Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [302]
But they never did identify all of the members of the Center, the real organizers of the uprising. According to one account, many of the “true activists” remained in the camp, quietly serving out their sentences, awaiting amnesty. Their names are unknown—and will probably remain so.
Chapter 25
THAW—AND RELEASE
Let’s not beat around the bush,
No more nonsense.
We are the children of the cult.
We are its flesh and blood
We have been raised in the fog
Ambiguous indeed,
Inside gigantomania
And scarcity of mind . . .
—Andrei Voznesensky, “Children of the Cult,” 1967 1
ALTHOUGH THEY LOST their battle, the Kengir strikers won the war. In the aftermath of the Steplag rebellion, the leadership of the Soviet Union really did lose its appetite for forced-labor camps —and with striking speed.
By the summer of 1954, the unprofitability of the camps was widely recognized. Another survey of the Gulag’s finances, carried out in June 1954, had again shown that they were heavily subsidized, and that the costs of guards in particular made them unprofitable.2 At a meeting of camp commanders and top Gulag personnel held soon after Kengir, many administrators complained openly about the poor organization of food supplies for camps, about the out-of-control bureaucracy—by this time there were seventeen separate food norms—and about the poor organization of camps. Some camps were still open, but with very few prisoners. Strikes and unrest continued. In 1955, prisoners organized another general strike in Vorkuta.3 The incentive to change was now overwhelming—and change came.
On July 10, 1954, the Central Committee issued a resolution, bringing back the eight-hour workday, simplifying the camp regimes, and making it easier for prisoners to earn early release through hard work. The special camps were dissolved. Prisoners were allowed to write letters and receive packages, often without restriction. In some camps, prisoners were allowed to get married, even to live with their spouses. The barking dogs and convoy guards became things of the past. New items became available for the prisoners to purchase: clothing, which had been unavailable before, and oranges. 4 The inmates of Ozerlag were even allowed to plant flowers.5
By this time, the upper echelons of the Soviet elite had also begun to conduct a wider debate about Stalinist justice. In early 1954, Khrushchev had ordered, and received, a report detailing how many prisoners had been accused of counter-revolutionary crimes since 1921, as well as an account of how many were still imprisoned. The numbers were by definition incomplete, since they did not include the millions sent into exile, those unjustly accused of technically nonpolitical crimes, those tried in ordinary courts, and those never tried at all. Still, given that these figures represent numbers of people who had been killed or sent to prison for no reason at all, they are shockingly high. By the MVD’s own count, 3,777,380 people had been found “guilty” of fomenting counter-revolution by the OGPU collegiums, the NKVD troikas, the Special Commissions, and all of the military collegiums and tribunals that had mass-produced sentences throughout the previous three decades. Of these, 2,369,220 had been sent to camps, 765,180 had been sent into exile, and 642,980 had been executed.6
A few days later, the Central Committee undertook to re-examine all of these cases—as well as the cases of the “repeaters,” those prisoners who had been sentenced to a second term of exile in 1948. Khrushchev set up a national committee, led by the chief prosecutor of the Soviet Union, to oversee the task. He also set up local committees in