Tales from the Gulag

Was responding to a post by O'Bill in this thread - got a little carried away recounting the tales told by Anne Applebaum in her Gulag. A History. Had nothing to do with the topic at hand, so probably better off in this thread of its own ...

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Why is this at all interesting? Because Magadan in the Far East is not just any town. It was the port to the Kolyma, perhaps the Gulag's most notorious concentration of forced labour/death camps, described in Varlam Shalamov's memoirs, Kolyma Tales).

To quote Anne Applebaum's Gulag - A History,


When Dalstroi, the huge trust that was to exploit the region's mineral assets through the Gulag prisoners' forced labour, was first set up, it was, typically, out of nothing:


Yet the first years that followed were still relatively benign. Prisoners got adequate food and warm clothing, three rest days a month, and didnt need to work "when the frost dipped below minus 60 degrees". Exiles still were allowed to keep books and papers, and exile families were not yet split up. (It's from such "favours" that one can tell how bad it was to become later.) It was the prisoners who built Magadan, "which contained 15,000 people by 1936". Applebaum quotes the writer Evgeniya Ginzburg:


By 1934, some sort of order seemed in place. "Death rates dropped from their high of 1933 as famine across the country receded and camps became better organised." But "the relative calm was not to last. Abruptly, the system was to turn itself inside out, in a revolution that would destroy masters and slaves alike": the Great Terror. It would devour camp bosses as well as inmates, and Magadan's camp boss, Eduard Berzin, was one of the most prominent to fall.

Ordered back to Moscow, "Berzin left Vladivostok as a first-class passenger, [but] arrived a prisoner." Purges swept the Kolyma camps and "by the time it was over, hundreds of people who had been associated with Berzin, from geologists to bureaucrats to engineers, were either dead or had themselves become prisoners".

The camps themselves "once again overflowed with new" prisoners. About another Siberian camp it's noted that "lacking barracks, prisoners built zemlyanki, dugouts in the earth". Death rates doubled within a year and "are presumed to be much higher in those far northern camps - Kolyma, Vorkuta, Norilsk - where political prisoners were sent in large numbers." NKVD orders appeared that "contained execution quotas for Gulag prisoners".

Meanwhile, Dalstroi still attempted to also attract free citizens to such places as Magadan, offering 20 percent higher wages, paid vacations and a generous pension. The propaganda press wrote glowingly of the city's appeal:


The reality: "One prisoner recalled having been sent, with a building brigade, 600 kilometres north of Magadan to build a bridge. Once they arrived, they realized that no one in the brigade had ever built a bridge before. One of the prisoners, an engineer, was put in charge of the project, although bridges were not his specialty. The bridge was built. It was also washed away in the first flood."

Officially, working days were extended to 11 hours, in practice many prisoners worked longer. When new camps were established, the prisoners first had to build them:


Hunger and cold permeated everything. In 1939, a Kolyma doctor pointed out "that prisoners were being made to eat their food outdoors, and that it froze while it was being eaten." Vladimir Petrov, a prisoner in Kolyma, recalls a period of five days without any food deliveries in his camp: "real famine set in at the mine. Five thousand men did not have a piece of bread." In winter, it was so cold that "touching a metal tool with a bare hand could tear off the skin"; in summer, "the surface of the tundra turns to mud [..] and mosquitos appear to travel in gray clouds":


Worst of all was Dalstroi's punishment camp, Serpantinnaya, "located on the northern slope of the hills just above Magadan." A sentence there was equated with a sentence to death, and little is known about it because so few survived to tell the story. One survivor


Meanwhile, Berzins successor, Ivan Nikishov, lived in luxury, having equipped himself "with a large personal security force, luxury automobiles, sweeping offices and a magnificent dacha overlooking the Pacific Ocean", the latter equipped with oriental carpets and crystal chandeliers. Yet many of the ordinary guards were simply opting for the only available opportunity to earn a little more, secure a little better pension - or had been sent to the camps themselves on strict orders, without having been told where their next job would be.

Reading Applebaum's book, I get the sense that Dalstroi, with its own "inmate troupe", which performed in Magadan, "benefiting from the many well-known singers and dancers incarcerated in Kolyma", became an odd mix between the Holocaust and the Frontier, a concentration of death and cruelty and at the same time the place where the desperate and adventurous went to carve out a new life. No wonder that your friend, if it was indeed this Magadan she had lived in, demonstrated this contradictory mix of "objection to Soviet rule" and "Soviet pride" - she would not be the only one.

... This post with thanks to Anne Applebaum's astounding book, which I am now halfway in reading ...