'The Catch' - Michael Makarenko - editorial

National Review, June 24, 1988

`The Catch'

MICHAEL MAKARENKO is not your run-of-the-mill political prisoner. While serving an eight-year term in a Soviet labor camp in the Seventies, Makarenko sued the KGB thirty times. Shortly after his release, he and a number of friends, reasoning that the victims as well as the heroes of the Revolution should be buried within the Kremlin walls, secretly interred there bones of prisoners who had died in Gulag and shot a film of the ceremony. Today Makarenko is the founding father of Resistance International in the U.S. [see "On the Right," p. 57], and continues his battle against Soviet tyranny.

Most recently Makarenko has come up with figures on just how many people there have been in Gulag at any one time. His method is simple. First he takes official Soviet population figures for citizens of voting age. From those figures he subtracts the number of those who voted in a national election that year. What is left (voting is compulsary in the Soviet Union) is the number of people in Gulag, who lose, along with their liberty, their right to vote.

By this means, Makarenko calculates that in 1938, at the height of Stalin's Great Terror, 15.9 per cent of the Russian people--17.6 million men and women--were excluded from voting and were in Gulag; in 1962, at the end of the Khrushchev thaw, the figure was down to 2.4 per cent--3.4 million people--but by 1975, after 11 years of Brezhnev's rule, it had move up to 5.4 per cent--9.4 million people. These figures, incidentally, do not include several million Russians not in the camps: men and women who have been sentenced to forced labor without deprivation of freedom; to conditional early release; to exile; or to banishment. The punishment of these people does not include disfranchisement.

In 1975, Soviet authorities stopped releasing their voting-rolls figures, but, working with other data, Makarenko concludes the prison figures are higher now than in Brezhnev's day.

The reason is that cheap slave labor is indispensable to the Soviet economy: prisoners can be forced to work in regions and under conditions that even semifree men would not tolerate. A fellow prisoner, a former colonel at one time employed by the Central Statistical Board of the USSR Council of Ministers, explained to Makarenko that various ministries periodically make known to Gosplan (the State Planning Commission) their labor requirements--over and above their regular shipments of criminals and political prisoners--often specifying not only how many bodies they need but what skills are in short supply. A campaign is then cranked up, orchestrated by the central press, and echoed in the provincial press, against "parasites," or "home distillers," or "hooligans," or whatever, and in two or three months' time hundreds of thousands of "working hands" have been rounded up by the KGB, tried, and sentenced, and are on their way to Siberia. This, said the colonel, is known at the State Planning Commission as "the catch," and it continues, Makarenko insists, in Year III of the Era of Glasnost.