Gulag revisited: What Happened to the British and Commonwealth Soldiers?

 
 
 
The following article was originally published in the Quarterly Review
 
 
Immediately after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the Russian penal system went through a radical reformation. The traditional “hard-labour” sentences were replaced by a two-tier system: the Vechecka “special purpose” camps, and those that were openly used for “forced labour”. Although not on the scale of those that would appear during the Stalin era, the purpose was the same; as well as criminals, “enemies of the state” such as aristocrats, businessmen and political opponents were incarcerated, often summarily.
 
 
In July 1921, the Council of People’s Commissars (SOVNARKOM) issued a secret decree defining the use, and the purpose, of “corrective forced labour”. It had already been acknowledged by the state that the camps were of little use in terms of rehabilitation of prisoners, but were merely a means of obtaining very cheap labour. The decree of 1929 effectively institutionalised the concept of slave labour in the Soviet Union, and laid the ground for the subsequent Stalinist atrocities. By April 1930 the system was officially established and in operation, and in November that year the word Gulag was first used.
 
 
During the early 1930s the camp network grew rapidly, and the numbers of prisoners rose as new offences were dreamt up by Stalin and his cabal. Article 58 of the Soviet penal code (1927), which was intended to criminalise political opposition, was updated in 1934 to include a number of new crimes, including “contact with foreigners” (article 58-3). After the Second World War, this article was used to imprison released Soviet POWs, on the grounds that their failure to fight to the death was an “anti-Soviet” act. In July 1937, the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, issued special order No. 00447, under which tens of thousands of inmates of the Gulag were executed for “continued anti-Soviet activity”. This category of offence included such treasonable acts as becoming ill, or failing to work hard enough.
 
 
Following a decline in the camp populations during the Second World War due to high mortality rates – 25% of inmates perished from starvation in 1941 alone – numbers swelled to almost 2.5 million by the time Stalin died in 1953. Many of the new inmates were from territories newly annexed by the Soviet Union, and many more were former citizens who were forcibly repatriated after fleeing in the pre-war years. A tightening of property ownership laws also created a whole new range of offences, and new categories of enemies of the state.
 
 
An amnesty followed Stalin's death, and the camps went into numerical decline. In January 1960, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) issued an order officially liquidating the Gulag.
 
 
The former Soviet Union is now littered with mass graves. To take just a few examples, at Kurapaty, near Minsk, as many as 30,000 citizens were executed by the NKVD between 1937 and 1941. At Bykivnia, on the outskirts of Kiev, as many as 225,000 “enemies of the state” were buried in at least 210 mass graves. At Butovo, in the Moscow region, at least 20,000 political prisoners were shot, and buried near the village of Drozhino.
The Gulag, although somewhat different to the Nazi concentration camp system, was equally heinous, and although its raison d'être was not extermination, the results were too often the same, and the penal system killed untold millions. Although precise figures are impossible to come by, the estimated number of deaths in captivity of 1.7 million is "officially tolerated". This fails, however, to take into account the common practice of releasing inmates close to death, nor does it take into account the prisoners and families who perished in the penal colonies. The highest estimate available is a massive and somewhat speculative 50 million, but it is unlikely that the truth will ever be known.
 
 
Prisoners as pawns
 
The transfer of Soviet POWs to the penal system following their release from Nazi prison camps is well known; what is rather less talked about is the fate of tens of thousands of Allied servicemen who were to disappear into the system – as many as 30,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers ‘liberated’ by the Soviets from German POW camps ended their days in the Gulag.
 
 
A 1992 book, Soldiers of Misfortune: Washington’s Secret Betrayal of American POWs in the Soviet Union by James D. Sanders, Mark A. Sauter, and R. Cort Kirkwood, claimed that 20,000 US servicemen were also taken by the Soviets, and that “Starting in 1945, the Soviet Union became the second-largest employer of American servicemen in the world.”
 
 
A Congressional Select Committee Report, dated may 23rd 1991, puts the figure at 25,000 US personnel being held captive in the Soviet Union after the war. The report also referred to testimony from a former inmate of the Gulag who claimed to have been imprisoned with as many as 900 US PoWs in the mid 1970s.
 
 
A Senate Select Committee had found that whilst 76,854 Americans were estimated to be in German POW camps as of 15 March 1945, the actual number of Americans recovered from German POW camps was 91,252. This suggests that amongst the numbers of those who were missing in action (MIA) and subsequently presumed killed, were many thousands who were in captivity, but whose status had not been reported by the Germans to the International Red Cross. It is these discrepancies that make it difficult to arrive at any reliable figure.
 
 
 
It has been speculated that the retention of personnel by the Soviets was in retaliation for the failure of the Allies to repatriate large numbers of Soviet POWs that had been identified as having anti-communist tendencies. For example, Home Office papers released in 2005 revealed how more than 7,000 Ukrainians from the 14th Waffen SS “Galicia” Division were allowed to settle in Britain, many becoming agents and returning to their home country. The remnants of this community can still be found today, centred around the Ukrainian centre in London's Notting Hill Gate.
 
 
 
Other Soviet PoWs liberated by the allies, of course, were to meet a terrible fate. Forced repatriations, illegal under the Geneva Convention, led to the deaths of thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav prisoners. In 1989 allegations against Lord Aldington that he had personally signed the orders that led to the slaughter resulted in a celebrated libel action. Aldington won record damages against his accuser, Nikolai Tolstoy, although he was never to see the money. Aldington died in 2000.
 
 
Vietnam and the Cold War
 
A US Department of Defence press release dated 9 Dec 2003 revealed that Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence Jerry Jennings had visited Moscow as part of a commission set up in 1992 (the US-Russia Joint Commission, or USRJC) to explore the question of whether Americans were held in, or transported through, the former Soviet Union during WWII, the Cold War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The cases of more than 200 airmen who went missing during the Korean War were initially discussed, and 140 of these were subsequently fully or partially resolved. It is widely held that downed American fliers, especially electronic warfare officers, were routinely sent to Moscow for interrogation and then execution. This issue was not one that the US government appeared willing to discuss, however, and the official line was that this never happened. But then the floodgates opened...
 
 
Speaking in the House of Representatives on October 29th 1991, Congressman Bill McCollum, now Attorney General of Florida, presented evidence that seemed to prove the case. A retired National Security Agency analyst and air-defence specialist, Terrell A. Minarcin, had been employed on intercepting enemy communications during the Vietnamese war. In a subsequent affidavit, sworn in November 1991, he claimed that 200 - 300 US PoWs were shipped to the Soviet Union, some as late as 1983.
 
 
On 4 November 1991, the Moscow-based journal Kommersant carried an interview with retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, a former head of Soviet foreign counter-intelligence, who had already confirmed that after preliminary interrogations in theatre by Russian and Chinese personnel, POWs were flown to Russia. "In my time in intelligence" he stated "we did participate in the interrogation of American prisoners." The article concluded that the eventual fate of these servicemen was “unknown". Kalugin, however, was to claim in an interview with Associated press in 1992 that he had personal knowledge of three cases of interrogation - a pilot, a Naval officer, and a CIA operative - following which the men concerned were returned to the US.
 
 
In an autobiographical essay “A little more about myself” written by General Dmitri Volkogronov, acclaimed historian and defence adviser to President Boris Yeltsin, in 1994, reference is made to a document, dating from the late 1960s, assigning the KGB the task of “delivering knowledgeable Americans to the USSR for intelligence purposes.”  This alleged document has been the subject of considerable discussion, and Russian authorities deny the existence of any such plan.
 
 
The then Chief of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Yevgeny Primakov however personally told General Volkogronov that the plan was never implemented, suggesting that it did exist, if only as a proposal. President Yeltsin was soon to indicate that if it were not this plan that was implemented, then perhaps it was another.
 
 
During the period of the Yeltsin government, Moscow had begun to open its files, and US investigators were given access to these documents, and also to Russian veterans who been involved in, or had knowledge of, the handling of prisoners. In fact, whilst Captain John P. Gay, director of the Asia/Pacific Division of the J-5, Joint Staff stated in 1991 that he “found no evidence that any previously unacknowledged Americans had been captured and imprisoned during the Cold War period by the Soviet Union, China or Korea” Yeltsin admitted in 1992 that a number of US airmen ‘lost’ during the Cold War had actually been captured and imprisoned in the Soviet Union. In June of that year he stated that some of these servicemen “might be still alive”. Subsequent investigations have found no evidence of this latter assertion, but the issue was “kept open”. Also in 1992, officials in Kiev confirmed to investigators that ten files concerning US servicemen, including at least one of whom went missing on Ukrainian territory, were turned over to Moscow, according to a report issued by the Senate Select Committee. There is no suggestion that any of these personnel were moved to labour camps, unlike those taken to the Soviet Union after the Second World War.
 
 
In 2006, all US access to documents and papers was withdrawn. In December 2007, General Robert H. “Doc” Foglesong, who had been Chairman of the USRJC on POWs, visited Moscow in an attempt to restore relations and resume co-operation. Although it had originally been proposed by the Kremlin, a planned meeting with President Putin was inexplicably cancelled, and he was also denied access to a Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence.
 
 
The USRJC has resolved numerous questions relating to missing US servicemen, and has also helped the Russians determine that some 450,000 of their citizens presumed missing after WW2 had in fact moved to other countries within the Soviet Union and abroad. There is a feeling amongst the US investigators that the Russians now feel that all that can be done has been done, and it is time to lay the matter to rest. But the Americans will clearly not rest until every man is accounted for, and they understand that this is likely to take some time.
 
 
In the Russian camp, whilst the political elite would like to bury the past as quickly as possible, amongst the military hierarchy there is great sympathy for the American position. During his 2007 trip, General Foglesong met with General Ruslan S. Aushev, Head of the War Veterans Committee of the Governments of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Aushev was supportive of USRJC’s efforts, and even suggested that the US should produce a short documentary film which could be broadcast in the peripheral regions of the former Soviet Union, where he was confident that local people would know of the whereabouts of graves of former Gulag prisoners.
 
 
This tactic has worked in the past. In 1993, a retired maritime border guard named Vasili Saiko heard of the work of the USRJC, and contacted them with information concerning the shooting down of an RB-29 over the sea to the north of Japan on October 7th 1952. Saiko had witnessed the incident from the deck of his cutter, and helped to recover the body of one airman, John Robertson Dunham. Saiko was also able to hand over Robertson's wedding ring to investigators. On another occasion, investigators were given access to a former MiG-17 pilot, 1st Lt. Viktor Lopatav, who took part in the shooting down of a C-130 Hercules over Armenia on September 2nd 1958.  During the Cold War there had been literally thousands of such reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory. There were numerous losses, with 10 flights being totally unaccounted for. The openness of the Yeltsin era has helped to account for many of the lost airmen.
 
 
 
 
The “Gulag” today
 
Although the Gulag was officially disbanded in the 1960s, so-called “free-labour camps” remain in operation in Siberia, as a part of the Russian penal system, to this day, accommodating up to one million inmates.
The Russian word etapirovanie literally means “transport by stages”. In 2005, Valerii Abramkin, head of a liberal NGO, the Moscow Centre for Prison Reform, was quoted in the Moscow Times as saying the time during which prisoners are in transit is used to “…shock them and break their spirit.” Unable to communicate with the outside world, with up to 20 prisoners in a six-berth compartment, they are at the mercy of their guards. Abramkin told the newspaper that during stops, prisoners are often pulled out and made to lie down or kneel in the snow or dirt for hours while being beaten.

 
A labour camp in the far northern Siberian Yamal (in the language of the indigenous Nenets, Yamal means “end of the world”) Peninsula, near the Arctic Circle, remains in service. It has been reported that Mikhail Khordokovsky, the oligarch who fell out with the Kremlin after he sponsored pro-democratic political parties, has served part of his sentence there, and he was certainly reported in the journal Kommersant, in October 2005, to have been in labour camp YaG-14/10.
 
 
Relatives have the right to know where loved ones are incarcerated, but there is no time-frame laid down within which this information must be imparted, so in reality many prisoners simply disappear into the system. Traditionally, NGOs would fight for the rights of such individuals, but Vladimir Putin has shut down many of these under legislation signed in January 2006, aimed at stopping foreign influence in Russian civil society. Memorial, the Sakharov prize-winning human rights campaign group, which has fought to publicise the treatment of Khordokovsky, has seen its own offices raided. In December 2008, masked men entered their premises and took away documents, including many personal testimonies of abuses perpetrated during the Stalin-era.
 
 
Rather disturbingly, as recently as 2001 the St Petersburg Times reported that North Korea was sending prisoners to Siberian labour camps as a means of paying off its Soviet-era debt to Russia. This continued breach of human rights appears to be conveniently overlooked by the European Union, as it allows itself to become ensnared in an asymmetrical relationship in which the Kremlin pulls all the strings. Whilst the US pursues the matter of its missing servicemen, EU states, particularly the UK, remain silent, fearful that Moscow may cut off the energy supplies on which they are now almost totally dependent. Political expediency often requires that a blind eye be turned to the facts, but the scale of the atrocities surely require the Russian state, which has accepted much liability, to follow a course of reform and transparency in which the west has a moral right to expect to be involved. The openness of the Yeltsin-era was replaced by the Putinist concept of Sovereign Democracy under which the state regained many of its Soviet-era powers. Dmitry Medvedev has stated his intention to work more closely with the US, the EU, and most recently the new British government. He has also softened considerably the sanctions against NGOs. Against this new political background, and with the Russian President keen to obtain the support and largesse of the west as he prepares to fight Putin for the presidency in 2012, renewed pressure, this time from the EU, may yield results. Russia should be helped to understand that this is not about retribution, it is about resolution. Maybe it is a good time now to reopen the files....
 
 
 
 
 
Author's note: All researchers will know that spine-tingling sensation when some previously lost nugget of information is unearthed. It is somewhat akin to being touched on the shoulder by a ghost. During the course of researching this article I heard whispers about US servicemen from the First World War being held in Siberian camps. The matter was certainly discussed by a Senate Select Committee in the mid-1990s.
 
My feeling is that these were likely to have been allied soldiers who found themselves fighting on the side of the White Russians during the 1917 revolution.
 
The chances are, given subsequent political events, that there will be no trail of evidence to prove or disprove this. But it might be interesting to take a look....