The Great Terror полностью

Special punitive camps are often reported. After the introduction of a new and harsher regime of katorga in the early 1940s, those so sentenced were deprived of blankets and mattresses for the first three years and otherwise subjected to harder labor, longer hours, and worse conditions.¹⁸⁴ Sometimes, as in the Dzhido camp, offending prisoners were put in chains for the remainder of their sentences.¹⁸⁵ For women, the Stalinogorsk camp was particularly severe: inmates worked in iron and coal mines. The second Alekseyevka camp, in the Kargopol group, a particularly bad one listed as a disciplinary camp but in fact full of foreign prisoners who had had no time to commit offenses in other camps, had a large number of Polish Jews who had escaped from the Nazi persecution and died like flies. They hated the Soviet regime more bitterly and passionately than anyone in the camps.¹⁸⁶

In one respect, Solzhenitsyn was lucky. He was not in a lumber camp. Here rations were notoriously low, and work was extremely hard. Professor Swianiewicz, who was himself in a lumber camp at one time, says that the former inmates are inclined to overestimate the proportion of prisoners sent to such work, probably because they were “under the constant fear of being sent to the forest. It was the equivalent of a death sentence for a person not accustomed to heavy physical work to be assigned for a long period to a felling brigade.”¹⁸⁷ One former assistant to a doctor in a northern camp says that in two successive winters about 50 percent of the workers in some forestry brigades died. Overall, about 30 percent of the labor force was lost by death or total exhaustion per annum.¹⁸⁸ A Pole who was briefly in Alekseyevka describes the visible death as extraordinary. He saw two drop dead as they left the gates with other brigades. In his own brigade, three died at the work site on the first day.’¹⁸⁹ A very active man would sometimes remain healthy by producing 120 or 150 percent of his quota for a year or eighteen months, and then one night would be found dead of heart failure in his bunk.¹⁹⁰

Even comparatively mild lumber camps were great killers. Finnish prisoners who were experts in the matter held that the norms prevailing were impossible even for the best-fed workers. They could only be brought down even to the barely tolerable level by various forms of cheating (tufta) and bribery—using the same logs over again by sawing off the stamped end, and so forth. Herling never came across a prisoner who had worked in the forest for more than two years. After a year, prisoners were usually incurable and, following transfer as “goners” to lighter work, retired to the mortuary.¹⁹¹

This was the last stage in the camps. When worn down, debilitated to the degree that no serious work could any longer be got out of them, prisoners were put on substarvation rations and allowed to hang around the camp doing odd jobs until they died. This category is recognized in Soviet as well as foreign books. Gorbatov, who describes the usual symptoms, confirms that to go sick was ordinarily fatal. For if you did, you had your ration cut and from that point there was no way out.¹⁹² This corps commander was at one time able to sweep the camp office floors, and there found an occasional crust to keep him going. He was himself saved from death by a friendly doctor who got him transferred to an easier post. In general, throughout the period, all our sources emphasize that survival for any length of time was rare in most camps except among those qualifying for “functions”—office jobs or other work enabling them to escape the main labor of the camp in question.

During bad periods “the camps of the disabled and unfit … became the most populous, and the largest labor brigades were those of the woodcutters and the gravediggers.”¹⁹³ The dead were buried in pits, with small wooden tags attached with string to their legs.¹⁹⁴

One estimate is that a batch of prisoners in the camps would, on the average, lose half its number in two or three years.¹⁹⁵ An NKVD functionary who worked on the Baltic–White Sea Canal group of camps gave evidence¹⁹⁶ that there were 250,000 prisoners in these camps at the beginning of the Purges, and the death rate was 700 a day, a figure also given elsewhere.¹⁹⁷ However, 1,500 new prisoners came in daily, so the population continued to rise.

The mortality rate of the camps in 1933 is estimated at about 10 percent per annum, and in 1938 to be running at about 20 percent.¹⁹⁸ The 1936 prisoners were almost all extinct by 1940. A woman who worked in a camp hospital notes that patients sentenced in 1937 and 1938 filled it in 1939 and 1940, but by 1941 there were few of them to be seen.¹⁹⁹