Antimulticulture
2005-11-19 11:44:11 UTC
The Gulag: Communism's Penal Colonies Revisited
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v21/v21n1p39_michaels.html
Dan Michaels
During the twentieth century it became common practice for nations to detain
citizens whose loyalty to the state was considered unreliable or suspect in
times of war or "national emergency." To sequester such persons Britain, the
United States, and Germany all established centers, variously called (often
depending on who won and who lost) relocation centers, detention centers,
labor camps, concentration camps, or death camps. Depending on
circumstances, the treatment of inmates varied from benign to cruel. Such
facilities in these countries were, however, temporary measures undertaken
during times of national peril. Only in the Soviet Union, where such camps
were collectively known as the Gulag (an acronym in Russian for the Main
Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies), were they a permanent
and integral part of the government.
Beginning in the 1970s, British researcher Robert Conquest and Russian Nobel
laureate (and former Gulag detainee) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did much to
alert the world to the horrors of the USSR's vast penal empire. Conquest's
readership has been limited largely to historians and the better educated,
while today Solzhenitsyn's monumental Gulag Archipelago is scarcely read at
all, except in a condensed version. Over the past decade, however, their
pioneer work has been supported and elaborated on by serious studies
compiled by survivors of the Soviet camps and by Russian, French, and German
scholars. The most important of these (and the basis for this essay) are:
The Gulag Handbook by Jacques Rossi; Sistema ispraviltel'no-trudovykh
lagerey v SSSR.1923-1960 (The System of Corrective Labor Camps in the USSR,
1923-1960), by a team of Russian researchers; Ralf Stettner's recent study
of the Gulag under Stalin; former Gulag administrator D.S. Baldaev's Gulag
Zeichnungen (Sketches from the Gulag); Avraham Shifrin's somewhat older
Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union; and the
powerful Black Book of Communism, by Stéphane Courtois. See note: 1
For whatever reason, American researchers have seemed content to relegate
the "Gulag archipelago" to the dustbin of history. Pitifully for the
reputation of the United States and Great Britain, all too many of their
scholars, writers, artists, and politicians ignored, or even sought to
justify, the Soviet camps when Communism ruled Russia. Their infrequent
condemnation of the Soviet penal system was all too often on behalf of
Communists who had fallen from favor. In 1944 Franklin Delano Roosevelt's
vice president, Henry Wallace, visited one of the worst and most brutal of
the Soviet penal camps, Magadan, lauding its sadistic commander, Ivan
Nikishov, and describing Magadan as "idyllic."
Workings of the Gulag
Organizationally the Gulag was subordinated to the secret police entity of
the day (successively, Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD, and KGB, from the last
of which emanate many of the leaders of today's Russian Federation). The
founder of the Soviet secret police, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, expressed the
guiding principle of the Cheka in 1918: "We represent in ourselves organized
terror -- this must be said very clearly." All subsequent Soviet governments
have rigorously observed that principle. In one consequence of that rigor,
conditions in the camps of Communist Russia were typically far more brutal
than those of the dreaded Siberian exile under the Tsars.
If France had one notorious penal colony -- Devil's Island -- the Soviet
Union had hundreds. Of several thousand work camps of various types, more
than five hundred were officially ITL (for "ispravitel'no-trudovoy lager"),
corrective labor camps and penal colonies. The first of these was
established in 1917; eventually the ITL camps extended across the breadth of
the USSR, from the severe arctic conditions of the far north to the scorched
plains of Central Asia. Or, as Solzhenitsyn put it: "from the Cold Pole at
Oy-Myakon to the copper mines of Dzhezkazgan."
Since the camp system was essential to the Soviet economy, the inmates were
put to work in every aspect of hard labor -- in railroad construction, road
building, canal building, forestry, mining, agriculture, construction sites,
etc., under conditions that were usually inhuman and unhealthy, and
oftentimes deadly. Women, though housed in separate barracks, often shared
the same work camps as the men -- and worked side by side with them at the
same labor. There were special camps for children, for mothers with babies,
and other exceptional cases. Psychiatric wards (psikhbol'nitsy) "treated"
other intractable "enemies of the people."
In 1943, with the "Great Patriotic War" raging, the Communists introduced an
even severer category of labor camp, the "katorga" (hard labor camp), within
the ITL system. Prisoners assigned to a katorga were assigned the hardest
work and received the lowest rations and the least medical attention. (The
word "katorga" stems from in Tsarist times, when hard labor, along with
"ssylka," or Siberian exile, were standard, though much milder,
punishments.)
As was the practice in the Soviet civilian sector in general, and long
predating the German use of similar slogans in their concentration camps,
the importance and joys of work were proclaimed and extolled by countless
slogans posted in the camps: "Work is a matter of honor, fame, courage, and
heroism"; "Shock work is the fastest way to freedom"; or, more ominously,
"No work, no food."
The basic daily food ration (the "payka") ranged from 400 to 800 grams of
bread, which accounted for more than half the prisoner's daily calories
(1200-1300). This amount varied, depending on whether the prisoner was a
shock worker or a Stakhanovite, an invalid, in isolation, etc. The most
productive workers received a food bonus of fish, potatoes, porridge, or
vegetables to supplement his bread. (Coincidentally, the American Morgenthau
Plan for occupied Germany called for the allotment of about the same number
of calories [1300] a day per German.) The UN World Health Organization sets
the minimum requirements for heavy labor at from 3100-3900 calories per day.
The inmate population reflected a cross-section of the USSR: Christian and
Muslim clergymen, "kulaks" (or independent farmers), political dissidents,
common criminals, "economic criminals," the remnants of the old elite,
Communists who had fallen from favor, ethnic minorities, the homeless,
"unpersons," "hooligans," and persons who had been, once too often, tardy at
work.
Within the camps of the Gulag, inmate society came to be broken down into
categories that depended on the prisoner's particular crime. Most political
prisoners or counterrevolutionaries were referred to as "58ers" for having
violated Article 58 of the criminal code; common criminals were called
"urki" or "blatnyaki"; less violent criminals accused of violating some
aspect of the civil code were categorized as "bytoviki"; individuals accused
of undermining Soviet economic laws were referred to as subversives or
pests -- "vrediteli" in Russian; trustees or "pridurki" in the camps, those
most likely to survive their imprisonment, acted as camp service personnel.
All inmates were referred to as "zeki," the acronym for the Russian word for
prisoner.
Reform, Soviet Style
Of all those who helped devise and perfect the slave labor system of the
Gulag, special mention must be made of Naftaly
Aronovich Frenkel. Frenkel, a Jew born in Turkey in 1883, had been a
prosperous merchant there, but after the Bolshevik revolution he moved -- as
did an appreciable number of Jews -- to the Soviet Union. Based in Odessa as
an agent of the State Political Administration, Frenkel was responsible for
the acquisition and confiscation of gold from the wealthier classes. The
unscrupulous Frenkel was unable to resist this temptation, however, and in
1927 was arrested, on orders of the Moscow central office, for skimming off
too much gold for himself. Convicted of economic crimes, he was sent to the
Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp (or SLON, as it was designated by the Soviet
bureaucracy), a bleak Arctic penal colony. Frenkel's special talent for
improving inmate work efficiency was quickly noticed by the camp officials
there, and it was not long before he was ordered to explain his ideas and
methods to Stalin personally. His main proposal was to link a prisoner's
food ration, especially hot food, to his production, essentially
substituting hunger for the knout as the main work incentive. Frenkel had
also observed that a prisoner's most productive work is usually done in the
first three months of his captivity, after which he or she was in so
debilitated a state that the output of the inmate population could be kept
high only by removing (killing off) the exhausted prisoners and replacing
them with fresh inmates. Another method of stimulating enthusiasm for work
among prisoners -- and at the same time culling the camp population by
killing off the weak -- was quite simple. When the prisoners were called out
on a work detail, they fell into line. The last man in to line up would be
shot as a laggard ("dokhodyaga"), one weakened enough to be useless for
work. These policies would ensure a constant inflow of new prisoners,
providing fresh labor while weeding out opposition to Stalin and his party.
So pleased was Stalin with Frenkel's ideas on the efficient exploitation of
inmate labor that he made him construction chief of the White Sea Canal
project, and later of the BAM railroad project. In 1937 Stalin appointed
Frenkel head of the newly founded Main Administration of Railroad
Construction Camps (GULZhDS). In that capacity, Frenkel was called upon to
provide railroad transport facilities to the Red Army in the 1939-40 "Winter
War" against Finland, and for the duration of Soviet participation in the
Second World War. He was eventually awarded the Order of Lenin three times,
named a Hero of Socialist Labor, and promoted to the rank of general in the
NKVD.
The methods instituted by Frenkel in building the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal
became the standard operating procedures for most subsequent labor camps,
including the BAM (Baltic-Amur Magistral) railroad project, the Dalstroy
(Far East Construction), Vorkuta, Kolyma, Magadan, and countless other hell
holes. Working on the BAM project after the war, the inmates noted that many
of the rails were marked "made in Canada" -- a reminder of the aid given by
the Western powers to support the Soviet war effort.
Welcome Guests
The number of inmates varied over time. Thus, for example, there were
roughly 300,000 prisoners in Soviet labor camps as early as 1932, a million
in 1935, and two million by 1940. (President Roosevelt officially recognized
the Soviet Union in 1933, extending the hand of friendship to its leader
just as Stalin was starving and imprisoning millions of his subjects in
Ukraine and Russia.) During the war, Stalin displayed his own brand of
clemency by permitting some one million inmates to serve in various Red Army
penal units. These were employed in clearing out minefields, not
infrequently by walking through them at gunpoint, and in other hazardous
tasks. Nevertheless, the population of the Soviet concentration camp system
rose precipitously in 1945-46.
From 1939 on, the Gulag filled up with nationals from the USSR's enemies:
Finns, Poles, Germans, Italians, Romanians, and Japanese, many of whom were
held for years after 1945. Although, technically, German prisoners of war
were under the jurisdiction of GUPVI (Main Directorate for POW and Internee
Affairs), they were nonetheless used no differently than other Gulag
inmates. Indeed, in the first few years of the war the death rate for POWs
exceeded that for non-POWs in the camps. Comparatively few German were taken
alive before Stalingrad.Most were shot out of hand, many of them mutilated.
Of the 95,000 German POWs captured at Stalingrad, only 5,000 survived to
return home. Of the dead, some forty thousand did not survive the march from
Stalingrad to the Beketovka camp, where 42,000 more perished of hunger and
disease. Particularly murderous treatment was inflicted on SS POWs, many of
whom, along with remnants of the Vlasov forces, were imprisoned and died on
Wrangel Island.
By the war's end, the USSR held 3.4 million German soldiers prisoner. Under
the provisions of the Yalta Agreement, the U.S. and U.K. had agreed to the
use of German POWs in the Soviet Gulag as "reparations-in-kind." Thus,
rather than repatriate them to their homeland, Stalin began incorporating
this captive human booty into the work camps in the summer of 1945.
Recognizing that the German prisoners of war were productive workers, Stalin
ordered that they be given food rations proportionate to their work. The
ration included 600 grams of black bread every day, spaghetti, a little
meat, sugar, vegetables, and rice. Officers got somewhat more, while,
naturally, Axis "war criminals" got less. Nonetheless, between 1941 and
1952, almost a million German POWs died in the camps. The last of the
surviving POWs (10,000 men) were released from the Soviet Union in 1955,
after a decade of forced labor. Approximately 1.5 million German soldiers
from the Second World War are still listed as missing in action. Of an
additional 875,000 German civilians abducted and transported to the camps,
almost half perished.
When the war ended in May 1945, British and U.S. civilian authorities
ordered their military forces in Germany to deliver to the Communists great
numbers of former residents of the USSR, including men who had taken up arms
with the Germans against the Soviets, prisoners of war, forced and voluntary
workers in the German wartime economy, and numerous persons who had left
Russia and established different citizenship many years before. This
"repatriation" of 4.2 million ethnic Russians and 1.6 million Russian POWs
from defeated Germany was augmented, as noted above, by a great influx of
German POWs and the arrival of large numbers of civilians abducted or
deported from Germany and Eastern Europe. Tens of thousands of Lithuanians,
Latvians, and Estonians were deported to Soviet camps, to be replaced in
their homelands by Soviet settlers. While most repatriated ethnic Russian
civilians, chiefly the women and children, were eventually reincorporated
into Soviet life, the Russian POWs and the Vlasov men were put under the
jurisdiction of SMERSH (Death to Spies), which sentenced about a third of a
million to serve from ten to twenty years in the Gulag. In 1947, swollen by
the dictates of Yalta and by Operation Keelhaul, the total number of Gulag
prisoners hit its peak at about nine million.
After Stalin
After the war, the most wretched and hazardous work continued to be
relegated to the inmates of the Gulag. Thus, under the direct supervision of
secret police chief Lavrenty Beria, thousands of Gulag inmates were used to
support the Soviet nuclear bomb project by mining uranium and preparing test
facilities on Novaya Zemlya, Vaygach Island, Semipalatinsk, and dozens of
other sites. Later, the Soviet navy employed Gulag prisoners to rid
decommissioned nuclear-powered submarines of radioactivity.
In 1953, the year of Stalin's death, the Gulag held around 2.7 million
prisoners. Over the next two years the number of inmates fell rapidly --
which is not to say that the Gulag withered away under Stalin's successors.
Danchik Sergeyevich Baldaev, an MVD major who worked in the Gulag from 1951
until his retirement in 1981, has published a book of drawings depicting the
travails and agonies of Russians and others declared "enemies of the people"
in the post-Stalin Gulag. Baldaev's book is arranged thematically, with
sections on camp organization, tortures and cruelties, sex, food and
housing, climatic conditions, common and political criminals, and so on.
Despite his own past and the horrors of his topic, he succeeds in depicting
the entire pathology of the Communist camps and their overlords in an almost
clinical manner, starkly and without theatrics.
As Baldaev makes clear, while officially the KGB administered the operation
of the camps, unofficially, inside the barracks, common criminals
(murderers, rapists, and psychopaths of every variety) ruled, using and
abusing the women and the weak. Calling themselves "vory v zakone"
(literally, thieves within the law, the type of which is a ceremonially
installed criminal leader who decides disputes and divides spoils), these
thugs were Mafiosi of the lowest type.
Women in the Gulag were preyed upon from all quarters. During their
transport to the camps they were often raped on the transport ships or in
the railroad cars. Upon arrival at their destination they would be paraded
naked in front of the camp officials, who would select those they fancied,
promising easier work in exchange for sexual favors. These officials,
according to Baldaev, preferred German, Latvian, and Estonian women, who
most likely would never see home again, over native Russian women, who
might. Women not selected by the camp officials became "prizes" for male
(and sometimes lesbian) criminals. Besides the everyday tortures of
starvation, work exhaustion, exposure to the cold of the far north, and
physical abuse, the more intractable prisoners of either sex might be
subjected to isolation, impalement, genital mutilation, or, more mercifully,
a bullet in the back of the head.
Empire of Death
It is estimated that more than thirty million prisoners entered the Gulag
during the half century in which it flourished. Not all of them perished, of
course. Short termers, especially, might endure their five-year sentence and
be released. In some cases, however, prisoners who had served their time in
the Gulag were denied return to their homes, and forced to live out the
remainder of their lives in towns near the camp. Robert Conquest, who of
Western scholars has done the most to investigate and to reveal the crimes
of the Soviet regime, estimates that one out of every three new inmates died
during the first year of imprisonment. Only half made it through the third
year. Conquest estimates that during the "Great Terror" of the late 1930s
alone, there were six million arrests, two million executions, and another
two million deaths from other causes in the camps. It is Conquest's belief
that, by the time of Stalin's death in 1953, about twelve million had
perished in the Gulag. Certain investigators, such as the late Andrei
Sakharov, have put the figure much higher, from 15 to 20 million. These
apparent discrepancies result from honest historians studying crimes,
committed in a closed society, of a magnitude never before seen, without
reliable documentation.
A grotesque ritual evolved for the thorough disposal of the wasted bodies of
inmates who had succumbed to hunger, exhaustion, exposure, and malnutrition.
A wooden marker with the deceased inmate's identification number was affixed
to his left leg, and gold teeth or fillings pried out. To ensure that the
death was not feigned, the skull of the inmate was smashed with a hammer, or
a metal spike driven into the chest. The near naked corpse would then be
removed from the camp area and buried in an unmarked grave.
Voices against Oblivion
In recent years various German groups have, with the cooperation of the
Russians, been establishing memorials for the German civilians and soldiers
who died in the Soviet Union. Recently, a Russian Jew, Aleksandr Gutman,
produced a documentary film in which he interviewed four German women from
East Prussia who as young girls had been raped by Red Army troops, then
transported soon after the war to a particularly hellish outpost of the
Gulag, no. 517, near Petrozavodsk in Karelia. Of the 1,000 girls and women
who were transported to that camp, 522 died within six months of their
arrival. These women were among tens of thousands of German civilians, men
and women, deported, with the acquiescence of the Western powers, to the
Soviet Union as German "reparations-in-kind" for slave labor. One of the
women interviewed by Gutman remarks: "While the diary of Anne Frank is known
throughout the world, we carry our memories in our hearts." Recently, German
philanthropists established a memorial cemetery for those women who perished
in slave pen no. 517. See note: 2
After rejection by numerous film festivals due to its "controversial"
nature, Gutman's Journey Back to Youth (Russian title: Puteshestviye v
yunost) was finally accepted by the 34th International Film Festival in
Houston, Texas, where it won the top prize -- the Platinum Award -- for 2001
(the film subsequently earned the U.S. International Film and Video
Festival's Gold Camera award). When Gutman attempted to show the documentary
in New York City, however, it opened and closed to such taunts as: "He
should be killed for making such a movie. Shame, a Jew describing the
sufferings of Germans."
The Perversion of Memory
Today we Americans, from children to dotards, are bombarded with
Holocaustiana, a saturation that borders on, and in some case results in,
Holocaustomania. Yet rarely are we informed of the cruel purposes and the
sadistic workings of the Soviet labor camps. More than half a century after
the end of the Second World War, the U.S. Justice Department maintains a
special branch -- the Office of Special Investigations -- exclusively
dedicated to the investigation, prosecution, and deportation of former Axis
soldiers and officials. Most of those who have been prosecuted served as
low-ranking guards at wartime German camps. But no such American office has
ever been created to hunt out the officials who headed and ran the
Communists' camps. The most recent book on the Gulag, Smirnov's System of
Corrective Labor Camps, lists more than five hundred camps with their
administrative officers through the 1960s. More than a few may well be U.S.
citizens today. If our leaders were suddenly to be fired with the same
passion for pursuing Soviet persecutors that they have for tracking old
Nazis and alleged terrorists, Smirnov's book might be the place to start.
While many of Germany's concentration camps have been preserved (some would
say enshrined), and are evidently intended to be maintained in perpetuity as
memorials to their former inmates and to the wickedness, not only of their
jailers, but of the entire German people, the far more extensive Soviet
Gulag camp system has in the past decade continued to disappear from the
Russian landscape, and from collective memory. See note: 3
Recent attempts of former inmates of the Soviet labor camps to establish (at
the very least) a museum of the Gulag have been frustrated by higher
authorities. As Yuri Pivovarov, director of the Institute of Social Science
Research at the Russian academy of Sciences, puts it: "People simple do not
equate the ethical and moral horrors and shame of Nazism with those of
Communism." Many who now object to the idea of a museum were formerly
high-ranking Communist officials, who today steer Russia into the New World
Order. Then, too, the Soviet Union was never conquered, and thus never
subject to conquerors' demands.
Among the Forgotten
Not long ago the well-known British travel writer, Colin Thubron, trekked
across Siberia. During his journey Thubron deliberately departed the usual
itinerary to view the ruins of two notorious Gulag camps: Vorkuta and
Kolyma. See note: 4 In his recent book In Siberia, Thubron describes them
with a grim lyricism:
Kolyma was fed every year by sea with tens of thousands of prisoners, mostly
innocent. Where they landed, they built a port, then the city of Magadan,
then the road inland to the mines where they perished. People still call it
the `Road of Bones.' ... Kolyma itself was called `the Planet,' detached
from all reality beyond its own -- death.
Of his visit to the dread Vorkuta, Thubron writes:
Then we reached the shell of Mine 17. Here, in 1943, was the first of
Vorkuta's katorga death-camps. Within a year these compounds numbered
thirteen out of Vorkuta's thirty: their purpose was to kill their inmates.
Through winters in which the temperature plunged to -40 F, and the purga
blizzards howled, the katorzhane lived in lightly boarded tents sprinkled
with sawdust, on a floor of mossy permafrost. They worked twelve hours a
day, without respite, hauling coal-trucks, and within three weeks they were
broken. A rare survivor described them turned to robots, their grey-yellow
faces rimmed with ice and bleeding cold tears. They ate in silence, standing
packed together, seeing no one. Some work-brigades flailed themselves on in
a bid for extra food, but the effort was too much, the extra too little.
Within a year 28,000 of them were dead ... Then I came to a solitary brick
building enclosing a range of cramped rooms. They were isolation cells.
Solzhenitsyn wrote that after ten days' incarceration, during which a
prisoner might be deprived even of clothing, his constitution was wrecked,
and after fifteen he was dead.
Departing Vorkuta, Thubron stumbled on a stone on which a message had been
scratched. It read:
"I was exiled in 1949, and my father died here in 1942. Remember us."
Notes
1. Jacques Rossi, The Gulag Handbook (New York: Paragon House, 1989); M.B.
Smirnov, et al., Sistema ispraviltel'no-trudovykh lagerey v SSSR. 1923-1960
(Moscow: Zven'ya, 1998); Ralf Stettner, Archipel Gulag: Stalins Zwangslager:
Terrorinstrument und Wirtschaftsgigant [The Gulag Archipelago: Instrument of
Terror and Economic Giant] (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1996); Danchik
Sergeyevich Baldaev, Gulag Zeichnungen (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins,
1993); Avraham Shifrin, The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration
Camps of the Soviet Union (New York: Bantam Books, 1982); and Stéphane
Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
(London: Harvard University Press, 1999).
2. Aleksandra Sviridova, in V novom sverte (In the New World), a
Russian-language newspaper published in New York, May 18-24, 2001, pp.
14-15.
3. Only recently, however, Dr. Judith Pallot, a geography lecturer at Oxford
University, reported that at least 120 "forest colonies" (forced labor
camps) dating from the Stalin era are still being used to house tens of
thousands, all of them common criminals as opposed to the mix of former
years. The camps Dr. Pallot reports on are located in the Perm region of the
Northern Urals. The average yearly temperature in that region is about minus
1° C (c. 30.8° F), although during the long winter from October to May it
falls as low as minus 40° C (c. -40° F). As in Czarist times, many prisoners
choose to remain as settlers in the vicinity of the camps when their
sentences have ended. Michael McCarthy, "Thousands of Russian Prisoners Are
Still Suffering in the Gulag Archipelago," in http://www.independent.co.uk.
4. Colin Thubron, In Siberia (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).
--
Jim
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Western_Nationalist
Union Against Multiculty
"Abolish Multiculty and String Up The Traitors!"
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v21/v21n1p39_michaels.html
Dan Michaels
During the twentieth century it became common practice for nations to detain
citizens whose loyalty to the state was considered unreliable or suspect in
times of war or "national emergency." To sequester such persons Britain, the
United States, and Germany all established centers, variously called (often
depending on who won and who lost) relocation centers, detention centers,
labor camps, concentration camps, or death camps. Depending on
circumstances, the treatment of inmates varied from benign to cruel. Such
facilities in these countries were, however, temporary measures undertaken
during times of national peril. Only in the Soviet Union, where such camps
were collectively known as the Gulag (an acronym in Russian for the Main
Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies), were they a permanent
and integral part of the government.
Beginning in the 1970s, British researcher Robert Conquest and Russian Nobel
laureate (and former Gulag detainee) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did much to
alert the world to the horrors of the USSR's vast penal empire. Conquest's
readership has been limited largely to historians and the better educated,
while today Solzhenitsyn's monumental Gulag Archipelago is scarcely read at
all, except in a condensed version. Over the past decade, however, their
pioneer work has been supported and elaborated on by serious studies
compiled by survivors of the Soviet camps and by Russian, French, and German
scholars. The most important of these (and the basis for this essay) are:
The Gulag Handbook by Jacques Rossi; Sistema ispraviltel'no-trudovykh
lagerey v SSSR.1923-1960 (The System of Corrective Labor Camps in the USSR,
1923-1960), by a team of Russian researchers; Ralf Stettner's recent study
of the Gulag under Stalin; former Gulag administrator D.S. Baldaev's Gulag
Zeichnungen (Sketches from the Gulag); Avraham Shifrin's somewhat older
Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union; and the
powerful Black Book of Communism, by Stéphane Courtois. See note: 1
For whatever reason, American researchers have seemed content to relegate
the "Gulag archipelago" to the dustbin of history. Pitifully for the
reputation of the United States and Great Britain, all too many of their
scholars, writers, artists, and politicians ignored, or even sought to
justify, the Soviet camps when Communism ruled Russia. Their infrequent
condemnation of the Soviet penal system was all too often on behalf of
Communists who had fallen from favor. In 1944 Franklin Delano Roosevelt's
vice president, Henry Wallace, visited one of the worst and most brutal of
the Soviet penal camps, Magadan, lauding its sadistic commander, Ivan
Nikishov, and describing Magadan as "idyllic."
Workings of the Gulag
Organizationally the Gulag was subordinated to the secret police entity of
the day (successively, Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD, and KGB, from the last
of which emanate many of the leaders of today's Russian Federation). The
founder of the Soviet secret police, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, expressed the
guiding principle of the Cheka in 1918: "We represent in ourselves organized
terror -- this must be said very clearly." All subsequent Soviet governments
have rigorously observed that principle. In one consequence of that rigor,
conditions in the camps of Communist Russia were typically far more brutal
than those of the dreaded Siberian exile under the Tsars.
If France had one notorious penal colony -- Devil's Island -- the Soviet
Union had hundreds. Of several thousand work camps of various types, more
than five hundred were officially ITL (for "ispravitel'no-trudovoy lager"),
corrective labor camps and penal colonies. The first of these was
established in 1917; eventually the ITL camps extended across the breadth of
the USSR, from the severe arctic conditions of the far north to the scorched
plains of Central Asia. Or, as Solzhenitsyn put it: "from the Cold Pole at
Oy-Myakon to the copper mines of Dzhezkazgan."
Since the camp system was essential to the Soviet economy, the inmates were
put to work in every aspect of hard labor -- in railroad construction, road
building, canal building, forestry, mining, agriculture, construction sites,
etc., under conditions that were usually inhuman and unhealthy, and
oftentimes deadly. Women, though housed in separate barracks, often shared
the same work camps as the men -- and worked side by side with them at the
same labor. There were special camps for children, for mothers with babies,
and other exceptional cases. Psychiatric wards (psikhbol'nitsy) "treated"
other intractable "enemies of the people."
In 1943, with the "Great Patriotic War" raging, the Communists introduced an
even severer category of labor camp, the "katorga" (hard labor camp), within
the ITL system. Prisoners assigned to a katorga were assigned the hardest
work and received the lowest rations and the least medical attention. (The
word "katorga" stems from in Tsarist times, when hard labor, along with
"ssylka," or Siberian exile, were standard, though much milder,
punishments.)
As was the practice in the Soviet civilian sector in general, and long
predating the German use of similar slogans in their concentration camps,
the importance and joys of work were proclaimed and extolled by countless
slogans posted in the camps: "Work is a matter of honor, fame, courage, and
heroism"; "Shock work is the fastest way to freedom"; or, more ominously,
"No work, no food."
The basic daily food ration (the "payka") ranged from 400 to 800 grams of
bread, which accounted for more than half the prisoner's daily calories
(1200-1300). This amount varied, depending on whether the prisoner was a
shock worker or a Stakhanovite, an invalid, in isolation, etc. The most
productive workers received a food bonus of fish, potatoes, porridge, or
vegetables to supplement his bread. (Coincidentally, the American Morgenthau
Plan for occupied Germany called for the allotment of about the same number
of calories [1300] a day per German.) The UN World Health Organization sets
the minimum requirements for heavy labor at from 3100-3900 calories per day.
The inmate population reflected a cross-section of the USSR: Christian and
Muslim clergymen, "kulaks" (or independent farmers), political dissidents,
common criminals, "economic criminals," the remnants of the old elite,
Communists who had fallen from favor, ethnic minorities, the homeless,
"unpersons," "hooligans," and persons who had been, once too often, tardy at
work.
Within the camps of the Gulag, inmate society came to be broken down into
categories that depended on the prisoner's particular crime. Most political
prisoners or counterrevolutionaries were referred to as "58ers" for having
violated Article 58 of the criminal code; common criminals were called
"urki" or "blatnyaki"; less violent criminals accused of violating some
aspect of the civil code were categorized as "bytoviki"; individuals accused
of undermining Soviet economic laws were referred to as subversives or
pests -- "vrediteli" in Russian; trustees or "pridurki" in the camps, those
most likely to survive their imprisonment, acted as camp service personnel.
All inmates were referred to as "zeki," the acronym for the Russian word for
prisoner.
Reform, Soviet Style
Of all those who helped devise and perfect the slave labor system of the
Gulag, special mention must be made of Naftaly
Aronovich Frenkel. Frenkel, a Jew born in Turkey in 1883, had been a
prosperous merchant there, but after the Bolshevik revolution he moved -- as
did an appreciable number of Jews -- to the Soviet Union. Based in Odessa as
an agent of the State Political Administration, Frenkel was responsible for
the acquisition and confiscation of gold from the wealthier classes. The
unscrupulous Frenkel was unable to resist this temptation, however, and in
1927 was arrested, on orders of the Moscow central office, for skimming off
too much gold for himself. Convicted of economic crimes, he was sent to the
Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp (or SLON, as it was designated by the Soviet
bureaucracy), a bleak Arctic penal colony. Frenkel's special talent for
improving inmate work efficiency was quickly noticed by the camp officials
there, and it was not long before he was ordered to explain his ideas and
methods to Stalin personally. His main proposal was to link a prisoner's
food ration, especially hot food, to his production, essentially
substituting hunger for the knout as the main work incentive. Frenkel had
also observed that a prisoner's most productive work is usually done in the
first three months of his captivity, after which he or she was in so
debilitated a state that the output of the inmate population could be kept
high only by removing (killing off) the exhausted prisoners and replacing
them with fresh inmates. Another method of stimulating enthusiasm for work
among prisoners -- and at the same time culling the camp population by
killing off the weak -- was quite simple. When the prisoners were called out
on a work detail, they fell into line. The last man in to line up would be
shot as a laggard ("dokhodyaga"), one weakened enough to be useless for
work. These policies would ensure a constant inflow of new prisoners,
providing fresh labor while weeding out opposition to Stalin and his party.
So pleased was Stalin with Frenkel's ideas on the efficient exploitation of
inmate labor that he made him construction chief of the White Sea Canal
project, and later of the BAM railroad project. In 1937 Stalin appointed
Frenkel head of the newly founded Main Administration of Railroad
Construction Camps (GULZhDS). In that capacity, Frenkel was called upon to
provide railroad transport facilities to the Red Army in the 1939-40 "Winter
War" against Finland, and for the duration of Soviet participation in the
Second World War. He was eventually awarded the Order of Lenin three times,
named a Hero of Socialist Labor, and promoted to the rank of general in the
NKVD.
The methods instituted by Frenkel in building the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal
became the standard operating procedures for most subsequent labor camps,
including the BAM (Baltic-Amur Magistral) railroad project, the Dalstroy
(Far East Construction), Vorkuta, Kolyma, Magadan, and countless other hell
holes. Working on the BAM project after the war, the inmates noted that many
of the rails were marked "made in Canada" -- a reminder of the aid given by
the Western powers to support the Soviet war effort.
Welcome Guests
The number of inmates varied over time. Thus, for example, there were
roughly 300,000 prisoners in Soviet labor camps as early as 1932, a million
in 1935, and two million by 1940. (President Roosevelt officially recognized
the Soviet Union in 1933, extending the hand of friendship to its leader
just as Stalin was starving and imprisoning millions of his subjects in
Ukraine and Russia.) During the war, Stalin displayed his own brand of
clemency by permitting some one million inmates to serve in various Red Army
penal units. These were employed in clearing out minefields, not
infrequently by walking through them at gunpoint, and in other hazardous
tasks. Nevertheless, the population of the Soviet concentration camp system
rose precipitously in 1945-46.
From 1939 on, the Gulag filled up with nationals from the USSR's enemies:
Finns, Poles, Germans, Italians, Romanians, and Japanese, many of whom were
held for years after 1945. Although, technically, German prisoners of war
were under the jurisdiction of GUPVI (Main Directorate for POW and Internee
Affairs), they were nonetheless used no differently than other Gulag
inmates. Indeed, in the first few years of the war the death rate for POWs
exceeded that for non-POWs in the camps. Comparatively few German were taken
alive before Stalingrad.Most were shot out of hand, many of them mutilated.
Of the 95,000 German POWs captured at Stalingrad, only 5,000 survived to
return home. Of the dead, some forty thousand did not survive the march from
Stalingrad to the Beketovka camp, where 42,000 more perished of hunger and
disease. Particularly murderous treatment was inflicted on SS POWs, many of
whom, along with remnants of the Vlasov forces, were imprisoned and died on
Wrangel Island.
By the war's end, the USSR held 3.4 million German soldiers prisoner. Under
the provisions of the Yalta Agreement, the U.S. and U.K. had agreed to the
use of German POWs in the Soviet Gulag as "reparations-in-kind." Thus,
rather than repatriate them to their homeland, Stalin began incorporating
this captive human booty into the work camps in the summer of 1945.
Recognizing that the German prisoners of war were productive workers, Stalin
ordered that they be given food rations proportionate to their work. The
ration included 600 grams of black bread every day, spaghetti, a little
meat, sugar, vegetables, and rice. Officers got somewhat more, while,
naturally, Axis "war criminals" got less. Nonetheless, between 1941 and
1952, almost a million German POWs died in the camps. The last of the
surviving POWs (10,000 men) were released from the Soviet Union in 1955,
after a decade of forced labor. Approximately 1.5 million German soldiers
from the Second World War are still listed as missing in action. Of an
additional 875,000 German civilians abducted and transported to the camps,
almost half perished.
When the war ended in May 1945, British and U.S. civilian authorities
ordered their military forces in Germany to deliver to the Communists great
numbers of former residents of the USSR, including men who had taken up arms
with the Germans against the Soviets, prisoners of war, forced and voluntary
workers in the German wartime economy, and numerous persons who had left
Russia and established different citizenship many years before. This
"repatriation" of 4.2 million ethnic Russians and 1.6 million Russian POWs
from defeated Germany was augmented, as noted above, by a great influx of
German POWs and the arrival of large numbers of civilians abducted or
deported from Germany and Eastern Europe. Tens of thousands of Lithuanians,
Latvians, and Estonians were deported to Soviet camps, to be replaced in
their homelands by Soviet settlers. While most repatriated ethnic Russian
civilians, chiefly the women and children, were eventually reincorporated
into Soviet life, the Russian POWs and the Vlasov men were put under the
jurisdiction of SMERSH (Death to Spies), which sentenced about a third of a
million to serve from ten to twenty years in the Gulag. In 1947, swollen by
the dictates of Yalta and by Operation Keelhaul, the total number of Gulag
prisoners hit its peak at about nine million.
After Stalin
After the war, the most wretched and hazardous work continued to be
relegated to the inmates of the Gulag. Thus, under the direct supervision of
secret police chief Lavrenty Beria, thousands of Gulag inmates were used to
support the Soviet nuclear bomb project by mining uranium and preparing test
facilities on Novaya Zemlya, Vaygach Island, Semipalatinsk, and dozens of
other sites. Later, the Soviet navy employed Gulag prisoners to rid
decommissioned nuclear-powered submarines of radioactivity.
In 1953, the year of Stalin's death, the Gulag held around 2.7 million
prisoners. Over the next two years the number of inmates fell rapidly --
which is not to say that the Gulag withered away under Stalin's successors.
Danchik Sergeyevich Baldaev, an MVD major who worked in the Gulag from 1951
until his retirement in 1981, has published a book of drawings depicting the
travails and agonies of Russians and others declared "enemies of the people"
in the post-Stalin Gulag. Baldaev's book is arranged thematically, with
sections on camp organization, tortures and cruelties, sex, food and
housing, climatic conditions, common and political criminals, and so on.
Despite his own past and the horrors of his topic, he succeeds in depicting
the entire pathology of the Communist camps and their overlords in an almost
clinical manner, starkly and without theatrics.
As Baldaev makes clear, while officially the KGB administered the operation
of the camps, unofficially, inside the barracks, common criminals
(murderers, rapists, and psychopaths of every variety) ruled, using and
abusing the women and the weak. Calling themselves "vory v zakone"
(literally, thieves within the law, the type of which is a ceremonially
installed criminal leader who decides disputes and divides spoils), these
thugs were Mafiosi of the lowest type.
Women in the Gulag were preyed upon from all quarters. During their
transport to the camps they were often raped on the transport ships or in
the railroad cars. Upon arrival at their destination they would be paraded
naked in front of the camp officials, who would select those they fancied,
promising easier work in exchange for sexual favors. These officials,
according to Baldaev, preferred German, Latvian, and Estonian women, who
most likely would never see home again, over native Russian women, who
might. Women not selected by the camp officials became "prizes" for male
(and sometimes lesbian) criminals. Besides the everyday tortures of
starvation, work exhaustion, exposure to the cold of the far north, and
physical abuse, the more intractable prisoners of either sex might be
subjected to isolation, impalement, genital mutilation, or, more mercifully,
a bullet in the back of the head.
Empire of Death
It is estimated that more than thirty million prisoners entered the Gulag
during the half century in which it flourished. Not all of them perished, of
course. Short termers, especially, might endure their five-year sentence and
be released. In some cases, however, prisoners who had served their time in
the Gulag were denied return to their homes, and forced to live out the
remainder of their lives in towns near the camp. Robert Conquest, who of
Western scholars has done the most to investigate and to reveal the crimes
of the Soviet regime, estimates that one out of every three new inmates died
during the first year of imprisonment. Only half made it through the third
year. Conquest estimates that during the "Great Terror" of the late 1930s
alone, there were six million arrests, two million executions, and another
two million deaths from other causes in the camps. It is Conquest's belief
that, by the time of Stalin's death in 1953, about twelve million had
perished in the Gulag. Certain investigators, such as the late Andrei
Sakharov, have put the figure much higher, from 15 to 20 million. These
apparent discrepancies result from honest historians studying crimes,
committed in a closed society, of a magnitude never before seen, without
reliable documentation.
A grotesque ritual evolved for the thorough disposal of the wasted bodies of
inmates who had succumbed to hunger, exhaustion, exposure, and malnutrition.
A wooden marker with the deceased inmate's identification number was affixed
to his left leg, and gold teeth or fillings pried out. To ensure that the
death was not feigned, the skull of the inmate was smashed with a hammer, or
a metal spike driven into the chest. The near naked corpse would then be
removed from the camp area and buried in an unmarked grave.
Voices against Oblivion
In recent years various German groups have, with the cooperation of the
Russians, been establishing memorials for the German civilians and soldiers
who died in the Soviet Union. Recently, a Russian Jew, Aleksandr Gutman,
produced a documentary film in which he interviewed four German women from
East Prussia who as young girls had been raped by Red Army troops, then
transported soon after the war to a particularly hellish outpost of the
Gulag, no. 517, near Petrozavodsk in Karelia. Of the 1,000 girls and women
who were transported to that camp, 522 died within six months of their
arrival. These women were among tens of thousands of German civilians, men
and women, deported, with the acquiescence of the Western powers, to the
Soviet Union as German "reparations-in-kind" for slave labor. One of the
women interviewed by Gutman remarks: "While the diary of Anne Frank is known
throughout the world, we carry our memories in our hearts." Recently, German
philanthropists established a memorial cemetery for those women who perished
in slave pen no. 517. See note: 2
After rejection by numerous film festivals due to its "controversial"
nature, Gutman's Journey Back to Youth (Russian title: Puteshestviye v
yunost) was finally accepted by the 34th International Film Festival in
Houston, Texas, where it won the top prize -- the Platinum Award -- for 2001
(the film subsequently earned the U.S. International Film and Video
Festival's Gold Camera award). When Gutman attempted to show the documentary
in New York City, however, it opened and closed to such taunts as: "He
should be killed for making such a movie. Shame, a Jew describing the
sufferings of Germans."
The Perversion of Memory
Today we Americans, from children to dotards, are bombarded with
Holocaustiana, a saturation that borders on, and in some case results in,
Holocaustomania. Yet rarely are we informed of the cruel purposes and the
sadistic workings of the Soviet labor camps. More than half a century after
the end of the Second World War, the U.S. Justice Department maintains a
special branch -- the Office of Special Investigations -- exclusively
dedicated to the investigation, prosecution, and deportation of former Axis
soldiers and officials. Most of those who have been prosecuted served as
low-ranking guards at wartime German camps. But no such American office has
ever been created to hunt out the officials who headed and ran the
Communists' camps. The most recent book on the Gulag, Smirnov's System of
Corrective Labor Camps, lists more than five hundred camps with their
administrative officers through the 1960s. More than a few may well be U.S.
citizens today. If our leaders were suddenly to be fired with the same
passion for pursuing Soviet persecutors that they have for tracking old
Nazis and alleged terrorists, Smirnov's book might be the place to start.
While many of Germany's concentration camps have been preserved (some would
say enshrined), and are evidently intended to be maintained in perpetuity as
memorials to their former inmates and to the wickedness, not only of their
jailers, but of the entire German people, the far more extensive Soviet
Gulag camp system has in the past decade continued to disappear from the
Russian landscape, and from collective memory. See note: 3
Recent attempts of former inmates of the Soviet labor camps to establish (at
the very least) a museum of the Gulag have been frustrated by higher
authorities. As Yuri Pivovarov, director of the Institute of Social Science
Research at the Russian academy of Sciences, puts it: "People simple do not
equate the ethical and moral horrors and shame of Nazism with those of
Communism." Many who now object to the idea of a museum were formerly
high-ranking Communist officials, who today steer Russia into the New World
Order. Then, too, the Soviet Union was never conquered, and thus never
subject to conquerors' demands.
Among the Forgotten
Not long ago the well-known British travel writer, Colin Thubron, trekked
across Siberia. During his journey Thubron deliberately departed the usual
itinerary to view the ruins of two notorious Gulag camps: Vorkuta and
Kolyma. See note: 4 In his recent book In Siberia, Thubron describes them
with a grim lyricism:
Kolyma was fed every year by sea with tens of thousands of prisoners, mostly
innocent. Where they landed, they built a port, then the city of Magadan,
then the road inland to the mines where they perished. People still call it
the `Road of Bones.' ... Kolyma itself was called `the Planet,' detached
from all reality beyond its own -- death.
Of his visit to the dread Vorkuta, Thubron writes:
Then we reached the shell of Mine 17. Here, in 1943, was the first of
Vorkuta's katorga death-camps. Within a year these compounds numbered
thirteen out of Vorkuta's thirty: their purpose was to kill their inmates.
Through winters in which the temperature plunged to -40 F, and the purga
blizzards howled, the katorzhane lived in lightly boarded tents sprinkled
with sawdust, on a floor of mossy permafrost. They worked twelve hours a
day, without respite, hauling coal-trucks, and within three weeks they were
broken. A rare survivor described them turned to robots, their grey-yellow
faces rimmed with ice and bleeding cold tears. They ate in silence, standing
packed together, seeing no one. Some work-brigades flailed themselves on in
a bid for extra food, but the effort was too much, the extra too little.
Within a year 28,000 of them were dead ... Then I came to a solitary brick
building enclosing a range of cramped rooms. They were isolation cells.
Solzhenitsyn wrote that after ten days' incarceration, during which a
prisoner might be deprived even of clothing, his constitution was wrecked,
and after fifteen he was dead.
Departing Vorkuta, Thubron stumbled on a stone on which a message had been
scratched. It read:
"I was exiled in 1949, and my father died here in 1942. Remember us."
Notes
1. Jacques Rossi, The Gulag Handbook (New York: Paragon House, 1989); M.B.
Smirnov, et al., Sistema ispraviltel'no-trudovykh lagerey v SSSR. 1923-1960
(Moscow: Zven'ya, 1998); Ralf Stettner, Archipel Gulag: Stalins Zwangslager:
Terrorinstrument und Wirtschaftsgigant [The Gulag Archipelago: Instrument of
Terror and Economic Giant] (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1996); Danchik
Sergeyevich Baldaev, Gulag Zeichnungen (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins,
1993); Avraham Shifrin, The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration
Camps of the Soviet Union (New York: Bantam Books, 1982); and Stéphane
Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
(London: Harvard University Press, 1999).
2. Aleksandra Sviridova, in V novom sverte (In the New World), a
Russian-language newspaper published in New York, May 18-24, 2001, pp.
14-15.
3. Only recently, however, Dr. Judith Pallot, a geography lecturer at Oxford
University, reported that at least 120 "forest colonies" (forced labor
camps) dating from the Stalin era are still being used to house tens of
thousands, all of them common criminals as opposed to the mix of former
years. The camps Dr. Pallot reports on are located in the Perm region of the
Northern Urals. The average yearly temperature in that region is about minus
1° C (c. 30.8° F), although during the long winter from October to May it
falls as low as minus 40° C (c. -40° F). As in Czarist times, many prisoners
choose to remain as settlers in the vicinity of the camps when their
sentences have ended. Michael McCarthy, "Thousands of Russian Prisoners Are
Still Suffering in the Gulag Archipelago," in http://www.independent.co.uk.
4. Colin Thubron, In Siberia (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).
--
Jim
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Western_Nationalist
Union Against Multiculty
"Abolish Multiculty and String Up The Traitors!"