Separated from Alaska by the 55-mile wide Bering Strait, Kolyma was first used as a place of exile and a source of gold under the Czars. In 1853, for example, the Czarist official Muraviov-Amurski was able to send to St Petersburg three tons of gold mined by convict labor. Over half a century later the Soviet Union, the world’s second largest gold producer, also exploited Kolyma as an enormous prison, where the principal occupation was gold-mining.
It is extraordinarily difficult to come up with a reliable estimate of the total number of political victims during the Soviet period. On 6 April 1990 the Soviet general and historian Dmitry Volkogonov, during a lecture delivered at the Pentagon, gave a preliminary estimate of the total number of ‘repressed persons’ (those imprisoned and/or murdered): 22.5 million. The estimates of some non-Soviet historians run considerably higher. If we speak only of Kolyma, there is a 1949 estimate by the Polish historian Kazimierz Zamorski of 3 million people exiled there, not more than 500,000 of whom supposedly survived.1 In 1978 Robert Conquest estimated that 3 million people met their deaths in Kolyma – certainly not fewer than 2 million.2 It is hard to grasp such figures.
The years 1937–9 were the period of the Great Purges. Millions of people were arrested, held for months in appalling prison conditions, tried on trumped-up charges and either executed or shipped to Siberia. Emaciated as a result of a hopelessly inadequate diet, denied even sufficient drinking water and toilet facilities, freezing from the cold, they would arrive at the Siberian ports of Vladivostok, Vanino or Nakhodka after a rail trip that lasted between thirty and forty days. There they were held in transit camps for varying periods of time.
Typhus epidemics killed many. Those who survived were sent by ship from the ‘mainland’, for the transit camps served as slave markets for the mining operations in Kolyma. Some of the mines employed agents to identify those prisoners most capable of work. Other mines simply had standing orders for a fixed number of new prisoners each year. The high mortality rate in Kolyma made for a constant shortage of manpower.
The ships used to transport prisoners to Kolyma were purchased in England, Holland and Sweden and formerly bore names such as the Puget Sound and the Commercial Quaker. Their builders had never intended them to carry passengers, but their Soviet purchasers found their capacious holds ideally suited for human cargo. In the freezing weather prisoners could easily be controlled by the use of fire pumps.
In 1931 a Soviet trust bearing the name Far Northern Construction was established to take charge of all forced-labor projects in north-eastern Siberia. With headquarters in the city of Magadan, Far Northern controlled all of Kolyma, an enormous natural prison bounded by the Pacific on the east, the Arctic Circle on the north and impassable mountains on the third side of the triangle. Gradually Far Northern increased its jurisdiction westward toward the Lena River and southward to the Aldan – a territory four times the size of France. Its domain may even have extended as far west as the Yenisei River. If this is true, Far Northern’s authority would have extended over a territory as large as all of Western Europe.
Reingold Berzin, a Latvian communist, was in charge of the trust from 1932 to 1937. During this period conditions are reported to have been relatively tolerable: prisoners received adequate food and clothing, were given manageable work assignments and could shorten their sentences by hard work. In 1937 Berzin, his deputy I. G. Filippov and a number of others were arrested and shot as Japanese spies. Management of Far Northern was handed over to K. A. Pavlov and a pathological murderer, Major Garanin (who himself was executed in 1939). The changes in leadership were signaled by Stalin in a 1937 speech in which he criticized the ‘coddling’ of prisoners.
Under Pavlov and Garanin food rations were reduced to the point where most prisoners could not hope to survive: clothing and rations were insufficient for the harsh climate, and prisoners were sent to work in temperatures as cold as – 60°F.
The camps were arranged in a hierarchy that provided virtually unlimited power and privilege for the senior bureaucrats. At the bottom of the non-convict pecking order were soldiers and former convicts who had been released but were not allowed to leave. Their living conditions were only slightly better than those of the prisoners.
Whenever possible, common criminals received trustee positions. Accustomed to violence, they easily controlled the political prisoners, even though the latter outnumbered them. In general, one of the worst features of the camps was that political prisoners were constantly brutalized and murdered by professional criminals.
With the onset of the Second World War the official workday was extended from ten to twelve hours (although unofficially it was often sixteen), and the bread ration was cut to a little over one pound per day. When the war came to a close, conditions improved, and a general amnesty was declared immediately after Stalin’s death for all prisoners with less than a five-year sentence. Unfortunately, only common criminals had received such light sentences.
During the Khrushchev period the politicals were released and ‘rehabilitated’, meaning the government admitted that they had been innocent all along.
Several Soviet books on Kolyma were published in the pre-Gorbachev era. One is Viktor Urin’s Along the Kolyma Highway to the Pole of Cold, published in 1959. A sort of tourist’s notebook of travel impressions, the book has a number of pictures – including some of women in bathing suits – and the effect is somewhat similar to that of an early National Geographic. Urin intersperses his travel descriptions with his own poetry. Andrei Zimkin, whose 1963 volume At the Headwaters of the Kolyma River makes no mention of convicts, spent from 1933 to 1961 in Kolyma. It is not clear whether he himself was a convict or a civilian employee of the camps.
Varlam Shalamov’s story is, by contrast, all too clear. A priest’s son, he joined a group of youthful Trotskyites in 1927, when he was a twenty-year-old law student at Moscow University. In 1929 he was picked up in a police trap when he came to collect some illegally printed materials. He refused to testify at his trial, was sentenced to three years’ hard labor and was granted an early release in 1932; sentences were still comparatively mild at the time.
By then Shalamov had already begun to write both fiction and verse, although life in the camps was a topic he would take up only later. Disappointed by lack of support from his arrested friends, he decided to disengage himself from politics, but the net of state terror ensnared him, along with millions of others.
In 1937 he was rearrested and sentenced to five years’ hard labor for ‘counter-revolutionary Trotskyite activities’. Retried in 1943 for having praised the Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin and called him a ‘classic Russian writer’, he was condemned to remain in the camps until the end of the war. Curiously, the new sentence turned out to be a blessing in disguise. His crime of ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ was viewed as trivial compared to the former ‘Trotskyite activities’. Until then he had been held in a virtual death camp, where – at nearly six feet tall – his weight had dropped to 90 pounds. With the new sentence he was transferred to a prison hospital and managed to regain his weight. Gold mining once more emaciated him, and he was returned to the hospital. After that he was sent to a logging camp where the convicts were simply not fed if they did not fulfill their work norms. Captured during an escape attempt, he was dispatched to a penal zone where, if they could not work, prisoners were thrown off a mountain or tied to a horse and dragged to their deaths. Chance came to his aid when a group of Italian prisoners were delivered to the site, replacing the Soviet convicts. It was at that point that a physician took an interest in him and managed to have him assigned to paramedical courses – a second fortunate twist of fate that literally saved his life.