The Secret History of Soviet Russia’s Police State by Martyn Whittock

Author:Martyn Whittock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Others simply passed on the warning: ‘Kolyma znaczit smert’ (Kolyma means death). Here there were gold mines, coal mines, logging operations. Within a year, many prisoners were dokhodyaga (goners), worn out by hard work, poor food, the cold of winter and mosquito-plagued summers, and by brutal treatment. Among themselves, prisoners often referred to this as katorga (hard labour), a term dating from tsarist times. During the Great Patriotic War (1941–5) the term was even used officially to describe the work regime in camps for those designated as ‘war criminals’. Among those worked to death in the Kolyma region was Mikhail Kravchuk, an acclaimed mathematician. As well as a human tragedy, such a prisoner was an immense loss to Soviet science. He was a very expensive labourer. The total number of prisoners passing through Kolyma between 1930 and 1953 was somewhere in the region of 2 million, probably more. How many died is extremely hard to determine and estimates vary hugely, ranging from 250,000 to more than 1 million fatalities.20

Anywhere in the USSR, convicts could be found labouring on many enterprises, ranging from gold mines to logging camps in the vast expanse of the taiga, railway construction to Pacific fishing camps, Moscow camps where engineers designed aircraft to agricultural camps in Uzbekistan. Brilliant scientists might be worked to death as convict labourers in the frozen north or in Kolyma, or their skills might cause them to be employed in a sharashka, a Gulag research and development laboratory. The variety was enormous and the secret police presided over a slave empire of vast proportions.

Conditions in the camps and sub-camps varied greatly, depending on the character and the whim of the local camp boss, and the regime he encouraged among the guards. One prisoner might find themselves hounded to destruction by a sadistic guard; another prisoner might find a guard inexplicably saved their life. The Polish prisoner, Jan Lewcun, was arrested in 1940 (his ‘crime’ was being Polish and capable of hard labour) and was eventually confined in a gold-mining camp in the Kolyma region. When his bread ration was stolen by another prisoner, he knew he was doomed and sat by the fence, waiting to be shot, to end the suffering. A passing guard called to him, ‘Pick up the shovel and start working, but be here the next time I come around.’ When the guard returned, he tossed a packet of meat sandwiches over the fence. Jan Lewcun survived.21

Life and death could seem quite arbitrary and dictated by factors beyond a prisoner’s control. In 1937–8, many camps were virtual death camps. But this changed noticeably, in 1939, with the fall of Yezhov and his replacement by Beria, and a reinstatement of economic productivity as a camp’s objective, instead of the swift elimination of prisoners which had so characterised the height of the Yezhovshchina.22 These changes in priorities affected the lives of millions of zeks, who were at the receiving end of policies decided in Moscow. Conditions across the Gulag would change

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