Gulag

He would have had little time for further reflection. By late August, hints of autumn were already in the air. There was little time to spare. As soon as they arrived, the prisoners immediately began to work twelve hours a day, building their camp and their work sites. The geologists set out to find the best places to drill for oil. More specialists arrived later in the autumn. New prisoner convoys arrived too, first monthly and then weekly, throughout the 1930 “season.” By the end of the expedition’s first year, the number of prisoners had grown to nearly a thousand.

Despite the advance planning, conditions in these early days, for both prisoners and exiles, were horrendous, as they were everywhere else. Most had to live in tents, as there were no barracks. Nor were there enough winter clothes and boots, or anywhere near enough food. Flour and meat arrived in smaller quantities than had been ordered, as did medicines. The number of sick and weakened prisoners rose, as the expedition’s leaders admitted in a report they filed later. The isolation was no less difficult to bear. So far were these new camps from civilization—so far were they from roads, even, let alone railway lines—that no barbed wire was used in Komi until 1937. Escape was considered pointless.

Still, prisoners kept arriving—and supplementary expeditions continued to set out from the base camp at Ukhta. If they were successful, each one of these expeditions founded, in turn, a new base camp—a lagpunkt— sometimes in places that were almost impossibly remote, several days’ or weeks’ trek from Ukhta. They, in turn, founded further sub-camps, to build roads or collective farms to serve the prisoners’ needs. In this manner, camps spread like fast-growing weeds across the empty forests of Komi.

The route of the Ukhtinskaya Expedition, Komi Republic, 1929

Ukhtpechlag, Komi Republic, 1937

Some of the expeditions proved to be temporary. Such was the fate of one of the first, which set out from Ukhta in the summer of 1930 for Vaigach Island, in the Arctic Sea. Earlier geological expeditions had already found lead and zinc deposits on the island, although the Vaigach Expedition, as it came to be called, was well provided with geologist prisoners as well. Some of these geologists performed in such an exemplary manner that the OGPU rewarded them: they were allowed to bring their wives and children to live with them on the island. So remote was the location that the camp commanders appear not to have worried about escape, and they allowed prisoners to walk anywhere they wished, in the company of other prisoners or free workers, without any special permissions or passes. To encourage “shock-work in the Arctic,” Matvei Berman, then the Gulag boss, granted prisoners on Vaigach Island two days off their sentence for every such day worked. ⁹ In 1934, however, the mine filled with water, and the OGPU moved both prisoners and equipment off the island the following year.¹⁰

Other expeditions would prove more permanent. In 1931, a team of twenty-three set off northward from Ukhta by boat, up the inland waterways, intending to begin the excavation of an enormous coal deposit—the Vorkuta coal basin—discovered in the Arctic tundra of the northern part of Komi the previous year. As on all such expeditions, geologists led the way, prisoners manned the boats, and a small OGPU contingent commanded the operation, paddling and marching through the swarms of insects that inhabit the tundra in summer months. They spent their first nights in open fields, then somehow built a camp, survived the winter, and constructed a primitive mine the following spring: Rudnik No. 1. Using picks and shovels and wooden carts, and no mechanized equipment whatsoever, the prisoners began to dig coal. Within a mere six years, Rudnik No. 1 would grow into the city of Vorkuta and the headquarters of Vorkutlag, one of the largest and toughest camps in the entire Gulag system. By 1938, Vorkutlag contained 15,000 prisoners and had produced 188,206 tons of coal.¹¹

Technically, not all of the new inhabitants of Komi were prisoners. From 1929, the authorities also began to send “special exiles” to the region. At first these were almost all kulaks, who arrived with their wives and children and were expected to start living off the land. Yagoda himself had declared that the exiles were to be given “free time” in which they were to plant gardens, raise pigs, go fishing, and build their own homes: “first they will live on camp rations, then at their own cost.”¹² While all of that sounds rather rosy, in fact nearly 5,000 such exile families arrived in 1930—over 16,000 people—to find, as usual, almost nothing. There were 268 barracks built by November of that year, although at least 700 were needed. Three or four families shared each room. There was not enough food, clothing, or winter boots. The exile villages lacked baths, roads, postal service, and telephone cables.¹³