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This name-calling was not just a pointless juvenile exercise, however. By describing their prisoners as “enemies” or as “subhuman,” guards reassured themselves of the legitimacy of their own actions. In fact, the rhetoric of “enemies” was only a part of the ideology of the Gulag cadres. The other part—call it the rhetoric of “state slavery”—constantly hammered home the importance of work, and of the ever-increasing production figures which were necessary for the continued existence of the Soviet Union. To put it bluntly: anything could be justified if it brought more gold out of the ground. This thesis was beautifully summed up by Aleksei Loginov, a retired former director of production and of prison camps in Norilsk, in an interview he gave to a British documentary filmmaker:

From the beginning we knew perfectly well that the outside world would never leave our Soviet Revolution alone. Not only Stalin realized it— everyone, every ordinary communist, every ordinary person realized that we had not only to build, but to build in the full knowledge that soon we would be at war. So in my area, the search for all sources of raw materials, copper, nickel, aluminum and iron, and so on, was incredibly intense. We had always known of the huge resources in Norilsk—but how to develop them in the Arctic? So the whole venture was put in the hands of the NKVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Who else could have done it? You know how many people had been arrested. And we needed tens of thousands up there . . .⁹¹

Loginov was speaking in the 1990s, nearly half a century after Norilsk ceased to be a vast prison complex. But his words echo those written in 1964 by Anna Zakharova, the wife of a camp commander, in a letter to the government newspaper Izvestiya which was never published—but did later appear in the underground press. Like Loginov, Zakharova also spoke of duty and of the sacrifices her husband had made for the greater glory of their country: “His health has already been ruined working with the criminal world, because all the work here wears on your nerves. We would be happy to move on, because my husband has already served his time, but they won’t let him go. He is a Communist and an officer, and he is bound by the duty of his position.”⁹²

Similar views were put to me by a camp administrator who wanted to remain anonymous. With pride she told me of the work her prisoners had done on behalf of the USSR during the war: “Absolutely every prisoner worked and paid his own way, and gave everything to the front that he could.” ⁹³

Within this larger framework of loyalty to the Soviet Union and its economic goals, cruelty carried out in the name of production figures seemed, to the perpetrators, downright admirable. More to the point, the true nature of the cruelty, like the true nature of the camps, could be hidden beneath the jargon of economics. After interviewing a former Karlag administrator in 1991, the American journalist Adam Hochschild complained, “From the colonel’s words you would not have known that it was a prison. Instead, he talked almost entirely about Karlag’s role in the Soviet economy. He sounded like a proud regional Party boss. ‘We had our own agricultural experiment station. Cattle breeding was also advanced. A special breed of cow, Red Steppe, was raised here, also Kazakh whiteheads . . .’”⁹⁴

At the highest levels, administrators frequently described the prisoners as if they were machines or tools, necessary for completing the job and nothing else. They were openly thought of as convenient, cheap labor—a necessity, simply, just like supplies of cement or steel. Again, Loginov, the Norilsk commander, puts it best: