The Great Terror полностью

Camps for mass work which includes those in “distant regions” for “class-dangerous elements” requiring “a more severe regime.” (Article 34)

Punitive camps for the “strict isolation” of those “previously detained in other colonies and showing persistent insubordination.” (Article 35)

The first category was mainly for very minor offenses against factory discipline, and for petty thieves. All sentenced under Article 58 or by the Special Board went initially to category two.

The labor camp was one of the pillars of Stalin’s whole system. Concealment of its nature from the West was one of his most extraordinary triumphs.

For the evidence on the camps was, by the late 1940s, overwhelming and detailed. Thousands of former inmates had reached the West, and their wholly consistent stories were supported by a good deal of documentation, such as the many labor-camp forms and letters reproduced in David J. DaIlin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky’s Forced Labour in Soviet Russia and, indeed, by the Corrective Labor Codex of the RSFSR, produced with much effect by the British delegation to the United Nations in 1949. Yet it was possible for Western intellectuals to disbelieve this material, and to join in Soviet-sponsored campaigns condemning all who revealed it as slanderers.

And, indeed, there had long been an alternative Soviet story. There were, it is true, corrective labor establishments of a highly beneficent type. Their operations could be seen in such works as Pogodin’s play The Aristocrats, which showed how prisoners were reclaimed at labor on the White Sea Canal and elsewhere. Pogodin represents bandits, thieves, and even “wrecker” engineers being reformed by labor. A regenerated engineer, now working enthusiastically at a project, has his old mother visit him. The kindly camp chief puts his car at her disposal, and she is delighted at her son’s healthy physical appearance. “How beautifully you have reeducated me,” a thief remarks, while another sings, “I am reborn, I want to live and sing.”

And much of the hostile evidence came from people who had been unjustly imprisoned in camps, and who had come to oppose the Stalin regime. They were, therefore, “anti-Soviet,” and purveyors of “anti-Soviet propaganda.” By this system, no evidence whatever of any facts unpalatable to Stalin could ever be admissible. As Bertrand Russell wrote of a labor-camp book:

The book ends with letters from eminent Communists saying that no such camps exist. Those who write these letters and those fellow-travellers who allow themselves to believe them share responsibility for the almost unbelievable horrors which are being inflicted upon millions of wretched men and women, slowly done to death by hard labour and starvation in the Arctic cold. Fellow-travellers who refuse to believe the evidence of books such as Mr Herling’s are necessarily people devoid of humanity, for if they had any humanity they would not merely dismiss the evidence, but would take some trouble to look into it.¹

As Russell truly remarks, it was “millions” who suffered. And here we have a point on which admissions only began to appear in the Soviet media in 1987 to 1989. While the publications in Khrushchev’s time of such books as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and of various memoirs by former camp inmates amounted to an acknowledgment that the long-disputed evidence produced in the West was accurate through and through, this applied to the nature of the camp system, not—or not explicitly—to its extent.

What many people of good will found hard to believe was less the existence of the system, in all its unpleasantness, than the numbers of prisoners alleged to be detained in them. When figures like 10 million were mentioned, it was an almost instinctive feeling that this did not accord with common sense, with normal experience. Nor, of course, did it. But, then, the reality of Stalin’s activities was often disbelieved because they seemed to be unbelievable. His whole style consisted of doing what had previously been thought morally or physically inconceivable.

Even so, it is difficult not to reject the larger figures out of hand as “obviously” exaggerated, and a very definite effort has to be made when we consider the evidence. This is multifarious, but inexact, and estimates have ranged from about 5 million upward. I am inclined to accept a figure of about 7 million purgees in the camps in 1938. This cannot, in any case, be very far wrong.