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and children and were expected to start living off the land. Yagoda himself had declared that the exiles were to be given “free time” in which they were to plant gardens, raise pigs, go fishing, and build their own homes: “first they will live on camp rations, then at their own cost.”12 While all of that sounds rather rosy, in fact nearly 5,000 such exile families arrived in 1930—over 16,000 people—to find, as usual, almost nothing. There were 268 barracks built by November of that year, although at least 700 were needed. Three or four families shared each room. There was not enough food, clothing, or winter boots. The exile villages lacked baths, roads, postal service, and telephone cables.13

Although some died, and many tried to escape—344 had attempted to escape by the end of July—the Komi exiles became a permanent adjunct to the Komi camp system. Later waves of repression brought more of them to the region, particularly Poles and Germans. Hence the local references to some of the Komi villages as “Berlin.” Exiles did not live behind barbed wire, but did the same jobs as prisoners, sometimes in the same places. In 1940, a logging camp was changed into an exile village—proof that, in a certain sense, the groups were interchangeable. Many exiles also wound up working as guards or administrators in the camps.14

In time, this geographical growth was reflected in camp nomenclature. In 1931, the Ukhtinskaya Expedition was renamed the Ukhto-Pechorsky Corrective-Labor Camp, or Ukhtpechlag. Over the subsequent two decades, Ukhtpechlag itself would be renamed many more times—and reorganized and divided up—to reflect its changing geography, its expanding empire, and its growing bureaucracy. By the end of the decade, in fact, Ukhtpechlag would no longer be a single camp at all. Instead, it spawned a whole network of camps, two dozen in total, including: Ukhtpechlag and Ukhtizhemlag (oil and coal); Ustvymlag (forestry); Vorkuta and Inta (coal-mining); and Sevzheldorlag (railways).15

In the course of the next several years, Ukhtpechlag and its descendants also became denser, acquiring new institutions and new buildings in accordance with their ever-expanding requirements. Needing hospitals, camp administrators built them, and introduced systems for training prisoner pharmacists and prisoner nurses. Needing food, they constructed their own collective farms, their own warehouses, and their own distribution systems. Needing electricity, they built power plants. Needing building materials, they built brick factories.

Needing educated workers, they trained the ones that they had. Much of the ex-kulak workforce turned out to be illiterate or semiliterate, which caused enormous problems when dealing with projects of relative technical sophistication. The camp’s administration therefore set up technical training schools, which required, in turn, more new buildings and new cadres: math and physics teachers, as well as “political instructors” to oversee their work.16 By the 1940s, Vorkuta—a city built in the permafrost, where roads had to be resurfaced and pipes had to be repaired every year—had acquired a geological institute and a university, theaters, puppet theaters, swimming pools, and nurseries.

Yet if the expansion of Ukhtpechlag was not much publicized, neither was it haphazard. Without a doubt the camp’s commanders on the ground wanted their project to grow, and their prestige to grow along with it. Urgent necessity, not central planning, would have led to the creation of many new camp departments. Still, there was a neat symbiosis between the Soviet government’s needs (a place to dump its enemies) and the regions’ needs (more people to cut trees). When Moscow wrote offering to send exile settlers in 1930, for example, local leaders were delighted.17 The camp’s fate was discussed at the highest possible levels as well. It is worth noting that in November 1932, the Politburo—with Stalin present—dedicated most of an entire meeting to a discussion of the present state and future plans of Ukhtpechlag, discussing its prospects and its