The Great Terror полностью

It is to be regretted that this testimony—very naturally strongly biased—mixes up personal observation and experience of conditions that are, in all conscience, bad enough, with hearsay gossip unsupported by evidence, and with manifestly exaggerated statistical guesses incapable of verification. The account would have carried greater weight if it had been confined to the very serious conditions of which the author had personal knowledge. His naive belief that this and other penal settlements are now maintained and continuously supplied with thousands of deported manual workers and technicians, deliberately for the purpose of making, out of this forced labour, a net pecuniary profit to add to the State revenue, will be incredible by anyone acquainted with the economic results of the chain-gang, or of prison labour, in any country in the world.¹⁵⁵

It is quite true that the mass arrests remain basically a political phenomenon. The slave-labor motive can only have been secondary. The engineers and scientists, the doctors and lawyers, were not arrested simply to provide a corps of incompetent lumberjacks. As Weissberg says:

After twenty years of endless trouble and enormous expense the Soviet Government finally developed a working body of really capable physicists. And now what’s happened? Shubnikov, one of the leading low-temperature physicists in the country, is to help dig a canal in the Arctic. So is our first director, Professor Obremov, also a leading Soviet physicist and an expert on crystallography. Can’t you imagine what expensive navvies men like Shubnikov and Obremov are.¹⁵⁶

But once people were arrested, the extraction of their physical labor ensured at least some contribution to the economy, and (granted the initial irrationality of the whole Purge) there is nothing contrary to reason and common sense in Stalin’s typical decision to integrate them into his economic machine. To this extent, the Webbs are simply wrong as to Stalin’s motives.

Moreover, Stalin was well aware of Marx’s economic objection to slavery. And with his usual refusal to accept precedent, he sought to overcome it by the simple but untried method of not giving the slave a flat subsistence, but linking his rations to his output. In this way, it was thought, the lack of incentive Marx had pointed to was overcome.

It is quite true that the forced-labor projects were, anyhow, like much else in Stalin’s economy, often totally misconceived even on their own terms. During the great wave of arrests in 1947, a Soviet account tells us, Stalin remarked at a meeting of the Council of Ministers that the “Russian people had long dreamed of having a safe outlet to the Arctic Ocean from the Ob River.” Simply on the basis of this remark, decisions were taken to build a railway to Igarka. For more than four years, amid feet of snow, in temperatures down to –55°C in winter, and with swamps and mosquitoes in the summer, forced laborers toiled at this vast project, at more than eighty camp sites at intervals of 15 kilometers along the 1,300-kilometer stretch. The estimated cost, if it had ever been completed, was from 4 to 6 million rubles per kilometer. In the end, 850 kilometers of rail, and 450 of telegraph poles only, had been completed. After Stalin’s death, the line, the signals, the railway stations, the locomotives, and all that had been erected were abandoned to rust in the snow.¹⁵⁷

But this was an irrationality of the Soviet political and planning system itself. When it came to an ordinary operation, such as logging, it might seem that a method of providing very cheap labor had indeed been found.

Some prisoners made efforts on the spot to estimate the economic value of the camps. A friend of mine who was in a logging camp in the Vorkuta area worked for a time on the administrative side there (from 1950 to 1952) and says that the results were to a large degree faked or inflated, as in ordinary Soviet factories at that time. A great deal of the work which counted against norms was of a valueless nature, and although the prisoners themselves received the barest minimum of all necessities, the total cost of the camp, with guards, administration, and so forth, was much in excess of the value of its output. Antoni Ekart reports much the same of the Vorkuta mines¹⁵⁸—which, however, would probably have been uneconomic even if run by free labor because of the distances involved and the total production effected. And a careful study¹⁵⁹ makes the supposed savings due to forced labor over the whole economy at best marginal.

A Soviet account reinforces this view. The writer recalls a conversation in which one of the technicians on the job, himself a former prisoner, commented on the suggestion that the use of convict labor for construction projects was relatively cheap: