Page 47 - The Chief Culprit

24 y e Chief Culprit

other hand, millions of people ended up in the concentration camps. is was a slave work-
force. Inmates do not have to be paid at all. ey can be sent anywhere. ey do not need
housing—a torn tent, wooden barrack that they build for themselves, or a hole in the ground
that they will dig will suffice. Inmates can be almost never fed or clothed. eir lives cost
nothing. ey can be forced to work any number of hours in a day, without holidays. ey
can be executed for unfulfilled production quotas. e development of the remote regions of
Siberia and the Far East would have been impossible without the multi-million-strong armies
of the inmates (and the “special settlers,” in other words, those deported by force and exiled
to those remote regions). e government planned in advance the number of prisoners that
would be needed for the next year, and would place an advance order for the arrests with the
People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD).
e second secret of Stalin’s industrialization success: vast resources available in the
USSR. Over a thousand years of its history, Russia had amassed an enormous treasure. e
country had huge gold reserves. In churches, monasteries, museums, tsarist palaces, and the
homes of rich people, mind-boggling valuables were collected: icons, paintings, statues, med-
als, books, antique furniture, furs, and jewelry. All this was mercilessly confiscated and sold
abroad. Stalin sold enormous reserves of gold, platinum, and diamonds to the outside world.
In just a few years, Stalin sold all that the nation had been gathering for centuries. Stalin
robbed churches and monasteries, the imperial vaults, and museums. Icons and precious
books, paintings by great Renaissance masters, collections of diamonds, and the treasures of
museums and libraries were all exported.
On top of all this, Russia has every sort of natural resource and in almost inexhaust-
ible quantities. Millions of people were cutting down forests and transporting the timber to
the northern ports. e timber was the base of exports. Stalin also organized gold mining
on a never-before-seen scale. Among others, a group of concentration camps was formed
under the name “Dal’stroy” (the Russian abbreviation for “Far Eastern Construction Trust”).
Jacques Rossi, a Frenchman, spent almost half of his life in Soviet concentration camps. He
wrote a remarkable encyclopedia, now known as e Gulag Handbook: An Encyclopedia and
Dictionary of Soviet Penitentiary Institutions and Terms related to the Forced Labor Camps. Here
is how he described this group of camps:

Dal’stroy is the most powerful and almost autonomous kingdom in the GULAG Empire.
Dal’stroy was founded in 1932–1933 on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, [at] the mouth
of the river Kolyma. e main task was obtaining gold. Local forests, coal, and other
resources were exploited only for the internal needs of Dal’stroy. All work was done by
the inmates, including the construction of villages and towns for the freely employed,
construction of thousands of kilometers of roads, barracks for inmates, etc. By the early
1940s, Dal’stroy stretched a length of 1,300 km from north to south, and 1,700 km from
east to west, encompassing the western part of Kamchatka and eastern Yakutia. Dal’stroy
was not subordinate to the local administration. 3

Starting in the late 1930s and all the way into the beginning of the 1950s, several hun-
4
dred thousand inmates were mining up to 100 tons of gold a year for Stalin. In 1939, just
Dal’stroy by itself mined 66.7 tons of gold on Kolyma. e plan for 1940 was for 80 tons of
gold. And the production of gold kept on growing. For comparison’s sake: In tsarist Russia,