Dzerzhinskii, Kamenev, and Stalin (the co-drafters of this decree) conceived of the camps as a combination “school of work” and pool of labor. In accord with their recommendation, the CEC adopted the following resolution:
The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission [Cheka] is empowered to confine to concentration camps, under the guidance of precise instructions concerning the rules of imprisonment in a concentration camp approved by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.128
For reasons that are not clear, in 1922 and subsequently, the term “concentration camps” was replaced by “camps of forced labor” (lageri prinuditel’nykh rabot).
On April 11, 1919, the CEC issued a “Decision” concerning the organization of such camps. It provided for the establishment of a network of forced labor camps under the authority of the Commissariat of the Interior—now headed by Dzerzhinskii:
Subject to internment in the camps of forced labor are individuals or categories of individuals concerning whom decisions had been taken by organs of the administration, Chekas, Revolutionary Tribunals, People’s Courts, and other Soviet organs authorized to do so by decrees and instructions.129
Several features of this landmark decree call for comment. Soviet concentration camps, as instituted in 1919, were meant to be a place of confinement for all kinds of undesirables, whether sentenced by courts or by administrative organs. Liable to confinement in them were not only individuals but also “categories of individuals”—that is, entire classes: Dzerzhinskii at one point proposed that special concentration camps be erected for the “bourgeoisie.” Living in forced isolation, the inmates formed a pool of slave labor on which Soviet administrative and economic institutions could draw at no cost. The network of camps was run by the Commissariat of the Interior, first through the Central Administration of Camps and later through the Main Camp Administration (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lageriami), popularly known as Gulag. One can perceive here, not only in principle but also in practical detail, Stalin’s concentration camp empire: it differed from Lenin’s only in size.
The CEC resolutions approving the creation of concentration camps called for detailed instructions to guide their operations. A decree issued on May 12, 1919,130 spelled out in meticulous bureaucratic language the constitution of the camps: how they were to be organized, what were the duties and putative rights of the inmates. The decree ordered every provincial capital city to construct a forced labor camp capable of holding 300 or more inmates. Since Soviet Russia had (depending on the shifting fortunes of the Civil War) about thirty-eight provinces, this provision called for facilities for a minimum of 11,400 prisoners. But this figure could be greatly expanded, for the decree authorized also district capital cities to construct concentration camps, and these numbered in the hundreds. Responsibility for organizing the camps was given to the Cheka; after they were in place, authority over them was to pass to the local soviets. This provision, one of many in Bolshevik legislation meant to keep alive the myth that the soviets were “sovereign” organs, was rendered inoperative by the assignment of responsibility for the “general administration” of the camps in Soviet Russia to a newly formed Department of Forced Labor (Otdel Prinuditel’nykh Rabot) of the Commissariat of the Interior, which, as noted, happened to have been headed by the same individual who directed the Cheka.
Russian governments had an old tradition of exploiting convict labor: “In no other country has the utilization of forced labor in the economy of the state itself played as significant a role as in the history of Russia.”131 The Bolsheviks revived this tradition. Inmates of Soviet concentration camps, from their birth in 1919, had at all times to perform physical labor either inside or outside the place of confinement. “Immediately upon their arrival in the camp,” the instruction read, “all inmates are to be assigned to work and they are to occupy themselves with physical labor throughout their stay.” To encourage camp authorities to exploit prison labor to the fullest, as well as to save the government money, it was stipulated that the camps had to be fully self-supporting:
The costs of running the camp and the administration, when there is a full complement of inmates, must be covered by the inmates’ labor. The responsibility for deficits will be borne by the administration and the inmates in accord with rules stipulated in a separate instruction.*
Attempts to escape from the camps were subject to severe punishments: for a first attempt, a recaptured prisoner could have his sentence prolonged as much as ten times; for a second, he was to be turned over to a Revolutionary Tribunal, which could sentence him to death. To further discourage escapes, the camp authorities were empowered to institute “collective responsibility” (krugovaia poruka), which made fellow inmates accountable for each other. In theory, an inmate had the right to complain of mistreatment in a book kept for the purpose.
Thus, the modern concentration camp was born—an enclave within which human beings lost all rights and became slaves of the state. In this connection, the question may arise as to the difference between the status of an inmate in a concentration camp and that of an ordinary Soviet citizen. After all, no one in Soviet Russia enjoyed personal rights or had recourse to law, and everyone could be ordered, under decrees providing for compulsory labor, to work wherever the state wanted. The line separating freedom from imprisonment in the Soviet Russia of that time was indeed blurred. For example, in May 1919, Lenin decreed the mobilization of labor for military construction on the southern front.132 He stipulated that the mobilized work force was to consist “primarily of prisoners as well as citizens confined to concentration camps and sentenced to hard labor.” But if these were insufficient, the decree called for pulling “into the labor obligation also local inhabitants.” Here, camp inmates were distinguished from ordinary, “free” citizens only by being the first to be drafted for forced labor. Even so, significant differences separated the two categories. Citizens not confined to camps normally lived with their families and had access to the free market to supplement their rations, whereas camp inmates could have only occasional visits from relatives and were forbidden to receive food packages. Ordinary citizens did not live, day in and day out, under the watchful eyes of the commandant and his assistants (often Communist trusties), who were held responsible for squeezing enough labor from their charges to cover their own salaries as well as the costs of running the camp. Also, they were not quite so liable to be punished, under the practice of “collective responsibility,” for the actions of others.
At the end of 1920, Soviet Russia had eighty-four concentration camps with approximately 50,000 prisoners; three years later (October 1923), the number had increased to 315 camps with 70,000 inmates.133
Information on conditions in the early Soviet concentration camps is sparse and few scholars have shown an interest in the subject.134 The occasional testimonies smuggled out by inmates or provided by survivors paint a picture that to the smallest detail resembles descriptions of Nazi camps: so much so that were it not that they had been published two decades earlier, one might suspect them to be recent forgeries. In 1922, Socialist-Revolutionary émigrés brought out in Germany, under the editorship of Victor Chernov, a volume of reports by survivors of Soviet prisons and camps. Included was a description of life in a concentration camp at Kholmogory, near Archangel, written in early 1921 by an anonymous female prisoner. The camp had four compounds holding 1,200 inmates. The prisoners were housed in an expropriated cloister whose accommodations were relatively comfortable and well heated. The author describes it nevertheless as a “death camp.” Hunger was endemic: food packages, some sent by American relief organizations, were immediately confiscated. The commandant, who bore a Latvian name, had prisoners shot for the most trifling offenses: if a prisoner, while working in the fields, dared to eat a vegetable that he had dug up, he was killed on the spot and then reported as having tried to escape. The flight of a prisoner automatically led to the execution of nine others, bound to him by “collective responsibility,” as provided for by law; a recaptured escapee was killed as well, sometimes by being buried alive. The administration regarded the inmates as ciphers, whose survival or death was a matter of no consequence.135