And, indeed, there had long been an alternative Soviet story. There were, it is true, corrective labor establishments of a highly beneficent type. Their operations could be seen in such works as Pogodin’s play The Aristocrats, which showed how prisoners were reclaimed at labor on the White Sea Canal and elsewhere. Pogodin represents bandits, thieves, and even “wrecker” engineers being reformed by labor. A regenerated engineer, now working enthusiastically at a project, has his old mother visit him. The kindly camp chief puts his car at her disposal, and she is delighted at her son’s healthy physical appearance. “How beautifully you have reeducated me,” a thief remarks, while another sings, “I am reborn, I want to live and sing.”
And much of the hostile evidence came from people who had been unjustly imprisoned in camps, and who had come to oppose the Stalin regime. They were, therefore, “anti-Soviet,” and purveyors of “anti-Soviet propaganda.” By this system, no evidence whatever of any facts unpalatable to Stalin could ever be admissible. As Bertrand Russell wrote of a labor-camp book:
The book ends with letters from eminent Communists saying that no such camps exist. Those who write these letters and those fellow-travellers who allow themselves to believe them share responsibility for the almost unbelievable horrors which are being inflicted upon millions of wretched men and women, slowly done to death by hard labour and starvation in the Arctic cold. Fellow-travellers who refuse to believe the evidence of books such as Mr Herling’s are necessarily people devoid of humanity, for if they had any humanity they would not merely dismiss the evidence, but would take some trouble to look into it.1
As Russell truly remarks, it was “millions” who suffered. And here we have a point on which admissions only began to appear in the Soviet media in 1987 to 1989. While the publications in Khrushchev’s time of such books as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and of various memoirs by former camp inmates amounted to an acknowledgment that the long-disputed evidence produced in the West was accurate through and through, this applied to the nature of the camp system, not—or not explicitly—to its extent.
What many people of good will found hard to believe was less the existence of the system, in all its unpleasantness, than the numbers of prisoners alleged to be detained in them. When figures like 10 million were mentioned, it was an almost instinctive feeling that this did not accord with common sense, with normal experience. Nor, of course, did it. But, then, the reality of Stalin’s activities was often disbelieved because they seemed to be unbelievable. His whole style consisted of doing what had previously been thought morally or physically inconceivable.
Even so, it is difficult not to reject the larger figures out of hand as “obviously” exaggerated, and a very definite effort has to be made when we consider the evidence. This is multifarious, but inexact, and estimates have ranged from about 5 million upward. I am inclined to accept a figure of about 7 million purgees in the camps in 1938. This cannot, in any case, be very far wrong.
A detailed list of camp groups covering 35 clusters was given as early as 19372 (a cluster usually included about 200 camps of around 1,200 inmates each). In 1945, on the basis of reports from Poles allowed to leave under the Soviet–Polish treaty, a far more comprehensive account was given, together with a map, showing 38 administration clusters and groups (including 8 under Dalstroy—the “Far Eastern Construction Trust”).3 In 1948, Dallin and Nicolaevsky, on the basis of careful research, were able to list and describe the operations of 125 camps or camp clusters, mentioning that a number of others had been reported but not wholly confirmed.4
Like the other mechanisms from which Stalin constructed the Purge, the labor camps were no new invention.
With a few exceptions, our major accounts of labor-camp life come from intellectuals who were sent to them from 1935–1936 on. For the victims of the Yezhov terror included a higher proportion of urban, and of foreign, intellectuals than had the repressions of earlier years. As a result, we are inclined to think of the system as arising, or passing through an enormous quantitative or qualitative change, at the beginning of the Great Purge proper. There are, indeed, a few accounts by “intellectuals” from the earlier period—for example, Professor Tchernyavin—and these differ little from later ones. But on the whole, those who suffered in the first half of the 1930s were mainly peasants, who were less inclined to write books about their experiences—even though an equivalent proportion of them ended up in Western Europe as a result of the captures and migrations of the war.
There is one important exception. When Victor Kravchenko sued Les Lettres françaises in 1949 for having declared his book I Chose Freedom a fake, many otherwise unforthcoming refugees in the West sent in affidavits of experiences of theirs which confirmed his story, and a number of these were peasants who had been in camps from as early as 1930.
Their accounts5 (and earlier ones) make it clear that the system already existed in much the same form, if with fewer inmates, at this earlier stage. Brutalities are described, indeed, which for a time became less common in the mid-1930s. This probably signifies the automatic hostility of the NKVD cadres to those whom they were able to think of as a genuinely hostile class element—kulaks. At the same time, the tradition of the Russian vlast, of straightforward beating for the clods of peasants, compared with a certain restraint toward the intelligentsia who might have influential friends and relations, still prevailed. Later on, of course, the latter class became, if anything, the target of yet greater extremes of brutality. But up to 1936, preferential treatment of political prisoners could still be claimed even by imprisoned Trotskyites, a category later to be marked out for specially vicious treatment.
Camps seem to have been in existence as early as mid-1918, but the decrees legalizing them were passed in September 19186 and April 1919.7 The first true death camp seems to have been at Kholmogori, near Archangel, in 1921. A list of sixty-five concentration camps administered in 1922 by the Main Administration of Forced Labor is given in the directory and address book All Russia of 1923.8 This Administration was merged in October 1922 with the Corrective Labor Section of the Commissariat of Justice, and the whole brought under the NKVD as the Main Administration of Places of Detention.
The first great camps were in the Solovetsky Monasteries in the far north. Here, in Tsarist times, the monks of the oldest tradition of isolation from the world had withstood a siege from 1668 to 1676, defending their faith in the Old Belief against the reformism of the time. When the camps were set up, some of the old monks were retained for a time to teach the convicts how to operate the fisheries. They were later liquidated for sabotage.9 At the Solovetsky camps, health conditions were very bad. Epidemics reduced the population from 14,000 to 8,000 in 1929 and 1930.10 In general, these were bad times in all the camps springing up around the White Sea. The average life span in them between 1929 and 1934 “did not exceed one or two years.”11 This was almost always due to corruption and inefficiency among the jailers. The remedy was a conventional one. “The G.P.U. commission would come down from Moscow and shoot half the administration, after which convict life returned to its normal horror.”12 The original Solovetsky “Camp of Special Designation” was changed in 1936 into a “Prison of Special Designation,” and in 1939 the surviving prisoners were transferred by sea to Norilsk and Dudinin.13