The Great Terror полностью

A detailed list of camp groups covering 35 clusters was given as early as 1937² (a cluster usually included about 200 camps of around 1,200 inmates each). In 1945, on the basis of reports from Poles allowed to leave under the Soviet–Polish treaty, a far more comprehensive account was given, together with a map, showing 38 administration clusters and groups (including 8 under Dalstroy—the “Far Eastern Construction Trust”).³ In 1948, Dallin and Nicolaevsky, on the basis of careful research, were able to list and describe the operations of 125 camps or camp clusters, mentioning that a number of others had been reported but not wholly confirmed.⁴

Like the other mechanisms from which Stalin constructed the Purge, the labor camps were no new invention.

With a few exceptions, our major accounts of labor-camp life come from intellectuals who were sent to them from 1935–1936 on. For the victims of the Yezhov terror included a higher proportion of urban, and of foreign, intellectuals than had the repressions of earlier years. As a result, we are inclined to think of the system as arising, or passing through an enormous quantitative or qualitative change, at the beginning of the Great Purge proper. There are, indeed, a few accounts by “intellectuals” from the earlier period—for example, Professor Tchernyavin—and these differ little from later ones. But on the whole, those who suffered in the first half of the 1930s were mainly peasants, who were less inclined to write books about their experiences—even though an equivalent proportion of them ended up in Western Europe as a result of the captures and migrations of the war.

There is one important exception. When Victor Kravchenko sued Les Lettres françaises in 1949 for having declared his book I Chose Freedom a fake, many otherwise unforthcoming refugees in the West sent in affidavits of experiences of theirs which confirmed his story, and a number of these were peasants who had been in camps from as early as 1930.

Their accounts⁵ (and earlier ones) make it clear that the system already existed in much the same form, if with fewer inmates, at this earlier stage. Brutalities are described, indeed, which for a time became less common in the mid-1930s. This probably signifies the automatic hostility of the NKVD cadres to those whom they were able to think of as a genuinely hostile class element—kulaks. At the same time, the tradition of the Russian vlast, of straightforward beating for the clods of peasants, compared with a certain restraint toward the intelligentsia who might have influential friends and relations, still prevailed. Later on, of course, the latter class became, if anything, the target of yet greater extremes of brutality. But up to 1936, preferential treatment of political prisoners could still be claimed even by imprisoned Trotskyites, a category later to be marked out for specially vicious treatment.

Camps seem to have been in existence as early as mid-1918, but the decrees legalizing them were passed in September 1918⁶ and April 1919.⁷ The first true death camp seems to have been at Kholmogori, near Archangel, in 1921. A list of sixty-five concentration camps administered in 1922 by the Main Administration of Forced Labor is given in the directory and address book All Russia of 1923.⁸ This Administration was merged in October 1922 with the Corrective Labor Section of the Commissariat of Justice, and the whole brought under the NKVD as the Main Administration of Places of Detention.

The first great camps were in the Solovetsky Monasteries in the far north. Here, in Tsarist times, the monks of the oldest tradition of isolation from the world had withstood a siege from 1668 to 1676, defending their faith in the Old Belief against the reformism of the time. When the camps were set up, some of the old monks were retained for a time to teach the convicts how to operate the fisheries. They were later liquidated for sabotage.⁹ At the Solovetsky camps, health conditions were very bad. Epidemics reduced the population from 14,000 to 8,000 in 1929 and 1930.¹⁰ In general, these were bad times in all the camps springing up around the White Sea. The average life span in them between 1929 and 1934 “did not exceed one or two years.”¹¹ This was almost always due to corruption and inefficiency among the jailers. The remedy was a conventional one. “The G.P.U. commission would come down from Moscow and shoot half the administration, after which convict life returned to its normal horror.”¹² The original Solovetsky “Camp of Special Designation” was changed in 1936 into a “Prison of Special Designation,” and in 1939 the surviving prisoners were transferred by sea to Norilsk and Dudinin.¹³

The statute on Corrective Labor Camps which governed the later period was adopted on 7 April 1930. The camps took their modern form at a time of vast expansion of the network.