Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [263]
Even those who returned home of their own accord could fall under suspicion. Whether they had left the Soviet Union voluntarily or by force, whether they had collaborated or been captured, whether they had returned willingly or been forced onto cattle cars, all were asked, at the border, to fill out a form which asked whether they had collaborated. Those who confessed (and some did) and those who seemed suspicious—including many Soviet POWs, despite the torments they had suffered in German camps— were kept for further questioning in filtration camps. These camps, set up early in the war, looked, and felt, similar to Gulag camps. Ringed by barbed wire, those inside were forced laborers in all but name.
In fact, the NKVD deliberately set up many of the filtration camps near industrial centers, so that the “suspects” could contribute free labor to the Soviet Union while the authorities investigated their cases. 68 Between December 27, 1941, and October 1, 1944, the NKVD investigated 421,199 detainees in filtration camps. In May 1945, more than 160,000 detainees were still living in them, engaged in forced labor. More than half were digging coal.69 In January 1946, the NKVD abolished the camps and repatriated another 228,000 to the USSR for further investigation. 70 Many, it is assumed, wound up in the Gulag.
Even among the POWs, however, there were special cases. Perhaps because the NKVD was handing out sentences to Soviet slave laborers and POWs— people who had, in fact, committed no crime whatsoever—the authorities invented a new kind of sentence for actual war criminals: people who had allegedly committed real crimes. As early as April 1943, the Supreme Soviet declared that the Red Army, in the course of liberating Soviet territory, had uncovered “acts of unheard beastliness and horrific violence, carried out by German, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, and Finnish fascist monsters, Hitlerite agents, as well as by spies and traitors among Soviet citizens.” 71 In response, the NKVD declared that sentenced war criminals would receive fifteen-, twenty-, or even twenty-five-year sentences, to be spent in specially designed lagpunkts. The lagpunkts were duly built in Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Kolyma, the three harshest northern camps. 72
With a curious linguistic flourish, and an ironic sense of history that may well reflect the involvement of Stalin himself, the NKVD named these lagpunktsusing a term taken from the penal history of Czarist Russia: katorga. The choice of this word would not have been accidental. Its resurrection, which echoed the resurrection of Czarist terminology in other spheres of Soviet life (military schools for officers’ children, for example), must have been intended to distinguish a new sort of punishment for a new sort of un-reformable, dangerous prisoner. Unlike the ordinary criminals condemned to ordinary punishment in the corrective labor camps of the Gulag, katorga prisoners could never hope to be reformed or redeemed, even in theory.
The revival of the word certainly seems to have caused some consternation. The Bolsheviks had fought against katorga but now they were reinstating it like the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, who forbade animals to drink alcohol, and then began drinking whiskey themselves. Katorga was also reinvented just as the world was beginning to discover the truth about the Nazi concentration camps. The use of the word eerily suggested that Soviet camps resembled “capitalist” camps a bit more than the Soviet authorities let on.
Perhaps this is why General Nasedkin, the Gulag’s wartime boss, commissioned, at this time, a history of Czarist katorga, and passed it on to Beria, at his request. Among other “explanatory notes,” the history painstakingly attempts to explain the difference between Bolshevik katorga, Czarist katorga, and other forms of punishment in the West: in the conditions of the Soviet Socialist state, katorga— exile with forced labor—as a punishment method is based on a different principle than it was in the past. In Czarist Russia and in