Gulag

Inmates were also allowed to participate, up to a point, in the political events of their time. Like the White Sea Canal, Kolyma promoted its own inmate shock-workers and Stakhanovites. One prisoner even became Dalstroi’s “instructor in the Stakhanovite methods of labor,” and those inmates who performed well could receive a small badge, declaring them to be “Kolyma shock-workers.”³⁸

Like Ukhtpechlag, Kolyma’s infrastructure quickly became more sophisticated. In the 1930s, prisoners built not only the mines, but also the docks and breakwaters for Magadan’s port, as well as the region’s single important road, the Kolyma Highway, which leads due north from Magadan. Most of Sevvostlag’s lagpunkts were located along this road, and indeed they were often named according to their distance from Magadan (“Camp Forty-seventh Kilometer,” for example). Prisoners also built the city of Magadan itself, which contained 15,000 people by 1936, and would go on growing. Returning to the city in 1947, after serving seven years in the farther-flung camps, Evgeniya Ginzburg “nearly swooned with surprise and admiration” at the speed of Magadan’s growth: “It was only some weeks later that I noticed you could count the big buildings on your fingers. But at the time it really was a great metropolis for me.” ³⁹

In fact, Ginzburg was one of the few prisoners to notice a peculiar paradox. It was strange, but true: in Kolyma, as in Komi, the Gulag was slowly bringing “civilization”—if that is what it can be called—to the remote wilderness. Roads were being built where there had been only forest; houses were appearing in the swamps. Native peoples were being pushed aside to make way for cities, factories, and railways. Years later, a woman who had been the daughter of a camp cook in a far-flung outpost of Lokchimlag, one of the Komi logging camps, reminisced to me about what life had been like when the camp was still running. “Oooh, there was a whole warehouse of vegetables, fields full of squash—it wasn’t all barren like today.” She waved her arm in disgust at the tiny village which now stood on the site, at the former camp punishment cells, still inhabited. “And there were real electric lights, and the bosses in their big cars drove in and out almost every day . . .”

Ginzburg made the same observation, more eloquently:

How strange is the heart of man! My whole soul cursed those who had thought up the idea of building a town in this permafrost, thawing out the ground with the blood and tears of innocent people. Yet at the same time I was aware of a sort of ridiculous pride . . . How it had grown, and how handsome it had become during my seven years’ absence, our Magadan! Quite unrecognizable. I admired each street lamp, each section of asphalt, and even the poster announcing that the House of Culture was presenting the operetta The Dollar Princess. We treasure each fragment of our life, even the bitterest.⁴⁰

By 1934, the expansion of the Gulag in Kolyma, in Komi, in Siberia, in Kazakhstan, and elsewhere in the USSR had followed the same pattern as Solovetsky. In the early days, slovenliness, chaos, and disorder caused many unnecessary deaths. Even without outright sadism, the unthinking cruelty of guards, who treated their prisoners as domestic animals, led to much misery.

Nevertheless, as time went on, the system seemed to be falling shakily into place. Death rates dropped from their high of 1933 as famine across the country receded and camps became better organized. By 1934, they were, according to the official statistics, hovering at around 4 percent.⁴¹ Ukhtpechlag was producing oil, Kolyma was producing gold, the camps in the Arkhangelsk region were producing timber. Roads were being built across Siberia. Mistakes and mishaps abounded, but this was true everywhere in the USSR. The speed of industrialization, the lack of planning, and the dearth of well-trained specialists made accidents and overspending inevitable, as the bosses of the big projects surely would have known.