Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [277]
Thanks to all of these new additions, the Gulag did not contract after the war. On the contrary, it expanded—reaching its highest level in the early 1950s. According to official statistics, on January 1, 1950, the Gulag contained 2,561,351 prisoners in the camps and colonies of its system—a million more than there had been five years earlier, in 1945. 14 The number of special exiles also grew, due to the major deportation operations in the Baltic States, Moldavia, and Ukraine, deliberately designed to complete the “Sovietization” of those populations. And at about the same time, the NKVD resolved, once and for all, the thorny question of the exiles’ future, decreeing that all deportees had been exiled “in perpetuity”—along with their children. By the 1950s, the number of exiles roughly matched the number of prisoners in camps.15
The second half of 1948 and the first half of 1949 brought yet another unexpected tragedy to the Gulag’s former inmates: a series of arrests, or rather re-arrests, of former prisoners, mostly those who had originally been arrested in 1937 and 1938, given ten-year sentences and only recently released. The re-arrests were systematic, thorough, and strangely bloodless. New investigations were rare, and most of the prisoners received only perfunctory interrogations. 16 The exile community in Magadan and the Kolyma valley knew something was wrong when they heard of the arrests of former “politicals” whose names all began with the first three letters of the Russian alphabet: the secret police, they realized, were re-arresting people in alphabetical order.17 No one could decide if this was funny or tragic. Evgeniya Ginzburg wrote that whereas “in ’37 evil had assumed a monumental tragic appearance . . . in ’49, the Georgian Serpent, yawning with repletion, was drawing up at leisure an alphabetical list of those to be exterminated ...”18
Overwhelmingly, the re-arrested describe feelings of indifference. The first arrest had been a shock, but also a learning experience: many had been forced to confront the truth about their political system for the first time. The second arrest brought no such new knowledge. “By ’49 I already knew that suffering can only cleanse one up to a point. When it drags on for decades and becomes a matter of routine, it no longer cleanses; it simply dulls all sensation,” wrote Ginzburg: “after my second arrest I would surely turn into a thing of wood.”19
When the police came for her the second time, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg went to her cupboard to pack, then stopped. “Why should I bother to take anything with me? The children can make better use of my things than I,” she thought. “Obviously I won’t survive this time; how could I possibly stand it?”20 Lev Razgon’s wife was re-arrested, and he demanded to know why. When told she had been sentenced again for the same crimes as before, he demanded further explanations:
“She’s already served her time. Does the law really permit you to punish a person twice for the same offense?”
The procurator looked at me in amazement.
“Of course not. But what’s the law got to do with it?”21
The majority of those re-arrested were not sent back to camps, but instead into exile, usually in particularly remote and underpopulated regions of the country: Kolyma, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Kazakhstan.22 There, most would live lives of unrelenting tedium. Shunned by the local communities as “enemies,” they found it difficult to find living space, difficult