Dostoevsky’s type of camp was abolished in the 1850s. (He makes the point that he is “describing the past.”) But even nonliterary prisoners in Stalin’s camps were able to make other comparisons—for example, one prisoner was a Polish Communist who had served two years in Wronki jail in Poland for political offenses. In the Polish jail, the prisoners had been locked in only at night, by day they were allowed in the garden; they were allowed any books from outside, unlimited correspondence, and weekly baths; there were five of them in a large room.115
THE PENAL EMPIRE
In the vast empty spaces in the north and the Far East, areas as big as fair-sized countries came under complete NKVD control. There were many camps scattered through the Urals, in the Archangel area, and more especially in and around Karaganda and on the new railway being built from Turkestan to Siberia. But in these, the NKVD administered only comparatively small enclaves. Even in the huge Karlag complex around Karaganda, where there were about 100,000 prisoners, they were in camps scattered over an area the size of France among other settlements, mostly of deported “free” labor. (These so-called free exiles were men and women whose innocence was absolutely clear even to the examining judges. In some areas, they were often little more than vagabonds, sleeping under bridges, begging their bread, and seeking work or even arrest to save themselves from starvation.)116
The two biggest true colonies of the NKVD empire were the great stretch of northwestern Russia beyond Kotlas, comprising roughly what is shown on the map as the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and the even vaster area of the Far East centered on the gold fields of Kolyma. These regions had, before the NKVD took over, populations of a handful of Russians and a few thousand Arctic tribesmen. A decade later, they held between them something between 1.25 and 2 million prisoners. For these great areas we have accounts from both Soviet and émigré publications.
The Soviet Arctic is a world of its own. The feeling of having been thrown out from normal life was accentuated by the physical phenomena. In winter, there is the extreme, extravagant cold; the short days in which a swollen, livid sun raises itself for a few hours above the horizon—or, in the Arctic proper, simply lightens the sky somewhat without appearing; the soundlessly flickering ion-stream of the aurora borealis. In summer, the long days; the mosquitoes; the slushy swamp of the melted surface, with its alien vegetation—bog cotton and dwarf willow a few inches high; and below it, hard as rock, the permafrost. South of this true tundra is the even wilder forest belt, the taiga, where the great complex of timber camps lay.
Most of the northern camps were separated from the country as a whole by vast stretches of empty land, sparsely inhabited by tribal hunters, the Chukchi, Yakut, Nentsi—the last being the Samoyeds, cannibals, from whom Ivan the Terrible had recruited his fiercest guards. Most of these were happy to turn in prisoners for a bounty, having in any case a general hostility to Russians.
KOLYMA
The largest camp area was that which came under Dalstroy, the Far Eastern Construction Trust. The exact boundaries of Dalstroy’s control have never been exactly determined, but it seems to have included all the territory beyond the Lena and north of the Aldan, at least as far east as the Gydan Range—a territory four times the size of France.
Its prison population was never as large as the Pechora region’s, being usually around 500,000. But the death rate was so high that more individual prisoners inhabited its camps at one time or another than any other region. Since it was supported by sea, and the number of ships, their capacity, and their average number of trips are known with reasonable accuracy, we can compute a probable minimum of 2 million dead.117
The main concentration of camps was in the Kolyma gold fields, based on Magadan, with its port of Nagayevo.118 Gold mining started on a big scale in the early 1930s. In 1935, a series of awards was announced in the gold-mining industry, with great publicity to all concerned. Most of those named were mentioned as working at Kolyma, under E. P. Berzin, the “Director.” High among the awards of Orders, a different decree was inserted—commuting the sentences and restoring the civil rights of five engineers in the gold industry for their services.
