Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [72]
Upon reaching Vladivostok, he proceeded, quite normally, to take the Trans-Siberian Express for Moscow. But although Berzin left Vladivostok as a first-class passenger, he arrived a prisoner. Just 70 kilometers outside Moscow, in the town of Aleksandrov, his train ground to a halt. In the middle of the night of December 19, 1937, Berzin was arrested on the station platform—outside the capital, so as not to cause a fuss in central Moscow— and driven to Lubyanka, Moscow’s central prison, for interrogation. He was quickly indicted for “counter-revolutionary sabotage-wrecking activities.” The NKVD accused him of organizing a “spy-diversionist Trotskyist organization in Kolyma,” which was allegedly shipping gold to the Japanese government and plotting a Japanese takeover of the Russian far east. They also accused him of spying for England and Germany. Clearly, the Dalstroi boss had been a very busy man. He was shot in August 1938 in the basement of Lubyanka prison.
The absurdity of the charges did not detract from the deadlines of the case. By the end of December, Pavlov, working quickly, had arrested the majority of Berzin’s subordinates. I. G. Filippov, the boss of the Sevvostlag camp, provided, under torture, an extensive confession which implicated virtually all of them. Confessing that he had “recruited” Berzin in 1934, he admitted that their “anti-Soviet organization” had planned to overthrow the Soviet government through the “preparation of an armed uprising against Soviet power in Kolyma . . . the preparation and accomplishment of terrorist acts against the leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet government . . . the encitement of the native population . . . and the encouragement of widespread wrecking,” among other things. Berzin’s chief deputy, Lev Epshtein, subsequently confessed to “gathering secret intelligence for France and Japan while conducting sabotage, diversion and wrecking.” The chief medical doctor at the Magadan polyclinic was accused of having “connections with alien elements and doubledealers.” By the time it was over, hundreds of people who had been associated with Berzin, from geologists to bureaucrats to engineers, were either dead or had themselves become prisoners.13
To put their experience in perspective, the Kolyma elite was not the only powerful network to be eliminated in 1937 and 1938. By the end of that year, Stalin had purged the Red Army of a whole host of notables, including Deputy People’s Commissar for Defense Marshal Tukhachevsky, Army Commander Ion Yakir, Army Commander Uborevich, and others, along with their wives and children, most of whom were shot, but some of whom wound up in camps. 14 The Communist Party met a similar fate. The purge penetrated not only Stalin’s potential enemies in the Party leadership, but also the provincial Party elite, the First Party Secretaries, the heads of local and regional councils, and the leaders of important factories and institutions.
So thorough was the wave of arrests in certain places and among a certain social class, later wrote Yelena Sidorkina—herself arrested in November 1937—that “Nobody knew what tomorrow would bring. People were afraid to talk to one another or meet, especially families in which the father or mother had already been ‘isolated.’ The rare individuals foolhardy enough to stand up for those arrested would themselves be automatically nominated for ‘isolation.’”15
But not everyone died, and not every camp was wiped out. In fact, the more obscure camp bosses even fared slightly better than the average NKVD officer, as the case of V. A. Barabanov, a protégé of Yagoda’s, illustrates. In 1935, when he was the deputy commander of Dmitlag, Barabanov was arrested along with a colleague for having arrived at the camp “in a drunken state.” As a result, he lost his job, received