Reports of physical violence are common.96 Refusal to work seems to have been punished variously: in the Far Eastern area, by immediate shooting; elsewhere, by stripping the offender and standing him in the snow until he submitted or by solitary confinement on 200 grams of bread. For a second offense, death was usual. And in camp, not only “sabotage” but also “anti-Soviet propaganda” might be treated as a capital crime.97
Occasional tightening of lax discipline in the camps led to the sudden infliction of penalties on a large scale. Appeals to the regulations were treated as repeated and willful refusal to work. In 1937, 400 prisoners were executed in a batch in Karaganda on such charges.98 A “mutiny” is reported in a camp near Kemerovo near the end of 1938. It was, in fact, a strike against rotten food. Fourteen of the ringleaders, twelve men and two women, were shot in front of all the rest of the prisoners, and then details from each hut helped to dig the graves.99
Apart from these executions for “disciplinary” reasons, often announced openly in the camps with the purpose of intimidating the occupants further, there were many killings of a different kind. Orders would come from Moscow for the liquidation of a given number of ex-oppositionists, and the quota would then be fulfilled by a cursory reinterrogation—not on activity in the camps, but on newly discovered circumstances in connection with the original offense, transforming it into a capital crime. For mass operations of this kind, special commissions were on occasion sent down, and given special powers and premises where the doomed men were transferred for investigation and death. For example, one such center was established in an abandoned brick factory in the Vorkuta area, where some 1,300 politicals are reported executed in the winter of 1937.100
In most of the main camp areas, there seem also to have been established special and highly secret “Central Isolation Prisons” covering a given group of camps. To one such, in Bamlag, we are told that some 50,000 prisoners were “transferred” for execution in the two years 1937 and 1938. The victims were tied up with wire like logs, stacked in trucks, driven out to a selected area, and shot.101
The Hungarian Communist writer Lengyel, himself a camp veteran, describes one of these special extermination camps in the Norilsk area, as what is evidently intended as authentic background, in his story “The Yellow Poppies”: the camp is wound up first by the execution of the remaining prisoners, and then by special NKVD squads who move in and execute all the staff and guards. Owing to the permafrost, it is impossible to bury the bodies, and they are piled into veritable hills and covered with truckloads of earth, the whole matter remaining unknown even in neighboring camps, and even when the camp site itself is later reoccupied as a prison hospital.
Prisoners are also reported shot to check epidemics, as in December 1941 at Kozhva, where the victims are said to have included the Bulgarian Communist leader Danko Sapunov.102 There have also long been unofficial reports of barge-loads of prisoners no longer able to work, or otherwise superfluous, being sunk in the Arctic seas. One of the missing groups of Polish officers is believed to have been killed in this way, and we are also told that this is how the poet Narbut perished.103 The Soviet press has lately confirmed the use of this method of liquidation—reporting, for example, that such was the fate of two leading Ukrainian intellectuals: the writer Hrihory Epik and the director Les Kurbas.104
The routine punishment was the punitive “isolators” built in each camp, and quite deadly. At Solzhenitsyn’s,
the fellows from 104 had built the place themselves and they knew how it looked—stone walls, a concrete floor, and no window. There was a stove, but that was only enough to melt the ice off the walls and make puddles on the floor. You slept on bare boards and your teeth chattered all night. You got six ounces of bread a day and they only gave you hot gruel every third day.
Ten days! If you had ten days in the cells here and sat them out to the end, it meant you’d be a wreck for the rest of your life. You got T.B. and you’d never be out of hospitals as long as you lived.
And the fellows who did fifteen days were dead and buried.105
