The Mortality of Released Prisoners and the Scale of Soviet Penal Mortality, 1939–45

Abstract

The Mortality of Released Prisoners and the Scale of Soviet Penal Mortality, 1939–45 Stephen G. Wheatcroft (bio) I was delighted to be asked to comment on Mikhail Nakonechnyi's provocative and important work on Soviet penal mortality, which I hope marks the beginning of a much needed search for data to empirically test theories about the scale of Soviet penal mortality There is no doubt that the release of ill and near-to-death prisoners would have reduced the appearance of mortality in the labor camps and colonies. But whether these releases were carried out specifically to reduce the camp and colony mortality figures seems to me to be unlikely. The amount by which this process reduced the appearance of mortality in the labor camps and colonies remains unclear, but thanks to the recent work of Mikhail Nakonechnyi, it is now a little clearer. He has demonstrated that there is documentary evidence to show that in certain locations at certain times, when general mortality levels were high, the level of unrecorded mortality for released prisoners was very high. In Bezymianlag, the main camp investigated by Nakonechnyi, in the month of May 1943 it amounted to as much as 64 percent of the level of recorded mortality in the camp. In Kargopol´lag in September 1943, it was as much as 46 percent above the level recorded there. Nakonechnyi has wisely noted that "the temporal and spatial" width of this phenomenon are "as yet unknown" (804). But they seem to be significant. Can we do anything to test their significance further and to improve our understanding of the scale of mortality in the Soviet penal system? The second part of my commentary is an attempt to do that. It emphasizes the need to look carefully at the dynamics of the population studied as well as its mortality count. It recommends calculating per capita indicators of mortality. It begins by looking in more detail at per capita mortality in Bezymianlag. Then it looks at what we know about the overall indicators of per capita mortality for all of the Soviet penal system and draws attention to [End Page 851] our current lack of knowledge about the history and philosophy of the penal statistical systems, and the urgency of improving our understanding in this area. But before doing this, I would like to comment a little more on the importance of Nakonechnyi's research, correct some erroneous references that he makes to my own work, and provide a rough guide as to what levels of per capita mortality should be considered crisis levels for normal populations, for penal populations, and for wartime. Nakonechnyi's work is particularly important for countering the ungrounded assertions of Golfo Alexopoulos, who has claimed the enormous importance of the "release to die" claim that she thinks covered up about five million deaths in the camps.1 When this is compared with Zemskov's figure for direct mortality in the camps of one million,2 it can be seen that she is proposing a 500 percent correction to penal mortality for the entire period 1929–53 and not just the worst years of 1941–45. Nakonechnyi's work is the first serious attempt to test this claim, although he presents it as though his arguments were directed at others (including myself). Testing and looking for documentary evidence to support claims are something that Nakonechnyi and I certainly agree are important.3 The origins of the "release to die" argument can be traced back to the Russian historical demographer V. A. Isupov, who argued in 2000 that "the secret of reducing mortality in the Gulag lay not so much in improving medical services and the living conditions of the prisoners as much as in the so-called aktirovka of the prisoners." He pointed to the decree of the plenum of the Supreme Court on 1 August 1942 and the joint directives of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), the People's Commissariat of Justice (NKIust) and the Procuracy of 23 October 1942 allowing for the liberation of prisoners too ill to work.4 "In other words," he wrote, "prisoners were aktirovany [released] to die." Isupov pointed out...