Formakov Arsenii - Gulag Letters

THE YALE-HOOVER SERIES ON AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES

GULAG LETTERS

ARSENII FORMAKOV

EDITED, TRANSLATED, AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY EMILY D. JOHNSON

Hoover Institution

Stanford University

Stanford, California

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Haven and London

Financial support was provided by the Office of the Vice President for Research, the Provost, and the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Oklahoma.

Copyright 2017 by Yale University and the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Letters and photographs from the Arsenii Ivanovich Formakov Papers, Hoover Institution Archive, reprinted by permission of Ausma Polonska, for the estate of Arsenii Formakov.

Correspondence of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published with the permission of Natalia Solzhenitsyn.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016953815

ISBN 978-0-300-20931-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

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Contents

by Emily D. Johnson

Acknowledgments

Many people, organizations, and institutions provided help and support as I worked on this project. I am grateful to Julie Cassiday, Alan Barenberg, Golfo Alexopoulos, Carol Ueland, Lazar Fleishman, Mark Harrison, Norman Naimark, and the anonymous readers who evaluated my manuscript for their suggestions for improving the text. Boris Ravdin provided a great deal of assistance in preparation for and during my research trip to Latvia. Dan Healey and Nikita Lomagin both helped when I had questions about archival materials. I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in the Hoover Institutions Summer Research Workshop on Authoritarian Regimes on several occasions. Paul Gregory played a key role in encouraging my work on this project. I am very grateful to Lora Soroka, Carol Leadenham, Eric Wakin, and the staff at the Hoover Institution Archive and Library for their assistance. The staff of the Memorial Society in Moscow, the Scientific-Information Center of Memorial in St. Petersburg, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia in Riga, and the State Archives of Latvia were generous with their time and assistance. Molly Murphy and the staff of the Inter-library Loan Department at the University of Oklahomas library worked miracles. My parents, Phil and Kathie Johnson and Leith Johnson and John Martinez, all helped facilitate the research travel required for this project by stepping in at key moments to provide childcare. My daughter Cerria was remarkably patient as I worked on the manuscript. Catharine Nepomnyashchy provided support and advice until her death and is sorely missed.

Funds provided by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER) and American Councils, under authority of Title VIII grants from the U.S. Department of State, supported the work contained in the to this volume, and to Ausma Polonska for allowing me to share her familys story.

Note on Transliteration, Punctuation, and Formatting

Although standard Library of Congress transliteration is employed in most places in this book, the spelling of some names (Evgenia, Dmitri, Ananievich, Vertinsky) has been simplified in the interest of accessibility or in keeping with established tradition. The first name Alexander is generally spelled in keeping with English-language norms. In the case of the author Solzhenitsyn, I use the transliteration Aleksandr because this is the name that he published under in English. Places in which the letters have been abridged are marked with a bracketed ellipsis; other ellipses reflect the punctuation used in the original Russian-language text. As a general rule, titles of books and films are provided in transliterated Russian followed by an English translation in brackets or parentheses when first used. In some instances, I have defaulted to the English when these titles reappear, with an eye to making the book more accessible to nonspecialists. Periodical titles (such as Pravda and Izvestiia) are generally provided in transliterated Russian, as is the norm in most publications. In rare instances where this seems likely to impede the understanding of nonspecialists, I default to English. In the case of some very well known works of literature (such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Dead Souls), I have opted to omit the transliterated Russian.

Introduction

Emily D. Johnson

ON DECEMBER 2, 1944, a fellow inmate who served as the head of the accounts department at the local outpost of the Krasnoiarskii Labor Camp (Kraslag) ran over to see Arsenii Formakov at the needle-making shop where he worked. Lets see you dance, he teased, and handed Formakov the postal form that accompanied a wire transfer sent from Riga. Formakov recognized his wifes handwriting, and tears welled up in his eyes as he read the brief, tender note that she had written at the bottom of the form for him: this was the first communication that he had received from her in three and a half years. Within days a real letter followed. For the next three years, until his release from the labor camp in December 1947, Formakov remained in regular communication with his wife and children. The letters that he sent them during this first term in the camps and, to a lesser extent, during a later period of confinement (19491955), which today form part of the Hoover Institution Archives extensive holdings on the history of the Baltic states and the Soviet labor camp system, represent the subject of this volume. These documents offer an immediate eyewitness account of daily life in a typical Soviet labor camp and provide a sense of the difficult choices that inmates faced as they struggled to survive.

A number of factors began to change this situation at the end of the 1920s, leading to the rise of the mass system of forced labor that Formakov would encounter in the 1940s. The crash industrialization campaign introduced with the First Five-Year Plan led to ambitious construction projects and efforts to extract natural resources in distant, forbidding locations that required vast reserves of unskilled labor just as new purges and the ruthless collectivization campaign were increasing the numbers of incarcerated exponentially. In one respect, however, this drive clearly succeeded: it spread a model of camp organization and forced labor developed in the 1920s at secret policerun detention sites, including the notorious Solovetsky labor camp, across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, allowing the penal system to expand and absorb the wave of victims sentenced during the great purges of the late 1930s. Over time, Gulag came to signify not just the administrative unit that governed the labor camp system beginning in the 1930s, but also the Soviet penal system as a whole.

By the start of World War II, when Formakov received his first sentence to hard labor, the population confined in Soviet labor camps and colonies stood at 2.3 million. Nonetheless, inmates faced continual demands that they increase their work output and thereby aid in the war effort.