The Soviet Gulag System - Part Five - The End

Today, we finish up our five-part series on the Soviet Gulag system. The punishments and rewards as well as the dismantling of the camps are discussed. If you'd like to support the podcast with a small monthly donation, click this link - https://www.buzzsprout.com/385372/support

Transcript

Episode 277 – The Soviet Gulag System – Part Five – The End

Last time, we described the abhorrent work that many of the prisoners of the Gulags were forced to do. Today, we talk about punishment, rewards, rebellions, escapes, and the end of the Gulags with the death of Joseph Stalin.

Anne Applebaum, in her book Gulag: A History, points out something very interesting, the fact that almost none of the Soviet concentration camps still stand today except for one structure, the punishment block buildings. One of the main reasons is that they were built of bricks, while the other structures were made of wood. These punishment isolators, as they were called, were created based on strict instructions from Moscow. They would be surrounded by fences making escape from them almost impossible.

The location of these stark, gray buildings was also mandated by the following rule, they “should be set up in a place which is farthest away from populated regions and from transport routes, should be well-guarded and guaranteed strict isolation. The guards should consist of only the most trusted, disciplined, and experienced riflemen, selected from among the free workers." There was to be one in every camp, except the smaller ones, which would share one with the nearby prisons.

The whole idea of separate punishment borders on the absurd, given what we know about the Gulags. These poor souls were kept in isolation, not allowed to work or exercise or to have any tobacco, paper, or matches. Of course, they also could have no relatives visiting or letters and packages. Food was also rationed more than outside the isolation buildings.

The amount of food served to those in isolation was meager. Applebaum writes, “Officially, the daily punishment rations for prisoners who had failed to fulfill the norm consisted of 300 grams of ‘black rye bread’, 5 grams of flour, 25 grams of buckwheat or macaroni, 27 grams of meat, and 170 grams of potato. Although these are tiny amounts of food, those resident in punishment cells received even less: 300 grams of ‘black rye bread’ a day, with hot water, and ‘hot liquid food’ – soup, that is – once every three days.”

Being put into these buildings was not seen as a form of extreme punishment but a means of making those not there work harder. They would especially target people who refused to work, those who committed grievous crimes such as murder, or those who tried to escape the camps. Another target was deeply religious people who refused to work for what they thought was a satanic Soviet system.

Janusz Bardach recalled the conditions of the cell he was placed in. “My underwear and undershirt were already damp, and I was shivering. My neck and shoulders got stiff and cramped. The soggy raw wood was decaying, especially on the edges of the bench… the bench was so narrow I could not lie on my back, and when I lay on my side, my legs hung over the edge; I had to keep them bent all the time. It was difficult to decide which side to lie on – on one side my face was pressed up against the slimy wall; on the other, my back became damp.”

Gustav Herling remembers his punishment this way, "My cell was so low that I could touch the ceiling with my hand… it was impossible to sit on the upper bunk without bending one's back against the ceiling, and the lower one could only be entered with the movement of a diver, headfirst, and left by pushing one's body away from wood, like a swimmer in a sandbank. The distance between the edge of the bunk and the bucket by the door was less than a normal step."

Not surprisingly, the treatment of those who served in the punishment isolators were willing to do almost anything to get out and would work harder than before to avoid going back in. Herling would write, “Prisoners there wept like children, promising good behavior only to get out.”

These isolation barracks did so well to force prisoners to work that they built entire camps, or lagpunkts, whose sole purpose was to house non-workers. The most notorious of them was Serpantinka, which was located north of Magadan. It was unlike anything I have found in all of my research regarding the kind of inhumane living conditions in it. Very few people ever survived Serpantinka as it was also a place where many of the victims of the Great Purge in 1937 and 38 were sent to be executed. As one of the few remembered, the barrack was "so overcrowded that prisoners took turns sitting on the floor while everyone else remained standing. In the mornings, the door would open, and the names of ten or twelve prisoners would be called. No one would answer. The first people that came to hand were dragged out and shot."

There were a few other such camps. One was Iskitim which was built around a limestone quarry. The prisoners were forced to dig by hand, with the dust causing severe and often fatal lung diseases. We know little about the prisoners and their lives, as few made it out. The only one we know of is Anna Larina, Nikolai Bukharin's wife. She would survive her stay at Iskitim as she was moved after a short stay there. Larina would live until 1996, having successfully rehabilitated her late husband.

Applebaum tells a short story about Iskitim in the Novosibirsk Oblast in southwestern Russia when she visited. "They have not been forgotten altogether. So powerfully did the suffering of the prisoners there work on the imagination of the local people of Iskitim that, many decades later, the appearance of a new freshwater spring on a hill just outside the former camp was greeted as a miracle. Because the gully below the spring was, according to local legend, the site of mass prisoner executions, they believed the sacred water was God's way of remembering them. On a still, freezing day at the end of the Siberian winter, with a meter of snow still covering the ground, I watched parties of the faithful trooping up the hill to the spring, filling their plastic cups and bottles with the clean water, sipping it reverently – and occasionally glancing, solemnly, into the gully below."

It is said that the spring comes from the ground where many priests were executed, although that could be a myth. Nevertheless, according to TripAdvisor, if you go to the town of Iskirit today, it is considered one of the most important things you can do. 

Not everything within the Gulag was punishment; they also allowed rewards, especially for those who met the norms. Mail and relative visits were some of the most sought-after gifts that a prisoner could receive. Of course, additional food was one of the most significant awards a worker in the camps could get, but anything was appreciated. 

As we've seen in the previous episodes, Moscow constantly gave orders on what the prisoners could get, what they could do, and just about every aspect of their stay in the camps. Early on, letters, food, and money were freely sent to most prisoners, with exceptions for those who committed the most serious crimes or were enemies of Stalin. By 1939, the Gulag system was being fine-tuned with rules that set strict guidelines on who could receive gifts from outside.

Political prisoners could receive letters just once a month, with some only allowed to receive them once every three months. There were strict rules about what the inmates' letters to their families could reveal. Things like naming the guards, indicating the number of fellow prisoners, the day-to-day work, or any details of what the camp was like. 

Corruption was another major problem that hindered the distribution of packages and letters. Since food was always a problem throughout the Soviet Union, guards and the commandants would steal when others weren’t watching. If you were caught, the penalty was going from running the camp to being a prisoner in it. 

Sometimes, it wasn't corruption; it was gross incompetence. We must remember that being a guard or a commandant in the camps wasn't a pleasant experience, even though it was better than being a prisoner. As one NKVD inspector put it, he found "packages, letters, and money orders are not distributed to prisoners, but rather lie by the thousands in warehouses and outposts." 

One of the most valuable items in the camps was paper. While you could only send letters to family members on rare occasions, finding paper to write those letters bordered on impossible. As Applebaum put it, "One prisoner recalled trading bread in exchange for two pages ripped out of The Question of Leninism, a book by Stalin. He wrote a letter to his family between the lines. Even the camp administrators, in smaller lagpunkts had to think up creative solutions. In Kedrovyi Shor, one camp accountant used old wallpaper for official documents.”

Packages sent to prisoners had to go through a procedure before they could take anything from the box. They had to open the package in front of a guard, who could cut open any item to check for impermissible items, weapons, or money. Then, the inmate could only take one thing with him. The rest of the box would be stored until the next allowed time. Of course, this was done to incentivize the prisoner to fulfill his norm. 

Sometimes, packages would be sent and not given to the inmate for years. Georgy Zhenov remembers it this way when he found out that he had something waiting for him at the storeroom, "Everything that had been put into the package: sugar, sausage, lard, candy, onions, garlic, cookies, cigarettes, chocolate, along with the wrapping paper in which each thing had been packed, during the three years of following me from address to address, had become mixed up, as if in a washing machine, turning finally into one hard mass with the sweet smell of decay, mold, tobacco, and the perfume of candy…

I went to the table, took a knife to a piece of it, and in front of everyone, almost not chewing, hastily gulped, not distinguishing taste or smell, fearing, in a word, that someone would interrupt or take it away from me…”

As Applebaum points out, "Letters and packages did not, however, evoke the greatest emotion, of the greatest agony, among prisoners. A prisoner's actual meetings with his relatives were far more wrenching, usually a spouse or mother." You would think that the emotions were almost always positive, but as you might guess, things did not always go the way you planned in the Gulag camps. 

We need to understand that if you were a prisoner, especially a political one, you and your family would be publicly shamed and shunned. No one wanted to be associated with an enemy of the state as you could easily be drawn into their supposed crimes. This was a strong defense mechanism to avoid being considered guilty due to association. Relatives of people accused and convicted of crimes would frequently lose jobs, get evicted from their apartments, and generally lose all of their friends.

Under this kind of pressure, we see wives scared to admit to their husbands that they were considering filing for divorce, not because they fell out of love but because it was the only way they could survive in Soviet society. The long time apart, though, could break anyone down as described by Gustav Herling, "feel the boundless suffering of the prisoner, without fully understanding it, or being in any way able to help; the long years of separation have killed off much of their feeling for their husbands… the camp, distant and barred off from the visitor, yet casts its shadowy menace upon them. The are not prisoners, but they are related to these enemies of the people…."

To top things off, the trip to a camp could be a very long and arduous adventure. Long train rides followed by walking long distances or hitching a ride to the camp could sap anyone's soul. Then you needed to deal with the camp guards and commandant begging to see your loved one. If you were lucky to see them for a few minutes, you could not touch them, and they were constantly watched by a guard who could end things if they heard anything forbidden to talk about. After all of that, you had to head back home, retracing the same lonely trip.

Some of the larger camps allowed multi-day visits without guards being present, but those were few and far between. Of course, only those who made their norm or beyond were allowed this luxury. This, though, would change gradually over the years to eliminate those types of visits. This was especially true once the war began.

Starting in the 1940s, the meetings were held in a building known as Dom Svidanii, or House of Meetings. It would be near the edge of the camp, far away from the barracks. We have Herling describing things again. "The house itself, seen from the road which led to the camp from the village, made a pleasant impression. It was built of rough pine beams, the gaps filled in with oakum, the roof was laid with good tiling… The door outside the zone, which could be used only by the free visitors, was reached by a few solid wooden steps; cotton curtains hung in the windows, and long window boxes planted with flowers stood by the windowsills. Every room was furnished with two neatly made beds, a large table, two benches, a basin, a water jug, a clothes-cupboard, and an iron stove; there was even a lampshade over the electric light bulb. What more could a prisoner, who lived for years on a common bunk in a dirty barrack, desire of this model petit bourgeois dwelling? Our dreams of life at liberty were based on that room."

Herling further goes on to describe the sexual anxiety men would suffer when they were allowed private time with their visiting wives. “Years of heavy labor and hunger had undermined their virility, and now, before an intimate meeting with an almost strange woman, they felt, beside nervous excitement, helpless anger and despair. Several times I did hear men boasting of their prowess after a visit, but usually these matters were a cause for shame, and respected in silence by all prisoners…”

In his work The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn uses his experience with his wife Natasha when she visited him to tell a story about Gerasimovich’s visiting wife Nadya, telling her husband she is filing for divorce. This was, in her mind, and thousands of others, the only way to “have a chance to live again.” Solzhenitsyn writes, “Nadya lowered her eyes. ‘I wanted to say – only you won’t take it to heart, will you? – you once said we ought to get divorced.’ She said it very quietly… 

Yes, there was a time when he had insisted on this. But now he was startled. Only then did he notice that her wedding ring, which she had always worn, was not on her finger.

'Yes, of course', he agreed, with every appearance of eagerness.

'Then you won't be against it… if… I… have to… do it?' With great effort, she looked at him. Her eyes were very wide. The fine pinpoint of her grey pupils was alight with a plea for forgiveness and understanding. 'It would be… pseudo,' she added, breathing the word rather than speaking it."

Herling helps us end this part of the experience by writing, "I came to the conclusion that if hope can often be the only meaning left in life, then its realization may sometimes be an unbearable moment."

When the war came to the Soviet land, it caused immeasurable death and destruction. To many in the gulags, though, it brought freedom. The war effort needed men, fighting men and women. They also required workers to produce the weaponry necessary to fight the Nazis. This meant that the people who remained in the camps needed to be fed better in order to produce more. In the first months of the war effort, 975,000 prisoners were transferred to the Red Army.

Towards the war's end, in early 1945, tens of thousands more were released for the final push to Berlin. It would cost many their lives, but they were, at least, free. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of others, many accused of collaborating with the enemy, were sent to the camps where many died. 

After the end of the war, over a hundred thousand captured Wehrmacht soldiers would fill the camps where life was an actual living hell. One such person was an uncle of mine. He would become a very angry man who moved with his wife to Michigan and raised a family. I visited him once and came away very scared of this distant person until I learned of what he went through from my parents on our car trip back home to New York.

While many prisoners, towards the end of the war, began to hope that things would improve as they were on the verge of winning, this would not be the case as a new war was about to start, the Cold War. The Soviets were riding a high by winning against all odds, but the cost was tremendous. They needed to rebuild their shattered infrastructure, but there was a shortage of men. The newly minted prisoners in the Gulag would help fill in the holes. Slave labor was the fastest and cheapest way to restore the economic power of the Soviet Union.

Post-War, Joseph Stalin began to ratchet up his paranoia. No one, especially those close to him, was safe. The army, ethnic minorities, and Jews were all targets of Soviet repression. After contracting during the war, the Gulag expanded to its greatest heights by 1950. According to official statistics, the number of prisoners reached an all-time high of 2.5 million. 

Part of the resurgence of inmates was the re-arrests of former prisoners. Many were given ten-year sentences, which in many cases, would lead to their deaths. This would begin in 1948, culminating in the most arrests in 1949. You might think that having to go back would shock those poor souls; it actually dulled their senses, as Evgeniya Ginzburg would recall. "By 1949, I already knew that suffering can only cleanse one up to a point. When it drags on for a decade and becomes a matter of routine, it no longer cleanses; it simply dulls all sensation. After my second arrest, I would surely turn into a thing of wood. 

As Applebaum puts the situation after the war, “The Gulag, and the exile system which supplemented it, were no longer temporary punishments. For those condemned to them, they had become a way of life.”

There were a new group of prisoners post-war, soldiers and partisans who fought against the Red Army. Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, Japanese, and Baltic fighters were behind the barbed wire. Hardened by years of fighting, they were not surprised by their capture and imprisonment. Violence would become more commonplace, with native Russians forming gangs against the increased number of foreigners. 

Everything changed on March 5, 1953, with the death of Joseph Stalin. Many prisoners rejoiced; some were stunned into silence, and some had, for the first time, hoped that the nightmare that was the Gulag would come to an end. The dismantling of the camps began within weeks. Lavrentiy Beria would order the release of "all prisoners with sentences of five years or less, to all pregnant women, to all women with young children, and to everyone under the eighteen – a million people in all. The amnesty was announced on March 27. Releases began immediately. 

While Beria would be arrested in June and executed in December 1953, dismantling the Gulag would continue, although a bit slower. In 1954, there were more amnesties doled out slowly but steadily. By 1956, most prisoners held in the camps were freed, and by 1960, the Gulag system was shut down. Mind you, there were still political prisoners for the next 30 years. It was nowhere near as bad as in the past, but it still was hard on political dissidents.

Well, I hope you enjoyed today’s episode and this series. Join me next time as we cover the historical relationship between Russia and China over the ages.

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