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In Vorkuta, the temperature is below zero Celsius for two-thirds of the year, and for more than 100 days the khanovey, or “wind of winds,” blows across the tundra. The climate killed those from the southern parts of Russia very quickly; few would be alive after a year or two.¹⁵⁰ As has been seen, much of our evidence comes from this region.

The head of the Pechora camps in 1936 was NKVD Major Moroz, who is variously described as particularly cruel and as sensible enough to give good rations and good conditions in exchange for good work. He himself had briefly been a convict between high NKVD appointments. And he later disappeared. His assistant, Bogarov, a man of the most brutal and ferocious appearance, seems in fact to have been as humane as his post permitted, and to have been behind these improved conditions.

Moroz was succeeded by “a confirmed sadist,” Kashketin, of whom it was said that the only safety from him lay in his being ignorant of one’s existence. After a few months of his rule, there were 2,000 convicts in the isolators of a single camp group, of whom only 76 survived. Kashketin’s brutality availed him no more than Moroz’s humanity: he, too, disappeared with all his subordinates at the end of the Yezhov period.

Norilsk, on the Arctic Ocean, was developed as a metallurgical project. A recent article in lzvestiya tells us that though there was death on a large scale from “unbearable toil, dystrophy, scurvy, and catarrhal diseases,” there are about 2 million survivors of the “nightmare barracks” from the intake of the postwar years still alive today, a striking testimony to the number in the camps.¹⁵¹

And so it was, on a smaller but still vast scale, throughout the NKVD’s realm, from the White Sea to Sakhalin, from the great complexes of Karaganda to the virtually unrecorded “death camps” of the Taymyr and Novaya Zemlya, from (as Solzhenitsyn puts it) the Pole of Cold at Oy-Myakoi to the copper mines of Dzhezkazgan.

SLAVE ECONOMICS

The millions of slave laborers at the disposal of Gulag played an important economic role, and indeed became accepted as a normal component of the Soviet economy.

An ad hoc Committee of the United Nations appointed under resolutions by UNESCO and the ILO, and consisting of a prominent Indian lawyer, a former President of the Norwegian Supreme Court, and a former Peruvian Minister of Foreign Affairs, reported in 1953 in a sober document leaving no doubt of the “considerable significance” of forced labor in the Soviet Union.

State-owned slaves were common in the ancient world. For example, the Laurion silver mines were operated by Athens on that basis. The Romans, too, had their servi publici. The Head of the Department of War Engineering Armaments, RSFSR, wanting some hundreds of prisoners for urgent work during the war, was told by the NKVD official responsible that there was a shortage. “Malenkov and Voznesensky need workers, Voroshilov is calling for road builders.… What are we to do? The fact is we haven’t yet fulfilled our plans for imprisonment. Demand is greater than supply.”¹⁵²

We think of the lumber camps as typical. But the best estimate seems to be that (of the comparatively low camp population of early 1941) only about 400,000 were held at lumbering. The other main categories were

Mining

1,000,000

Agriculture

  200,000

Hired out to various State enterprises

1,000,000

Construction and maintenance of camps and manufacture of camp necessities

  600,000

General construction

3,500,000

¹⁵³

Even in the great lumbering area of the northwest, a high proportion of prisoners were building the Kotlas–Vorkuta railway. Many others were erecting (like Solzhenitsyn’s hero) various industrial and mining buildings.

It has often been pointed out that slave labor is economically inefficient. Karl Marx had the same view:

The lowest possible wage which the slave earns appears to be a constant, independent of his work in contrast to the free workers. The slave obtains the means necessary to his subsistence in natural form, which is fixed both in kind and in quantity, whereas the remuneration of the free worker is not independent of his own work.¹⁵⁴

Slavery thus owed part of its inefficiency to lack of incentives.

The same point is put by the Webbs, in a passage worth quoting at length as representing a certain way of looking at Soviet affairs common in the 1930s. They are criticizing Professor Tchernyavin’s first-hand account of the camps he served in: