Embassies and Labour Camps
BOOKS about Russia are usually by diplomats, journalists, escaped prisoners or 'friendly delegates.' It has long been the practice of the last of these to refuse to believe the stories of escaped prisoners, and to dismiss the stories of diplomats on the theory—used indeed about diplomats' knowledge of other countries too—that these sheltered and isolated dudes never see anything. In reality, of course, highly intelligent men who are in Moscow for two or three years can see a great deal that the passing delegate could not.
Admiral Stevens, a humane, reasonable man, a great admirer of the Russian people and of Russian culture and a fluent speaker of the language, was able to see a surprising amount. His naive and straightforward account is valuable, simply because so few people have the talents and opportunities for this sort of thing. And, in spite of a certain amount of simpliste reflection, it makes a
sympathetic and wide-ranging book. '
At the other end of the Soviet social scale is Mr. Ekart's account of his experiences in the labour camps. Like so many similar books it is unemotionally written. It seems that it is only people of his type, incurable optimists and yet clear-sighted realists, who possess the capacity to survive. Mr. Ekart's book is one of what is now a considerable documentation about the Vorkuta group of camps. But, though he does not tell a brand-new story, he makes an individual and valuable contribution to the literature.
How can it be that there are people who contrive to ignore or dismiss the existence of this atrocious system? Partly see-no-evil parochialism no doubt, as Mr. Ekart implies. But, of course, many of those who are concerned to deny the existence of the Soviet forced-labour system are not to be affected by argument or evidence. For the fact is that their denials are purely formal : they are not, in reality, in the least upset by the camps. Indeed, the particular form of sadism which flourishes in pro-Soviet circles is one whose unique pleasure it is to combine the delights of terrorism with the satisfactions of a conscience persuaded that in the long run such horrors are for the humane and progressive best.
Mr. Ekart was lucky enough not to be sent to Vorkuta proper, but to remain at Kotlas further south, a less horrifying place. There he soon had the first symptoms of all prisoners, 'legs swollen to the groin. a sure sign of organic exhaustion.' But he was able to become an assistant to one of the doctors, and eventually to make reasonably effective preparations for suicide in case of an order of transfer to Vorkuta. The squalor, sickness and repression at Kotlas were not intense enough to blunt his intelligence, and he has retained quite an amount of interesting information. For example, I believe he gives the first indication of the areas of Central Asia to which the Karacha—one of the nations deported from the Caucasus in 1943-44—were sent.
In the same camp was Alexander Staroskin, one of three brothers who had been, among Russia's leading footballers in the 1930s. All three had been abroad too.much and had ended up in camps. From conversations with Staroskin and a doctor who had been in the Physical Education Department before his arrest, Ekart is able to give a clear account of the Soviet regime's attitude to sport—sport for the'masses being an adjunct of military training, while a few highly trained and highly professional teams carry Soviet prestige abroad. Dr. Matveyev aided that the effect inside Russia of a Soviet sporting victory, ,abroad is' important, on the basis that 'if Dynamo can beat a French team, obviously the French have even less bread and meat than we do.'
Other interesting fellow-inmates included Yakovlev, the Soviet artillery expert, who was unpatriotically realistic about the importarrce of Western military aid in the war, a daughter of Tukhachevsky who had been only eleven years old when her father had been shot, and—in some ways the.most striking of all- Roginsky, Vyshinsky's chief assistant in the great purge trials of the Thirties. Roginsky defended the forced-labour system and police methods in general with the argument that the rights of an
individual, or even of a generation, were not important in the long run. His fellow-inmates were prudent enough not to point out that there was no proof or sign that the long run was doing any better than the short. Meanwhile, the argument that, since the labour plan required so many engineers or doctors per 10,000 arrests, the M VD were forced to fill up their quota of these specialists without regard to 'subjective' considerations, was not very consoling.
Mr. Ekart did his best to get information about the economic value of the Vorkuta mines. Engineers at Kotlas estimated to him that the whole project, by which vast coal mines were set up in this inhospitable area, was a mistaken one. A greater increase in production could have been obtained by development of existing mines in Central Asia. For a very short period in the war, indeed, the main mines of Russia were overrun, but even then Vorkuta only supplied a few million tons, which again could have been made more easily available by development of the more accessible mints of Western Siberia.
But it is not the economic, nor even the moral, judgement that is the whole crux : for we can only form a realistic political opinion about the claims of the regime by considering that it still finds it necessary to imprison its citizens in such astonishingly large
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