The Soviet Gulag System - Part Four - The Work

Today, we discuss the work done in the Gulags. Brutal and sometimes absurd, work was the reason for the people to populate the prisoner camps. If you'd like to support the podcast with a small monthly donation, click this link - https://www.buzzsprout.com/385372/support

Transcript

Episode 276 – The Soviet Gulag System – Part Four – The Work

Last time, we discussed the life of prisoners within the Gulag. Today, our topic will be the varied types of work a prisoner would do.

Work was at the core of everyday life in almost all gulag system camps. Your life and welfare depended on how well you worked or what you produced. There were numerous jobs within the system; some were geared towards specific specialties of the inmates, like one of the camps within Moscow where the prisoners designed airplanes. Others might work in nuclear power plants, farming, and fishing.

Then there were the really tough jobs like logging, mining for gold and coal, building highways in the artic tundra, and factories to support the war effort. The Soviet economic system was propped up by slave labor in the Gulag. The reliance on slave labor for those three decades was why the communist system was doomed to fail. Slavery was a very inefficient economic system, and communism in the USSR was inefficient as well.

Those sentenced to short terms in the camps, under three years, usually had easier jobs, many surrounding a specific factory or occupation. Those with longer terms usually would be bounced around numerous more physically straining jobs. In her book Gulag, Applebaum gave a couple of examples of this. "Evgeniya Ginzburg worked cutting trees, digging ditches, cleaning the camp guest house, washing dishes, tending chickens, doing laundry for camp commanders' wives, and caring for prisoners' children. Finally, she became a nurse. During the eleven years, he spent in camps, another political prisoner, Leonid Sitko, worked as a welder, as a stonemason in a quarry, as a construction worker on a building brigade, as a porter in a railway depot, as a miner in a coal mine, and as a carpenter in a furniture factory, making tables and bookshelves.”

The most important thing for the survival of the prisoner, also known as a zek, was the brigades they were assigned to. These were people who, if you were lucky, would support and protect you. They could also turn on you if you didn't do the work, as your food and theirs depended on the amount of work everyone did. A brigade could be as small as four or as large as 400 zeks. A brigadier would lead the brigade. They were usually a respected and "high-status" prisoner. They would dole out the jobs based on what the zek could do or were trained to do in their pre-prisoner life. You wouldn't send an airplane engineer to chop wood, as you wouldn't send a logger to design tanks.

Here is what one prisoner wrote about the brigade and their leader. “The life of a person depends very much on his brigade and brigadier, given that you spend all your days and nights in their company. At work, in the dining hall, and in your bunks – always the same faces. The brigade members can either work all together, in groups, or individually. They can help you survive, or help destroy you. Either sympathy and help, or hostility and indifference. The role of the brigadier is no less important. It also matters who he is, what he thinks his tasks and obligations are: to serve the bosses at your own cost and his own benefit, to treat his brigade members like underlings, servants, or lackeys – or to be your comrade in ill-fortune and to do everything possible to make life easier for the members of the brigade.”

In his novel, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes that the camp brigade "isn't like a work gang outside, where Ivan Ivanovich and Pyotr Petrovich each get a wage of his own. In the camps, things are arranged so that the zek is kept up to the mark, not by his bosses but by the others in his gang. Either everybody gets a bonus, or else they all die together."

Anne Applebaum makes an essential distinction between the Soviet Gulag camps and the Nazi concentration camps. “The brigadier’s attitude mattered because, for the most part, general work was not intended to be phony or meaningless. Whereas in German camps, work was often designed, according to one prominent scholar, to be 'principally a means of torture and abuse'. Soviet prisoners were meant to be fulfilling some aspect of the camp’s production plan.” She further goes on to write, “Most of the time, prisoners were not meant to suffer – or perhaps it is more accurate that no one cared if they did or not. Far more important was that they fit into a camp production plan and fulfill a work norm. A norm could be anything: a certain number of cubic meters of wood to be cut down, ditches to be dug, or coal to be hauled. And these norms were taken deadly seriously."

These norms were supposedly done scientifically; the reality was that they were arbitrary and, oftentimes, absurdly challenging to meet. Here is what one of the prisoners, Evgeniya Ginzburg, had to say about their work after years of prison work wore her and her friend down. "For three days, Galya and I struggled to achieve the impossible. Poor trees, how they must have suffered at being mangled by our inexpert hands. Half-dead ourselves and completely unskilled, we were in no condition to tackle them. The axe would slip and send showers of chips in our faces. We sawed feverishly, jerkily, mentally accusing each other of clumsiness – we knew we could not afford the luxury of a quarrel. Time and again, the saw got stuck. But the most terrifying moment was when the tree was at last on the point of falling, only we didn't know which way. Once Galya got hit on the head, but the medical orderly refused even to put iodine on the cut, saying, 'Aha! That's an old trick! Trying to get exempted on the first day, are you?'"

Some camps, of course, were far worse than others, especially those in the extreme north. The temperatures could go from very cold in the winter to quite warm in the summer. One of the biggest problems in the summer was the mosquitos. As one prisoner put it, "The mosquitos crawled up our sleeves, under our trousers. One's face would blow up from the bites. At the work site, we were brought lunch, and it happened that as you were eating your soup, the mosquitos would fill up the bowl like buckwheat porridge. They filled up your eyes, your nose, and throat, and the taste of them was sweet, like blood. The more you moved and waved them away, the more they attacked. The best method was to ignore them, to dress lighter, and instead of an anti-mosquito hat, to wear a wreath of grass or birch bark."

Of all the jobs you could have in the winter months, those forced to work in the forests had it worst. When a winter storm hit, things got scary. As Dmitri Bystroletov recalled, “In that instant, the wind began a wild and terrifying howl, forcing us to the ground. The snow swirled up into the air, and everything disappeared – the lights of the camp, the stars, the aurora borealis – and we were left alone in a white fog. Opening our arms wide, clumsily slipping and stumbling, falling and supporting one another, we tried as quickly as possible to find the road back. Suddenly, a thunderclap burst above our heads. I scarcely managed to hang on to my fellow climber when a violent stream of ice, snow, and rocks began gushing toward our faces. The swirling snow made it impossible to breathe, impossible to see…"

Another even worse story was told by Janusz Bardach. He recalls a time when the workers in Kolyma were caught in a snowstorm and had to tie ropes to each other to make it back to camp. "I couldn't see anything beyond Yuri's back and clung to the rope as though it was a life preserver… With the familiar landmarks gone, I had no idea how much further we had to go and was sure we'd never make it back. My foot fell upon something soft – a prisoner who had let go of the rope. 'Stop!' I shouted. But there was no stopping. No one could hear my voice. I leaned down and pulled his arm towards the rope. 'Here!' I tried to link his hand with the rope. 'Hold on!' It was no use. The man's arm fell to the ground when I let go. Yuri's stern command to move on carried me onward…" When Janusz's brigade made it back to the camp, and a count was done, three people were missing. Usually, as he put it, "the bodies of prisoners who got lost weren’t found until springtime, often within one hundred meters of the zone.”

When I started researching the gulags and the prisoners, I assumed they would be clothed better than I discovered. Here is what was allocated according to the central Gulag administration. One summer shirt to last two seasons, a pair of summer trousers to last two seasons, one padded-cotton winter jacket to last two years, padded winter trousers to last eighteen months, felt boots to last two years, and underwear to last nine months. You figure that wasn't too bad, except that the prisoners rarely got all their allotment of clothes; as Applebaum puts it, "In a camp in Krasnoyarsk, less than half the prisoners had shoes. In Norilsk, in the far north, only 75 percent had warm boots, and only 86 percent had warm clothes. In Vorkuta, also in the north, only 25 to 30 percent of prisoners had underclothes, while only 48 percent had warm boots."

Many prisoners would try to make their own shoes and boots. As Elinor Lipper tells about her homemade boots, “They were made of lightly padded and quilted sacking with high, wide tops that reach to the knee, the shoe itself strengthened by oil cloth or artificial leather at the toe and heel. The sole is made of three cross sections of rubber from worn-out automobile tires. The whole thing is fastened to the foot with string below the knee so that the snow does not get in… after a day’s use, they become all twisted, and the flabby soles turn every which way. They absorb moisture with incredible speed, especially when the sacks of which they are made were used for bagging salt…”

With all of these disadvantages in clothing, food deprivation was a significant problem. While the people setting the norms would make unreasonably high expectations, they wouldn't provide adequate nutrition to even allow the prisoners to try to achieve anything close to the norms. If they somehow did achieve a norm, all they might get in addition to the low amounts of food was a herring or maybe an extra piece of bread. 

As you may imagine, all of this would lead to a spate of accidents. Being tired, hungry, and under-clothed, it was potentially lethal. As Alexander Dolgun writes, “Cold, numbed fingers could not hold on to handles and levers and timbers and crates, and there were many accidents, often fatal. One man was crushed when we were rolling logs off a flat car, using two logs as a ramp. He was buried when twenty or more logs let loose at once and he was not fast enough. The guards shoved his body out of the way on the platform and the blood-stiffened mass was waiting for us to carry it home when night came.”

Another hazardous place to work was the mines. Applebaum shares this about the statistics gathered in 1945. "One such compilation, for the year 1945, lists 7,124 accidents in the Vorkuta coal mines alone, including 482 that resulted in serious injury and 137 that resulted in death. The inspectors laid blame on the shortage of miners' lamps, on electrical failures, and on the inexperience of workers and their frequent rotation. Angrily, the inspectors calculated the number of workdays lost due to accidents: 61,492."

While there were over a million prisoners in the gulags, there was a need for far more workers. This was especially true for the more skilled workers like engineers and administrators. The Soviet government tried very hard to persuade people to take jobs on a two-year contract, which included a significantly high wage, paid vacations, better food, and supplies. 

The Soviet press would be used as a propaganda tool, making out the cities where the camps were located as some sort of magical place. Here is an example that was written in English in the magazine Sovietland. “The sea light that is Magadan by night is a most stirring and alluring spectacle. This is a town which is alive and bustling every minute of the day and night. It swarms with people whose lives are regulated by a strict working schedule. Accuracy and promptness begets speed, and speed becomes easy and happy work.” 

This, of course, failed miserably. The Soviet people may have been lied to repeatedly, but the propaganda did not fool them. This would cause Moscow to send unqualified people to build projects that no one knew how to construct. One was a bridge north of Magadan. While an engineer had some qualifications, bridge building was not one of them. The bridge was built but washed away when met with a flood.

Numerous projects throughout the Gulag system met the same fate, but Applebaum mentions one that stands above the rest relating to an unmitigated failure. "There were entire Gulag projects, employing thousands of people and enormous resources, which proved spectacularly wasteful and ill-conceived. Of these, perhaps the most famous was the attempted construction of a railway line from the Vorkuta region to the mouth of the Ob River in the Arctic Sea. As usual, there were complications…”

She further goes on to describe the mess that was in this project. “By the end of the year, the complications had grown more serious. The surveying team had established that the Kamenny Cape was a poor location for the port: the water was not deep enough for large ships, and the land was too unstable for heavy industry. In January 1949, Stalin held a midnight meeting, where the Soviet leadership determined to move the site, and the railway too…"

The railway between the two sites was about 800 miles apart. When Stalin died in March 1953, 310 miles were built from one end, 124 from the other, about 374 miles short. The project was eventually abandoned, wasting over 40 billion rubles and costing tens of thousands of lives. 

This was more of the norm than unusual. Time after time, Moscow bureaucrats would devise plans to force the camps to work on them, many preposterous to anyone from the outside world. When it all fell apart, they blamed the workers, brigadiers, or camp commandants.

As you might imagine, the Soviet government had to ensure none of this got out to the public. This is where the NKVD and another institution, The Kulturno Vospitalelnaya Chast, known to the prisoners of the gulags as KVCh, or the Cultural-Education Department, created the propaganda necessary to tell a false story. This was primarily meant for the camp prisoners but also had uses outside the zonas. 

This was initially established early on in 1924 at the Solovetsky prison. The first edition of the magazine distributed within the prison had this to say, "The corrective-labor policy of Russia must re-educate prisoners through accustoming them to participating in organized productive labor." 

Photographs in the NKVD archives show the Gulag camps as beautiful places to stay. As Applebaum shares, "The pictures show carefully planted gardens, flowers, shrubs, a fountain, and a gazebo in which prisoners could sit and rest." We all know this was definitely not the way life was in the camps. Trying to pull the wool over the people outside the camps was far more successful than doing this to the poor prisoners inside. 

The main goal of the propaganda within the camps was the single-minded increase in production. The KVCh would put on concerts, have murals painted, and put other niceties together, especially for the most valuable of the prisoners, the shock workers. These men and sometimes women were the most able-bodied of all the prisoners. They would produce products or work incredible feats of work. Or that is what the KVCh would tell the Soviet people. One example was when on April 21, 1933, 30,000 shock-workers were gathered to work for two straight days, never leaving their workplaces. 

Lavrentiy Beria would use the KVCh more so than his predecessors. He changed things so that the niceties that rewarded good work even had a mean streak to them. While prisoners could play an instrument, they were not allowed to sing. Political speeches were given, and everyone had to attend and pay attention. There would be wall newspapers to share the propaganda with the prisoners. The focus would be on examples of the best work produced and the accomplishments of the shock workers. There was one thing that I found interesting, there were never any pictures of Joseph Stalin in any of the Gulag camps. 

This is how Applebaum puts it. "No pictures of Stalin were allowed: these were, after all, still criminals, not 'comrades', and they were still excommunicated from Soviet life, forbidden even to gaze upon their leader. This is the exact opposite of what was happening throughout the rest of the Soviet Union. Stalin was worshipped, but not in the camps.

Propaganda movies would be shown to the workers, but at times, these darkened rooms would be where revenge killings would occur. As one prisoner mentioned, "I remember, at the end of one of these performances, seeing the body of a dead man carried past on a stretcher." 

The absurdity of Soviet propaganda had Applebaum pose a very important set of questions, “In fact, this question – ‘Did the believe in what they were doing?’ – is actually a small part of a much larger question, one which goes to the heart of the nature of the Soviet Union itself: Did any of its leaders ever believe in what they were doing? The relationship between Soviet propaganda and Soviet reality was always a strange one: the factory is barely functioning, in the shops there is nothing to buy, old ladies cannot afford to heat their apartments, yet in the streets outside, banners proclaim the ‘triumph of socialism’ and the ‘heroic achievements of the Soviet motherland.’”

I’d like to end today’s episode with another snippet from Anne Applebaum’s book Gulag. “Perhaps the Cultural-Educational Department functioned, within the Gulag bureaucracy, as the ultimate scapegoat: if the plan was not being filled, it was not poor organization or malnutrition that was to blame, not stupidly cruel work policies or the lack of felt boots – but insufficient propaganda. Perhaps the system's rigid bureaucracy was at fault: once the center had decreed there must be propaganda, everyone tried to fulfill the order without ever questioning its absurdity. Perhaps the Moscow leadership was so isolated from the camps that they really did believe that 444 political information sessions and 762 political speeches would make starving men and women work harder – although, given the material also available to them in camp inspection reports, this seems unlikely.

Or perhaps there is no good explanation. Vladimir Bukowsky, the Soviet dissident who was later a prisoner himself, shrugged when I asked him about it. This paradox, he said, was what made the Gulag unique: 'In our camps, you were expected not only to be a slave laborer but to sing and smile while you worked as well. They didn't just want to oppress us: they wanted us to thank them for it.’”

Well, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Join me next time when we wrap up the series on the Gulags when we finally see the closing of many of the prisoner camps around the Soviet Union.

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