Securing the nuclear nation

Abstract

In 1946, in the Southern Urals, construction of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics first plutonium plant fell to the GULAG-Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD). The chief officers in charge of the program – Lavrentii Beria, Sergei Kruglov, and Ivan Tkachenko – had been pivotal figures in the deportation and political and ethnic cleansing of territories retaken from Axis forces during WWII. These men were charged with building a nuclear weapons complex to defend the Soviet Union from the American nuclear monopoly. In part thanks to the criminalization and deportation of ethnic minorities, Gulag territories grew crowded with foreign nationals and ethnic minorities in the postwar years. The NKVD generals were appalled to find that masses of forced laborers employed at the plutonium construction site were members of enemy nations. Beria issued orders to cleanse the ranks of foreign enemies, but construction managers could not spare a single healthy body as they raced to complete their deadlines. To solve this problem, they created two zones: an interior, affluent zone for plutonium workers made up almost exclusively of Russians; and anterior zones of prisoners, soldiers, ex-cons, and local farmers, many of whom were non-Russian. The selective quality of Soviet “nuclearity” meant that many people who were exposed to the plant's secret plutonium disasters were ethnic minorities, people whose exposures went unrecorded or under-recorded because of their invisibility and low social value.

Keywords:

• plutonium
• nuclear
• POWs
• filtration camps
• national minorities
• environment
• contamination
• Gulag
• Beria

Notes

1. In some regions of the Urals, special settlers and prisoners were so numerous they outnumbered free citizens (Suslov 2003, 45, 48–52, 57).

2. On living conditions and low wages for employees in construction firms, see Chernikov (1995, 17).

3. Additionally, prison and special settler labor was deployed from the late 1920s as a substitute for unwilling “free” labor in hard to access territories of the North and East (Viola 2007, 97–98).

4. Catching workers was a problem. In the northern Urals Oblast of Molotov, NKVD agents caught 1590 of 12,170 deserters in the first half of 1944. In the second half, they improved reporting and policing and nabbed 6016 workers or 7448 who had quit. An amnesty of 30 December 1944 gave workers 15 days to return to their original place of work in order to avoid arrest (Livshin and Orlov 2003, 9, 152–155). See also Klevniuk (2004, 44–45). In Perm Oblast, in the immediate postwar years, for example, 1600 prisoners were freed from camps of repatriated POWs. Most of these were scientists, engineers, and industrial leaders (Suslov 2003, 45).

5. Gulag production accounted for 10% of entire gross industrial output of the USSR (Filtzer 2002, 25). On the role industrial managers played in encouraging the growth of Gulag camps in the Urals, see Harris (1999) and Suslov (2003, 30, 51).

6. In just one month, November 1943, the Sverdlovsk censors skimmed over a million letters in 21 languages (Stykalin 2005, 96–108).

7. It is hard to get an accurate number of workers and their status for the plutonium site. Some estimates run as high as 40,000 prisoners. Alexander Saranskii was in charge of hiring and personnel for Cheliabmetalurgstroi (ChMS). He remembered that they took first of all the “special contingents,” prisoners and special settlers, whom he defined as Germans (Chernikov 1995, 37, 57–58, 107, 115). Officials counted in the fall of 1946 that they had sent to the special site no. 859 (Ozersk) 1895 interned Germans, all of the region's 15,669 special settlers and a portion of the 8000 POWs held by ChMS. As of 1 January 1947, there were nearly 9000 prisoners at the site and the ChMS enterprise wanted to send in more prisoners, but could not for lack of housing. See Ob'edinennyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Cheliabinskoi Oblasti (hereafter, OGAChO) R-1619/2/48, 46–59. Four months later, the ChMS NKVD enterprise had 13,000 prisoners, 7000 special settlers and 8200 POWs, only 47% of whom were healthy enough to work. OGAChO R-1619/2/48, 80–91. For much higher estimates of the number of prisoners at 40,000, see Dokuchaev (1998, 282). Kuznetsov (2008, 88) gives a figure of 11 corrective labor camps (ITL) and 16,000 special settlers and internees. He does not give the number of prisoners. See Mel'nikova (2006, 33) on an estimate of 8400 prisoners (but no record of exiles) at the Maiak site.

8. OGAChO 1619/2c/43, 42–43 and OGAChO 1619/2/43, 66.

9. For the civil war in West Ukraine, see Burds (2001).

10. On organization of new camps, see OGAChO 1619/2/43, 66–67 and OGAChO 1619/2/43, 63–64. On the lack of a process for selecting out the most dangerous prisoners, see Kuznetsov (2008, 61). On sorting prisoners for health rather than political reliability, see OGAChO R-1619/2/48, 58. For evidence of dangerous criminals within the plutonium site camps, see OGAChO 1619/2/434, 27.

11. OGAChO 1619/23/48, 86–87 and OGAChO R-1619/2/51, 6–8. For more on the status of special settlers, see Viola (2007, 95).

12. OGAChO R-1619/2/48, 46–59.

13. OGAChO 1619/2/43, 225 and OGAChO 1619/2/44, 54–57.

14. OGAChO R-1619/2/48, 46–59.

15. OGAChO R-1619/2/51, 5–6. On non-convoy labor, see Bell (2013, 116–141).

16. OGAChO R-1619/2/51, 6–8.

17. OGAChO P-288/1/141, 12; OGAChO 1619/1/39, 256; and OGAChO 288/42/77, 4. In a neighboring nuclear installation, 217 soldiers were court-martialed in 1947 alone (Kuznetsov 2008, 96–98). On the general unruliness of postwar soldiers, see Fedorov (2005, 197–208).

18. OGAChO 1619/2/44, 3; see also Chernikov (1995, 25). On the general features of construction brigades in the atomic sites of the Urals, see Kuznetsov (2008, 86–87).

19. A rare, hand-drawn map of the plutonium production site from 26 March 1947 shows that there was a Pass Control Point, on the main road into the area from Kyshtym, but the fence to “alienate the territory” was still only “projected” OGAChO R-274/20/18, 121–122. For record of non-site civilians catching rides on ChMS buses to construction sites, see OGAChO 1619/1/39, 300.

20. On Tkachenko's background, see Chernikov (1995, 48–49).

21. Saranskii's memories exaggerate the completeness of the background checks. For complaints about the lack of thorough background checking and record keeping in the personnel division, see OGAChO P-1137/1/48, 84–85.

22. See, for example, Riabev (2004, 431, 633–637)

23. OGAChO P-1137/1/48, 79–85; and Chernikov (1995, 116, 96). For transcripts of the political working over of a Jewish administrator, see OGAChO 2469/1/4, 1–12. In the Urals, even the successful director of the tank factory, I. M. Zal'tsman, was accused of being a cosmopolitan and fired. OGAChO P-288/14/1, 13–25. On an attempt to clear the larger Soviet nuclear bomb installations of Jews, see Vazhnov (2002, 95–97).

24. OGAChO 2469/1/121, 173.

25. By 1957, in the Ozersk Party roster, most candidates and members were Russians with some Ukrainians. OGAChO 2469/1/120.

26. See Soviet of Ministers decree, no 233–297, “O vyselenii iz osoborezhimnoi zony vsekh neblagonadezhnykh i rodstvennikov grazhdan poneshekh ugolovnoe nakazanie,” 8 February 1948. For local orders, OGAChO 23/1/22, 4–5 and OGAChO 288/43/21, 1–2.

27. OGAChO 288/42/34, 56; and Khakimov (2006, 16). For petitions asking to return, see OGAChO R-274/20/30, 50–53, 66–67, 78, and 87.

28. OGAChO R-274/20/18, 121–122.

29. OGAChO P-288/1/141, 12.

30. OGAChO 2469/1/117, 168, 234; OGAChO 2469/1/118, 105; see also Kazansky (2007, 12).

31. OGAChO P-1137/1/31, 68–70. The periodic cleansing of special regime cities started in the early 1930s and was an essential element of keeping cities such as Moscow and Leningrad as consuming preserves for Soviet elite (Popov 1995, 3–14; Hagenloh 2000, 286–308; Kessler 2001, 478–504; Shearer 2004, 835–881).

32. The original orders by Ivan Serov called for deporting former prisoners sentenced for counter-revolutionary activity, banditism, and repatriated soldiers (Riabev 2007, 170, 183, 187). The order is also mentioned in “Protokol no. 77 zasedaniia spetsial'nogo komiteta pre sovnarkome SSSR,” 23 May 1949. An earlier call to deport went evidently unheeded (Riabev 2002, 245–46, 368). From 1948–1949, MVD officials sent 5000 people from site 859 to Dal'stroi. In 1951–1952, 7000 special settlers and members of their families were sent to Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan (Kuznetsov 2008, 96).

33. For prisoners' successful requests to remain in the closed city at the end of their sentences, see OGAChO 2469/3/3, 59–64.

34. OGAChO P-1137/1/38, 142–146; OGAChO P-1137/1/38, 234–235; and OGAChO P-1137/1/48, 78–80.

35. OGAChO 1137/1/48, 80–84. On the charges against Jewish professors in Cheliabinsk, see OGAChO 288/42/54, 140–152.

36. OGAChO 1137/1/48, 80–84.

37. Ibid.

38. For a retrospective view of cost overrun and turnover problems, see OGAChO 1138/1/22, 157–161 and OGAChO 2469/1/2, 10–11.

39. Prior to 1953, there were smaller, secret amnesties that recognized abuses of the judicial system. A 1949 amnesty, for example, released about 84,000 women and children (Afanasev 2004, 85–86). A 1950 amnesty released pregnant women and women with small children from construction camps of nuclear sites. Female former inmates with children up to the age of 14 years were also free to leave the regime zones (Riabev 2007, 65).

40. On labor shortage “because of the amnesties,” see OGAChO 1138/1/29, 21–31, 58–64. On amnesties in the ZATO system, see Kuznetsov (2008, 78–81), and in the Cheliabinsk Oblast, see OGAChO 274/20/33, 65–67. On Beria's reforms, see Knight (1993, 185).

41. OGAChO 1138/1/25, 117–123.

42. OGAChO 1138/1/22, 125–128.

43. OGAChO 1138/1/29, 58–63.

44. As the charges were relayed in Ozersk, OGAChO 1138/1/26, 6–7.

45. Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii 3/47/13, l. 1.

46. OGAChO 2469/1/1.

47. OGAChO 107/22/67, 52–53.

48. The estimate was villages would get 150–300 rads in a month, 7–14 times greater than the permissible annual dose of 25 rads at the time. Larin, Kombinat “Maiak,” 52.

49. OGAChO R1644/1/4a, 92–94; and Institut global'nogo klimata i ekologii (2005).

50. OGAChO 2469/1/118, 101–105; OGAChO 2469/2/4, 21–29; and Medvedev (1990, 108).

51. Areas with more than three curies per square kilometer fall into Zone 1, the most highly contaminated areas of the trace (Dobrynina 2004).

52. OGAChO 2469/1/1, 93.

53. A 1968 report by the Institute of General Genetics found evidence of chromosomal aberrations in Muslumovo at approximately 25 times greater than the norm (Shevchenko 1998). For a study on fertility problems, see Akleyev and Ploshchanskaya (2000). For a review of literature that found a rise in congenital problems, but at rates that proved inconclusive, see Kossenko, Burmistrov, and Wilson (2000).

54. On corporate promotion of doubt, see Proctor and Schiebinger (2008, 14–20).

55. For an older version of the same argument, see Daniel J. Flood to Glenn Seaborg, 23 August 1963 and “AEC Air Pollution in New York City,” Atomic Energy Commission 506/6, 22 June 1965, DOE Germantown, Record Group 326, 1362/7.

56. Estimates at the Maiak Plant are far greater, at one billion curies (Larin 2012).