Soviet Slave Labor Reforms
HILDEBRANDT, RAINER
Returnees frown Vorkuta claim Soviet Slave Labor Reforms By Rainer Hildebrandt Berlin "In recent weeks, the Soviet I forced-labor system has undergone the most far-reaching changes in its...
...we need the coal...
...The returnees believe that, sooner or later, Western journalists will be taken to Vorkuta, since, after the uprising, many of them were no longer content with visiting showpiece camps near Moscow or Leningrad, but asked—in vain—to see Vorkuta...
...Among the reports I heard, the most interesting were those of the Vorkuta prisoners, most of whom had been in the camps as recently as early October...
...A veteran of the anti-Hitler underground, he has been active since the war in resistance work in Berlin and East Germany...
...But I beg you to understand us as well...
...The "regime" sectors at Vorkuta, according to the returnees, contain "the best and the worst...
...in the future, political prisoners were kept in the intermediate and free sectors...
...In the opinion of most of the returnees, the division into three sectors was introduced less out of humanitarianism than in order to prevent a recurrence of the 1953 uprisings in Vorkuta and other Soviet camps...
...Since the reforms, about 25 per cent more has been produced in Vorkuta, with big clocklike signs showing the accomplishments of the various shifts...
...Almost every one of the returnees told of seeing one of his fellow prisoners axed to death or garroted by a blatnoi, but none of the witnesses dared to provide identification lest he be the next victim...
...It was a new experience for the prisoners to be addressed not as criminals but as unfortunate individuals of whom the Soviet economic system had need...
...This is what I heard from a number of Germans released from the Vorkuta camps after Chancellor Adenauer's trip to Moscow...
...Some miners have had as much as 82 days stricken off their sentences for 30 work days...
...Since a short time ago, they relate, Vorkuta has been divided into three zones: a "regime" sector (the most secluded one, with very strict surveillance), an intermediate sector, and a free sector...
...In recent weeks, it has also emerged in East Germany in a number of stone-quarry and coalmining camps, with remission of up to two-thirds of the sentence for 140-per-cent fulfilment of norms...
...In order to break this passive resistance, the zaschot system was introduced, whereby those who produced more received a reduction in sentence...
...It will be difficult for the Soviet regime to make propaganda capital of the zaschot system, since Moscow has always maintained that norms were increased only by agreement with the workers—this, of course, quite apart from the injustice of enabling the physically strong prisoner to reduce his sentence more readily than the older or weaker prisoner...
...However, the regime can be counted on to exploit the existence of intermediate and free sectors in its "corrective-labor camps...
...It would be a great step forward if...
...Suspicion of the zaschot system has not yet been allayed...
...The free sector contains prisoners who have completed two-thirds of their sentences, have "behaved themselves" and have fulfilled their quotas...
...These include the most serious political offenders, as well as those who refused to work for religious or political reasons...
...When these reforms were announced shortly before they were carried out, the prisoners could hardly believe their ears...
...Hildebrandt was a close associate and friend of Berlin's Socialist Mayor, Ernst Renter...
...There is also the danger that future prisoners will be given higher sentences and then obliged to bring them down to the old level through work...
...The fact that not one of those allowed to leave the camp has attempted escape is attributable to the forbidding physical surroundings — the vast spaces, wild animals and snow storms...
...These people live on the same basis as those who live in the area in "forced residence...
...The lucky names and the number of days remitted are posted prominently at the mine entrances, so that the prisoners will be convinced that the camp authorities are in earnest...
...Another privilege accorded the intermediate sector is the kommerts stolovaya, a small restaurant where the prisoners can have a good meal or buy figs, canned fish and the like...
...Wages have been gradually introduced in almost all Soviet camps in the last two years, and a good worker averages 220 rubles a month (equivalent in purchasing power to $27.50, according to the recent estimate of Harry Schwartz in the New York Times...
...Many prisoners fear that they will not benefit from recent amnesty decrees, but will have to earn their freedom by extra work...
...For several weeks, the front pages of German newspapers have been filled with the returnees' moving accounts of their experiences in the Soviet Union...
...They also contain criminal shirkers and the much-feared blatnois, members of an organized criminal gang who put pressure even on representatives of the camp administration and often murder their foes...
...A general with a cultivated manner told them: "We understand you perfectly...
...That these blatnois are now restricted to the regime camps is regarded by those in the other sectors as one of the greatest improvements so far made...
...The Vorkuta outbreak was made possible by the solidarity of the prisoners, which was so great that, for example, the "Stakhanovites" who exceeded the norms were treated as outcasts by their comrades...
...Whereas previously the blatnois and the criminals were the most privileged—because the most feared—in the camps, now the politicals are better off if they are fortunate enough to be in an intermediate or free camp...
...Conditions in the "regime" camps are no different from those which formerly prevailed throughout the Soviet forced-labor system...
...Nevertheless, the introduction of the zaschot system is regarded by most as an improvement in camp conditions...
...The latter can be reached by bus in 15 to 45 minutes—depending on the prisoner's camp location—and has 70,000 inhabitants...
...Just as it is the West's duty to uncover every injustice behind the Iron Curtain, it is also our duty to take note of improvements...
...Returnees frown Vorkuta claim Soviet Slave Labor Reforms By Rainer Hildebrandt Berlin "In recent weeks, the Soviet I forced-labor system has undergone the most far-reaching changes in its history...
...By the end of September, a good third of the prisoners in the intermediate sector had already had at least one propusk, and the number was steadily increasing...
...Once there, the prisoner can move about freely, make friends and pay visits, and frequent theaters, cabarets and restaurants...
...Rainer Hildebrandt is author of The Explosion, a history of the East German Revolt of June 1953...
...Meanwhile, only the future will tell whether the reforms in the Soviet forced-labor system are merely a new effort to squeeze more work out of the prisoners, or are designed to case their lives and restore them more quickly to freedom...
...In the intermediate sector, however, good workers receive an occasional propusk or pass, usually good for four to eight hours, which entitles them to leave camp to spend evenings or Sundays in the town of Vorkuta...
...They are forbidden to leave the rayon (district), and are completely subject to the orders of the camp's labor office...
...you want your freedom...
Vol. 38 • November 1955 • No. 46
