Between 1947 and 1951, Glavgidrostroi and Volgostroi (another system of MVD labor camps) was in charge of the construction of the Volga-Don Canal, which connected the Volga and Don Rivers.169 Chief Engineer Zhuk received a special high salary for managing the slave labor on this project.170 After the reorganization of Glavgidrostroi in the late 1950s, Zhuk continued his career as a member of the Academy of Sciences (elected in 1953).171 The construction plans for the dams and canals that caused so much environmental damage to the Volga, Angara, and Yenisei river basins were developed under his guidance at this institute. Praise for people like Zhuk continues in Russia today.
For instance, in 1993, the official journal of the Russian Academy, Vestnik Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, congratulated geologist Academician Nikolai Shilo on his eightieth birthday.172 A short biography written in the style of the Brezhnev period declares that “besides his scientific research work, N. A. Shilo made a tremendous contribution to the organization of science in the northeastern region of the country [Russia].” It was not explained that Shilo started his career in the Far East as a high-ranking functionary of the MVD system in charge of countless gold-mining labor camps. In 1949, he was appointed director of the All-Union Research Institute One for Gold and Rare Metals (VNII-1), one of the main branches of the MVD system in the Soviet Far East.173 In Stalin’s Russia, the geographic names Magadan and Kolyma, where Shilo worked, were the predecessors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The writer Georgii Demidov, who spent fourteen years in several of the worst Kolyma labor camps, named Kolyma “Oswiecim [Auschwitz] without ovens.”174 Shilo’s biography also mentions him as “an honorable citizen of the city of Magadan and the city of Winnipeg (Canada),” as well as “an honorable Doctor of Science of Ohio State University” (apparently he received an honorary degree there as a consequence of some joint scientific project during Soviet times).
In 1964, Shilo was elected a corresponding member and in 1970 he became a full member of the academy. In 1960, he was appointed director of the Academy North–Far Eastern Scientific Center (in Magadan), and in 1977, he became head of the presidium of this center.175 After many years of work in the Academy of Sciences system, Shilo was known among Russian scientists as a person who still used the language of Gulag functionaries. Even in the 1990s, when inviting a person into his office, Shilo continued to say “Vvedite,” which is an order to bring a prisoner in, instead of “Voidite,” which means an invitation to come in.
Another academician and commissar/minister of marine transport (in 1941–1948), Pyotr Shirshov (1905–1953), was in charge of transportation of prisoners to the Dalstroi (Main Directorate for Building in the Far East), shipments of supplies for them, and transportation of the slave labor products back to the “main” land. Before his career as a Soviet minister, Shirshov took part in several expeditions to the Arctic, including the first expedition on a drifting scientific station called “The Northern Pole” in 1937–1938.176 The Soviet press of the time presented the first explorers of the Northern Pole as national heroes. Shiroshov was elected academician in 1939, when Stalin himself, Vyshinsky, and many other officials became members of the academy.
I found out about the involvement of Academician Shirshov in Gulag activity only in recently published archival materials, in the catalog of the formerly top-secret Special Files of Beria.177 In 1949, Shirshov, who at the time was characterized as a “Soviet patriot and a true son of the Party of Lenin and Stalin,”178 headed a state commission that worked on speeding up the transportation of the MVD prisoners to the Dalstroi. He was personally responsible for transport ships (including the dreaded Dzhurma)179 that were infamous for their inhuman conditions.180 In 1946, Shirshov organized transportation of Japanese POWs from Korea to different USSR labor camps for “work at industrial sites of different ministries.”181 Later, Shirshov was involved in other movements of prisoners182 and personally asked Beria not to reduce the number of prisoners working at Latvian ports.183 In 1946, he became director of the Academy Institute of Oceanology. After Shirshov’s death, this institute was given his name: P. P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, Russian Academy of Sciences. Besides the institute, a bay on Franz Josef Land and an underwater ridge in the Bering Sea bear the name of this Gulag manager and academician.
Psychologically, Shirshov’s involvement in Dalstroi work is not easy to imagine. He knew very well what transportation meant for scores of thousands of prisoners. His own wife, the thirty-three-year-old actress Yevgeniya Garkusha, was arrested in 1946 and sent to the Kolyma gold mines, where she died almost immediately.184 Shirshov was never told the reason for her arrest.
Magadan and Kolyma (the Dalstroi region) were the main areas for gold-mining labor camps in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s time. Dalstroi’s gold was no less bloody than the “Jewish” gold from the Nazi extermination camps that the Swiss banks held for so long.185 The life span of prisoners in the Kolyma mines was about one year. To stay alive was even worse. There were special labor camps for thousands of frostbitten invalids without fingers, hands, feet, noses, or ears.186 In 1940, the Dalstroi mines produced about 300 tons of gold.187 Of the 10,000–12,000 Polish POWs sent to Kolyma in 1940–1941 after the occupation of Poland by Nazi and Soviet troops (according to the Stalin-Hitler agreement of 1939), only 583 were still alive in 1942–1943.188 The number of Polish victims who died in the Dalstroi area is approximately the same as that of Polish officers killed in the Katyn Massacre. It is unfortunate that there is no movement to compensate the relatives of these Polish forced laborers as is now being pursued for Jewish forced labor in Nazi Germany.
Perhaps it is not hard to understand how “scientists” like Shilo evaded exposure for so long, as even many Americans of the era did not want to see what was going on. In summer 1944, the vice president of the United States, Henry A. Wallace, and a group of advisers headed by Professor Owen Lattimore and representing the Office of War Information visited the Kolyma area.189 This trip was apparently the result of political intrigues. President Franklin D. Roosevelt “simply wanted Wallace out of the country so he could select a more popular running mate for the fall election.”190 The NKVD officials of the Dalstroi reported personally to Stalin about the trip of the American delegation.191
The American delegation was completely fooled by the Soviet and NKVD-NKGB authorities. Members of the delegation did not notice the telltale signs of labor camps (such as the ubiquitous barbed wire) and were charmed by the most dreadful NKVD officials.192 In an article published by National Geographic Magazine at the end of 1944, Lattimore wrote:
Magadan is… a part of the domain of a remarkable concern, the Dalstroi (Far Northern Construction Company), which can be roughly compared to a combination of Hudson’s Bay Company and TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority]. It constructs and operates ports, roads, and railroads, and operates gold mines and municipalities, including, at Magadan, a first-class orchestra and a good light-opera company… As one American remarked, high-grade entertainment just naturally seems to go with gold, and so does high-powered executive ability.
Mr. Nikishov, the head of Dalstroi, had just been decorated with the Order of Hero of the Soviet Union for his extraordinary achievements.193 Both he and his wife have a trained and sensitive interest in art and music and also a deep sense of civic responsibility.