In any case, of those who went into the camps, only a small proportion ever came out again. For long, some of the best evidence we had came from German Communists withdrawn from the camps and handed over to the Nazis in 1939 and 1940, from Poles released under the 1941 treaty, and from others who, benefiting from exceptional circumstances, were in for equally short periods. In general, releases were very rare, and survival until the post-Stalin amnesties rarer still.
The length of sentence anyhow made little difference. (Those who were released were in any case all rearrested around 1947–1948.) Upon the expiration of a sentence, it was usual for prisoners to be called before a Special Section officer and given a few more years, though in some cases they were sent back to prison in Moscow or elsewhere, reinterrogated, and sentenced for fresh crimes.
Shukhov sort of liked the way they pointed at him—the lucky guy nearly through with his sentence. But he didn’t really believe it. Take the fellows who should’ve been let out in the war. They were all kept in till forty-six—“till further notice.” And then those with three years who’d gotten five more slapped on. They twisted the law any way they wanted. You finished a ten-year stretch and they gave you another one. Or if not, they still wouldn’t let you go home.200
We do know of people who lasted up to seventeen years and were then rehabilitated—Snegov, referred to in Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, for instance, or Lieutenant-General Todorsky. They seem to have served in the less severe camps. But much of the published Soviet evidence until 1987 was from figures such as Gorbatov, who was among the rehabilitated officers of 1940 and would not otherwise have survived. (The routine of rehabilitation, in those few cases in which it applied, was slow. Gorbatov had, he later found out, been defended by Budenny, and on 20 March 1940 his sentence was rescinded and a review ordered. He did not get back from Magadan to the Butyrka until 25 December 1940. By 1 March 1941 he was in the Lubyanka, and on 5 March he was released.)
The other sort of Soviet witness was of the type of Solzhenitsyn, who says that though a man might possibly last ten years, any much longer period was out of the question—and this at a comparatively good period in camp history. Solzhenitsyn was in fact released after ten years, in the post-Stalin rehabilitations. He had fortunately been sentenced late in Stalin’s life. A man sentenced in 1938 would have had to wait seventeen or eighteen years. Of those arrested in the period 1936 to 1938, we can hardly allow 10 percent to have survived; in fact, a Soviet historian tells us that 90 percent of those who went to camp before the war perished, while Academician Sakharov notes that only 50,000 of the more than 600,000 party members sent to camp, rather than executed, survived.201 A million would be an outside figure. Of the other 7 million-odd, the number who died either by execution or in camps during the actual two-year Yezhov period may be taken as about 3 million.202 The rest followed over a period of years, during which time their number was continually added to by the victims of later arrest.
A recent Soviet article puts it that “their death was caused by unbearable toil, by cold and starvation, by unheard-of degradation and humiliation, by a life which could not have been endured by any other mammal.”203
In another we read,
I often hear the word “lucky” from those I am recording. I was lucky—the firing squad was replaced by twenty-five years of hard labor; lucky—I waited for hours on the tundra to be shot but wasn’t; lucky—I was transferred from general work to the meteorological station; lucky—I had enough time to take my daughter to my parents before the arrest; lucky…. One day we shall learn how many people died in the prisons and camps and how many returned.204
A Soviet poet wrote as long ago as 1963, in
There—row on row, according to years,
Kolyma, Magadan,
Vorkuta and Narym
Marched in invisible columns.
The region of eternal frost
Wrote men off into eternity,
Moved them from the category of “living”
To that of “dead” (little difference between them)—
Behind that barbed wire
White and grizzled—
With that Special Article of the law code
Clipped to their case files.
Who and what for and by whose will—
Figure it out, History.205
12
Pascal
