Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [48]
Yet Stalin’s interest in concentration camps need not have had a rational source at all: perhaps Stalin’s obsessive interest in vast construction projects and toiling teams of forced laborers was connected, somehow, to his particular form of megalomaniacal madness. Mussolini once said of Lenin that he “is an artist who has worked in men as others have worked in marble or metal.”36 This description may be better applied to Stalin, who literally enjoyed the sight of large numbers of human bodies, marching or dancing in perfect synchronization.37 He was captivated by the ballet, by orchestrated exhibitions of gymnastics, and by parades featuring giant pyramids built out of anonymous, contorted human figures. 38 Like Hitler, Stalin was also obsessed with the cinema, particularly Hollywood musicals, with their enormous casts of coordinated singers and dancers. He might have derived a different but related form of pleasure from the vast teams of prisoners who dug canals and built railway lines at his bidding.
Whatever his inspiration, whether political, historical, or psychological, it is clear that from the Gulag’s earliest days, Stalin took a deep personal interest in the camps, and exerted an enormous influence on their development. The crucial decision to transfer all of the Soviet Union’s camps and prisons away from the ordinary justice system and into the hands of the OGPU, for example, was almost certainly made at Stalin’s behest. By 1929, Stalin had taken a great personal interest in this institution. He took an interest in the careers of the top secret policemen, and oversaw the construction of comfortable houses for them and their families.39 By contrast, the prison administration of the Interior Commissariat was very much out of his favor: its leaders had backed Stalin’s opponents in the bitter, internal Party factional fighting of the time.40
Everyone who took part in the Yanson commission would have known all of these details perfectly well, which might have been enough to persuade them to put the prisons in the hands of the OGPU. But Stalin also intervened directly in the Yanson commission’s deliberations. At one point in the tangled deliberations, the Politburo actually reversed its original decision, declaring its intention to take the prison system away from the secret police once again, and put it back in the hands of the Commissariat of the Interior. This prospect outraged Stalin. In a 1930 letter to his close collaborator, Vyacheslav Molotov, he denounced this idea as an “intrigue” orchestrated by the Commissar of the Interior who is “rotten through and through.” He ordered the Politburo to implement its original decision, and shut down the Commissariat of the Interior altogether.41 Stalin’s decision to give the camps to the OGPU determined their future character. It removed them from ordinary judicial scrutiny, and placed them firmly in the hands of a secret police bureaucracy whose origins lay in the mysterious, extralegal world of the Cheka.
While there is less hard evidence to support the theory, it may also be that the constant emphasis on the need to build “camps of the Solovetsky type” came from Stalin as well. As mentioned earlier, the Solovetsky camps never were profitable, not in 1929, not ever. In the June 1928–June 1929 working year, SLON still received a 1.6-million-ruble subsidy from the state budget.42 Although SLON might have appeared more successful than other local businesses, anyone who understood economics knew that it hardly competed fairly. Forestry camps which employed prisoners would always appear more productive than regular forestry enterprises, for example, simply because the latter’s peasant employees only worked in the winter, when they were unable to farm.43
Nevertheless, the Solovetsky camps were perceived to be profitable—or at least Stalin perceived them to be profitable. Stalin also believed that they were profitable precisely because of Frenkel’s “rational