Gulag by Anne Applebaum Page A

Bolshevik legal theorists who followed in his wake—also reckoned that the creation of the Soviet state would give rise to a new kind of criminal: the “class enemy.” A class enemy opposed the Revolution, and worked openly, or more often secretly, to destroy it. The class enemy was harder to identify than an ordinary criminal, and much harder to reform. Unlike an ordinary criminal, a class enemy could never be trusted to cooperate with the Soviet regime, and required harsher punishment than would an ordinary murderer or thief. Thus in May 1918, the first Bolshevik “decree on bribery” declared that: “If the person guilty of taking or offering bribes belongs to the propertied classes and is using the bribe to preserve or acquire privileges, linked to property rights, then he should be sentenced to the harshest and most unpleasant forced labor and all of his property should be confiscated.” 8
    From the very earliest days of the new Soviet state, in other words, people were to be sentenced not for what they had done, but for who they were.
    Unfortunately, nobody ever provided a clear description of what, exactly, a “class enemy” was supposed to look like. As a result, arrests of all sorts increased dramatically in the wake of the Bolshevik coup. From November 1917, revolutionary tribunals, composed of random “supporters” of the Revolution, began convicting random “enemies” of the Revolution. Prison sentences, forced-labor terms, and even capital punishment were arbitrarily meted out to bankers, to merchants’ wives, to “speculators”— meaning anyone engaged in independent economic activity—to former Czarist-era prison warders and to anyone else who seemed suspicious. 9
    The definition of who was and who was not an “enemy” also varied from place to place, sometimes overlapping with the definition of “prisoner of war.” Upon occupying a new city, Trotsky’s Red Army frequently took bourgeois hostages, who could be shot in case the White Army returned, as it often did along the fluctuating lines of the front. In the interim they could be made to do forced labor, often digging trenches and building barricades. 10 The distinction between political prisoners and common criminals was equally arbitrary. The uneducated members of the temporary commissions and revolutionary tribunals might, for example, suddenly decide that a man caught riding a tram without a ticket had offended society, and sentence him for political crimes. 11 In the end, many such decisions were left up to the policemen or soldiers doing the arresting. Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka—Lenin’s secret police, the forerunner of the KGB— personally kept a little black notebook in which he scribbled down the names and addresses of random “enemies” he came across while doing his job. 12
    These distinctions would remain vague right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, eighty years later. Nevertheless, the existence of two categories of prisoner—“political” and “criminal”—had a profound effect on the formation of the Soviet penal system. During the first decade of Bolshevik rule, Soviet penitentiaries even split into two categories, one for each type of prisoner. The split arose spontaneously, as a reaction to the chaos of the existing prison system. In the very early days of the Revolution, all prisoners were incarcerated under the jurisdiction of the “traditional” judicial ministries, first the Commissariat of Justice, later the Commissariat of the Interior, and placed in the “ordinary” prison system. That is, they were thrown into the remnants of the Czarist system, usually into the dirty, gloomy stone prisons which occupied a central position in every major town. During the revolutionary years of 1917 to 1920, these institutions were in total disarray. Mobs had stormed the jails, self-appointed commissars had sacked the guards, prisoners had received wide-ranging amnesties or had