Gulag has become a word of horror for all of us, Russian and non-Russian, and rightly so. The system it describes was one of almost unexampled coldblooded inhumanity. We now know almost all that is to be known about it. But the deep, penetrating illustration that Getman gives us is unique in taking us right into the human actualities.

The first Soviet prison camps were set up in 1918 as part of the terror by which the regime established itself. The system continued to grow, and became institutionalized. The most notorious of the late 1920s camps were those on the Arctic island Solovki. But it was only in the 1930s that the camps ceased to be merely inhuman rural prisons and the system of intensive slave labor was introduced. And soon many of the several million peasants deported as kulaks were working, either in camps or in ‘special’ settlements under secret police control. At this time the Soviets were exporting lumber, and the countries to which it was sent were disturbed by reports that it was being cut by forced labor. This the Soviet government denied, despite first-hand evidence. The campaign of total fabrication of the dreadful realities now entered its vital phase. This involved, amongst other things, hiding the camps and the slave labor operations from foreigners, apart from those the Communists were able to blackmail or bribe.

The center of repression moved, in the early 1930s, to the Baltic-White Sea Canal. This was opened with much fanfare in 1932. In fact, though it exploited several hundred thousand forced laborers, it was never of much use. Its predicted ability to transfer the Northern or Baltic Fleets to the other sea was not achieved. A group of writers and others were brought in, however, and produced a book on it in which they printed the results of their interviews with selected prisoners who told them of how they had been spiritually saved by “corrective labor.” This book was published in English in New York, but eventually had to be withdrawn, most of the officials and the writers quoted having been shot.

Many of the projects were more usual, though most effective in wearing out their miserable human capital. But insane enterprises persisted. When, after World War II, Stalin demanded a new railway across north Siberia, for four years—in temperatures down to -55C in winter—thousands of forced laborers in more than eighty labor camps managed to build 850 kilometers of rail. The whole thing was abandoned, locomotives and all, in the 1950s.

From the mid-thirties on, the terror became yet more intense, the treatment worse still. These millions of totally innocent men and women were treated in ways that would have been thought grossly inhumane elsewhere even if applied to the worst criminals. In Russia itself, in Tsarist times, enemies of the state such as Lenin were merely ‘exiled’ to Siberia—with their wives, housing and even an allowance.

In Soviet times most of the prisoners had been held in one or another of the immensely overcrowded prisons, and had been ‘interrogated’ to produce confessions of being to one degree or another enemies of the people, of society, of the party. It was taken for granted that anyone given only a ten-year sentence was totally innocent, and guards and police officials sometimes implicitly accepted this.

The prisoners were then transported in packed and unsanitary cattle trucks for journeys often of weeks, with minimal rations, with not even water given regularly, with hardly room to stand in almost total darkness. In the case of the Kolyma camps in Northeast Siberia, “the pole of cold and cruelty” of the system, as Solzhenitsyn put it, prisoners then had to face a week or more packed into the holds of the slave ships, even more filthy and crowded.

After this interlude, they faced a deadly environment. There were often executions in the camps. Ten thousand were specifically ordered by Moscow in 1937. Others were carried out for local offenses such as failing three times to work, or simply as a means of removing those showing any other sign of independence, or uttering any “anti-Soviet” words. Some were done locally, others in special camps serving a whole area such as the Serpantinka in Kolyma. There were even small execution camps outside of any particular group that handled a few hundred brought in at a time, two or three batches a week.

A further horror of the Gulag was that, in most camps, there was a proportion of members of the old Russian criminal caste, the urkas, dating from the Time of Troubles. These were favored by the authorities, and, together with the camp officials, they terrorized the noncriminal prisoners in an alliance productive of both physical abuse and starvation.

Far worse, if anything, than the general brutality and degradation inflicted on the prisoners was the central point of the whole Gulag operation—the food ration. It was calculated so that satisfactory toil could bring up to 800 grams of bread a day. Anything less than 100 percent fulfilment of the arbitrary and often almost impossibly high ‘norm’ meant a lower ration. In any case, the corruption in the camps and the favoring of the gang-criminal element kept the ordinary convicts’ food intake at little above, often under, starvation level. One striking comparison is with the Japanue prisoner of war camps on the River Kwai whose ration was about 3,500 calories (though, as in the Soviet Union, very deficient in vitamins)—the worst experience of its sort directly known to Westerners. The Gulag ration, in a more lethal climate, was about 2,400 calories.

The Soviet example, however, long remained unknown—or rather misknown—during the war. There were model prisons, to be shown to inquiring foreign penologists—in particular Bolshevo, where all the most progressive methods of restoring errant individuals to society were practiced. On one occasion an American mission headed by Vice President Henry Wallace was in the dreadful Kolyma area on a stage in a flight to China. He and his colleagues were actually guests at a campsite. Its wire had been taken down, its towers temporarily demolished and the prisoners replaced by healthy police and other officials. The trick worked. Wallace, though he later had second thoughts, published a eulogy. An even more positive line was taken by another member of the mission, Professor Owen Lattimore, who wrote of the healthy and heroic workers. No allusion to the realities of Gulag life was permitted in the Soviet Union until 1962. Very much against the wishes of most of the leadership, Khrushchev was induced to permit the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a crucial moment in the emergence there, for the first time, of a true memory and understanding of the fearful Soviet past. As Galina Vishevakaya, the great singer, put it, they had let the genie out of the bottle and were not able to put it back. But it still took decades for the full story to become available, with the developing glasnost of the late 1980s, followed by the collapse of the regime.

The word Gulag only became known the world over with the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in 1973. The material he had collected from a large number of victims proved final and decisive to a wide readership that had not until then really assimilated the realities. In France, in particular, where the Soviet system was deeply entrenched in an unusually idealistic intelligentsia, the book was widely seen as the death blow for communism.

Nikolai Getman shows the world of hunger and deprivation and oppression with extraordinary clarity and vision. In his paintings one can see the whole perspective of what the Soviet government itself had to describe in the last years of the regime as a system in which “death was caused by unbearable toil, by cold and starvation, by unheard of degradation and humiliation, by a life that could not have been endured by any other animal.”

This essay originally published in
The Gulag Collection: Paintings of the Soviet penal system by former prisoner Nikolai Getman
[ISBN: casebound 0-9675009-2-3, limpbound 0-9675009-1-5]
Copyright © 2001 The Jamestown Foundation
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