Not everyone who was arrested was shot, and as a result, the population of the prison camps boomed. In the 1920s the prison camps had been relatively small and organized around the main camp on the Solovki Islands in the White Sea. In those years just over one hundred thousand people languished in Solovki and various other prisons, in cold, insect-infested cells, required to work cutting peat or felling trees. In 1929 Stalin and the security police decided to turn the prison system into a network of labor camps on the Solovki model, and common criminals were placed in the same camps. The great expansion came with the collectivization of agriculture, for those kulaks considered especially dangerous were sent to camps rather than to the special settlements. By 1934, when the GULAG, or the Chief Administration of Camps, under the OGPU/NKVD came into being, there were half a million prisoners. By 1939 a million-and-a-half prisoners lived in camps and “labor colonies,” which had a somewhat less strict regime. Though plenty of people died in Soviet camps, they were not death camps, but labor camps, and the GULAG took the labor component quite seriously. At first they even advertised their “successes,” such as the building of the White Sea Canal in 1931–32, touted as an example of labor successfully re-educating class enemies. From 1937, however, the camps were in principle secret. The system was a complex hierarchy, ranging from “special settlements,” where the prisoners lived in fairly normal housing or minimally livable barracks, to horrific mining settlements like Vorkuta or the Kolyma gold fields on the east coast of Siberia, reachable only by ship. Most prisoners were assigned labor in forests, cutting trees for the timber industry with primitive tools, or were assigned to mine, or work in construction. Death was the result of disease, accidents, and general privation, for the GULAG needed labor to meet its own plans. Most deaths occurred during the shipment out to the camps in 1937–38 when hundreds of thousands were shipped east and north in unheated boxcars to places where facilities for the prisoners were almost non-existent. In the Stalin years, failure to meet the plan could be fatal, so the camp commandants engaged in a complex juggling game to keep the prisoners well-enough fed and housed to be able to work while not expending too much on them. With the special settlements, some four million people lived “under the jurisdiction of the NKVD” by 1941. Of these most were not political prisoners in the usual sense. In the camps and colonies, only about twenty percent had been convicted of “counter-revolutionary actions” or other political offenses, and the rest were a mixture of common criminals and those who fell afoul of increasingly strict laws on labor discipline, hooliganism, or “theft of state property,” a particularly murky area given the realities of Soviet life. Many were imprisoned for passport violations after the introduction of internal passports in 1932. Even the “political” prisoners included many classified as political only in the super-politicized categories of Stalin and the NKVD. The camp system under Stalin was primarily a system of convict labor into which political prisoners were added.
At the end of the 1930s the Soviet Union was even more a land of paradox than before. State centralization had continued to increase. The defeat of the Right Opposition had put Stalin’s allies in all the key positions of state: Molotov became the chair of the Council of People’s Commissars, the head of state and government. Along with Molotov and Stalin the inner circle now consisted of Lazar Kaganovich, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and, until his death Valerian Kuibyshev. While Ordzhonikidze and Kuibyshev oversaw industry, Kaganovich took care of transport and Mikoyan of the crucial area of food supplies and trade. Voroshilov was in charge of the armed forces. All of them had other duties as well, and they regularly met to discuss even minute issues of economic management as well as political questions. Around this inner group until 1937–38 was a large number of managers and party officials who had mostly come out of the Civil War and come into power under Stalin. This was the core Soviet elite at the time, and most of them did not survive the terror of 1937–38. The result of the terror was to further concentrate power in the inner circle and even more so on Stalin himself, but to also bring new men into the leadership. Foremost among them was Lavrentii Beriia, another Georgian who replaced Ezhov as head of the security police. Others of the younger men were Andrei Zhdanov, Georgii Malenkov, and Nikita Khrushchev, all of whom would play major roles in the coming war and post-war years. Zhdanov was the son of a school inspector and worked his way up through provincial party leadership to take over Leningrad’s party after the assassination of Kirov. Malenkov, also from the Urals, and with a pre-revolutionary gymnasium education, made his career in the central party apparatus in Moscow. Khrushchev, by contrast, was actually a worker in the Donbass who rose through the party ranks when Kaganovich was running the Ukrainian party in the 1920s, and then moved on to Moscow. All three had served in the Civil War. Along with these new men came a shift in the structure of power at the center, with all of the leaders taking more direct roles in managing the state, not merely supervising it from the Politburo. The centralization of power was formalized in May 1941 when Stalin replaced Molotov as Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. Stalin now formally and actually headed both party and state.
Figure 19. The funeral of the writer Maxim Gorky in 1936. From right to left: Genrikh Iagoda, chief of the political police, Stalin,Viacheslav Molotov, Bulgarian Communist and Comintern leader Georgii Dimitrov, (in white) Andrei Zhdanov, Lazar Kaganovich.
Alongside the centralization of power in the Politburo and then with Stalin alone a whole cult of the leader appeared, managed from the center. It was already normal in the early 1920s to display portraits of Lenin, Trotsky, and the current leadership at major celebrations like November 7 and May 1. By the end of the 1920s Stalin was the central figure in these displays and by the end of the 1930s almost the only figure. Statues of Stalin sprouted in addition to the ubiquitous statues of Lenin, and cities and institutions were named in his honor. At party meetings it was the ritual to stand when his name was mentioned and acclaim him. Stalin was not a dynamic public speaker, in part because of his pronounced Georgian accent, and he never seems to have desired the unceasing public display and admiration that Hitler and Mussolini craved and staged over and over. He rarely appeared in public and his actual personality remained private, but the standard epithets – “great leader of peoples”– were obligatory. His writings were the required textbooks of Marxism and his image and his name were everywhere and became basic components of Soviet political culture.
The centralization of power also affected the complex federal structure of the USSR. Starting in 1929–30 all-union Commissariats of Agriculture, Education, and Culture and other organs had been created that stood over the analogous republican agencies. The policies and structures of the NEP era had meant a sort of de facto alliance of the party with intellectuals in the non-Russian republics to build and in some cases create local cultures. This arrangement in many ways paralleled the role of the pre-revolutionary Russian engineers and economists in Soviet industry, and it met the same fate beginning in 1929–30. Show trials of local nationalists signaled the end of collaboration, as did the appearance of an all-union Commissariat of Culture and Education. In 1932–33 the party carried out a campaign against Ukrainian nationalism, including show trials of Ukrainian intellectuals accused of nationalism and ties with foreign powers. The Ukrainian party leaders who preferred the older policy committed suicide and others were arrested or demoted. Similar campaigns took place in other republics, all of them part of the “cultural revolution” of 1929–1932.