Lithuanians and Estonians) in territories captured or reoccupied by the Red Army but never really reconciled to Soviet power. The Gulag system expanded into a vast industrial empire, with 67 camp complexes, 10,000 individual camps and 1,700 colonies, employing a captive labour force of 2.4 million people by 1949 (compared with 1.7 million before the war). Overall, it is estimated that conscript labourers represented between 16 and 18 per cent of the Soviet industrial workforce between 1945 and 1948. They were especially important in the mining of precious metals in cold and remote regions where free labour was very expensive, if not impossible, to employ (hence their contribution to the Soviet economy was even more significant than the figures would suggest). Slave labour also made up the workforce in the big construction projects of the late 1940s which came to symbolize, officially at least, the post-war confidence and achievements of the Soviet system: the Volga– Don Canal; the Kuibyshev hydro-electric station; the Baikal-Amur and Arctic railways; the extensions to the Moscow Metro; and the Moscow University ensemble on the Lenin Hills, one of seven wedding-cake like structures (‘Stalin’s cathedrals’) in the ostentatious ‘Soviet Empire’ style which shot up around the capital in these years.18
The post-war years saw a gradual merging between the Gulag and civilian economies. Every year about half a million Gulag labourers were contracted out to the civilian sector, mostly in construction, or wherever the civilian ministries complained of labour shortages; about the same number of free labourers, mostly specialists, were paid to work in Gulag industries. The Gulag system was increasingly compelled to resort to material incentives to motivate even its forced labourers. The population of the camps had become more unruly and difficult to control. With the amnesty of about a million prisoners in 1945, mainly criminals, who had their sentences either reduced or annulled, the camps were left with a high proportion of ‘politicals’ – not the intellectual types who filled the camps in the 1930s but strong young men who had fought as soldiers in the war, foreign POWs, Ukrainian and Baltic ‘nationalists’ – who were hostile to the Soviet regime and not afraid of violence. Without a system of rewards, these prisoners simply refused to meet the set targets. The cost of guarding the prisoners was also becoming astronomical. By 1953, the MVD was employing a quarter of a million guards within its camps, spending twice as much on the upkeep of the Gulag than it received in revenue from its output. Several senior MVD officials were seriously questioning the effectiveness of using forced labour at all. There were even mooted plans, supported by Beria and Malenkov, to dismantle sections of the Gulag and convert the prisoners into partially civilian workers, but since Stalin was a firm supporter of the Gulag system, none of these ideas was seriously proposed.19
The Norilsk complex is a good example of the post-war convergence between the Gulag and civilian economies. Its population tripled, from 100,000 to nearly 300,000 prisoners between 1945 and 1952. Most of the new arrivals were Soviet POWs who had passed through the ‘filtration camps’ (where ‘collaborators with the enemy’ were weeded out by interrogation) on their return from Europe and the former zones of Nazi occupation; or soldiers and civilians who were rounded up as ‘nationalists’ from the Baltic region and Ukraine. But there was also a steady increase in the number of free labourers, who represented about one-third of the total workforce by 1949, if one includes prisoners who remained (or were made to remain) on paid contracts in the Norilsk complex after their release. Finally, there was a large contingent of Komsomol enthusiasts who came to Norilsk as volunteers; and relatives of prisoners who came to be united with their families.20
Lev Netto was born in 1925 to an Estonian family of Communists that had come to Moscow in 1917. His father was a member of the Latvian Rifle Brigade that played a vital role in Lenin’s seizure of power; his mother, who became an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, named Lev after Trotsky, who was her hero. In 1943, Lev was mobilized by the Red Army and assigned to a special NKVD unit of partisans which was sent to fight behind the German lines in Estonia. Captured by the enemy in 1944, Lev was imprisoned in Dvinsk in Latvia and then sent to a POW camp near Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany. In April 1945, the POWs were forced by the Germans to march west. Lev and a few of the other prisoners ran away from the convoy and were liberated by US troops. Lev spent two months in a camp run by the Americans. Despite their attempts to persuade him not to return to his native land, he went back to the Soviet Union in May 1945. He was twenty years old and wanted to study at a university. When Lev reached the Soviet border, he was sent to a filtration camp and then put back into the Red Army. For the next three years Lev served as an ordinary soldier in the newly occupied territories of western Ukraine. In April 1948, he was arrested in Rovno, charged with spying for the USA and, after weeks of torture by his NKVD interrogators, accused of having betrayed his partisan brigade to the Germans during the war. Threatened with the arrest of his parents, Lev signed a full confession to his crimes, and was sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labour followed by five years of exile in Norilsk.21
Maria Drozdova was sent to Norilsk after being arrested in Berlin by the Red Army in April 1945. Four years earlier, when she was seventeen, Maria had been captured by the Germans in Krasnoe Selo, near Leningrad, the town she lived in with her parents. She was taken by the German army to Estonia, where she worked as a nurse in a field hospital, and then to Berlin, where she was employed as a servant in the house of a senior Nazi official. Maria resisted several attempts by the Germans to recruit her as a spy – she was beaten by them many times – but her wounds were not enough to persuade the Soviet military tribunal which sentenced her to ten years in Norilsk for ‘treason against the Motherland’.22
The precious metals of Norilsk played an important role in Stalin’s thinking about the post-war reconstruction of the Soviet economy. To stimulate the Norilsk labour force the camp administration made increasing use of work credits and monetary rewards. By 1952, money wages had become the norm for the majority of Norilsk prisoners, who each earned on average 225 roubles a month, about one-third the normal rate of pay for civilian workers, although in Norilsk food and housing were ‘free of charge’. Many of the voluntary workers received special (‘northern’) rates of pay which were far higher than they could have earned outside the Gulag system.23 A strange hybrid system was evolving in Norilsk: a prison system where the prisoners were paid. But no amount of pay could make up for the loss of dignity and the inhumane conditions in which they were forced to live and work. It was only a matter of time before they rebelled.
2
The post-war years witnessed the consolidation of a new type of educated Soviet ‘middle class’. From 1945 to 1950, the number of students in universities and higher schools doubled, giving rise to a young professional class of technicians and managers who would become the leading functionaries and beneficiaries of the Soviet system over the next few decades. This new elite was different from the Soviet cadres of the 1930s: its members were better educated, less ideological in outlook and more stable. Their professional qualifications not only assured them senior positions in the Soviet system, but virtually guaranteed them immunity from demotion on account of class or ideological impurity. Professional capacity began to take the place of proletarian values in the ruling principles of the Soviet elite.
The creation of this professional class was a conscious policy of the Stalinist regime, which recognized the need for a larger and more reliable stratum of engineers, administrators and managers, both to compete with the capitalist economies and to stabilize the Soviet system by providing it with a more solid social base. The regime needed the support of a loyal middle class, if it was not to be overwhelmed by broader social pressures for political reform after 1945; and the most direct means of winning that loyalty was to cater to people’s bourgeois aspirations. This new Soviet bourgeoisie was rewarded with secure and well-paid jobs, private apartments and the domestic pleasures of a comfortable home. There were few consumer goods to meet their aspirations in the immediate post-war years, but, as in the 1930s, there were plenty of promises of ‘the good life’. Soviet propaganda, films and fiction conjured up an image of the personal and material happiness that lay ahead for those who studied hard and worked diligently. In post-war films and fiction, personal enrichment was promoted as a just reward for industry and loyalty; the pursuit of private happiness, domesticity and material goods was represented as a newly positive (‘Soviet’) value.24
The expansion of the higher education system was the key to the creation of this middle class. By the early 1950s, there were 1.7 million students in Soviet universities, and well over 2 million students in the higher technical schools and colleges.25 The student population was basically a mix of children from intelligentsia families, a larger share of children from the existing
