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http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/5687
Letter from the Gulag
by Golfo Alexopoulos
The strange story of a prisoner who complained to Stalin's secret police chief—and got results. By Golfo Alexopoulos.
In the last years of Joseph Stalin’s life, the Gulag became increasingly unmanageable. Authorities at one Siberian camp seized ammonium and detonators from a group of thirty prisoners who were planning to dig a tunnel through the Bering Strait and escape, according to a 1951 report, “to the Americans in Alaska.” As the regime handed out seemingly interminable sentences, hopeless prisoners argued that only a bullet to the head would cause them to stop their aggressive behavior. A culture of violence and routine insubordination descended not only on the prisoner population but on camp authorities as well.
In 1952, Alexander Ivanov, a 32-year-old prisoner at a labor camp in the far north, wrote two letters to the Soviet Council of Ministers. The first was intercepted by camp officials, who punished Ivanov for informing the Soviet leadership about acts of torture at the camp. But this did not stop the insolent Gulag prisoner. Ivanov wrote again, and this time gave his letter to another inmate, who smuggled the damaging document out of the camp upon his release and ensured that the letter journeyed hundreds of miles to its Kremlin address. The letter landed in the hands of Stalin’s chief of state security (MVD), Lavrenty Beria, a man so close to the dictator that he was entrusted with supervising the Soviet Union’s nuclear program.
Beria, who was known for his cruelty, not only read the prisoner’s account of torture and abuse at the camp but gave the petition to his deputy, S. N. Kruglov, with the following instructions: “Verify the stated facts carefully and take measures against those guilty of this misconduct. Report your results to me.” Kruglov immediately called a meeting of the Gulag leadership and initiated an extensive investigation that would result in the arrest of several camp officials and the firing of the camp’s director.
“What rules here,” prisoner Alexander Ivanov wrote in a letter smuggled out of the camp, “is a kind of fascist arbitrariness.”
Gulag prisoners wrote many letters of complaint to Soviet authorities about everything from the lack of food, winter clothes, and shoes to the loss of packages from relatives and the illegal acts of camp administrators. This was not the first written complaint from a Gulag prisoner to capture Beria’s attention, nor was it the first that Kruglov had been charged with investigating. Nonetheless, the Kremlin’s response to Ivanov’s letter is astonishing. The prisoner’s petition triggered a massive inquiry into nearly every aspect of operations at this particular camp, Pechorlag. Each of his specific charges of torture was investigated in detail. Many people at the camp were interrogated. A six-member MVD commission produced a remarkably long report whose purpose was noted in the first paragraph: “To confirm the contents of the petition sent to the USSR Council of Ministers by prisoner A. V. Ivanov.”
The MVD chief had been hearing for years about various problems at Pechorlag, and the report catalogs many—acts of extortion, theft, and murder; heterosexual and homosexual relationships; interactions with the local civilian population; work strikes; escape and attempted escape. Ironically, Stalin’s most brutal henchman appears to have taken special interest in the problem of camp violence, whether perpetrated by guards who tortured prisoners or prisoners who murdered each other and their guards. To be sure, the Soviet leadership typically justified repressive policies as prophylactic and necessary while often criticizing individual acts of violence by subordinates as excessive. Nonetheless, Beria might have been motivated by a number of factors. For years, camp officials had worried about the corrupting influence of detention and the fact that camps often functioned as a mere breeding ground for criminal gangs. Many Gulag prisoners, reentering Soviet society after serving their sentences, brought home the criminal behavior learned from survival in the camps. Perhaps Beria sought to mitigate what some considered the contaminating influence of the camps on Soviet society. Or perhaps he believed that the absence of law and order undermined the camps’ economic functions.
Treb'o bi te smiri ovaj Gruzin Lavrentije....
pa da se ti središ malo....
ali prethodno bi ipak morala da se umiješ,
gde pred Komesara vnutarnjih del -musava?
Ne ide,brate.......
