It’s so cold that frostbite happens within minutes. Sunrise and sunset are three hours apart. But work needs to be done in the mine shafts, on the power grid, and for the railroad that goes into the distant town. Everyone in the brigade wears the same uniform: valenki (felt boots), a shoddy outer coat of pleated wool, and a head covering. Breakfast before work is porridge or herring with black bread; in the afternoon, there is weak soup and the same bread. The prescribed beverage is yeast-based and somehow meant to prevent scurvy. Either an outhouse or a slop bucket serves as a toilet; maintaining a semblance of cleanliness and preventing diseases like botulism are critical. There are perks for the hardest workers: agitprop movie showings, access to books and music, all in the service of political re-education.
Prisoners in the GULAG, known as zeki (from zaklyuchyonnїy, “locked in”), were consigned to oblivion somewhere in the Russian Arctic or the Eurasian landmass of Siberia. Near Abez in the Komi Republic, for example, there was once a settlement that served six camps, two of which were built for women, housing 1,500 in each. For the prisoners held there in the 1940s and 1950s, the treacherous terrain was greater deterrence to escape than the guards. In 1959, the wooden barracks, barbed-wire fences, and watch towers were razed by the prisoners themselves under orders from Moscow in a crude effort to conceal the horrors of Stalinism. Any remaining structures dissolved into the tundra. Now the once-sprawling compound is reduced to graves marked by wooden signs with no names, just letters and numbers. A sign shows where the morgue once stood.
Researching the history of Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship, I learned that the GULAG began not in the Arctic or the Far East but in Moscow itself. Right after the Russian Revolution, when Vladimir Lenin was in power, the Moscow Council of Workers and Red Army Deputies (Moskovskiy sovet rabochikh i rasnoarmeyskikh deputatov, or MSRiKD) took control of the city. On paper, the structure of MSRiKD was like Moscow itself—with rings and a star in the middle denoting the “central administrative department,” aka the Kremlin. The ring connecting the tips of the star shows the municipal government’s subdepartments: “audit,” “instruction,” “criminal investigation,” “trade and manufacture,” “address desk” (issuing certificates of residence), “post and telegraph” (communications), “external security,” and “fire.” At the far edges are an array of “arrest houses” identified by triangles and accompanied by stars that mark the “combat squads” of the criminal investigation apparatus. The capital of the Soviet Union had become a carceral state within a carceral state.
The prisons operated out of former mansions, monasteries, and factories. One took over the 1918 headquarters of the Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries-Internationalists, which aligned itself with the Bolsheviks; another camp was set up in a brick-making operation that had once been owned by the Russian-Belgian entrepreneur Alfred Gasha. The “Gasha Concentration and Production Camp No. 1 of the Main Directorate of Public Works,” as it became known, provided the model for other camps in Moscow.
The first of them housed prisoners of war. The Political Red Cross, which provided aid to POWs before and after 1917, generated list after list of Moscow’s prisons, their detainees, “and their services” to the economy. Included are the names of immigrants and foreign fighters detained in Petrograd and transported to Moscow between 1918 and 1922. (The collapse of the tsarist system left diplomats of neutral nations in a precarious situation, desperate to liaise with the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Leon Trotsky, trying to salvage their investments in Russia, and mobilizing to bring their people – immigrants working as cheesemakers, teachers, and governesses – back home.) Edgar Kamp, age 34, was arrested on June 2, 1918, at the Swedish Mission, where he’d been working as a courier. Like his arrested boss, the head of the mission’s passport division, he’d been interrogated twice and diagnosed as “neurotic.” Later, this criminalized population diversified to include idlers, saboteurs, and common crooks like Konstantin Gordeyev, a 23-year-old Muscovite twice arrested in 1921-22 for trafficking in contraband, locked up in Butïrskaya, then interrogated at the Interregional Criminal Investigation Department, where it was decided, “based on his convictions and criminal history and in order to preserve public safety,” to relocate him to a camp in Arkhangelsk.
Female convicts ended up in Novinskaya Women’s Prison, a brick and iron complex with a central yard located on a Novinsky Boulevard side-street. It had opened at the end of 1907, a decade before the Revolution, and remained in operation through Lenin, Stalin, and the Second World War as the dumping ground for political prisoners (242 of them in 15 units in 1908) and assorted “undesirables.” According to Yekaterina Nikitina, an extremely vibrant personality imprisoned before the Revolution, eighty percent of the convicts were peasant women – victims of village life. Many went to prison for the murder of a husband or father-in-law, less often for arson. The hallway cleaner, Annushka, was a meek and hard-working woman of about 50 who was given 15 years for killing her drunken husband with an ax, cutting him into pieces and feeding him to her pigs. “I was afraid of prison, the trial, and hard labor,” she once remarked. “But prison feels like paradise to me!” The facilities in Annushka’s “paradise” included a church, school, hospital, and workrooms where the prisoners sewed and washed clothes as penance.
The post-Soviet enterprise “Memorial” preserved data about this place in an online portal called Eto pryamo zdes’ (It happened right here). Bureaucratic records are held in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History. For personal stories, there is the journal published in the 1920s and early 1930s by former political prisoners and exiled settlers called Hard Labor and Exile (Katorga i ssïlka). One of the journal’s 1926 contributors, Irina Kakhovskaya, commended the guards at Novinskaya for allowing the women to live “quite freely and noisily,” as opposed to the absolute silence governing her previous detention center. Kakhovskaya also recalled the women in her cell greeting her like happy hostesses, with “black sesame crackers” and “tea that had been kept warm after dinner under a pile of pea coats.” When the guards decided they needed to assert their authority, books were confiscated and the charitable prison committee providing decent meals to the women chased from the premises. The prison housed children and a few orphans, pitiful sods whose imaginations were so impoverished that telling them fairy tales was pointless “because they had never seen cows, flowers, a grandpa or a grandma or a speckled hen.” They played in the laundry, pretending to be the guards of the toiling women, then “ran into the kitchen to see the white cat.”
The Moscow GULAG system dissolved under Stalin, but the security apparatus remained entrenched in the capital. The People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) operated a school on the grounds of a former convent where agents-in-training learned the history of incarceration from the era of Peter the Great to the present, the function and structure of the prison camps under the Soviets, the criminal system within the criminal system of those camps, and prosaic matters like mail censorship, sanitation, tuberculosis prevention, prisoners’ transportation and subsistence. “The GULAG,” students were told, “is not an economic resource, but an organ of the NKVD called upon during the transition from capitalism to communism to protect the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist construction carried out by it from encroachments by class-hostile elements and violations by de-classed elements [former landowners, for example] and unstable elements among the working people.” Everyone labored for the cause under Stalin, and that labor was meant to be beneficial, enlightening. “The obligation of socially useful labor for all citizens, proclaimed in 1936 by the Stalinist Constitution, also applies to persons deprived of liberty who are capable of work.” In 1946, a lecture was added about events in the GULAG during the war – the formation of groups within the system “preparing acts of sabotage, spreading defeatist fascist agitprop among prisoners, and the increase in banditry and other crimes.” Understandably, these hostile elements required “liquidation.”
Prison labor shaped the city under Stalin and under the ground. The first stations of Moscow’s spectacular Metro system were built by heroic “shock” workers joined by Komsomol members, miners from the Donbas, dispossessed kulaks, assorted laborers from Moscow’s factories, and GULAG prisoners.
In 1947, Stalin proposed the construction of eight new high-rise buildings, one for each of the centuries of Moscow’s existence. Seven of the eight high-rise “sisters” were realized between 1947 and 1957 amid no end of arguments about the number and layout of floors and walls, the inclusion or exclusion of clocks and crowns and spires, and who, besides privileged apparatchiki, the buildings might accommodate. Their bases were expanded, and floors added to the central sections along with decorative pilasters and pylons. The first of the blocky architectural blockbusters to be completed, in 1952, was the 25-floor Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building. The last was the 34-floor Ukraine Hotel, four years after Stalin’s death. Nothing came of the administrative complex intended for the demolished Zaryadye neighborhood. Kotelnicheskaya included communal apartments in a side wing but also housed, in the central part, members of the elite like prima ballerina Galina Ulanova.
The largest of the seven, at 36 floors, went to Moscow State University. The building strikes a majestic pose on the horizon, beautifully illuminated at night just beyond Sparrow Hills.
In its initial conception, it had enough space to accommodate “5,250 undergraduates and 750 graduate students,” along with faculty, academic departments, canteens, libraries, and museums. Construction was chronicled in the newspapers with sentimental pathos: “Prokhor Turuntayev has been part of the biggest construction projects in the country. He was the first steeplejack to put a star on the Kremlin towers. For restoration work during the war he earned an Order of Lenin. He’s a natural at his trade, installation, a simple soul who loves to work. He has the look of an ancient Russian knight.”
No mention is made of the 14,290 prisoners assigned to the university construction site, and the decision, for security reasons, to use the 23rd floor as housing for those who hadn’t been paroled – creating a kind of penthouse GULAG. Records indicate that the prison camp inside of the building housed 368 people, of which 208 were women. Another 7,105 prisoners worked at lower levels of the construction site and lived in makeshift barracks. Some were locals; others came from the far north owing to the skills that they possessed and because their re-education was complete. The Prosecutor General of the USSR authorized the “release” of 2,000 low-risk GULAG prisoners as “volunteer” construction workers. 1,774 ended up being transferred from the camps to the Moscow State University construction site, where they worked “either until the end of their unserved sentence or the university was finished.” The Construction Directorate also used prisoners for the other Stalinist skyscraper projects.
In 1952, one of the workers built a hang glider to escape his prison in the sky. There are different versions as to what happened next. Either “Icarus” made it to the other side of the Moskva River and disappeared forever or he was shot down by the guards. A witness claimed he saw two men flying with homemade wings: one survived, the other did not. Then there is the “happy ending” version of the tale, in which the escapee was captured upon landing but released by Stalin, who couldn’t help but admire his bravery. He became a hero of socialist labor.
