Gulag

In the history of the Gulag, however, 1937 does mark a genuine water-shed. For it was in this year that the Soviet camps temporarily transformed themselves from indifferently managed prisons in which people died by accident, into genuinely deadly camps where prisoners were deliberately worked to death, or actually murdered, in far larger numbers than they had been in the past. Although the transformation was far from consistent, and although the deliberate deadliness of the camps did ease again by 1939— death rates would subsequently rise and fall with the tides of war and ideology up until Stalin’s death in 1953—the Great Terror left its mark on the mentality of camp guards and prisoners alike.⁴

Like the rest of the country, the Gulag’s inhabitants would have seen the early warning signs of the terror to come. Following the still mysterious murder of the popular Leningrad Party leader Sergei Kirov in December of 1934, Stalin pushed through a series of decrees giving the NKVD far greater powers to arrest, try, and execute “enemies of the people.” Within weeks, two leading Bolsheviks, Kamenev and Zinoviev—both past opponents of Stalin’s—had already fallen victim to the decrees, and were arrested along with thousands of their supporters and alleged supporters, many from Leningrad. Mass expulsions from the Communist Party followed, although they were not, to start with, much broader than expulsions that had taken place earlier in the decade.

Slowly, the purge became bloodier. Throughout the spring and summer of 1936, Stalin’s interrogators worked on Kamenev and Zinoviev, along with a group of Leon Trotsky’s former admirers, preparing them to “confess” at a large public show trial, which duly took place in August. All were executed afterward, along with many of their relatives. Other trials of leading Bolsheviks, among them the charismatic Nikolai Bukharin, followed in due course. Their families suffered too.

The mania for arrests and executions spread down the Party hierarchy, and throughout society. It was pushed from the top by Stalin, who used it to eliminate his enemies, create a new class of loyal leaders, terrorize the Soviet population—and fill his concentration camps. Starting in 1937, he signed orders which were sent to the regional NKVD bosses, listing quotas of people to be arrested (no cause was given) in particular regions. Some were to be sentenced to the “first category” of punishment—death—and others to be given the “second category”—confinement in concentration camps for a term ranging from eight to ten years. The most “vicious” among the latter were to be placed in special political prisons, presumably in order to keep them from contaminating other camp inmates. Some scholars speculate that the NKVD assigned quotas to different parts of the country according to its perception of which regions had the greatest concentration of “enemies.” On the other hand, there may have been no correlation at all.⁵

Reading these orders is very much like reading the orders of a bureaucrat designing the latest version of the Five-Year Plan. Here, for example, is one dated July 30, 1937:

Clearly, the purge was in no sense spontaneous: new camps for new prisoners were even prepared in advance. Nor did the purge encounter much resistance. The NKVD administration in Moscow expected their provincial subordinates to show enthusiasm, and they eagerly complied. “We ask permission to shoot an additional 700 people from the Dashnak bands, and other anti-Soviet elements,” the Armenian NKVD petitioned Moscow in September 1937. Stalin personally signed a similar request, just as he, or Molotov, signed many others: “I raise the number of First Category prisoners in the Krasnoyarsk region to 6,600.” At a Politburo meeting in February 1938, the NKVD of Ukraine was given permission to arrest an additional 30,000 “kulaks and other anti-Soviet elements.”⁷

Some of the Soviet public approved of new arrests: the sudden revelation of the existence of enormous numbers of “enemies,” many within the highest reaches of the Party, surely explained why—despite Stalin’s Great Turning Point, despite collectivization, despite the Five-Year Plan—the Soviet Union was still so poor and backward. Most, however, were too terrified and confused by the spectacle of famous revolutionaries confessing and neighbors disappearing in the night to express any opinions about what was happening at all.