Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

In 1964, Shilo was elected a corresponding member and in 1970 he became a full member of the academy. In 1960, he was appointed director of the Academy North–Far Eastern Scientific Center (in Magadan), and in 1977, he became head of the presidium of this center. 175After many years of work in the Academy of Sciences system, Shilo was known among Russian scientists as a person who still used the language of Gulag functionaries. Even in the 1990s, when inviting a person into his office, Shilo continued to say “Vvedite,” which is an order to bring a prisoner in, instead of “Voidite,” which means an invitation to come in.

Another academician and commissar/minister of marine transport (in 1941–1948), Pyotr Shirshov (1905–1953), was in charge of transportation of prisoners to the Dalstroi (Main Directorate for Building in the Far East), shipments of supplies for them, and transportation of the slave labor products back to the “main” land. Before his career as a Soviet minister, Shirshov took part in several expeditions to the Arctic, including the first expedition on a drifting scientific station called “The Northern Pole” in 1937–1938. 176The Soviet press of the time presented the first explorers of the Northern Pole as national heroes. Shiroshov was elected academician in 1939, when Stalin himself, Vyshinsky, and many other officials became members of the academy.

I found out about the involvement of Academician Shirshov in Gulag activity only in recently published archival materials, in the catalog of the formerly top-secret Special Files of Beria. 177In 1949, Shirshov, who at the time was characterized as a “Soviet patriot and a true son of the Party of Lenin and Stalin,” 178headed a state commission that worked on speeding up the transportation of the MVD prisoners to the Dalstroi. He was personally responsible for transport ships (including the dreaded Dzhurma ) 179that were infamous for their inhuman conditions. 180In 1946, Shirshov organized transportation of Japanese POWs from Korea to different USSR labor camps for “work at industrial sites of different ministries.” 181Later, Shirshov was involved in other movements of prisoners 182and personally asked Beria not to reduce the number of prisoners working at Latvian ports. 183In 1946, he became director of the Academy Institute of Oceanology. After Shirshov’s death, this institute was given his name: P. P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, Russian Academy of Sciences. Besides the institute, a bay on Franz Josef Land and an underwater ridge in the Bering Sea bear the name of this Gulag manager and academician.

Psychologically, Shirshov’s involvement in Dalstroi work is not easy to imagine. He knew very well what transportation meant for scores of thousands of prisoners. His own wife, the thirty-three-year-old actress Yevgeniya Garkusha, was arrested in 1946 and sent to the Kolyma gold mines, where she died almost immediately. 184Shirshov was never told the reason for her arrest.

Magadan and Kolyma (the Dalstroi region) were the main areas for gold-mining labor camps in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s time. Dalstroi’s gold was no less bloody than the “Jewish” gold from the Nazi extermination camps that the Swiss banks held for so long. 185The life span of prisoners in the Kolyma mines was about one year. To stay alive was even worse. There were special labor camps for thousands of frostbitten invalids without fingers, hands, feet, noses, or ears. 186In 1940, the Dalstroi mines produced about 300 tons of gold. 187Of the 10,000–12,000 Polish POWs sent to Kolyma in 1940–1941 after the occupation of Poland by Nazi and Soviet troops (according to the Stalin-Hitler agreement of 1939), only 583 were still alive in 1942–1943. 188The number of Polish victims who died in the Dalstroi area is approximately the same as that of Polish officers killed in the Katyn Massacre. It is unfortunate that there is no movement to compensate the relatives of these Polish forced laborers as is now being pursued for Jewish forced labor in Nazi Germany.

Perhaps it is not hard to understand how “scientists” like Shilo evaded exposure for so long, as even many Americans of the era did not want to see what was going on. In summer 1944, the vice president of the United States, Henry A. Wallace, and a group of advisers headed by Professor Owen Lattimore and representing the Office of War Information visited the Kolyma area. 189This trip was apparently the result of political intrigues. President Franklin D. Roosevelt “simply wanted Wallace out of the country so he could select a more popular running mate for the fall election.” 190The NKVD officials of the Dalstroi reported personally to Stalin about the trip of the American delegation. 191

The American delegation was completely fooled by the Soviet and NKVD-NKGB authorities. Members of the delegation did not notice the telltale signs of labor camps (such as the ubiquitous barbed wire) and were charmed by the most dreadful NKVD officials. 192In an article published by National Geographic Magazine at the end of 1944, Lattimore wrote:

Magadan is… a part of the domain of a remarkable concern, the Dalstroi (Far Northern Construction Company), which can be roughly compared to a combination of Hudson’s Bay Company and TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority]. It constructs and operates ports, roads, and railroads, and operates gold mines and municipalities, including, at Magadan, a first-class orchestra and a good light-opera company… As one American remarked, high-grade entertainment just naturally seems to go with gold, and so does high-powered executive ability.

Mr. Nikishov, the head of Dalstroi, had just been decorated with the Order of Hero of the Soviet Union for his extraordinary achievements. 193Both he and his wife have a trained and sensitive interest in art and music and also a deep sense of civic responsibility.

We visited gold mines operated by Dalstroi in the valley of the Kolyma River, where rich placer workings are strung out for miles. It was interesting to find, instead of the sin, gin, and brawling of an old-time gold rush, extensive greenhouses growing tomatoes, cucumbers, and even melons, to make sure that the hardy miners got enough vitamins! 194

I felt uncomfortable while writing down these paragraphs. Knowing what Magadan and the Kolyma gold mines were for millions of prisoners who perished, the words of the sophisticated American professor sounded blasphemous to me. I can only leave it to Lattimore’s conscience to rectify his comparison of the Dalstroi land of slavery with the “combination of Hudson’s Bay Company and TVA.”

Ivan Nikishov (1894–1958), Communist Party functionary, member of the Supreme Soviet, and candidate member of the Central Committee, was head of the Dalstroi in 1940–1946. In 1942, he married Aleksandra Gridasova, who became head of the Maglag, a complex of labor camps (including a camp for women) in Magadan and the surrounding area. 195The Nikishovs’ “extraordinary achievements” left a considerable mark in the history of the Soviet Gulag: as with Rudolf Hoess and Elsa Koch for Nazi Germany, the Nikishovs are remembered as NKVD officials with no boundaries to their cruelty. 196Vegetables were raised by slaves in permafrost soil not for themselves but only for their masters (the Nikishovs’ mansion in Magadan was surrounded by a garden), and the “first-class orchestra and a good light-opera company” consisted of slave musicians and actors, who any minute could end up in a gold, tin, or uranium mine. 197As in the Nazi camps, the “first-class orchestra” provided “high-grade entertainment” every day at 5:00 A.M. in the dark frozen tundra to gloomy columns of exhausted prisoners, surrounded by ruthless guards and barking dogs, when the prisoners were about to leave the concentration camps to work in the inhuman conditions of the Kolyma area.