from the prison camp. He built a shack in which they lived. Yevdokiia picked up casual jobs. When she realized that she was pregnant, she performed an abortion on herself, smashing her fists against her womb and pulling out the foetus. She nearly died. She lay in bed for several months. None of the doctors in the town would even look at her, because abortion had been declared illegal by the government. Yevdokiia cured herself by eating herbs.
In 1934, the passport system reached Tashtagol. Aleksei was rearrested and sent to the Stalinsk metal works as a penal labourer. Yevdokiia and the girls were arrested too. By sheer coincidence, they were sent off to join him at the metal works. They lived together – one of several hundred families – in a dug-out which ran along the river bank against the outside of the factory wall. The ‘roof’ was made of branches and pine needles packed with mud; the ‘walls’ leaked in the rain. Aleksei made some rudimentary furniture. He carved wooden cups and spoons. Once again the Okorokovs began to piece together a domestic existence. Miraculously, they had survived and managed to remain together as a family, but the traumas of the past three years had left their mark, especially on the girls. Maria and Tamara both suffered from nightmares. They were frightened and withdrawn. ‘After three years of living on the run,’ reflects Maria, ‘my sister and I had grown accustomed to not talking. We had learned to whisper rather than to talk.’47
3
The promise of the Five Year Plan was the creation of a modern industrial society. ‘We are marching full steam ahead on the road to industrialization, to socialism, leaving behind our age-old Russian backwardness,’ Stalin said in 1929. ‘We are becoming a nation of metal, motors and tractors, and when we have placed the Soviet man in an automobile and the peasant on a tractor, then let the capitalists of the West, who so proudly vaunt their civilization, attempt to catch up with us.’48
The symbols of this progress were the huge construction projects of the First Five Year Plan: industrial cities like Magnitogorsk, a vast complex of steel and iron works built from scratch on the barren slopes of the Urals; railroads and canals, like the Moscow–Volga and the White Sea Canal, which opened up new areas to exploitation and supplied the booming cities with basic goods; and enormous dams like Dneprostroi, the largest hydro-electric installation in the world, whose turbines were turning by 1932. These ‘successes’ had an important propaganda value for the Stalinist regime at a time when there was still considerable opposition – inside and outside the Party – to the policies of forcible collectivization and the over-ambitious industrial targets of the Five Year Plan. They enabled it to foster the belief in ‘socialist progress’, in the imminent arrival of the Soviet utopia, which became the ideological justification for the sacrifices demanded from the people for the plan’s fulfilment. In his memoirs, written in the 1980s, Anatoly Mesunov, a peasant son who became an OGPU guard at the White Sea Canal, sums up the effect of this propaganda on millions of ‘ordinary Stalinists’, as he describes himself:
I had my doubts about the Five Year Plan. I did not understand why we had to drive so many convicts to their deaths to finish the canal. Why did it have to be done so fast? At times it troubled me. But I justified it by the conviction that we were building something great, not just a canal, but a new society that could not have been built by voluntary means. Who would have volunteered to work on that canal? Today, I understand that it was very harsh and perhaps even cruel to build socialism in this way, but I still believe that it was justified.49
Stalin’s industrial revolution was very different from the industrialization of Western societies. As Mesunov suggests, the rates of growth that Stalin had demanded in the Five Year Plan could not have been achieved without the use of forced labour, particularly in the cold and remote regions of the Far North and Siberia, where most of the country’s minerals and fuel supplies were located. The supply of slave labour, beginning with the mass arrest and deportation of the ‘kulaks’ in 1929, was the economic rationale of the Gulag system. Although originally conceived as a prison for the regime’s enemies, the Gulag system soon developed as a form of economic colonization – as a cheap and rapid way of settling the land and exploiting the industrial resources of the Soviet Union’s remote regions, where nobody would want to live – and this rationale was openly acknowledged by Gulag officials among themselves.50 Historians have different views of the Gulag’s origins – some seeing it as a by-product of Stalin’s consolidation of political power, others emphasizing its role as a means of isolating and punishing phantom ‘classes’ like the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘kulaks’, or national and ethnic groups which were deemed dangerous to the state.51 These factors all played their part, but the economic motive was key, growing in importance from the moment the regime began to look for ways to make its prisons pay for themselves.
In the 1920s, the labour camps were basically prisons in which the prisoners were expected to work for their keep. The most important was the Solovetsky Camp of Special Significance (SLON), established by OGPU in a former monastery on the White Sea island of that name in 1923, which was to become the prototype of the Gulag in its use of slave labour. Employed in tsarist times to incarcerate political dissidents, the monastery was turned by the Bolsheviks into a general prison for all its adversaries – members of the outlawed opposition parties, intellectuals, former Whites – as well as ‘speculators’ and common criminals. One of the prisoners was Naftaly Frenkel, a Jewish businessman from Palestine who had become involved in smuggling to Soviet Russia and was arrested by the Soviet police in 1923. Shocked by the prison’s inefficiency, Frenkel wrote a letter setting out his ideas on how to run the camp and put it in the prisoners’ ‘complaints box’. Somehow the letter got to Genrikh Iagoda, the fast-rising OGPU boss. Frenkel was whisked off to Moscow, where he explained his plans for the use of prison labour to Stalin, who was keen on the idea of using prisoners for economic tasks. Frenkel was released in 1927 and placed in charge of turning SLON into a profit-making enterprise. The prison’s population expanded rapidly, from 10,000 in 1927 to 71,000 in 1931, as SLON won contracts to fell timber and build roads and took over factories in Karelia, on the Finnish border. Most of the new arrivals were ‘kulak’ peasants, like Nikolai Golovin, who came to the Solovetsky camp in December 1930. The prisoners were organized according to their physical abilities and given rations according to how much work they did. The strong survived and the weak died.52
In 1928, as the mass arrests of ‘kulaks’, priests and traders, ‘bourgeois specialists’ and engineers, ‘wreckers’, ‘saboteurs’ and other ‘enemies’ of Stalin’s forced industrialization threatened to overwhelm the Soviet prison system, the Politburo established a commission to study the possible use to which the growing prison population could be put. Headed by the Commissar of Justice, N. M. Ianson, the commission included Interior Commissar V. N. Tolmachyov as well as Iagoda, the OGPU chief. The three men were locked in battle for control of the prison population, but Stalin clearly favoured Iagoda, who proposed using it to colonize and exploit the industrial resources of the Far North and Siberia through a new network of labour camps. There was an almost inexhaustible supply of timber in these remote areas; and geologists, like Pavel Vittenburg, were charting rich reserves of gold, tin, nickel, coal, gas and oil, which could be cheaply mined by convict labourers. In April 1929, the commission proposed the creation of a new system of ‘experimental’ camps, each with 50,000 prisoners, controlled by OGPU. The commission underlined that, by concentrating larger numbers in the camps, the costs of maintaining this slave labour force could be reduced from 250 to just 100 roubles per capita per year. Two months later, the Politburo passed a resolution (‘On the Use of Prison Labour’) instructing OGPU to establish a network of ‘correctional-labour camps’ for the ‘colonization of [remote] regions and the exploitation of their natural wealth through the work of prisoners’. From this point on, the political police became one of the main driving forces of Soviet industrialization. It controlled a rapidly expanding empire of penal labour camps, whose population grew from 20,000 prisoners in 1928 to 1 million by 1934, when OGPU merged with the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs); the new authority then took control of the political police and directed all these labour camps through the Gulag.53
The largest of the early penal labour camps, Belbaltlag, with more than 100,000 prisoners by 1932, was used to build the White Sea Canal, 227 kilometres of waterway connecting the Baltic with the White Sea. The idea of the canal had first been advanced in the eighteenth century, but it had proved beyond the technical capabilities of the old regime, so the idea of building it was a vital part of the propaganda mission of the Five Year Plan to demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet system. It was a fantastically ambitious project, given that the planners intended to construct the canal without machines or even proper surveys of the land. Critics of the project (who envisaged building it with free labour) had argued that the huge construction costs could not be justified because there was relatively little shipping on the White Sea. But Stalin was insistent that the canal could be built both cheaply and in record time – a symbol of the Party’s will and power – as long as OGPU supplied sufficient prison labour. Frenkel was put in charge of construction. The methods he had used in SLON were re-
