The Great Terror полностью

It merely seems so. After all the prisoners have somehow to be fed, shod, clothed, and guarded; special areas have to be constructed, provided with watchtowers for the guards—yes and for that matter the maintenance of the guards is a costly matter. Then also there is the physical training section and all the other “sections” which in fact only exist on paper … in fact a sizable establishment. Then there are those again who have to fetch the water for them, heat the baths and wash the floors. After all there are a lot of things that human beings need. There are also many duty officers and personnel, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the countless carpenters, clerks and other “scabs” as they are called in the camp! So that if one averages it out you must reckon one and a half ancillary persons for every one who actually works. The other main thing is that the guards cannot deploy the labor force as it ought to be: either one is not allowed to use the proper machinery, or else the foremen, not to mention the convicts themselves, simply have no time to stop and think about how to organize the labor force because of the consequent parades, inspections, and the rest of the to-ing and fro-ing.¹⁶⁰

The maintenance of the guards, it may be remarked, was also a military debit. Throughout the war period, the camps continued to be guarded by picked NKVD soldiers, in a proportion of about one guard to twenty inmates. The Soviet Government thus forfeited the use of certainly no fewer than 250,000 trained and healthy troops.

Even so, in certain circumstances, forced labor does seem to have paid: coal from Karaganda was sometimes noticeably cheaper than that from the Donets Basin.’¹⁶¹ Moreover, there are certain fields where free labor would be inordinately expensive, and where slave labor is probably economically preferable—for instance, in the mines and strategic roads of northeastern Siberia. In 1951, in the United States Congress, the immense labor cost of setting up an American air base in Greenland was disclosed. We can be sure that the equivalents in northern Siberia were completed far more cheaply with slave labor than they could have been with even Soviet free labor. That is to say, while it is true that the forced-labor system was not limitlessly expandable, it may have paid in certain fields.

In any case, to start examining the economics of the operation in an abstract way is clearly a mistake. A man killed by squeezing a year or two’s effort out of him is of more use than a man kept in prison. The camps were politically efficient. They effectively isolated masses of potential troublemakers, and were a great disincentive to any sort of anti-Stalinist activity, or even talk. Assuming that the political purging was necessary, the camps were a useful end product.

Like everything else in Stalin’s epoch, the system operated by pressure from the top down. Every camp had its “plan,” and every camp chief worked under a system of penalties and rewards. There were some odd results. Camp chiefs are reported as having kept recaptured prisoners whom they should have returned to their original camps. Again, in the prison at Kotlas, there was a group of prisoners consisting entirely of invalids and old people, whom none of the camps would accept, for obvious economic reasons. They remained there for over a year as the problem solved itself by their dying.¹⁶²

FOOD AND DEATH

In the camps, the commandants operated the norm system vis-à-vis the prisoners. As a general principle there were various “cauldrons,” or food allotments. The principle is simple enough. Precise figures varied considerably, but the following shows a typical proportion. In the Kolyma camps, for men doing twelve to sixteen hours’ heavy physical labor a day, eight months of it in very low temperatures, the daily ration, of very poor bread, is given as follows by a former prisoner writing in the West:

for more than 100% of the norm

up to 930 grams (32 oz.)

for 100%

815 grams (28½ oz.)

for 70–99%

715 grams (25 oz.)

for 50–69%

500 grams (17½ oz.)

disciplinary ration

300 grams (10½ oz.)

plus “soup,” 3½ oz. of salt fish, and just over 2 oz. of groats

¹⁶³

A Soviet account of the same area gives

for 100% fulfillment

800 grams

nonfulfillment for whatever reason

500 grams

punitive

300 grams ‘

¹⁶⁴

The first is given in ounces in the original, so the slight discrepancy has no significance. What seems to be the abolition of the intermediate stage may be due to the fact that the Russian was serving there later—from 1942 until at least 1950—as against the other’s circa 1938 to 1946. A Polish account, of 1940 to 1941, gives 500 grams for 50 percent norm and 300 for less.¹⁶⁵

Another reported ration scheme, in one of the northern camps in the winter of 1941/1942:

for the full norm

700 grams of bread, plus soup and buckwheat

for those not attaining the norm

400 grams of bread, plus soup

¹⁶⁶