Andrew rothstein

6 Deputy Kazakpayev at the Soviet of Nationalities, 16th March, 1946 (I, p. 168).

7 Deputy Kurbanov at the Soviet of the Union, 29th January, 1944 (X, p. 59).

8 Deputy Sharipov at the Soviet of Nationalities, 16th October, 1946 (II, p. 136).

1 I, pp. 211-15.

2 III, Izvestia, 23rd February, 1947.

3 Deputies Tokobayev (Soviet of Nationalities, 29th January, 1944) and Kulatov (Soviet of the Union, 31st January, 1944), X, pp. 125-6, 192-3.

4 Deputy Janaliev (Soviet of Nationalities, 26th April, 1945), XI, p. 163.

5 Izvestia, 14th February, 1947.

6 Pravda, 1st and 3rd March, 1946.

7 Kulatov, 31st January, 1944, and Janaliev, 26th Aprils 1945, ut supra.

8 Pravda, 3rd March, 1946.

9 Pyatiletni Plan (1929), vol. iii, p. 318.

10 Ut supra, XI, p. 163.

1 X, p. 74, and I, p. 167.

2 Deputy Kuliev at the Soviet of the Union, 25th April, 1945 (XI, p. 28), and deputy Khokhlov at Soviet of Nationalities, same day (ibid., p. 82).

3 Izvestia, 30th January, 1947.

4 Deputy Khokhlov at the Soviet of Nationalities, 16th October, 1946, II, p. 96.

5 Deputy Berdyev at the Soviet of Nationalities, 22nd February, 1947 {III, Izvestia, 23rd February, 1947).

6 Izvestia, 30th January, 1947.

1 Deputy Abdurahmanov at the Soviet of Nationalities, 16th October, 1946 (II, p. 36), and deputy Kornietz, at the Soviet of the Union, the same day (ibid., p. 100).

2 I, p. 170 (16th March, 1946).

3 I, pp. 164-5.

4 III, Izvestia, 22nd February, 1947.

5 Deputy Kazalpayev, 16th March, 1946 (I, p. 169).

6 Deputy Kurbanov, at the Soviet of Nationalities, 16th March, 1946 (I, pp. 110-11).

7 Deputy Berdyev, at the Soviet of Nationalities, 18th March, 1946 (I, p. 215).

1 III, Izvestia, 23rd February, 1947.

2 Deputy Kulatov at the Soviet of Nationalities, 16th October, 1946 (II, p. 138).

3 Ibid., p. 135.

4 Akimov, People’s Commissar for the Textile Industry, at the Soviet of the Union, 31st January, 1944 (X, p. 212).

5 Deputy Abdurahmanov at the Soviet of the Union, 29th January, 1944 (X, p. 68).

6 Voznesensky, Report on the Five Year Plan (1946), p. 33.

7 Izvestia, 28th February, 1947.

1 See also Sukharevski, Sotsialisticheskoe Vosproizvodstvo v Novem Pyatiletnem Plane, in Bolshevik No. 9 (May, 1946).

2 Cf. figures in Law on the Five Year Plan (1946) and in the League of Nations Statistical Year Book (1939-40).

3 V. M. Molotov, New Powers of the Soviet Republics (Soviet War News, 1944), pp. 4, 6, 10.

4 From Literaturnaya Gazeta of 15th March, 1947: “Tashkent. Many Uzbek writers are working at translations of Russian and Western literature into their own language. The writer Abdulla Kakhar is completing his translation of the first volume of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’. The poet Gafur Galam is translating Dante’s ‘Inferno’. The poet Sheikh-Zadeh is working at a translation of Byron’s ‘ Childe Harold’. He has also translated Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ for the Khamza Academic Theatre of Drama. Mirtemir Tursunov is finishing a translation of Homer’s ‘ Odyssey’.”

1 The Battle for Output, pp. 5, 11.

2 Ibid._: pp. 6, 10-11.

1 These pages were already in type when Forced Labour in Soviet Russia, by Mr. D. J. Dallin (Hollis and Garter, 1948), was published. Space prevents more than a brief notice of the wilder mare’s nests on which it is based. (i) It is not true that the use of prisoners for large-scale corrective works of national importance is now kept secret—as reference to the Soviet Encyclopaedias (volumes published in 1940 and 1948) and to a standard legal text-book (Administrativnoye Pravo, 1946) pp. 191, 244-6) will show. (ii) If Mr. Dallin’s suggestions about the numbers of such prisoners—10-12 millions, 85-90% of them males, 30-40% dying yearly—were true, it would mean that from a quarter to a fifth of all Soviet males are in the camps (heavily guarded), and that the U.S.S.R. loses about a twelfth of its male population aged 15-59 yearly (see Dr. F. Lorimer, Population of the Soviet Union, 1946, pp- 122, 143)—a manifest absurdity. (iii) The list of 37 labour camps and 1 group of camps which Mr. Dallin reproduces on the basis of a collection of letter-heads (pp. 74-83) made by released Polish officers—the only documentary evidence he vouchsafes, apart from stories by anti-Soviet emigrants—would account for some 46,000 inmates (he says there are 1200 in each). Quite arbitrarily, however, he multiplies this by 200, suggesting that the letter-heads refer to “clusters”, each of 20 “regions” of 10 camps each: and thus arrives at a grand total exceeding 9,000,000. It is not true that there is any mention of either “clusters” or “regions” in the letter-heads: all but one of them refer specifically to single camps, directly under the Ministry of the Interior. The exception is the letter-head of the Magadan office of the North-Eastern (Dalstroy) camps—but that too does not mention “clusters” or “regions”, or give any other indication of how many camps come under its management. (iv) It is quite untrue that the Kolyma goldfields have not been mentioned for 10-12 years (e.g., see the Physical Geography Reader for secondary schools, pp. 344, 364, or the Geography Textbook for teachers’ training colleges, pp. 61, 67, 199, both published 1946). (v) No evidence is offered for the suggestion (p. 252) that the labour camps are “an organic element of the Soviet entity”, and that without them “the proud Five Year Plans would, have ended in a fiasco”. The one attempt to do so, by producing estimates of the value of work done by the labour camps in the Russian Republic (R.S.F.S.R.) in 1932 (p. 211), is itself a fiasco. For their total output, including agricultural works, is put at 305 million roubles: whereas the industrial output alone of the R.S.F.S.R., that year, was 31.4 milliard roubles—one hundred times as much (Itogi Vypolnenia Vtorogo Pyatiletnego Plana, 1939, p. 46). Timber exports, which Mr. Dallin tells us were among the main objects of the camps and had to be “stepped up” from 1934 onwards, to make machinery imports possible, were actually halved in volume by 1938, and reduced by nearly 25% in value! As for gold exports—Mr. Dallin’s other mainstay—the foreign trade figures for 1934-8 show a large positive balance, which made such exports unnecessary.

There is a mass of other evidence to show that his book only demonstrates the headstrong anti-Soviet prejudices of its author.

So far as the substance of the matter is concerned, it is well known that Soviet penal policy is based on the principle of corrective labour. This is applied at all stages—in the shape of supervised work at one’s own job for light offences, work in corrective labour settlements for sentences up to three years, employment on big public works (canals, railways, land improvement schemes, etc.), while living in corrective labour camps, for major offences. Tens of thousands of people have been reclaimed for society in this way; and the system has no practical bearing on Soviet economic planning, which depends entirely upon the informed initiative of free labour, as has been shown.