Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [283]
So bad had the situation become that in January 1952, the commander of Norilsk sent a letter to General Ivan Dolgikh, then the Gulag’s commander in chief, listing the steps he had taken to prevent rebellion. He suggested abandoning large production zones where prisoners could not receive enough supervision, doubling the number of guards (which he conceded would be difficult), and isolating the various prisoner factions from one another. This too would be difficult, he wrote: “given the great number of prisoners who belong to one or other of the rival factions, we would be lucky if we could simply isolate the leaders.” He also proposed to isolate free workers from prisoners at production sites—and added, finally, that it would be quite useful to release 15,000 prisoners outright, since they would be more productive as free laborers. Needless to say, this suggestion implicitly threw the entire logic of forced labor into doubt.51
Higher up the Soviet hierarchy, others agreed. “Now we have need of first-class technology,” conceded Kruglov, then-boss of the MVD: clearly, the third-class technology found in the Gulag was no longer considered sufficient. A Central Committee meeting of August 25, 1949, even dedicated itself to the discussion of a letter received from an educated prisoner, identified as Zhdanov. “The most important deficit of the camp system is the fact that it relies upon forced labor,” Zhdanov wrote. “The real productivity of prison labor is extremely low. In different working conditions, half as many people could do double the work that prisoners do now.” 52
In response to this letter, Kruglov promised to raise prisoner productivity, chiefly by bringing back wages for high-performing prisoners, and reinstating the policy of reducing sentences for good work performance. No one seems to have pointed out that both these forms of “stimulation” had been eliminated in the late 1930s—the latter by Stalin himself—precisely on the grounds that they reduced the profitability of the camps.
It hardly mattered, since the changes made little difference. Very little of the prisoners’ money actually reached their pockets: an investigation carried out after Stalin’s death showed that the Gulag and other institutions had illegally confiscated 126 million rubles from prisoners’ personal accounts. 53 Even those tiny amounts of money which did come into the prisoners’ possession were probably more disruptive than helpful. In many camps, criminal bosses set up collection and protection systems, forcing prisoners further down the hierarchy to pay for the privilege of not being beaten or murdered. It became possible to “purchase” easier trusty jobs with cash as well.54 In political camps, prisoners used their new wages to bribe guards. Money also brought vodka into the camps, and later drugs as well.55
The promise of shorter sentences for harder work may have helped increase worker enthusiasm a bit more. Certainly the MVD keenly supported this policy, and in 1952 even proposed to free large groups of prisoners from three of the largest northern enterprises—the Vorkuta coal mine, the Inta coal mine, and the Ukhtinsky oil refinery—and to employ them as free workers. It seems that even MVD enterprise managers preferred, simply, to deal with free men rather than prisoners.56
So great were concerns about the economics of the camps that Beria, in the autumn of 1950, ordered Kruglov to survey the Gulag and uncover the truth. Kruglov’s subsequent report claimed that the prisoners “employed” by the MVD were no less productive