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Nadya tried to contact the stranger, but to no avail: the censors were no longer letting political prisoners’ letters through, especially letters which referred to the indefinite extension of prisoners’ sentences. Later, Nadya heard her son had joined a gang. In 1947, he too turned up in Kolyma, with a five-year sentence.¹⁰

For everyone who remained behind barbed wire, life grew harsher as the war progressed. New laws established longer working days. A refusal to work was no longer just illegal; it became an act of treason. In January 1941, Vasily Chernyshev, then the commander of the central Gulag administration, sent a letter to the bosses of all of the camps and colonies, describing the fate of twenty-six prisoners. The camp court system had tried them, found them guilty of refusing to work, and granted five of them an additional ten-year camp sentence. The court sentenced the remaining twenty-one to death. Curtly, Chernyshev told his underlings to “inform the prisoners of all camps and corrective-labor colonies” of these sentences.¹¹

The message trickled down very quickly. All prisoners, wrote Gustav Herling, knew well that “among the gravest offenses which could be committed in the camp after 22 June 1941 were the spreading of defeatism and refusal to work, which, under the new defense regulations, was included in the category of ‘sabotage of the war effort.’”¹²

The results of all of these policies, coupled with the massive food shortages, were dramatic. Although mass executions were not as common as they had been in 1937 and 1938, prisoner mortality rates for 1942 and 1943 are nevertheless the highest in the Gulag’s history. According to the official statistics, which are almost certainly an underestimate, 352,560 prisoners died in 1942, or one in four. One in five, or 267,826, died in 1943. ¹³ The number of sick prisoners, while officially calculated at 22 percent in 1943 and 18 percent in 1944, was probably much higher than that, as typhus, dysentery, and other epidemics swept through the camps.¹⁴

By January 1943, the situation had become so dramatic that the Soviet government created a special food “fund” to the Gulag: prisoners might be “enemies,” but they were still needed for war production. The food situation did improve as the tide of the war turned in the Soviet Union’s favor, but even with these extra rations, the food norms at the end of the war contained a third less calories than those issued in the late 1930s. ¹⁵ In all, well over two million people died in the camps and colonies of the Gulag during the war years, not taking into account those who died in exile and other forms of imprisonment. More than 10,000 of these were shot, for treason or sabotage, on the orders of camp prosecutors. ¹⁶

To put these figures and these changes in context, it must also be said that the free population of the Soviet Union also suffered during the war, and that stricter regimes and tighter rules affected workers outside the camps as well as within them. As early as 1940, in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Poland and the Baltic states, the Supreme Soviet established an eight-hour working day and a seven-day working week for all factories and institutions. Even more drastically, the regime forbade all workers from leaving their place of work. To do so became a crime, punishable with a camp sentence. The production of “poor quality” goods (“sabotage”) became a crime too, and sentences for other offenses grew harsher. Workers accused of filching spare parts, tools, paper, or writing instruments from their workplaces could be sentenced to spend a year in a camp—or more. ¹⁷

People also starved outside the camps almost as frequently as they starved within them. During the German blockade of Leningrad, bread rations fell to 4 ounces a day, which was not enough to survive on, and heating oil was unavailable, turning the far northern winter into a torment. People caught birds and rats, stole food from dying children, ate corpses, and committed murder to get hold of ration cards. “In their apartments people battled for life, like perishing polar explorers,” remembered one survivor. ¹⁸

Nor was Leningrad the only starving city. NKVD reports written in April 1945 describe famine and mass starvation right across central Asia, in Uzbekistan, Mongolia, and the Tartar Republic. Families of frontline soldiers, lacking their breadwinner, suffered the most. Famine hit Ukraine as well: as late as 1947, cases of cannibalism were still being reported.¹⁹ In all, the Soviet Union claimed to have lost twenty million of its citizens during the war. Between 1941 and 1945, the Gulag was not the Soviet Union’s only source of mass graves.