Nicolas Werth
CANNIBAL ISLAND
Death in a Siberian Gulag
248pp. Princeton University Press. £15.95 (US $24.95).
978 0 691 13083 5
Lynne Viola
THE UNKNOWN GULAG
The lost world of Stalin’s special settlements
278pp. Oxford University Press. £17.99 (US $30).
978 0 19 518769 4
Tomas Kizny
GULAG
Life and death within Soviet concentration camps
496pp. Firefly. $69.95; distributed in the UK by Orca. £39.95.
978 1 55297 964 8
You know something is wrong when you find yourself longing to be lying on a wooden plank in a Gulag barracks. The “residents” of Nazino Island could only wish for the stark comforts and liminal order of a labour camp over the ghastly scenario that played out before them in the early spring of 1933 in Western Siberia. In the middle of the night, they were dumped on a small, barren island in the midst of an icy, roaring river hundreds of miles from civilization. With no food, no shelter, not much for clothing, 6,000 people, plucked from the streets of Moscow a few weeks before, found themselves wondering how their lives had taken this ghoulish and, for most, fatal turn.
Nicolas Werth’s Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag recounts a chapter in a horribly train-wrecked experiment in penal reform. Werth sifts the story of Nazino or “Cannibal” Island, from an assortment of Soviet archives to illustrate arguably the worst nightmare of the whole fiendish Gulag enterprise. He tells the story admirably, setting it in context of the trauma that took hold of Soviet society with the tremors of collectivization, the first five-year plan and the resulting famine.
The tragedy grew out of a junction in Soviet penal history when Soviet leaders dreamed of doing away with guards, barbed wire and labour camps in favour of humane settlements where prisoners would till the soil, log the forests and become productive citizens in self-reliant frontier communities. These new communities, called “special settlements”, existed in huge sweeps of territory run by the Gulag administration. Lynne Viola’s The Unknown Gulag: The lost world of Stalin’s special settlements maps out the creation and spread of this less well-known department of the Gulag administration. Viola shows how the settlements grew out of the need in 1930 to relocate hundreds of thousands of farmers uprooted as kulaks during the drive to collectivization. Designating virgin territory for the deportees and shipping them to remote regions became an answer to the problem of swelling numbers of banished people corralled at train stations awaiting their fate. In the case of Nazino, “social undesirables” who were caught begging, thieving, black-marketeering or simply standing on the street during a round-up were sent to the remote Narym region of Western Siberia. Instead of felling the thick forest for the socialist cause, starving people turned on each other, on their guards and doctors, killing, marauding and dying. Only the predatory survived. Two-thirds expired while Soviet officials stood by.
What were the Gulag planners thinking? Who would send hungry, unshod people to the Siberian Taiga without supplies, shelter and tools in the midst of a famine in order to build a brave new world? If this wasn’t sheer sadism, but really a utopian project, as Werth, I think rightly, asserts, who could imagine success?
Oddly enough, the dump-prisoners-on-frigid-island model had proved successful just a few years before. Feodor Eikhmans, a decorated security officer, probably first came up with the idea. In a 1930 report, he noted that the Soviet Union had miles of hard-to-reach, scarcely settled frontier overflowing with treasures: coal, timber, furs, fish, gold, lead, oil and silver. As director of the notorious Solovetsky Labour Camp, he boasted, he had made over the barren Murmansk region into a flourishing centre of industry, education and socialist government. Exploiting this frontier required skill, he wrote, and organizational acumen, toughness, and lots and lots of manpower. No civilian agency could accomplish this gargantuan task. Only the Gulag could manage it because, he wrote, the Gulag was built on “self-reliant, military discipline” and it had “economic flexibility and experience in overcoming obstacles arising from harsh environments”.
Henryk Iagoda, then deputy director of the Soviet Bureau of State Security (OGPU), pounced on Eikhmans’s memo. Prisons and labour camps, he pronounced, were a vestige of the bourgeois past. Soviet penal authorities would conquer the frontier with groups of inmates, self-reliant, hardworking, who would establish settlements, where they would build their own homes, raise their own produce and livestock, while working in mines and logging operations. Women could go along and be allowed to marry. And, he reasoned, since most of the prisoners were agrarian types (deported kulaks) who pined for the soil, they would not run away from the settlements, removing the need for guards. Sounding as though he had cribbed Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, Iagoda dreamed how the settlements would one day become the outposts for a Soviet manifest destiny. “In a few years”, Iagoda fantasized, “these settlements will become proletarian mining towns.”
With Iagoda’s blessing, Eikhmans wasted no time. He emerged just a few months later standing on the bridge of a ship steaming across the White Sea. He had with him one hundred prisoners, a handful of guards, and a few chemists and geologists to start a mining settlement on Vaigach Island. Tomas Kizny’s poignant collection of photos and essays, Gulag: Life and death inside the Soviet concentration camps, describes the short history of this experiment in polar expedition married to penal rehabilitation. Like Alaskan prospectors, the settler-convicts, swaddled in native fur, relied initially on the indigenous Nenets of the island and shipments from across the frozen sea. Reportedly, Eikhmans ran a humane settlement. Prisoners were not guarded. They worked an eight-hour day in the mines. After work they were free to wander about and purchase cheese, sausage, chocolate and clothing at the expedition commissary. Prisoners fraternized with the guards and professionals.
They formed clubs, a choir, wrote a newspaper and took literacy classes. When prisoners went out to the tundra, they were issued guns to fend off the polar bears. On Vaigach Island, in fact, the chief function of guards and guns seems to have been in confrontation, not with criminals, but with nature. In one photo, a Chekist stands in a classic trophy-hunting pose with a foot on the belly of a felled white dolphin. In another picture, Eikhmans’s wife, a prisoner herself, is skiing, trailed by an armed guard, there to protect her from bears.
Eikhmans’s settlement was the shining model for an alternative to Gulag labour camps: a Turnerian vision of free, self-reliant and dynamic settlers who, in conquering the frontier, forged “proletarian mining towns”. In the vast Soviet Union, this scene could have played out endlessly: plentiful, untapped land continuously receding before the resourcefulness of Gulag frontiersmen, who, at the brutal but vital juncture of savagery and civilization, temper convicts into proletarian citizens. Admittedly, it is hard to imagine Iagoda and Eikhmans, committed Soviet security officers, as idealists looking to make a better world. Yet it is important not to overlook the idealism even in institutions as dreadful as the Gulag, for ideals can have a self-blinding agency. Sadly, this humane vision of self-reliant convict settlements was put into action, and in so doing caused a great deal of suffering, in Nazino and elsewhere in the vast and spreading Gulag territories.
Viola’s magnificently wide-ranging research shows how the tragedy of Cannibal Island was multiplied across the Soviet frontier, in the Northern Territories, in the Far East, in Siberia and Kazakhstan, as half a million people died of hunger, cold and exhaustion in Gulag special settlements in the 1930s. Rather than Eikhmans’s carefully planned settlement, local security officers were told to prepare for tens of thousands of exiles in a few months’ time, with few resources. When deportees arrived, few preparations were waiting. Dumped on harsh and undesirable territory, prisoners usually had to build their own homes, scrub up some food, fulfil quotas for logging or mining, or perish.
And many did. Others fled the unguarded settlements, walking, hitching rides, jumping trains back home or to cities to disappear. Of 1.3 million kulaks deported from 1930 to 1933, only 970,000 were in the settlements to be counted in December 1934.
And so, the special settlements begat a new problem in Soviet society; hundreds of thousands of escaped “convicts”, living on forged papers and borrowed time. For Iagoda, these misplaced people were a security threat and just plain unsightly. In the spring of 1933 the Politburo ordered a cleansing of Moscow, Leningrad and the posh Black Sea resort towns where the leadership vacationed. This cleansing tossed up another 300,000 people, of whom eventually 6,000 were sent to Nazino. Some were indeed kulaks or criminals on the run. A fair number, however, were good workers, even party members caught in the dragnets. One fellow had stepped out to smoke a cigarette before the movies. A woman was in Moscow on official party business. They all were sent to Nazino, asserting, like every prisoner, their loyalty and innocence.
In the spring of 1933, Dmitri Tsepkov, Gulag commander of the Narym Region, received a telegram with word to prepare for a large contingent of special settlers. The new shipment would more than double the population of the already famished and goods-starved region of 4,000 people. The news was worrisome. Tsepkov’s previous group of deportees had gone wild. Dropped on the edge of town with no jobs, homes and food, the deportees had shifted from begging to robbing the local population, until finally locals had hunted down and shot the remaining settlers. The Narym Region was not exceptional. By 1933, roving bands of escaped outlaws raided, raped, killed and generally terrorized the lone Gulag sheriffs and their small posses all along the Soviet frontier.
Tsepkov chose to send the latest group of settlers to the barren Nazino Island, not in the hopes of duplicating Eikhmans’s success on Vaigach Island, but because he was terrified of this new group of prisoners. To give Tsepkov credit, he did try to divert the inevitable disaster. Before the deportees’ arrival, he tried to get wood and labour to build shelters, but the Gulag officials failed to send funds. He asked local collective farm directors to fork out food, but they refused, being hungry themselves. When the settlers came early on a listing barge, already starving, dressed in rags, with only bags of raw flour to keep them, he scoured his region for cooking utensils and supplies. In a week of searching, he dug up some tools, a few hundred pairs of felt boots, and a bolt of cloth. So Nazino Island, seventy kilometres up river, offered Tsepkov a refuge, a way to shove out of sight the savagery he knew was coming. He had seen it before.
The guards cast the exiles off on the island and then unloaded bags of flour. But, because the flour bags were in short supply, they poured the flour directly on the ground, a mountain of grain, soon rotting. Prisoners lined up to get their ration. Few prisoners had containers and so they held out their hats, shirt tails, or dirty palms. In a snowfall, with no cooking utensils, the famished prisoners ran to the river to mix the flour with water and gulp it down. Many fell sick with dysentery. Others dropped from hypothermia. Within days, gangs organized to control the flour rations and they started hunting the weak, the goners. As the gangs grew bolder, they attacked healthy people, their guards and doctors. Some guards fled. Others began trading with gang leaders, exchanging food for gold fillings stolen from corpses. Rumours of cannibalism floated downriver to the authorities in Western Siberia. Tsepkov’s bosses dressed him down. He showed up at the island, wrung his hands, barked some orders and left again.
Tsepkov was a very unimportant man in the Soviet system. Yet his name, actions, even his thoughts have percolated down from his lonely riverside outpost deep in the taiga bound by ice and snow from October to May. Why do we know so much about Tsepkov, Nazino and the horrors of the special settlements which Viola and Werth set out? Officially, the Soviet Union denied the existence of the Gulag system. Knowledge of the Nazino tragedy could easily have remained hidden in the interior. Yet the same Moscow officials who ordered the deportations and set fantastically optimistic goals for colonizing frontiers with starving prisoners, ordered investigations into “abuses”, when they inevitably occurred. The quantity of documentary evidence is astonishing. Why did Soviet officials write about the abuses in the first place, and then in such detail?
Lynne Viola argues that Soviet leaders ordered reports because they begrudged the lost economic potential of famished labour forces. Nicolas Werth lays the blame on a stubborn insistence on engineering a utopian world, despite all evidence of its failure. They are, of course, both right. Economic rationale drove the creation and elevation of the special settlements. And ideology propped them up. Ideologically and physically, kulaks and “social undesirables” were expendable in the drive for socialism. But I am not wholly convinced that these were the only reasons for the excess of documents chronicling government-issue nightmares. I have sat in the tiny reading room in the Moscow “special archive”, and read the accounts from Gulag agents in the field. Many of these are dry texts, ground out at the end of a wearying day. But others are startling in their immediacy and poignancy. There is something to the full-throated disgorging of horror in these reports that emits a mournful human cry. The men express shock, sorrow but also offence at being forced to witness and take part in human degradation and destruction. In other words, in 1930, the utopian visionaries reconceived industry, agriculture and penal detention, aspiring to remake “The World” in the image of socialism. In 1933, local security officers inherited the violence and suffering of the dystopia these visionaries inspired. I have often thought that some of these “company men”, the dutiful Soviet security officials, were trying, however feebly and hopelessly, to make their world a little less awful.
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Kate Brown is an Assistant Professor at UMBC in Maryland. Her book, A Biography of No Place: From ethnic borderland to Soviet heartland, won the American Historical Association's George Louis Beer Prize for 2004.
