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DAVID PRIESTLAND

Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky
GULAG BOSS

A Soviet memoir
Edited and translated by Deborah Kaple 229pp.
Oxford University Press. £16.99 (US $29.95).
978 0199742660 

In the early 1990s, the American historian Deborah Kaple interviewed a number of former Soviet political advisers in China for a research project on international communism. She was shocked when one of them, Fyodor Mochulsky, revealed that he had run a number of labor camps in his youth. How could this "apparently pleasant and affable man" have been part of Stalin's system of state repression? This question goes to the heart of the Soviet experience of Stalinism: many participated in the repressions, and by the time of Stalin's death, hundreds of thousands were guarding a prison population of more than 5 million. Students of the Gulag have sought answers in the numerous accounts by victims and in recently opened archives. But Gulag Boss, written in the late 1990s and translated by Kaple, is one of very few memoirs written by a camp administrator, and gives us a fascinating insight into the mind of a once-loyal Stalinist.
Mochulsky was trained as a young engineer, and in 1940 was sent to supervise the building of a railway by prison labor about a thousand miles north-east of Leningrad. The Gulag played a key role in the Stalinist economy. Each camp was expected to fulfill an ambitious daily plan using poorly fed prisoners who worked in appalling conditions. As Mochulsky shows, prisoners were only given full rations if they achieved their quota, and administrators who failed to meet Moscow's demands could expect harsh punishment.
Mochulsky's family told Kaple that his conscience was troubled by his time in the Gulag, and his memoir is designed to show that he behaved as humanely as possible within an extraordinarily cruel and chaotically inefficient system. He remembers how horrified he was when he arrived at his first camp and discovered that there was no housing for the prisoners: they were sleeping in the open, just as the Arctic winter was beginning. He realized that they would not survive long, but setting the prisoners to work building barracks would prevent them from fulfilling the daily plan targets on the railway, rigorously enforced by the Gulag bureaucracy. Mochullsky decided to take a risk: two weeks' work was devoted to the barracks, fake figures were reported to the centre, and the prisoners agreed to labor especially hard to fulfill the monthly plan in the second fortnight. The idea worked, but Mochulsky was later denounced for breaking the rules, and only narrowly avoided becoming a prisoner himself.
We might, therefore, expect Mochulsky to be critical of the camps, and indeed in a final, analytical chapter, he denounces them as "monstrous inventions". However, a great deal of Gulag Boss is more concerned to show how he devoted his considerable intelligence and resourcefulness to making the system work. Though written after the collapse of the USSR, it reads like the account of a committed young Soviet of the 1940s - ambitious and confident, eager to please his superiors, and keen to demonstrate how the system could be run better. He does not express remorse for his role, while real empathy for the suffering of his charges is in short supply. Of course, Mochulsky was press-ganged into service in the camps, and he had little choice but to ensure that prisoners fulfilled plans. But ultimately, this is the memoir of a confident beneficiary of the system, not of the oppressed victim its author claims to have been.
What, then, motivated Mochulsky? He was no Marxist-Leninist ideologue or class warrior, committed to transforming society. This type was no longer in the ascendant in the Communist Party, and indeed Mochulsky was contemptuous of party dogmatists. But nor was he an example of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" - a narrow bureaucrat seeking to perfect the system, oblivious of the bigger moral picture.
Rather, his memoir displays a very clear and confident morality, at the root of which lies Soviet patriotism and the valorization of hard work, discipline and a rather practical, technical expertise. Mochulsky generally sees the prisoners as a "labor force", there to filled plans and he boasts of his role in improving their "labor discipline". His sympathies lie with those who were either patriotic or hard-working: the volunteers for the Finnish war who were captured by the enemy and then imprisoned by the Soviets on suspicion of collaboration; and the rich peasants (kulaks) who were "in reality, the hardest working people we had in our countryside". He has much less time for the intellectuals and the "aristocratic" Poles, whom he regarded as lazy and effete.
Such attitudes were common within Mochulsky's generation - those born in the revolutionary period, who benefited from the massive expansion in technical education in the 1930s and went on to run the new planned economy. However, there was a distinct tension between their mixture of "Calvinist", technocratic and disciplinarian values, and the idealistic socialism the regime claimed to champion. And it was this culture that the Soviet "sixties" generation and its most influential member, Mikhail Gorbachev, were to challenge. As this revealing and readable book shows, Fyodor Mochulsky and his like could not understand the criticisms of Gorbachev and others, even after they had been defeated. Their world-view had built the Soviet empire; they could not see that it contributed to the backlash that ultimately led to its downfall.