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                                 The GULAG

     The Soviet system of forced labor camps was first
established in 1919 under the Cheka, but it was not until the
early 1930s that the camp population reached significant numbers.
By 1934 the GULAG, or Main Directorate for Corrective Labor
Camps, then under the Cheka's successor organization the NKVD,
had several million inmates.  Prisoners included murderers,
thieves, and other common criminals--along with political and
religious dissenters.  The GULAG, whose camps were located mainly
in remote regions of Siberia and the Far North, made significant
contributions to the Soviet economy in the period of Joseph
Stalin.  GULAG prisoners constructed the White Sea-Baltic Canal,
the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Baikal-Amur main railroad line,
numerous hydroelectric stations, and strategic roads and
industrial enterprises in remote regions.  GULAG manpower was
also used for much of the country's lumbering and for the mining
of coal, copper, and gold.
     Stalin constantly increased the number of projects assigned
to the NKVD, which led to an increasing reliance on its labor.
The GULAG also served as a source of workers for economic
projects independent of the NKVD, which contracted its prisoners
out to various economic enterprises.
     Conditions in the camps were extremely harsh.  Prisoners
received inadequate food rations and insufficient clothing, which
made it difficult to endure the severe weather and the long
working hours; sometimes the inmates were physically abused by
camp guards.  As a result, the death rate from exhaustion and
disease in the camps was high.  After Stalin died in 1953, the
GULAG population was reduced significantly, and conditions for
inmates somewhat improved.  Forced labor camps continued to
exist, although on a small scale, into the Gorbachev period, and
the government even opened some camps to scrutiny by journalists
and human rights activists.  With the advance of democratization,
political prisoners and prisoners of conscience all but
disappeared from the camps.




        To the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of
             the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik)

      We appeal to you, asking you to pay a minimum of attention
to our request.

     We are prisoners who are returning from the Solovetsky
concentration camp because of our poor health.  We went there
full of energy and good health, and now we are returning as
invalids, broken and crippled emotionally and physically.  We are
asking you to draw your attention to the arbitrary use of power
and the violence that reign at the Solovetsky concentration camp
in Kemi and in all sections of the concentration camp.  It is
difficult for a human being even to imagine such terror, tyranny,
violence, and lawlessness.  When we went there, we could not
conceive of such a horror, and now we, crippled ourselves,
together with several thousands who are still there, appeal to
the ruling center of the Soviet state to curb the terror that
reigns there.  As though it weren't enough that the Unified State
Political Directorate [OGPU] without oversight and due process
sends workers and peasants there who are by and large innocent
(we are not talking about criminals who deserve to be punished),
the former tsarist penal servitude system in comparison to
Solovky had 99% more humanity, fairness, and legality.  [...]

     People die like flies, i.e., they die a slow and painful
death; we repeat that all this torment and suffering is placed
only on the shoulders of the proletariat without money, i.e., on
workers who, we repeat, were unfortunate to find themselves in
the period of hunger and destruction accompanying the events of
the October Revolution, and who committed crimes only to save
themselves and their families from death by starvation; they have
already borne the punishment for these crimes, and the vast
majority of them subsequently chose the path of honest labor.
Now because of their past, for whose crime they have already
paid, they are fired from their jobs.  Yet, the main thing is
that the entire weight of this scandalous abuse of power, brute
violence, and lawlessness that reign at Solovky and other
sections of the OGPU concentration camp is placed on the
shoulders of workers and peasants; others, such as
counterrevolutionaries, profiteers and so on, have full wallets
and have set themselves up and live in clover in the Soviet
State, while next to them, in the literal meaning of the word,
the penniless proletariat dies from hunger, cold, and back-
breaking 14-16 hour days under the tyranny and lawlessness of
inmates who are the agents and collaborators of the State
Political Directorate [GPU].

     If you complain or write anything ("Heaven forbid"), they
will frame you for an attempted escape or for something else, and
they will shoot you like a dog.  They line us up naked and
barefoot at 22 degrees below zero and keep us outside for up to
an hour.  It is difficult to describe all the chaos and terror
that is going on in Kemi, Solovky, and the other sections of the
concentrations camp.  All annual inspections uncover a lot of
abuses.  But what they discover in comparison to what actually
exists is only a part of the horror and abuse of power, which the
inspection accidently uncovers.  (One example is the following
fact, one of a thousand, which is registered in GPU and for which
the guilty have been punished: THEY FORCED THE INMATES TO EAT
THEIR OWN FECES.  "Comrades," if we dare to use this phrase,
verify that this is a fact from reality, about which, we repeat,
OGPU has the official evidence, and judge for yourself the full
extent of effrontery and humiliation in the supervision by those
who want to make a career for themselves.  [...]

     We are sure and we hope that in the All-Union Communist
Party there are people, as we have been told, who are humane and
sympathetic; it is possible, that you might think that it is our
imagination, but we swear to you all, by everything that is
sacred to us, that this is only one small part of the nightmarish
truth, because it makes no sense to make this up.  We repeat, and
will repeat 100 times, that yes, indeed there are some guilty
people, but the majority suffer innocently, as is described
above.  The word law, according to the law of the GPU
concentration camps, does not exist; what does exist is only the
autocratic power of petty tyrants, i.e., collaborators, serving
time, who have power over life and death.  Everything described
above is the truth and we, ourselves, who are close to the grave
after 3 years in Solovky and Kemi and other sections, are asking
you to improve the pathetic, tortured existence of those who are
there who languish under the yoke of the OGPU's tyranny,
violence, and complete lawlessness....

To this we subscribe: G. Zheleznov, Vinogradov, F. Belinskii.

Dec. 14, 1926

True copy








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TRANSLATOR'S COMMENTS: The letter is written in very poor
Russian.   For the sake of clarity, the translator corrected the
grammar and substituted a few words.