Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [267]
Chapter 21
AMNESTY—AND AFTERWARD
Today I bid farewell to the camp with a cheerful smile,
To the wires that for a year kept freedom away . . .
Will nothing be left of me here,
Will nothing restrain my hurried steps today?
Oh no! Behind the wire I leave a Golgotha of pain
Still trying to pull me to the outer ends of misery.
Behind I leave graves of anguish and the remains of yearning
And secretly shed tears, the beads of our rosary . . .
All that now seems to have floated away, like a leaf blown off a tree At long last we have broken our ties of bondage. And my heart is no longer filled with hate For today rainbows break through the clouds in my eyes!
—Janusz Wedów, “Goodbye to the Camp” 1
MANY OF THE METAPHORS that have been used to describe the Soviet repressive system—the “meat-grinder,” the “conveyor belt”—make it sound relentless, inexorable, uncompromising. Yet at the same time, the system was not static: it kept turning, churning, producing new surprises. If it is true that the years from 1941 to 1943 brought death, illness, and tragedy to millions of Soviet prisoners, it is equally true that for millions of others the war brought freedom.
Amnesties for healthy men, of fighting age, began only days after the war broke out. As early as July 12, 1941, the Supreme Soviet ordered the Gulag to free certain categories of prisoners directly into the Red Army: “those sentenced for missing work, for ordinary and insignificant administrative and economic crimes.” The order was repeated several more times. In all, the NKVD released 975,000 prisoners during the first three years of the war, along with several hundred thousand ex-kulak special exiles. More amnesties continued up to, and during, the final assault on Berlin. 2 On February 21, 1945, three months before the end of the war, more orders were issued to release prisoners: the Gulag was told to have them ready for induction into the army by March 15.3
The size of these amnesties had an enormous impact on the demography of the camps during the war, and, consequently, on the lives of those who remained behind. New prisoners poured into the camps, mass amnesties freed others, and millions died, making statistics for the war years extremely deceptive. Figures for the year 1943 show an apparent decline in the prisoner population, from 1.5 million to 1.2 million. In that year, however, another figure indicates that 2,421,000 prisoners passed through the Gulag, some newly arrested, some newly released, some transferred between camps, and many dead.4 Still, despite the hundreds of thousands of new prisoners arriving every month, the total number of Gulag inmates most definitely declined between June 1941 and July 1944. Several forestry camps, hurriedly set up to accommodate the glut of new prisoners in 1938, were just as rapidly eliminated.5 Remaining prisoners worked longer and longer workdays, yet even so, labor shortages were endemic. In Kolyma, during the war years, even free citizens were expected to help pan for gold in their free hours after work.6
Not that all prisoners were allowed to go: the amnesty orders explicitly excluded both “criminal recidivists”—meaning the professional criminals—as well as the political prisoners. Exceptions were made for a very few. Recognizing, perhaps, the damage done to the Red Army by the arrests of leading officers in the late 1930s, a few officers with political sentences had been quietly released after the Soviet invasion of Poland. Among them was General Alexander Gorbatov, who was recalled to Moscow from a distant lagpunkt of Kolyma in the winter of 1940. Upon seeing Gorbatov, the interrogator assigned to reinvestigate his case looked again at a photograph taken before his arrest, and immediately began asking questions. He was trying to establish whether the skeleton in front of him could really be one of the army’s most talented young officers: “My quilt trousers were patched, my legs were wrapped in cloths and I wore miner