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This sort of activity was unceremoniously abandoned in the late 1930s when prisoners became “enemies” and could no longer be “shock-workers” at the same time—nevertheless, after Beria took control of the camps in 1939, propaganda did slowly return. While there would never again be a White Sea Canal—a Gulag project whose “success” was trumpted to the world—the language of re-education was brought back to the camps. By the 1940s, every camp theoretically had at least one KVCh instructor, as well as a small library and a KVCh “club,” where theatrical performances and concerts were put on, political lectures were given, and political discussions were held. Thomas Sgovio remembered one such club: “The main room, seating about thirty persons, had wooden, gaudily painted walls. There were a few tables, supposedly for reading purposes. However, there were no books, newspapers or periodicals. How could there be? Newspapers were worth their weight in gold. We used them for smoking.”⁵⁷

From the 1930s on, the main “clients” of the KVCh were supposed to be the criminal prisoners. Just as it was unclear whether politicals would be allowed to hold specialists’ jobs, so too was it unclear whether it was worth anybody’s time trying to re-educate them. A 1940 NKVD directive on the cultural-educational work of the camps stated explicity that those who had committed counter-revolutionary crimes were not suitable targets for re-education. In camp theatrical productions, they were allowed to play musical instruments, but not to speak or sing.⁵⁸

As was so often the case, these orders were ignored more frequently than they were obeyed. And—as was also often the case—the KVCh’s actual function in camp life differed from what the Gulag’s masters in Moscow had intended it to do. If Moscow intended the KVCh to force prisoners to work harder, the prisoners used the KVCh for their own purposes: for moral support—and for survival.

On the face of it, it appears as if the cultural-educational instructors inside the camps sought to propagate the value of work among prisoners much in the same way that Communist Party operatives sought to do so in the world outside the prison gates. In the larger camps, the KVCh produced camp newspapers. Sometimes these were full newspapers, with reports and long articles on the successes of the camp, as well as “self-criticism”— comments about what was going wrong inside the camp—a standard feature of all the Soviet press. Aside from a brief period in the early 1930s, these newspapers were intended largely for the free workers and the camp administration.⁵⁹

For prisoners, there were also “wall newspapers,” designed not for distribution (there were paper shortages, after all) but for display on special notice boards. One prisoner described the wall newspapers as “an attribute of the Soviet way of life, no one ever read them but they appeared regularly.” They often featured “humor sections”: “They assumed, obviously, that workers dying of hunger would read the material in this section, give a great belly laugh, and finally hold up to shame those refusers and shirkers who didn’t want to repay their guilt to the Motherland through honest work.”⁶⁰

Ludicrous though they seemed to many, the central Gulag administration in Moscow took the wall newspapers very seriously. Wall newspapers, ordered one directive, should “portray the best examples of work, popularize the shock-workers, condemn the shirkers.” No pictures of Stalin were allowed: these were, after all, still criminals, not “comrades,” and they were still excommunicated from Soviet life, forbidden even to gaze upon their leader. The often absurd atmosphere of secrecy which had descended upon the camps in 1937 remained in place throughout the 1940s as well: newspapers printed in the camps could not be taken out of the camps.⁶¹

Along with hanging up newspapers, the KVCh also showed films. Gustav Herling was shown an American musical, “full of women in fitted bodices, men in tight jackets and frilly cravats,” as well as a propaganda film which ended in “the triumph of righteousness”: “The clumsy students came first in their socialist competition of work and with blazing eyes delivered a speech glorifying the State where manual labor had been raised to the highest position of honor.”⁶²

Meanwhile, some criminal prisoners took advantage of the darkened rooms where the films were shown to carry out revenge killings and murders. “I remember, at the end of one of these performances, seeing the body of a dead man carried past on a stretcher,” one prisoner told me.⁶³

The KVCh also sponsored football matches, chess matches, concerts, and performances referred to solemnly as “self-taught creative activities.” One archival document lists the following repetoire of an NKVD singing and dancing ensemble, which was touring the camps:

The Ballad of Stalin

The Cossack Meditation on Stalin

The Song of Beria

The Song of the Motherland

The Fight for the Motherland