Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [250]
People also starved outside the camps almost as frequently as they starved within them. During the German blockade of Leningrad, bread rations fell to 4 ounces a day, which was not enough to survive on, and heating oil was unavailable, turning the far northern winter into a torment. People caught birds and rats, stole food from dying children, ate corpses, and committed murder to get hold of ration cards. “In their apartments people battled for life, like perishing polar explorers,” remembered one survivor. 18
Nor was Leningrad the only starving city. NKVD reports written in April 1945 describe famine and mass starvation right across central Asia, in Uzbekistan, Mongolia, and the Tartar Republic. Families of frontline soldiers, lacking their breadwinner, suffered the most. Famine hit Ukraine as well: as late as 1947, cases of cannibalism were still being reported.19 In all, the Soviet Union claimed to have lost twenty million of its citizens during the war. Between 1941 and 1945, the Gulag was not the Soviet Union’s only source of mass graves.
If greater regimentation and stricter rules immediately followed the declaration of war, so did chaos. The German invasion proceeded with shocking speed. In the first four weeks of Barbarossa, nearly all of the 319 Soviet units committed to battle were destroyed.20 By the autumn, Nazi forces had occupied Kiev, besieged Leningrad, and appeared to be on the verge of capturing Moscow too.
The western outposts of the Gulag were overwhelmed in the very first days of the war. The authorities had closed the remaining barracks on the Solovetsky Islands in 1939, and had transferred all prisoners to mainland prisons: they considered the camp to be too close to the Finnish border. 21 (In the course of the evacuation and the later Finnish occupation, the camp’s archive disappeared. It was probably destroyed, according to standard procedures, but rumors, never substantiated, claim that all of the papers were stolen by the Finnish army and are still hidden in a top-secret government vault in Helsinki.22) The authorities also instructed Belbaltlag, the camp which ran the White Sea Canal, to evacuate its prisoners in July 1941, but to leave its horses and cattle behind for the Red Army. There is no record of whether the Red Army managed to make use of them before the Germans got there.23
Elsewhere, the NKVD simply panicked, and nowhere more so than in the recently occupied territories of eastern Poland and the Baltic states, where the jails were overflowing with political prisoners. The NKVD had no time to evacuate them, yet could hardly leave “anti-Soviet terrorists” in German hands either. On June 22, the very day of the German invasion, the NKVD began to shoot the inmates in the prisons of Lwów, the Polish-Ukrainian city near the German-Soviet front line. While they were carrying out the operation, however, a Ukrainian-led uprising engulfed the city, forcing the NKVD to abandon the prisons altogether. Emboldened by the sudden absence of guards and the sound of nearby artillery fire, a group of inmates in Brygidka prison, in the Lwów city center, smashed their way out. Others refused to leave, fearing the guards might be waiting outside the gates, hoping for just such an excuse to kill them.
Those who remained paid for their mistake. On June 25, the NKVD, reinforced by border guards, returned to Brygidka, freed the “ordinary” criminal prisoners—and machine-gunned the remaining