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6 the Economy of the Gulag 6 THE ECONOMY OF THE GULAG Oleg Khlevnyuk After World War II a certain number of documents that the Hitlerites had taken from Soviet archives found their way to the United States. They included the plan for development of the USSR national economy for 1941 (without the secret appendixes). For a long time this document was the only archival source that allowed specialists to draw any conclu- sions about the economics of forced labor in the USSR.1 Nonethe- less, several specialized studies on forced labor were written in the West on the basis of various available materials. It is noteworthy that one of the first such works, the book by D. Dallin and B. Nicolaevsky, soon after its publication was translated into Rus- sian in the research department of the USSR MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) and was typed up in four copies for the leader- ship of Soviet punitive bodies.2 Other than this publication of four copies, not a single work on the economy of the Gulag was issued in the USSR until Gorbachev’s perestroika. This was a completely forbidden topic for Soviet historians. As for specific facts, the most valuable part of the first publica- Translated by Steven Shabad. 1. N. Jasny, ‘‘Labour and Output in Soviet Concentration Camps,’’ Journal of Political Economy, October 1951. 2. D. J. Dallin and B. P. Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1947). See State Archive of the Russian Federa- tion (GARF), f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 1800. ................. 8732$$ $CH6 03-22-07 07:10:56 PS 112 Oleg Khlevnyuk tions both about the Gulag as a whole and about its economy was the testimony of former inmates of Stalin’s camps.3 But most of the other data (especially statistics) suffered from imprecision and, most important, could not be verified without access to the archives. In spite of the dearth of sources, historians managed to formulate a number of conclusions and hypotheses and to outline the basic directions for further study of the problem. In brief, these conclusions and questions for the future boiled down to the following. First, the starting point of the genuinely massive use of forced labor was determined fairly precisely (the end of the 1920s), and the main stages of development of the economy of the Gulag were described in general terms. Second, in spite of disagreements regarding the number of prisoners, there was general acknowledgment that forced labor played a substan- tial role in the industrialization of the USSR. The relative size of the Gulag’s economy and the real value to Soviet industrialization of the facilities that prisoners built remained an open question. Third, the extensive involvement of the punitive bodies in eco- nomic activity made it possible to raise the question of the rela- tionship between the political and economic motives for the Stalinist terror. It was widely believed that the mass repressions were a direct function of the need to provide manpower for Gulag enterprises and construction projects. Fourth, there was interest in the problem of the efficiency level of forced labor in the Stalinist system. The general condemnation of the Gulag as a criminal and inhuman system did not eliminate the question of the objective reasons—including economic ones—for its proliferation. Most re- searchers leaned, more or less, toward the theory that the use of prisoners in the Stalinist economic system (which in essence was mobilizational and coercive) had a number of advantages that the Soviet leaders valued. The opening of the archives, which began gradually in the late 3. The best known of these books are: A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipel- ago, 3 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1973) and J. Rossi, The Gulag Handbook (London: Overseas Publication Interchange, 1987). ................. 8732$$ $CH6 03-22-07 07:10:57 PS The Economy of the Gulag 113 1980s and peaked in the early 1990s, radically changed the work- ing conditions of historians of the Soviet period. Among other things, they got a chance to study the above-mentioned questions on the basis of archival materials. But to all intents and purposes the problems of the Gulag’s economy remained outside the main- stream of studies of the Stalinist period, which grew over the past decade. For various reasons the majority of works on the history of the Gulag either dealt with the political aspects of the mass repressions or described individual structures of the Stalinist puni- tive machine, trying to determine the number of victims of the terror and conditions more precisely.4 For the present, on the basis of the archival materials that have been opened up in recent years and the first studies, we can present only a general picture of the development of the forced-labor economy during the Stalinist pe- riod. The archives have confirmed the previously established fact that the Stalinist Gulag and its economy per se began to take shape in the early 1930s and this new stage differed substantially from the previous one. In June 1929 the Politburo approved a resolution ‘‘On the Utilization of the Labor of Criminal Prison- ers.’’ To supplement the Solovetsky camp—the only camp at the time—the resolution provided for the creation of a network of new camps in remote areas of the country for the purpose of colo- nizing those areas and exploiting ‘‘natural resources through the use of the labor of prisoners.’’5 This decision was adopted in order to relieve the overcrowded prisons and reduce government out- lays on prisoner upkeep. The initial notion was that the camps would be of modest sizes—to accommodate a total of up to 50,000 inmates. But the adoption of the resolution on the creation of the camps (which had been in the works at least since the beginning 4. See, e.g., the basic publication Sistema ispravitelno-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR. 1923–1960. Spravochnik (Moscow: Zvenia, 1998). 5. Russian State Archives of Contemporary History (RGASPI), f. 17, op. 3, d. 746, ll. 2, 11. ................. 8732$$ $CH6 03-22-07 07:10:57 PS 114 Oleg Khlevnyuk of 1928) coincided with the first major wave of terror of the Stalin period—the so-called ‘‘dekulakization’’ and the forcible creation of collective farms. In the course of a few months, several hundred thousand people, primarily peasants, were arrested or sent into internal exile. Exiled peasants were placed in so-called special set- tlements in remote areas of the country (altogether more than 500,000 people were exiled after the first phase of this operation, before May 20, 1930). At the same time the number of prisoners in the newly created camps increased sharply—to nearly 180,000 as of January 1, 1930, which was several-fold above the limits that had been set just six months before. The leadership of the OGPU (Unified State Political Adminis- tration) was confronted with the problem of making economic use of these several hundred thousand prisoners and special set- tlers. Initially there were no coherent plans in this regard. Exiled peasants were sent to work at the enterprises of other people’s commissariats, mostly lumbering. Camp inmates were used at various construction projects and in the timber industry. In many instances the camps autonomously negotiated contracts with vari- ous enterprises and provided them with workers. At first the pros- pects for the development of the Gulag and its economy were unclear even to its leaders. For example, in April 1930 the vice chairman of the OGPU, Genrikh Yagoda, sharply criticized the camp system and proposed replacing the camps with colonizing settlements situated in the country’s remote areas. Prisoners could live in these settlements with their families, in Yagoda’s view, work in lumbering or other industries and keep their own per- sonal garden plots.6 Coming from one of the creators of the Gulag (in 1934 Yagoda would become the head of the NKVD, the Peo- ple’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, which was created to re- place the OGPU), such liberal projects suggested that even the country’s top leadership initially had no definite notions about the significance of the camps and the economic utilization of inmates. 6. GARF, f. R-9479, op. 1, d. 3, ll. 23–24. ................. 8732$$ $CH6 03-22-07 07:10:58 PS The Economy of the Gulag 115 The evolution of these notions was strongly influenced by the Gulag’s first major project, the White Sea–Baltic Canal (BBK), construction of which began in the second half of 1930.7 This complex transport system, which linked the Baltic and White Seas, was built in a record time of two years. During certain peri- ods more than 100,000 prisoners were deployed in the construc- tion. For the first time the camp economy demonstrated its ‘‘advantages’’ in practice: the rapid concentration of substantial contingents of manpower in the required location, the opportu- nity to exploit prisoners in any conditions, without considering casualties. Methods of organizing the Gulag’s major economic projects were refined at the BBK, and Chekist leadership person- nel gained experience. New assignments were a logical outgrowth of this. In April 1932 a camp was established on the Kolyma, where gold prospecting and mining were developed; in October 1932 the construction of a canal linking the Volga with the Moskva River and the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline in the Far East (BAM) were turned over to the OGPU; in Novem- ber 1932 the OGPU formed the Ukhta-Pechora Trust for the pur- pose of organizing coal and oil production and the development of other resources in the Pechora Basin.
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