Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [282]
By the early 1950s, the Gulag’s masters found themselves faced with a paradoxical situation. They had wanted to crack down on the criminal recidivists, the better to increase production and ensure the smooth functioning of camp enterprises. They had wanted to isolate counter-revolutionaries, in order to prevent them from infecting other prisoners with their dangerous views. By tightening the repressive noose, however, they had made their task more difficult. The rebelliousness of the politicals and the wars of the criminals hastened the onset of an even deeper crisis: finally, it was becoming clear to the authorities that the camps were wasteful, corrupt, and, above all, unprofitable.
Or, rather, it was becoming clear to everyone except Stalin. Once again, Stalin’s mania for repression and his dedication to the economics of slave labor dovetailed so neatly that it was hard for contemporary observers to say whether he raised the number of arrests in order to build more camps, or built more camps in order to accommodate the number of arrestees. 42 Throughout the 1940s, Stalin insisted upon giving even more economic power to the MVD—so much so that by 1952, the year before Stalin’s death, the MVD controlled 9 percent of the capital investment in Russia, more than any other ministry. The Five-Year Plan written for the years 1951 through 1955 called for this investment to more than double.43
Once again, Stalin launched a series of spectacular, attention-grabbing Gulag construction projects, reminiscent of those he had supported in the 1930s. At Stalin’s personal insistence, the MVD constructed a new asbestos production plant, a project that required a high degree of technological specialization, precisely the sort of thing the Gulag was bad at providing. Stalin also personally advocated the construction of another railway line across the Arctic tundra, from Salekhard to Igarka—a project that became known as the “Road of Death.”44 The late 1940s were also the era of the Volga–Don, the Volga–Baltic, and the Great Turkmen Canals, as well as the Stalingrad and Kuibyshev hydroelectric power stations, the latter the largest in the world. In 1950, the MVD also began the construction of a tunnel, and a railway line, to the island of Sakhalin, a project which would require many tens of thousands of prisoners.45
This time, there was no Gorky to sing the praises of the new Stalinist constructions. On the contrary, the new projects were widely considered wasteful and grandiose. Although there were no open objections to these projects in Stalin’s lifetime, several, including the “Road of Death” and the tunnel to Sakhalin, were aborted within days of his death. The sheer pointlessness of these feats of crude manpower had been well understood, as the Gulag’s own files prove. One inspection carried out in 1951 showed that an entire 52 miles of far northern railway track, constructed at great expense and at the cost of many lives, had not been used for three years. Another 230 miles of similarly costly highway had not been used for eighteen months. 46
In 1953, yet another inspection, carried out on the orders of the Central Committee, showed that the cost of maintaining the camps far exceeded any profits made from prison labor. In 1952, in fact, the state had subsidized the Gulag to the tune of 2.3 billion rubles, more than 16 percent of the state’s entire budgetary allocation.47 One Russian historian has noted that MVD memos to Stalin concerning expansion of the camps often began with the phrase “in accordance with Your wishes,” as if to emphasize the writer’s subtle objections.48
The Gulag’s Moscow bosses were well aware of the spread of dissatisfaction and unrest within the camps too. By 1951, mass work refusals, carried out by both criminal and political prisoners, had reached crisis levels: in that year, the MVD calculated that it had lost more than a million workdays due to strikes