Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [81]
Several of these initiatives ran counter to the laws of the time, and actually encountered resistance. The chief prosecutor, Vyshinsky, and the People’s Commissar of Justice, Richkov, both opposed the liquidation of early release, as well as the imposition of the death sentence for those accused of “disorganizing camp life.” But Beria, like Yagoda before him, clearly had Stalin’s support, and he won all of his battles. From January 1, 1940, the NKVD was even granted the right to take back some 130,000 prisoners who had been “loaned” to other ministries. Beria was determined to make the Gulag really and truly profitable.69
With surprising speed, Beria’s changes did make an impact. In the final months before the Second World War, the economic activity of the NKVD began, once again, to grow. In 1939, the NKVD’s turnover was 4.2 billion rubles. In 1940, it was 4.5 billion rubles. As prisoners began to stream into the camps during the war years, those numbers would grow even more quickly. 70 According to official statistics, the number of deaths in camps also halved from 1938 to 1939, from 5 percent back to 3 percent, even as the number of prisoners continued to increase.71
There were also now far more camps than there had been, and they were much bigger than they had been at the beginning of the decade. The number of prisoners had nearly doubled between January 1, 1935, and January 1, 1938, from 950,000 to 1.8 million, with about another million people sentenced to exile.72 Camps which had contained nothing more than a few huts and some barbed wire had become true industrial giants. Sevvostlag, the main Dalstroi camp, contained nearly 200,000 prisoners in 1940. 73 Vorkutlag, the mining camp that developed out of Ukhtpechlag’s Rudnik No. 1, contained 15,000 prisoners in 1938; by 1951, it would contain over 70,000.
But there were new camps as well. Perhaps the grimmest of the new generation was Norillag, usually known as Norilsk. Located, like Vorkuta and Kolyma, north of the Arctic Circle, Norilsk sat right on top of an enormous nickel deposit, probably the largest in the world. The prisoners of Norilsk not only dug the nickel, but they also built the nickel-processing plant and the power stations alongside the mines. Then they built the city— Norilsk—to house the NKVD men who ran the mines and the factories. Like its predecessors, Norilsk grew quickly. The camp contained 1,200 prisoners in 1935; by 1940, it contained 19,500. At its largest, in 1952, 68,849 prisoners would be incarcerated there.74
In 1937, the NKVD also founded Kargopollag, in the Arkhangelsk region, followed, in 1938, by Vyatlag, in central Russia, and Kraslag, in the Krasnoyarsk district of northern Siberia. All were essentially forestry camps, which acquired side interests—brick factories, wood-processing plants, furniture-making workshops. All would double or triple in size in the 1940s, by which time they contained some 30,000 prisoners apiece. 75
There were other camps too, opening and shutting and reorganizing themselves so frequently that it is difficult to give precise numbers for a particular year. Some were quite small, built to serve the needs of a particular factory or industry or building project. Others were temporary, built for the purposes of road or railway construction, and abandoned afterward. To manage their enormous numbers and complex problems, the Gulag administration eventually set up subdivisions: a Main Administration of Industrial Camps, a Main Administration of Road Building, a Main Administration of Forestry Work, and so on.
But it was not only their sizes that had changed. From the end of the 1930s, all new camps had a purely industrial character, without the fountains and “gardens” of Vishlag, without the idealistic propaganda that accompanied the building of Kolyma, without the prisoner specialists at all levels of camp