Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [272]
After the war, the Poles’ descriptions of their experiences formed the basis for reports on Soviet forced-labor camps produced by the Library of Congress and the American Federation of Labor. Their straightforward accounts of the Soviet slave-labor system came as a shock to many Americans, whose awareness of the camps had dimmed since the days of the Soviet timber boycotts in the 1920s. These reports circulated widely, and in 1949, in an attempt to persuade the United Nations to investigate the practice of forced labor in its member states, the AFL presented the UN with a thick body of evidence of its existence in the Soviet Union:
Less than four years ago the workers of the world won their first victory, the victory against Nazi totalitarianism, after a war which was waged with the greatest sacrifices—waged against the Nazis’ policy of enslavement of all people whose countries they had invaded . . .
However, in spite of the Allied victory, the world is perturbed to a very high degree by communications which seem to indicate that the evils we have fought to eradicate, and for whose defeat so many have died, are still rampant in various parts of the world ...29
The Cold War had begun.
Life within the camp system often mirrored and echoed life in the greater Soviet Union—and this was never more true than during the final years of the Second World War. As Germany crumbled, Stalin’s thoughts turned to a postwar settlement. His plans to draw central Europe into the Soviet sphere of influence solidified. Not coincidentally, the NKVD also entered what might be described as its own expansive, “internationalist” phase. “This war is not as in the past,” Stalin remarked in a conversation with Tito, recorded by the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas. “Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own social system as far as his army can reach.”30 Concentration camps were a fundamental part of the Soviet “social system,” and as the war drew to a close, the Soviet secret police began to export their methods and personnel to Soviet-occupied Europe, teaching their new foreign clients the camp regimes and methods they had now perfected at home.
Of the camps created in what was to become the “Soviet bloc” of Eastern Europe, those set up in eastern Germany were perhaps the most brutal. As the Red Army marched across Germany in 1945, the Soviet Military Administration immediately began to construct them, eventually setting up eleven of these “special” concentration camps—spetslagerya— in all. Two of them, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, were located on the site of former Nazi concentration camps. All of them were under the direct control of the NKVD, which organized and ran them in the same manner as it ran the camps of the Gulag back at home, with work norms, minimal rations, and overcrowded barracks. In the famine-wracked postwar years, these German camps seem to have been even more lethal than their Soviet counterparts. Nearly 240,000 mostly political prisoners passed through them during the five years of their existence. Of these, 95,000—more than a third—are thought to have died. If the lives of Soviet prisoners were never particularly important to the Soviet authorities, the lives