In one respect, Solzhenitsyn was lucky. He was not in a lumber camp. Here rations were notoriously low, and work was extremely hard. Professor Swianiewicz, who was himself in a lumber camp at one time, says that the former inmates are inclined to overestimate the proportion of prisoners sent to such work, probably because they were “under the constant fear of being sent to the forest. It was the equivalent of a death sentence for a person not accustomed to heavy physical work to be assigned for a long period to a felling brigade.”187 One former assistant to a doctor in a northern camp says that in two successive winters about 50 percent of the workers in some forestry brigades died. Overall, about 30 percent of the labor force was lost by death or total exhaustion per annum.188 A Pole who was briefly in Alekseyevka describes the visible death as extraordinary. He saw two drop dead as they left the gates with other brigades. In his own brigade, three died at the work site on the first day.’189 A very active man would sometimes remain healthy by producing 120 or 150 percent of his quota for a year or eighteen months, and then one night would be found dead of heart failure in his bunk.190
Even comparatively mild lumber camps were great killers. Finnish prisoners who were experts in the matter held that the norms prevailing were impossible even for the best-fed workers. They could only be brought down even to the barely tolerable level by various forms of cheating (tufta) and bribery—using the same logs over again by sawing off the stamped end, and so forth. Herling never came across a prisoner who had worked in the forest for more than two years. After a year, prisoners were usually incurable and, following transfer as “goners” to lighter work, retired to the mortuary.191
This was the last stage in the camps. When worn down, debilitated to the degree that no serious work could any longer be got out of them, prisoners were put on substarvation rations and allowed to hang around the camp doing odd jobs until they died. This category is recognized in Soviet as well as foreign books. Gorbatov, who describes the usual symptoms, confirms that to go sick was ordinarily fatal. For if you did, you had your ration cut and from that point there was no way out.192 This corps commander was at one time able to sweep the camp office floors, and there found an occasional crust to keep him going. He was himself saved from death by a friendly doctor who got him transferred to an easier post. In general, throughout the period, all our sources emphasize that survival for any length of time was rare in most camps except among those qualifying for “functions”—office jobs or other work enabling them to escape the main labor of the camp in question.
During bad periods “the camps of the disabled and unfit … became the most populous, and the largest labor brigades were those of the woodcutters and the gravediggers.”193 The dead were buried in pits, with small wooden tags attached with string to their legs.194
One estimate is that a batch of prisoners in the camps would, on the average, lose half its number in two or three years.195 An NKVD functionary who worked on the Baltic–White Sea Canal group of camps gave evidence196 that there were 250,000 prisoners in these camps at the beginning of the Purges, and the death rate was 700 a day, a figure also given elsewhere.197 However, 1,500 new prisoners came in daily, so the population continued to rise.
The mortality rate of the camps in 1933 is estimated at about 10 percent per annum, and in 1938 to be running at about 20 percent.198 The 1936 prisoners were almost all extinct by 1940. A woman who worked in a camp hospital notes that patients sentenced in 1937 and 1938 filled it in 1939 and 1940, but by 1941 there were few of them to be seen.199
In any case, of those who went into the camps, only a small proportion ever came out again. For long, some of the best evidence we had came from German Communists withdrawn from the camps and handed over to the Nazis in 1939 and 1940, from Poles released under the 1941 treaty, and from others who, benefiting from exceptional circumstances, were in for equally short periods. In general, releases were very rare, and survival until the post-Stalin amnesties rarer still.
The length of sentence anyhow made little difference. (Those who were released were in any case all rearrested around 1947–1948.) Upon the expiration of a sentence, it was usual for prisoners to be called before a Special Section officer and given a few more years, though in some cases they were sent back to prison in Moscow or elsewhere, reinterrogated, and sentenced for fresh crimes.
Shukhov sort of liked the way they pointed at him—the lucky guy nearly through with his sentence. But he didn’t really believe it. Take the fellows who should’ve been let out in the war. They were all kept in till forty-six—“till further notice.” And then those with three years who’d gotten five more slapped on. They twisted the law any way they wanted. You finished a ten-year stretch and they gave you another one. Or if not, they still wouldn’t let you go home.200
We do know of people who lasted up to seventeen years and were then rehabilitated—Snegov, referred to in Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, for instance, or Lieutenant-General Todorsky. They seem to have served in the less severe camps. But much of the published Soviet evidence until 1987 was from figures such as Gorbatov, who was among the rehabilitated officers of 1940 and would not otherwise have survived. (The routine of rehabilitation, in those few cases in which it applied, was slow. Gorbatov had, he later found out, been defended by Budenny, and on 20 March 1940 his sentence was rescinded and a review ordered. He did not get back from Magadan to the Butyrka until 25 December 1940. By 1 March 1941 he was in the Lubyanka, and on 5 March he was released.)
The other sort of Soviet witness was of the type of Solzhenitsyn, who says that though a man might possibly last ten years, any much longer period was out of the question—and this at a comparatively good period in camp history. Solzhenitsyn was in fact released after ten years, in the post-Stalin rehabilitations. He had fortunately been sentenced late in Stalin’s life. A man sentenced in 1938 would have had to wait seventeen or eighteen years. Of those arrested in the period 1936 to 1938, we can hardly allow 10 percent to have survived; in fact, a Soviet historian tells us that 90 percent of those who went to camp before the war perished, while Academician Sakharov notes that only 50,000 of the more than 600,000 party members sent to camp, rather than executed, survived.201 A million would be an outside figure. Of the other 7 million-odd, the number who died either by execution or in camps during the actual two-year Yezhov period may be taken as about 3 million.202 The rest followed over a period of years, during which time their number was continually added to by the victims of later arrest.
A recent Soviet article puts it that “their death was caused by unbearable toil, by cold and starvation, by unheard-of degradation and humiliation, by a life which could not have been endured by any other mammal.”203
In another we read,
I often hear the word “lucky” from those I am recording. I was lucky—the firing squad was replaced by twenty-five years of hard labor; lucky—I waited for hours on the tundra to be shot but wasn’t; lucky—I was transferred from general work to the meteorological station; lucky—I had enough time to take my daughter to my parents before the arrest; lucky…. One day we shall learn how many people died in the prisons and camps and how many returned.204