Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [50]
A few scattered archival documents hint at the same story. In 1934, for example, Yagoda wrote a letter to his subordinates in Ukraine, demanding 15,000 to 20,000 prisoners, all “fit to work”: they were needed urgently in order to finish the Moscow–Volga Canal. The letter is dated March 17, and in it Yagoda also demanded that the local OGPU bosses “take extra measures” to ensure that the prisoners had arrived by April 1. Where these 15,000 to 20,000 prisoners were supposed to come from was not, however, clearly explained. Were they arrested in order to meet Yagoda’s requirements?55 Or—as historian Terry Martin believes—was Yagoda simply struggling to ensure a nice, regular inflow of labor into his camp system, a goal which he never in fact achieved?
If the arrests were intended to populate the camps, then they did so with almost ludicrous inefficiency. Martin and others have also pointed out that every wave of mass arrests seems to have caught the camp commanders completely by surprise, making it difficult for them to achieve even a semblance of economic efficiency. Nor did the arresting officers ever choose their victims rationally: instead of limiting arrests to the healthy young men who would have made the best laborers in the far north, they also imprisoned women, children, and old people in large numbers.56 The sheer illogic of the mass arrests seems to argue against the idea of a carefully planned slave-labor force—leading many to conclude that arrests were carried out primarily to eliminate Stalin’s perceived enemies, and only secondarily to fill Stalin’s camps.
Yet, in the end, none of these explanations for the growth of the camps is entirely mutually exclusive either. Stalin might well have intended his arrests both to eliminate enemies and to create slave laborers. He might have been motivated both by his own paranoia and by the labor needs of regional leaders. Perhaps the formula is best put simply: Stalin proposed the “Solovetsky model” of concentration camps to his secret police, Stalin selected the victims—and his subordinates leaped at the opportunity to obey him.
Chapter 4
THE WHITE SEA CANAL
Where mossy cliffs and waters slumbered
There, thanks to the strength of labor
Factories will be built
And towns will grow.
Smokestacks will rise up
Under the Northern skies,
Buildings will shine with the lights
Of libraries, theaters, and clubs.
—Medvedkov, a White Sea Canal prisoner, 19341
IN THE END, only one of the objections raised during the meetings of the Yanson commission caused any further concern. Although they were certain that the great Soviet nation would overcome the lack of roads, although they had few qualms about using prisoners as slave laborers, Stalin and his henchmen remained exceptionally touchy about the language foreigners used to describe their prison camps abroad.
In fact—contrary to popular belief—foreigners in this era described Soviet prison camps rather frequently. Quite a lot was generally known in the West about the Soviet concentration camps at the end of the 1920s, perhaps more than was generally known at the end of the 1940s. Large articles about Soviet prisons had appeared in the German, French, British, and American press, particularly the left-wing press, which had wide contacts among imprisoned Russian socialists.2 In 1927, a French writer named Raymond Duguet published a surprisingly accurate book about Solovetsky, Un Bagne en Russie Rouge (A Prison in Red Russia), describing everything from the personality of Naftaly Frenkel to the horrors of the mosquito torture. S. A. Malsagov, a Georgian White Army officer who managed to escape from Solovetsky and cross the border, published Island Hell, another account of Solovetsky, in London in 1926. As a result of widespread