Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books) by Orlando Figes

Author:Orlando Figes [Figes, Orlando]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780141930855
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

Stalin’s final warning turned out to be prophetic. Ten years later, in 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

The rates of growth that Stalin had demanded in the Five Year Plan could not have been achieved without the use of forced labour, particularly in the cold and remote regions of the far north and Siberia, where so many of the Soviet Union’s precious economic resources (diamonds, gold, platinum and nickel, oil, coal and timber) were located but where nobody would freely go. The Gulag was the key to opening up these areas for Soviet industry. Sending millions of prisoners to dig mines and canals, build railways and chop down forests in Arctic zones made an incalculable contribution to the country’s economic growth.

The word ‘Gulag’ is an acronym for the Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies. The Soviet prison system started as a means of isolating ‘counter-revolutionary elements’. But with the beginning of the Five Year Plan it became a form of economic colonization – a cheap and rapid way of settling and exploiting the industrial resources of the far north and Siberia through an archipelago of labour camps and colonies, factories, canals, mines and railway-building sites – a slave economy that would spread its dark shadow over the entire Soviet Union.

Solzhenitsyn placed the Gulag at the heart of the Bolshevik experiment. Forced-labour camps had been set up in the Civil War, mainly as a means of punishing the revolution’s enemies, but for economic projects too. In some ways the mentality that led to the Gulag had its origins in the Bolshevik view of human beings as raw material, a commodity to be expended by the state to reach the revolution’s goals. Trotsky spoke of the labour armies he conscripted in the final stages of the Civil War as ‘peasant raw material’ (muzhitskoe syr’ie). Around the same time the Bolsheviks began to talk of the ‘workforce’ (rabsila) rather than the ‘working class’ (rabochii klass) – a symbolic shift that turned the workers from an active agent of the revolution into an object of the planned economy. Here were the intellectual origins of the Gulag – in the idea of dragooning long lines of half-starved and ragged slaves on to building-sites. It was only later, to mask this slave economy, that the Bolsheviks developed the lofty rationale of perekovka (the ‘reforging’ of deviant human beings through corrective labour) as a philosophical justification for the Gulag labour camps.

The labour camps of the 1920s were basically prisons in which the inmates were made to work for their keep. The pattern was set at Solovki, the Solovetsky Camp of Special Significance (SLON), which had been established by OGPU in the former White Sea island monastery in 1923.

One of the prisoners at Solovki was Naftaly Frenkel, a businessman from Palestine arrested for smuggling contraband to Soviet Russia. Shocked by the prison’s inefficiency, Frenkel wrote a letter setting out his ideas on how to run the camp, and put it in the ‘suggestions box’ (they had them even in prisons).

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