Nazi concentration camp guards tended to believe in Nazi racist ideology, worked in camps an easy train ride to Berlin, and, if not driven by ideology, had vast opportunities for corruption (through the theft of inmate belongings). Soviet Gulag guards lived thousands of miles from home in some of the world's harshest climates. Although some camps and colonies were located in central regions, the most important were dispersed in forlorn corners of the vast Soviet Union. They were built close to the vast mineral and forestry resources of the Far North, Siberia, and Kazakhstan.
Although prisons in other societies are not exactly located on prime real estate, they can scarcely compare in remoteness and hardship with the prisons of the Soviet Gulag. As a massive industrial and mining empire, the Gulag spun off a huge demand for guards in a society that was perennially short of labor. The USSR, in 1953, had a prison population fifteen times larger than the United States, a country of comparable size. The Gulag administration faced a constant struggle of recruiting and retaining guards.
In any penitentiary system, the task of guards is basically the same: All societies isolate violent and dangerous offenders as a threat to the physical safety and property of their citizens. In the Soviet case, most inmates were condemned to the Gulag not as threats to public safety but because of actual or suspected opposition to the Soviet state.
That guards perform their jobs well was extremely important to the leadership. If the guarding system broke down, civil society could be swamped with "socially dangerous” persons who could infect the rest of society with their anti-Soviet views. Yet, there was little reason to expect that Gulag guards would be the "best and the brightest.” Guards had to work in remote regions where free labor would not come on its own. Guarding is a cruel, brutal, and unrewarding business in its own right, let alone in an arctic climate. Unless the Gulag administration was to pay exceptional wages and benefits, there would also be no reason for qualified persons to volunteer for guard positions.
The official statistics for the militarized guard division of the Gulag for 1945 show that only twelve percent belonged to the party, ninety percent had an elementary education or less, and almost eighty percent had been on the job less than a year.2 If one adjusts these figures to exclude officers (who accounted for about ten percent of the total), the characteristics of ordinary guards look even worse.
Their officers were not much better. NKVD/MVD officers with uncompromised backgrounds and good training opted for careers in the central administration or in the glamorous operational administrations. The guard division was a dumping ground for compromised officers sent to Gulag camps under the motto: "You can take those whom we do not need.”3 "Officer” positions in the Gulag even had to be fulfilled by "free labor,” suggesting even a shortage of officers. In 1948, 26,254 of the 63,033 officer positions were filled by "free labor.”4 Given that most camps were off limits to civilians, many of these "free” officers were either prisoners themselves or former prisoners.
That the Gulag was not a particularly desirable place of employment is reflected in the fact that of the 337,484 authorized positions in the camp sector, 21 percent were unfilled (in 1948). In the early 1930s, shortages were so severe that prisoners occupied managerial positions in camp administration. During the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, most lower-level administrative and technical positions were held by prisoners. Although the Gulag administration sought to minimize the use of prisoners as guards for obvious reasons, the number of prisoner-guards was substantial. As of January 1939, of the 94,921 armed guards in camps and colonies, 25,023 were prisoners.5 The practice of using prisoner-guards continued throughout the history of the Gulag.
The Gulag had other ways to force "free” persons into guard positions. Many inmates became guards after their sentences were completed because internal passport controls would not permit them to live elsewhere. After World War II, Red Army soldiers, POWs, displaced persons, and others who would have been in Germany or in other foreign countries were automatically processed in "filtration” camps. Many who escaped imprisonment were made into concentration camp guards. Others had their papers taken away and had no choice but to remain as guards. At the beginning of 1946, the number of such guards numbered 31,ooo.6
The sorry conditions of the armed guards of the Gulag were summarized in a letter to the NKVD minister Beriia in August of 1945:
At the current time, most of the armed guards are older persons and war invalids. Many have asked to be demobilized based on the state decree about demobilizing older persons. The Gulag administration gives a standard answer to such requests that the personnel staff is not subject to this decree. Such an answer is correct for the present but the basic question is the future insofar as most guards are older than forty, disqualified from military service because of health, war invalids, or women. Our efforts to recruit demobilized solders is not yielding results. There are other substantive deficiencies. For example in the armed guards, we have in the commanding staff in officer ranks free workers recruited from collective farms and cities in the ordinary fashion.7
Although former Red Army soldiers understood weaponry, those recruited from the collective farms did not. Guards did not know how to clean their rifles, and one female guard went on duty with a rag stuffed in her rifle.8
World History
