Gulag

The message was clear: zeks were no longer considered full citizens of the Soviet Union, if they were to be considered people at all. One prisoner observed that they were subject to “a kind of excommunication from political life, and are allowed to take no part in its liturgies and sacred rites.”²⁹ After 1937, no guard used the word tovarishch, or “comrade,” to address prisoners, and prisoners could be beaten for using it to address guards, who they had to call grazhdanin, or “citizen.” Photographs of Stalin and other leaders never appeared on the walls within the camps or in prisons. A relatively common sight of the mid-1930s—a train carrying prisoners, its wagons bedecked with portraits of Stalin and banners declaring the occupants to be Stakhanovites—became unthinkable after 1937. So did celebrations of the workers’ holiday on the First of May, such as those once held at the Solovetsky kremlin.³⁰

Many foreigners were surprised at the powerful effect that this “excommunication” from Soviet society had on Soviet prisoners. One French prisoner, Jacques Rossi, author of The Gulag Handbook, an encyclopedic guide to camp life, wrote that the word “comrade” could electrify prisoners who had not heard it in a long time: “A brigade that had just completed an eleven-and-a-half-hour shift agreed to stay and work the next shift only because the chief engineer . . . said to the prisoners: ‘I ask that you do this, comrades.’”³¹

From the dehumanization of the “politicals” there followed a very distinct, and in some places drastic, change in their living conditions. The Gulag of the 1930s had been generally disorganized, frequently cruel, and sometimes deadly. Nevertheless, in some places and at some times during the 1930s, even political prisoners had been offered the genuine possibility of redemption. The workers of the White Sea Canal could read the newspaper Perekovka, whose very name meant “reforging.” The conclusion of Pogodin’s Aristokraty featured the “conversion” of an ex-saboteur. Flora Leipman—daughter of a Scotswoman who had married a Russian, moved to St. Petersburg, and quickly been arrested as a spy—visited her imprisoned mother in a northern logging camp in 1934, and found that “there was also still an element of humanity between the guards and the prisoners as the KGB was not so sophisticated and psychologically orientated as it was to become a few years later.”³² Leipman knew what she was talking about, since she herself became a prisoner “a few years later.” For after 1937, attitudes did change, particularly toward those arrested under Article 58 of the criminal code for “counter-revolutionary” crimes.

In the camps, politicals were removed from the jobs they had held in planning or engineering, and forced to return to “general work,” meaning unskilled physical labor in mines or forests: “enemies” could no longer be allowed to hold any position of importance, for fear they would engage in sabotage. Pavlov, the new head of Dalstroi, personally signed the order forcing one prisoner geologist, I. S. Davidenko, to be “used as a common laborer and in no case allowed to conduct independent work. Davidenko’s tasks should be carefully controlled and subject to daily observation.” ³³ In a report filed in February 1939, the commander of Belbaltlag also claimed that he had “chased away all workers not deserving of political trust,” and in particular “all former prisoners, sentenced for counter-revolutionary crimes.” From then on, he pledged, administrative and technical jobs would be reserved for “Communists, Komsomol members [members of the Young Communist league] and trusted specialists.” ³⁴ Clearly, economic productivity was no longer the camps’ top priority.

Camp regimes across the system grew harsher for ordinary criminal prisoners as well as politicals. Bread rations for “general work” at the beginning of the 1930s could be as high as 1 kilogram per day, even for those who did not fulfill 100 percent of the norm, and up to 2 kilograms for Stakhanovites. In the main lagpunkts of the White Sea Canal, meat was served twelve days a month.³⁵ By the end of the decade, the guaranteed ration had more than halved, falling to between 400 and 450 grams of bread, while those who managed 100 percent got an extra 200 grams. The punishment ration fell to 300 grams.³⁶ Speaking of that era in Kolyma, Varlam Shalamov wrote that