Gulag Page 4

  Thus did their Siberian experience provide the Bolsheviks with an earlier model to build upon—and a lesson in the need for exceptionally strong punitive regimes.

  If the Gulag is an integral part of both Soviet and Russian history, it is inseparable from European history too: the Soviet Union was not the only twentieth-century European country to develop a totalitarian social order, or to build a system of concentration camps. While it is not the intention of this book to compare and contrast the Soviet and the Nazi camps, the subject cannot be comfortably ignored either. The two systems were built at roughly the same time, on the same continent. Hitler knew of the Soviet camps, and Stalin knew of the Holocaust. There were prisoners who experienced and described the camps of both systems. At a very deep level, the two systems are related.

  They are related, first of all, because both Nazism and Soviet communism emerged out of the barbaric experiences of the First World War and the Russian civil war, which followed on its heels. The industrialized methods of warfare put into wide use during both of these conflicts generated an enormous intellectual and artistic response at the time. Less noticed—except, of course, by the millions of victims—was the widespread use of industrialized methods of incarceration. Both sides constructed internment camps and prisoner-of-war camps across Europe from 1914 on. In 1918 there were 2.2 million prisoners of war on Russian territory. New technology—the mass production of guns, of tanks, even of barbed wire—made these and later camps possible. Indeed, some of the first Soviet camps were actually built on top of First World War prisoner-of-war camps.42

  The Soviet and Nazi camps are also related because they belong, together, to the wider history of concentration camps, which began at the end of the nineteenth century. By concentration camps, I mean camps constructed to incarcerate people not for what they had done, but for who they were. Unlike criminal prison camps, or prisoner-of-war camps, concentration camps were built for a particular type of noncriminal civilian prisoner, the member of an “enemy” group, or at any rate of a category of people who, for reasons of their race or their presumed politics, were judged to be dangerous or extraneous to society.43

  According to this definition, the first modern concentration camps were set up not in Germany or Russia, but in colonial Cuba, in 1895. In that year, in an effort to put an end to a series of local insurgencies, imperial Spain began to prepare a policy of reconcentración, intended to remove the Cuban peasants from their land and “reconcentrate” them in camps, thereby depriving the insurgents of food, shelter, and support. By 1900, the Spanish term reconcentración had already been translated into English, and was used to describe a similar British project, initiated for similar reasons, during the Boer War in South Africa: Boer civilians were “concentrated” into camps, in order to deprive Boer combatants of shelter and support.

  From there, the idea spread further. It certainly seems, for example, as if the term kontslager first appeared in Russian as a translation from the English “concentration camp,” probably thanks to Trotsky’s familiarity with the history of the Boer War.44 In 1904, German colonists in German South-West Africa also adopted the British model—with one variation. Instead of merely locking up the region’s native inhabitants, a tribe called the Herero, they made them carry out forced labor on behalf of the German colony.

  There are a number of strange and eerie links between these first German-African labor camps and those built in Nazi Germany three decades later. It was thanks to these southern African labor colonies, for example, that the word Konzentrationslager first appeared in the German language, in 1905. The first imperial commissioner of Deutsche Sud-West Afrika was one Dr. Heinrich Goering, the father of Hermann, who set up the first Nazi camps in 1933. It was also in these African camps that the first German medical experiments were conducted on humans: two of Joseph Mengele’s teachers, Theodor Mollison and Eugen Fischer, carried out research on the Herero, the latter in an attempt to prove his theories about the superiority of the white race. But they were not unusual in their beliefs. In 1912, a best-selling German book, German Thought in the World, claimed that nothing can convince reasonable people that the preservation of a tribe of South African kaffirs is more important for the future of humanity than the expansion of the great European nations and the white race in general . . . it is only when the indigenous people have learned to produce something of value in the service of the superior race . . . that they can be said to have a moral right to exist.45

  While this theory was rarely put so clearly, similar sentiments often lay just beneath the surface of colonial practice. Certainly some forms of colonialism both reinforced the myth of white racial superiority and legitimized the use of violence by one race against another. It can be argued, therefore, that the corrupting experiences of some European colonists helped pave the way for the European totalitarianism of the twentieth-century.46 And not only European: Indonesia is an example of a post-colonial state whose rulers initially imprisoned their critics in concentration camps, just as their colonial masters had.

  The Russian Empire, which had quite successfully vanquished its own native peoples in its march eastward, was no exception.47 During one of the dinner parties that takes place in Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, Anna’s husband—who has some official responsibilities for “Native Tribes”—holds forth on the need for superior cultures to absorb inferior ones.48 At some level, the Bolsheviks, like all educated Russians, would have been aware of the Russian Empire’s subjugation of the Kirgiz, Buryats, Tungus, Chukchi, and others. The fact that it didn’t particularly concern them—they, who were otherwise so interested in the fate of the downtrodden—itself indicates something about their unspoken assumptions.

  But then, full consciousness of the history of southern Africa or of eastern Siberia was hardly required for the development of European concentration camps: the notion that some types of people are superior to other types of people was common enough in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. And this, finally, is what links the camps of the Soviet Union and those of Nazi Germany in the most profound sense of all: both regimes legitimated themselves, in part, by establishing categories of “enemies ” or “sub-humans” whom they persecuted and destroyed on a mass scale.

  In Nazi Germany, the first targets were the crippled and the retarded. Later, the Nazis concentrated on Gypsies, homosexuals, and, above all, on the Jews. In the USSR the victims were, at first, the “former people”—alleged supporters of the old regime—and later the “enemies of the people,” an ill-defined term which would come to include not only alleged political opponents of the regime, but also particular national groups and ethnicities, if they seemed (for equally ill-defined reasons) to threaten the Soviet state or Stalin’s power. At different times Stalin conducted mass arrests of Poles, Balts, Chechens, Tartars, and—on the eve of his death—Jews. 49

  Although these categories were never entirely arbitrary, they were never entirely stable either. Half a century ago, Hannah Arendt wrote that both the Nazi and the Bolshevik regimes created “objective opponents” or “objective enemies,” whose “identity changes according to the prevailing circumstances—so that, as soon as one category is liquidated, war may be declared on another.” By the same token, she added, “the task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.”50 Again: people were arrested not for what they had done, but for who they were.

  In both societies, the creation of concentration camps was actually the final stage in a long process of dehumanization of these objective enemies— a process which began, at first, with rhetoric. In his autobiography, Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote of how he had suddenly realized that the Jews were responsible for Germany’s problems, that “any shady undertaking, any form of foulness” in public life was connected to the Jews: “on putting the probing knife to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a l
ittle Jew who was often blinded by the suddenness of the light . . .”51

  Lenin and Stalin also began by blaming “enemies” for the Soviet Union’s myriad economic failures: they were “wreckers” and “saboteurs” and agents of foreign powers. From the late 1930s, as the wave of arrests began to expand, Stalin took this rhetoric to greater extremes, denouncing the “enemies of the people” as vermin, as pollution, as “poisonous weeds.” He also spoke of his opponents as “filth” which had to be “subjected to ongoing purification”—just as Nazi propaganda would associate Jews with images of vermin, of parasites, of infectious disease.52

  Once demonized, the legal isolation of the enemy began in earnest. Before the Jews were actually rounded up and deported to camps, they were deprived of their status as German citizens. They were forbidden to work as civil servants, as lawyers, as judges; forbidden to marry Aryans; forbidden to attend Aryan schools; forbidden to display the German flag; forced to wear gold stars of David; and subjected to beatings and humiliation on the street.53 Before their actual arrest in Stalin’s Soviet Union, “enemies” were also routinely humiliated in public meetings, fired from their jobs, expelled from the Communist Party, divorced by their disgusted spouses, and denounced by their angry children.

  Within the camps, the process of dehumanization deepened and grew more extreme, helping both to intimidate the victims and to reinforce the victimizers’ belief in the legitimacy of what they were doing. In her book-length interview with Franz Stangl, the commander of Treblinka, the writer Gitta Sereny asked Stangl why camp inmates, before being killed, were also beaten, humiliated, and deprived of their clothing. Stangl answered, “To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies. To make it possible for them to do what they did.”54 In The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, the German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky has also shown how the dehumanization of prisoners in the Nazi camps was methodically built into every aspect of camp life, from the torn, identical clothing, to the deprivation of privacy, to the heavy regulation, to the constant expectation of death.

  In the Soviet system, the dehumanization process also began at the moment of arrest, as we shall see, when prisoners were stripped of their clothes and identity, denied contact with outsiders, tortured, interrogated, and put through farcical trials, if they were tried at all. In a peculiarly Soviet twist on the process, prisoners were deliberately “excommunicated” from Soviet life, forbidden to refer to one another as “comrade,” and, from 1937 on, prohibited from earning the coveted title of “shock-worker,” no matter how well they behaved or how hard they worked. Portraits of Stalin, which hung in homes and offices throughout the USSR, almost never appeared inside camps and prisons, according to many prisoner accounts.

  None of which is to say that the Soviet and Nazi camps were identical. As any reader with any general knowledge of the Holocaust will discover in the course of this book, life within the Soviet camp system differed in many ways, both subtle and obvious, from life within the Nazi camp system. There were differences in the organization of daily life and of work, different sorts of guards and punishments, different kinds of propaganda. The Gulag lasted far longer, and went through cycles of relative cruelty and relative humanity. The history of the Nazi camps is shorter, and contains less variation: they simply became crueler and crueler, until the retreating Germans liquidated them or the invading Allies liberated them. The Gulag also contained a wide variety of camps, from the lethal gold mines of the Kolyma region to the “luxurious” secret institutes outside Moscow, where prisoner scientists designed weapons for the Red Army. Although there were different kinds of camps in the Nazi system, the range was far narrower.

  Above all, however, two differences between the systems strike me as fundamental. First, the definition of “enemy” in the Soviet Union was always far more slippery than the definition of “Jew” in Nazi Germany. With an extremely small number of unusual exceptions, no Jew in Nazi Germany could change his status, no Jew inside a camp could reasonably expect to escape death, and all Jews carried this knowledge with them at all times. While millions of Soviet prisoners feared they might die—and millions did—there was no single category of prisoner whose death was absolutely guaranteed. At times, certain prisoners could improve their lot by working in relatively comfortable jobs, as engineers or geologists. Within each camp there was a prisoner hierarchy, which some were able to climb at the expense of others, or with the help of others. At other times—when the Gulag found itself overburdened with women, children, and old people, or when soldiers were needed to fight at the front—prisoners were released in mass amnesties. It sometimes happened that whole categories of “enemies” suddenly benefited from a change in status. Stalin arrested hundreds of thousands of Poles, for example, at the start of the Second World War in 1939—and then abruptly released them from the Gulag in 1941 when Poland and the USSR became temporary allies. The opposite was also true: in the Soviet Union, perpetrators could become victims themselves. Gulag guards, administrators, even senior officers of the secret police, could also be arrested and find themselves sentenced to camps. Not every “poisonous weed” remained poisonous, in other words—and there was no single group of Soviet prisoners who lived with the constant expectation of death.55

  Second—as, again, will become evident in the course of this book—the primary purpose of the Gulag, according to both the private language and the public propaganda of those who founded it, was economic. This did not mean that it was humane. Within the system, prisoners were treated as cattle, or rather as lumps of iron ore. Guards shuttled them around at will, loading and unloading them into cattle cars, weighing and measuring them, feeding them if it seemed they might be useful, starving them if they were not. They were, to use Marxist language, exploited, reified, and commodified. Unless they were productive, their lives were worthless to their masters.

  Nevertheless, their experience was quite different from that of the Jewish and other prisoners whom the Nazis sent to a special group of camps called not Konzentrationslager but Vernichtungslager— camps that were not really “labor camps” at all, but rather death factories. There were four of them: Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Majdanek and Auschwitz contained both labor camps and death camps. Upon entering these camps, prisoners were “selected.” A tiny number were sent to do a few weeks of forced labor. The rest were sent directly into gas chambers where they were murdered and then immediately cremated.

  As far as I have been able to ascertain, this particular form of murder, practiced at the height of the Holocaust, had no Soviet equivalent. True, the Soviet Union found other ways to mass-murder hundreds of thousands of its citizens. Usually, they were driven to a forest at night, lined up, shot in the skull, and buried in mass graves before they ever got near a concentration camp—a form of murder no less “industrialized” and anonymous than that used by the Nazis. For that matter, there are stories of Soviet secret police using exhaust fumes—a primitive form of gas—to kill prisoners, just as the Nazis did in their early years.56 Within the Gulag, Soviet prisoners also died, usually not thanks to the captors’ efficiency but due to gross inefficiency and neglect.57 In certain Soviet camps, at certain times, death was virtually guaranteed for those selected to cut trees in the winter forest or to work in the worst of the Kolyma gold mines. Prisoners were also locked in punishment cells until they died of cold and starvation, left untreated in unheated hospitals, or simply shot at will for “attempted escape.” Nevertheless, the Soviet camp system as a whole was not deliberately organized to mass-produce corpses—even if, at times, it did.

  These are fine distinctions, but they matter. Although the Gulag and Auschwitz do belong to the same intellectual and historical tradition, they are nevertheless separate and distinct, both from one another and from camp systems set up by other regimes. The idea of the concentration camp may be general enough to be used in many different cultures and situations, but even a superficial study of the concentration camp’s c
ross-cultural history reveals that the specific details—how life in the camps was organized, how the camps developed over time, how rigid or disorganized they became, how cruel or liberal they remained—depended on the particular country, on the culture, and on the regime.58 To those who were trapped behind barbed wire, these details were critical to their life, health, and survival.

  In fact, reading the accounts of those who survived both, one is struck more by the differences between the victims’ experiences than by the differences between the two camp systems. Each tale has its own unique qualities, each camp held different sorts of horrors for people of different characters. In Germany you could die of cruelty, in Russia you could die of despair. In Auschwitz you could die in a gas chamber, in Kolyma you could freeze to death in the snow. You could die in a German forest or a Siberian waste-land, you could die in a mining accident or you could die in a cattle train. But in the end, the story of your life was your own.

  PART ONE

  THE ORIGINS OF THE GULAG, 1917—1939

  Chapter 1

  BOLSHEVIK BEGINNINGS

  But your spine has been smashed,

  My beautiful, pitiful era,

  And with an inane smile

  You look back, cruel and weak,

  Like an animal past its prime,

  At the prints of your own paws.

  —Osip Mandelstam, “Vek”1

  One of my goals is to destroy the myth that the cruelest era of repression began in 1936–37. I think that in future, statistics will show that the wave of arrests, sentences and exile had already begun at the beginning of 1918, even before the official declaration, that autumn, of the “Red Terror.” From that moment, the wave simply grew larger and larger, until the death of Stalin . . .