Jake DeBacher’s Reviews > Gulag: A History > Status Update

...eighteen million Soviet citizens passed through the camps and colonies between 1923 and 1953.... the number of [WWII] POWs exceeded four million... added up the number of special exiles and got a figure of 6,015,000... Adding the numbers together, the total number of forced laborers in the USSR comes to 28.7 million.

According to [Shifrin's] account, he and his comrades were sent directly to the front despite a shortage of weapons: 500 men were given 100 rifles. "Your weapons are in the hands of the Nazis," the officers told them. "Go get them."

In May 1944, 31,000 NKVD officers, soldiers, and operatives completed the entire deportation of 200,000 Tartars in three days, using 100 jeeps, 250 trucks, and 67 trains.

Although mass executions were not as common as they had been in 1937 and 1938, prisoner mortality rates for 1942 and 1943 are nevertheless the highest in the Gulag's history. According to the official statistics, which are almost certainly an underestimate, 352,560 prisoners died in 1942, or one in four. One in five, or 267,826, died in 1943.

So secret were these voyages considered to be, in fact, that when the Indigirka, a Dalstroi ship containing 1,500 passengers - mostly prisoners returning to the mainland - hit a reed off the Japanese island of Hokkaido in 1939, the ship's crew chose to let most of the passengers die rather than seek aid.

In 1940, the prison of Stanislawwow, in newly occupied eastern Poland, contained 1,709 people, well above its capacity of 472, and possessed a mere 150 sets of sheets.

Another ex-prisoner, S. G. Durasova, even claims that he was specifically told, by one of his investigators, that "we never arrest anyone who is not guilty. And even if you weren't guilty, we can't release you, because then people would say that we are picking up innocent people."

So far were these new camps from civilization - so far were they from roads, even, let alone railway lines - that no barbed wire was used in Komi until 1937 [seven years later]. Escape was considered pointless.