At the Centre of the Gulag Archipelago, a Quiet Lagoon …
What sights and sensations does the word "lagoon" evoke? The poet Sheri Hoff thinks of:
A quiet lagoon...
Floating in the salty, blue water,
the sun shining on my face.
That's what it makes me think of, too.
If you like playing with words, there can be other associations. For Germans and Russians the first syllable of this beautiful word might evoke less pleasurable images. If the British invented the concentration camp (at the time of the Boer war), the Germans abbreviated the term to konzentrationslager and the Russians imported the word lager from German for their own forced labour camps. "Lag" was the Soviet-era abbreviation of anything to do with the institutions of forced labour. GULAG for example, was the chief administration of labour camps of the USSR interior ministry in Moscow; Siblag, Sevlag, among many others, were respectively the Siberian and Northern camp complexes.
But how could you get from the frostbitten outposts of the Soviet empire, encircled by barbed wire, to a lagoon? While some could only dream, others played with words.
On July 5, 1946, Lt. Col. Luferov, chief of the secretariat of GULAG (the chief administration of labour camps) of the USSR MVD (interior ministry) in Moscow, signed off a curt memorandum to his party comrade Major Silant'ev, chief of the control and inspection department (the document is in the Soviet archives collection of the Hoover Institution: GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1 dop., d. 144A, folio 91):
I inform you that the word "Laguna" is assigned to GULAG as its customary telegraphic address.
I request you to inform all departments and administrations of the USSR interior ministry chief administration of labour camps and also the peripheral units: ITL MVD [the labour camps themselves], UITLK MVD (the administration of labour camps and colonies), OITK MVD [the department of labour colonies], and PFL MVD [the verification and filtration camps for returning Soviet prisoners of war and labourers previously held in Germany].
This story shows that even the most heartless of Soviet bureaucrats could hear the poetry of word-play in his soul.
Mark Harrison
14 May 2009 21:47
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Tags: Forced-Labour History Russia
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Karl
Dear Mark,
I’m an undergraduate student of economics with a interest in Russian history. One thing I’d like to ask is about the different “total numbers” one see as regards the victims of mass repression. I’m aware of the archival research, and how scholars have been able to reach something similar of a “consensus” (i.e. the debate between Conqeust and for example Davies / Wheatcroft is now on very different terms).
My question marks arose as regards the so called Russian Truth Commission, which was headed by Yakovlev in the 1990s. They give a number of 32 million victims of political repression, out of which 13 were during the Civil War. But do these numbers include Gulag prisoners, who did not die necessarily? Or does Yakovlvev refer to people who were killed during the Soviet years only? I have problems getting the numbers to add upp with what has been presented in much research lately.
22 May 2009, 08:36
Mark Harrison
Unless Yakovlev gave a breakdown, it is hard to say. I am away from my own library and there are some things it is hard for me to check, but let me begin with the Stalin period (1929 to 1953). It is hard to attribute more than 12 or 13 million premature deaths (from famine, deportations, and terror) to Stalin’s policies and decisions, unless one wished to make him co-responsible for World War II. Far higher numbers could be reached, however, by including victims of repression not resulting in death, for example, arrests and imprisonments, either for supposedly “political” crimes, or including economic or property crimes under laws unique to the Soviet system. (One reason that numbers in the Gulag turned out to hold fewer people than some scholars supposed was that many of its victims entered it for relatively short periods and then returned to society.) If one extended the time period back 1917, the same issues would arise, such as which victims to count and who was to blame for the civil war and the famine that followed it. The numbers would be on a somewhat reduced scale compared with the later period. To summarize, it is very hard to get to 32 million premature deaths without making the Bolsheviks responsible for everything that happened in European history; it would be easy to get to 32 million victims of repression of all kinds.
23 May 2009, 01:43
Karl
Many thanks, that pretty much summarizes what I suspected as well.
25 May 2009, 13:28
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