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Accustomed to the idea that any major political event was bad for them, political prisoners absorbed the news of the invasion with particular horror. They were right to do so: “enemies of the people”—now seen as a potential fifth column—were in some cases immediately singled out for increased repression. Some—a so-far unknown number—were executed. Stajner records that on the second day of the war, food supplies were cut: “sugar was eliminated, and even our soap ration was cut in half.” On the third day of the war, all foreign prisoners were rounded up. Stajner, an Austrian citizen (although he considered himself a Yugoslav communist), was re-arrested, removed from his camp, and jailed. The camp prosectuors reopened the investigation into his case.

The same pattern repeated itself across the camp system. In Ustvymlag, on the first day of the war, the camp command banned all letters, parcels, and newspapers, and took down the camp’s radio amplifiers.³ The bosses of Kolyma removed political prisoners’ right to read letters and newspapers, and cut off access to radios too. Everywhere, searches increased, morning counts grew longer. Lagpunkt commanders organized special maximum-security barracks for prisoners of German descent. “All you Burgs, Bergs and Steins, fall out on the left. All you Hindenbergs and Ditgensteins and so forth,” the guards called out, indicating that Evgeniya Ginzburg should join them. She managed to dash into the Registration and Distribution office, and persuaded an inspector to look up her nationality and citizenship: “This must have been the first time in the history of the world that being Jewish was an advantage.”⁴

The Karlag administration removed all prisoners of Finnish and German origin from the camp lumber factory, and sent them to cut timber. One Finnish American prisoner remembered that “After five days the factory stopped production because the Finns and the Germans were the only specialists who knew how to work . . . Without permission from Moscow, they took us back to the factory.”⁵

The most dramatic change, for those affected by it, was the order—also issued on June 22, 1941—forbidding all prisoners convicted of “betrayal of the Motherland, spying, terror, diversion, Trotskyism, rightish tendencies, and banditry” (in other words, all politicals) from leaving the camps. The prisoners called this decree an “extra term,” although it was in fact an administrative order, not a new sentence. According to official records, 17,000 prisoners were immediately affected. Others would be included later.⁶ Usually, there was no forewarning: on the day they were due to be released, those who fell under the terms of the order simply received a document instructing them to remain behind barbed wire “for the duration of the war.”⁷ Many assumed this meant they would remain in prison forever. “It was only then that I understood the whole tragedy of my situation,” one remembered.⁸

The tragedy hit women with children harder than anyone else. One Polish prisoner recounted the story of a woman who had been forced to leave her baby in a nursery outside the camp. Every day of her imprisonment, she thought of nothing but getting her child back. Then, when her release date came up, she was told she would not be set free because of the war: “She threw her work aside and, falling onto the table, she began not to sob but to howl like a wild animal.”⁹

Olga Adamova-Sliozberg also tells the story of a woman, Nadya Fyodorovich, due to be released on June 25, 1941. Her son, then living in the home of distant relatives who wished to be rid of him, was waiting for her. She had been writing to him, telling him to be patient. When she learned she was not to be released, she wrote to him again. He did not answer:

At last, in the winter of 1942, she received a letter from a stranger. He had picked Borya up at some remote station in Siberia near Irkutsk, and found that the boy was suffering from pneumonia. He had taken him in and nursed him till he was better. He reproached Nadya for having forgotten about her son as soon as she was released; she was a bad mother; she had probably gone and gotten married and was doing nicely for herself while her fourteen-year-old son, hitching a free ride on a train all the way from Ryazan to Irkutsk, was dying of hunger.