated—was the most shaken, possibly because Khrushchev may have helped organize the investigations into the Doctors’ Plot in the first place, possibly because of his strong feelings about Ukraine. Khrushchev may also have feared that he would sooner or later figure on Beria’s new list of enemies. Slowly, through use of an intensive whispering campaign, he turned the other Party leaders against Beria. By the end of June, he had won them all over. At a Party meeting, he surrounded the building with loyal troops. The surprise succeeded. Shocked, stuttering, and stammering, the man who had been the second most powerful person in the USSR was arrested and removed to prison.

Beria would remain in prison for the few months left of his life. Like Yagoda and Yezhov before him, he occupied himself by writing letters, pleading for mercy. His trial was held in December. Whether he was executed then or earlier is unknown—but by the end of 1953 he was dead. ²⁵

The Soviet Union’s leaders abandoned some of Beria’s policies as quickly as they had been adopted. But neither Khrushchev nor anyone else ever revived the large Gulag construction projects. Nor did they reverse Beria’s amnesty. The releases continued—proof that doubts about the Gulag’s efficiency had not been limited to Beria, disgraced though he might be. The new Soviet leadership knew perfectly well that the camps were a drag on the economy, just as they knew that millions of the prisoners in them were innocent. The clock was now ticking: the Gulag’s era was coming to an end.

Perhaps taking their cue from the rumors emanating from Moscow, the Gulag’s administrators and guards adjusted to the new situation too. Once they got over their fears and their illnesses, many guards changed their behavior almost overnight, relaxing the rules even before they had been ordered to do so. One of the commanders of Alexander Dolgun’s Kolyma lagpunkt began shaking prisoners’ hands and calling them “comrade” as soon as news broke of Stalin’s illness, even before the dictator had been officially declared dead.²⁶ “The camp regime weakened, became more human,” recalled one prisoner.²⁷ Another put it somewhat differently: “The guards didn’t show the sort of patriotism they had shown when Stalin was alive.”²⁸ Prisoners who refused to do a particularly strenuous, unpleasant, or unfair task were no longer punished. Prisoners who refused to work on Sundays were no longer punished.²⁹ Spontaneous protests broke out—and the protesters were not punished, either, as Barbara Armonas remembered: