The Gulag is a dark spot in Soviet history. Living conditions of prisoners in the gulag. Repressive policies and their institutional foundations

Diary of a Gulag Guard

The diary of a sheep guard, which was kept directly in the Gulag, and in which the author described his life for several months in 1935-36, is probably the only surviving source of this kind. Ideas about the Gulag system and the camp world are based on for the most part, on the memories of victims of repression. Here is evidence of camp life from the perspective of a person who was (at least for some time) on this side of the barbed wire

Memories of not the victims, but the perpetrators of Stalin’s crimes, the people who were on this side of the barbed wire: the highest ranks of the NKVD who organized the repressions, investigators, camp commanders, camp personnel - practically do not exist. But hundreds of thousands of people went through this system (in 1939, for example, the personnel of the NKVD was 365,839 people. Data are given in the book: G.M. Ivanova. Gulag in the system of a totalitarian state. Moscow, 1997, p. 161). But they usually did not have the need to write memoirs.

Chistyakov Ivan Petrovich: biographical information

The diary of Ivan Chistyakov, commander of an armed guard platoon (“VOKhR”) on the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) is a unique historical evidence. The diary is in the archives of the Memorial Society in Moscow, where it was transferred by people who accidentally discovered it in the papers of their deceased distant relative.

The diary consists of two small notebooks. One describes the three days Chistyakov spent hunting in August 1934, before his conscription into military service. internal troops and departure to BAM. Sketches in the spirit of “Notes of a Hunter” by Ivan Turgenev, classic hunting stories, illustrated with drawings by the author - all this sounds like nostalgia for old pre-revolutionary Russia, and contrasts sharply with another notebook, the entries in which date back to 1935-36. All this time their author was in the GULAG.

We know very little about him. Along with the notebooks, only a blurry amateur photograph has survived, on the back of which there is the inscription:

“Chistyakov Ivan Petrovich, repressed in 1937 – 1938. He died in 1941 at the front in the Tula region.”

All other information about this person can only be gleaned from his diary.

How old was its author at that time? Probably already more than 30, since in the diary there is a mention that he has already lived half of his life, and that he was at the front. This means that even if he participated in the civil war at the very end, in 1920-21, then he should have been at least 18-19 years old.

Before being drafted into the army (to the great misfortune of Ivan Chistyakov, he ends up serving in the internal troops) he lived in Moscow, not far from Sadovo-Kudrinskaya Square. I rode the tram to work, free time went to the theater, went in for sports, loved to draw, in a word, lived the life of an ordinary, relatively intelligent Soviet city dweller of the early 30s.

Ivan Petrovich Chistyakov, a man with such a patronymic and surname characteristic of Russia, did not have a very successful non-proletarian origin for that time. He's probably average technical education and he was expelled from communist party during one of the broad purges that took place in the late 20s and early 30s, when, first of all, the so-called socially alien elements were deprived of their party membership. (Chistyakov also mentions this in his diary, because he believes that he was sent to BAM as a person already guilty in the eyes of the authorities).

It is difficult to understand from the text of the diary what he worked before being drafted into the army, perhaps a teacher at some technical school, or perhaps an engineer. He apparently has no family, although he occasionally mentions receiving a letter or package, but there is no mention of a woman he loves or children.

Chistyakov is mobilized into the internal troops at the moment when huge Stalinist projects under the leadership of the OGPU-NKVD are really unfolding, when the Gulag is being created, which is experiencing an acute shortage of personnel. In the fall of 1935, he ends up in one of the most distant and terrible places - on the BAM, that is, in Bamlag (Baikal-Amur forced labor camp).

Bamlag

In 1932, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR adopted a resolution on the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline. BAM was a construction site of defense significance, and its construction was initially entrusted to the People's Commissariat of Railways. Only 3.5 years were allotted for construction. The urgency of the work was related to the military-strategic situation in the Far East that emerged after Japan captured Manchuria in 1930-31. But, despite the propaganda campaign that was unfolding in the USSR, to mobilize for Far East it was impossible for people to work hard. It soon became clear that this Stalinist task could only be accomplished in such a short time using free forced labor.

The construction was transferred to the hands of the OGPU. Streams of prisoners and special settlers (mostly exiled dispossessed people) flowed into Bamlag. By this time, the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the first large-scale construction project of the Gulag, was being completed, and thousands of prisoners were sent from there to the BAM.
In mid-1935, when the author of the diary ended up in Bamlag, the number of prisoners working on construction was already about 170 thousand people, and by the time the camp was disbanded - by May 1938, over 200 thousand (out of more than 1.8 million of all Gulag prisoners at that time moment).

Chiefs GULAG a

Bamlag in 1935 covered a huge territory - from Chita to Ussuriysk, exceeding 2000 km in length. It was controlled from the city of Svobodny in the Far Eastern Territory.

The first construction manager at Bamlag was Sergey Mrachkovsky an old Bolshevik, former member of the Trotskyist opposition. In September 1933, when the construction of the road took on a large scale, the entire leadership of Bamlag, led by Mrachkovsky, was arrested in connection with the “case of the counter-revolutionary Trotskyist group.”–

Bamlag became the new boss Nataliy Frenkel, one of the most odious builders of the Gulag system. Before his appointment to Bamlag, Frenkel had a fantastic career. In the early 20s, he was convicted of fraud and smuggling and sent to the Solovetsky camps. Over the course of several years of his stay on Solovki, prisoner Frenkel managed to turn into the head of the production department of the camp, and upon his release, he was taken into service in the OGPU. In 1931-1933, Frenkel became one of the leaders of the first largest object of the OGPU, built by the hands of prisoners - the White Sea-Baltic Canal.

The artistic image of this new camp world and its organizer is drawn by the writer Vasily Grossman in the novel “Life and Fate”:

“At the beginning of the New Economic Policy, Frenkel built a motor plant in Odessa. In the mid-twenties he was arrested and deported to Solovki. Sitting in the Solovetsky camp, Frenkel submitted a brilliant project to Stalin... The project spoke in detail, with economic and technical justifications, about the use of huge masses of prisoners to create roads, dams, hydroelectric power stations, and artificial reservoirs. The owner appreciated his idea. The twentieth century has invaded the simplicity of labor, sanctified by the simplicity of prison companies and old hard labor, the labor of a shovel, a pick, an ax and a saw. The camp world began to absorb progress; it pulled electric locomotives, excavators, bulldozers, electric saws, turbines, cutters, and a huge fleet of cars and tractors into its orbit. The camp world mastered transport and communications aviation, radio communications and intercoms, automatic machines, state-of-the-art systems ore beneficiation; the camp world designed, planned, drew, gave birth to mines, factories, new seas, giant power plants. It developed rapidly, and the old penal servitude seemed funny and touching, like children’s blocks.” Vasily Grossman. Life and Destiny, Moscow, 1988, pp. 790-791.

One of these new ambitious Gulag projects was the construction of BAM (a complex multi-kilometer railway structure) and it was carried out, like all other camp construction projects, with backbreaking manual labor (with a shovel, wheelbarrow, pick and saw) of hundreds of thousands of prisoners.

Grossman correctly assessed the importance of Frenkel's role - he remained the head of construction in Bamlag for the entire subsequent period and turned out to be one of the few GULAG figures, and who was not arrested, was able to hold out in this position and even move up. In 1940, Frenkel already served as head of the railway construction department of the GULAG and the NKVD of the USSR, i.e. managed all the railway camps in the country.

Frenkel began his leadership of Bamlag with a radical restructuring of the camp units. As a master of organization and an expert on camp life, he created phalanx- specialized teams of 250-300 people each, where all prisoners were bound by mutual responsibility for fulfilling the plan and competition for rations. (These phalanx brigades are repeatedly mentioned in Chistyakov’s diary.) The essence of this new system was accurately described by a man who was on the other side of the barbed wire in the early thirties, the famous author of “Kolyma Tales”:

“After all, only in the early thirties was this main issue resolved. What to hit with - a stick or soldering, a power scale depending on output. It turned out that with the help of the food scale, the promised reduction in time, it is possible to force both “pests” and household workers not only to work well, energetically, for free, even without an escort, but also to inform, sell all their neighbors for the sake of a cigarette butt, the approving look of the concentration camp authorities” Varlam Shalamov . Vishera. Antinovel, Moscow, 1989, p.43

The system proposed by such innovators of the Gulag as Frenkel was to use

“...free forced labor, where a gastric food scale was combined with the hope of early release based on test scores. All this is developed in extremely detail, the ladder of rewards and punishment in the camp is very large - from the punishment cell one hundred grams of bread every other day to two kilograms of bread when fulfilling the Stakhanov norm (that’s what it was officially called). This is how the White Sea Canal was carried out, the Moskanal - the construction of the first five-year plan. The economic impact was great.

The effect of corrupting the souls of people - both authorities, prisoners, and other citizens - was also great. A strong soul is strengthened in prison. The camp is with early release corrupts every, every soul - boss and subordinate, civilian and prisoner, career commander and hired mechanic" Varlam Shalamov, ibid. p. 45, writes Shalamov.

Every month Frenkel received trains with new prisoners, and his camp grew by leaps and bounds. The second department of Bamlag (this is where Chistyakov ends up) was a huge working anthill. It also included the construction of second railway tracks, locomotive repair depots, stations and other civil structures. There were mechanical workshops and auxiliary agricultural farms, its own propaganda brigade and camp press, production phalanxes with hundreds of prisoners - “puter soldiers”, isolation wards for the guilty and phalanxes for penal prisoners and refuseniks.

Soviet construction

Bamlag prisoners built the railway in incredibly difficult geographical and climatic conditions. They laid rails through undeveloped territories of the Far East - mountains, rivers, swamps, overcoming rocks, permafrost, and high soil moisture. In such conditions, construction work could be carried out no more than 100 days a year, but the prisoners worked all year round and in any weather for 16-18 hours a day. Many developed “night blindness”; Malaria, colds, rheumatism, and stomach diseases were rampant.

Thanks to the hard labor of tens of thousands of people, by the end of 1937, the main sections of Bamlag’s work on the second tracks of the route (Karymskaya - Khabarovsk) were completed. Now the prisoners had to begin the construction of the BAM itself - the road from Taishet through northern Baikal to Sovetskaya Gavan - with a length of 4,643 km. After the start Patriotic War in 1941, huge construction was stopped; The Gulag no longer had enough people or capacity.

In fact, the construction of a new section of the Baikal-Amur Railway continued in the 70s, and then thousands of youth brigades were sent to the construction site, which was declared a Komsomol strike. Construction took 12 years and ended shortly before the start of perestroika. Today this section of the railway has been renamed, and the name BAM no longer exists.

Cogs of the system

Our ideas about the camp world are formed, first of all, under the influence of those memories left by former prisoners, victims of repression. How the Gulag system functioned, its mechanism and structures can now be learned thanks to archives where thousands of documents have been preserved. Today, much is known about the organizers and leaders of the GULAG.

But the image of a “man with a gun” on this side of the barbed wire is very familiar to us, and we can hardly imagine the so-called “cogs” of a huge repressive machine. Former prisoners, as can be judged by numerous recollections, more often remembered their investigators, those who interrogated them in prison after their arrest, drew up protocols and indictments. In addition, the further fate and camp term of those arrested depended on the investigator, and they were often inclined to see in him, in a specific person, and not in the state repressive machine, personalized violence, a manifestation of injustice and cruelty towards them.

But those who guarded them in the camps were, as a rule, not remembered by the people who ended up in the Gulag for many years. The guards changed often, they all seemed to have the same face, and in the prisoner’s memory only the one who unexpectedly showed some kind of human feelings or, on the contrary, special cruelty remained.

The attitude of prisoners towards those who guarded them in the camps is described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago”:

“This is our limitation: when you are sitting in a prison or camp, the character of the jailers interests you only in how to avoid their threats and exploit their weaknesses. Otherwise, you don’t want to be interested in them at all, they are unworthy of your attention... And now, belatedly, you realize that you haven’t looked into them much... can a person who is capable of at least some useful activity go to a prison camp supervision? - let’s ask the question: can a camp prisoner even be a good man? What kind of system of moral selection suits their life?... Every person who has had at least a glimpse of spiritual education, who has at least some kind of conscientious consideration, the distinction between evil and good, will instinctively fight back by all means so as not to fall into this dark legion . But let’s say we failed to fight back. The second selection begins: during training and first service, the authorities themselves take a closer look and expel all those who show laxity (kindness) instead of will and firmness (cruelty and heartlessness). And then the long-term third selection: everyone who had no idea where they were going and what they were going to do, now figured it out and were horrified. To be constantly an instrument of violence, a constant participant in evil! “After all, this is not given to everyone and not right away. After all, you trample on other people’s destinies, but inside something stretches, bursts - and you can’t live like this anymore! And very late, but people still start to break out, call themselves sick, get certificates, leave for a lower salary, take off their shoulder straps - but just to leave, leave, leave! And the rest, then, got involved? And the rest, therefore, have gotten used to it, and their fate already seems normal to them. And certainly useful. And even honorable. But some people didn’t even need to get involved: they were like that from the very beginning.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Archipelago GULAG, vol.2, Moscow 1988, p.494

These words of Solzhenitsyn about those who failed to “fight back”, who feel that they “cannot live like this any longer”, and only want to “leave, leave, leave”, can easily be attributed to Ivan Chistyakov. And the diary he left gives us a unique opportunity to understand what the person who found himself in his role thought and felt.

“Call and go...”

It was not of his own free will that Chistyakov ended up at the end of the world to command a platoon of VOKhR riflemen, who were supposed to escort prisoners to work, guard the perimeter of camps, escort trains and catch fugitives.
From now on, every day he spends on Bama will be imbued with one desire: to get out of the nightmare in which he found himself. And he never tires of describing it: a very difficult climate, disgusting housing, where at night from the cold his hair sticks to his forehead, lack of a bathhouse, normal food, a cold that constantly torments him, pain in the stomach:

“I have no desire to serve in the army, much less in BAM. But what should I do? It would be warm though in the room where you can relax. And this is not the case. One side is warmed by a potbelly stove, and the other is frozen. Some kind of carelessness is developing, okay, somehow. And every day you live is a piece of life that could be lived, and not vegetated.”

Chistyakov commands a security platoon, he is the lowest command link in this system, and he feels the severity of his position on two sides: on the one hand, rude, illiterate, drunken shooters, many of whom are also prisoners (sentenced to short terms) or former prisoners.

“There’s no one to say a word with here, you can’t talk to a soldier, and you can’t talk to riflemen either, you get used to it and you’re no longer a commander. We are a simple filly, and upon completion of construction we will quietly leave the arena. The whole or greater burden of construction lies with us, the team riflemen and platoon commanders...”

On the other hand, he is under pressure from his Chekist superiors, who were transferred to BAM from and went through the school of “Solovetsky, not Soviet” power there (a saying that was born in the Solovetsky camp and in long years survived him); a school whose methods have now spread throughout the entire Gulag system. Varlam Shalamov writes about what this power is like, what cruel methods it acts towards prisoners (and this is what Chistyakov had to face at BAM), analyzing his own camp experience in the early 30s:

“After all, someone shot those three fugitives, whose corpses - it was winter - were frozen and stood near the watch for three whole days, so that the camp inmates were convinced of the futility of the escape. After all, someone gave the order to expose these frozen corpses for teaching? After all, the prisoners were put - in the same North, which I traveled all over - they were put “on mosquitoes”, on a stump naked for refusing to work, for failure to fulfill the production quota” V. Shalamov, ibid., p.43

Against the background of such evidence, it becomes obvious that the role that Chistyakov should play here in Bamlag cannot but cause deep disgust, and in his diary he writes about this quite frankly.

“The night brings us anxiety, escapes and murders. Autumn night Help me out, at least be my dear protection to the prisoner. So today two escaped. Interrogation, chase, reports, headquarters, part 3, and instead of rest, the night brings excitement and nightmare.”

He is not a security officer, he is a stranger here, a slave, so from time to time reflection awakens in him, and he remembers “how many... he increased his sentence. No matter how hard you try to be calm, sometimes it will break through. Arrest anyone."

He is struck by the monstrous conditions in which prisoners engaged in hard labor on the construction of the railway are kept.

“Let's go to the barracks... Bare bunks, cracks everywhere, snow on the sleeping people, no firewood...
A crowd of moving people. Intelligent, thinking, specialists. Rags of dirt from the ground... They don’t sleep at night, they spend the day at work, often in thin boots, in bast shoes without mittens, eating cold food in a quarry. In the evening it’s cold again in the barracks, delirium again at night. Involuntarily you remember home and warmth. Involuntarily, everyone and everything will be to blame... The camp administration does not care about the s/c. The result is refusals... and the s/c is right - after all, they are asking for the minimum, the minimum that we must give, we are obliged to. Funds have been allocated for this. But our randomness, sloppiness, our reluctance, or God knows what else, to work...”

In the notes he made shortly after his arrival at BAM, notes of sympathy for those whom he was forced to protect are still strong. He understands why people refuse to go to work and try to escape whenever possible.

“They sent young children: lousy, dirty, undressed. There is no bathhouse, no, because you cannot overspend 60 rubles. Which will be 1 kopeck per person. They talk about fighting escapes. They look for reasons, use weapons, without seeing these reasons in themselves. What is there inertia, bureaucracy or sabotage? People are barefoot, undressed, and everything is available in the warehouse. They don’t give it to those who want and will work, citing the fact that they will waste it. So they don’t squander and don’t work, but run.”

The methods by which this construction is being carried out, the combination of chaos with indifference and ruthlessness towards people who are deprived of the most necessary things, all this causes Chistyakov’s rejection. The uniqueness of the diary is that the author describes what is happening day after day - from within the forced labor system itself.
At every step he is faced with the meaninglessness and ineffectiveness of work organized in this way. For example, the authorities do not provide prisoners with firewood, and in conditions of 50 degrees below zero, people need to somehow warm up, which means - and Chistyakov admits this - they are forced to steal and burn precious sleepers intended for construction.

“They burn sleepers and carry them in carts. Here a little, there a little, but in general they destroy thousands, they destroy so many that it’s scary to think about. The authorities either don’t want or can’t figure out that firewood is needed and that sleepers will cost more. Probably everyone, like me, doesn’t want to serve in BAM. So they don't pay attention to anything. High-ranking party members, old security officers do and work at random, giving up on everything... All discipline is based on the Revolutionary Tribunal. Chistyakov often uses the old term “revolutionary tribunal” - that is, a revolutionary tribunal created in 1917 and lasting until 1922, instead of a military tribunal , to whose trial he was subject, as a military man, on fear.”

Chistyakov expresses his dissatisfaction and irritation with the KGB authorities, who are in constant hysteria, “throwing them out of the office, growling,” because from above they are demanding from him at any cost to fulfill the construction completion plan, which is fantastic in terms of time, on almost every page of his diary. As well as disbelief in their “customized” methods of work. But expressing criticism out loud is simply dangerous:

“Try to tell me the true state of things, they’ll make you sleepy, you’ll start coughing...”

Judging by what Chistyakov describes in his diary, he behaves, in essence, the same way as prisoners, that is, he tries in every possible way to avoid carrying out meaningless orders. He realizes what the camp authorities do not understand, who

“believes that the subordinate to whom the order is given is ready and obliged to carry out this order urgently and with all his heart. In fact, not everyone is a slave. A whole number of hard-working prisoners meet any order from their boss in order to strain all their spiritual strength and not carry it out... This is a natural action of a slave. But the camp authorities, Moscow and below, for some reason think that their every order will be carried out. Every order from the highest authorities is an insult to the dignity of the prisoner, regardless of whether the order itself is useful or harmful. The prisoner’s brain is dulled by all kinds of orders, and his will is insulted” Varlam Shalamov, ibid. p. 25.

And yet, the tragedy of the situation in which Chistyakov finds himself lies in the fact that whether he wants it or not, sometimes he realizes with horror that he is “growing into BAM.” And this means that the sympathy he initially felt for the prisoners is gradually weakening, almost disappearing. Fights and murders among criminals, constant escapes for which he has to answer, all this leads to the fact that human feelings in him are dulled. Moreover, here in Bamlag there are few intelligent people among the prisoners, their time has not yet come, the 37th year of mass terror is still ahead. Of course, there were such people in Bamlag, for example, until 1934 he was there, sentenced to 10 years the famous scientist and philosopher Pavel Florensky, but in Chistyakov’s diary none of the prisoners convicted under a political article are mentioned. The main contingent is criminals, those imprisoned on domestic charges, dispossessed kulaks, caught street children - minors. These people are especially easy to decide to escape, and the situation is favorable for this: the constant movement of phalanx brigades as the construction of railway lines progresses, the absence of a stationary camp infrastructure. Chistyakov writes that he has to travel many kilometers on foot or on horseback every day. In such conditions, preventing escapes becomes almost impossible.

Women prisoners (mostly representatives of the criminal world or prostitutes) evoke in him feelings, although sometimes mixed with pity, but, above all, horror and disgust:

“There is a fight on the phalanx, women are fighting. They beat their ex... and kill them. We are powerless to help; we are prohibited from using weapons on the phalanx. We have no right to carry weapons. All of them 35Article 35 of the Criminal Code provided for punishment of up to 5 years for violating the passport regime and for those who were classified as SVE (socially harmful element). Tramps, prostitutes and other petty criminal elements, but still I feel sorry for the person. Eh, we’ll do our best, they’ll end up where we’re right, they’ll repent. The boil will break through. The devil knows what, and not the third part3 - the operational-chekist department - was responsible for all the intelligence and operational work among the prisoners and monitored the camp staff, they burn us, give us time, whether the weapon was used correctly or incorrectly, but nothing for murder. Well, okay, let the s/c beat themselves, we don’t want to get dirty in their blood.”

Tram noise

Are echoes of the life that the country lived in 1935-36 reaching the Far East in Bamlag? Chistyakov mentions several times in his diary the names of Soviet party leaders (Voroshilov, Kaganovich) and current political events. But, mainly, due to the fact that he is obliged to provide political information to his shooters based on newspaper materials. He reads to them Mikhail Kalinin’s speech about the draft of a new Soviet constitution, talks about the construction of the Moscow metro, about the international situation (mentioning Hitler). However, he himself apparently does not think too much about the meaning of these events, at least about how false in the conditions of Bamlag, which he himself describes, the very word “constitution” sounds. When Chistyakov writes in a mocking tone about the meeting taking place in the dining room in support of the beginning trial of the Trotskyist-Zinoviev bloc, it is not the show trial of the political opposition itself that evokes ridicule, but the illiterate and stupid speeches of the security officers, who do not know how to inspire and direct the thoughts of the listener.

“I and all the VOH workers are participants in the great construction project. We give our lives to build a socialist society, and what will mark all this, but nothing. They may mark it with the Revtrib...”

Chistyakov is quite typical small man early Soviet era, he just wants to be a loyal citizen. And his dreams are modest, he just wants to live normal human joys:

“I want to play sports, radio, work in my specialty, study, follow and test metal technology in practice, work in cultural society, I want theater and cinema, lectures and museums, exhibitions, I want to draw. Ride a motorcycle, or maybe sell a motorcycle and buy a rubber airplane, fly..."

But he will never have any of this again. He feels that even the modest life of a Muscovite in the 1930s that he previously led has come to an end. Moscow in the first half of the 30s - in fact a gray city, with communal apartments, crowded trams, with queues and food cards and poorly dressed people - now seems to Chistyakov the most beautiful place on earth.

“Karetno-Sadovaya appeared, the noise of the tram, the streets, pedestrians, the thaw and street cleaners cleaning the sidewalk with scrapers. It seems that it hurts in the temples. There is less than half of life left to live. But this half is crumpled BAM ohm. And no one cares about my life. How to gain the right to manage your time and life... Even the lousy fence of the Moscow outskirts seems dear and close.”

From the point of view of today, this feeling of melancholy and doom seems strange - after all, Chistyakov was called up, probably for only a year, everything is about to end, and he will return home. But he understands well where he lives, he understands that he is powerless before the authorities, who can do anything to him. And most importantly, he feels how thin the line is that separates him from those he is forced to protect. One of the most frequently repeated motifs in the diary is the anticipation of one’s own arrest. The tribunal that his superiors are threatening him with may actually convict him for unprevented escapes, and for everything else that easily falls under the article “negligence,” and leave him in the Gulag for many years. In the atmosphere of denunciations and mutual surveillance that reigns among the security officers in Bamlag, Chistyakova puts almost everything at risk. He is a “class alien”, he has been purged from the party, criticizes his superiors, disdains orders, etc. And the fact that he isolates himself from the others, does not drink with everyone else, constantly writes and draws something, is cause for concern and the suspicious attitude of the security officers towards him.

And Chistyakov gradually comes to terms with the thought of a future arrest, he even convinces himself that maybe they will give him a short sentence, and then, after serving his time, he will at least be able to return to his former life.

“You still have to get time and leave. After all, I won’t be the only one with a criminal record in the USSR. People live and will live. This is how BAM re-educated me. This corrected my thoughts. Made a criminal. I am now already a criminal, theoretically. I’m slowly sitting among the path army soldiers. I’m preparing myself and getting used to the future... Or maybe I’ll flop?”

" Get crazy…"

Perhaps the melancholy and despair that Ivan Chistyakov feels more and more during this year on Bam is intensified many times over by the fact that any other life now seems to him a mirage, and the whole world already seems like a complete Bamlag.

Gradually, a feeling of loneliness and doom, fear, takes over the author of the diary so strongly that possible death becomes almost a reality. He is increasingly having thoughts of suicide. Suicide, after the terrible cataclysms of the revolution and civil war, which became almost the fashion of those years, this choice sometimes seems to many of Chistyakov’s contemporaries to be perhaps the simplest. And Chistyakov, reporting about someone’s suicide in the camp, writes about this as a possible way out for himself.

“The shooter shot himself, meaning the shooter is a prisoner or a former prisoner. The order on this matter says that he shot himself out of fear of a new camp term, the order says he was afraid of getting a new term, but the true situation is probably different. The order is needed for moral processing. What will they write if I flop? Get crazy. Life is so precious and so pricelessly, uselessly, and cheaply lost.”

“I took out the revolver and put it to my throat. So easy you can press, hook and. And then I won’t feel anything. How easy it is to do all this. It's just like joking. And there’s nothing scary, nothing supernatural. It was like eating a spoonful of soup. I don't know what kept me from clicking. Everything is so real, everything is natural. And the hand does not tremble.”

When Chistyakov writes about suicide, he deliberately reduces the pathos and tragedy of this decision; it is not without reason that he several times uses the slang word for this, which became common during the civil war - “flop”.

And yet, although in places his diary seems almost like a suicide diary, he does not commit suicide. In this world, which for Chistyakov has narrowed to the space of a camp, he still has points of support that hold him back. This is the nature of the Far East, the taiga, the hills that he describes; the landscapes that he paints are what confronts him with the horror of Bamlag’s life.

But the main thing that holds him back, that gives him strength and the opportunity to survive on BAM, is his diary. It is dangerous to conduct it: it paints such a terrible picture, it is full of such despair, and such descriptions of what is happening in Bamlag that almost every line can serve as proof of Chistyakov’s anti-Soviet sentiments and become a reason for imprisonment. Sometimes he says this directly:

“What if the 3rd part or the political part reads these lines? They will understand from their point of view.”

But he cannot help but make his notes: “my life is in the diary.”
Ivan Chistyakov is a little man, and he says this many times, but the realization of this leads him to the fact that on the pages of the diary he (even if only on these pages) begins not only to grumble, but also to rebel against the system that swallows him. He comes to an almost Kafkaesque understanding of his powerlessness in front of the inhuman state machine, which blurs the line between freedom and unfreedom. And even to the point of tragic sarcasm, when he writes about the historical necessity of the camps:

“The path of ruin of melancholy and anger. The path of even greater insignificance and humiliation of man. But sometimes cold analysis takes effect and many things go out due to lack of fuel. There have always been prisons in history, and why, ha ha ha, should I not be in them, but only others. This camp life is necessary for some historical conditions, well, that means for me too..."

Of course, this is only a diary, but Chistyakov, Bamov’s security guard, who, albeit unwillingly, nevertheless became a cog in a huge repressive machine, in the diary defends his right to at least these entries.

In 1935, when Chistyakov was sent to BAM, Stalin uttered the famous phrase: “Life has become better, comrades, life has become more fun.” And in his diary, this little man, amazingly enough, without realizing it, directly objects to the all-powerful leader. Even if only in a whisper, even if secretly, Chistyakov utters such a terrible and so important phrase for Russia:

“In the system of the state, a person is nothing as a person.”

Man's destiny

The further fate of the diary author, apparently, unfolded as he predicted. In 1937, Chistyakov was arrested, but he was probably not sentenced to a very long term, otherwise in 1941 he would not have been able to go to the front and die - 300 kilometers from his beloved Moscow, which he was unlikely to experience again see.

We do not know where Ivan Chistyakov was in 1939, when, according to what had already been built by the hands of the prisoners whom he guarded in 1935-36, railway There were long trains with new flows to BAM. Among them was one of the best poets of the 20th century, Nikolai Zabolotsky. Years later he described BAM:

“For more than two months our mournful train dragged along the Siberian Railway. Two small icy windows under the ceiling only timidly illuminated our heated vehicle for a short time during the day. The rest of the time, a candle stub was burning in the lantern, and when there were no candles, the entire carriage was plunged into impenetrable darkness. Huddled close to each other, we lay in this primeval darkness, listening to the sound of wheels and indulging in inconsolable thoughts about our fate. In the mornings, only out of the corner of our eyes, we saw through the window the boundless expanses of Siberian fields, the endless snow-covered taiga, the shadows of villages and cities, overshadowed by columns of vertical smoke, the fantastic steep cliffs of the Baikal coast... We were taken further and further, to the Far East, to the ends of the world... In early February we arrived in Khabarovsk. They stood here for a long time. Then suddenly they pulled back, reached Volochaevka and turned from the highway to the north along the new railway line. On both sides of the road, columns of camps with their guard towers and villages of brand new gingerbread houses, built according to the same model, flashed. The kingdom of BAMA welcomed us, its new settlers. The train stopped, the bolts rattled, and we emerged from our shelters into this new world, drenched in the sun, shackled in fifty-degree cold, surrounded by visions of thin Far Eastern birches reaching into the very sky.” From the book “Strange” poetry and “strange” prose. Philological collection dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the birth of N.A. Zabolotsky (scientific editor: E.A. Yablokov, Moscow, I.E. Loschilov, Novosibirsk). – “The Fifth Country”, M., 2003, p. 13.

It is a miracle that Chistyakov’s diary, the entries in which were cut off, probably with his arrest, was somehow preserved, did not fall into the hands of the NKVD officers, was not thrown out and destroyed, and that it was possible to send it to Moscow. Thanks to this, another voice of a lonely man who lived in a terrible era has reached us.

In fact, GULAG is an acronym consisting of the initial letters of the Soviet institution"Main Directorate of Camps and Prisons". This organization was engaged in maintaining and providing everything necessary for people who once violated Soviet law and suffered severe punishment for this.

Prison camps in Soviet Russia began to be created with 1919 years. They contained those convicted of criminal and political crimes. This institution was directly subordinate to Cheka and was located mostly in the Arkhangelsk region and with 1921 year was called "Northern Special Purpose Camps",abbreviation" Elephant". With the growth of the fifth column (which was actively fueled from abroad, just as in our time), a number of measures were taken in the young Soviet Republic as a result of which it was created in 1930 year "The Main Directorate of Forced Labor Camps". Throughout its relatively short existence in 26 served their sentences in these camps for years 8 million people. A huge number of whom were imprisoned on political charges (although most of them were imprisoned for business).
If we compare the most terrible Stalinist times and modern American democracy, it turns out that there are many more people in American prisons than in the most severe years of repression.However, for some reason no one cares about this.

Prisoners of forced labor camps received Active participation in the construction of bridges, mines, canals, roads, huge industrial enterprises and even entire cities.

The most famous construction projects in which prisoners took part:

Nakhodka city

Vorkuta city

City of Komsomolsk-on-Amur

Tsimlyanskaya HPP

Tunnel to Sakhalin Island (not completed)

Nizhny Tagil Iron and Steel Works

Volga-Don Canal

White Sea-Baltic Canal

Dzhezkazgan city

Ukhta city

Sovetskaya Gavan city

Zhigulevskaya HPP

Volzhskaya HPP (deciphering Hydroelectric power station)

Railway tracks in the north of the USSR

Norilsk Mining and Metallurgical Plant

Moscow Canal

The largest GULAG assemblies

Ukhtizhemlag

Ustvymlag

Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp (SLON)

Sevzheldorlag

SVITL

Prorvlag

Perm camps (Usollag, Visheralag, Cherdynlag, Nyroblag, etc.), Pechorlag

Norilsklag (Norilsk ITL)

Kraslag

Kisellag

Intalag

Dmitrovlag (Volgolag)

Dzhezkazganlag

Vyatlag

Belbaltlag

Berlag

Bamlag

ALGERIA (transcript: Akmola camp for wives of traitors to the Motherland)

Khabarlag

Ukhtpechlag

Taezlag

Siblag

Svirlag

Peczheldorlag

Ozerlag

Lokchimlag

Kotlas ITL

Karaganda ITL (Karlag)

Dubravlag

Dzhugjurlag

Dallag

Vorkutlag (Vorkuta ITL)

Bezymyanlag

If you look at Wikipedia, you can read interesting facts there. For example, in the Gulag there was 2000 special commandant's office, 425 colonies 429 camps. Most prisoners were in 1950 year, then he was detained there 2 million 561 thousand people (for comparison in USA V 2011 were in prison for a year 2 million 261 thousand Human). The saddest year GULAG was 1941 when people died in places not so distant 352 thousands of people, which was essentially about a quarter of all convicts. For the first time, the number of prisoners in the Gulag exceeded a million people in 1939 year, which means that in a “terrible” 1937 less than a million people were imprisoned in the year, for comparison, you can take another look at the figures on the number of prisoners in the “Empire of Good” for 2011 year and be a little surprised, and also start asking liberals questions that are uncomfortable for them. The camp system included institutions for minors, where juvenile delinquents could be sent starting from 12 years.

IN 1956 year GULAG was renamed " Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Colonies", and after a short time in 1959 year was once again renamed " Main Directorate of Prisons".

Documentary film about the Gulag

GULAG is an abbreviation made up of the initial letters of the name Soviet organization“Main Directorate of Camps and Places of Detention,” which was responsible for the detention of people who had violated Soviet law and were convicted for it.

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 on Soviet Union radio stations “Voice of America”, “Freedom”, “Free Europe”, “Deutsche Welle”, thanks to which soviet people were more or less aware of Stalin's terror. In the USSR, the book was published openly in 1990.

GULAG (1930–1960), created in the system of the OGPU - NKVD of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps, a symbol of lawlessness, slave labor and arbitrariness in Soviet society of the Stalinist era.

The Soviet prison camp system began to take shape in the years Civil War. From the first years of its existence, a feature of this system was the fact that for criminal offenders there were only places of detention (subordinate to the Main Directorate of Compulsory Labor of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the RSFSR and the Central Punitive Department of the People's Commissariat of Justice of the RSFSR - ordinary prisons and forced labor camps), and for political opponents of the Bolshevik regime - other places of detention (the so-called "political isolation wards", as well as the Directorate of Solovetsky Special Purpose Camps created in the early 1920s, which were under the jurisdiction of the state security bodies of the Cheka - OGPU).

In the context of accelerated industrialization and collectivization of agriculture in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the scale of repression in the country increased sharply. There was a need for a quantitative increase in the number of places where prisoners were held, as well as for a wider involvement of prisoners at industrial construction sites and for the colonization of sparsely populated, economically undeveloped regions of the USSR. On July 11, 1929, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR adopted a resolution "On the use of labor of criminal prisoners", according to which the maintenance of all prisoners sentenced to a term of 3 years and above was transferred to the OGPU, in whose system the Main Directorate of Camps (GULAG) was formed in April of the following year. All large forced labor camps (ITL), according to the decree, were to be transferred from the NKVD to the GULAG, new camps were ordered to be created only in remote, sparsely populated areas. Such camps were entrusted with the task of complex “exploitation of natural resources through the use of labor deprived of liberty.”

The network of Gulag camps soon covered all the northern, Siberian, Central Asian and Far Eastern regions of the country. Already in 1929, the Administration of Northern Camps for Special Purposes (USEVLON) was formed, which was engaged in the development of the Pechora coal basin, with its headquarters in Kotlas; Far Eastern ITL with control location in

Khabarovsk and the area of operation covering the entire south of the Far Eastern Territory; Siberian ITL with management in Novosibirsk. In 1930, the Kazakhstan ITL (Alma-Ata) and the Central Asian ITL (Tashkent) were added to them. At the end of 1931, the construction of the White Sea-Baltic waterway was transferred from the People's Commissariat of Transport to the OGPU and the White Sea-Baltic ITL was formed. In the spring of 1932, the North-Eastern ITL (Magadan) was created to accommodate Dalstroy; In the fall, the OGPU was entrusted with the construction of the Moscow-Volga canal and the Baikal-Amur railway and, accordingly, the Dmitrovsky and Baikal-Amur ITL near Moscow were organized.

The total number of prisoners in the Gulag camps grew rapidly. On July 1, 1929 there were about 23 thousand of them, a year later - 95 thousand, and a year later - 155 thousand people. On January 1, 1934, the number of prisoners was already 510 thousand people. excluding those on the way.

The liquidation of the OGPU and the formation of the NKVD of the USSR in 1934 led to the fact that all places of detention in the country were transferred to the Gulag of the NKVD of the USSR. To the 13 camps adopted from the OGPU in 1935, Sarov and Akhunsky ITL were added, and the total number of prisoners exceeded 725 thousand people.

Forest camps did not require large investments for arrangement, survived all reorganizations and continued to operate until the day the Gulag was liquidated.

Creation of the camp system

The camp system began to take shape during the Civil War.

The main principle of the prison-camp system was that criminal offenders were kept in certain places of detention, which were subordinate to the Main Directorate of Compulsory Labor, and political criminals of the Bolshevik regime were kept in “political isolation cells”.

Everyone knows that the situation in the country in the late 1920s and early 1930s was extremely difficult. Thanks to accelerated industrialization and collectivization of agriculture, the scale of repression used in the country has sharply increased. Naturally, there was an urgent need to increase the number of places for holding prisoners.

On July 11, 1929, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR adopted a resolution “On the use of labor of criminal prisoners,” according to which the maintenance of all those sentenced to a term of 3 years or more was transferred to the OGPU. In April 1930, the Main Directorate of Camps (GULAG) appeared.

According to the decree, everything is corrected - labor camps were to be transferred from the NKVD to the GULAG. But still a small number of camps were to appear in remote, sparsely populated areas. Lawlessness reigned in the camps, basic human rights were not respected, and severe punishments were applied for the slightest violation of the regime. Prisoners worked for free on the construction of canals, roads, industrial and other facilities in the country. The main goal of such camps is to develop natural resources through the labor of people deprived of their freedom. According to the project, after serving their sentence, people were proposed to be left in the areas adjacent to the camps. Prisoners who performed well at work or distinguished themselves by exemplary behavior were offered to be transferred “to a free settlement.” The Gulag camp system covered many regions of the country - northern, Siberian, Central Asian, and Far Eastern.

The number of prisoners in the Gulag camps grew every year. The number of prisoners on July 1, 1929 was about 23 thousand people, in 1930 - 95 thousand, by 1931 - 155 thousand people, by January 1, 1934 - 510 thousand people. During the years of great terror, the number of Gulag prisoners grew rapidly, despite the fact that the death penalty was applied to them - execution. Let’s compare, for example: in July 1937, there were 788 thousand prisoners in the camps; in April 1938, the total number exceeded 2 million people. The number of prisoners kept growing and later it was decided to organize five new forced labor camps, and later another thirteen special logging camps. The sharp rise in the number of convicts and the increase in the number of camps led to the fact that the Gulag could not cope with its primary tasks. Subordinate to the NKVD were all the forced labor camps of the Gulag, which specialized in agriculture and fishing; as well as nine more special production departments and departments.

Consider the Gulag forced labor camp. As a rule, the abbreviation “GULAG” refers to the entire apparatus of suppression, including prisons, as well as the system of ideological propaganda.

In the USSR there were the following GULAG units:

Akmola camp for wives of traitors to the Motherland (ALZHIR), Bezymyanlag, Belbaltlag, Vorkutlag (Vorkuta ITL), Dallag, Dzhezkazganlag, Dzhugdzhurlag, Dmitrovlag (Volgolag), Karaganda ITL (Karlag), Kotlas ITL, Lokchimlag, Norilsklag (Norilsk ITL), Ozerlag, Perm camps (Usollag, Cherdynlag, Nyroblag, etc.), Pechorlag, Pechzheldorlag, Prorvlag, Svirlag, SVITL, Sevzheldorlag, Siblag, Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp (SLON), Taezhlag, Ukhtpechlag, Khabarla. Each of the listed camp administrations included a number of camps and camps.

How did you end up in the Gulag?

On the eve of arrest

An arrest snatches a person from his usual life unexpectedly, sometimes leaving his relatives with just a few things as a keepsake, symbols of his former prosperity: tableware, a wall rug, a match holder, a hunting measure for gunpowder... And a feeling of confusion, misunderstanding - for what?

The reason for the arrest could be anything: non-proletarian origin, a handful of ears of corn collected on a collective farm field, related or friendly relations with someone already arrested, “violation of passport regulations”, even being late for work.

Any careless word spoken not only in front of strangers, but also among friends, could cost one’s life. The country was overrun with secret security agents - seksots - who regularly supplied intelligence reports, which were also sufficient grounds for arrest. In the “freest country” in the world, denunciation was elevated to the rank of a civic virtue.

"Arrests are classified according to different criteria: night and day; domestic, official, travel; primary and repeated; dismembered and group. Arrests vary in the degree of surprise required, in the degree of expected resistance (but in tens of millions of cases no resistance was expected, just like there was no one).Arrests vary according to the seriousness of the search; according to the need to make an inventory for confiscation, typing up rooms or apartments; according to the need to arrest the wife along with the husband, and send the children to an orphanage, or the rest of the family into exile, or also old people to the camp." (A. I. Solzhenitsyn “The Gulag Archipelago”)

During the search, operatives confiscated all documents: passports, identification cards, student cards, even travel documents. An inventory of confiscated items was compiled. Some of the confiscated items could then be found in the homes of the OGPU-NKVD workers themselves or in “random things” stores. “Things of no value” were destroyed, just as the manuscripts and notebooks of the outstanding biologist N.I. Vavilov were destroyed, while the flintlock pistol and two rifle cartridges found during the search were handed over to the NKVD warehouse.

It is unlikely that state security officials understood who Vavilov was and could determine the value of his scientific material. Most often, people who had several classes of education went to work in the authorities primary school. For them, this was a real opportunity, without having a specialty, to climb the social ladder, to provide for themselves financially, to have something that was unattainable for ordinary Soviet citizens. Each employee of the punitive authorities had to sign an obligation to keep all information and data about their work in the strictest confidence.

Prison - investigation - sentence

Over time, investigative methods have been developed down to the smallest detail. The investigation became a conveyor belt, where threats and torture alternated with intimate conversations, imprisonment in a punishment cell with offers of cooperation.

"... One must think that there was no such list of tortures and humiliations that would be handed over to the investigators in printed form... But it was simply said... that all measures and means are good, since they are aimed at a high goal; that the prison doctor should interfere as little as possible with progress of the investigation. Probably they arranged a comradely exchange of experience, “learned from the advanced”; well, “material interest” was declared - increased pay for night hours, bonuses for short investigation times...” (A. I. Solzhenitsyn “The Gulag Archipelago”)

At the end of the investigation, the arrested man awaited trial, at which he hoped to prove the absurdity of the charges brought against him. He had no idea that an indictment had already been sent to the “appropriate authorities,” and that extrajudicial bodies—the Special Meeting or the local “troika”—would pass a verdict in absentia on the basis of the protocols, without a trial, without questioning the accused. On a daily basis, secretaries sometimes signed hundreds of ready-made forms for extracts from the minutes of meetings of extrajudicial bodies, on which the word “shoot” was written. The verdict was final. Those sentenced to the “highest measure of social protection” were first collected into one cell, then taken from the death chamber at night to basements or taken to special training grounds and shot there. In Moscow, mass burials of those executed were carried out at the NKVD training ground in Butovo, Kommunarka, at the Donskoye and Vagankovskoye cemeteries, and on the territory of the Yauzskaya hospital. According to official sources, only in Moscow and the Moscow region in 1921 - 1953. About 35 thousand people were shot. One of the hundreds of thousands of victims of bloody tyranny was the Petrograd teacher E. P. Zarudnaya, the mother of six children. Her officer husband emigrated from Russia immediately after the revolution. This gave rise to accusing her of having connections with the White Guards during the Civil War. In 1921, in Omsk, she was arrested and shot the same year. The children were saved - with the help of the American consul, they were taken to Japan, and from there to America.

The economic role of the Gulag

A. I. Solzhenitsyn wrote in Chapter V: “The economic need manifested itself, as always, openly and greedily: the state, which decided to grow stronger in a short time (here three-quarters of the work is done in a timely manner, as in the White Sea!) and without consuming anything from the outside, needs there was a workforce:

a) extremely cheap, or better yet, free;

b) unpretentious, ready to move from place to place any day, free from family, requiring no organized housing, no schools, no hospitals, and for some time, no kitchen or bathhouse.

It was possible to obtain such labor only by swallowing one’s own sons.”

By the early 1930s, prison labor was seen as an economic resource. A resolution of the Council of People's Commissars in 1929 ordered the OGPU to organize new camps for holding prisoners in remote areas of the country, for the colonization of these areas, as well as the development of the exploitation of their natural resources through the use of prison labor.

Joseph Stalin expressed a clearer attitude of the authorities towards those deprived of liberty as an economic resource. In 1938, he spoke at a meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and stated the following about the then existing practice of early release of prisoners: “We are doing something bad, we are disrupting the work of the camps. These people, of course, need release, but from the point of view of the state economy this is Badly…"

Prisoners who were held in the Gulag between 1930 and 1950 built large industrial and transport facilities, such as:

· Canals: White Sea-Baltic Canal named after Stalin, Canal named after Moscow, Volga-Don Canal named after Lenin

· HPPs: Volzhskaya, Zhigulevskaya, Uglichskaya, Rybinskaya, Kuibyshevskaya, Nizhnetulomskaya, Ust-Kamenogorskaya, Tsimlyanskaya, etc.

· Metallurgical enterprises: Norilsk and Nizhny Tagil MK, etc.);

· Objects of the Soviet nuclear program

Many Soviet cities were built with the help of the labor of Gulag prisoners: Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Sovetskaya Gavan, Magadan, Dudinka, Vorkuta, Ukhta, Inta, Pechora, Molotovsk, Dubna, Nakhodka

Prisoners also worked in agricultural work, mining and logging. According to some estimates, the Gulag accounted for an average of three percent of the gross national product.

The head of the Gulag, Nasedkin, wrote on May 13, 1941: “A comparison of the cost of agricultural products in the camps and state farms of the NKSKH of the USSR showed that the cost of production in the camps significantly exceeds the state farm.”

After Stalin's death and the mass amnesty of 1953, the construction of many facilities was not completed. Over the years thereafter, the Gulag system gradually withdrew and finally ceased to exist in 1960.

The Soviet Gulag was a massive system of forced labor camps. Throughout its history, about 18 million people passed through prisons and Gulag camps. Under Stalin, prisoners in forced labor camps became important resource intensive development of many industries, including the country's transport infrastructure, mining and timber industry. Millions of residents went through the hell of the Gulag, many were not guilty of any crime.

The term "GULAG" is an acronym for the Soviet bureaucratic institution, the Main Directorate of Camps, which administered the Soviet forced labor system during Stalin's reign. Concentration camps were created in the Soviet Union shortly after the 1917 revolution, but the system really grew to gigantic proportions thanks to Stalin, with the goal of turning the USSR into a modern industrial state, as well as the collectivization of agriculture in the early 1930s.

A network of Gulag camps existed throughout the USSR, but the largest of them were located in the most extreme geographical and climatic regions of the country: Siberia and southern Central Asia. Prisoners were employed in various fields of economic activity, but their work was, as a rule, unskilled, and the labor was manual and economically ineffective. A combination of outbreaks of violence, extreme climatic conditions, hard labor, meager food rations and unsanitary living conditions led to extremely high mortality rates in the camps.

By the end of 1940, under the authority of the Main Directorate of Camps there were more than 50 camps and at least 1000 points and departments, more than 400 colonies, 50 colonies for minors, 90 houses where babies were sent after the birth of imprisoned women.

After Stalin's death in 1953, the Gulag system began to decline radically, but forced labor camps and political prisoners continued to function in the USSR until the Gorbachev era.

Life of Gulag prisoners

In the camps of the Gulag system, there were three different regimes for keeping prisoners: general, reinforced and strict.

Most of the Gulag prisoners were kept under general conditions. It was allowed to unconvoy them and involve them in work at the lower level in the GULAG apparatus, in its administrative and economic part. Also, general security prisoners were often involved in convoy and guard duty, in order to protect and supervise other prisoners.

The enhanced regime of detention involved the use of prisoners mainly in general work. There were repeat thieves, robbers and others convicted of dangerous crimes.

A strict regime was observed for criminals convicted of premeditated murders, robberies, and escapes from places of punishment. High-security prisoners were guarded especially strictly: they could not be unescorted, such prisoners were sent in most cases to heavy physical work, the system of punishments for refusal to work or other violations of the camp regime was much stronger than in other regimes.

Political prisoners were also subject to strict conditions, since the crimes provided for by the main political article of that time - Art. 58 of the Criminal Code - were also considered especially dangerous.

Devaluation of prisoners' lives

In the eyes of the authorities, the prisoner of the camp had almost no importance. Until now, the exact number of deaths in the Gulag camps has not been established. Those who died from hunger, cold and hard labor were easily replaced by new prisoners.

When not working, Gulag prisoners were typically kept in a camp area surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire, closely guarded by armed soldiers in guard towers.

The living area consisted of a series of overcrowded, smelly, poorly heated barracks. Life in the camps was brutal and cruel. Prisoners fought for access to any benefits, and violence among them was common.

Even if they survived the famine, did not die from illness or hard work, they could always succumb to the tyranny and violence of the camp guards. All the time, the prisoners were under the close attention of “informers” - prisoners who collaborated with the camp leadership, watched and reported on their neighbors in the barracks.

Gulag prisoners received food based on how much work they did. The full ration in the camp barely provided a chance to even just survive. In the event that a prisoner did not complete his daily work quota, he received less food. If a prisoner consistently did not meet his work quotas, then he had no choice but to die of hunger.

Work in the Gulag

The working day of Gulag prisoners could reach 14 hours a day. Typical labor in the camps was tedious physical work. Prisoners were forced to work in the most extreme climatic conditions, and could spend their days logging, using hand saws and axes, or digging in the frozen ground with primitive picks. Others mined coal or copper by hand, and these prisoners often died from fatal lung diseases due to constant inhalation of ore dust. The prisoners' food was insufficient to withstand such difficult work.

Built between 1931 and 1933, the White Sea-Baltic Canal was the first major construction project involving Gulag prisoners. More than 100,000 prisoners dug a canal about 150 kilometers long in just 20 months, using simple picks, shovels and homemade wheelbarrows in their work. Initially celebrated by both the Soviet and Western press, the canal actually turned out to be too narrow to accommodate a sufficient number of seagoing vessels. During the construction of the White Sea Canal, according to various estimates, about 10,000-13,000 prisoners died. Some researchers claim that the actual death toll was more than 120,000.

Kolyma instilled fear in the Gulag prisoners. The prisoners knew that this was a place where winter lasted 12 months a year. Kolyma was so far away that it was impossible to get there with the help of ground transport. Prisoners sent to Kolyma, having traveled through the entire USSR by train, could wait several months to be transported to the camp by water when the tracks were clear of ice. Then they were transferred to ships and sent to work related to gold mining. According to the testimony of prisoners, surviving in Kolyma was much more difficult than in any other camp in the Gulag system.

Women in the Gulag

Women in the Gulag camps had no easier time than men. Very often they were tortured and raped by guards and male prisoners. Some of them, for the purpose of self-preservation, chose “husbands” for themselves so that they would protect them from attacks while serving their sentences. Some of them were pregnant upon arrival at the camp or became pregnant while in the camp. Sometimes the Gulag system was lenient to women and granted amnesty to pregnant women and women with young children.

But most often, women in labor were given a short break from forced labor, and after giving birth, Gulag officials took the children from their mothers and placed them in special orphanages. Often these mothers were never able to find their children after leaving the camp.

Gulag. Women's camp