A Soviet account reinforces this view. The writer recalls a conversation in which one of the technicians on the job, himself a former prisoner, commented on the suggestion that the use of convict labor for construction projects was relatively cheap:
It merely seems so. After all the prisoners have somehow to be fed, shod, clothed, and guarded; special areas have to be constructed, provided with watchtowers for the guards—yes and for that matter the maintenance of the guards is a costly matter. Then also there is the physical training section and all the other “sections” which in fact only exist on paper … in fact a sizable establishment. Then there are those again who have to fetch the water for them, heat the baths and wash the floors. After all there are a lot of things that human beings need. There are also many duty officers and personnel, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the countless carpenters, clerks and other “scabs” as they are called in the camp! So that if one averages it out you must reckon one and a half ancillary persons for every one who actually works. The other main thing is that the guards cannot deploy the labor force as it ought to be: either one is not allowed to use the proper machinery, or else the foremen, not to mention the convicts themselves, simply have no time to stop and think about how to organize the labor force because of the consequent parades, inspections, and the rest of the to-ing and fro-ing.160
The maintenance of the guards, it may be remarked, was also a military debit. Throughout the war period, the camps continued to be guarded by picked NKVD soldiers, in a proportion of about one guard to twenty inmates. The Soviet Government thus forfeited the use of certainly no fewer than 250,000 trained and healthy troops.
Even so, in certain circumstances, forced labor does seem to have paid: coal from Karaganda was sometimes noticeably cheaper than that from the Donets Basin.’161 Moreover, there are certain fields where free labor would be inordinately expensive, and where slave labor is probably economically preferable—for instance, in the mines and strategic roads of northeastern Siberia. In 1951, in the United States Congress, the immense labor cost of setting up an American air base in Greenland was disclosed. We can be sure that the equivalents in northern Siberia were completed far more cheaply with slave labor than they could have been with even Soviet free labor. That is to say, while it is true that the forced-labor system was not limitlessly expandable, it may have paid in certain fields.
In any case, to start examining the economics of the operation in an abstract way is clearly a mistake. A man killed by squeezing a year or two’s effort out of him is of more use than a man kept in prison. The camps were politically efficient. They effectively isolated masses of potential troublemakers, and were a great disincentive to any sort of anti-Stalinist activity, or even talk. Assuming that the political purging was necessary, the camps were a useful end product.
Like everything else in Stalin’s epoch, the system operated by pressure from the top down. Every camp had its “plan,” and every camp chief worked under a system of penalties and rewards. There were some odd results. Camp chiefs are reported as having kept recaptured prisoners whom they should have returned to their original camps. Again, in the prison at Kotlas, there was a group of prisoners consisting entirely of invalids and old people, whom none of the camps would accept, for obvious economic reasons. They remained there for over a year as the problem solved itself by their dying.162
FOOD AND DEATH
In the camps, the commandants operated the norm system vis-à-vis the prisoners. As a general principle there were various “cauldrons,” or food allotments. The principle is simple enough. Precise figures varied considerably, but the following shows a typical proportion. In the Kolyma camps, for men doing twelve to sixteen hours’ heavy physical labor a day, eight months of it in very low temperatures, the daily ration, of very poor bread, is given as follows by a former prisoner writing in the West:
for more than 100% of the norm
up to 930 grams (32 oz.)
for 100%
815 grams (28½ oz.)
for 70–99%
715 grams (25 oz.)
for 50–69%
500 grams (17½ oz.)
disciplinary ration
300 grams (10½ oz.)
plus “soup,” 3½ oz. of salt fish, and just over 2 oz. of groats
163
A Soviet account of the same area gives
for 100% fulfillment
800 grams
nonfulfillment for whatever reason
500 grams
punitive
300 grams ‘
164
The first is given in ounces in the original, so the slight discrepancy has no significance. What seems to be the abolition of the intermediate stage may be due to the fact that the Russian was serving there later—from 1942 until at least 1950—as against the other’s circa 1938 to 1946. A Polish account, of 1940 to 1941, gives 500 grams for 50 percent norm and 300 for less.165
Another reported ration scheme, in one of the northern camps in the winter of 1941/1942:
for the full norm
700 grams of bread, plus soup and buckwheat
for those not attaining the norm
400 grams of bread, plus soup
166
Most Arctic arrangements were probably close to these two. The ration outside the Arctic proper was rather lower, typically
over 100%
750–1,000 grams
100%
600–650 grams
50–100%
400–475 grams
penal (under 50%)
300–400 grams
167
These rations may be compared with those of a camp system more familiar to Western readers—that of one of the Japanese P.O.W. camps on the River Kwai (Tha Makham). There, prisoners got a daily ration norm of 700 grams of rice, 600 of vegetables, 100 of meat, 20 of sugar, 20 of salt, and 5 of oil—for a total of 3,400 calories, but, as in Russia, very deficient in vitamins.168 (Even in the 1980s in the USSR, the camp norm was of 2,400 calories only, mainly based on 700 grams of black bread.)
We can make certain other comparisons. In the Ukrainian cities in the famine period of the 1930s, the bread ration was 800 grams for industrial workers, 600 for manual workers, 400 for office employees. In the siege of Leningrad, in 1941 to 1942, about one-third to one-half of the population remaining in the city died of hunger, mostly during the first winter. The rations in the worst period were
October 1941
the basic ration was down to 400 grams of bread a day for workers and 200 grams for dependents
Late November 1941
250 grams for workers and 125 for dependents
Late December 1941
up to 350 grams for workers and 200 for dependents
169
At Leningrad, there were small additional rations of meat and sugar; lumber workers got a supplementary ration above the norm; and a truly major difference is that in camps the prisoners never got their full ration, and if there was a bad or inedible portion of the original bulk ration, that was the part that went to them. Solzhenitsyn describes what happens to the groat issue:
Shukhov had had thousands of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he’d never had a chance to weigh a single one of them on a scale … he and every other prisoner had known a long time that the people who cut up and issued your bread wouldn’t last long if they gave you honest rations. Every ration was short. The only question was—by how much?170