In 1937, a special camp, in the Potmalag complex, was set up which contained about 7,000 wives and sisters of enemies of the people. Some, transferred to Segeta on the Kirovsk railway, are said to have been amnestied in 1945.44 But most were sent to a new camp, “ALZHIR,” in the Karaganda complex. Prisoners there included wives of many enemies of the people—like those of Ryutin, Svanidze, Pyatnitsky, and Krestinsky—and sisters of Gamarnik, Tukhachevsky, and others.
Women who had been arrested included the pregnant. The wife of a Comintern official, an invalid with curvature of the spine, was arrested in the seventh month of pregnancy, and gave birth in the Butyrka. On the transit train, having no milk at all, she filtered the fish “soup” through her stockings to feed the baby. Their further fate is not stated.45
Children were also conceived and born in the camps. The mothers were allowed to feed them, but the babies were kept separately. “After a year they were removed to unknown destinations. It was explained to the mothers, ‘You have broken the regulations. Connections with men are not permitted. Therefore the children are ours, not yours. They belong to the Security Organs, and we will bring them up.’” One estimate in a Soviet paper is that the “children of the NKVD” numbered 500,000 to 1 million.”46 There was a children’s “special camp” near Akmolinsk, which later became an ordinary camp. About 400 children lived in barracks, in two or three levels of bunks. Later they were allowed to work, tending a herd of 250 cattle, and sewing.47 A sad account of those in Bamlag’s “children’s kombinat” is given in a recent Soviet article, while in special children’s prisons in Ashkhabad, the fate of seven- or eight-year-olds was “hunger and cold, beatings, humiliations.”48 In another such article, Lydia Chukovskaya tells of children born in the camps who at the age of five could not yet speak.49
SETTING UP CAMP
In general, the great expansion of the Yezhov period was marked by the setting up of new camps. For example, in the Archangel area, the Kargopol “camp,” consisting of a number of smaller camps in a radius of about thirty-five miles, containing in 1940 about 30,000 prisoners, was founded in 1936 by 600 prisoners who were simply put out of the train in the middle of the forest and who built their own barracks and fences. The death rate had been very heavy. The Polish and German Communist prisoners had died first, followed by the national minorities from Asia.50
Pasternak, certainly drawing on the experiences of friends who had suffered, described in Doctor Zhivago the setting up of a new camp:
We got off the train.—A snow desert. Forest in the distance. Guards with rifle muzzles pointing at us, wolf-dogs. At about the same time other groups were brought up. We were spread out and formed into a big polygon all over the field, facing outward so that we shouldn’t see each other. Then we were ordered down on our knees, and told to keep looking straight ahead in front on pain of death. Then the roll-call, an endless, humiliating business going on for hours and hours, and all the time we were on our knees. Then we got up and the other groups were marched off in different directions, all except ours. We were told: “Here you are. This is your camp.”—An empty snow-field with a post in the middle and a notice on it saying: “Gulag 92 Y.N.90”—that’s all there was….
First we broke saplings with our bare hands in the frost to get wood to build our huts with. And in the end, believe it or not, we built our own camp. We put up our prison and our stockade and our punishment cells and our watch towers, all with our own hands. And then we began our jobs as lumberjacks.51
In exactly the same way, a Pole describes being marched, in rags, to a spot on the frozen tundra where there was no more than a sign: “Camp Point No. 228.” The prisoners dug pits to live in and covered them with branches and earth. The food was simply raw rye flour, kneaded with water.52
Another prisoner describes being marched to a temporary camp which would not hold, however squeezed, more than one-fifth of the prisoners. The others were left out in the mud for several days. They began to light fires made of bits of parts of the barracks, and were charged and beaten up by the guards. Twice a day, they had one-third of a liter of soup, and once a day about half a kilo of bread.53
On entry into an established camp, prisoners were allotted their categories for work. This might be done by a quick examination of the prisoners’ legs.54 A certificate of “first-class” health was required for the heaviest tasks. (A Soviet writer describes one being issued to a political four hours before her death from scurvy.)55 Then they were marched to the barracks, where, typically, “two hundred men slept in fifty bug-ridden bunks,” on boards or mattresses “full of heavy and hard-packed sawdust.”56
Crowding was intense. The former director of a Kemerovo works describes negotiating with the NKVD for 2,000 slave laborers.57 The trouble was not the number, but how to accommodate them in the existing camps in the area. The officials concerned were shown around a camp which appeared to be packed solid, but the commandant agreed with his superior that yet another layer of bunks could be put in.
There would be a stove, though not adequate to warm one of the Arctic huts “because the orderlies only brought in ten pounds of coal dust for each stove, and you didn’t get much warmth from that.”58 In a corner would be the twenty-gallon latrine tank which prisoner orderlies carried off to empty daily—“light work for people on the sick list!”59
The company, apart from the complement of urkas who in a nonpenal camp would be lording it in the corridors, were of a varied lot of “politicals.” There would be saboteurs—specialists and engineers. At first they mostly had technical jobs, but, as the mass purges grew in scope, so many engineers and specialists flooded the camps that the chance of appointment to a technical position which had previously saved so many of them became proportionately rare.
There were certain special categories. In Kotlas, there was a whole group of men of eighty years and older who had been sentenced in Daghestan as part of the “liquidation of feudal remnants.”60 And about 3,000 Moscow homosexuals were in camp at the “Third Watershed,” on the Baltic–White Sea Canal.61 But usually the intake was mixed.
An account of the Dzhezkazgan camp in a Moscow article of the Khrushchev period mentions a former Ambassador to China, a soloist from the Bolshoi Opera, an illiterate peasant, an Air Force genera1.62 Common were soldiers, intellectuals, and especially Ukrainian and other nationalists, on the one hand, and members of religious sects, on the other. Solzhenitsyn points out that the Baptists were in the camps simply for praying. For this (at the time he writes of), “they all got twenty-five years, because that was how it was now—twenty-five years for everybody.”63 There are many reports of sectarians being beaten or sent to the isolator cells for refusal to work on Sundays.64 A priest, beaten blind, was noted in 1937.65
As in all times of trouble and oppression, the millenarian sects flourished. In the great slave empires of the past, similar voices had always spoken for the oppressed and hopeless. Now they sometimes preached that the horrors of the present were a special trial, and that from the Russian people, degraded and demoralized, a “race of saints” would arise.66 Even twenty years later, in Vorkuta, we are told that there was more religious organization (and sharper national feeling) among the minority groups still settled there after their camp experiences than in other districts67