The camps where criminals (criminal and political) were kept existed in Soviet Russia since 1919, were subordinate to the Cheka, were located mainly in the Arkhangelsk region and since 1921 were called SLON, the decoding means “Northern camps for special purposes.” With the growing terror of the state against its citizens, as well as the increasing tasks of industrializing the country, which few people agreed to solve voluntarily, the Main Directorate of Forced Labor Camps was created in 1930. During the 26 years of its existence, a total of more than eight million Soviet citizens served in the Gulag camps, a huge number of whom were convicted on political charges without trial.
Gulag prisoners took a direct part in the construction of a huge number of industrial enterprises, roads, canals, mines, bridges, and entire cities.
Some of them, the most famous
- White Sea-Baltic Canal
- Moscow Canal
- Volga-Don Canal
- Norilsk Mining and Metallurgical Plant
- Nizhny Tagil Iron and Steel Works
- Railway tracks in the north of the USSR
- Tunnel to Sakhalin Island (not completed)
- Volzhskaya HPP (deciphering Hydroelectric power station)
- Tsimlyanskaya HPP
- Zhigulevskaya HPP
- City of Komsomolsk-on-Amur
- Sovetskaya Gavan city
- Vorkuta city
- Ukhta city
- Nakhodka city
- Dzhezkazgan city
The largest associations of the Gulag
- ALGERIA (transcript: Akmola camp for wives of traitors to the Motherland
- Bamlag
- Berlag
- Bezymyanlag
- Belbaltlag
- Vorkutlag (Vorkuta ITL)
- Vyatlag
- Dallag
- Dzhezkazganlag
- Dzhugjurlag
- Dmitrovlag (Volgolag)
- Dubravlag
- Intalag
- Karaganda ITL (Karlag)
- Kisellag
- Kotlas ITL
- Kraslag
- Lokchimlag
- Norilsklag (Norilsk ITL)
- Ozerlag
- Perm camps (Usollag, Visheralag, Cherdynlag, Nyroblag, etc.), Pechorlag
- Peczheldorlag
- Prorvlag
- Svirlag
- SVITL
- Sevzheldorlag
- Siblag
- Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp (SLON)
- Taezlag
- Ustvymlag
- Ukhtpechlag
- Ukhtizhemlag
- Khabarlag
According to Wikipedia, there were 429 camps, 425 colonies, and 2,000 special commandant’s offices in the Gulag system. The Gulag was the most populous in 1950. Its institutions housed 2 million 561 thousand 351 people; the most tragic year in the history of the Gulag was 1942, when 352,560 people died, almost a quarter of all prisoners. For the first time, the number of people held in the Gulag exceeded one million in 1939.
The Gulag system included colonies for minors, where they were sent from the age of 12
In 1956, the Main Directorate of Camps and Prisons was renamed the Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Colonies, and in 1959 - the Main Directorate of Prisons.
"GULAG Archipelago"
A study by A. Solzhenitsyn on the system of detention and punishment of prisoners in the USSR. Written in secret between 1958-1968. First published in France in 1973. “The Gulag Archipelago” was endlessly quoted in broadcasts to the Soviet Union by radio stations Voice of America, Liberty, Free Europe, and Deutsche Welle, thanks to which the Soviet people were less aware of Stalin’s terror. In the USSR, the book was published openly in 1990.
The international traveling exhibition “To Live or to Write,” dedicated to the writer’s work, has opened Varlama Shalamova. Unfortunately, this talented person, who went through all the horrors, is little known in Belarus.
The international exhibition has been running since 2015. Photo by Evgenia Moskvina
Sergey Soloviev, a candidate of philosophical sciences from Moscow, told the residents of Vitebsk about how the author of the famous “Kolyma Tales” had to survive in the harsh conditions of Soviet correctional labor institutions in 1930-1956.
Sergey Soloviev. Photo by Evgenia Moskvina
Shalamov served his first term from 1929 to 1932 in the Vishera camp (Northern Urals) on charges of participation in an underground Trotskyist group. In 1937 - again a similar charge and five years of imprisonment in the North-Eastern camp in Kolyma. The working day in Sevoslag was 11 hours in winter and 15 hours in summer.
The exhibition contains many images of Kolyma. Photo by Evgenia Moskvina
Sergei Solovyov said that Kolyma for prisoners was a real “without stoves”, in which people were burned, completely unadapted to the harsh climate, where frosts of 35 degrees occur even in April. In those years, a huge number of camps were located in the Kolyma region, under the jurisdiction of. During 1932-1953, the number of prisoners amounted to 859,911 people, of whom 121,256 died, 7,300 escaped, and 13,000 were shot. One of the most terrible camps was the Magadan “serpentine”, in which people sentenced to death were kept. Alas, today only ruins remain of the former places of detention, where many citizens of the USSR met their deaths.
Map of the Kolyma camps. Photo by Evgenia Moskvina
How a person changed under such conditions can be traced by the characteristics of the camp authorities, which appeared in the prisoners’ files every few months. At first the person worked hard, then his attitude towards hard work became worse and worse, then he degraded so much that he fell asleep in his clothes after a work shift, then... a death certificate.
In order to turn a person into an animal, “a feeling of hunger and a little fear were enough” (quote from Shalamov). Varlam Tikhonovich was saved only thanks to the staff of the prison hospital, who recommended him for an eight-month course for paramedics. After graduation, Shalamov worked in the village of Debin at the Central Hospital of Dalstroy.
In his letters to Solzhenitsyn, after leaving the camp, Shalamov noted that the horrors of Stalin’s camps must be conveyed to readers:
Remember, the most important thing: camp is a negative school from the first to the last day for anyone. The person - neither the boss nor the prisoner - needs to see him. But if you saw him, you must tell the truth, no matter how terrible it may be.
Shalamov had to experience a lot. Photo by Evgenia Moskvina
And Varlam Shalamov, as noted by all the spectators who came to the opening of the exhibition at the creative center, succeeded. The international exhibition, consisting of 35 tablets in Russian, has already been visited by residents of Brest. And within the framework of the “Live or Write” project, Vitebsk residents also expect a meeting with a famous local historian who will tell about those who lived in our country.
The exhibition makes you think. Photo by Evgenia Moskvina
Come to the lecture-presentation “The fate of Belarusians during the years of Stalinism” June 23 V 18.00 . V . After all, among those 859,911 people there were probably many of our fellow countrymen...
Stalin's Gulag and US concentration camps
Now it is very fashionable to talk breathlessly about the horrors of the Gulag (main administration of the camps) of 1937 - 1960. Usually such a conversation takes place with references to the literary works of Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn. I don’t want to refute these writers, but I just want to briefly compare the Soviet system of Stalin’s Gulag and the situation in the concentration camps of the United States, which claims to be the most democratic country in the world.
Soviet camp systemGULAG.
Existed in 1934-1960. In total, over the years of the existence of the Gulag system, 15-18 million people passed through it. Of these, approximately 1.5 million died in the camps. That is, at least 10%.
Torture and abuse According to Brodsky - In the camps, torture and humiliation were actively used against prisoners. Researcher Yuri Arkadyevich Brodsky mentions the following: - Dragging stones or logs from place to place, - Counting seagulls, - Loudly shouting “international” for many hours in a row. If the prisoner did not scream, then two or three prisoners were killed, after which the people stood screaming until they began to fall from exhaustion. This could be carried out at night, in the cold. As for the counting of seagulls, I’ll leave it up to him, but “... then two or three prisoners were killed, after which...” I’ll try to look at it from the other side... According to an official investigation document signed by the head of the Gulag operations department of the NKVD of the USSR, from 1942, the names of the shooters on duty in the camp in the Chkalov region are indicated. The document stated in particular: . “The shooters tied them up and placed them half-naked in a cold isolation cell, tied them with wire, took them outside and tied them to a pole. The prisoners were half-naked and taken out into the street and kept in the cold for several hours. There were cases when, half-naked, prisoners were forced to lie in the snow for hours.” That is, even during the war, in case of abuse of prisoners, official investigations were carried out. Knowing the attitude towards violators of discipline at that time and taking into account that production output was laid down for each prisoner, Brodsky’s words about such a mass extrajudicial murder raise very serious doubts. Organization of camps In the ITL, three categories of prisoner detention regime were established: strict, enhanced and general. -- On a strict regime, especially dangerous criminals convicted of banditry, robbery, premeditated murder, escape from prison and incorrigible recidivist criminals. They were under enhanced security and supervision, could not be unescorted, were used primarily for hard physical work, and were subject to the most severe penalties for refusing to work and for violating the camp regime. “Political crimes” () were also considered especially dangerous. -- Those convicted of robberies and other dangerous crimes, repeat offenders, were kept under enhanced security conditions. These prisoners were also not subject to release and were used mainly for general work. -- The rest of the prisoners in the correctional labor camp, as well as all those in correctional labor colonies (CPCs), were kept under general conditions. It was allowed to unconvoy them, use them in lower-level administrative and economic work in the apparatus of camp units and penal colonies, as well as involve them in the guard and convoy service for the protection of prisoners. -- At the end of quarantine, medical labor commissions established categories of physical labor for prisoners. -- Physically healthy prisoners were assigned the first category of working ability, allowing them to be used for heavy physical work. -- Prisoners who had minor physical disabilities (low fatness, non-organic functional disorders) belonged to the second category of working ability and were used in moderately difficult work. -- Prisoners who had obvious physical disabilities and diseases, such as: decompensated heart disease, chronic disease of the kidneys, liver and other organs, however, did not cause deep disorders of the body, belonged to the third category of working ability and were used in light physical work and individual work physical labor. -- Prisoners who had severe physical disabilities that precluded the possibility of their employment were classified in the fourth category - the category of disabled people. -- Work standards were about 270-300 working days per year (varied in different camps and in different years, excluding, of course, years wars). A working day is up to 10-12 hours maximum. In case of severe climatic conditions, work was canceled. Food standard No. 1 (basic) for a Gulag prisoner in 1948 (per person per day in grams)
:
- -- Bread 700 (800 for those engaged in heavy work) -- Wheat flour 10 -- Various cereals 110 -- Pasta and vermicelli 10 -- Meat 20 -- Fish 60 -- Fats 13 -- Potatoes and vegetables 650 -- Sugar 17 -- Salt 20 -- Surrogate tea 2 -- Tomato puree 10 -- Pepper 0.1 -- Bay leaf 0.1
Punishment systemand encouragement
(C) Prisoners who refused to work were subject to transfer to a penal regime, and “malicious refuseniks, whose actions corrupted labor discipline in the camp,” were subject to criminal liability. Penalties were imposed on prisoners for violations of labor discipline. Depending on the nature of such violations, the following penalties could be imposed: - deprivation of meetings, correspondence, transfers for up to 6 months, restriction of the right to use personal money for up to 3 months and compensation for damage caused; -- transfer to general work; -- transfer to a penal camp for up to 6 months; -- transfer to a punishment cell for up to 20 days; - transfer to worse material and living conditions (penal ration, less comfortable barracks, etc.) In relation to prisoners who complied with the regime, who performed well at work, who exceeded the established norm, the following incentive measures could be applied by the camp leadership: - - declaration of gratitude before the formation or in an order with entry into a personal file; -- issuing a bonus (cash or in kind); -- granting an extraordinary visit; -- granting the right to receive parcels and transfers without restrictions; -- granting the right to transfer money to relatives in an amount not exceeding 100 rubles. per month; - transfer to a more qualified job. I would like to draw your attention to one point, I will return to it later - (C) “... granting the right to transfer money to relatives...” The third system of stimulating labor in the camps consisted of differentiated payments to prisoners for the work they performed. This money is in administrative documents initially and until the end of the 1940s. were designated by the terms “cash incentive” or “cash bonus”. The concept of “salary” was also sometimes used, but this name was officially introduced only in 1950. Prisoners temporarily released from work due to illness and other reasons were not paid wages during their release from work, but the cost of guaranteed food and clothing allowances was also not withheld from them.
Juvenile prisoners
In open-type colonies there are juvenile offenders with one criminal record, and in closed-type colonies, under special regime conditions, juvenile offenders from 12 to 18 years old are kept, who have a large number of convictions and several convictions. Since the decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People's Commissars, 155,506 teenagers aged 12 to 18 years have been sent through labor colonies, of which 68,927 have been tried and 86,579 have not been tried. Since the main task of the NKVD labor colonies is to re-educate children and instill in them labor skills, production enterprises are organized in all GULAG labor colonies in which all juvenile criminals work. In the GULAG labor colonies there are, as a rule, four main types of production (apparently they mean juvenile colonies):
- - Metalworking, - Woodworking, - Shoe production, - Knitting production (in colonies for girls).
List of stall goods for sale to prisoners in forced labor camps: 1. Sandwiches. 2. Jam, jam, 3. Butter, lard, lard. 4. Sausages. 5. Various fruits: fresh and dried, berries. 6. Potatoes. 7. Cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, garlic, sauerkraut, beets, radishes, mushrooms. 8. Fresh fish, smoked, dried and salted, herring. 9. Cheese, feta cheese, milk, sour cream, kefir. So everything is in order - cheese, sour cream, smoked fish, and sausage. In fact (although this was not particularly advertised), they also sold vodka, as can be seen, for example, from the following complaints from “victims of repression”: (WITH)"...I had money, I decided to buy vodka, after drinking the vodka that was brought to me - I drank alone - I headed to my workplace in the lower part of the pit, where my team was working..."(from the complaint of prisoner N.P. Yanysh to the Supreme Court of the USSR) Maybe they had no time to buy sausages due to overwork?
Also no. The working day rarely exceeded 10 hours; there were also non-working days - on average 5 days off per month. I emphasize that these are the norms adopted in 1939 under Beria, after mass rehabilitation, when only truly proven enemies remained in the Gulag, when all those who were imprisoned innocently,were released Were there any violations!? More likely , yes - otherwise where did she come from? snickering the foam that emerged on the Gorbachev and Yeltsin wave of plunder of the country. By the way, working well in the Gulag meant not only eating well, but also shortening your sentence!! For exceeding the norm, a day was counted as one and a half, two or even three days. Hence the early releases. After all this, it is unnecessary to remind that in the midst of the so-called. “repression”, according to the verdicts of the notorious TROIK there were 20% of acquittals. - http://www.dal.by/news/2/06-09-12-44/
About German prisoner of war camps
Over the past few days, a comparative table of the food basket of today's Russians and German prisoners of war has been popular on the internet. .
When analyzing which It turns out that today’s Russians eat little better than captured Germans during the Second World War. All other norms content for German prisoners of war they corresponded to general camp standards. According to the Central Financial Department of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, for the period from 1943 to January 1, 1950 prisoners of war worked 1,077,564,200 man-days, earned 16,723,628 thousand rubles and performed work in construction and industry with a total value of approximately 50 billion rubles. On June 18, 1946, the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted Resolution No. 1263-519ss “On sending home sick and disabled prisoners of war of German and other Western nationalities.” In April 1947, a conference of the foreign ministers of the USSR, USA and Great Britain was held in Moscow, at which a decision was made to repatriate German prisoners of war by December 31, 1948. But in practice, repatriation dragged on until 1950. According to official statistics from the Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internees of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs dated October 12, 1959 In total, 2,389,560 German military personnel were captured, of which 356,678 died in captivity. (14.9%) Mortality was especially high in the first years of the war. Due to severe frosts, poor uniforms and extremely poor nutrition, many prisoners, exhausted by long marches, died already on the way to the camps. In the post-war years, mortality decreased significantly. According to some German sources, 3.15 million German military personnel were captured by the Soviets, of whom 1-1.3 million died in captivity. Representatives of the international Red Cross were allowed to visit them, and sometimes mail was delivered from the homeland.
US camps
Eisenhower death camps Source - http://www.anti-orange-ua.com.ru/content/view/2148/42/
Among the first US prisoners of war was Corporal Helmut Liebig, who served in the anti-aircraft experimental group at Peenemunde in the Baltic. Liebig was captured by the Americans on April 17 near Gotha in central Germany. Forty-two years later, he clearly recalled that there were not even tents in the Gotha camp, only a barbed wire fence around a field that soon turned into a swamp.
The prisoners received a small portion of food on the first day, but on the second and subsequent days it was cut by half. To get it, they were forced to run through the gauntlet. Hunched over, they ran between rows of American guards, who beat them with sticks as they approached the food. On April 27, they were transferred to the American camp Heidesheim, where for several days there was no food at all, and then only a little. In the open air, starving and thirsty, people began to die. Liebig counted between 10 and 30 bodies daily being pulled out of his Section B, which held about 5,200 people. He saw one prisoner beat another to death over a small piece of bread. The mortality rate in American camps for German prisoners of war in the Rhineland was about 30% in 1945, according to surviving medical records. One day in June, through hallucinations, Liebig saw "Tommies" entering the camp. The British took the camp under their guard, and this saved Liebig's life. At the time, he was 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighed 96.8 pounds. According to the stories of ex-prisoners of Rheinberg, the last action of the Americans before the arrival of the British was to level one section of the camp with a bulldozer, with many weakened prisoners unable to leave their holes... General Dwight Eisenhower was like the supreme commander of SHAEF - all Allied armies in northwestern Europe, and the Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces in the European Theater of Operations. “God, I hate the Germans,” he wrote to his wife Mamie in September 1944. In March 1945, a CCS letter signed by Eisenhower recommended the creation of a new class of prisoners - Disarmed Enemy Forces - DEF - which, unlike prisoners of war were not covered by the Geneva Convention. Therefore they should not have been supplied by the victorious army after Germany's surrender. On April 26, 1945, the Joint Command approved DEF status only for prisoners of war in the hands of the US Army: the British command refused to accept the American plan for their prisoners of war. The CCS decided to keep the status of the disarmed German troops a secret. Maybe the US Army did not have enough food to feed such a mass of people!? Reference - The army reserves had such a supply of food that when an entire warehouse center in England stopped supplying after an accident, it was not noticed for three months . In addition, the International Committee of the Red Cross had more than 100,000 tons of food in warehouses in Switzerland. Thus, the reason for the policy of deprivation of German prisoners of war could in no way be a lack of supplies.(from the memoirs of a German prisoner of war) For more than half of the days we did not receive any food at all. And on other days - a meager ration "K". I noticed that the Americans gave us one tenth of the ration that they themselves received... I complained to the head of the American camp that they were violating the Geneva Convention, to which he replied: “Forget about the Convention. You have no rights here.” Conditions in the American camps along the Rhine were inspected at the end of April by two US Army Medical Corps colonels, James Mason and Charles Beasley, who described them in a newspaper published in 1950: “Huddled together behind barbed wire for warmth, they presented a terrifying sight: about 100,000 slow, apathetic, dirty, emaciated people with blank looks, dressed in dirty gray field uniforms, stood ankle-deep in mud...
The commander of the German Division reported that the people had not eaten for at least two days, and the water supply was the main problem - although the deep Rhine flowed 200 yards away." (C) At the meeting, Eisenhower and Churchill agreed to reduce the prisoners' rations. Churchill was required to agree on the level prisoner rations because he had to announce a reduction in the British meat ration and wanted to make sure that "the prisoners, as far as possible... were to be supplied with the supplies that we had saved." Eisenhower responded that he had already "given the matter due attention" , but was going to recheck everything to see if "further reduction is possible." He told Churchill that POW prisoners were receiving 2,000 calories a day (2,150 calories was accepted by the US Army Medical Corps as the absolute maintenance minimum for adults living in warm conditions and sedentary lifestyles (US military personnel received 4,000 calories per day). However, he did not say that The American army practically does not feed DEF - Disarmed Enemy Forces or feeds them significantly less than those who still enjoy the status of prisoners of war. Help - in American DEF camps ( Disarmed Enemy Forces) received approximately 900 - 1300 calories per day. Reference - in German camps, according to doctors' calculations, it was 1,300 - 1,400 calories German prisoner of war camp
It was US Army policy to provide "no shelter or other amenities." In the arrangement of the prisoners: people lived in holes they dug in the ground. From the memoirs of a military doctor - ..... In the first camp he entered, he witnessed the presence of dirty land “inhabited by living skeletons,” some of which were dying before his eyes. Others were breasting under pieces of cardboard, although July was not too hot. Women lying in holes dug in the ground looked at him, swollen from hunger, with bellies parodying pregnancy; old men with long gray hair looked at him hunched over; children of six or seven years old with hungry circles of raccoons around their eyes looked at him with lifeless gaze. Two German doctors in the “hospital” tried to help the dying on the ground in the open air, between the traces of the tent that the Americans had taken with them. Julien, a member of the Resistance, caught himself thinking: “This is reminiscent of photographs of Dachau and Buchenwald..” Help - In July and August, US Quartermaster Littlejohn reported to Eisenhower that Army food reserves in Europe had increased by 39%. On August 4, Eisenhower's one-sentence order condemned everyone prisoners of war in American hands on the situation DEF: "Immediately consider all members of German troops held under US protection in the American occupation zone of GERMANY to be disarmed enemy forces, and not having the status of prisoners of war"The DEF mortality rate for the entire period was five times the above percentages. The official "Weekly PW & DEF Report" for September 8, 1945 is still on file in Washington. It states that a total of 1,056,482 prisoners were held by the US Army in the European Theater, of which about two thirds were identified as POW. The remaining third - 363,587 - DEF. During the week, 13,051 of them died.
.... more than 900,000, and quite possibly more than 1 million, died in American and French camps,morewhat was killed in northwestern Europe,from America's entry into the war in 1941 to April 1945.
In this aerial photograph, each black dot represents a German prisoner of war sitting in a snowy field for a month.
In "Eisenhower's Death Camps": A U.S. Prison Guard's Story
In the "Eisenhower Death Camps": The Story of an American Guard (excerpt)
http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History/us_war_crimes/Eisenhowers_death_camps.htm
I... saw on a hill near the camp an officer shooting a group of German civilian women with a 45 caliber pistol.
To my question he answered: “Shooting at targets” and continued to fire until the last cartridge in the magazine. I saw the women running for cover, but due to the range, I was unable to determine whether the officer had injured anyone. .... They considered the Germans to be subhuman, worthy of destruction: another turn of the downward spiral of racism. .... http://s-mahat.ru/cgi-bin/index.cgi?cont=113 http://s-mahat.ru/cgi-bin/index.cgi?cont=114 http:// s-mahat.ru/cgi-bin/index.cgi?cont=115 Were there such actions?Eisenhower than-
something exclusive to the USA!?
No - this was a standard practice for them applied to concentration camps. Later, in a separate article I will touch on labor camps during the depression years and camps for political prisoners, and now I want to dwell on a modern camp belonging to the most democratic country in the world. Guantanamo Bay Barracks Speaking about the democratic victories of the West in recent times, about the desire of many of our compatriots to finally find themselves in the friendly arms of this very Western democracy, we must not forget about such a pillar of the principles of “humanism and democracy” as the Guantanamo Bay prison. This is a place where people are thrown without trial, turning a blind eye to the fundamental legal principle of the presumption of innocence. If we take into account the fact that in order to end up in Guantanamo Bay as a prisoner, it is enough that any representative of the American military command considers a person a terrorist or gives him the status of an accomplice of terrorist brigades, then only one thought comes to mind: the Guantanamo Bay camp is a classic example concentration camp of modern times. A real public explosion was caused by the information that even after Barack Obama’s instructions to dissolve the prison, torture and abuse of prisoners continued in Guantanamo. From the words of al-Gharani, who, by the way, was imprisoned in Guntanamo prison at the age of 14 on charges of aiding terrorist groups, it followed that violence, expressed in the most sophisticated forms of torture, flourishes in American prisons. Today, 168 prisoners remain in Guantanamo Bay prison, many of whom have been awaiting trial and sentencing for several years. However, Guantanamo statistics indicate that the case of only one in fifty prisoners actually goes to trial, and the fate of the rest remains in the hands of the ideological inspirers of the continued operation of the concentration camp on the American military base. Many representatives of the officer corps of the Guantanamo Bay prison today say that all stories about torture and abuse of prisoners here are pure fiction. However, then it is not clear what to do with the numerous photographic evidence of how the American military carries out their “educational work” in prison, with video materials that are published on the Internet. One of the judges who considered the claims of several former Guantanamo Bay prisoners used a completely unique argument in his verdict. Former prisoners accused the US authorities of violating international legal standards regarding the detention of prisoners of war. However, Judge Brian Boyle said that the former prisoners did not have the right to challenge their options for being kept in an American prison, since they had the status of “enemy military,” but they could not be called prisoners of war. The English press reports the imminent publication of a report by the British human rights organization Reprieve on the Guantanamo Bay prison. The authors of this document report: during the “war on terrorism,” 17 American warships were turned into floating prisons. (WITH)In the organization's reportReprieveOne of the prisoners is quoted as saying that prisoners on ships are treated worse than in Guantanamo. This is hardly surprising, given the veil of secrecy surrounding illegal floating dungeons.
There appears to be no limit to US ingenuity in exploiting the potential of secret prisons. Today, the American government holds about 270 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, over 600 prisoners in Bagram, Afghanistan, and approximately 27,000 prisoners in Iraqi dungeons.
If this is a promising model for the future of the penitentiary system, it will allow the government to keep secret all information about prisoners, violations of their rights and mistakes made during arrests, the Guardian newspaper reports.
Abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay was par for the course.
Materials - Taguba report
The second quarter of the 20th century became one of the most difficult periods in the history of our country. This time was marked not only by the Great Patriotic War, but also by mass repressions. During the existence of the Gulag (1930-1956), according to various sources, from 6 to 30 million people were in forced labor camps dispersed throughout all the republics.
After Stalin's death, the camps began to be abolished, people tried to leave these places as quickly as possible, many projects on which thousands of lives were thrown fell into disrepair. However, evidence of that dark era is still alive.
"Perm-36"
A maximum security labor colony in the village of Kuchino, Perm Region, existed until 1988. During the Gulag, convicted law enforcement officers were sent here, and after that, the so-called political ones. The unofficial name “Perm-36” appeared in the 70s, when the institution was given the designation BC-389/36.
Six years after its closure, the Perm-36 Memorial Museum of the History of Political Repression was opened on the site of the former colony. The collapsing barracks were restored and museum exhibits were placed in them. Lost fences, towers, signal and warning structures, and utility lines were recreated. In 2004, the World Monuments Fund included Perm-36 in the list of 100 specially protected monuments of world culture. However, now the museum is on the verge of closure - due to insufficient funding and protests from communist forces.
Dneprovsky mine
On the Kolyma River, 300 kilometers from Magadan, quite a lot of wooden buildings have been preserved. This is the former convict camp "Dneprovsky". In the 1920s, a large tin deposit was discovered here, and especially dangerous criminals began to be sent to work. In addition to Soviet citizens, Finns, Japanese, Greeks, Hungarians and Serbs atoned for their guilt at the mine. You can imagine the conditions under which they had to work: in the summer it gets up to 40 degrees Celsius, and in the winter - down to minus 60.
From the memoirs of prisoner Pepelyaev: “We worked in two shifts, 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Lunch was brought to work. Lunch is 0.5 liters of soup (water with black cabbage), 200 grams of oatmeal and 300 grams of bread. It is, of course, easier to work during the day. From the night shift, you get to the zone by the time you have breakfast, and as soon as you fall asleep, it’s already lunch, when you go to bed, there’s a check, and then there’s dinner, and then it’s off to work.”
Road of Bones
The infamous abandoned highway, 1,600 kilometers long, leading from Magadan to Yakutsk. Construction of the road began in 1932. Tens of thousands of people who participated in laying the route and died there were buried right under the road surface. At least 25 people died every day during construction. For this reason, the tract was nicknamed the road with bones.
The camps along the route were named after kilometer marks. In total, about 800 thousand people passed through the “road of bones”. With the construction of the Kolyma federal highway, the old Kolyma highway fell into disrepair. To this day, human remains are found along it.
Karlag
The Karaganda forced labor camp in Kazakhstan, which operated from 1930 to 1959, occupied a huge area: about 300 kilometers from north to south and 200 from east to west. All local residents were deported in advance and allowed onto the lands uncultivated by the state farm only in the early 50s. According to reports, they actively assisted in the search and arrest of fugitives.
On the territory of the camp there were seven separate villages, in which a total of over 20 thousand prisoners lived. The camp administration was based in the village of Dolinka. A museum in memory of the victims of political repression was opened in that building several years ago, and a monument was erected in front of it.
Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp
The monastery prison on the territory of the Solovetsky Islands appeared at the beginning of the 18th century. Here priests, heretics and sectarians who disobeyed the will of the sovereign were kept in isolation. In 1923, when the State Political Administration under the NKVD decided to expand the network of northern special purpose camps (SLON), one of the largest correctional institutions in the USSR appeared on Solovki.
The number of prisoners (mostly those convicted of serious crimes) increased significantly every year. From 2.5 thousand in 1923 to more than 71 thousand by 1930. All property of the Solovetsky Monastery was transferred for the use of the camp. But already in 1933 it was disbanded. Today there is only a restored monastery here.
The history of the Gulag is closely intertwined with the entire Soviet era, but especially with its Stalinist period. The network of camps stretches throughout the country. They were attended by a variety of different groups of the population, accused under the famous 58th article. The Gulag was not only a system of punishment, but also a layer of the Soviet economy. Prisoners carried out the most ambitious projects
The origins of the Gulag
The future Gulag system began to take shape immediately after the Bolsheviks came to power. During the Civil War, she began to isolate her class and ideological enemies in special concentration camps. At that time they did not shy away from this term, since it received a truly monstrous assessment during the atrocities of the Third Reich.
At first, the camps were run by Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin. Mass terror against the “counter-revolution” included wholesale arrests of the rich bourgeoisie, factory owners, landowners, merchants, church leaders, etc. Soon the camps were handed over to the Cheka, whose chairman was Felix Dzerzhinsky. Forced labor was organized there. This was also necessary in order to raise the destroyed economy.
If in 1919 there were only 21 camps on the territory of the RSFSR, then by the end of the Civil War there were already 122. In Moscow alone there were seven such institutions, where prisoners were brought from all over the country. In 1919 there were more than three thousand of them in the capital. This was not yet the Gulag system, but only its prototype. Even then, a tradition had developed according to which all activities in the OGPU were subject only to internal departmental acts, and not to general Soviet legislation.
The first forced labor camp in the Gulag system existed in emergency mode. The civil war led to lawlessness and violation of the rights of prisoners.
Solovki
In 1919, the Cheka created several in the north of Russia, or more precisely, in the Arkhangelsk province. Soon this network received the name SLON. The abbreviation stood for "Northern Camps for Special Purposes." The Gulag system in the USSR appeared even in the most remote regions of a large country.
In 1923, the Cheka was transformed into the GPU. The new department distinguished itself with several initiatives. One of them was a proposal to establish a new forced camp on the Solovetsky archipelago, which was not far from those same Northern camps. Before this, there was an ancient Orthodox monastery on the islands in the White Sea. It was closed as part of the fight against the Church and the “priests.”
This is how one of the key symbols of the Gulag appeared. This was the Solovetsky special purpose camp. His project was proposed by Joseph Unschlikht, one of the then leaders of the Cheka-GPU. His fate is indicative. This man contributed to the development of the repressive system of which he ultimately became a victim. In 1938, he was shot at the famous Kommunarka training ground. This place was the dacha of Genrikh Yagoda, the People's Commissar of the NKVD in the 30s. He too was shot.
Solovki became one of the main camps in the Gulag of the 20s. According to the instructions of the OGPU, it was supposed to contain criminal and political prisoners. A few years after its inception, Solovki grew and had branches on the mainland, including in the Republic of Karelia. The Gulag system was constantly expanding with new prisoners.
In 1927, 12 thousand people were kept in the Solovetsky camp. The harsh climate and unbearable conditions led to regular deaths. Over the entire existence of the camp, more than 7 thousand people were buried there. Moreover, about half of them died in 1933, when famine raged throughout the country.
Solovki were known throughout the country. They tried not to bring information about problems inside the camp outside. In 1929, Maxim Gorky, at that time the main Soviet writer, came to the archipelago. He wanted to check the conditions in the camp. The writer's reputation was impeccable: his books were published in huge editions, he was known as a revolutionary of the old school. Therefore, many prisoners pinned their hopes on him that he would make public everything that was happening within the walls of the former monastery.
Before Gorky ended up on the island, the camp underwent a total cleanup and was brought into decent shape. The abuse of prisoners has stopped. At the same time, the prisoners were threatened that if they told Gorky about their lives, they would face severe punishment. The writer, having visited Solovki, was delighted with how prisoners were re-educated, accustomed to work and returned to society. However, at one of these meetings, in a children's colony, a boy approached Gorky. He told the famous guest about the abuses of the jailers: torture in the snow, overtime work, standing in the cold, etc. Gorky left the barracks in tears. When he sailed to the mainland, the boy was shot. The Gulag system brutally dealt with any dissatisfied prisoners.
Stalin's Gulag
In 1930, the Gulag system was finally formed under Stalin. It was subordinate to the NKVD and was one of the five main departments in this people's commissariat. Also in 1934, all correctional institutions that had previously belonged to the People's Commissariat of Justice were transferred to the Gulag. Labor in the camps was legislatively approved in the Correctional Labor Code of the RSFSR. Now numerous prisoners had to implement the most dangerous and ambitious economic and infrastructure projects: construction projects, digging canals, etc.
The authorities did everything to make the Gulag system in the USSR seem like the norm to free citizens. For this purpose, regular ideological campaigns were launched. In 1931, construction of the famous White Sea Canal began. This was one of the most significant projects of Stalin's first five-year plan. The Gulag system is also one of the economic mechanisms of the Soviet state.
In order for the average person to learn in detail about the construction of the White Sea Canal in positive terms, the Communist Party instructed famous writers to prepare a book of praise. This is how the work “Stalin Canal” appeared. A whole group of authors worked on it: Tolstoy, Gorky, Pogodin and Shklovsky. Particularly interesting is the fact that the book spoke positively about bandits and thieves, whose labor was also used. The GULAG occupied an important place in the Soviet economic system. Cheap forced labor made it possible to implement the tasks of the five-year plans at an accelerated pace.
Political and criminals
The Gulag camp system was divided into two parts. It was a world of politicians and criminals. The last of them were recognized by the state as “socially close”. This term was popular in Soviet propaganda. Some criminals tried to cooperate with the camp administration in order to make their existence easier. At the same time, the authorities demanded loyalty and surveillance of political leaders from them.
Numerous “enemies of the people,” as well as those convicted of alleged espionage and anti-Soviet propaganda, had no opportunity to defend their rights. Most often they resorted to hunger strikes. With their help, political prisoners tried to draw the attention of the administration to the difficult living conditions, abuses and bullying of jailers.
Single hunger strikes led to nothing. Sometimes NKVD officers could only increase the suffering of the convicted person. To do this, plates with delicious food and scarce products were placed in front of the starving people.
Fighting protest
The camp administration could pay attention to the hunger strike only if it was massive. Any concerted action by prisoners led to the search for instigators among them, who were then dealt with with particular cruelty.
For example, in Ukhtpechlag in 1937, a group of people convicted of Trotskyism went on a hunger strike. Any organized protest was considered a counter-revolutionary activity and a threat to the state. This led to the fact that an atmosphere of denunciation and mistrust of prisoners towards each other reigned in the camps. However, in some cases, the organizers of the hunger strikes, on the contrary, openly announced their initiative because of the simple despair in which they found themselves. In Ukhtpechlag, the founders were arrested. They refused to testify. Then the NKVD troika sentenced the activists to death.
While forms of political protest in the Gulag were rare, mass riots were common. Moreover, their founders were, as a rule, criminals. Convicts often became victims of criminals who carried out orders from their superiors. Representatives of the criminal world received exemption from work or occupied an inconspicuous position in the camp apparatus.
Skilled labor in the camp
This practice was also due to the fact that the Gulag system suffered from a lack of professional personnel. NKVD employees sometimes had no education at all. The camp authorities often had no choice but to place the prisoners themselves in economic, administrative and technical positions.
Moreover, among the political prisoners there were a lot of people of various specialties. The “technical intelligentsia” was especially in demand - engineers, etc. In the early 30s, these were people who received their education in Tsarist Russia and remained specialists and professionals. In successful cases, such prisoners could even develop trusting relationships with the administration in the camp. Some of them, upon release, remained in the system at the administrative level.
However, in the mid-30s, the regime tightened, which also affected highly qualified prisoners. The situation of the specialists located in the inner camp world became completely different. The well-being of such people depended entirely on the character and degree of depravity of a particular boss. The Soviet system created the Gulag system also in order to completely demoralize its opponents - real or imaginary. Therefore, there could be no liberalism towards prisoners.
Sharashki
Those specialists and scientists who ended up in the so-called sharashkas were luckier. These were closed scientific institutions where they worked on secret projects. Many famous scientists ended up in camps for their freethinking. For example, this was Sergei Korolev - a man who became a symbol of the Soviet conquest of space. Designers, engineers, and people associated with the military industry ended up in sharashkas.
Such establishments are reflected in the culture. The writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who visited the sharashka, many years later wrote the novel “In the First Circle,” where he described in detail the life of such prisoners. This author is best known for his other book, “The Gulag Archipelago.”
By the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, colonies and camp complexes had become an important element of many industrial sectors. The Gulag system, in short, existed wherever slave labor of prisoners could be used. It was especially in demand in the mining, metallurgical, fuel and forestry industries. Capital construction was also an important area. Almost all large buildings of the Stalin era were erected by prisoners. They were mobile and cheap labor.
After the end of the war, the role of the camp economy became even more important. The scope of forced labor expanded due to the implementation of the atomic project and many other military tasks. In 1949, about 10% of the country's production was created in the camps.
Unprofitability of camps
Even before the war, in order not to undermine the economic efficiency of the camps, Stalin abolished parole in the camps. At one of the discussions about the fate of the peasants who found themselves in the camps after dispossession, he stated that it was necessary to come up with a new system of rewards for productivity in work, etc. Often parole awaited a person who either distinguished himself by exemplary behavior or became another Stakhanovite.
After Stalin's remark, the system of counting working days was abolished. According to it, prisoners reduced their sentences by going to work. The NKVD did not want to do this, since refusal to take tests deprived prisoners of motivation to work diligently. This, in turn, led to a drop in the profitability of any camp. And yet the tests were cancelled.
It was the unprofitability of enterprises within the Gulag (among some other reasons) that forced the Soviet leadership to reorganize the entire system, which previously existed outside the legal framework, being under the exclusive jurisdiction of the NKVD.
The low productivity of prisoners was also due to the fact that many of them had health problems. This was facilitated by a poor diet, difficult living conditions, bullying by the administration and many other adversities. In 1934, 16% of prisoners were unemployed and 10% were sick.
Liquidation of the Gulag
The abandonment of the Gulag occurred gradually. The impetus for the start of this process was the death of Stalin in 1953. The liquidation of the Gulag system began a few months later.
First of all, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued a decree on mass amnesty. Thus, more than half of the prisoners were released. As a rule, these were people whose sentence was less than five years.
At the same time, the majority of political prisoners remained behind bars. The death of Stalin and the change of power gave many prisoners confidence that something would soon change. In addition, prisoners began to openly resist the oppression and abuse of the camp authorities. Thus, several riots occurred (in Vorkuta, Kengir and Norilsk).
Another important event for the Gulag was the 20th Congress of the CPSU. Nikita Khrushchev, who shortly before had won the internal struggle for power, spoke at it. From the platform, he also condemned the numerous atrocities of his era.
At the same time, special commissions appeared in the camps, which began reviewing the cases of political prisoners. In 1956, their number was three times less. The liquidation of the Gulag system coincided with its transfer to a new department - the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. In 1960, the last head of the GUITC (Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps), Mikhail Kholodkov, was retired.