Moroz was succeeded by “a confirmed sadist,” Kashketin, of whom it was said that the only safety from him lay in his being ignorant of one’s existence. After a few months of his rule, there were 2,000 convicts in the isolators of a single camp group, of whom only 76 survived. Kashketin’s brutality availed him no more than Moroz’s humanity: he, too, disappeared with all his subordinates at the end of the Yezhov period.
Norilsk, on the Arctic Ocean, was developed as a metallurgical project. A recent article in lzvestiya tells us that though there was death on a large scale from “unbearable toil, dystrophy, scurvy, and catarrhal diseases,” there are about 2 million survivors of the “nightmare barracks” from the intake of the postwar years still alive today, a striking testimony to the number in the camps.151
And so it was, on a smaller but still vast scale, throughout the NKVD’s realm, from the White Sea to Sakhalin, from the great complexes of Karaganda to the virtually unrecorded “death camps” of the Taymyr and Novaya Zemlya, from (as Solzhenitsyn puts it) the Pole of Cold at Oy-Myakoi to the copper mines of Dzhezkazgan.
SLAVE ECONOMICS
The millions of slave laborers at the disposal of Gulag played an important economic role, and indeed became accepted as a normal component of the Soviet economy.
An ad hoc Committee of the United Nations appointed under resolutions by UNESCO and the ILO, and consisting of a prominent Indian lawyer, a former President of the Norwegian Supreme Court, and a former Peruvian Minister of Foreign Affairs, reported in 1953 in a sober document leaving no doubt of the “considerable significance” of forced labor in the Soviet Union.
State-owned slaves were common in the ancient world. For example, the Laurion silver mines were operated by Athens on that basis. The Romans, too, had their servi publici. The Head of the Department of War Engineering Armaments, RSFSR, wanting some hundreds of prisoners for urgent work during the war, was told by the NKVD official responsible that there was a shortage. “Malenkov and Voznesensky need workers, Voroshilov is calling for road builders.… What are we to do? The fact is we haven’t yet fulfilled our plans for imprisonment. Demand is greater than supply.”152
We think of the lumber camps as typical. But the best estimate seems to be that (of the comparatively low camp population of early 1941) only about 400,000 were held at lumbering. The other main categories were
Mining
1,000,000
Agriculture
200,000
Hired out to various State enterprises
1,000,000
Construction and maintenance of camps and manufacture of camp necessities
600,000
General construction
3,500,000
153
Even in the great lumbering area of the northwest, a high proportion of prisoners were building the Kotlas–Vorkuta railway. Many others were erecting (like Solzhenitsyn’s hero) various industrial and mining buildings.
It has often been pointed out that slave labor is economically inefficient. Karl Marx had the same view:
The lowest possible wage which the slave earns appears to be a constant, independent of his work in contrast to the free workers. The slave obtains the means necessary to his subsistence in natural form, which is fixed both in kind and in quantity, whereas the remuneration of the free worker is not independent of his own work.154
Slavery thus owed part of its inefficiency to lack of incentives.
The same point is put by the Webbs, in a passage worth quoting at length as representing a certain way of looking at Soviet affairs common in the 1930s. They are criticizing Professor Tchernyavin’s first-hand account of the camps he served in:
It is to be regretted that this testimony—very naturally strongly biased—mixes up personal observation and experience of conditions that are, in all conscience, bad enough, with hearsay gossip unsupported by evidence, and with manifestly exaggerated statistical guesses incapable of verification. The account would have carried greater weight if it had been confined to the very serious conditions of which the author had personal knowledge. His naive belief that this and other penal settlements are now maintained and continuously supplied with thousands of deported manual workers and technicians, deliberately for the purpose of making, out of this forced labour, a net pecuniary profit to add to the State revenue, will be incredible by anyone acquainted with the economic results of the chain-gang, or of prison labour, in any country in the world.155
It is quite true that the mass arrests remain basically a political phenomenon. The slave-labor motive can only have been secondary. The engineers and scientists, the doctors and lawyers, were not arrested simply to provide a corps of incompetent lumberjacks. As Weissberg says:
After twenty years of endless trouble and enormous expense the Soviet Government finally developed a working body of really capable physicists. And now what’s happened? Shubnikov, one of the leading low-temperature physicists in the country, is to help dig a canal in the Arctic. So is our first director, Professor Obremov, also a leading Soviet physicist and an expert on crystallography. Can’t you imagine what expensive navvies men like Shubnikov and Obremov are.156
But once people were arrested, the extraction of their physical labor ensured at least some contribution to the economy, and (granted the initial irrationality of the whole Purge) there is nothing contrary to reason and common sense in Stalin’s typical decision to integrate them into his economic machine. To this extent, the Webbs are simply wrong as to Stalin’s motives.
Moreover, Stalin was well aware of Marx’s economic objection to slavery. And with his usual refusal to accept precedent, he sought to overcome it by the simple but untried method of not giving the slave a flat subsistence, but linking his rations to his output. In this way, it was thought, the lack of incentive Marx had pointed to was overcome.
It is quite true that the forced-labor projects were, anyhow, like much else in Stalin’s economy, often totally misconceived even on their own terms. During the great wave of arrests in 1947, a Soviet account tells us, Stalin remarked at a meeting of the Council of Ministers that the “Russian people had long dreamed of having a safe outlet to the Arctic Ocean from the Ob River.” Simply on the basis of this remark, decisions were taken to build a railway to Igarka. For more than four years, amid feet of snow, in temperatures down to –55°C in winter, and with swamps and mosquitoes in the summer, forced laborers toiled at this vast project, at more than eighty camp sites at intervals of 15 kilometers along the 1,300-kilometer stretch. The estimated cost, if it had ever been completed, was from 4 to 6 million rubles per kilometer. In the end, 850 kilometers of rail, and 450 of telegraph poles only, had been completed. After Stalin’s death, the line, the signals, the railway stations, the locomotives, and all that had been erected were abandoned to rust in the snow.157
But this was an irrationality of the Soviet political and planning system itself. When it came to an ordinary operation, such as logging, it might seem that a method of providing very cheap labor had indeed been found.
Some prisoners made efforts on the spot to estimate the economic value of the camps. A friend of mine who was in a logging camp in the Vorkuta area worked for a time on the administrative side there (from 1950 to 1952) and says that the results were to a large degree faked or inflated, as in ordinary Soviet factories at that time. A great deal of the work which counted against norms was of a valueless nature, and although the prisoners themselves received the barest minimum of all necessities, the total cost of the camp, with guards, administration, and so forth, was much in excess of the value of its output. Antoni Ekart reports much the same of the Vorkuta mines158—which, however, would probably have been uneconomic even if run by free labor because of the distances involved and the total production effected. And a careful study159 makes the supposed savings due to forced labor over the whole economy at best marginal.