Gulag

To put their experience in perspective, the Kolyma elite was not the only powerful network to be eliminated in 1937 and 1938. By the end of that year, Stalin had purged the Red Army of a whole host of notables, including Deputy People’s Commissar for Defense Marshal Tukhachevsky, Army Commander Ion Yakir, Army Commander Uborevich, and others, along with their wives and children, most of whom were shot, but some of whom wound up in camps. ¹⁴ The Communist Party met a similar fate. The purge penetrated not only Stalin’s potential enemies in the Party leadership, but also the provincial Party elite, the First Party Secretaries, the heads of local and regional councils, and the leaders of important factories and institutions.

So thorough was the wave of arrests in certain places and among a certain social class, later wrote Yelena Sidorkina—herself arrested in November 1937—that “Nobody knew what tomorrow would bring. People were afraid to talk to one another or meet, especially families in which the father or mother had already been ‘isolated.’ The rare individuals foolhardy enough to stand up for those arrested would themselves be automatically nominated for ‘isolation.’”¹⁵

But not everyone died, and not every camp was wiped out. In fact, the more obscure camp bosses even fared slightly better than the average NKVD officer, as the case of V. A. Barabanov, a protégé of Yagoda’s, illustrates. In 1935, when he was the deputy commander of Dmitlag, Barabanov was arrested along with a colleague for having arrived at the camp “in a drunken state.” As a result, he lost his job, received a light prison sentence, and was working at a distant camp in the far north in 1938 when the mass arrests of Yagoda’s henchmen took place. In the chaos, his existence was forgotten. By 1954, his love of alcohol forgiven, he had risen through the ranks once again to become the deputy commander of the entire Gulag system.¹⁶

But in the folk memory of the camps, 1937 was not only remembered as the year of the Great Terror; it was also the year that propaganda about the glories of criminal re-education finally ground to a halt, along with any remaining lip service to the ideal. In part, this may have been due to the deaths and arrests of those most closely associated with the campaign. Yagoda, still linked in the public mind to the White Sea Canal, was gone. Maxim Gorky had died suddenly in June 1936. I. L. Averbakh, Gorky’s collaborator on Kanal imeni Stalina and author of From Crime to Labour, a subsequent tome dedicated to the Moscow–Volga Canal, was denounced as a Trotskyite and arrested in April 1937. So were many of the other writers who had taken part in Gorky’s White Sea Canal collective.¹⁷

But the change had deeper origins as well. As the political rhetoric grew more radical, as the hunt for political criminals intensified, the status of the camps, where these dangerous politicals resided, changed as well. In a country gripped by paranoia and spy-mania, the very existence of camps for “enemies” and “wreckers” became, if not exactly a secret (prisoners working on roads and apartment blocks were to be a common sight in many major cities in the 1940s) then at least a subject never discussed in public. Nikolai Pogodin’s play, Aristokraty, was banned in 1937, to be revived again, though only briefly, in 1956, well after Stalin’s death. ¹⁸ Gorky’s Kanal imeni Stalina was also placed on the list of forbidden books, for reasons that remain unclear. Perhaps the new NKVD bosses could no longer stomach the frothy praise for the disgraced Yagoda. Or perhaps its bright depiction of the successful re-education of “enemies” no longer made sense in an era when new enemies were appearing all the time, and when hundreds of thousands of them were being executed, instead of reformed. Certainly its tales of smooth, all-knowing Chekists were hard to reconcile with the massive purges of the NKVD.

Not wanting to seem lax in their task of isolating the regime’s enemies, the Gulag’s commanders in Moscow issued new internal secrecy regulations too, entailing huge new costs. All correspondence now had to be sent by special courier. In 1940 alone, the NKVD’s couriers had to transmit twenty-five million secret packages. Those writing letters to camps now wrote exclusively to post office boxes, as the locations of camps became a secret. The camps themselves disappeared from maps. Even internal NKVD correspondence referred to them euphemistically as “special objects” (spetsobekty) or “subsections” (podrazdeleniya) in order to conceal their real activity.¹⁹