Yanks for Stalin
Interview Transcript

Abel Aganbegyan    (cont)

A.  You would have to ask a specialist.  I wouldn't blame everything on one person.  It was a regime.  A dictatorial regime, a one party regime.  That is the source.  The face only serves to personify the dictatorship.  The face of the high leader.  But you can't say that he was everything, the beginning and the end.  I don't share the belief of those that think if it weren't for him, if they had killed him, everything would have been different.  I think that another just like him would have taken his place.  From his inner circle.  And it is possible that it could have been worse. 

Q.  I agree.  We were just in Magnitogorsk, and we learned that 40% of the population was sent there forcibly after dispossession.

A.  And not only in Magnitogorsk, but everywhere.  In the Baltics, in Severomorsk…

Q.  Where were the worst conditions?

A.  All of them were terrible.  The worst of them was the pacification of Kalima.  It's all bones.  I went to Kalima for the first time in 1956.  I was named to the Labor Committee in 1955 and began to travel to all the regions in which they were releasing prisoners, and we had to create conditions that would be inviting for free people, to get them come and replace the prison labor.  Otherwise, the system would collapse.  Otherwise there would be no minerals extraction, and we needed coal.  I was in Irkutia, which was filled with prisoners.  Barb-wire lined both sides of the track.  The train station was a prison camp, with guard towers.  This was back in 1955.  In 1956, while riding on the main thoroughfare through Kalima, all you could see were deserted camps and cemeteries.  Kalima is only bones, a boneyard.  And  Norilsk?  It was only prisoners, 100% prisoners.

Q.  What about the 1930s?

A.  In the 1930s there weren't that many concentration camps.  1937 was only the beginning, and that is why there wasn't such a huge number of camps, but there were peasants and there is little difference.  Think about it, what were the peasants at that time?  They were people without passports, who had no choice.  If the authorities forced them to Magnitogorsk, they went to Magnitogorsk.  How are they any different from prisoners?  They can't go anywhere.  A peasant couldn't just go anywhere he desires.  They were all peasants performing semislave labor.  If you look at the films recording how they built Dneproges, how they built Magnitogorsk, you see that it is all manual labor.  Shovels, boards, wheelbarrows, hand-carts on train tracks.  It was heroic labor, and many died there, because it was a huge assemblage of people and epidemics were rampant.  Now there is little of that left, but in our time, say in the 1950s, the old barracks still stood, and you could see how they lived back then.

Q.  But all the gigantic factories that were built, Dneproges, Magnitogorsk, the Gorkovskiy Automotive Plant…?

A.  Those were the times, that is how they built things.  It's true, that's how they built.  There wasn't any equipment, no technology like there is now.  Russia was a poor country.  I don't know, I'm old, I'm already 66.  But I remember the prewar years.  Sugar only came in big clumps.  The chunk stood on the table, and you would use a pair of pincers to pinch off a little piece for your tea.  You couldn't just put sugar into your tea to sweeten it, like you can now.  We had no butter.  It was an entirely different life.  Maybe there was a rich intelligentsia.  But I remember in Moscow, in the 1950s when I was at the university, neither I nor any of my friends owned a suit.  We walked around in shirtsleeves.  Before the 1960s, maybe before 1958, I didn't know a single person among my friends who had his own apartment.  Of all the people I knew, not one of them lived in his own apartment.  I had one relative who apparently had his own apartment, but I never saw it, my cousin's apartment.  I heard he had four children and because of that he had a private apartment, but I was alone, and I never had my own apartment until the 1960s.  It was a different life.

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