Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [22]
Almost as soon as it was created, the Cheka was given an extraordinary task to carry out. On September 5, 1918, Dzerzhinsky was directed to implement Lenin’s policy of Red Terror. Launched in the wake of an assassination attempt on Lenin’s life, this wave of terror—arrests, imprisonments, murders—more organized than the random terror of the previous months, was in fact an important component of the civil war, directed against those suspected of working to destroy the Revolution on the “home front.” It was bloody, it was merciless, and it was cruel—as its perpetrators wanted it to be. Krasnaya Gazeta, the organ of the Red Army, described it: “Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin . . . let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie—more blood, as much as possible . . .”24
The Red Terror was crucial to Lenin’s struggle for power. Concentration camps, the so-called “special camps,” were crucial to the Red Terror. They were mentioned in the very first decree on Red Terror, which called not only for the arrest and incarceration of “important representatives of the bourgeoisie, landowners, industrialists, merchants, counter-revolutionary priests, anti-Soviet officers” but also for their “isolation in concentration camps.”25 Although there are no reliable figures for numbers of prisoners, by the end of 1919 there were twenty-one registered camps in Russia. At the end of 1920 there were 107, five times as many. 26
Nevertheless, at this stage, the purpose of the camps remained ambiguous. The prisoners were to carry out labor—but to what end? Was labor meant to re-educate the prisoners? Was it meant to humiliate them? Or was it supposed to help build the new Soviet state? Different Soviet leaders and different institutions had different answers. In February 1919, Dzerzhinsky himself made an eloquent speech advocating a role for the camps in the ideological re-education of the bourgeoisie. The new camps would, he said, make use of the labor of those persons under arrest; for those gentlemen who live without any occupation; and for those who are unable to work without being forced to do so. Such punishment ought to be applied to those working in Soviet institutions who demonstrate unconscientious attitudes to work, tardiness, etc. . . . In this way we will create schools of labor.27
When the first official decrees on the special camps were published in the spring of 1919, however, slightly different priorities appeared to take precedent.28 The decrees, a surprisingly lengthy list of rules and recommendations, suggested that each regional capital set up a camp for no less than 300 people, “on the border of the city, or in nearby buildings like monasteries, estates, farms, etc.” They mandated an eight-hour workday, with extra hours and night work allowed only “in agreement with the labor code.” Food packages were forbidden. Meetings with members of the immediate family were allowed, but only on Sundays and holidays. Prisoners attempting escape could have their sentence multiplied by ten. A second attempt could be punished by death—an extremely harsh sentence in comparison with the lax Czarist laws on escape, which the Bolsheviks knew only too well. More important, the decrees also made clear that the work of the prisoners was intended not for their own educational benefit, but to pay for the cost of the camp’s upkeep. Prisoners with disabilities were to be sent elsewhere. The camps were to be self-financing. Optimistically, the camps’ original founders believed that they would pay their own way.29
Thanks to the irregular flow of state financing, those running the camps quickly became interested in the idea of self-finance or at least in making some practical use of their prisoners. In September 1919, a secret report shown to Dzerzhinsky complained that sanitary conditions in one transit camp were “below criticism,