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workshops, and factories, and their economic activity too was badly organized and unprofitable. 43 A 1928 inspector’s report on one such camp, in rural Karelia—fifty-nine prisoners, plus seven horses, two pigs, and twenty-one cows—complained that only half the prisoners had blankets; that horses were in poor condition (and one had been sold to a Gypsy, without authorization); that other horses were regularly used to run errands for the camp guards; that when the camp’s prisoner blacksmith was freed, he walked away with all of his tools; that none of the camp’s buildings had heating or even insulation, with the exception of the chief administrator’s residence. Worse, that same chief administrator spent three or four days a week outside the camp; frequently released prisoners early without permission; “stubbornly refused” to teach agronomy to the prisoners; and openly stated his belief in the “uselessness” of prisoner re-education. Some of the prisoners’ wives lived at the camp; other wives came for long visits and disappeared into the woods with their husbands. The guards indulged in “petty quarrels and drunkenness.”44 No wonder higher authorities took the local Karelian government to task in 1929 for “failing to understand the importance of forced labor as a measure of social defense and its advantageousness to the state and society.”45

Such camps were clearly unprofitable, and had been from the start, as the records show. As early as July 1919, the leaders of the Cheka in Gomel, Belorussia, sent a letter to Dzerzhinsky demanding an urgent 500,000-ruble subsidy: construction of their local camp had ground to a halt for lack of funding.46 Over the subsequent decade, the different ministries and institutions that vied for the right to control prison camps continued to squabble over funding as well as power. Periodic amnesties were declared to relieve the prison system, culminating in a major amnesty in the autumn of 1927, on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. More than 50,000 people were released from the ordinary prison system, largely because of the need to relieve overcrowding and save money.47

By November 10, 1925, the need to “make better use of prisoners” was recognized at the highest level. At that time, G. L. Pyatakov, a Bolshevik who would hold a series of influential economic positions, wrote to Dzerzhinsky. “I have come to the conclusion,” his letter explained, “that in order to create the most elementary conditions for work culture, compulsory labor settlements will have to be established in certain regions. Such settlements could relieve overcrowding in places of incarceration. The GPU should be instructed to explore these issues.” He then listed four regions which needed urgent development, all of which—the island of Sakhalin in the far east, the land around the mouth of the Yenisei River in the far north, the Kazakh steppe, and the area around the Siberian city of Nerchinsk— later became camps. Dzerzhinsky approved the memo, and sent it on to two other colleagues to develop further.48

At first, nothing happened, perhaps because Dzerzhinsky himself died soon after. Nevertheless, the memo proved a harbinger of change. Up until the middle of the 1920s, the Soviet leadership had not been clear whether its prisons and camps were primarily intended to re-educate prisoners, to punish prisoners, or to make profits for the regime. Now, the many institutions with a stake in the fate of the concentration camps were slowly reaching a consensus: the prisons were to be self-sufficient. By the end of the decade, the messy world of the post-revolutionary Soviet prisons would be transformed, and a new system would emerge from the chaos. Solovetsky would become not just an organized economic concern but also a model camp, an example to be cloned many thousands of times, all across the USSR.

Even if no one was aware of it at the time, the importance of Solovetsky would become clear enough in retrospect. Later, reporting back to a Solovetsky Party meeting in 1930, a local commander named Comrade Uspensky would