The most careful estimates of the camp population over the pre-Yezhov period run as follows:
In 1928, 30,000.
In 1930, over 600,000.
In 1931 and 1932, a total of nearly 2 million in “places of detention” can be estimated from figures given for the allotment per prisoner of newspapers, and a Moscow scholar recently estimates that of “over” 15 million dekulakized in the collectivization of 1930 to 1932, 1 million of the males of working age were sent directly to labor camps.14
In 1933 to 1935, Western estimates run mainly at the 5 million level (70 percent of them peasants),15 and in 1935 to 1937, a little higher.16 But recent Soviet analysis suggests that (omitting deportees held in NKVD “Special Settlements”) the true figure may be lower, in the 2 to 4 million range. A Soviet textbook of the 1930s gives the maximum numbers at forced labor (
TO THE CAMPS
This established system awaited the new intake. After sentence, the prisoners were crammed into Black Marias, of a type originally produced before the Revolution; they had then been designed for seven persons, but by narrowing the cellular partitions to a minimum, now took twenty-eight.18 Then, usually at night, they were loaded into the railway wagons taking them to their destination, either cattle wagons which had carried twelve horses or forty-eight men in the Tsarist wars and now held up to a hundred prisoners,19 or the specially made “Stolypin trucks,” named after the Tsarist Minister—though, as a Soviet writer says, “Why were these appalling narrow penal wagons called Stolypin trucks? They were of quite recent origin”—which often held twenty to thirty people in six-man compartments.20 These journeys to the camps might last months. For example, one prisoner describes a forty-seven-day railway journey from Leningrad to Vladivostok.21 Such trips are sometimes described as worse than the camps themselves. The crowded goods wagons were practically unheated in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer. Inadequate food and drinking water and sanitary arrangements caused great suffering and a high death rate. A foreign Communist complains of spending six weeks in a ship’s hold, on “one of the widest rivers in the world,” with only seven fluid ounces of drinking water a day.22
The train guards, from the so-called convoy troops of the NKVD, were particularly brutal and negligent. During transport to the camps, the NKVD’s regulation mania was not even formally observed when it came, for example, to rations. Sometimes there was nothing to drink the “tea” ration from. Often rations gradually got smaller and smaller, and the guards started failing to distribute them at all. Even the water to be provided was often forgotten for a day or two.23 A Soviet woman writer complains of the suffering caused by the provision of only one mug of water a day for all purposes on the long run from Moscow to Vladivostok.24
A Pole who collated the accounts of his countrymen deported in 1939 and 1940 remarks:
It seems almost impossible for any human being, when not experiencing any particular sensations of anger or vindictiveness and when not in danger of thereby being deprived of it himself, persistently to refuse to hand in a bucket of water to fifty or sixty human beings shut in under such conditions. It is a fact that these men did refuse to do so, and could keep up this attitude throughout journeys lasting four, five and six weeks. There were whole days of twenty-four hours when not a drop of anything to drink passed into the cars. There were periods even of thirty-six hours.25
The writer adds that in examining “many hundreds”26 of accounts, he has noted one case of a guard passing in an extra bucket, and five others of the doors being opened for ten minutes or so to relieve the fetor of the cars. Of the doctors or medical orderlies attached to each train, he found a few cases of “a little more than blank indifference” to particular children, and two records of decided kindness.27 The brutalization Bukharin had noted in the Party had reached down and everywhere reinforced a more archiac brutality. These train journeys were highly debilitating. A Soviet writer, later rehabilitated, describes a party of men being marched from Vladivostok Transit Camp to the embarkation point for Magadan immediately after coming off the train, without food. After several had collapsed and died, the remainder refused to go on, whereupon the guards panicked, started kicking the corpses, and shot a number of others.28
