Nothing to Lose but Their Chains

FORCED LABOR IN SOVIET RUSSIA (331 pp.) -- David J. Dal I in and Boris I. Nicolaevsky--Yale University ($3.75).

Communism, the 20th Century's great myth, has spawned a host of subsidiary myths. Conspicuous among them is the widely peddled notion that Russia's dictatorship of the proletariat has lifted proletarians to new heights of human dignity. The Russian line is: We have liquidated capitalism and thereby ended the exploitation of workers. The reality is that the Soviet economy rests squarely on a base of slave labor and that the Soviet Union is the greatest slave state in history.

The fact of slavery in the Soviet Union is not news; its literature is extensive.*Author Dallin (CoAuthor Nicolaevsky contributed only one chapter to this book) lists a bibliography of ten packed pages on the subject, including Vladimir Tchernavin's unforgettable I Speak for the Silent Prisoners of the Soviet (Hale, Cushman & Flint, Boston, 1935). But until now, most of the slave-camp exposes consisted of narratives of personal experience and scattered corroboration drawn from between-the-lines interpretations of official documents. What Author Dallin has done is to bring all of this material together in a thoroughly documented volume. Documentation impedes the narrative flow and hampers the book's organization, but it serves its own arresting end. It gives the slave-camp horror a third-dimensional depth and breadth and establishes the Soviet version of planned economy for what it is: history's most monstrous crime against the individual.

How Many Slaves? Dallin asks and tries to answer the big question: How many forced-labor camps and prisoners are there in Russia? After compiling a list of 125 camps, scattered from Murmansk to Vladivostok, he has to confess that the catalogue is far from complete. But it is by far the biggest list yet compiled. Examining all estimates, Dallin concludes that Soviet slave-labor camps contain not less than 12,000,000 men, women & children. But he cites other estimates whose figures have soared as high as 30 million. Two of the biggest slave-labor camps: Solovetski Island in the White Sea, which has been in business since 1923, and Dalstroy's camps in the Kolyma valley in eastern Siberia.*

The Russian slave class, as Dallin analyzes it, has three principal divisions: 1) habitual criminals; 2) dethroned bureaucrats; 3) politicals. In the pariah society that suffers a living death behind the barbed wire of the camp's, the criminals are the elite, bureaucrats usually wangle the cushy administrative jobs, political offenders most often are worked to death by a deliberate policy of bloodless liquidations. A political offender need not be a man or woman who wants to toss a bomb at Stalin, but merely one who tells a disrespectful joke about him.

Biggest Business. Slaves and slave camps are the private property of the MVD, and their productivity has made the Soviet secret police the world's biggest business. Slaves build electric power dams, factories, canals, railroads. They mine coal, iron, gold. By Dallin's estimate, they represent at least one out of every four Soviet workers. Since they can be regimented without appeal, worked to death without mercy and paid little or nothing, they are the Soviet Government's most profitable labor.

Prison labor, Dallin points out, is a Russian tradition. But at the time of the Revolution, prison laborers numbered only 50,000. Under the Communist Party, the number of slaves has grown to millions, largely due to the need for cheap, forced labor to push through the successive five-year plans. In at least one year, Dallin reports, the MVD received a quota for the number of arrests that had to be made. What Friedrich Hayek postulated in The Road to Serfdom, David Dallin has effectively documented from the Soviet Union's case history: the demands of a totally planned economy enjoin a mass manipulation of labor and lead inevitably to forced labor and hence to a police state.

Troubled Conscience. There was a time when the conscience of the Politburo was still troubled by its growing slave class. In 1929, in answer to growing complaints about inhuman conditions (overcrowding, hunger, lack of sanitation, overwork, lack of adequate heat and clothing) in the Solovetski camps--they then had 100,000 prisoners--Maxim Gorky was dispatched to investigate. Writes Dallin: "For a whole month before his arrival barracks were scrubbed and cleaned; regulations and orders informing the prisoners of punishments and sentences of their fellow inmates were removed from the walls; cozy 'red corners' with books and newspapers were arranged, and an afternoon recess introduced. Gorky walked through the camps, talked to prisoners in the presence of guards, inspected a few barracks. The prisoners were assembled to sing a little song for him:

"Deported as we are for our deeds,

We still enjoy many a right.

We publish newspapers, which everybody reads,

We stage performances--a lovely sight!

We write, and our songs we sing.

Abroad they've never dreamt of such a thing!"

Gorky, who, according to the testimony at the great Purge Trial, was murdered by Police Boss Henry Yagoda (who was later liquidated), presumably found slave life wonderful.

The Author. David Julievich Dallin, 58, has spent most of his life in exile from his native Russia. A revolutionary, but no Bolshevik, he was a fugitive from the Czar's Okhrana (secret police) from 1911 to 1917. After the Bolshevist coup d'etat, he again went into exile in 1922, lived in many European cities before coming to the U.S. in 1940, where a succession of magazine articles and books (Soviet Russia's Foreign Policy, The Real Soviet Russia) made him a place as one of the most realistic interpreters of the Soviet Union.

*Last month, Britain's Laborite M.P. Richard Stokes, a manufacturer of excavating machinery, banned further trade between his firm and the Soviet Union until the Soviet Union "released 17 million people of many nationalities held in slave-labor camps."

*Established in 1932, Dalstroy is the MVD trust in charge of mining gold in the Kolyma valley. It has a rigorously restricted port city, Magadan (pop. 40,000), through which millions of slaves have passed, many to perish at work in "the land of white death."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.