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Still, the rebellion was far more than a typical criminal rebellion: it was clearly politically motivated, and openly anti-Soviet. Nor did the participants fit the profile of the typical, criminal runaway: the majority were political prisoners. Rumors of the rebellion would, the NKVD knew, travel quickly around the many nearby camps, which had an unusually high number of politicals during the war years. Some, then and later, suspected that the Germans knew about the Vorkuta camps, and planned to use them as a fifth column, should their march into Russia ever get that far. Rumors that German spies really did parachute into the region persist to this day.

Moscow feared a repeat performance, and took action. On August 20, 1942, all of the bosses of all of the camps in the system received a memorandum: “On the Increase in Counter-Revolutionary Activities in NKVD Corrective-Labor Camps.” It demanded that they eliminate the “counter-revolutionary and anti-Soviet element” in their camps within two weeks. The resulting series of investigations, carried out across the Soviet Union, “uncovered” a massive number of alleged conspiracies, ranging from the “Committee of People’s Liberation” in Vorkuta, to the “Russian Society for Vengeance Against the Bolsheviks” in Omsk. A report published in 1944 declared that 603 insurgency groups operating within the camps had been uncovered in the years 1941 to 1944, with a total of 4,640 participants. ⁷²

Doubtless, the vast majority of these groups were fictitious, created in order to prove that the camps’ internal informer networks were actually doing something. Nevertheless, the authorities were right to be afraid: the Ust-Usa rebellion really would prove to be a harbinger of the future. Although it was defeated, it was not forgotten: neither were the sufferings of the executed socialists and Trotskyites. A decade later, a new generation of prisoners would re-invent the political strike, picking up where the rebels and the hunger strikers had left off, altering their tactics for a new era.

Properly speaking, however, their story belongs to subsequent chapters. They are not part of the history of life in the camps at the height of the Gulag’s reign, but rather part of a later saga: the history of how the Gulag came to an end.

PART THREE

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CAMP–INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, 1940—1986

Chapter 19

THE WAR BEGINS

I was a soldier, now I’m a convict

My soul is frozen, my tongue is silent.

What poet, what artist

Will depict my terrible captivity?

And the evil crows didn’t know

What sort of sentence they gave us

When they tortured us, when they chased us

From prison to exile to camp.

But wonders occur! Above the quarry

A free star shines

Although my soul is frozen—it is not shattered

Although my tongue is silent—it will speak!

—Leonid Sitko, 1949¹

COLLECTIVE WESTERN MEMORY generally recognizes September 1, 1939, the date of the German invasion of western Poland, as the beginning of the Second World War. But in the Russian historical consciousness, neither that day, nor September 7, 1939—the date of the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland—count as the start of the battle. Dramatic though it was, this joint invasion, arranged in advance through the negotiations that produced the Hitler-Stalin pact, did not directly affect most Soviet citizens.

By contrast, no Soviet citizen ever forgot June 22, 1941—the day that Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his surprise attack on his Soviet allies. Karlo Stajner, then a prisoner in Norilsk, heard the news on the camp radio:

Suddenly the music was interrupted, and we heard Molotov’s voice speaking of the Nazis’ “treacherous attack” on the Soviet Union. After a few words, the program went off the air. There were about a hundred people in the barracks, but you could have heard a pin drop: we were all staring at one another. Vasily’s neighbor said: “It’s all over for us now.”²