JEDRUCZEK, continued

According to Donald Hingley, the political police, known as NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) “continued to control throughout the Stalin era, a huge slave empire containing networks of camps set up in the most extensive areas of USSR” (148). As Hingley explains, the first political police known as Oprichnina was set up in 1565 by “Ivan the Terrible, the first grand Duke of Moscow to be crowned as Tsar” (1). Hingley writes that NKVD was the twentieth century equivalent of Oprichnina because both organizations terrorized the entire population rather than investigating and punishing individuals. Both Stalin and Ivan the Terrible feared their own people and used secret police to mass murder all potential opponents (2). Hingley states that NKVD assisted Stalin in transforming already existing camps, giving them a new shape and purpose. As a result of mass arrests, the number of prisoners totaled millions rather than ten of thousands. Prisoners consisted not only of mere thieves and criminals, but also of intellectuals, doctors and political activists. Camp laborers became a part of the Soviet Union’s economic development, and engaged in projects such the canal joining the White Sea and the Baltic (148).
David J. Dallin writes that those corrective labor camps were developed and established between 1928-1934, during what Stalin called “the Great Turning Point.” In order to rapidly develop the Russian economy without foreign investment, Stalin planned to reduce people’s general standard of living to the lowest level. This meant “a colossal increase in repressions,” mass executions and deportations (191-92). According to Dallin, in order to centralize Russia’s economy Stalin introduced three so-called Five-Year Plans. The first one became a law in 1928 and it made prison labor the essential part of the general industrialization. One of the laws stated that prisoners who received more than a three-year sentence had to serve their terms in labor camps. The Five-Year Plan allowed Stalin, as the official circular of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR states, “to bring about the realization of a series of economic projects with great savings and expenditures [...] by means of widespread use of labor of individuals sentenced to measures of social protection” (206-08).

According to Dallin, the secret police then established a new department, the Gulag (Chief Administration of Camps) to overlook the camps, which were “infecting, like a growing cancer, new towns, provinces, and regions” (208, 211). Boris Levytsky states that without such people as Henry Yagoda, the first chief of the Gulag, the secret police would never have succeeded. Yagoda “found means of making the forced laborers work in the worst conditions.” Stalin and his closest associates were proud that their system of “combining forced labor and economic development functioned with so little friction” (75-76). Dallin writes that the Russian dictator “had gained faith in the abilities of Yagoda and in the effectiveness of forced labor in 1929-1930,” when the secret police “had demonstrated its efficiency in the lumber economy of the north” (212).

Hingley writes that NKVD had its organization active in the army and on the outside. Outside it maintained Special Forces such as Frontier Troops, Railway Troops, and Convoy Troops responsible for escorting prisoners to concentration camps, and Gulag Troops which ensured that the prisoners did not escape (171). According to Levytsky, the Gulag, with its headquarters in Moscow “consisted of two sections: the Camp and Railway Administration and the Administration of lines of Communication.” However the system of labor camps was fully autonomous and, in the words of Levytsky, “the competence of local authorities was abolished.” The Camps had their own armed force and police (139). The NKVD was a complex organization where a special department carefully watched all parts of the Communist Party (Radzinsky 348). According to Edvard Radzinsky, there were special secret sections within NKVD watching over NKVD personnel. On top of that, “there was a super secret special section to keep an eye on the secret special sections. This section too kept files, innumerable dossiers” (348).

The administration of the labor camps was just as complex. According to Dallin, there were two main departments, VOKhRA, and the internal NKVD. VOKhRA, the armed guard of the camp consisted of NKVD employees. They were assisted by convicted NKVD officials, who “in an attempt to reintegrate themselves and regain freedom,” tried to “exceed their superiors in severity.” The local NKVD followed the principles established by central NKVD in Moscow. Those local officials were in charge of putting prisoners into solitary confinement, gathering information on suspicious persons, sabotage, plans of escape, and even on members of the NKVD itself (245- 46). According to Elinor Lipper, survivor of Stalin’s camps, NKVD “employed an army of prisoner stool pigeons” to watch the prisoners (219). Lipper mentions a woman regarded as the most powerful prisoner in the work camp, who was responsible for the distribution of work. She had the ability to make proposals to transfer workers to lighter jobs or other more remote camps. She made those decisions based on her personal liking, thus prisoners had to “shower presents and flattery upon her” (204-5). Lipper also describes a female guard who was the distributor of bread in the camp and who was hated by everyone. The former inmate explains that all prisoners craved the end of the loaf of the bread rather than the middle section, but only the guard’s special friends received the end part. Lipper writes, “an end mysteriously fills you more than the middle section of the bread, although it too weighs only seven ounces” (205). Dallin states that directors of camps or camp employees were often ex- prisoners who, after serving their sentences, remained in the camps. After years spent in prisons they felt lonely and knew that family and friends would not welcome them home (18). In the words of Ann Applebaum, often NKVD officers became prisoners, and then became guards, making second careers in the Gulag administration (258). The administration of the gulag functioned as a hierarchy with large bosses, whom Solzhenitsyn called “camp keepers,” on the top; under them were the militarized guards, or “prison keepers” (535).

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