Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [82]
It might be said, in fact, that by the end of the decade, the Soviet concentration camps had attained what was to be their permanent form. They had, by this time, penetrated nearly every region of the Soviet Union, all twelve of its time zones, and most of its republics. From Aktyubinsk to Yakutsk, there was not a single major population center that did not now have its own local camp or colony. Prison labor was used to build everything from children’s toys to military aircraft. In the Soviet Union of the 1940s it would have been difficult, in many places, to go about your daily business and not run in to prisoners.
More important, the camps had evolved. They were now no longer a group of idiosyncratically run work sites, but rather a full-fledged “camp-industrial complex,” with internal rules and habitual practices, special distribution systems and hierarchies.77 A vast bureaucracy, also with its own particular culture, ruled the Gulag’s far-flung empire from Moscow. The center regularly sent out orders to local camps, governing everything from general policy to minor details. Although the local camps did not (or could not) always follow the letter of the law, the ad hoc nature of the Gulag’s early days never returned.
The fortunes of prisoners would still fluctuate along with Soviet policy, economics, and, most of all, the course of the Second World War. But the era of trials and experiments was over. The system was now in place. The group of procedures that prisoners called the “meat-grinder”—the methods of arrest, of interrogation, of transport, of food, and of work—were, at the start of the 1940s, set in stone. In essence, these would change very little until Stalin’s death.
The Gulag at its zenith, 1939–1953
PART TWO
LIFE AND WORK IN THE CAMPS
Chapter 7
ARREST
We never asked, on hearing about the latest arrest, “What was he arrested for?” but we were exceptional. Most people, crazed by fear, asked this question just to give themselves a little hope; if others were arrested for some reason, then they wouldn’t be arrested, because they hadn’t done anything wrong. They vied with each other in thinking up ingenious reasons to justify each arrest: “Well, she really is a smuggler, you know,” “He really did go rather far,” or “It was only to be expected, he’s a terrible man,” “I always thought there was something fishy about him,” “He isn’t one of us at all . . .”
This was why we had outlawed the question “What was he arrested for?”
“What for?” Akhmatova would cry indignantly whenever, infected by the prevailing climate, anyone of our circle asked this question.
“What do you mean what for? It’s time you understood that people are arrested for nothing!”
—Nadezhda Mandelstam Hope Against Hope1
ANNA AKHMATOVA—the poet, quoted above by another poet’s widow—was both right and wrong. On the one hand, from the middle of the 1920s—by the time the machinery of the Soviet repressive system was in place—the Soviet government no longer picked people up off the streets and threw them in jail without giving any reason or explanation: there were arrests, investigations, trials, and sentences. On the other hand, the “crimes” for which people were arrested, tried, and sentenced were nonsensical, and the procedures by which people were investigated and convicted were absurd, even surreal.
In retrospect, this is one of the unique aspects of the Soviet camp system: its inmates arrived, most of the time, via a legal system, if not always the ordinary judicial system. No one