Gulag (an abbreviation for Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps in English) was a system of legalized slavery in the USSR. Before the 1960s, when the rich mineral deposits were found in Soviet territory, the country was in desperate need of resources for development, and the government began to extract them from the unpaid labor of prisoners.
The Slave Trade
The Soviet government did the same things that the Vikings did a thousand years ago. The Vikings sailed to the Slavs’ land not so much to rob (there was very little to take away from the forest dwellers) but to capture prisoners and sell them at the slave markets of Byzantium.
Something Similar Happened in the USSR. From the late 1920s to the late 1950s, the Soviet political police was engaged in several military campaigns against its own population. Some of the prisoners were killed, but the vast majority of the arrested were handed over to the Gulag. Millions of Soviet slaves built factories and power stations, worked in mines, and did waterlogging, and that was how the Soviet superpower was built.
It Could Happen to Anyone
The political police could arrest anyone for anything, and the fear of this huge and incomprehensible machine was the reason behind the mass false denunciations:
“Please, take my neighbor, not me! See, I’m vigilant and loyal, and I’m ready to do anything for the sake of the Party and the government!”
People were eager to join the harassment of the appointed “enemy” so that the system would consider them as loyalists and wouldn’t touch them. It was like the fight for a life jacket on a sinking ship: every man for himself.
But it was impossible to be safe from Gulag even for members of the Soviet government.
A Research Laboratory in the Prison
During WWII, my husband’s great-grandfather, Pavel Sholokhov, served in the air defense forces in besieged Leningrad. He was arrested in 1945. Someone reported him to the political police after Pavel commented on a Soviet newspaper: “They write a lot, but little is true.”
Pavel was an expert sheet metal worker, so he was sent to a special laboratory at the prison research institute where he worked for eight years. After Stalin’s death, he was released, but his health was so poor that he died one year later.
A Prisoner and a Guard
My grandfather, Nikolai Baryakin, was the head of the local Department Against Misappropriation of Socialist Property in Yuryevetz, a small town by the Volga River. In 1948, he received a report that someone had stolen several bags of flour from the state mill, but for some reason, he didn’t start an investigation. As a result, Nikolai was arrested, expelled from the communist party, and sentenced to five years of hard labor. But when he arrived at the camp, he became not a regular prisoner but an armed guard—because he used to be a law enforcement officer.
This was one of the most striking features of the Gulag: prisoners were guarded by other prisoners. The guards got a better chance of survival, and therefore, they did everything possible to continue in that capacity and run the Gulag system smoothly.
If you were in a camp in the Arctic or in Siberia, the rules of the game were very simple: if you had a guard’s sheepskin coat, you would survive the winter, and if not, you could only pray not to get frostbite.
Without vitamin C in your food, you might get scurvy unless you get special rations reserved for guards.
Moreover, if you were a guard, you could regularly write home and receive letters from your loved ones.
Love Letters from the Camp
I have no idea what Nikolai was doing while he was in the camp. But I have his letters to his wife, Diana. There’s nothing about his camp life. The censors made sure that guards never described anything specific, so it looked as though Nikolai was not a prisoner/guard but some kind of polar explorer.
“My dear Diana,
I’m still waiting for a letter from you. I can’t restrain myself from talking to you, let it be on paper. If you’d only know how much I worry about you and your well-being.
Diana, sweetheart! Do you still love me? Please forgive me for this question and don’t take offense. Those doubtful thoughts disturb my mind only because I’m so crazy about you.
I’m still alive and well in the same old place. It’s autumn here. Only half a month ago, we didn’t have any nights at all, and the sun was shining all the time. And now everything is gone like a dream, and there’s only the fetters of the winter waiting for us in the future.
Now, I don’t do patrolling anymore, and I got some writing job here in the office. I wish I could do it during the whole winter, like last year, but I’ll be alright anyway. Don’t worry about me and take care of yourself.
I send you a thousand kisses, my dearest wife.
Yours truly,
Nikolai”
Instead of five years, my grandfather spent three and a half years in the camp, and nobody knows why he was released on parole. Subsequently, he was reinstated in the party and was appointed as director of a woodworking factory. But he too died early, at the age of sixty, even though he did not drink or smoke.
The Dark Secret
Surprisingly, I learned about the existence of the Gulag only after the collapse of the USSR. The adults told us children nothing about Grandfather Nikolai’s camp experience. The same happened in other families: people just disappeared—some forever and some for several years—and if they returned home, they were completely exhausted both physically and morally. And everybody, including themselves, pretended that nothing had happened—it was much easier to rebuild your life that way.
Shadow of the Gulag
Of course, mass repressions made a huge impact on Soviet society. Millions of prisoners returning home brought thieves’ jargon with them, the language they had spoken in camps. For many, it became a common form of communication, especially in the workers’ neighborhoods.
The gypsy romance songs that were very popular in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century made way to criminals’ songs (the so-called Russian chanson), and the beliefs of the labor camps are now deeply rooted in Russian society:
- Don’t stick your head out if you don’t want to lose it.
- Don’t expect—and certainly don’t demand—anything from your superiors.
- If you can cheat the system, do it. Laws are just a suggestion.
- Try to join the strongest pack.
- Try to get a good position in the system, and milk it dry while you can.
- The highest authorities are good. Sometimes they make a call and punish the local bosses, who are thieves, murderers, and traitors, without exception.
- Do not trust anyone except your family and closest friends. If a stranger tries to be good to you, he surely wants to rip you off.
- Take advantage of a stupid stranger who’s just asking to be tricked.
- Stealing from the state is not a crime but a smart way to do business.
- The world is ruled by force, and goodwill doesn’t exist, especially to strangers.
The Worst of the Consequences
There’s no such word like “community” in Russian language, and there’s no such a phenomenon since obschinas, the rural communities, were destroyed during Stalin’s era.
Extreme disunity and lack of faith in joint actions is a result of a massive subconscious trauma of betrayal caused by the Gulag system.
The Soviet state promised its citizens to build communism by the 1980s, but it turned out that all that time, it was not building a happy society of the future but reproducing the system more suitable for the early Middle Ages. The builders of the future got the wrong blueprints, and due to lack of education, they couldn’t figure it out in time.
