Resistance in the Concentration Camps in Russia

We return to the question of the "defence of the USSR" advocated by the Trotskyist movement during the Second World War. An outpost of the international revolution – a country where power has been seized before anywhere else, as was the case in Russia in 1917 – must of course be "defended", even if, in order to remain in power, it must act as a State among States, signing treaties and trading with them. The correctness of any choice, including in foreign policy, lies in the will and concrete commitment to advancing the revolutionary process at the international level, subordinating to this task even the fate of the "State" that was the first to be "conquered".

Lenin, Trotsky, the vanguard of the Russian and international proletariat, pursued this line with determination and immense sacrifices, despite the delays and errors which always accompany real struggles. From the peace of Brest-Litovsk to the Treaty of Rapallo, from the relations with British trade unions to the exchange of goods with the Americans, from "war communism" to the NEP, their strategy was always directed towards world revolution.

The "defence of the USSR"

By contrast, Stalin's Russia could no longer be "defended", and it should not have been "defended", because its government no longer represented an outpost of the revolution, but a State capitalism that had dismantled Bolshevik power. Stalinism had buried the revolution in Russia, China, Germany, and Spain, and was now doing the same in the Second World War. No further proof was required – enough had already been seen.

The objection that it is easy to make this case in hindsight is well-founded: it was certainly not easy back then, in the heat of war. Millions of fighters and hundreds of thousands of communist militants saw Russia, and Stalin himself, as the main bastion of support for their struggle. And yet other fighters and militants, even back then, were already aware that Moscow had aligned itself with the other imperialist powers, with shifting alliances and territorial conquests. In any case, the post-war period – with the Yalta partition and the decades of dictatorship of State capitalism in Russia and in the countries of Eastern Europe, till its collapse in 1989-91 – would finally dispel any remaining doubts.

Internationalists in Stalin's camps

Over the years, numerous books, memoirs, documentaries, films, and novels have addressed the tragedy of the Stalinist concentration camps. There is no shortage of serious and accurate documentation, but most of this material is aimed at attacking and denigrating, along with Stalin, Marxism, Lenin, and the October Revolution.

The supposed continuity between Lenin and Stalin is the cornerstone of this simplification, or rather this historical falsification, regardless of its origins or intentions. The truth is that Russian State capitalism – those capitalist or even precapitalist social stratifications which the Bolshevik party had kept under control with an iron grip in the service of the international revolution – overturned the situation in less than a decade. The ebb of the revolutionary process in Europe and in the world, the terrible pressure of Stalinism, which was a political expression of that counter-revolutionary process, destroyed the Bolshevik party and the Third International. The working class entered the Second World War defeated, decimated, and above all deceived.

Every opponent of Stalinism was labelled a "Trotskyist" to be eliminated, even opponents who did not subscribe to the analyses of the exiled former Red Army commander. Regardless, the most detailed information about this period comes from Trotskyist sources. In the deportation camps during the 1930s, writes René Dazy, for the deportees and prisoners, there was no escape from the administration's cruel abuses, its illegalities, its inconsistencies [Fusillez ces chiens enragés – Le génocide des trotskistes, Olivier Orban, 1981].

There were protests, but they proved futile, with any information that filtered through inevitably being fragmentary and imprecise. By the beginning of 1935, those labelled as "Trotskyists" numbered 2,000-3,000, later reaching roughly 10,000. They managed, thanks to their unity, to maintain work rules and schedules compatible with preserving an embryo of political life.

With the start of the major show trials and the sending of hundreds of thousands of people – later millions – into the camps, the situation worsened. On October 27^th, 1936, the great strike of the political prisoners of Vorkuta began, when they refused to go to work and about a thousand began a hunger strike. The authorities sought to isolate the rebels, transferring them to barracks far from the camp, where, despite the harsh climate and demoralising isolation, the majority continued to strike, even when some began to die. The NKVD ensured that the movement was ignored by the outside world.

The protest ended in March 1937, when a telegram arrived from Moscow: Inform the hunger strikers of the Vorkuta mines that all their demands will be met. Only a few demands were actually later met (food rations, eight-hour workdays, etc.). However, new waves of prisoners kept arriving from the Moscow trials, and maintaining order in the camps was entrusted to common-law convicts, who acted as ruthless Kapos.

The strikes in the mines

At the Kolyma mine in 1937, anti-Stalinist political prisoners had planned to commemorate the 20^th Anniversary of the Revolution by refusing to go to work. On the morning of November 7^th, they were planning to raise black flags over the barracks as a sign of mourning and to sing the Internationale. Their collective had prepared three slogans: Down with Fascism, Long Live Leninism, and Long Live the Great Socialist October Revolution.

Betrayed by a spy, they were blocked inside the mine the day before, where they still sang the Internationale, and were later dispersed across several camps and liquidated. Simultaneously in Vorkuta, NKVD agents proceeded with the arrest of the leaders of the strike movement, including Sergei Sedov, Trotsky's son, and shot them.

In March 1938, a tribunal was organised in Kolyma and Vorkuta, before which prisoners filed at the pace of 30 to 40 a day. Each of them was interrogated for between five and ten minutes, mistreated and insulted, then sent back to his hut. Sentences were delivered quickly and the prisoners, in groups of 25, were gathered in the courtyard. Each was given a small hunk of bread and ordered to prepare for a transfer, then loaded onto trucks. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, from a nearby embankment, a burst of rifle fire echoed, followed by isolated detonations. Then the guards returned without the prisoners.

The executions lasted a long time: At irregular intervals 30 or 40 prisoners were called and taken away, including, in May 1938, the women and wives of the detained comrades. By then, the condemned, aware of their fate, would walk away singing the Internationale. From the third convoy onward, the local radio would announce the executions in an almost invariable format: 'For counter-revolutionary agitation, sabotage, theft, refusal to work, attempted escape, the following detainees [...] have been shot'.

The death marches

Jean-Jacques Marie addresses the crises of Stalinism in the Trotskyist journal he edited, Cahiers du mouvement ouvrier [N° 3, September 1998]. He draws on the well-known book The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn [YMCA-Press, 1973], which describes the decision of the Stalinist police to kill all political prisoners to prevent them from being liberated by the approaching Germans. At Vorkuta, mass executions took place. When the freight trains arranged for the transfer of prisoners were no longer able to depart on time, the executioners decided to bring tanks full of oil and pour them over the carriages before setting them on fire. All the prisoners were burned alive.

Marie writes that reality is even more complex than these atrocities. For the political prisoners, Beria [the head of the police] handled the matter very simply: execution before the arrival of the German troops. However, this bloody solution was not always applicable, since the authorities wanted to use the prisoners to dig trenches, carry out terracing work, etc..

In all, at least 750,000 men and women needed to be deported, with German tanks closing in and air raids overhead. Depending on the circumstances, those in charge made different decisions, some shooting all the prisoners, others letting them free. The Red Army soldiers, when they arrived, systematically disarmed the agents of the penal colonies, who accompanied the convoys to prevent the weapons from falling into the hands of the inmates in revolt.

In short – reads Marie's tragic and disheartened conclusion – the treatment of prisoners in the face of the German advance very closely reflects the reality of Soviet society under Stalin and Beria: a mixture of barbarism, political repression, terror, disorder, deceit, and individual initiatives.

The Internationalism