Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [24]
But this too was a harbinger of what was to come: confusion would beset the definitions of “camp,” “prison,” and “forced labor” for most of the next decade. Control over penal institutions would remain in constant flux. Responsible institutions would be endlessly renamed and reorganized as different bureaucrats and commissars attempted to gain control over the system.36
Nevertheless, it is clear that by the end of the civil war, a pattern had been set. Already, the Soviet Union had clearly developed two separate prison systems, with separate rules, separate traditions, separate ideologies. The Commissariat of Justice, and later the Commissariat of the Interior, ran the “regular” prison system, which dealt mainly with what the Soviet regime called “criminals.” Although in practice this system was also chaotic, its prisoners were kept in traditional prisons, and its administrators’ stated goals, as presented in an internal memorandum, would be perfectly comprehensible in “bourgeois” countries: to reform the criminal through corrective labor—“prisoners should work in order to learn skills they can use to conduct an honest life”—and to prevent prisoners from committing further crimes.37
At the same time, the Cheka—later renamed the GPU, the OGPU, the NKVD, and finally the KGB—controlled another prison system, one that was at first known as the system of “special camps” or “extraordinary camps.” Although the Cheka would use some of the same “re-education” or “reforging” rhetoric within them, these camps were not really meant to resemble ordinary penal institutions. They were outside the jurisdiction of other Soviet institutions, and invisible to the public eye. They had special rules, harsher escape penalties, stricter regimes. The prisoners inside them had not necessarily been convicted by ordinary courts, if they had been convicted by any courts at all. Set up as an emergency measure, they were ultimately to grow larger and ever more powerful, as the definition of “enemy” expanded and the power of the Cheka increased. And when the two penal systems, the ordinary and the extraordinary, eventually united, they would unite under the rules of the latter. The Cheka would devour its rivals.
From the start, the “special” prison system was meant to deal with special prisoners: priests, former Czarist officials, bourgeois speculators, enemies of the new order. But one particular category of “politicals” interested the authorities more than others. These were members of the non-Bolshevik, revolutionary socialist political parties, mainly the Anarchists, the Left and Right Social Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and anyone else who had fought for the Revolution, but had not had the foresight to join Lenin’s Bolshevik faction, and had not taken full part in the coup of October 1917. As former allies in the revolutionary struggle against the Czarist regime, they merited special treatment. The Communist Party’s Central Committee would repeatedly discuss their fate up until the end of the 1930s, when most of those who remained alive were arrested or shot.38
In part, this particular category of prisoner bothered Lenin because, like all leaders of exclusive sects, he reserved his greatest hatred for apostates. During one typical exchange, he called one of his socialist critics a “swindler,” a “blind puppy,” a “sycophant of the bourgeoisie,” and a “yes-man of blood-suckers and scoundrels,” fit only for the “cesspit of renegades.”39 Indeed, long before the Revolution, Lenin knew what he would do with those of his socialist comrades who opposed him. One of his revolutionary companions recalled a conversation on this subject: