Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [45]
Knowing that the prison system was deteriorating as fast as prisoner numbers were rising, the Politburo of the Communist Party set up a commission in 1928 to deal with the problem. Ostensibly, the commission was neutral, and contained representatives of the Interior and Justice Commissariats, as well as the OGPU. Comrade Yanson, the Commissar of Justice, was placed in charge of it. The commission’s task was to create “a system of concentration camps, organized in the manner of the OGPU camps” and its deliberations took place within clear limits. Despite Maxim Gorky’s lyrical passages about the value of labor in the reformation of criminals, all of the participants used fiercely economic language. All expressed the same concerns about “profitability” and spoke frequently about “rational use of labor.”22
True, the protocol written up after the commission meeting of May 15, 1929, records a few practical objections to the creation of a mass camp system: camps would be too difficult to set up, there were no roads leading to the far north, and so on. The Commissar of Labor thought it was wrong to subject minor criminals to the same punishment as recidivists. The Commissar of the Interior, Tolmachev, pointed out that the system would look bad abroad: the “White Guard emigrants” and the bourgeois foreign press would claim that “instead of building a penitentiary system intended to reform prisoners through corrective labor, we’ve put up Chekist fortresses.” 23
Yet his point was that the system would look bad, not that it was bad. No one present objected on the grounds that camps “of the Solovetsky type” were cruel or lethal. Nor did anyone mention the alternative theories of criminal justice of which Lenin had been so fond, the notion that crime would disappear along with capitalism. Certainly no one talked about prisoner re-education, the “transformation of human nature,” which Gorky had lauded in his essay on Solovetsky and which would be so important in the public presentation of the first set of camps. Instead, Genrikh Yagoda, the OGPU’s representative on the committee, put the regime’s real interests quite clearly:
It is already both possible and absolutely necessary to remove 10,000 prisoners from places of confinement in the Russian republic, whose labor could be better organized and used. Aside from that, we have received notice that the camps and jails in the Ukrainian republic are overflowing as well. Obviously, Soviet policy will not permit the building of new prisons. Nobody will give money for new prisons. The construction of large camps, on the other hand—camps which will make rational use of labor—is a different matter. We have many difficulties attracting workers to the North. If we send many thousands of prisoners there, we can exploit the resources of the North . . . the experience of Solovetsky shows what can be done in this area.
Yagoda went on to explain that the resettlement would be permanent. After their release, prisoners would stay put: “with a variety of measures, both administrative and economic, we can force the freed prisoners to stay in the North, thereby populating our outer regions.”24
The idea that prisoners should become colonists—so similar to the Czarist model—was no afterthought. While the Yanson commission was holding its deliberations, a separate committee of the Soviet government had also begun to investigate the labor crisis in the far north, variously proposing to send the unemployed or Chinese immigrants to solve the problem. 25 Both committees were looking for solutions to the same problem at the same time, and no wonder. In order to fulfill Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, the Soviet Union would require huge quantities of coal, gas, oil, and wood, all available in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the far