Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [264]
Reading the instructions issued to describe the new regime, one wonders whether some of those assigned to katorga might not have preferred the death sentence after all. Katorga convicts were separated from other prisoners by high fences. They received distinct, striped uniforms, with numbers sewn on to the back. They were locked into their barracks at night, and the windows of the barracks were barred. They worked longer hours than ordinary prisoners, had fewer rest days, and were forbidden from carrying out any sort of work other than hard labor, at least for the first two years of imprisonment. They were carefully guarded: each group of ten prisoners was assigned two convoy guards, and each camp was told to deploy a minimum of five dogs. Katorga prisoners could not even be moved from one camp to another without the specific agreement of the Gulag administration in Moscow.74
Katorga prisoners also seem to have become the mainstay of a brand-new Soviet industry. In 1944, the NKVD claimed, in a list of its economic achievements, to have produced 100 percent of the Soviet Union’s uranium. “It is not difficult,” writes the historian Galina Ivanova, “to deduce who it was that mined and processed the radioactive ore.” 75 Prisoners and soldiers would also build the first Soviet nuclear reactor in Chelyabinsk, after the war. “At that time, the whole building site was a camp of sorts,” remembered one worker. On the site, special “Finnish” cottages would be built for the German specialists who were also drafted to work on the project.76
Without a doubt, the katorga prisoners included many genuine Nazi collaborators and war criminals, including those responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews. With such people in mind, Simeon Vilensky, a Kolyma survivor, once warned me not to be too convinced of the innocence of everyone who was in the Gulag: “These were people who would have been in prison, should have been in prison, under any regime.” As a rule, other prisoners shunned convicted war criminals, and were even known to attack and beat them.77
Nevertheless, of the 60,000 prisoners condemned to katorga by 1947, quite a few had been sentenced on more ambiguous grounds.78 Among them, for example, were thousands of Polish, Baltic, and Ukrainian anti-Soviet partisans, many of whom had fought against the Nazis before turning around to fight against the Red Army. By doing so, all of them believed they were fighting for their own national liberation. According to a document on underage katorga prisoners, sent to Beria in 1945, these partisans included Andrei Levchuk, accused of joining the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), one of the two main anti-Soviet partisan groupings in Ukraine. While in their service he allegedly “took part in the murder of innocent citizens and the disarming of Red Army soldiers and the appropriation of their possessions.” At the time of his arrest in 1945, Levchuk was fifteen years old.
Yaroslava Krutigolova was another such “war criminal.” Also a member of an OUN partisan group—she served as a nurse—she had been arrested at the age of sixteen.79 The NKVD also picked up a woman of German origin who had worked as a German translator for Soviet partisans. Hearing that she had been arrested for “aiding and abetting the enemy,” the leader of her partisan brigade made a special journey, away from the front lines, to testify on her behalf. Thanks to him, she received a ten-year katorga instead of twenty-five.80
Finally, the ranks of katorga prisoners included Alexander Klein, a Red Army officer who was captured by the Germans, yet managed to escape and make his way back to a Soviet division. Upon his return, he was interrogated, as he later recounted:
Suddenly the Major raised himself sharply, and asked, “Can you prove that