Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [203]
Child prisoners were not exempt from the relentless demands of the slave labor system either. Although children’s colonies were not, as a rule, usually located within the tougher northern forestry or mining camps, in the 1940s there was a children’s lagpunkt in the far northern camp of Norilsk. Some of its 1,000 inmates were put to work in the Norilsk brick factory, while the others were put to work clearing snow. Among them were a few children of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, with the majority fifteen or sixteen, the older juvenile prisoners having already been transferred to the adult camp. Many inspectors complained about the conditions in the Norilsk children’s camp and it was eventually moved to a more southerly part of the USSR—but not before many of its young prisoners fell victim to the same diseases of cold and malnutrition as their adult counterparts. 98
More typical is the Ukrainian report, which explains that children in the Ukrainian children’s labor colonies had been assigned jobs in woodwork, metalwork, and sewing.99 Kmiecik, who was in a children’s colony near Zhitomir, in Ukraine, worked in a furniture factory.100 Still, the colonies observed many of the same practices as the adult camps. There were production targets to be achieved, individual norms to meet, a regime to observe. One NKVD order of 1940 directed children between the ages of twelve and sixteen to work four-hour days, and to spend a further four hours on schoolwork. The same order required children age sixteen to eighteen to work eight-hour days, with two hours devoted to schoolwork. 101 In the Norilsk camp, this regime was not observed, as there was no school at all.102
In Kmiecik’s juvenile camp, there were only evening classes. Among other things, he was taught there that “England is an island in Western Europe . . . It is ruled by lords wearing red robes with white collars. They own the workers who toil for them, paying them little money.” 103 Not that the children were there primarily to be educated: in 1944, Beria proudly informed Stalin that the Gulag’s juvenile camps had contributed impressively to the war effort, producing mines, grenades, and other goods worth a total of 150 million rubles.104
Children were also subjected to the same sort of camp propaganda as adults were. Camp newspapers of the mid-1930s feature child Stakhanovites, and gush with praise for the “35ers,” the street children placed in camps according to the law of 1935, glorifying those who had seen the light and been reformed by physical work. The same newspapers also lambast those children who had not understood that “they must abandon their past, that it is time to start a new life . . . Card games, drunkenness, hooliganism, refusal to work, thievery, etc., are all widespread among them.” 105 To combat this youthful “parasitism,” children were made to take part in the same sorts of cultural-educational concerts as adults, singing the same Stalinist songs.106
Finally, children were subject to the same psychological pressures as adults. Another NKVD directive of 1941 called for the organization of an agenturno-operativnoe obsluzhivanie—a “network of informers”—within NKVD children’s colonies and children’s reception centers. Rumors had spread of counter-revolutionary sentiments among both the staff and the children in the camps, particularly the children of counter-revolutionaries. The children in one camp had even staged a mini-revolt. They took over the dining room, trashed it, and attacked the guards, wounding six of them.107
In only one sense were the children of the juvenile camps lucky: they had not been sent to ordinary camps, to be surrounded by ordinary adult prisoners,