Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [275]
Other types of work included collecting gold from sand, using a net in the river (shaking and washing it in the river). This was much easier; sometimes you would be lucky and meet the quota earlier, and then you could play just a little, rather than tell your teacher you had already met the quota ...43
The writer Chul Hwan Kong defected from North Korea in 1992. He had previously spent ten years, along with his entire family, in Yodok punishment camp. One Seoul human rights group estimates that about 200,000 North Koreans are still being held in similar prison camps, for “crimes” such as reading a foreign newspaper, listening to a foreign radio station, speaking to a foreigner, or in any way “insulting the authority” of North Korea’s leadership. About 400,000 are thought to have died as prisoners in such camps.44
Nor are the North Korean camps confined to North Korea. In 2001, the Moscow Times reported that the North Korean government was paying off its debts to Russia by sending labor teams to work in heavily guarded mining and logging camps across isolated parts of Siberia. The camps—“a state within a state”—contain their own internal food distribution networks, their own internal prison, and their own guards. Some 6,000 workers were thought to be involved. Whether they were being paid or not was unclear— but they were certainly not free to leave. 45
Not only was the idea of the concentration camp general enough to export, in other words, but it was also enduring enough to last to the present day.
Chapter 22
THE ZENITH OF THE CAMP–INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
At seventeen—we loved to study.
At twenty—we learned to die.
To know that if we are allowed to live
That means nothing has happened, just yet.
At twenty-five—we learned to exchange
Life for dried fish, firewood and potatoes . . .
What was left to learn at forty?
We have skipped so many pages
Perhaps we’ve learned that life is short—
But then, we already knew that at twenty . . .
—Mikhail Frolovsky, “My Generation”1
Meanwhile, 1949, twin brother of 1937, was advancing on our land, on the whole of Eastern Europe, and, before all else, on the places of prison and exile . . .
—Evgeniya Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind 2
WITH THE END OF THE WAR came victory parades, tearful reunions—and the widespread conviction that life would, and should, grow easier. Millions of men and women had endured terrible privations in order to win the war. Now they wanted to live easier lives. In the countryside, rumors of the abolition of the collective farms spread rapidly. In cities, people openly complained about the high prices charged for rationed food. The war had also exposed millions of Soviet citizens, both soldiers and slave laborers, to the relative luxuries of life in the West, and the Soviet regime could no longer plausibly claim, as it had once done, that the Western working man was far poorer than his Soviet equivalent.3
Even many in power now felt it was time to reorient Soviet production away from armaments and toward the consumer goods that people desperately needed. In a private telephone conversation, taped and recorded for posterity by the secret police, one Soviet general told another that “Absolutely everyone says openly how everyone is discontented with life. On the trains, in fact everywhere, it’s what everyone is saying.”4 Surely, the general speculated, Stalin must have known this too, and would soon have to take action.
By the spring of 1945, hopes were high among prisoners as well. In January of that year, the authorities had declared another general amnesty for women who were pregnant or had small children, and large numbers— 734,785 by July, to be precise—were being released.5 Wartime