FORCED LABOR AND SLAVERY: CAUSE AND EFFECT of Racialization
Among quite a few other features, the processes of political construction and social repression established by the Soviet system of repression are analogous to those found in imperial regimes built on racial differences and the mobilization of slave labor.
The very use of these terms represents a symptom. In her first-hand account of the repression of 1937, Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg sought to describe the fate of her unfortunate companions in the Gulag by using terms that are also found in accounts of plantation slavery. Referring to those that who had completed their sentences, she uses the term “freedmen.” In fact, the choice of the word “slave” to capture the situation of the “zeks” held by the Gulag administration is a commonÂplace in the literature on the experience of the camps. Ginzburg describes how words could be problematic with regards to an officer of one of the units:We felt that far from parading his liberalism towards the slaves under his orders, he was haunted by the fear that he might resemble a slave driver. (By using these terms I do not make any preÂtense to offering a socio-economic definition of the situation. It was simply that the word “rab,” slave, had already entered into the language of daily life in Kolyma.)[389]
In his Gulag Archipelago trilogy, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn distinguishes between the word “liudi”, which refers to people, but in the sense of servants, and the term “joziain” (lord or master of the house), which had disappeared with the Revolution but had been reborn in the context of the camp system. One survey, admittedly imperfect, has been done of the fleets that took the prisoners to their distant destinations, using as a model the history of the Atlantic slave trade.[390]
The formal analogy with colonial and slaveholding societies no doubt runs deeper than this.
One characteristic of the Soviet regime of repression was that it was impossible for prisoners who had served their sentences to reintegrate back into their regular lives. Many received additional sentences of five or ten years so that the administration could postpone the problem of their reintegration. If they were released, they did not receive the internal passport that would have allowed them to return to where they were from. There were many who settled in the environs of the camp, as was the case with the famous city of Magadan, where their status was one of second-class citizens. They were prisoners no longer, but they did not enjoy the rights of ordinary citizens. Marriages between partners of different statuses took place in these locales, which brought together residents who had settled there of their own accord and people who had little choice but to live there. Kulaks who had survived the first waves of deportations and internments were unable to reintegrate back into their native villages post-collectivization and so went to live in the big cities. The security organs saw this phenomenon as a threat to social order.[391] This problem of social engineering was resolved by the second de-kulakization, launched in July 1937, that saw “the transformation of â€?kulak’ into a political category, disÂconnected from any socio-economic meaning but an indelible stain on the targeted individuals.”[392] It is, of course, the indelibility of this stain that echoes what we find through the study of Iberian societies, which were obsessed with the inerasable nature of the macula of bad origins, and no less obsessed with the immaculate conÂception of Our Lady. The interpretive framework imposed by the People’s CommisÂsar for Justice Nikolai Vassilievitch Krylenko in 1934, four years before he would be condemned to death, would have suited a sixteenth century Castilian inquisitor: “The class enemy lives on in those who represent the classes of the past.”[393] Here again we find the byvshie liudi, representatives despite themselves.From the very first years of the new regime, an ambiguity appeared with respect to the moral status of labor within the process of the creation of a socialist society. In the first instance, it is important to emphasize that the planning of the economy and the organization of labor reflected, to a great degree, the security organs, beginÂning with the creation of the Cheka. A central element of the doctrine that emerged out of this context can be found in the report signed by Felix Edmundovich DzerÂzhinsky on February 17, 1919, which he drafted with Stalin and Lev Borisovich Kamenev. This document recommended maintaining the concentration camps in order to take advantage of the labor of the prisoners, defined as individuals without stable occupations or persons who were incapable of work except under coercion. This represented an explicitly punitive use of labor that aimed to correct for a lack of enthusiasm or a propensity to tardiness. Their example would then supposedly increase the discipline of the bureaucrats themselves. This is why the forced labor camps could indeed be called true “schools of work.”[394]
In a collection of articles published in Paris in 1920, in response to Karl KautÂsky and the exiled Mencheviks' critiques of the militarization of labor in the afterÂmath of the Civil War, Leon Trotsky, who was primarily responsible for this policy, came to its defense. He adopted the mantle of a historian of labor:
History has known slave labor. History has known serf labor. History has known the regulated labor of the medieval craft guilds. Throughout the world there now prevails hired labor, which the yellow journalists of all countries oppose, as the highest possible form of liberty, to Soviet “slavery.” We, on the other hand, oppose capitalist slavery with socially-regulated labor on the basis of an economic plan, obligatory for the whole people and consequently compulsory for each worker in the country. Without this we cannot even dream of a transition to Socialism.
The element of material, physical, compulsion may be greater or less; that depends on many conditions - on the degree of wealth or poverty of the country, on the heritage of the past, on the general level of culture, on the condition of transport, on the administrative apparatus, etc., etc. But obligation, and, consequently, compulsion, are essential conditions in order to bind down the bourgeois anarchy ∣∙ ∙ ∙∣[395]Clearly, the Bolshevik leader did not dodge the question of forced labor, even if the term â€?slavery' seemed to him to be too pejorative to describe this program for the coerced collective mobilization of the working class, which would enable it to meet the demands of the historical role that those in Lenin's circle had set out for it. The stakes were not simply saving a regime confronted with the collapse of industrial production and productivity following the October Revolution.[396] The system of forced labor was intended to impel a metamorphosis in the people themselves. A few paragraphs after the above outline of a theory of the successive phases in the history of labor, Trotsky adopts a theory that might, with great deal of imagination, be called anthropological. It would seem that the goal was directing the Russian proletariat down the path of civilization thanks to the universal expansion of forced labor in Soviet society:
If it were to turn out that the planned, and consequently compulsory organization of labor that is arising to replace imperialism led to the lowering of economic life, it would mean the destruction of all our culture, and a retrograde movement of humanity back to barbarism and savagery. Happily, not only for Soviet Russia but for the whole of humanity, the philosophy of the low productivity of compulsory labor - “everywhere and under all conditions” - is only a belated echo of ancient Liberal melodies. [...] The whole of human history is the history of the organization and education of collective man for labor, with the object of attaining a higher level of productivity.
Man, as I have already permitted myself to point out, is lazy; that is, he instinctively strives to receive the largest possible quantity of products for the least possible expenditure of energy. Without such a striving, there would have been no economic developÂment. The growth of civilization is measured by the productivity of human labor, and each new form of social relations must pass through a test on such lines.[397]This citation illustrates how quite old evolutionary arguments, notably that man is inherently lazy and that this must be corrected if he is to be lifted out of barbarism, reappeared at the center of a rhetoric that announced a future without equal. The first part of the argument floats the threat of tumbling back into a state of savagery; the middle denounces the idea that forced labor is less productive than free labor, criticizing this idea for not taking into account non-economic variables, such as societal organization; the final section proposes a correlation between putting a purportedly lazy humankind to work and the progress of civilization. The idea that servitude is a school for the correction of sloth is, in fact, an ancient argument.[398] This idea fed quite a few racist laws and discourses. Even upon close examination, it is hard to see what would separate this line of argument from that of Juan Gines de Sepulveda in his critique of Las Casas, or that of any of the anti-abolitionist pamphleteers from the Southern states of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.
What we have here is, in effect, a view of forced labor as pedagogical, not only as a means of punishing class enemies, those men of the past, but as a lesson diÂrected to the working class itself. Maxim Gorky, after his return from exile, was to become an intellectual ally of Stalin’s. In this role he drafted reports on different installations within the Soviet network of concentration camps. With regards to the Solovki Islands camp, he noted: “the Solovets camp must be seen as a preparatory course.” Forced labor converted thieves into good citizens and served, at the same time, to stigmatize class enemies:
The behavior of the proletarian against delinquents cannot be as severe and pitiless as what class enemies, his natural enemies, deserve [...] he will find it easy to reeducate the delinÂquents, if they belong to his class, whether they are laborers or peasants.[399]
Alongside the economic utility of the gulags when it came to building large infraÂstructure projects with unremunerated labor, the official Soviet ideology deployed two other types of arguments: the necessity of repression (being finished with class enemies, people of the past, once and for all) and of pedagogy (ensuring that the workers would measure up to the historical role of the proletariat, the entrance of the peasant masses into the socialist project of civilization).
The idea that forced labor played a civilizing role was certainly not an invention of Leninist empiricism. Every historian who examines the complex history of the relationship between, on the one hand, the creation of juridical norms and theological frameworks, and, on the other, the wide-scale adoption of slavery, which began in Western Europe in the fifteenth century, will encounter analogous rationalizations.[400] The descendants of Muslims and Mediterranean Islam were preordained to relegation and disappearÂance; Africans and certain Amerindian populations, considered incapable of parÂticipating in colonial life on an equal footing with the Europeans in America, were enslaved in order to be educated or, worse still, domesticated.This pedagogical enthusiasm was particularly strong during the 1930s. The most spectacular example of this was the propaganda work Gorky orchestrated to celebrate the construction of the canal from the White Sea to the Baltic (the Belo- morkanal) by convict labor.[401] The work published on this occasion insisted that despite the high mortality rate, this giant project constituted a path towards edificaÂtion in every sense of the term: it was a massive transportation project, a pillar in the foundation of the socialist state, a lesson in collective living and ethics. Here are the terms Gorky uses to describe the resistance of the peasant prisoners to the exigent demands of the Bolshevik administration: “they are half-human, idolaters of private property, but in the end collective labor collapsed their zoological individualism [...].” Later on in the same work, he observes: “It is said that in the factories the authentic proletarians look at those who had been socially dangerous in the past as if they were men of a inferior race, which is to say how one-hundred percent AmerÂicans see Blacks.”[402] Half-humans, idolaters, zoology, inferior race: the use of these expressions denotes an ideology that, even though it does not quite deserve to be labeled racist, nonetheless borrowed from registers that had fed racial thought throughout the long history of European colonial imperialism.
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