Eduard Berzin
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Eduard Petrovich Berzin (Latvian: Eduards Bērziņš; 1894-1938), born in Latvia, was first a soldier, then a Chekist, but is remembered primarily for setting up Dalstroy, which instituted a system of Kolyma forced-labour camps in North-Eastern Siberia where hundreds of thousands prisoners died. It was considered to be the most brutal of all the Gulag regions.
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[edit] Gaining experience
Before the Russian Revolution of 1917, Berzin studied painting at Berlin's Academy of Fine Arts where he met his wife, Elza Mittenberg, also an artist, from Riga.
After fighting on the front with the Red Army in the First World War, in 1918 Berzin became a commander of the First Latvian Fuseliers with special responsibilities for Lenin's protection. Gaining the trust of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, he soon became a member of the Cheka or secret police.
In 1926, Stalin gave Berzin the task of setting up the Vishera complex of labour camps in the Urals known as Vishlag where cellulose and paper were to be produced. This he did with great enthusiasm and success. The 70,000 prisoners there were in most cases treated surprisingly well, even receiving wages and benefitting from cinemas, libraries, discussion clubs and dining halls. Ostensibly, at least, he was an exemplary director.
[edit] The Kolyma period
It was apparently on the basis of this success that in 1931 Stalin appointed him head of Dalstroy, the authority which was to develop Kolyma making use essentially of forced labour consisting of some convicted criminals but mainly political prisoners. He arrived in Nagaevo Bay by steamship on 2 February 1932 together with a small number of prisoners (mainly mining engineers) and some security guards.
It is reported that Berzin's primary aim was to exploit the region to the full, in line with the objectives of Stalin's First Five Year Plan. The prisoners were simply his workforce. The focus of his attention was gold mining as gold was needed to pay for industrial development across Russia. This required construction of the harbour town of Magadan, substantial road building, some lumbering and building a large number of labour camps.
From the very start, however, lack of proper preparations combined with an exceptionally hard winter in 1932/33 led to tremendous hardship, particularly for the prisoners sent up into the River Kolyma valley to build roads and mine gold, very many of whom perished in the cold[1].
It is said that Berzin tried to treat his prisoners comparatively well in order to enable them to carry out their work as efficiently as possible. After the hard winter of 1932 and difficult conditions the following summer, the situation started to evolve more positively . Although hardships continued, the overall efficiency of the operations and the conditions for the prisoners improved under Berzin's leadership. The years 1934 to 1937 were remembered as a comparatively good period, particularly in the light of what was to follow under later leaders[2].
For example, in his first year, when the prisoners were required to process about one cubic meter of ore-bearing earth per day, the total output was half a ton of gold. By 1935, when the prisoners were processing four to six cubic meters of earth per day, total output rose to 14 tons of gold. As a result, Berzin was invited to Moscow to receive the Order of Lenin for "surpassing the mining plan".
On returning to Kolyma, no doubt as a result of instructions he had received, he issued even harsher orders. Prisoners were required to work in the opencast mines at temperatures as low as -55 C. As a result, annual gold output rose to 33 tons.
Despite the dreadful conditions and the high death toll, over the years Berzin succeeded in having a road built to Seimchan high up in the Kolyma valley which was to lead to even higher gold outputs in subsequent years.
[edit] Family life in Kolyma
In her memoires, his wife Elza describes their family life in Magadan in some detail. Berzin, clad in a bearskin coat, would spend the days travelling around the camps in his Rolls Royce so that he could personally oversee the work in progress. He only saw his children - Petia aged 12 and Mirza aged 15 - at breakfast and dinner. He enjoyed music, listened to gramophone records of Tchaikovsky, Schubert and Grieg (which he had bought on an official visit to Philadelphia in 1930), and encouraged the children to perform in the school theatre under the guidance of artistic prisoners.
Shortly after a holiday with his family in Italy with visits to Rome, Venice and Sorrento, Berzin was arrested in December 1937, accused of spying for Britain and Germany and planning to put Magadan under the control of the Japanese. At the height of Stalin's Great Purge, Berzin was tried and immediately shot at Lubyanka prison on 1 August 1938.
[edit] Assessment
While Berzin used increasingly brutal methods in the Kolyma camps, his tactics were not as dreadful as those used by his successors. Nevertheless, under pressure from Stalin, he drove his workforce to impossible levels of hardship which inevitably resulted in illness, starvation and death in even higher proportions.
A bust in memory of Eduard Berzin now stands outside the municipal building in the centre of Magadan. A Magadan street is named after him, as is one of its schools.
[edit] Sources
- Applebaum, Anne, Gulag: A History, Broadway Books, 2003, hardcover, 720 pp., ISBN 0-7679-0056-1
- Bollinger, Martin J., Stalin’s slave ships : Kolyma, the Gulag fleet, and the role of the West, Praeger, 2003, 217 p., ISBN 0275981002
- Conquest, Robert: Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, Viking Press, 1978, 254 p. ISBN 0670414999
- Kizny, Tomasz, Gulag, Firefly Books, 2004, 495 p. ISBN 1552979644
- Shalamov, Varlam, Kolyma Tales, Penguin Books, 1995, 528 pp., ISBN 0-14-018695-6
- Toker, Leona, "Return from the Archipelago: narratives of Gulag survivors", Indiana University Press, c2000, 333 p., ISBN 0253337879
