Main LA Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 3, 16 January 1950, p. 2..
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
|
Add another to the books being published by those who survived and are seeking to “tell the West”: Anton Ekart, Polish engineer who left for Russia in 1939 in a cattle truck and finally succeeded, in 1947, in making his way to Stockholm. During this period, sometimes free, sometimes imprisoned, sometimes deported to a camp north of the Urals, he experienced various aspects of life in Stalinist Russia. The French edition of his story Escape from Russia has just been published in Paris by Hachette. The article about Ekart’s Russian experience, excerpts from which we publish here, first appeared in a Paris periodical and was translated for the British Socialist Leader by John McNair; we reproduce it from this translation. Those who have already read some of the accounts which have been published by refugees from the Iron Curtain will find little that is brand-new but much which highlights the picture of society under totalitarian Stalinism. – Ed. |
Of the railway which is being constructed at Vorkurts the convicts say “There is a corpse beneath each sleeper.” Great mineral resources in coal were discovered in 1867, but the czarist regime did not exploit them because of the distance and the climate which each winter fell so low as 90 to 100 degrees below zero.
Nothing stopped the Soviets. A geological survey was carried out in 1928 and in 1929, and in 1930, the first work of boring and drilling was commenced. In April 1940, the first mine was opened, of which the output was fixed at 750,000 tons. The last of the 800 miles of rail between Kotlas and Vorkurts was laid December 25, 1941, after working night and day. In 1946 production exceeded 5,000,000 tons, and the estimate for 1950 is 10,000,000 tons.
But the estimate of the number of corpses reaches a million. Naturally, it is not a question of free workers but a part of the 25,000,000 “concentrationers” (one Russian out of eight), which, according to Ekart exist in the USSR.
The entrepreneur, the exploiter, was the NKVD (secret police), without doubt the greatest industrialist in the world, a trust more important and powerful than those of Rockefeller, Pierpoint Morgan and Carnegie combined.
Himself a victim of the system, Roginsky [Vishinsky’s substitute during the Moscow Trials of 1937, whom Ekart met in the Vorkurts prison – Ed.] was in agreement with Ekart in stating that Soviet Justice is nothing else than a machine for furnishing gratuitous and unlimited labor power.
“Our penal code,” he agreed, “it only an instrument, let us say the most important instrument, for transforming the social structure from capitalism to socialism. The problem was to eliminate the ‘old generations,’ that is to say, those, no matter what their age may be, who are incapable of thinking and acting in accordance with the Communistic spirit. No one would volunteer for such districts as Vorkurts but the Soviet Union has a large number of prisoners and can obtain any others she wants. She gains both economically and politically. While utilizing cheap labor she eliminates her enemies.”
Another fallen dignitary, Gladkish, ex-commissar of the army, completed the edification of Ekart in revealing to him the real significance of the “purges.” They come to the rescue of the NKVD which does not succeed in satisfying the enormous demand for human lives of which the regime has need.
“Take the great trial of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and the others at Moscow in 1937. The sessions were public and the foreign press invited. Everything seemed to be carried on following a procedure similar, or nearly, to that of the West. But, as a matter of fact, this was only the spectacular facade behind which the real trial was carried on, that of several million suspects who were arrested and deported on the spot.
“The NKVD Instituted in each administrative center a committee of three – the troikas – which had the power to arrest and to interrogate and to condemn. All the Russian intellectuals were thus practically eliminated. Of the millions of men who were included in this operation scarcely any survive now in the concentration camps.”
The war gave new pretexts for purges. All Russian prisoners, escaped or not, were considered as traitors to their country. For them, liberation was only a change of concentration camp. They were immediately arrested on their return to Russia and were not even authorized to see their families.
The survivors of the territory occupied by the Germans were treated in the same way. The whole of the tribe of the Karuchi (150,000 people) which were established in 1926 at the north of the Caucasus were deported to Siberia, under the pretext that they had manifested sympathy for the invaders.
The population of Moscow itself, the heart of the republic, was not spared. Those who had retreated in front of the German advance were condemned for desertion. Those who remained on the spot were suspected of having awaited the enemy through sympathy and were equally condemned.
Anton Ekart’s book allows us to solve the enigma of Alexis Kapler. This young cinema artist, already celebrated, was arrested by the NKVD owing to his idyll with Svetlana, the daughter of Stalin, and condemned to 10 years of prison for “anti-Soviet propaganda.” It is not known what has become of him. Ekart met him in the camp of Kotlas in the Arctic Circle from which he has little chance of returning.
The policy of collective suggestionism in the Soviet Union has a double face. One of the faces is turned towards the exterior, and is called propaganda. All is grist to its mill, commencing with sport.
Ekart knew in prison a doctor, Matveyev, who was an authority on sporting matters. He asked him whether they played football in the little towns and villages in the Soviet Union as they do in Western Europe. Matveyev shrugged his shoulders.
“How do you expect the mass of the people, fatigued and undernourished, to interest themselves in sport? No, sport is only accessible to a small minority. It has two objects: on the one hand it constitutes good propaganda abroad and, on the other hand, it raises the level of the army and the secret police.
“Nevertheless, the USSR possesses celebrated teams such as the Dynamo.
“The team is composed of professionals selected at a very early age. Soviet sportsmen live in a luxurious existence in the watering places of the Crimea and the Caucasus. They have the best trainers possible, are well-clothed and well-nourished. But their lives are under strict control – no alcohol, no women. This is not, however, the principal reason why their fate is not enviable.”
“And why not?”
“Because sport only lasts a certain time. The Soviet sportsman is something like a pure-bred racehorse, well looked after as long as he wins, but sent to the knackers’ yard when he is finished. His career usually ends by deportation. A defeated Soviet champion is not only useless but dangerous; he could relate what he saw abroad.
“But Soviet sport and the Dynamo football team in particular, have done more than any other form of propaganda to give credit abroad to the belief in the Soviet paradise. The Western nations reason thus: if the USSR possesses teams like the Dynamo, it is obvious that the physical condition of the people is excellent and that the standard of life is high.
“On the other hand, the average Russian thinks, ‘If Dynamo has beaten the French, it is a proof that their government gives its athletes less meat and less sugar than does ours. Therefore, the food situation is worse in France than here.’”
While in prison, Anton Ekart became acquainted with a lucid analyst of the regime, Colonel Yakovlev, the ex-instructor of the Military Academy at Moscow and ex-commander of heavy artillery on the front at Voronef. “If the Soviet Government and the NKVD were grateful,” said he, ironically, “they would erect a statue to Hitler on the Red Square.”
“The army was full of spies,” he explained. “When war broke out the hatred against the NKVD was greater than the hatred against the Germans. Entire divisions, principally those composed of men belonging to national minorities, killed their political commissars and surrendered en masse. This is why there were so many Russian prisoners at the beginning of the war.
“But the Germans missed their chance. Their terrorism was even more cruel than that of the NKVD. The massacres of prisoners of war, the deportations, the truck loads sent to the gas chambers, all these things caused a change of opinion against the Germans. In Ukraine, notably, if the Germans had conducted themselves as humanely as in 1918, they would have had all the population behind them.”
At Kotlas, in the extreme North, an old man Serafin enjoyed a privilege. He was so old and so friendly that the camp commandant turned a blind eye on the length of his hair which he could wear floating over his shoulders after the manner of the Russian Church. However, they took away from him his comb and his crucifix. In view of his protests they returned to him the first but not the second.
They did him another favor. When finally he died of senility they buried him in an individual grave, instead of throwing him into the common trench.
The old abbot had passed from the “sacred” Russia of the czars to an isle of deportation in the White Sea. When the war broke out he was at liberty. Stalin, amid a blaze of propaganda trumpets, restored the church. This is the reason why Father Serafin departed for the prisons of the far North.
“They have re-established the church,” said he to Ekart, “but what a church. Even while the patriarch Sergius was still living it was Alexis, an old propagandist of atheism, who was named in his place. Those who remained of the ‘old clergy’ refused to recognize him and threats only succeeded in intimidating a negligible minority. Those who did not submit were arrested, and,” added old Serafin, “I am one of those.”
“I am 76 years old. In my case there is no question of heroism. But I should have acted the same if I had been a young man. I am not afraid of them. God will punish them for all the crimes they have committed. They have gone so far that the new priests which have been appointed are the agents of the NKVD. They use the confessional to extract the information which they need.”
“It is hard to die without having cried aloud one’s hatred for the regime which has taken one’s father and one’s family. The father-confessor takes away from the penitent a heavy burden, but this has the result of sending thousands of unfortunates into the concentration camps and the prisons.”
Main LA Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 25 February 2023