Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [61]
Yet although all of the camp complexes founded in the early 1930s were disorganized to start out with—and all of them were unprepared to receive the emaciated prisoners coming in from the famine districts—not all of them descended into lethal disarray. Given the right set of circumstances— relatively favorable conditions on the ground, combined with strong support from Moscow—some found it possible to grow. With surprising speed, they developed more stable bureaucratic structures, built more permanent buildings, even spawned a local NKVD elite. A handful would eventually occupy whole swathes of territory, converting entire regions of the country into vast prisons. Of the camps founded at this time, two—the Ukhtinskaya Expedition and the Dalstroi Trust—eventually attained the size and status of industrial empires. Their origins deserve a closer look.
To the unobservant passenger, an automobile ride along the crumbling cement highway that leads from the city of Syktyvkar, the administrative capital of the Komi Republic, to the city of Ukhta, one of Komi’s major industrial centers, would seem to offer little of interest. The 200-kilometer road, somewhat the worse for wear in a few places, leads through endless pine forests and across swampy fields. Although the road crosses a few rivers, the views are otherwise unremarkable: this is the taiga, the splendidly monotonous sub-Arctic landscape for which Komi (and indeed all of northern Russia) is best known.
Even though the views are not spectacular, closer examination reveals some oddities. If you know where to look, it is possible in certain places to see indentations in the ground, just alongside the road. These are the only remaining evidence of the camp that was once strung out along the length of the road, and of the teams of prisoners that built it. Because the building sites were temporary, prisoners here were often housed not in barracks but in zemlyanki, earth dugouts: hence the marks in the ground.
On another section of the road lies the remains of a more substantial sort of camp, once attached to a small oil field. Weeds and underbrush now cover the site, but they are easily pushed away to reveal rotting wooden boards—possibly preserved by the oil that came off the prisoners’ boots— and bits of barbed wire. There is no memorial here, although there is one at Bograzdino, a transit camp farther along the road, which held up to 25,000 people. No trace remains of Bograzdino whatsoever. In yet another place along the road—behind a modern gas station, property of Lukoil, a present-day Russian company—stands an old wooden watchtower, surrounded by metal debris and bits of rusted wire.
Carry on to Ukhta in the company of someone who knows the city well, and its hidden history will be quickly revealed. All of the roads leading into town were once built by prisoners, as were all of central Ukhta’s office blocks and apartment buildings. In the very heart of the city there is a park, planned and built by prisoner architects; a theater in which prisoner actors performed; and sturdy wooden houses, where the camp commanders once lived. Today, the managers of Gazprom, another new Soviet company, inhabit modern buildings on the same leafy street.
Nor, in the Komi Republic, is Ukhta unique. Although difficult at first to see, traces of the Gulag are visible all over Komi, this vast region of taiga and tundra which lies to the northeast of St. Petersburg and to the west of the Ural Mountains. Prisoners planned and built all of the republic’s major cities, not just Ukhta but also Syktyvkar, Pechora, Vorkuta, and Inta. Prisoners built Komi’s railways and roads, as well as its original industrial infrastructure. To the inmates who were sent there in the 1940s and 1950s, Komi seemed to be nothing but one vast camp—which it was. Many of its villages are still referred to locally by their Stalinist-era names: “Chinatown,” for