The Great Terror полностью

For about two months in winter, there is no sunrise at all. One calmly written account of the Kolyma camps has as a natural chapter heading: “Sickness, Self-mutilation, Suicide.”¹³⁰

Not, of course, that these were limited to Kolyma. But in Kolyma the death rate was particularly high, and the despair rate, too. Gorbatov, a strong man with great will power who had even resisted interrogation successfully, tells us that he barely survived less than a year in the gold camps. The death rate among the miners is estimated in fact at about 30 percent per annum,¹³¹ though it varied to some extent with location, type of work, and personality of commandant. A Kolyma prisoner comments that it is rarely possible to live on the camp ration for more than two years. By the fourth, at the very latest, the prisoner is incapable of work, and by the fifth year he can no longer be alive.¹³² In one of the Kolyma penal camps which had started a year with 3,000 inmates, 1,700 were dead by the end, and another 800 in hospital with dysentery.¹³³ In another—a regular camp—it is estimated that 2,000 out of 10,000 died in a year.¹³⁴ Of some 3,000 Poles, over a period of about fifteen months, about 60 percent were counted dead.¹³⁵ A Soviet article of 1988 says that “of every one hundred inmates of Kolyma, only two or three survived.”¹³⁶

In a camp there described in the Khrushchev-period press,¹³⁷ inmates did a twelve-hour day. The food ration for 100 percent norm was 800 grams of bread per day. Nonfulfillment of norms, through whatever cause, automatically entailed a reduction of the bread ration to 500 grams. This was just above starvation level; any further reduction to 300 grams (as a punitive measure) meant certain death. Work at the surface gold sites was performed in accordance with a strict division of labor. Two men had to start a bonfire, and this had to be done without matches, by the ancient method of striking sparks with flints. Another man had to fetch water from the frozen river and melt it. Next, the deeply frozen ground had to be softened, then excavated, and the sand passed through sieves in search of gold.

Three youths of about seventeen appeared in this camp. They looked younger than their age, perhaps because they were so thin as to be almost emaciated. After the death of the father of one of them, the son had found a collection of Lenin’s works, and in the last volume an envelope containing a copy of Lenin’s Testament. Not keeping it a secret, he and his closest associates were arrested on a charge of terrorism and counter-revolution, and sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labor. So there they all were—three boys and two girls in Kolyma and others of the youthful group dispersed in other prison camps.

There were several women’s camps in the Kolyma area. Eugenia Ginzburg (the mother of the writer Aksyonov), who became a nurse just in time to save her life, and survived to be rehabilitated, gives an account of the Elgen camp which makes it clear that it was a killer. She describes the impossibility of the tree-felling norm, the trade in sex, the using up of the “quota” of medical exemptions on the common criminals, and the sole methods of survival—“threats, intrigue and graft.” Women prisoners who had become illegally pregnant in illicit camp intercourse were among those sent to Elgen. They were allowed to try to feed their babies, but milk hardly came, owing to the rations and work, and after a few weeks usually ceased altogether, whereupon “the baby would have to fight for its life” on patent foods. As a result, “the turnover of ‘mothers,’ was very rapid.”¹³⁸ Even worse was the women’s disciplinary camp at Mylga where they worked in the gypsum quarries.¹³⁹

Gorbatov and others note NKVD officers saving old mates in the services or the Party by giving them easy jobs. This old-boys’ network was all very well for those with good connections. A Soviet source gives the other side of the picture. A commandant discovered his former general among the doomed dokhodyagi—“goners”—and gave him a post in the store. A Jew called Dodya Shmuller, who had been a trouble to the authorities through constantly demanding his rights under the regulations, was then in the punitive isolator on 300 grams of bread a day, and unlikely to survive. When he heard of the general being saved, he put in one last formal complaint, about his ration, but merely received a further spell in the isolator.¹⁴⁰

Another disciplinary case is of a team accused of concealing gold which they had dug up. Their quarters were thoroughly searched, but nothing was found. However, in order to “teach the men a lesson,” the whole team was sentenced to solitary confinement in a punitive section known as “Stalin’s Villa.” Only a few survived.¹⁴¹