2 Striking Against the Gulag, 1947–53

The Economics of Forced Labour

The key instrument directing political repression inside the Gulag system was the state security service, known by various names over the decades, among them the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, and KGB.10 According to Swianiewicz, “during the 1930’s the NKVD became not only a security police with its own army … but also a huge industrial and constructional concern which organized production under its own administration.” In addition, it played the role of a “contractor supplying labour force to enterprises.” Central to these roles was the constant “search for new sources of manpower. The reign of terror which was a characteristic of the Stalinist period was to a certain extent a result of the atmosphere created by this extension of the NKVD’s economic sector.”11

The profits from the camps covered a considerable amount of expenses connected with the increasing national expenditures, but most certainly, they covered almost completely the cost of maintaining the huge NKVD apparatus, which in Stalin’s time expanded to one of the largest, and one could even risk stating “the” largest enterprise in the world. It conducted huge construction projects, mostly in the far regions of the Soviet Union; it built railroads, roads, and canals; it exploited forests on the huge stretches between the Finnish border and the Pacific Ocean; it owned coal mines and farms, and it possessed its own research institutes in the same manner as great monopolistic industrial concerns. The aggregate amount of the work force, free and enslaved, employed in the NKVD enterprises during the period when I was there as a slave had to extend to more than 7 million people.12

This gigantic enterprise—centred in what Solzhenitsyn called his country’s “sewage disposal system”—had an unending appetite for new labourers, the supply of which took the form of successive waves of mass repression and arrests. Solzhenitsyn identifies three such waves.13 The first began as a small wave in the 1920s, but grew enormously in the years from 1928 to 1932 with the implementation of the first five-year plan—a wave that has been variously labelled as “liquidating the kulaks as a class,” “dekulakization,” the “great turning point,” or, probably most accurately, the “war on the peasantry,” the tragic consequences of which were touched on in the Introduction and to which we will return in chapter 5.14 Solzhenitsyn reminds us that this first wave drove some fifteen million peasants “out into the taiga and the tundra,” and that this massive displacement remained, for many decades, largely forgotten, not least because “peasants are a silent people, without a literary voice, nor do they write complaints or memoirs.”15 The second wave, the Great Terror of 1937–38, is somewhat better known, given that it “swept up and carried off to the Archipelago people of position,” educated people, around whom were others who escaped incarceration and who, in Solzhenitsyn’s time, were still “writing, speaking, remembering.”16 Then came the third wave, from 1944 to 1946, during which the Soviet regime “dumped whole nations down the sewer pipes,” along with millions of individuals who had fought for Russia and become prisoners of war in Germany. This was the wave in which Solzhenitsyn was caught—a soldier who dared to make remarks critical of Stalin in letters to a friend.17

The harsh compulsion of economic necessity characterized the Russian Revolution from its inception. From 1921 to 1923, a horrific famine took place, centred on areas of what is today Ukraine. Roman Serbyn tells us that starvation and related epidemics claimed 1.5 million to 2 million lives.18 Some food aid, in the form of grain shipments, arrived from the West to assist in feeding the starving millions. Nonetheless, in 1922, amidst much controversy, the Soviet government announced that it was resuming the export of grain to the West. While food was unloaded in the port of Odessa, coming in as aid to hungry Ukrainians, grain grown by Ukrainian peasants was simultaneously loaded to be shipped to Germany. Some rail workers who were ordered to transport grain out of the country went on strike. But the export went ahead, despite acts of sabotage against trains and elevators containing grain for export.19 Roman Serbyn argues that this policy had economic roots. The five-year-old regime was seeking to industrialize, which required foreign exchange with which to purchase the technology and other inputs needed in modern industry. But because Western banks would not extend loans to the Soviet government, the only source of foreign exchange was trade, and one of the only commodities Russia could sell abroad for cash was wheat.20

In the 1930s, the decade in which the Gulag exploded in size, the catastrophe of forced collectivization so seriously damaged the agricultural sector that grain was no longer a candidate to be a commodity from which serious amounts of foreign currency could be acquired through external trade. Serbyn says that “timber was to a very great extent made to take the place of grain” and that to this end, “extensive exploitation of the forests became necessary in order to maintain a foreign balance. The forestry reserves were, however, mostly in the remote northern regions where there was no adequate supply of manpower.” The first five-year plan projected a need for 900,000 workers in the forestry industry, but only about 50,000 became available through contracts with collective farms. Into the labour supply breach stepped the security services, leading to hundreds of thousands of prisoners engaged in forced labour in the “great timber industry run by what was then called the NKVD in the extreme north of European Russia.”21

Another commodity was central to the Gulag: gold, the most precious commodity of all. Gold dug out of the ground at one of the most brutal camps, Kolyma, was “sold directly to the West, exchanged for desperately needed technology and machinery.”22 But it was a third commodity that dominated the lives of the prisoners in Vorkuta, an indispensable energy input for Soviet industrialization. The story of Vorkuta is the story of coal.

The Transition to Coal

The drive to industrialization accelerated in the 1930s, and with that acceleration came even greater compulsion. Industrialization depended on coal, which was extracted in large part from the forced labour camps in and around Vorkuta and which required thousands and thousands of coal miners—some forced and some “free.” During World War II, after the loss of Ukraine and its vast coal supplies to the German invaders, the drive to extract coal from the mines in and around Vorkuta accelerated again.23 By the early 1950s, the forced labour system, whether used for producing coal or some other product, with its millions of prison labourers, had become central to the Soviet economy. As Joseph Scholmer noted at that time: “Prisoners, who had been employed in the industrial ministries before their arrest, estimated that half of the entire coal production of the Soviet Union and eighty per cent of the wood supply is provided by forced labour.”24

That this industrialization was based on forced labour was not atypical in the history of the world economy. As we saw in the introduction, Swianiewicz drew a direct parallel between forced collectivization in the Soviet Union and the enclosure movement in Great Britain. The Soviet forced labour system had similar historical parallels. Compulsion and unfree labour have often accompanied the early years of the development of a capitalist economy, particularly during the period of what Marx referred to as ursprüngliche Akkumulation—typically translated as “primitive accumulation” but which we should more accurately, and less offensively, translate as “primary” accumulation.25 Robert Miles suggests that primary accumulation is “synonymous with the creation of a labour market and the commodification of labour power.”26 “Force or compulsion” writes Abigail Bakan, in a comment on Miles’s analysis, “are employed as a precondition of moving from one mode of production to another, as it involves the physical separation of pre-capitalist laborers from the means of production and reproduction.”27

Evgeny Preobrazhensky—a Soviet economist and Trotskyist who, in 1937, became a victim of Stalin’s terror—tried to apply this notion of primary accumulation to the transition not only to capitalism but also to socialism. In 1926, he picked up a term originally coined by V.M. Smirnov—“primitive socialist accumulation” (or, as Preobrazhensky also called it, “preliminary socialist accumulation”).28 Preobrazhensky suggested that the concept should be understood as a necessary accompaniment to the development of a socialist economy. However, while related to capitalist primary accumulation, preliminary socialist accumulation could, in important ways, be distinguished from it, principally because the former is intimately connected with colonization. Preobrazhensky claimed that, with regard to “colonial plundering, a socialist state, carrying out a policy of equality between nationalities and voluntary entry by them into one kind or another of union of nations, repudiates on principle all the forcible methods of capital in this sphere. This source of primitive accumulation is closed to it from the very start and for ever.”29

This claim rings hollow. In chapter 6, we will examine Russia’s postrevolutionary approach to both Poland and Georgia, which is different in form but not in substance from the approach of capitalist great powers to states they wish to subordinate as part of their sphere of influence. Furthermore, if the economic essence of colonial primary accumulation was unequal exchange—the metropole extracting more surplus from its colonies than it returns to them—this is precisely the relationship that Preobrazhensky advocated in the relationship of what he called the “socialist” sector of the economy to the “petty,” or presocialist, economy of the small peasants. In a nonindustrialized country such as Russia, “socialist accumulation” will “be obliged to rely on alienating part of the surplus product of pre-socialist forms of economy”—that is, from the peasantry.30 From 1926 until early 1929, this idea was vociferously opposed by both Bukharin and Stalin. Suddenly, though, in the summer of 1929, Stalin did an about-face and adopted Preobrazhensky’s approach almost without amendment.

Like Preobrazhensky, Stalin made the appropriate statement opposing colonialism. “In the capitalist countries industrialisation was usually effected, in the main, by robbing other countries, by robbing colonies or defeated countries,” he argued, insisting that the Soviet Union “cannot and must not engage in colonial robbery, or the plundering of other countries.”31 What was the alternative to external colonialism? It was something that can only be called internal colonialism—the superexploitation of the Russian countryside by its cities. At first, this was to be enforced solely through a consciously distorted price and tax structure, to create what Preobrazhensky labelled “non-equivalent exchange” between the country and the city.32 Stalin initially put this in bland economic terms: the peasantry, he said, “not only pays the state the usual taxes, direct and indirect; it also overpays in the relatively high prices for manufactured goods … and it is more or less underpaid in the prices for agricultural produce.” In less bland terms, however, he characterized this as “in the nature of a ‘tribute’”—and as we will outline in chapter 5, the extraction of this tribute went far beyond taxes and prices.33 Stalin quickly moved to forcible seizure of grain stockpiles, pushing millions of peasants, at gunpoint, off their land and into collective farms. As with European colonialism, the extraction of a “tribute” cost the lives of millions. While in this “war on the kulaks,” according to Alec Nove, “Stalin levied a tribute on the peasants on a scale greater than Preobrazhensky had ever conceived,” it was in essence a policy completely consistent with Preobrahensky’s theory.34 And in fact Preobrazhensky, while upset at the pace of Stalin’s forced collectivization, as were all in the Trotskyist opposition, did see such a link. Preobrazhensky’s concept of “primitive socialist accumulation had been ruthlessly imposed by collectivization,” writes Nove, and “industrialization was being made possible ‘by exploiting the peasants, by concentrating the resources of the peasant economy in the hands of the state.’”35

It’s all a bit esoteric. Without too much effort, we can demonstrate that the experience of Russia in the 1930s belongs in the category of industrialization and forced labour. But how can such horrific methods—which, as we have seen, cost millions of lives—result in something called socialism? Let’s put aside the political rhetoric about “socialism” and examine the economics of forced labour in a bit more detail. There are two conditions in which many industrializing economies have resorted to compulsion and forced labour: when labour power is cheap and in plentiful supply, and when economically critical and labour-intensive tasks cannot be accomplished without coercion. Capitalism in the Americas, for instance, had an economically critical set of labour-intensive tasks to perform in its early years—the tasks involved in operating plantations to supply English textile mills with cotton and European dining room tables with sugar and coffee. However, the work on those plantations could not be performed by free labour, since, given a choice, the free labourers would, to a person, rather homestead on their own land (which was also in plentiful supply) than break their backs in the interests of international capital. But with a huge pool of cheap and available labour in Africa, that problem could be solved through a centuries-long forced labour system that was even more brutal, more exploitive, and longer-lasting than the forced labour system in Stalin’s Gulag. In Russia, similar conditions laid the material foundations for the “high Stalinism” of the postwar period.36 There was labour-intensive, economically necessary work throughout all of the Arctic, its treasure house of natural resources eagerly awaited by industry in the south. And there was a massive pool of millions of displaced peasants. Left to themselves, very few would have migrated to the far north to work and die in the coal and gold mines. But they were not left to themselves. Whole towns, whole nations, were interned in the vast camp system and forced to use their labour to accumulate wealth for Stalinist industrialization.

Vorkuta, in particular, became one of the most important areas to Soviet industrial development in the entire forced labour system. Joseph Scholmer described the situation in the early 1950s: “The coal from Vorkuta [that] supplies the whole of Leningrad and Leningrad is the heart of Soviet industry, with its factories making precision instruments, electrical equipment, optical lenses and engine parts.”37 In 1950, three of the coal mines in the Vorkuta complex won “first prize for coal production for the entire industry in the USSR,” notes Edward Buca.38

The story of coal in Vorkuta—with forced labour as a unifying thread—links the area’s first identity, as a place for the extermination of anti-Stalinist socialists, to its second, as one of Russia’s largest coal producers. Barenberg narrates how the first seams of coal in the Vorkuta area were discovered by a young geologist, Georgii Aleksandrovich Chernov, during an expedition in the summer of 1930. A year later, Chernov returned with what he described as a group of thirty-nine “mining engineers of Ukhta,” who began work on the first permanent settlement in the region. Chernov related this story in his memoirs, but, as Barenberg points out, he “failed to acknowledge the most important detail of the discovery of coal in Vorkuta…. The thirty-nine ‘mining engineers of Ukhta’ who arrived in Vorkuta were in fact prisoners.”39 Once coal was discovered in the area, it was not long before the first mine began operating in 1934, although output remained limited until 1937, when electric power arrived.40

The centrality of forced labour to Vorkuta and coal is discernible even in usually dispassionate reports from academic congresses. Turn to the findings of the seventeenth session of the International Geological Congress, published in 1937. This dull, dry professional text, prepared under the direction of Mikhail Prigorovksy, carries the usual Stalinist verbiage about vast increases in production, breaking the limits imposed by the old tsarist system, and so on. It speaks of “the enormous growth of the socialist construction and exploitation of new regions,” going on to list “the Tungus Basin, Lena field, Pechora and Bureya basins” as “prospective coal areas.”41 But the most significant sentence in the report is this: “Newly obtained data confirm the presence there of enormous … distributed coal reserves.”42

This mention of “newly obtained data” was published in 1937, the year the mass killings of the Oppositionists began. Of the twenty-two specific locales on which the Prigorovsky volume reports, pride of place is given to the Pechora coal-bearing region in which Vorkuta is located, soon to become the killing ground of the Left Opposition. The Pechora district report is the first in the book, in spite of the fact that it is the district for which the authors have the least information, as its author (T. Ponomarev) admits: “The estimates of the reserves of the Pechora coals given in this article are but preliminary and most approximate ones, since most recent data concerning this question have not been received … in time for being included in the manuscripts prepared for print. For the same reason no figures of the actual and probable reserves of the region are given by us in this paper.”43

Ponomarev’s comment raises the question of where this “most recent data”—so recent that it could not be included—might have come from. As he notes, the presence of coal in the Pechora district was first “established by geological explorations carried on there in 1924–1930 by the Geological Service of the USSR. Nearly all the industrially important coal areas of the basin presently known to us have been detected in the result of these works.”44 This information clearly dovetails with Barenberg’s account of Chernov’s discovery (with, however, no mention of the role of forced labour in this process). But again, 1930 does not qualify as “recent.”

Ponomarev’s report might seem like the end of the road—were it not for Maria Joffe’s gripping account of her twenty-nine years in the Gulag. Central to her memoirs are the camps in the Vorkuta area, and the Brickworks several kilometres from Vorkuta where the mass executions took place. Joffe describes one of her fellow prisoners, a young geologist named Gleb Elizavetsky. Like Joffe, he was imprisoned for “Counter-revolutionary Trotskyist Activity” (KRTD). Elizavetsky was, in Joffe’s words, a “non-party man.”45 But, like so many others, however, once painted with the KRTD brush, he had no hope of reprieve, and he would meet the same fate as if he had been an active member of the Left Opposition. Early in 1937, Elizavetsky announced to Joffe and others that “he had got a permit to go outside the zone to do geological research, outside working hours.”46 Describing his findings, he said: “There might be Devonian oil in one of the areas, but research would have to be carried out as to whether it’s sufficient for industrial development. At the site of the precipice—there are slight traces of pelitsipods and this might mean coal.” In a footnote, Joffe explains that pelitsipods (which should really be “pelecypods” in English translation) are “a kind of fossilised cockle-shell sometimes preceding coal seams.”47

A doctor found Elizavetsky’s report on coal lying in the camp warden’s office. In an effort to save Elizavetsky’s life, writes Joffe, “the doctor got the paper registered, packed up, sealed and speedily despatched with the rest of the mail.” Joffe says that the “doctor had every confidence in the life-saving qualities of those ‘pelitsipods.’ Moscow was urging haste in the search for oil and coal.” The discovery did not save Elizavetsky’s life. In spite of his important findings, he was sent off to the death camps.48

If the coal of Vorkuta did not prove life-saving for Elizavetsky, it did prove to be life-sustaining for the people and factories of Petrograd. His early 1937 report on his findings could well be the “most recent data” to which Ponomarev refers, however we might never know with certainty. Perhaps buried somewhere in the old NKVD records are documents to prove that this “Trotskyist” geologist was in fact the person who discovered evidence of important new coal deposits in the Pechora coal basin, a basin that includes Vorkuta. Whatever the truth, Elizavetsky’s story is emblematic of the overlap between Vorkuta’s main role in the 1930s, as a death camp for Stalin’s enemies, and its emergent role as a forced labour camp in the subsequent decades, a production centre of coal to feed Russian industrialization.

The Transition from Forced Labour

Industrialization in the USSR was conducted in the context of incredible repression against the Left, against the labour force inside industry, and against national minorities inside the Russian empire. All three of these “constituencies” found ways to organize against their jailers. That organization transformed into mass resistance when the various divisions inside the camps were bridged. And once again, this mass resistance, culminating in the great mineworkers’ strike of 1953, made Vorkuta the focal point of a wave of anti-Stalinism, the second such wave since the triumph of Stalin in the 1920s.

The least studied of these three components of the anti-Stalinist resistance is the Left inside Russia itself. The contradiction between the words of the regime’s rulers and the realities of life in a Stalinist society provided ideological conditions that nourished the re-creation of oppositional currents almost as soon as the old Opposition had been liquidated. German journalist Brigitte Gerland was arrested in Dresden in 1946 for reporting on conditions under Soviet occupation; after fifteen months in a German prison, she was transferred to Vorkuta.49 Upon her release in 1953, she described a “program of resistance” developed by “small secret circles, meeting at night behind locked doors” inside the Soviet labour camps. One such movement “is said to have started from a discussion between five Moscow students on the long-banned poetry of Boris Pasternak.” These students envisaged “a way of making room for spiritual freedom in a collectivist society by decentralization of state power, until the state could finally be replaced altogether by the workers and peasants ‘syndicates.’” According to Gerland, this initial core of five “recruited hundreds of followers” until the group was infiltrated by police spies, arrested en masse in 1950, and sent to the labour camps.50

Elsewhere, Gerland tells a similar story with a more explicitly political focus. In 1948, a manifesto written by a dozen students began circulating in Moscow.51 The students called their group Istinny trud Lenina (Lenin’s True Work), and such a name needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It is certainly not a coincidence that its initials—ITL—are identical to those for Corrective Labour Camp (in Russian, Ispravitel’no-trudovoi lager’), the Stalinist euphemism for the forced labour camps that comprised the core of the Gulag. P.M. Tashtemkhanova is not alone in believing that in choosing precisely this name for their clandestine organization, “it was the Corrective Labour Camps (ITL) which were being referred to allegorically and sarcastically by the young interlocutors of B. Gerland.”52 It is probable that Gerland, in describing these students as “Leninist,” is leaning too much on the literal meaning of ITL and paying too little heed to the deep sarcasm the choice of name expressed. Nonetheless, following Gerland, we can see a considerable amount in the analysis of the ITL that is reminiscent of the old Left Opposition—in spite of that Opposition’s physical liquidation. The ITL argued that a political revolution was necessary against a bureaucracy that was strangling the original ideals of the 1917 revolution and that the foundation of a rebirth of real socialism would be a regeneration of workers’ councils (soviets).53 In this sense, they could be seen as reviving the classic framework developed by Leon Trotsky. Other oppositionists had revived the framework of the Group of Democratic Centralism, or Decists, who, in the 1920s, had called the USSR a “system of ‘state capitalism’” that had “destroyed workers’ democracy.”54 Echoing this analysis, some of the young members of the ITL referred to Russia as “state capitalist,” arguing that no vestiges of the old revolution remained. Their manifesto was circulated underground, allowing the group to grow to an organization of several hundred, with links to universities in Leningrad, Kyiv (Kiev in Russian), and Odessa.55

In 1949, the group was broken by the Russian authorities. According to Gerland, “in a single night, entirely unexpectedly, hundreds of its members were arrested and condemned to twenty-five-year terms at hard labor.”56 Scattered throughout the Gulag, these ITL students reconstituted an opposition, along with anarchist students and other oppositional currents they encountered in the camps. Gerland was impressed by these student oppositionists: “Outstanding among them were the children of the generation of ’37; their parents, once leading figures in party, army and government, had fallen victims to Stalin’s great purge.”57 It was these ITL students, she says, who saw that the key to resistance lay in the collective action of workers:

The idea of a mass strike of forced laborers was popularized in the camp by the Leninist students…. The Leninists knew that only a strike which embraced at least an entire forced-labor area that was important economically, such as Vorkuta, stood any chance of success. And so they undertook, systematically and patiently, to forge contacts between all the camps in the city of Vorkuta as well as in the Vorkuta district itself.58

For a strike to succeed, the divisions between the prisoners, which had been cultivated by the authorities, had to be overcome. There were two types of divisions that were the most intense—first, among the “criminal” population, between collaborators (suki) and irreconcilables (blatnoy), and second, among the entire prison population, between the Russians and the non-Russians.59 Before the oppositional students arrived in the camps, however, the first remarkable steps at overcoming these divisions had already taken place.

Forty kilometres east of Vorkuta, four small prison camps, with about five thousand prisoners in total, contained the toughest of the “criminal” elements among the prison population. Added to these was a group of former Red Army officers, including three named Mikhtyiev, Nasarov, and Malmyga. In 1947, these three were at the centre of a conspiracy that resembled nothing if not the great Spartacus slave revolt in 71 BC inside the Roman Empire. They determined to kill their guards, seize their weapons, form an army from the prisoners in their camps, and march on the main camp system in Vorkuta proper. Once Vorkuta was conquered, “with an army of hundreds of thousands of prisoners, with food and weapons from the camp stores, they planned to march down the railway to the west. Their goal was nothing less than raising an army of the oppressed—prisoners, workers, peasants—to overthrow the system and the great leader [Stalin] himself.”60 Faced with the possibility of resistance, the suki stopped collaborating with the prison authorities and threw in their lot with the blatnoy. This was “the first time the suki and the blatnoy stopped fighting each other and allied themselves against the guards.”61

The plan, of course, failed, but not before the rebels had killed all the guards in the four camps, formed an army of several thousand, and begun a march across the tundra to Vorkuta itself. There, the odds were stacked against them. Warned in advance, the Vorkuta authorities had airplanes and machine guns with which to greet the zek army, and they massacred these latter-day Spartacans by the hundreds. Few survived, but their example was to be key to the next round of struggle.

The surviving rebel blatnoy were imprisoned in one of the worst of Vorkuta’s forced labour camps. There, one by one, they were ordered to perform tasks that would violate their code of solidarity. They each steadfastly refused, and, one by one, they were shot. Imprisoned in the same camp were a group of other “irreconcilables,” who were there as punishment for being uncooperative and who bore witness to these events. One of them was Edward Buca, who later described the rebel blatnoy and their impact:

Their solidarity was total. All to a man obeyed the blatnoy code, and refused to do anything connected with the oppression of other prisoners. Their behaviour was an example to the rest of us. Naturally, only a few of us knew the details of what had taken place in the little zone [the four small prison camps east of Vorkuta], but most of us had an inkling—and this was enough. The seeds of revolt had been sown. More and more suki in the camp stopped persecuting the other prisoners, and eventually the blatnoy called a halt to their struggle against the suki.62

Six years later, Buca would be a key leader in the strikes that brought the forced labour system to its knees.

This was not the first such Spartacus-like rebellion, but it is the best documented. In his memoir The Notebooks of Sologdin, Dimitri Panin—on whom Solzhenitsyn based the character Sologdin in his epic novel about the camps, The First Circle—relates his eyewitness account of a similar revolt in 1942. A small camp in the Pechora district, south and west of Vorkuta and near Ust-Usa, was headed by a disgruntled “commandant” whose staff responsible for the work details were all former prisoners sentenced under Article 58. The commandant and these former Article 58 prisoners lured the camp’s armed security guards into the bathhouse, stole their clothes and weapons, freed and armed the rest of the prisoners, and began marching on the central headquarters for the Pechora district, located in Ust-Usa. They liberated several camps on the way and amassed a small army. After weeks of fighting, the Soviet authorities finally suppressed this uprising. The insurgents were killed virtually to the last man. The handful of survivors committed suicide.63

In 1948, a group of war veterans (some perhaps belonging to or inspired by the underground veterans’ organization, Democratic Movement of the North of Russia) seized their guards’ weapons and tried to take a town in the Noril’sk labour-camp region, east of the Urals. “The effort failed,” writes George Saunders, “and they fled toward the mountains—reportedly over 2,000 strong—but were annihilated by the Kremlin’s airpower. A similar revolt apparently occurred in the eastern Siberian region of Kolyma.”64

Through these uprisings—even though most ended in failure and death—the evidence was accumulating “that it was possible to wage an open struggle against the tyranny practiced in Stalin’s camps.”65 The 1947 uprising, in particular, showed that the divisions between suki and blatnoy could be overcome if resistance against their common enemy, the prison authorities, was seen as possible. It also showed that the blatnoy were more than just hardened criminals—they could constitute themselves as a fighting force.

Significantly, resistance methods soon began to shift from the tactics of Spartacus to the tactics of the modern workers’ movement. In 1949, the ITL students, in alliance with the blatnoy, attempted to organize a strike in one of Vorkuta’s most important coal pits, but their efforts met little response from the miners.66 In 1951, in the hard labour camp near Ekibastuz in the southwest of the USSR, a five-day work stoppage and hunger strike of three thousand prisoners ended in a victory.67 These were the first rumblings of a storm that was to explode two years later.

Although collective rebellion could demonstrate the possibility of unity between blatnoy and suki (and the politicals), another equally profound division confronted these activists in the preparation of strike activity: the national divisions between Russians and non-Russians inside the camp. Edward Buca describes the situation well:

One result of our desperate condition was increased hatred and strife between the different nationalities, with each group trying to blame another for our plight. The basic conflict was between Russians and Ukrainians. The Russians regarded the Ukrainian nationalists and separatists as the real guilty men…. enemies of the Soviet fatherland, aliens who didn’t deserve to be fed; they should be worked until they dropped dead, and left to rot in the tundra. The Russian prisoners had picked up these ideas from the NKVD officers and guards. When the NKVD noticed this, they gladly encouraged it in order to keep the prisoners divided among themselves.68

These divisions resulted in a highly complex and conflictual situation. On the one hand was Russian chauvinism, a hatred of the Russian prisoners for the non-Russians, cultivated by the NKVD and captured perfectly by Buca. On the other was bitter anti-communism, particularly of the Ukrainian prisoners, whose experience of national oppression at the hands of the Stalinists made them hate all things Russian and all things communist, and who looked to the Western democracies for salvation. Among many of the non-Russians, this faith in the West made them distrustful of any camp conspiracies. Waiting on Stalin’s death, which they were convinced would lead to war with the West and liberation from Stalinism, their main objective was to stay alive and stay out of trouble.

Activists within the largely Russian Left and among the non-Russian national minorities worked hard to break down these divisions. For the Left, it meant including demands for “national minority rights” in their political slogans. As Gerland reported, the ITL students “categorically condemned the Stalinist policy of nationalistic expansion” as well as “all the annexations by the Soviet Union perpetrated after the war, because these annexations run counter to the principle of national self-determination so passionately defended by Lenin.”69

More concretely, activists organizing among the national minorities ensured that representatives from all of “the nations of Vorkuta” were on their underground committees. When the young Pole Edward Buca asked an old Ukrainian prisoner for advice on how to organize, he was told: “Before you act, you must do everything possible to organize all nationalities.” Accordingly, in the initial work of pulling together clandestine groups, Buca recalled, “it was arranged that each national group would have its own leader; these latter would together select the supreme commanders.”70

But it took outside events to force the pace and make mass resistance a possibility. The catalyst was the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953, which had four important impacts. First, it raised expectations massively. “I’ll always remember that morning,” recalled Buca, a Polish national. “We were on our way to the mine when the announcement came over the loudspeaker…. We stopped in our tracks … Some prisoners were weeping, everyone was moved. This was like a great earthquake which could affect even our lives. It was certain that one era in history was over and who could know what the next would be like?”71 Joseph Scholmer also remembered that moment:

When the actual announcement of his death came, bearded moujiks [peasants] with tears in their eyes went down on their knees and prayed. “I’ve been in this camp nineteen years now,” said one of the Georgians. “But this is the best news I’ve ever heard.” “God has saved the Jews,” a Polish Zionist whispered to me…. “If he hadn’t died, there would have been pogroms again as bad as anything at the time of the Black Hundred, or Petljura, or Hitler.”72

Second, the death of Stalin temporarily paralyzed the camp authorities, who were unsure which faction in the Kremlin would gain control. This became even more pronounced after the fall of Lavrenti Beria, the long-time head of the Soviet secret police and, until overthrown in a palace coup in June 1953 and eventually executed, the presumed heir to Stalin’s power.73 An authoritarian regime needs iron discipline from top to bottom. When a split opens up at the top, when it is unclear who the final authority is, the entire system can become temporarily paralyzed. In the context of such paralysis and confusion, mass action that seemed unthinkable just days before can suddenly be on the agenda.

Third, among the non-Russian national minorities, Stalin’s death set in motion a chain of events that led to massive disillusionment with the Western democracies. Scholmer recalled that “Churchill’s statement that the new men in the Kremlin had to be given a chance to show their good-will and work out their policy in peace … caused the most profound dismay in the camps.”74 The national minorities had been reluctant to support resistance activities, banking everything on Western intervention. With the West having indicated its willingness to coexist with a post-Stalin Russia, thousands who had remained aloof from all talk of conspiracy and strike were now ready for action.

Fourth, and most importantly, the post-Stalin paralysis in the Soviet bureaucracy made possible the rise of a new workers’ movement in Eastern Europe, culminating in the massive East Berlin workers’ uprising, whose example electrified the millions of forced labourers in Russia’s Arctic. Anne Applebaum describes the discontent building in the last years of Stalin’s life, discontent that was not confined to East Germany. “The Soviet ambassador to Prague had written of ‘near-total chaos’ in Czech industry in December 1952,” notes Applebaum. This chaos existed throughout Eastern Europe and expressed itself as mass marches in Czechoslovakia, strikes by tobacco workers in Bulgaria, and, perhaps most significantly, a huge population movement from East to West Germany. “More than 160,000 people had moved from East to West Germany in 1952, and a further 120,000 had left in the first four months of 1953.”75 Beria himself had a clear eye as to the reasons for this chaos, citing, among other causes, “the unwillingness of individual groups of peasants to join the agricultural production cooperatives” and “the severe difficulties that the GDR [German Democratic Republic, official name of East Germany] is experiencing with the supply of food products and consumer goods.”76

This crisis situation came to a head on 16 June 1953, when East Berlin “witnessed its first major mass strikes since the war,” and the next day, when thousands of construction workers marched through the city carrying banners saying “Berliners, join us! We don’t want to be slaves to our work!”77 The movement became massive and, before it was put down by the brute force of Russian tanks, spread throughout the country. Applebaum describes the size of the uprising: “Demonstrations took place in all of the major cities and industrial centres … especially those with a strong communist or social democratic tradition: Rostock, Cottbus, Magdeburg, Dresden, Leipzig, Erfurt, and Halle. In total, about 500,000 people in 373 towns and cities went on strike in about 600 enterprises. Between a million and 1.5 million people took part in demonstrations of some kind.”78

This magnificent upsurge in resistance to Stalinism galvanized the forced labourers in Vorkuta. As Scholmer recalled: “Although official news of the rising in Berlin and the Eastern Zone on June 17 only appeared late and in a garbled form in the camps, it wasn’t difficult to form an objective picture of what had happened…. Even the ordinary prisoner felt instinctively that what had happened in Berlin and the Eastern Zone was a revolt against the police system which had arrested, sentenced and enslaved himself.”79 Strike committees soon formed in various sections of the camp. According to Gerland, even members of the non-Russian minorities, who had until then sought to avoid activism, began to join these committees.80 She goes on to report that, on 21 July 1953, six thousand forced labourers at mine Pits no. 1 and no. 7, where ITL students and anarchists were particularly influential on the strike committees, refused to go to work. Feverishly working to spread the strike, prisoners “requisitioned all the available stocks of paper” and produced thousands of leaflets, which read:

Fellow prisoners, you have nothing to lose but your chains!

Don’t expect to gain your freedom through anyone’s efforts but your own. No one will help you; no one will save you; only you yourselves can change your lot.

Down tools! The strike is our only weapon!81

Scholmer, imprisoned in Camp 6, which he describes as “one of the relatively quiet camps,” estimates that more than ten thousand workers eventually took part in the strike—although, even according to an official estimate, this figure is too low by half.82 Gerland, whose information comes from Pits 1 and 7, where the key organizing took place, says that, by 23 July, some thirty thousand labourers were on strike, halting operations at ten of the mines. The strike continued to spread, and “within ten days, twenty big pits inside the city and its environs were shut down tight.”83

Whatever the exact numbers, given the conditions, what the strike committees accomplished was remarkable. Even though the authorities had surrounded the striking sections of the camp with troops, thus effectively isolating them from one another, news spread like wildfire. “This was accomplished in the main,” Gerland writes, “thanks to the aid of soldiers who sympathized with the strikers and therefore incurred the risk of maintaining the contacts which had been broken by the work stoppage.”84 As well as keeping lines of communication open, the strike committees had to ensure the day-to-day survival of the strikers. To this end, the committees assumed control over entire sections of the camps, putting the strikers in charge of routine operations. It was, in effect, a kind of workers’ control.

Edward Buca, who was at one of the more isolated camps, oversaw a strike committee that arranged for maintaining the abandoned mine shafts so that gas would not build up and explode.85 The strikers also provided staff for the bakery, “which made bread for both guards and prisoners,” maintained a functioning hospital for the many sick and disabled camp inmates, and even ran a laundry, again for both the inmates and the guards.86 Not only did this self-organization build the confidence of the strikers themselves, it also helped them gain the sympathy of the soldiers who surrounded the camp. Buca reports that, when the first batch of guards’ laundry had been washed, “it was hung out in the sun to dry, and the guards, most of them simple peasant boys, were impressed. ‘We’ll never fire on you,’ several of them said.”87

But the strikers were vulnerable, especially if the prison authorities could find loyal troops.88 By the end of July, such troops were in place, and the striking sections of the camp were surrounded. The relatively isolated camp, under the control of Edward Buca’s multinational strike committee, was chosen to serve as an example to the rest. That example would take place “the first day of August, 1953,” when the striking prisoners were given an ultimatum: surrender within the next forty minutes or face the consequences.89 Buca describes what happened next:

I asked those around me what they wanted to do. These were my closest collaborators, and their decision was unanimous: they would not leave the camp, even if it meant death.

Then I went from group to group, asking for their decisions. It was the same everywhere: death rather than surrender.90

The prisoners massed at the camp gates, linking arms, to confront the troops. They were first attacked by a fire engine, “but before the hoses could be unwound,” a wall of prisoners advanced, “turning the vehicle out of the gate as if it had been a toy.”91 Then the massacre began. Roman Rudenko, chief prosecutor of the Soviet Union, who had arrived to oversee negotiations with the strikers, pulled out a pistol and shot Ihnatowicz, one of the key strike leaders. “It must have been a signal,” writes Buca:

There was a salvo of shots from the guards, straight into the mass of prisoners. But we were standing with our arms linked, and at first no one fell, though many were dead and wounded.

Only Ihnatowicz, a little in front of the line, was standing alone. He seemed to stand for a moment in astonishment, then turned round to face us. His lips moved, but no words came out. He stretched out an arm, then fell.

As he fell, there came a second salvo, then a third, and a fourth. Then the heavy machine-guns opened fire…. Then the firing stopped. There was silence. After waiting a few moments, I gave orders to stand up. Hundreds lay dead. I gave orders to take the wounded to hospital as quickly as possible. Some refused to go and turned back with some notion of trying to stop the guards from entering the camp. Some tore off their ragged shirts and yelled at the guards, “Shoot, you red devils! Shoot!”

But there were no more shots.92

We will never know how many died. Buca’s friend Greczanik, who had been on the front line, said it was “hard to tell,” but he thought there must have been “at least four hundred killed.”93 Scholmer quotes the surgeon Blagodatov, who, after the massacre, was ordered to the camp and found about two hundred seriously wounded prisoners, “most of them hit in the chest and stomach…. Sixty-four prisoners had been killed on the spot.” Many of the wounded died. “We operated for a whole week,” said the surgeon. “We did what we could, but they were dying from their wounds all the time.”94

This did not signal an immediate end to the strike. Even though news of the massacre at Buca’s camp spread throughout the Vorkuta complex, other strikers held out for a while longer. Moscow made some concessions: allowing letters to be written home twice a month instead of twice a year, allowing yearly visits from family members, eliminating the hated identification numbers, and removing the iron bars from barracks windows. The strikers rejected these concessions out of hand as inadequate. Moscow responded with promises of better food, higher pay, and shorter work shifts. Still, the strikers held firm. General Derev’ianko, who had been one of those responsible for the massacre at Buca’s camp, then “resorted to a ruse” in Gerland’s words: “Members of the strike committee and of the central strike leadership were politely invited to an interview at the headquarters, an invitation they naturally accepted. They were cordially met at the camp gate by orderlies, who accompanied them to the city; but not a single one of them returned from this talk.”95

Finally, strikers at Camp 7 were presented with an ultimatum to “march out and form up in the tundra or else the camp would be taken by storm.”96 The strike leaders decided to march into the tundra as ordered to avoid a massacre. Once there, the authorities arrested strikers who were in any way suspected of being among the leaders of the strike, four to five hundred in total. “This action in fact eliminated the entire strike committee though they were not known individually,” writes Scholmer. “All the active elements in the camp were now missing. The masses were leaderless. The morale of the strikers had been broken. Work began in the pit again next day.”97 Some pits held out to November, for more than three months, but, as Gerland tells us, “they finally returned to work only because the supply of food and, what is even more vital in polar regions, the supplies of coal gave out.”98

While it is the one for which we have the best eyewitness accounts, the strike in Vorkuta was not the only one that year—some of them preceding the dramatic events in East Berlin. Danylo Shumuk was a prison-labourer in the Noril’sk area camps, sent there along with thousands of others to exploit the copper and other non-ferrous metals in the surrounding hills. The conditions were brutal. In the summer of 1947 during a clandestine meeting of prisoners, in the first stages of organizing the “self-help group” referred to in the Preface, he reported to those assembled that “close to fourteen thousand prisoners sentenced to hard labour were brought to this camp. After only three years approximately eight thousand remain, many of whom have been partly or completely crippled; the other six thousand, broken by the cold, hunger, harsh work and constant brutality, are no longer with us.”99 In 1953, out of these appalling conditions, a strike movement broke out, parallel to that in the Vorkuta camps. According to Shumuk, “by the second half of May close to twenty thousand political prisoners were on strike in the Noril’sk area.”100

At the core of Shumuk’s account of the strike at his camp—the last to be engulfed by the strike wave—is a story of self-organization that parallels Buca’s. The clandestine “self-help” group formed in 1947, by the end of 1949, had grown to include approximately “fifty of the most capable Ukrainians in the camp.”101 It saw its role as building the morale of the prisoners, and finding ways to push back against violence and excesses from the camp administration. It won considerable influence throughout the camp as a result.

The strike in Shumuk’s camp began on 4 June 1953. Three days earlier, twenty political prisoners had been transferred to the camp, including Ivan Vorobev, “who had gained a legendary reputation because of his many escapes from the camps.”102 On 4 June, when it became clear that these new prisoners, Vorobev included, were being beaten mercilessly, a rebellion to save their lives began among the rest of the inmates. “The fourth of June 1953 was a memorable day” says Shumuk. “All the prisoners had left the barracks and were now in the street, waiting to see what would happen next.”103 What did happen was a remarkable two-month long strike.

Robert Conquest says that the prisoners “struck for comparatively mild demands—contact with their families, letters and parcels, regularisation of the ration system and so on.”104 While formally true, there was actually much more involved. Like the events in Vorkuta, it was an uprising of the very oppressed against absolutely appalling conditions. As in Vorkuta, the events ended with a massacre. “Many attempts were made to trick” the strikers, writes Conquest, “but the strike was eventually put down by force, with over 1,000 dead. Executions of ‘ringleaders’ followed on a mass scale. The rebellion’s rank and file were sent for special punishment to Kolyma.” About a month later, these prisoners “were sent on to the notorious mines of Kholodnaya. An old inmate describes them marching to their trucks, shouting boasts and sneering at the meeker prisoners who had preceded them and some of them even singing Ukrainian nationalist songs.”105

We can draw several conclusions from these remarkable events in 1953. By using the strike—the classic tactic of the international workers’ movement—the Vorkuta workers indicated that they were a new force to be reckoned with. In the 1930s, the Vorkuta inmates had only moral power on their side. The heroic hunger strikes of the anti-Stalinist socialists had no hope of winning. They were a magnificent statement of a dying generation. By the 1950s, however, the forced labour inmates of Vorkuta had, in additional to moral power, economic power. Two students who had been in Leningrad during the Vorkuta strikes ended up in the Vorkuta pits two months after the strikes ended. “We soon got to know you were on strike,” they told Scholmer and other labourers in the camp. “The drop in coal was noticeable at once. We don’t have any reserves.”106 The moral power of the 1930s had been reinforced with economic power in the 1950s.

Without question, this flexing of newfound economic muscle hastened the demise of the forced labour system in the Soviet Union. “New strikes kept breaking out through 1954 and 1955,” writes George Saunders, “until finally a general amnesty of political prisoners was granted and the camp system partly dismantled.”107 That the strikes could have such great impact was possible because of the changes that had taken place in the Russian economy over a generation. By the 1950s, the conditions that made forced labour economically “rational” for the Russian economy were disappearing. Once the mines had been opened, the canals dug, the dams built, and the roads cut through the tundra, a transition away from forced labour and toward waged labour was clearly on the agenda. Forced labour was less suited to the next stage of industrial development than it had been to the stage of “primary accumulation.”108 A higher technical level required higher skill levels on the part of the working masses and hence greater use of labour by consent rather than by coercion. Importantly, the pool of cheap labour represented by the millions of peasants displaced by war and civil wars was, by and large, used up—millions having been driven off the land either to the cities in search of work or to the Gulag. As such rural reserves disappear, the conditions for systems of formal coerced labour become more constrained.

Certainly, this is a long and difficult process. And certainly, “free wage labour” has elements—sometimes profound elements—of coercion. However, it matters a great deal whether labour is formally coerced (as in the Gulag system) or informally coerced (through wage levels, benefits, and levels of unionization). In the former situation, organizing is difficult in the extreme. In the latter, the difficulties are real but of an entirely different order. The next chapter, in examining the struggles of the emergent “free” wage labouring class in Vorkuta and elsewhere, will reveal this clearly.

So, the events of 1953 represented an economic transformation. Most importantly, however, those events represented the transformation of the mass of forced labourers into a collectivity of proletarians. The proletariat is, in part, formed objectively by capitalism. But it emerges as a class when it subjectively begins defining itself as a class that can act in its own interests. That began to happen in Vorkuta in 1953.

In Scholmer’s words, “the most important thing about the strike was that it ever took place at all.”109 Buca later reflected on his feelings at the end of the fourth day of the strike:

I sat outside one of the huts—out of sight of the guards—and talked and joked with the prisoners, and thought about the changes that had taken place inside the camp during those four days: we had become human beings again.

Anyone who saw those prisoners, from those in the hospital who had no hope of surviving to those who were exhausted from their brutal work, could never doubt that the attempt we had made had been worth while [sic], however it might turn out. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but, despite my fears, I was happy.110

Shumuk documents the remarkable self-activity that was the foundation on which this kind of new confidence was built. Critical to the conduct of the two-month-long strike in his camp were the regular general meetings pulling together hundreds of striking prisoners.

The general meetings were held in the club, which could accommodate approximately 700 people. Whenever we had to persuade the [strike] committee to follow our lead, our “invisible” self-help organization summoned its supporters to the club where they occupied, according to a prearranged plan, all the available places. As the meeting went through the agenda, and especially when controversial matters were being discussed, our supporters in the audience would speak. There were usually five to seven such speeches, and after each one, all those present would clap and shout their approval.111

The self-organization and resulting solidaristic consciousness so clearly visible in the Vorkuta and Noril’sk strikes of 1953 marked the end of one era and the beginning of the next. They marked the end of the era when industrialization could be, and was, conducted on the backs of millions of zeks. They marked the beginning of an era when industrialization would increasingly have to rely on wage labour, as it did in the West. And the strikes also served notice that these wage labourers would make an effort to put their imprint on the future of this vast industrial economy. It is to this era that we now turn in order to examine the third and last wave of anti-Stalinist struggle, in which Vorkuta once again played a central role. The making of a new working class, begun by hunger strikes of the Trotskyists in the 1930s, continued with the prison camp strikes of the zeks in the 1950s. Although participants in both movements paid a huge price in the short term—mass executions in the 1930s, systematic slaughter of frontline militants in the 1950s—both movements formed indispensable components of the new class-in-the-making that emerged from the rubble of counter-revolution.