The Soviet Gulag System - Part One

Today, we begin a five-part series on one of the most tragic institutions in Soviet history, the Gulag. If you'd like to support the podcast with a small monthly donation, click this link - https://www.buzzsprout.com/385372/support

Transcript

Episode 273 - The Soviet Gulag System - Part One

Last time, we covered the history of the Fabergé Eggs and their family. Today, we will begin a multi-part series on one of the most tragic institutions in Soviet history, the Gulags.

Aside from my extensive library, my primary sources for this series includes several important books. The first is a no-brainer, The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. My second, and perhaps the broadest, look into the Soviet prison system was the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum. I’ve also leaned on Dressed For A Dance in the Snow: Women’s Voices from the Gulag by Monika Zgustova and Women of the Gulag: Portraits of Five Remarkable Lives by Paul R. Gregory.

Appelbaum’s monumental work is not an easy read, nor are any of the aforementioned works. Not because they are difficult intellectually but because it is hard to come to grips with the depictions of the grim conditions and the suffering of the people sent to the gulags. One of my goals in using these books is to impart the emotions from the tales and information they share with the reader, as difficult as it may be to listen to.

The description of the gulags and the people who suffered in them cannot be done through photographs. While gruesome, a pictorial illustration doesn't quite do justice to the plight of the millions sent to these God-forbidden hell holes. This is why I think this series is so important, as there are still political prisoners in Russia today under some of the same harsh treatments dealt out by the Soviet regime. 

The gulag system used by the communist government had its roots in Tsarist Russia beginning in the 17th century. These camps were based in Siberia and were considered forced labor prisons. While the conditions in these places were pretty bad, they were nowhere near the kind of brutal conditions that the Soviets would develop starting right after the Bolshevik Revolution.

As Applebaum puts it concerning the Tsarist version of the gulags, “If life in Tsarist exile did become intolerably unpleasant, there was always escape. Stalin himself was arrested and exiled four times. Three times he escaped, once from Irkutsk and twice from Vologda province, a region which later became pockmarked with camps." She further writes, "Thus did their Siberian experience provide the Bolsheviks with an earlier model to build upon – and a lesson in the need for exceptionally strong punitive regimes." They basically learned how to make the camps impossible to escape from and more intolerable based on what they saw as the Tsar's mistakes. 

To begin this journey on the history of the Soviet gulags, I'll start with a quote from our favorite Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, shared in Anne Applebaum’s book. “In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there), ‘Can you describe this’? And I said, ‘I can’. Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.”

The second is from the beginning of the introduction of Anne Applebaum's book, which describes what we will be talking about for the next few episodes. "This is a history of the Gulag: a history of the vast network of labor camps that were once scattered across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, from the islands of the White Sea to the shores of the Black Sea, from the Arctic Circle to the plains of central Asia, from Murmansk to Vorkuta to Kazakhstan, from central Moscow to the Leningrad suburbs. Literally, the word GULAG is an acronym, meaning Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration. Over time, the word ‘Gulag’ has also come to signify not only the administration of the concentration camps but also the system of Soviet slave labor itself, in all its forms and varieties: labor camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women’s camps, children’s camps, transit camps. Even more broadly, ‘Gulag’ has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the ‘meat grinder’: the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths.”

The story of the gulags would begin right after the Bolsheviks gained power. Vladimir Lenin decreed that anyone who opposed his party was an enemy and that they should be locked away in concentration camps. Creating eighty-four such facilities in forty-three provinces would only take three years. Their stated intention was to 'rehabilitate' the enemies of the people. However, its metamorphosis into something far more sinister would begin with the ascension of Joseph Stalin. He would convert these rehabilitation centers into slave labor camps to fuel the industrialization of the Soviet Union and to eliminate his enemies.

Let’s look at some statistics regarding the number of people who spent time in the Gulag system. At any given time, approximately 1.5 to 2 million people were in the gulags between 1929 and 1953. Given that many people were released after they served their terms, there are estimates that anywhere from 14 to 25 million people were in the gulag system, with an additional six million being exiled into areas where the prisons were set up. While these people were not inside the camps, they had to suffer in the abhorrent conditions that existed in the newly created “towns.” Another estimate is that 1.5 to 1.7 million people died while in the camps. Whatever the actual numbers are, it is staggering to think that at the height of the imprisonment of Soviet citizens, over 1% were in a gulag at any one time and that 15% of the people were in a camp at one time or another. 

There is a quote from Applebaum’s book that is somewhat haunting, “Years after being released, the Gulag’s inhabitants were often able to recognize former inmates on the streets simply from the ‘look in their eyes.’” With so many people serving time in the system, it is unsurprising that they would come across others rather readily. 

There have been numerous comparisons between the gulags and the Nazi concentration camps, but the two have vast differences. While both utilized those imprisoned as slave labor, the Soviet system depended on the inmates to drive their economy, whereas the Nazis just used them for their war effort. The gulags caused the deaths of a million or more; it wasn't their intent to execute people; they worked them to death. The Nazis used their camps as killing centers targeting people for their ethnicity, religion, or mental health status. The Soviets used their camps as a warning that any opposition or appearance of resistance to the rule of the Bolsheviks would not be tolerated. Also, people did make it out of the gulags alive, while few met that same fate in the concentration camps.

Of course, both institutions were evil on a level that staggers the mind. Both deserve condemnation from all sides, but the truth of the matter is that the Nazi concentration camps have been viewed as being worse than the Soviet gulags to this day. That is why it is vital to bring to light the atrocities that were committed against the people of the Soviet Union so that their suffering is not forgotten. Also, under Stalin, over 30 million people lost their lives between 1929 and his death in 1953. 

If we think that these camps were unique to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, we would be terribly wrong. Applebaum shares these historical examples, "The rulers of ancient Rome and Greece sent their dissidents off to distant colonies. Socrates chose death over the torment of exile from Athens. The poet Ovid was exiled to a fetid port on the Black Sea. Georgian Britain sent its pickpockets and thieves to Australia. Nineteenth-century France sent convicted criminals to Guyana. Portugal sent its undesirables to Mozambique."

Applebaum also points out that the Spanish set up the first modern concentration camps in Cuba in 1895. During the Boer Wars, the British created camps in South Africa, where civilians were 'concentrated'.

Let’s get back to the Soviet gulags. A few things about them and the surrounding areas. While many of the camps were surrounded by barbed wire to lessen the chances of escape, those outside the actual gulag were called Bolshaya zona, the big prison zone. Those who lived there may have had it a bit easier, but it was not, as Applebaum puts it, "humane" in any sense. 

One of the questions we have to ask ourselves is why Lenin ordered the creation of the Gulag system? It was quite honestly because the Bolsheviks were in a fragile position after the October Revolution. They had to find and isolate their enemies, especially those with Tsarist connections. The wealthy, those who owned businesses, soldiers in the White army, and anyone they considered "class enemies." The people the Bolsheviks didn't put into the camps were petty criminals. They seemed to not care about them, believing that they would disappear when the socialist utopia came into being. 

Quoting Applebaum again, “From the very earliest days of the new Soviet state, in other words, people were sentenced not for what they had done, but for who they were.” Because of the arbitrary nature of these rules, anyone could be arrested for anything, and that was the case very often. Political crimes were just as bad as real crimes, but who was to say what a crime even was? For example, a person caught not having a ticket on a train could be considered someone who stole from the people. That could be interpreted as a political crime which could get you a hefty sentence in the gulag. 

What you have to remember is that many of the members of the secret police, the Cheka, and their successor agencies were very uneducated people. Those with higher educations were often times those who would be arrested for being members of the bourgeois.

The impetus to build the gulags was the creation of the Red Terror by order of Vladimir Lenin and carried out by the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, on September 5, 1918. It came after the assassination attempt on Lenin and Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky on August 30th. 

Early on, during Lenin’s years in power, the prison system was grossly overcrowded and inadequately prepared for the high number of new inmates. This overcrowding would lead to outbreaks of diseases such as typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis, and starvation. One example is the first of the major labor camps, the Solovetsky special camp, located on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, having been converted from a monastery into a prison in 1923. In 1923, Solovetsky contained about 3,000 prisoners; by 1930, the number had jumped to about 50,000.

Solovetsky served as a prototype for the Gulag system and was the main labor camp to build the White Sea/Baltic Sea Canal. It was a converted monastery and would house a number of the monks when it was made into a prison. It was also a place that made escape difficult as it was an island surrounded by brutally cold water.

The story of the creation of the White Sea/Baltic Sea canal is one of sadness, incompetency, and desperation. It is estimated that between 14 and 25,000 people died in its construction. Over 150,000 people dug through the ground by hand with no help from machinery. While it was completed in only 20 months, four months ahead of schedule, it was too shallow to allow for anything but mid-sized ships to navigate the canal. This was another example of one of Stalin's five-year plans that, while it delivered, it ended up with a subpar outcome. In a bit of irony, of all the men who ran Solovki, only one would survive into Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel. The others were all executed during the Great Purge of the late 1930s. 

Frenkel’s story is an unusual one as he was initially arrested in 1923 and sent to Solovetsky as a prisoner. In a few short months, he became a guard, and eventually, as unbelievable as it sounds, he became camp commandant and a successful one at that. Alexander Solzhenitsyn claimed that Frenkel developed the notorious you-eat-as-you-work system, also known as the nourishment scale, which destroyed weaker prisoners in weeks and would later cause uncounted casualties. However, other historians, including Anne Applebaum, dispute that claim, saying, "Even if Frenkel did not invent every aspect of the system, he did find a way to turn a prison camp into an apparently profitable economic institution, and he did so at a time, in a place, and in a manner which may well have brought that idea to the attention of Stalin."

Stalin would meet Frenkel and protect him from the purges to come. He would die in 1960 at the age of 76, an old man by Bolshevik standards.

So who were the people who would be sent to the gulags in the Soviet Union? As Applebaum put it, "From the start, the 'special' prison system was meant to deal with special prisoners: priests, former Tsarist officials, bourgeois speculators, enemies of the new order But one particular category of 'politicals' interested the authorities more than others. These were members of the non-Bolshevik, revolutionary socialist political parties, mainly the Anarchists, the Left and Right Social Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and anyone else who had fought for the Revolution, but had not had the foresight to join Lenin’s Bolshevik faction, and had not taken full part in the coup of October 1917.”

However, these prisoners were challenging to work with because they had all been incarcerated in the Tsarist system and knew how to agitate against their captors. Hunger strikes, work stoppages, and escapes were all things these people were well aware of and good at. They also would send letters to family and friends telling their tales of woe in the gulags. This would be made public and bring bad press to the new rulers of the Soviet Union. This had to stop and stop quickly, or enemies of the Bolsheviks would gain strength.

This led to an expansion of the gulags east towards Siberia and far away from any big cities. Additionally, as you might guess, the ability to communicate with the outside world was severely curtailed. Solovetsky would be the place where many of these special prisoners would be sent to. 

The treatment of these poor souls in Solovetsky was barbaric. From Applebaum’s book, “They had also put prisoners ‘to the bench’, meaning they were forced to sit on poles for up to eighteen hours without moving, sometimes with weights tied to their legs and their feet not touching the floor, a position guaranteed to leave them crippled. Sometimes, prisoners would be made to go naked to the baths, up to 2 kilometers away, in freezing weather. Or they were deliberately given rotten meat. Or they would be refused medical help. At other times, prisoners would be given pointless, unnecessary tasks: to move huge quantities of snow from one place to another, for example, or to jump off bridges whenever a guard shouted ‘Dolphin’!!”

Not only did the sadistic guards torture and abuse the prisoners, but they also would almost arbitrarily execute them. The most notorious place for killing prisoners was Sekirka, the church cellars that would be the last place many people would be alive. A long flight of 365 stairs would lead out from the Sekirka church, where many so-called accidents where prisoners would be pushed to their deaths. In the 1990s, descendants of some of those unfortunate people erected a wooden cross at the bottom of the hill to honor those who perished there.   

It wasn't all doom and gloom at Solovetsky as, after a while, they allowed the inmates to form choirs, theater groups, and other artistic endeavors, but only after they completed their labors for the day. They even let them celebrate Easter in 1926. So while the official stance on religion was total opposition, the commanders of Solovetsky believed that some tolerance would help general morale and make the work more profitable and efficient.

The goal of every labor camp was to pay for itself; unfortunately, for the Soviet Union, that wasn't happening even at Solovetsky. Part of the problem was the administrators running the camps were frequently uneducated people, much like the members of the Cheka. Even more infuriating to those in the Kremlin in Moscow, the camp commanders kept asking for more money, which was in short supply. 

The dilemma that the Bolsheviks had was defining the purpose of the gulags. Was it to re-educate those unbelievers in communism, was it to turn a profit, or were they there to punish prisoners? Solovetsky was the model for the hundreds of new camps to pop up throughout the Soviet Union. It was the previously mentioned Naftaly Frenkel who would provide the answers to the dilemma. 

The problem that Frenkel would solve would prove to be the catalyst in the expansion of the gulags making it more desirable for now Stalin-run the Soviet Union to enslave more of its people. Numerous Bolshevik commissars condemned Frankel as he had changed the reason for the camps from punishing saboteurs and anti-communist agitators and re-educating the bourgeoise into an almost capitalist system.

The successes at Solovetsky, as Applebaum puts it, "became the central argument for the restructuring of the entire Soviet prison system. If it were to be achieved at the cost of worse rations and poorer living conditions for prisoners, no one much cared. If it was to be achieved at the price of poor relations with local authorities, that bothered no one either." But, of course, having Stalin's blessing made the entire thing moot as it was his word or your life. Disagreement over the gulags and their purpose would cost the lives of thousands of Bolsheviks in the coming Great Purge. 

Well, this is where we end today's episode. Join me next time when we begin discussing individual experiences within the concentration camps of the gulags, with particular attention paid to women sent there. 

So, until next time, Dasvidania eh Spasiba za Vinyamineya.