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it seems as if the Gulag administration openly functioned within the NKVD as a place of exile, a last resort for disgraced secret police.13 Once sent to the outer reaches of the Gulag’s empire, officers were rarely allowed to return to any other branch of the NKVD, let alone to Moscow. As a sign of their different status, the Gulag’s employees wore distinct uniforms, and had a slightly altered system of badges and ranks.14 At Party conferences, Gulag officers complained about their inferior status. “The Gulag is seen as an administration from which everything can be demanded and nothing given in return,” griped one officer: “This excessively modest way of thinking—that we are worse than everyone else—is wrong, and it allows inequities in pay, in housing, and so on, to continue.” 15 Later, in 1946, when the NKVD was divided and renamed once again, the Gulag fell under the control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) while almost all of the NKVD’s more exciting functions, particularly intelligence and counter-intelligence, were moved to the more prestigious Ministry of State Security (MGB, later KGB). The MVD, which ran the prison system until the end of the Soviet Union, would remain a less influential bureaucracy. 16

In fact, camp commanders had had relatively low status right from the beginning. In a letter smuggled out of Solovetsky in the early 1920s, one prisoner wrote that the camp administration consisted entirely of disgraced Chekists who “have been convicted of speculation or extortion or assault or some other offense against the ordinary penal code.”17 In the 1930s and 1940s, the Gulag became the ultimate destination of NKVD officials whose biographies did not match requirements: those whose social origins were not proletariat enough, or whose Polish, Jewish, or Baltic nationality made them suspect during eras when those ethnic groups were being actively repressed. The Gulag was also the last refuge for those who were simply stupid, incompetent, or drunk. In 1937, the then-chief of the Gulag, Izrail Pliner, complained that

We get the leftovers from other sections; they send us people based on the principle “you can take what we do not need.” The cream of the crop are the hopeless drunkards; once a man goes over to drink he’s dumped on to the Gulag . . . From the point of view of the NKVD apparatus, if someone commits an offense, the greatest punishment is to send him to work in a camp.18

In 1939, another Gulag official described camp guards as “not second-class but fourth-class people, the very dregs.”19 In 1945, Vasily Chernyshev, at the time the Gulag boss, sent out a memorandum to all camp commanders and regional NKVD chiefs expressing horror at the low quality of the camp armed guards, among whom had been discovered high levels of “suicide, desertion, loss and theft of weapons, drunkenness, and other amoral acts,” as well as frequent “violation of revolutionary laws.”20 As late as 1952, when corruption was discovered at the highest levels of the secret police, Stalin’s first response was to “exile” one of the main pepetrators, who promptly became deputy commander of the Bazhenovsky camp in the Urals.21

The Gulag’s own archives also confirm the belief, delicately expressed by one former prisoner, that both guards and administrators were “more often than not, very limited people.”22 Of the eleven men who held the title “Commander of the Gulag,” for example—the administrator of the entire camp system—between 1930 and 1960, only five had had any kind of higher education, while three had never got any farther than primary school. Those who held this job rarely did so for long: over a thirty-year period, only two men, Matvei Berman and Viktor Nasedkin, held it for longer than five years. Izrail Pliner lasted only a year (1937–38), while Gleb Filaretov lasted only three months (1938–39).23

On the bottom of the NKVD hierarchy, on the other hand, personal files of the employees of the prison service from the 1940s show that even the most elite jailers—Party members and those applying for Party membership—came