Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [273]
For the most part, the inmates of the East German camps were not high-ranking Nazis or proven war criminals. That sort of prisoner was usually taken back to Moscow, interrogated, and put directly into the Soviet POW camps or the Gulag. The spetslagerya were meant instead to serve the same function as the Polish and Baltic deportations: they were designed to break the back of the German bourgeoisie. As a result, they contained not leading Nazis or war criminals but judges, lawyers, entrepreneurs, businessmen, doctors, and journalists. Among them were even some of the very few German opponents of Hitler, whom the Soviet Union—paradoxically— also feared. Anyone who had dared to fight the Nazis, after all, might also dare to fight the Red Army.31
The NKVD interned a similar sort of person in the Hungarian and Czechoslovakian prison camps, set up by the local secret police services, on Soviet advice, after the Communist Party consolidated power in Prague in 1948, and in Budapest in 1949. Arrests were carried out with what has been described as a “caricature” of Soviet logic: a Hungarian weatherman was arrested after reporting “an influx of icy air coming from the northeastern direction, from the Soviet Union” on the day that a Soviet division arrived in Hungary; a Czech businessman wound up in a camp after his neighbor accused him of referring to “that imbecile, Stalin.” 32
Yet the camps themselves were no caricature. In his memoir of Reczk, the most notorious Hungarian camp, the Hungarian poet Gyorgy Faludy sketches a portrait of a system which seems almost an exact copy of the Gulag, right down to the practice of tufta and the starving Hungarian prisoners searching for wild berries and mushrooms in the woods.33 The Czech system also had a special feature: a set of eighteen lagpunkts, grouped around the uranium mines of Yachimov. In retrospect, it is clear that political prisoners with long sentences—the equivalent of the Soviet katorga inmates— were sent to these mining camps in order to die. Although they worked extracting uranium for the new Soviet atomic bomb project, they were not given special clothing or any form of protection at all. The death rates are known to have been high—though how high, exactly, is still unknown.34
In Poland, the situation was more complicated. By the end of the war, a significant proportion of the Polish population were living in a camp of some kind, whether a displaced persons’ camp (Jews, Ukrainians, former Nazi slave laborers), a detention camp (Germans and Volksdeutsche, Poles who had claimed German ancestry), or a prison camp. The Red Army set up some of its POW camps in Poland, filling them not only with German prisoners but also with members of the Polish Home Army, on their way to Soviet deportation. In 1954, 84,200 political prisoners were still incarcerated in Poland as well.35
There were also camps in Romania, in Bulgaria, and—despite his “anti-Soviet” reputation—in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Like the central European camps, these Balkan camps began by resembling the Gulag, but over time began to differ. Most had been set up by local police, with Soviet advice and guidance of some kind. The Romanian secret police, the Securitate, seem to have been working under the direct orders of their Soviet counterparts. Perhaps for that reason, the Romanian camps most closely resemble the Gulag, even to the extent that they carried out absurd, overambitious projects of the sort Stalin himself favored in the Soviet Union. The most famous of these, the Danube–Black Sea Canal, appears to have served no real economic function at all. To this day, it is every bit as empty and deserted as the White Sea Canal which it so eerily resembles. A propaganda slogan declared that the “Danube–Black Sea Canal is the tomb of the Romanian bourgeoisie!” Given that up to 200,000 people may have died building it, that may have indeed been the canal’s real purpose. 36
The Bulgarian and Yugoslav camps had a different ethos. Bulgarian police appear to have been less concerned with