Deborah Kaple

Citizen Boss: A Gulag Memoir
Excerpt published in Nassau Literary Review

By Fyodor Mochulsky, Translated by Deborah Kaple

Fyodor Mochulsky’s memoir, Citizen Boss, is an important and unusual look at the inner workings of the GULAG prison labor system during the years 1940-1946. The GULAG was a system of forced, or slave labor, which at its height, numbered at least 476 large and small camps. GULAG is simply an acronym for the words Glavniyi Upravlenie Lagerei in Russian, which translates as Main Administration of Camps. Between 1917 and 1953, this extensive system of slave labor camps that dotted Soviet Russia provided a significant labor source to the building of Soviet socialism. It also claimed at least 2.7 millions of lives.
This small book gives us a glimpse at a very important part of Russia’s recent history, the years that Stalin, the Communist Party and the NKVD (formerly KGB, now FSB) transformed the country using the extreme methods of terror, fear and torture. The NKVD, in particular, played a leading role in this tumultuous time, for between 1929 and 1953, an estimated 18-20 million people passed through the camps and 6 million more were exiled. The NKVD-run camps were crammed full of people wrongfully sentenced on trumped-up charges having to do with allegations that the person was “counter-revolutionary.” Recent Russian estimates are that between 1931 and 1953, about 3.8 million people were arrested for “counter-revolutionary” crimes, of which 786 thousand were simply shot.
Most Gulag memoirs were written by prisoners who survived the Gulag. What makes Citizen Boss so remarkable is that it was written by someone who worked for the camp system. That is, Fyodor Mochulsky was not a prisoner, but an employee of the NKVD. He was a believing Communist Party member who, at age 22, was assigned by the Communist Party to work at Pechorlag, a prison camp so far north in Russia that it was above the Arctic Circle. There he worked as a boss of a unit of prisoners who were there to build a new 500-kilometer long rail line over permafrost. In Citizen Boss, he details the everyday concerns of the GULAG employees, as well as describing the convicts, the guards, the bosses and the system as he saw and experienced it.
In this excerpt, Mr. Mochulsky records his first impressions of the Gulag camp he is to live and work at for the next 6 years. He arrived at Pechorlag with two classmates who had also recently graduated from a railroad engineering school in Moscow, and this was what they found.

CHAPTER 6: COLD AND STARVATION
A few weeks after celebrating the 23rd Anniversary of the October Revolution, we three left the Camp Administration offices in a sleigh for our new jobs in the “Sivaya Maska.” As I said before, this was the northernmost section, also known as the Sixth Department of the Third Region of the labor camp. We rode the sleigh on the frozen Usa River to the buoy-keeper’s house, where we had stored some of our belongings on our way in to Abez. All our things were there as we had left them, including our skis and ski boots.
Before we left, they gave us Army-issue short sheepskin coats, padded boots and fur hats. On the advice of those who had lived in the far north longer than we had, we wore quilted pants and padded jackets under the sheepskins, and we shoved hay into our felt boots. Then we buried ourselves in hay on the sleigh. Prisoners who could freely travel in the camp without armed escorts drove the sleighs. These men were also bundled up in padded clothing and felt boots. Our sleigh carefully headed down the banks of the frozen Usa River, and started off towards the north along smooth tracks. We were on our way to meet our new fate.
As we rode in the sleigh, we noticed that our cheeks were starting to freeze from the snow and icy wind. First we would see a light redness from the snow and wind on the cheeks, and then, suddenly a white spot would appear and quickly spread. Our driver had warned us that if the redness faded and the cheek no longer had any feeling, then we had to immediately rub snow on the cheek. The severity of the polar climate was rapidly becoming clear. After that, we always wrapped scarves over our faces when we rode on horses or in sleighs.
When we arrived at the “Sivaya Maska,” Nikolai was dropped off at his part of the camp, and Volodya and I then stayed the night in a tent “hotel.” Early the next day, the two of us set out again. As we traveled, we could see, off to the right, a spur of the Ural Mountains covered in dense forest. The tundra was buried under a thick layer of snow. Here and there shrubs stuck up. After traveling 14 kilometers northward from “Sivaya Maska,” I finally saw the prison camp watch-towers of my Unit, “Pernashor,” where my new life awaited me.
I will never forget our approach to that place. The road went alongside the prison camp. A heavy snow was falling. Just ahead, I saw a group of prisoners, about six of them, in padded jackets covered with Army-issue greatcoats, walking out from a thin stand of trees. They wore Army boots, and on their heads they had on Army caps without the star. They were bent low, pulling the straps of a sleigh loaded with wood. Behind them, in a fur hat, felt boots and a sheepskin coat with its collar upturned, paced a VOKhR guard carrying a bayoneted rifle under his arm. The whole group made its way to the camp gates. The gates opened, the prisoners and the sleigh disappeared into the zone. The gates closed.
The guard with the rifle walked to the long, snow-covered barracks that were located next to the camp, which, I was to find out later, was where the Security Platoon was located. Next to those barracks sat two dugouts. One belonged to the Commander of the Platoon, who on the day of my arrival, was not in the zone. The other dugout housed the Political Instructor and his wife. He had been notified by Selektor that I was arriving. As he helped bring my things into his dugout, he seemed surprised that I had brought my skis from Moscow. Volodya traveled on to his new job in the camp Unit further north.
One of the first things the Political Instructor did for me was to choose a group of prisoners to build me my own dugout. While this was happening, I asked him to show me around “Pernashor.” When we entered the prison camp, I was gripped with horror at what I saw.
There was not one barrack in our camp. Instead, the prisoners were lying on spots they had cleared off on the bare ground. They had scraped the snow off of several meters of frozen ground in the shape of squares, and had placed crudely-cut branches down as make-shift beds. On top of these branches lay the prisoners, dressed in their greatcoats and Army boots, “resting” after their 12-hour workday.
Under their greatcoats the prisoners wore padded pants and padded jackets. On their heads were their forage caps. Several of them had wrapped their heads up in towels. Some of them had stuck fir branches into the snow around their heads, which they seemed to think would protect them a little from the icy wind. Each brigade had its own quadrant for sleeping, but depending on which way the wind was blowing, they switched places constantly to try to avoid the freezing air. Several prisoners were moving about the territory of the camp like shadows.
Near the gates at the end of the camp, a brigade of carpenters was building coffins.
At the same time, the Camp Administration officials continually screamed over the Selektor at the Unit Bosses, demanding an accounting of how many prisoners had worked, and how many had fulfilled their norms for the 24-hour period. All they cared about was how much each prisoner needed to be fed, which was tied to how much work he had done that day. And to show how serious their demands were, they constantly cursed at us and threatened to slam us into prison, unless “by tomorrow all the prisoners went to work and fulfilled 100% of the plan.” As I mentioned earlier, those who did not fulfill their work norms received 300 grams (about 10 ounces) of bread, and soup.
It was clear that winter had already arrived in full force, and the building of living quarters for the prisoners had not been included in the work plan. I immediately turned to the Political Instructor and asked him what was going on. Weren’t we simply condemning all of these prisoners to an early death with such terrible conditions? To my questions, the Political Instructor only raised his hands, saying that it was not up to him, and that he himself could not understand what was happening. There was nobody to turn to, but we had to do something quickly to fix this. But what to do?
One morning shortly thereafter, Volodya came to see me from the neighboring camp Unit, and told me that it was the same dreadful situation in his camp. He said: “Fedya, what will we do? This is a nightmare! When they were sending us off in Moscow, they told us something absolutely different than this. What kind of labor re-education is going on with these prisoners if they are all just dying during the winter?”
He spoke to me to as a close friend, with full awareness that I was at the time a candidate member of the Communist Party. (Volodya never had joined the Komsomol, and did not belong to the Party.)
But what could two young specialists who had just arrived at the GULAG--which was a state within the state--what could we actually do? We were far from Moscow and we had no way to get in touch with anyone there. Formally, we answered for our positions at Pechorlag both to Moscow and to the Party Obkom (Regional Communist Party) of Komi, ASSR, which was located in the capital of the republic, in Syktyvkar. But there were no roads to Syktyvkar, and neither the prison camp nor the Department had any kind of connections with them. But still, the leadership of Pechorlag had to be aware of the actual situation at the camp, because every day, each camp Unit had to report to Pechorlag headquarters, via the Selektor. Every Boss of a Unit of prisoners gave a summary of what the Unit had managed to build during the preceding 24-hour period. In this report, we always included the number of sick prisoners, how many had died, the situation with food, and so on. We did this every day.
Volodya waited for an answer from me. I agreed with his thinking. We discussed this terribly difficult situation for a long time, without coming up with a solution within the confines of the camp. Then, finally, we came to the following conclusions:
--According to what the GULAG officials had told us in Moscow, the prisoners were being held in the camps so that the Soviet State could re-educate them through labor. And after the prisoners had finished their sentences, they would return to a normal life.
--What clashed with this, though, was that in our camp, the living conditions were dangerous, and were, in fact, just leading the prisoners straight to a quick death. With the onset of winter, we felt that, more than anything, we had to do what was necessary to save their lives, even if it meant stopping work on railroad building.
--In so far as we had neither the opportunity nor the time to convince the leadership in our camp Department and above in the GULAG hierarchy, and people were dying already right now, we decided that we had to act fast and work with the quickest methods available to save lives.
--At the same time, since the Soviet government had designated our camp as having importance to the war effort, and war could break out at any moment, we also had to fulfill the monthly construction plan.
Once we said all this to each other, we figured out what to do.
When we had first traveled to our Units in Pechorlag from Abez, both of us remembered remarking on the number of good-quality pine logs that were trapped in the banks of the Usa River. These logs were supposed to float from the Ural Mountains to another destination, but many of them had gotten stuck in the mud. Volodya and I decided that our two camp Units could go and get those logs, bring them back, and do some building. We drew up plans up for some solid barracks, a mess house, a bathhouse, a “lice-fighter” (which was a place where you could turn up the temperature to 100 degrees Centigrade [212 degrees Fahrenheit] in order to kill lice) and other buildings we thought we might need.
In one night, then, we put together plans for all these buildings from our available materials. We did not even have one nail. There were none in either of our camp Units.
In order to construct stoves in the barracks, I took the risk of damaging “socialist property.” Someone at some time had thrown out several mining carts in my Unit. I thought that we could turn these carts upside down and cut a hole in the bottom for pipes (we had tin plate). Then we could cut a door in the end of the cart for fuel, and line the whole thing with a base of stone and clay (bricks were not available). Then we only had to add the pipe and the stove was ready.
Volodya and I agreed to call a meeting with the prisoners in each of our camp Units, and explain the situation to them. We planned our words carefully. We told them that their camp had been designated as significant to the war effort, and that war could break out any day. And because of this, the GULAG headquarters demanded that the prisoners fulfill their 24-hour plans. However, the Arctic winter was just beginning, and it would only get much worse. It was a huge problem that we did not have proper barracks and other buildings in our camp Unit.
We proposed to the prisoners that we all take two weeks from railroad building and devote the time to constructing our camp. We told them honestly that during these two weeks, we (the Unit Bosses) would be feeding the leadership “tufta,” or made-up numbers, that would show all the prisoners fulfilling the daily plan by 100%. In this way, we would ensure that every prisoner would receive a normal amount of food during this two-week period.
We needed to be protected, so we made all of the prisoners promise not to tell the authorities anything. During these two weeks, we told them that we would build warm barracks, a mess hall, a bathhouse, the lice-killer, through which we would immediately run all the linens, and supply the new camp. Then, after the two weeks spent on constructing our camp, we would work to fulfill the norms on track building by 200% for the next two weeks. In this way, we would still fulfill GULAG NKVD’s monthly plan of construction. We told the prisoners that the Security Platoon had also agreed to go along with our plan. The VOKhR armed guards themselves had been suffering, like the prisoners, with no housing and little food, so they too were ready to support us.
Volodya left for his own camp Unit, fully ready to implement all that we had agreed on. Between shifts, I gathered all the prisoners in my camp Unit together. By this time, I already had a good idea of who was in my Unit. For instance, I knew I had many excellent skiers from Leningrad. In 1939, these men had volunteered to go to the Finish front after the government had recruited them to join battalions of skiers that were sent to the enemy’s rear. At the time, Nikolai and I also had volunteered for these battalions, but the recruiters explained to us that for the time being, they were only taking men from Leningrad. We were told that we would be called if they decided to take volunteers from other cities. We did not get our turn. The war with Finland ended at the beginning of 1940.
In practice, when these battalions were thrown across the front line, they inevitably left ski trails. The Finnish aviators then cut off the trails, found the battalions by following their tracks, and destroyed them. They took as prisoners all the men who were left alive, which was mostly the wounded ones. Then the war ended, and our countries exchanged prisoners. But the Soviet Union, instead of sending the soldiers home, sent them to do forced labor at Pechorlag.
In November 1940, these men still did not know their ultimate fates, since they had not been officially sentenced. In the meantime, they were being kept as convicts, and treated as such. Several of these former soldiers were students, many of them my age. There are no words that could convey their suffering. When any of these unfortunate young people complained about their fate, I looked at them and could not find any way to comfort them.