Gulag

As the camps expanded, the nature of the OGPU changed too. As before, Soviet secret police continued to spy upon the regime’s enemies, to interrogate suspected dissidents, and to ferret out “plots” and “conspiracies.” From 1929 on, the secret police also shouldered part of the responsibility for the Soviet Union’s economic development. Over the next decade, they would even become pioneers of a sort, often organizing the exploration as well as the exploitation of the Soviet Union’s natural resources. They planned and equipped geological expeditions which sought to identify the coal, oil, gold, nickel, and other metals that lay beneath the frozen tundra of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of the Soviet far north. They decided which of the enormous stands of timber would be the next to be cut into valuable raw-wood exports. To move these resources into the Soviet Union’s major cities and industrial centers, they set up a huge network of road and rail links, carving out a rudimentary transport system across thousands of kilometers of uninhabited wilderness. On occasion, they took part in these ventures themselves, marching across the tundra, clad in heavy fur coats and thick boots, telegraphing their discoveries back to Moscow.

Prisoners acquired new roles along with their captors. Although some continued to toil behind barbed wire, digging coal or ditches, throughout the first half of the 1930s prisoners also paddled canoes down rivers north of the Arctic Circle, carried the equipment needed for the geological surveys, and broke the ground for new coal mines and oil wells. They built the barracks, unrolled the barbed wire, and set up the watchtowers for new camps. They constructed the refineries needed to process the resources, pounded in the stakes for the railways, and poured the cement for the roads. Eventually, they settled the newly opened territories too, populating the virgin wilderness.

Later, Soviet historians would lyrically call this episode in Soviet history the “Opening Up of the Far North,” and it is true that it did represent a real break with the past. Even in the last decades of Czarist rule, when a belated industrial revolution had finally exploded across Russia, no one had attempted to explore and settle the far northern regions of the country with this intensity. The climate was too harsh, the potential human suffering too great, Russian technology too primitive. The Soviet regime was less troubled by such concerns. Although its technology was not much better, it had little regard for the lives of the people it sent to do the “opening up.” If some of them died—well, more could be found.

Tragedies were plentiful, particularly at the outset of this new era. Recently, the veracity of one particularly horrific incident, long a part of camp survivors’ folklore, was confirmed by a document found in the archives in Novosibirsk. Signed by an instructor of the Party Committee in Narym, western Siberia, and sent to the personal attention of Stalin in May 1933, it precisely describes the arrival of a group of deported peasants—described as “backward elements”—on the island of Nazino in the Ob River. The peasants were exiles, and as such were supposed to settle on the land, and presumably to farm it: