It later became routine, when a corpse was taken to the morgue, “to crack his skull with a big wooden mallet to make sure.”111
Escapes were occasionally made, but very seldom with any success. They were acts of desperation; but, of course, there was enough desperation to produce them. In the Pechora area, the NKVD offered a reward of eleven pounds of wheat to anyone turning in an escaped prisoner. In the early 1930s, escaped prisoners in other regions were sometimes sheltered by the peasantry, but this was very seldom true among the terrorized kolkhozniks of the Purge period. There were, nevertheless, rare successes. Gypsies, in particular, sometimes reached encampments of their own race where its solidarity saved them from discovery. And odd individuals, like the Spanish Communist general El Campesino, made completely successful escapes.
Recaptured prisoners were always brutally manhandled, and almost invariably shot.
For any escape on the march to the camps from the railheads, the guards were charged with complicity and sentenced to two or three years, which they continued to serve as guards but without pay. This made them extremely vigilant. In the camps, too, “if anybody got out it was hell on the guards and they kept on the go without food or sleep. It made ‘em so mad they often didn’t bring the fellow back alive.”112
One consequence of this vigilance was continual counting of prisoners:
The lieutenant stood still and watched. He’d come outside to double-check the count. That was the routine when they left the camp.
The men meant more to a guard than gold. If there was one man missing on the other side of the wire, he’d soon be taking his place.…113
They counted you twice on the way out—once with the gates still shut, so they knew if they could open them, and then a second time, when you were going through the gates. And if they thought there was something wrong, they did a recount outside.”114
This is one of several interesting parallels with Dostoevsky’s account of forced labor in the 1840s, in The House of the Dead:
The prisoners are lined up, counted and called over at dawn, midday and nightfall, and sometimes more often during the day, depending on the suspicions of the guards and their ability to count. The guards often made mistakes, counted wrongly, went away and then came back again. Eventually the wretched guards would succeed in arriving at the right figure and lock up the hut.
In a general comparison between this century and the last, we note that in Dostoevsky’s time prisoners had considerably more freedom of action inside the camp, and were not under such strict guard outside either, though Dostoevsky mentions that his convicts are serving “incomparably” the worst of the three types of hard labor. With the exception that in Dostoevsky’s camp the main sanction is frightful floggings, which sometimes result in death, rather than the “isolators,” the life of the convict was on the whole preferable in his descriptions to those of Solzhenitsyn and the others. Each convict has his own box with a lock and key. Prisoners keep domestic animals. They do not work on Sundays or feast days, or even on their own name days. Jews and Moslems have parallel privileges. The food is greatly superior, and prisoners on the sick list go into town to buy “tobacco, tea, beef; on Christmas Day, suckling-pig, even goose.” They even have enough bread to spare for the horse of the water carrier.
The convicts in The House of the Dead are all, indeed, really guilty of one or another offense—often murder, like the hero Goryanchikov—though there are about a dozen political prisoners out of thirty.
Dostoevsky’s type of camp was abolished in the 1850s. (He makes the point that he is “describing the past.”) But even nonliterary prisoners in Stalin’s camps were able to make other comparisons—for example, one prisoner was a Polish Communist who had served two years in Wronki jail in Poland for political offenses. In the Polish jail, the prisoners had been locked in only at night, by day they were allowed in the garden; they were allowed any books from outside, unlimited correspondence, and weekly baths; there were five of them in a large room.115
THE PENAL EMPIRE
In the vast empty spaces in the north and the Far East, areas as big as fair-sized countries came under complete NKVD control. There were many camps scattered through the Urals, in the Archangel area, and more especially in and around Karaganda and on the new railway being built from Turkestan to Siberia. But in these, the NKVD administered only comparatively small enclaves. Even in the huge Karlag complex around Karaganda, where there were about 100,000 prisoners, they were in camps scattered over an area the size of France among other settlements, mostly of deported “free” labor. (These so-called free exiles were men and women whose innocence was absolutely clear even to the examining judges. In some areas, they were often little more than vagabonds, sleeping under bridges, begging their bread, and seeking work or even arrest to save themselves from starvation.)116
The two biggest true colonies of the NKVD empire were the great stretch of northwestern Russia beyond Kotlas, comprising roughly what is shown on the map as the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and the even vaster area of the Far East centered on the gold fields of Kolyma. These regions had, before the NKVD took over, populations of a handful of Russians and a few thousand Arctic tribesmen. A decade later, they held between them something between 1.25 and 2 million prisoners. For these great areas we have accounts from both Soviet and émigré publications. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is set in the northeastern camps. General Gorbatov’s Years Off My Life covers his experiences in Kolyma. These and other Moscow-published works confirmed and complemented the large amount of material long available in the West.
The Soviet Arctic is a world of its own. The feeling of having been thrown out from normal life was accentuated by the physical phenomena. In winter, there is the extreme, extravagant cold; the short days in which a swollen, livid sun raises itself for a few hours above the horizon—or, in the Arctic proper, simply lightens the sky somewhat without appearing; the soundlessly flickering ion-stream of the aurora borealis. In summer, the long days; the mosquitoes; the slushy swamp of the melted surface, with its alien vegetation—bog cotton and dwarf willow a few inches high; and below it, hard as rock, the permafrost. South of this true tundra is the even wilder forest belt, the taiga, where the great complex of timber camps lay.
Most of the northern camps were separated from the country as a whole by vast stretches of empty land, sparsely inhabited by tribal hunters, the Chukchi, Yakut, Nentsi—the last being the Samoyeds, cannibals, from whom Ivan the Terrible had recruited his fiercest guards. Most of these were happy to turn in prisoners for a bounty, having in any case a general hostility to Russians.
KOLYMA
The largest camp area was that which came under Dalstroy, the Far Eastern Construction Trust. The exact boundaries of Dalstroy’s control have never been exactly determined, but it seems to have included all the territory beyond the Lena and north of the Aldan, at least as far east as the Gydan Range—a territory four times the size of France.
Its prison population was never as large as the Pechora region’s, being usually around 500,000. But the death rate was so high that more individual prisoners inhabited its camps at one time or another than any other region. Since it was supported by sea, and the number of ships, their capacity, and their average number of trips are known with reasonable accuracy, we can compute a probable minimum of 2 million dead.117