In Soviet times, for obvious reasons, it was not customary to talk or write about the children of the Gulag. School textbooks and other books told more and more about grandfather Lenin at children’s parties, about the touching care with which domestic security officers and Felix Edmundovich personally welcomed street children, about Makarenko’s activities.
Slogan “Thank you to Comrade Stalin for our happy childhood!” was replaced by something else - “All the best goes to the children!”, but the situation has not changed.
Now, of course, everything is different: both the situation with information and the state’s attitude towards children. Problems are not hushed up; attempts are being made to somehow solve them. The Russian President admitted that almost five million homeless or street children are a threat to the country's national security.
There are no universal recipes for solving this problem. It is unlikely that the experience of the security officers, who created only a few dozen model colonies, will help here; in reality, by the way, everything there didn’t look quite the same as in the film “A Start to Life.”
All the more unacceptable is the experience of Stalin’s struggle against street children using repressive methods. However, to know about what happened in the 1930s. with children who find themselves on the street or who have lost their parents (most often due to the fault of the state), of course, it is necessary. It is necessary to talk about children's destinies, distorted by the Stalinist regime, in school lessons.

In the 1930s There were about seven million street children. Then the problem of homelessness was solved simply - the Gulag helped.
These five letters have become an ominous symbol of life on the verge of death, a symbol of lawlessness, hard labor and human lawlessness. The inhabitants of the terrible archipelago turned out to be children.
It is not known exactly how many there were in various penitentiary and “educational” institutions in the 1920s-1930s. However, statistical data on some related age categories of prisoners have been preserved. For example, it is estimated that in 1927, 48% of all inmates of prisons and camps were young people (16 to 24 years old). As we see, this group also includes minors.
IN Convention On the rights of the child, the preamble states: “A child is every human being under the age of 18.”
The convention was adopted later. But in the Stalinist USSR, other legal formulations were in use. Children who found themselves under the care of the state or sent by the state to atone for their guilt, mostly fictitious, were divided into categories:
1) camp children(children born in custody);
2) kulak children(peasant children who managed to escape deportation during the forced collectivization of the village, but who were later caught, convicted and sent to camps);
3) children of enemies of the people (those whose parents were arrested under Article 58); in 1936-1938 children over 12 years of age were condemned by a Special Meeting under the wording “member of the family of a traitor to the motherland” and sent to camps, as a rule, with terms ranging from 3 to 8 years; in 1947-1949 children of “enemies of the people” were punished more severely: 10-25 years;
4) spanish children; they most often ended up in orphanages; during the purge of 1947-1949. these children, already grown up, were sent to camps with sentences of 10-15 years - for “anti-Soviet agitation.”
To this list compiled by Jacques Rossi, one can add the children of besieged Leningrad; children of special migrants; children who lived near the camps and observed camp life every day. All of them were somehow involved in the Gulag...

The first camps on Bolshevik-controlled territory appeared in the summer of 1918.
Decrees of the Council of People's Commissars of January 14, 1918 and March 6, 1920 abolished “courts and imprisonment for minors.”
However, already in 1926, Article 12 of the Criminal Code allowed children from the age of 12 to be tried for theft, violence, mutilation and murder.
The decree of December 10, 1940 provided for the execution of children from 12 years of age for “damage ... to railways or other tracks.”
As a rule, it was envisaged that minors would serve their sentences in children’s colonies, but often children also ended up in “adult” colonies. This is confirmed by two orders “on Norilsk construction and the NKVD ITL” dated July 21, 1936 and February 4, 1940.
The first order is about the conditions for the use of “s/c minors” in general work, and the second is about the isolation of “s/c minors” from adults. Thus, the cohabitation lasted four years.
Did this happen only in Norilsk? No! Numerous memories confirm this. There were also colonies where boys and girls were kept together.

These boys and girls not only steal, but also kill (usually collectively). Children's correctional labor colonies, where minor thieves, prostitutes and murderers of both sexes are kept, are turning into hell. Children under 12 years old also end up there, since it often happens that a caught eight- or ten-year-old thief hides the name and address of his parents, but the police do not insist and write down in the protocol - “age about 12 years old,” which allows the court to “legally” convict the child and sent to the camps. The local authorities are glad that there will be one less potential criminal in the area entrusted to them.
The author met many children in the camps who looked to be 7-9 years old. Some still did not know how to pronounce individual consonants correctly.

From the history course we know that during the years of war communism and NEP, the number of street children in Soviet Russia increased to 7 million people. It was necessary to take the most drastic measures.
A.I. Solzhenitsyn noted: “Somehow they cleared away (and not with education, but with lead) the clouds of homeless youth who in the twenties besieged the city’s asphalt boilers, and since 1930 they all suddenly disappeared.” It's not hard to guess where.
Many people remember documentary footage about the construction of the White Sea Canal. Maxim Gorky, who admired the construction, said that this was an excellent way to re-educate prisoners. And they tried to re-educate children who stole a carrot or several ears of corn from a collective farm field in the same way - through backbreaking labor and inhuman living conditions.
In 1940, the Gulag united 53 camps with thousands of camp departments and points, 425 colonies, 50 colonies for minors, 90 “baby homes”. But these are official data. We don't know the true numbers. They didn’t write or talk about the Gulag back then. And even now some of the information is considered closed.

Did the war interfere with the re-education of young residents of the Land of Soviets? Alas, it not only did not interfere, but even contributed. Law is law!
And on July 7, 1941 - four days after Stalin’s notorious speech, in the days when German tanks were rushing towards Leningrad, Smolensk and Kyiv - another decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Council was issued: to judge children with the use of all measures of punishment - even in those cases when they commit crimes not intentionally, but through negligence.
So, during the Great Patriotic War, the Gulag was replenished with new “youngsters”. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, “the decree on the militarization of the railways drove through the tribunals crowds of women and teenagers, who most of all worked on the railways during the war years, and who, having not undergone barracks training before, were most late and violated.”
Today it is no secret to anyone who organized the mass repressions. There were many performers, they were changed from time to time, yesterday's executioners became victims, and the victims became executioners. Only the main manager, Stalin, remained permanent.
All the more ridiculous is the famous slogan that adorned the walls of schools, pioneer rooms, etc.: “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!”
In 1950, when a new school, No. 4, opened in Norilsk, which was literally surrounded by barbed wire. It was built, of course, by prisoners. At the entrance there was a sign:

Warmed by Stalin's care,
Countries of Soviet children,
Accept as a gift and as a sign of greetings
You are a new school, friends!

However, the enthusiastic children who entered the school truly perceived it as a gift from Comrade Stalin. True, on the way to school they saw how “security guards with machine guns and dogs were taking people to and from work, and the column with its long gray mass filled the entire street from beginning to end.” It was an ordinary sight that surprised no one. You can probably get used to this too.
And this was also part of the state policy: let them watch! And they looked, and were afraid - and were silent.
There was another school, but without new desks, luxurious chandeliers and a winter garden. It was a school set up right in the barracks, where half-starved “youngsters” aged 13-16 only learned to read and write. And that's the best case scenario.

Efrosinia Antonovna Kersnovskaya, who was imprisoned in various prisons and camps, recalled the children she met along her Gulag path.

Who knows, I'm innocent! But children? In Europe they would be “children,” but here... Could Valya Zakharova, eight years old, and Volodya Turygin, a little older, work as ring workers in Suiga, that is, carry mail, walking back and forth 50 km a day - in winter, in a snowstorm? Children aged 11-12 worked in the logging area. And Misha Skvortsov, who got married at 14? However, these ones didn’t die...

Her journey to Norilsk was long. In 1941, Efrosinia Kersnovskaya found herself on the ship “Voroshilov” among the Azerbaijani “criminals”.

There are women and children here. Three completely ancient old women, eight women in the prime of life and about thirty children, if these skeletons covered with yellow skin lying in rows can be considered children. During the journey, 8 children had already died. The women wailed:
- I told the boss: children are going to die - he laughed! Why did you laugh...
On the lower shelves lay rows of little old men with sunken eyes, pointed noses and parched lips. I looked at the rows of dying children, at the puddles of brown sludge splashing on the floor. Dysentery. The children will die before reaching the lower reaches of the Ob, the rest will die there. In the same place where the Tom flows into the Ob on the right bank, we buried them. We - because I volunteered to dig the grave.
It was a strange funeral... For the first time I saw how they were buried without a coffin, not in a cemetery or even on the shore, but at the very edge of the water. The guard did not allow us to go higher. Both mothers knelt down, lowered and laid first the girl, then the boy, side by side. They covered their faces with one scarf, with a layer of sedge on top. The mothers stood, clutching bundles with the frozen skeletons of their children to their chests, and with eyes frozen in despair, they looked into this hole, into which water immediately began to fill.

Within Novosibirsk, Efrosinia Antonovna met with other “youngsters”, this time boys. “Their barracks were in the same area, but were fenced off.” However, the children managed to leave the barracks in search of food, “practicing theft, and, on occasion, robbery.” One can imagine that “such a program” of education made it possible to release already experienced criminals from the colony.
Already in Norilsk and once in the surgical department of the hospital, Efrosinia Antonovna saw traces of the joint detention and “education” of young children and repeat offenders.

Two wards were reserved for the treatment of syphilis. All the patients were still just boys and had to undergo surgical treatment of the anus, narrowed by healed syphilitic ulcers.

Young girls were also subjected to “education.” Here are lines from a letter dated 1951 from prisoner E.L. Vladimirova, a former literary worker at the Chelyabinsk Worker newspaper.

Staying in Soviet camps crippled the woman not only physically, but also morally. Human rights, dignity, pride - everything was destroyed. In all the bathhouses in the camps, male criminals worked; the bathhouse was entertainment for them; they also carried out the “sanitation” of women and girls; they were forced to resist.
Until 1950, men worked as servants everywhere in women's areas. Gradually, women were instilled with shamelessness, which became one of the reasons for the camp debauchery and prostitution that I observed, which became widespread.
In the village of “Bacchante” there was an epidemic of venereal diseases among prisoners and freemen.

In one of the prisons, A. Solzhenitsyn was next to children who had already received “education” from hardened criminals.

In the low semi-darkness, with a silent rustling, on all fours, like large rats, youngsters are sneaking up on us from all sides - these are just boys, there are even twelve year olds, but the code accepts even such, they have already gone through the thieves' process and are here now continue their studies with thieves. They were unleashed on us. They silently climb on us from all sides and, with a dozen hands, pull and tear from us, from under us, all our goods. We are trapped: we cannot rise, we cannot move.
Not even a minute had passed before they snatched the bag of lard, sugar and bread. Having risen to my feet, I turn to the eldest, to the godfather. The juvenile rats did not put a single crumb in their mouth, they have discipline.

Children were transported to the place of detention together with adults. Efrosinia Kersnovskaya recalls:

I look at my fellow travelers. Juvenile delinquents? No, still children. Girls are on average 13-14 years old. The eldest, about 15 years old, already gives the impression of a really spoiled girl. Not surprisingly, she has already been to a children's correctional colony and has already been “corrected” for the rest of her life.
The girls look at their older friend with fear and envy. They have already been convicted under the law “on ears of grain”; some were caught stealing handfuls and some even handfuls of grain. All are orphans or almost orphans: the father is at war; there is no mother - or they are driven away to work.
The smallest is Manya Petrova. She is 11 years old. The father was killed, the mother died, the brother was taken into the army. It’s hard for everyone, who needs an orphan? She picked onions. Not the bow itself, but the feather. They “had mercy” on her: for the theft they gave her not ten, but one year.

It happened in a transit prison in Novosibirsk. There, Efrosinia Kersnovskaya met many other “youngsters” who were in the same cell with repeat offenders. They no longer had sadness and fear. The “education” of juvenile delinquents was in good hands...

The labor of minor prisoners in Norillag has been known since 1936. These were the most difficult, unsettled, cold and hungry years in our area.
It all started with the order “on Norilsk construction and ITL NKVD” No. 168 of July 21, 1936 on the incoming labor force and its use:

6. When juvenile prisoners aged 14 to 16 years are used for general work, a 4-hour working day is established with 50% rationing - based on an 8-hour working day for a full-time worker. At the age of 16 to 17 years it is established
A 6-hour working day using 80% of the norms of a full-time worker - based on an 8-hour working day.
The rest of the time, children should be used: in school literacy classes for at least 3 hours daily, as well as in cultural and educational work.

However, as mentioned above, the isolation of children from adult prisoners began only in 1940. This is evidenced by the mentioned “Order for the Norilsk forced labor camp of the NKVD No. 68 of February 4, 1940 on the isolation of minor prisoners from adults and the creation of a completely suitable living conditions."
By 1943, there was a noticeable increase in the number of juvenile camp inmates. The order dated August 13, 1943 states:

1. Organize a Norilsk labor colony for minors at the Norilsk NKVD plant, subordinate directly to the NKVD department for combating child homelessness and neglect.

One of the zones for “youngsters” in Norilsk was located next to the women’s zone. According to the memoirs of Efrosinia Kersnovskaya, sometimes these “youngsters” staged group raids on their neighbors in order to get additional food. Efrosinia Kersnovskaya once became a victim of such a raid by boys of 13-14 years old. The security guard came to the rescue and raised the alarm.
The explanatory note to the report of the Norilsk labor colony for September-December 1943 testifies to how the colony lived and worked.

As of January 1, 1944, the colony contained 987 juvenile prisoners, all of them were housed in barracks and distributed into 8 educational groups of 110-130 people each. Due to the lack of a school and a club, there was no training for n/z [minor prisoners].
2. Labor use. Out of 987 people, up to 350 people are employed in the shops of the Norilsk plant. From the moment the colony was organized until the end of the year, up to 600 people did not work anywhere, and it was not possible to use them in any work.
Those hired to work in the workshops of the Norilsk plant do not undergo theoretical training; they are placed together with adult prisoners and civilians, which affects production discipline.
There are no premises: bathhouse-laundry, warehouse, dining room, office, school and club. As for transport, there is 1 horse allocated by the plant, which does not meet the needs of the colony. The colony is not provided with household equipment.

In 1944, the colony officially ceased to exist. But the policy of the party, which raised children in camps and prisons, has changed little. The memories of former political prisoners of Norillag have been preserved, who in 1946 were brought on ships to Dudinka along with the “young children”.

Our group from Usollag (there were many young children) arrived at the Norilsk camp in August 1946. They were delivered on a barge along with Japanese prisoners of war, like herring in a barrel. Dry rations - for three days, six hundred and fifty kilos of bread and three herrings. Most of us ate everything right away. They didn’t give us water: the guards “explained” that there was nothing to scoop from overboard, and we licked the wooden paneling and our sweat. Many died along the way.

The Norilsk children's colony, as Nina Mikhailovna Kharchenko, a former teacher, recalls, was disbanded after the rebellion of the “youngsters” (for some it ended in death). Some of the children were transferred to a camp for adults, and some were taken to Abakan.
Why did the riot happen? Yes, because “the barracks resembled barnyards... they lived from hand to mouth.”

In the Gulag there were also baby's home. Including on the territory of Norillag. In total, in 1951, there were 534 children in these homes, of which 59 children died. In 1952, 328 children should have been born, and the total number of infants would have been 803. However, documents from 1952 indicate the number 650. In other words, the mortality rate was very high.
Inhabitants of Norilsk infant homes were sent to orphanages in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. In 1953, after the Norilsk uprising, 50 women and children were sent to Ozerlag.

The children were not only directly in Norilsk. There was a punishment cell called Callargon several tens of kilometers from the village (they were shot there). The head of the camp could assign a prisoner there for up to 6 months. Apparently they couldn’t last much longer on the penalty ration - they “went to Shmitikha,” that is, to the cemetery.
In the hospital, E.A. Kersnovskaya cared for a minor self-mutilator from Callargon. He ended up there for a “terrible” crime: “he returned home without permission - he couldn’t stand the hunger.”
First, logging, then the second crime - forging a meal ticket and an extra portion of gruel. The result is Callargon. And this is surely death. The boy artificially caused deep phlegmon in his right palm by injecting kerosene into his hand with a syringe. This was an opportunity to go to the hospital. However, as a self-harmer, he was sent back with a passing convoy...
A seventh-grade student from a Latvian gymnasium was also in the camp (Kersnovskaya did not remember either his first or last name). His fault was that he shouted: “Long live free Latvia!” The result was ten years of camps.
It’s not surprising that when he found himself in Norilsk, he was horrified and tried to escape. He was caught. Usually the fugitives were killed, and the corpses were displayed in the camp department. But with this boy it was a little different: when he was taken to Norilsk, he was in terrible condition. If he had been taken to the hospital right away, he could still have been saved. But he was thrown into prison, having first been beaten.
When he finally got to the hospital, the doctors were helpless. Apparently, he received a good upbringing, because for everything, be it an injection, a heating pad, or just a straightened pillow, he barely audibly thanked:
- Mercy...
He died soon after. At the autopsy, it turned out that the poor boy’s stomach was like it was made of lace: he had digested himself...

There were children on the so-called Uranium Peninsula- in “Rybak”, a special secret camp that was not even marked on special NKVD maps - apparently for purposes of secrecy.
Recalls L.D. Miroshnikov, a former geologist at NIIIGA (21st Directorate of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs).

Five hundred prisoners were brought in hastily towards the end of the polar night. No special selection was carried out before they were sent to the secret NKVD camp, so among the convicts of “Rybak” there were even teenagers - they talk about a certain guy named Prokhor, who ended up in the camp straight from school, after a fight with the son of the district committee secretary. Prokhor was serving a five-year sentence when he was pulled out of the camp and transferred to Rybak 20.

Prokhor was not destined to return home after serving his five-year sentence. It was impossible to stay alive after working at a secret facility. Some of the prisoners died from radiation sickness, while others were loaded onto barges and drowned at the end of their work...
The exact number of children who died in Norilsk is still unknown. Nobody knows how many children the Gulag killed. The already mentioned former teacher of the Norilsk children's colony, N.M. Kharchenko, recalls that a “burial place for colonists, as well as adult prisoners, was allocated - a cemetery behind a brick factory, half a kilometer from the quarry” 21.

In addition to the colonies, there were orphanages throughout Russia. All children separated from their parents were placed there. Theoretically, after serving their sentence, they had the right to take back their sons and daughters. In practice, mothers often did not find their children, and sometimes they did not want or could not take them home (usually there was no home, often there was no work, but there was a danger of a quick new arrest).
How the children of “enemies of the people” were kept can be judged from the recollections of eyewitnesses. Nina Matveevna Vissing is Dutch by nationality. Her parents came to the USSR by invitation and after some time were arrested. We ended up in an orphanage in the city of Boguchar through some kind of orphanage. I remember a large number of children in a strange room: gray, damp, no windows, vaulted ceiling.

Our orphanage was located next to either a prison or an insane asylum and was separated by a high wooden fence with cracks. We loved watching strange people behind the fence, although we were not allowed to do so.
In the summer we were taken outside the city to the river bank, where there were two large wicker barns with gates instead of doors. The roof was leaking and there were no ceilings. This barn could accommodate a lot of children's beds. They fed us outside under a canopy. In this camp we saw our father for the first time and did not recognize him, we ran into the “bedroom” and hid under the bed in the farthest corner. Father came to us for several days in a row, taking us for the whole day so that we could get used to him.
During this time, I completely forgot the Dutch language. It was the autumn of 1940. I think with horror what would have happened to us if my father had not found us?! 22

Unhappy children, unhappy parents. The past was taken away from some, the future from others. Everyone has human rights. According to Solzhenitsyn, thanks to this policy, “children grew up completely cleansed of parental filth” 23. And the “father of all nations,” Comrade Stalin, will make sure that in a few years his students will unanimously chant: “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!”
Some women were allowed to stay in prison with their children. In the first years of Soviet power, women could be imprisoned with a child or pregnant women. Article 109 of the Correctional Labor Code of 1924 provided that “when women are admitted to correctional labor institutions, at their request, their infant children are also admitted.” But this article was not always observed.
Pregnant women gave birth to children right there in the camp.
A woman always remains a woman. “I just wanted to the point of madness, to the point of beating my head against the wall, to the point of dying for love, tenderness, affection. And I wanted a child - a creature dear and dear, for whom I would not be sorry to give my life,” this is how former Gulag prisoner Khava Volovich, who received 15 years in the camps when she was 21, explained her condition, without knowing for what .
In the event of a live birth, the mother received several meters of footcloth for the newborn. Although the newborn was not considered a prisoner (how humane that was!), he was given a separate children's ration. Mothers, i.e. nursing mothers received 400 grams of bread, black cabbage or bran soup three times a day, sometimes with fish heads.
Women were released from work only immediately before giving birth. During the day, mothers were escorted by escort to their children for feeding. In some camps, mothers stayed overnight with their children.
This is how G.M. Ivanova described the life of newborns and small children of the Gulag.

Women prisoners, convicted of domestic crimes, and with children of their own worked as nannies in the mother's barracks...
At seven o'clock in the morning the nannies woke up the children. They were pushed and kicked out of their unheated beds (to keep the children “clean”, they did not cover them with blankets, but threw them over the cribs). Pushing the children in the back with their fists and showering them with harsh abuse, they changed their undershirts and washed them with ice water. And the kids didn’t even dare cry. They just groaned like old men and hooted. This terrible hooting sound came from children's cribs all day long. Children who were supposed to be sitting or crawling lay on their backs, legs tucked up to their stomachs, and made these strange sounds, similar to a muffled moan of a pigeon. It was only possible to survive in such conditions by a miracle.

E.A. Kersnovskaya, at the request of her young mother, Vera Leonidovna, had to baptize in the cell the grandson and great-grandson of admirals Nevelsky, who had done so much for Russia. It happened in a camp near Krasnoyarsk.
Vera Leonidovna's grandfather - Gennady Ivanovich Nevelskoy (1813-1876) - explorer of the Far East, admiral. He explored and described the shores
in the Sakhalin region, discovered a strait connecting the southern part of the Tatar Strait with the Amur Estuary (Nevelskoy Strait), established that Sakhalin is an island.
The further fate of his granddaughter and great-grandson is unknown. However, it is known that in 1936-1937. the presence of children in the camps was recognized as a factor reducing the discipline and productivity of female prisoners. In the secret instructions of the NKVD of the USSR, the period of stay of a child with his mother was reduced to 12 months (in 1934 it was 4 years, later - 2 years).
Children who reached the age of one were forcibly sent to orphanages, which was noted in the mother’s personal file, but without indicating the address. Vera Leonidovna didn’t know about this yet...

The forced deportation of camp children is planned and carried out like real military operations - so that the enemy is taken by surprise. Most often this happens late at night. But it is rarely possible to avoid heartbreaking scenes when frantic mothers rush at the guards and the barbed wire fence. The zone was shaken by screams for a long time.

Among the residents of the Gulag there were also children of besieged Leningrad. E.A. Kersnovskaya remembers them.

These dystrophics are just children, they are 15-16 years old...
Tom Vasilyeva and Vera. They, together with adults, dug anti-tank ditches. During an air raid, they rushed into the forest. When the fear passed, we looked around...
Together with other girls we went to the city. And suddenly - the Germans. The girls fell to the ground and screamed. The Germans reassured us and gave us chocolate and delicious lemon cookies. When they let us go, they said: in three kilometers there is a field, and there is a field kitchen on it, hurry up. The girls ran away.
To their misfortune, they told the soldiers everything. They were not forgiven for this. It was terrible to look at these children exhausted to the limit.

Were in the Gulag and spanish children. Pavel Vladimirovich Cheburkin, also a former prisoner, spoke about them.
Cheburkin recalled how in 1938 a young Spaniard was brought to Norillag, taken from his parents. Juan was baptized into Ivan, and his surname was changed in the Russian manner - the Spaniard became Ivan Mandrakov.

When the Spanish Civil War ended with Franco's victory, Republicans began to leave their homeland. Several steamships with the Spaniards arrived in Odessa. The last of them had to stand at the roadstead for a long time - either the places of distribution throughout the Union allotted for visitors had run out, or fraternal republican solidarity had dried up...
Be that as it may, when the unfortunates were brought to Norilsk, many of them died from the camp “hospitality”... Juan, rebaptized Ivan Mandrakov, due to his age, first ended up in an orphanage, from where he fled. He became an ordinary street child, stealing food from the market...
He was assigned to Norillag, from where there was no escape.

A. Solzhenitsyn also writes about the children of Spanish Republicans.

Spanish children are the same ones who were taken out during the Civil War, but became adults after World War II. Brought up in our boarding schools, they equally melded very poorly with our lives. Many were rushing home. They were declared socially dangerous and sent to prison, and especially persistent ones - 58, part 6 - espionage for... America.

There were many such nimble children who managed to grab Article 58. Geliy Pavlov received it at the age of 12. According to the 58th, there was no age minimum at all! Dr. Usma knew a 6-year-old boy who was in prison under Article 58 - this is an obvious record.
The Gulag accepted 16-year-old Galina Antonova-Ovseenko, the daughter of the USSR plenipotentiary representative in Republican Spain. At the age of 12, she was sent to an orphanage where the children of those repressed in 1937-1938 were kept. Galina's mother died in prison, her father and brother were shot.
The story of G. Antonova-Ovseenko is reproduced by A. Solzhenitsyn.

Difficult-to-educate teenagers, the mentally retarded and juvenile delinquents were also sent to this orphanage. We waited: when we turn 16, they will give us passports and we will go to vocational schools. But it turned out that he was transferred to prison.
I was a child, I had the right to childhood. So who am I? An orphan whose living parents were taken away! A criminal who did not commit a crime. I spent my childhood in prison, my youth too. One of these days I will turn twenty.

The further fate of this girl is unknown.

Children of special settlers also became inhabitants of the Gulag. In 1941, our interlocutor Maria Karlovna Batishcheva was 4 years old. At this age, the child usually does not remember himself. But little Masha remembered the tragic night for the rest of her life.
All the inhabitants were herded like cattle into one place: screams, crying, roaring animals - and a thunderstorm. From time to time she illuminated the horror that was happening in the center of the village.
What was their fault? All of them were Germans, which means they automatically became “enemies of the people.” Then the long road to Kazakhstan. Maria Karlovna doesn’t remember how she survived in Kazakhstan, but life in the special settlement is described in the book “The Gulag: Its Builders, Inhabitants and Heroes.”

The mortality rate among children was enormous. We do not have general information, but many specific examples reveal this terrible picture.
In the Novo-Lyalinsky district, for example, in 1931. 87 children were born and 347 children died; in Garinsky, 32 were born and 73 children died in two months. In Perm, at the K plant, almost 30% of all children died in two months (August-September).
Due to the high mortality rate, homelessness has also increased. In fact, information about street children in the early years of kulak exile was not centrally recorded.
In the first year and a half of exile, the issue of education for children from among the migrants was practically not resolved and was relegated to the background.
Against this background, there was a decline in morale among the special settlers, the abandonment of many traditions, encouragement of denunciations, etc. Special settlers were practically deprived of their civil rights.

Maria Karlovna proudly talks about the fact that her grandfather was a participant in the First World War and was wounded. In the hospital, one of the princesses - the emperor's daughters - looked after him. She gave her grandfather a Bible. This relic is now kept by my brother in Germany.
Returning to the front, my grandfather fought bravely, for which he received a personalized watch from the hands of Nicholas II. He was struck with two St. George's crosses. All this lay for a long time at the bottom of the chest.
Maria, the granddaughter of the Knight of St. George, became the daughter of an “enemy of the people” for 16 years. Until the age of 20, she was expelled from everywhere - from school, from college, looked at askance, called a fascist. The passport had a stamp: special resettler.
Maria, exhausted by incessant persecution, once, already in Norilsk, threw her hated passport into the fire, hoping in this way to get rid of the mark of civil inferiority. Having reported the loss of her passport, she waited with fear for an invitation to the department. She withstood everything that the representative of the authorities shouted at her - the main thing was that there was no stigma.
She cried all the way home. Clutching her new passport to her chest, Maria was afraid to look at the new document. And only at home, having carefully opened the passport and not seeing the page with the stamp there, she sighed calmly.
Maria Karlovna Batishcheva still lives in Norilsk, is raising her great-grandson and gladly responds to invitations from schoolchildren to talk about themselves on the day of remembrance of victims of political repression.
The fate of Maria Karlovna is similar to the fate of another woman - Anna Ivanovna Shchepilova.

My father was arrested twice. In 1937 I was already six years old. After my father’s arrest, our torment began. In the village we were not allowed to live or study, considering us “the children of enemies of the people.”
When I became a teenager, I was sent to do the hardest work in the forest - cutting wood, just like grown men. Even my peers weren’t friends with me. I was forced to leave, but they didn’t hire me anywhere either. My whole life was spent in fear and torment. Now I have neither strength nor health! 33

The Gulag also had other children - those who lived next to the prisoners, but were still at home (although home most often was a barracks closet), and studied in a regular school. These are the children of the so-called Volnyashek, civilians.
Tamara Viktorovna Pichugina in 1950 was a first-grade student at Norilsk secondary school No. 3.

We were ordinary restless children, we loved to jump into the snow from roofs, slide down the slide, and play house. One day me, Larisa and Alla were playing next to the platform. Having decided to arrange our future “home”, we began to clear the platform of snow. Soon we came across two corpses. The frozen people were without felt boots, but in padded jackets with numbers. We immediately ran to the PRB [production and work block]. We knew this block well: “our prisoners” were there. Uncle Misha, Uncle Kolya... they took these corpses, I don’t know what happened next.
In general, we treated prisoners like ordinary people and were not afraid of them. For two winters, for example, after classes we ran to “our” block of the PRB. We’d run in, and it would be warm there, the stove was made from a barrel, the guard with the rifle was asleep. Our “uncles” warmed themselves there and usually drank tea. So, Uncle Misha will help us take off our felt boots, put our mittens by the stove to dry, shake off our shawl and seat us at the table. Having warmed up, we began to tell homework.
Each of them was responsible for some subject. They correct us, add, they told us so interestingly. After checking the lessons, they gave each of us 2 rubles. 25 kopecks for a cake. We ran to the stall and enjoyed the sweets.
Now I just understand that, probably, our “uncles” were teachers, scientists, in general, very educated people; perhaps they saw us as their own children and grandchildren from whom they had been separated. There was so much fatherly warmth and tenderness in their relationship with us.

Alevtina Shcherbakova, a Norilsk poetess, remembers. In 1950 she was also a first-grader.

The female prisoners who worked plastering the already built houses on Sevastopolskaya Street were from the Baltic states. Unusual hairstyles with curls and rolls above the forehead made them look like otherworldly beauties in children's eyes.
Women and children are inseparable from each other in any conditions, and the guards often literally turned a blind eye when slaves called children in just to talk to them and caress them. And only God knows what was going on in their hearts and souls at that moment.
Children brought bread, and women gave them preserved beads or unusual buttons. Alka knew how such meetings ended - the beauties cried.
Mom didn’t encourage this communication (you never know), but she didn’t particularly prohibit it either.

It happened that real tragedies played out in front of the children. Little Tamara (Tamara Viktorovna Pichugina) witnessed such tragedies more than once.

We lived on Gornaya Street, block No. 96. For drinking water we had to go to the water pump. Next to our block there were two lagoon departments - the fifth and the seventh.
So, I’m standing in line for water and, as usual, looking around. At this time, a man came out of the bathhouse from the side of the zone in only his shorts, stood on the railing and, as soon as he jumped on the barbed wire, tore off his entire body. Then the guard shot from the tower and hit the man in the thigh, then the Vokhrovites jumped out, handcuffed the wounded man and led him to the camp.
I don’t remember that this picture shocked me much, I remember that I felt sorry for my uncle: he must be very cold, I thought.
Another case. I see it like now: in the winter a column of prisoners is walking, and suddenly a man comes out of its ranks, undresses to his underpants or shorts and sits down, huddled right next to the road. They did not lift him up, one guard remained with him, but the entire column calmly moved on. Then reinforcements arrived, and he was taken to another camp compartment.
We knew well: this man was lost at cards. But they said that it happened that no one took such poor fellows away; they remained by the road and sat until they froze. When they were covered with snow, tubercles formed, and sometimes children found these tubercles and “rolled them away” from the road.

M.M. Korotaeva (Borun) shares her memories:

A festive concert was announced at the school. They promised musical theater, and, of course, our school amateur performances.
But we were waiting for the artists! We were excited, put on our best clothes, the hall was packed. Behind a closed curtain, instruments were being tuned, something was being moved, something was being nailed down. We waited patiently, transfixed with happiness.
And finally the curtain opened. The stage shone, glowed, glittered with lights, flowers, some wonderful decorations! We stood frozen and listened to excerpts from operettas, operas, and scenes from plays.
The artists were in magnificent dresses, hairstyles, with beautiful jewelry, the men were in black suits, in snow-white shirts with butterflies - everyone was beautiful and cheerful. The orchestra is small but very good.
At the end of their concert, we sang our favorite “Yenisei Waltz” together with the artists. I really didn’t want to let the artists go, so we clapped and clapped. And somehow I no longer wanted to watch our amateur performances.
We suddenly decided to run, look at the artists up close, and see them off at least from afar. Running along the corridor of the second floor, then the first, we heard voices in one of the classrooms and realized that they were there, artists. Quietly, on tiptoe, we crept up to the door, which was slightly open.
Nina Ponomarenko was the first to look in - and suddenly recoiled, whispering in horror: “These are not artists, these are prisoners!”
I looked in next and also couldn’t believe my eyes - in the acrid, thick tobacco smoke I saw figures of people sitting on desks, walking around the classroom, and these really were prisoners. We knew them - they cleared roads, dug out houses after a snowstorm, built houses, dug the earth, all the same - in gray padded jackets, gray earflaps, with unkind eyes. We were afraid of them. So why are they here, what are they doing?
And then I saw something that immediately sobered me up - bags, boxes, from which something bright and beautiful could be seen. Yes, these are the costumes and instruments of our artists. It's them, they!
Confused and frightened, we stood at the door until we heard voices in the corridor - someone was walking towards the class. We rushed away and saw gray figures coming out, taking out suits and walking towards the exit. There were no women, no men - all equally gray, dull, silent.
There was a gray covered truck parked outside the school where people loaded up and drove away. We understood: into the zone. And we all stood there, unable to comprehend what we had seen and understood, with a perplexed question in our heads - why is this happening? Why?
We didn’t return to the hall, we couldn’t. When I sing “The Yenisei Waltz” now, I always remember that distant concert and the tragedy of the soul that we, the children, experienced.

We tried to look at the lives of children who were sucked into the camp whirlpool. Of course, not all Soviet children lived this way, but many did. And the point here is not in quantitative indicators, not in percentages.
Of course, someone in the Stalinist USSR really had a happy childhood - although it was unlikely that the leader should be thanked for this. In the wild, children went on hikes, sang songs around the fire, and relaxed in pioneer camps, and not in others. A lot of wonderful songs were composed for them, their parents loved them, they wore beautiful shoes...
But we must not forget about those children whom party judges sentenced to three, five, eight and ten, twenty-five years in the camps, to death. They were born on the floor of dirty calf-cars, died in the holds of overcrowded barges, and went crazy in orphanages. They lived in conditions that established courageous people could not stand.
“The young children,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “were “thieves’ pioneers,” they learned the precepts of their elders. The elders willingly guided both the worldview of the youngsters and their training in theft. It’s tempting to learn from them, but not to learn is impossible.”38
Stalin’s “laws on juveniles” lasted for 20 years, “until the decree of April 24, 1954, slightly relaxed: it freed those juveniles who had served more than one-third of the first term - what if there were five, ten, fourteen of them?” 39
What happened in the Gulag was infanticide in the literal sense of the word. All archives have not yet been opened. But even when they are opened, we will not learn from the documents about all the tragic fates of children. Something, of course, can be restored from the memories of eyewitnesses, but, alas, there are not so many of them left.
It is unlikely that it will be possible to describe the fate of every person who was subjected to repression, every child who was deprived of a father and mother, everyone who wandered as a street child around the country, everyone who died of hunger in Ukraine, from backbreaking labor in the camps, from the lack of medicine and care in orphanages, from the cold in the trains of special settlers... But everything possible should be done so that the terrible pages of our history are filled not only with question marks, but also with evidence.

GARF. F. 9416-s. D. 642. L. 59. 36 Right there. pp. 4-5.
37 About time, about Norilsk, about myself. pp. 380-381.
38 Solzhenitsyn A. Decree. op. T. 6. pp. 282-283.
39 Right there. P. 286.

Lyubov Nikolaevna Ovchinnikova is a teacher at gymnasium No. 4 in Norilsk.
A student of this gymnasium, Varvara Ovchinnikova, participated in the preparation of materials intended for study in class.
Drawings of former Gulag prisoners were used.

). There were the following ITL:

• Akmola camp for wives of traitors to the Motherland (ALGERIA)
• Bezymyanlag
• Vorkutlag (Vorkuta ITL)
• Dzhezkazganlag (Steplag)
• Intalag
• Kotlas ITL
• Kraslag
• Lokchimlag
• Perm camps
• Pechorlag
• Peczheldorlag
• Prorvlag
• Svirlag
• Sevzheldorlag
• Siblag
• Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp (SLON)
• Taezlag
• Ustvymlag
• Ukhtizhemlag

Each of the above ITLs included a number of camp points (that is, the camps themselves). The camps in Kolyma were famous for the particularly difficult living and working conditions of prisoners.

Gulag statistics

Until the end of the 1980s, official statistics on the Gulag were classified, researchers’ access to the archives was impossible, so estimates were based either on the words of former prisoners or members of their families, or on the use of mathematical and statistical methods.

After the opening of the archives, official figures became available, but the Gulag statistics are incomplete, and data from different sections often do not fit together.

According to official data, more than 2.5 million people were simultaneously held in the system of camps, prisons and colonies of the OGPU and the NKVD in 1930-56 (the maximum was reached in the early 1950s as a result of the post-war tightening of criminal legislation and the social consequences of the famine of 1946-1947).

Certificate of mortality of prisoners in the Gulag system for the period 1930-1956.

Certificate of mortality of prisoners in the Gulag system for the period 1930-1956.

Years	Number of deaths	% of deaths compared to the average
1930*	7980	4,2
1931*	7283	2,9
1932*	13197	4,8
1933*	67297	15,3
1934*	25187	4,28
1935**	31636	2,75
1936**	24993	2,11
1937**	31056	2,42
1938**	108654	5,35
1939***	44750	3,1
1940	41275	2,72
1941	115484	6,1
1942	352560	24,9
1943	267826	22,4
1944	114481	9,2
1945	81917	5,95
1946	30715	2,2
1947	66830	3,59
1948	50659	2,28
1949	29350	1,21
1950	24511	0,95
1951	22466	0,92
1952	20643	0,84
1953****	9628	0,67
1954	8358	0,69
1955	4842	0,53
1956	3164	0,4
Total	1606742
*Only in ITL. ** In correctional labor camps and places of detention (NTK, prisons). *** Further in ITL and NTK. **** Without OL. (O.L. - special camps). Help prepared based on materials EURZ GULAG (GARF. F. 9414)

After the publication in the early 1990s of archival documents from leading Russian archives, primarily in the State Archives of the Russian Federation (former TsGAOR USSR) and the Russian Center for Socio-Political History (former TsPA IML), a number of researchers concluded that for 1930-1953 6.5 million people visited forced labor colonies, of which about 1.3 million were for political reasons, through forced labor camps in 1937-1950. About two million people were convicted under political charges.

Thus, based on the given archival data of the OGPU-NKVD-MVD of the USSR, we can conclude: during the years 1920-1953, about 10 million people passed through the ITL system, including 3.4-3.7 million people under the article of counter-revolutionary crimes .

National composition of prisoners

According to a number of studies, on January 1, 1939, in the Gulag camps, the national composition of prisoners was distributed as follows:

• Russians - 830,491 (63.05%)
• Ukrainians - 181,905 (13.81%)
• Belarusians - 44,785 (3.40%)
• Tatars - 24,894 (1.89%)
• Uzbeks - 24,499 (1.86%)
• Jews - 19,758 (1.50%)
• Germans - 18,572 (1.41%)
• Kazakhs - 17,123 (1.30%)
• Poles - 16,860 (1.28%)
• Georgians - 11,723 (0.89%)
• Armenians - 11,064 (0.84%)
• Turkmens - 9,352 (0.71%)
• other nationalities - 8.06%.

According to the data given in the same work, on January 1, 1951, the number of prisoners in camps and colonies was:

• Russians - 1,405,511 (805,995/599,516 - 55.59%)
• Ukrainians - 506,221 (362,643/143,578 - 20.02%)
• Belarusians - 96,471 (63,863/32,608 - 3.82%)
• Tatars - 56,928 (28,532/28,396 - 2.25%)
• Lithuanians - 43,016 (35,773/7,243 - 1.70%)
• Germans - 32,269 (21,096/11,173 - 1.28%)
• Uzbeks - 30029 (14,137/15,892 - 1.19%)
• Latvians - 28,520 (21,689/6,831 - 1.13%)
• Armenians - 26,764 (12,029/14,735 - 1.06%)
• Kazakhs - 25,906 (12,554/13,352 - 1.03%)
• Jews - 25,425 (14,374/11,051 - 1.01%)
• Estonians - 24,618 (18,185/6,433 - 0.97%)
• Azerbaijanis - 23,704 (6,703/17,001 - 0.94%)
• Georgians - 23,583 (6,968/16,615 - 0.93%)
• Poles - 23,527 (19,184/4,343 - 0.93%)
• Moldovans - 22,725 (16,008/6,717 - 0.90%)
• other nationalities - about 5%.

History of the organization

First stage

On April 15, 1919, the RSFSR issued a decree “On forced labor camps.” From the very beginning of the existence of Soviet power, the management of most places of detention was entrusted to the department of execution of punishments of the People's Commissariat of Justice, formed in May 1918. The Main Directorate of Compulsory Labor under the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs was partially involved in these same issues.

After October 1917 and until 1934, general prisons were administered by the Republican People's Commissariats of Justice and were part of the system of the Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Institutions.

On August 3, 1933, a resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR was approved, prescribing various aspects of the functioning of the ITL. In particular, the code prescribes the use of prisoner labor and legitimizes the practice of counting two days of hard work for three days, which was widely used to motivate prisoners during the construction of the White Sea Canal.

The period after Stalin's death

The departmental affiliation of the Gulag changed only once after 1934 - in March the Gulag was transferred to the jurisdiction of the USSR Ministry of Justice, but in January it was returned to the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs.

The next organizational change in the penitentiary system in the USSR was the creation in October 1956 of the Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Colonies, which in March was renamed the Main Directorate of Prisons.

When the NKVD was divided into two independent people's commissariats - the NKVD and the NKGB - this department was renamed Prison Department NKVD. In 1954, by decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, the Prison Administration was transformed into Prison department Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR. In March 1959, the Prison Department was reorganized and included in the system of the Main Directorate of Prisons of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Gulag leadership

Heads of the Department

The first leaders of the Gulag, Fyodor Eichmans, Lazar Kogan, Matvey Berman, Israel Pliner, among other prominent security officers, died during the years of the “Great Terror”. In 1937-1938 they were arrested and soon shot.

Role in the economy

Already by the beginning of the 1930s, the labor of prisoners in the USSR was considered an economic resource. A resolution of the Council of People's Commissars in 1929 ordered the OGPU to organize new camps for the reception of prisoners in remote areas of the country

The attitude of the authorities towards prisoners as an economic resource was expressed even more clearly by Joseph Stalin, who in 1938 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:

In the 1930s-50s, Gulag prisoners carried out the construction of a number of large industrial and transport facilities:

• 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;
• a number of railways (Transpolar Railway, Kola Railway, tunnel to Sakhalin, Karaganda-Mointy-Balkhash, Pechora Mainline, second tracks of the Siberian Mainline, Taishet-Lena (beginning of BAM), etc.) and highways (Moscow - Minsk, Magadan - Susuman - Ust-Nera)

A number of Soviet cities were founded and built by Gulag institutions (Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Sovetskaya Gavan, Magadan, Dudinka, Vorkuta, Ukhta, Inta, Pechora, Molotovsk, Dubna, Nakhodka)

Prisoner labor was also used in agriculture, mining, and logging. According to some historians, the Gulag accounted for an average of three percent of the gross national product.

No assessments have been made of the overall economic efficiency of the Gulag system. 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 the war, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Chernyshov wrote in a special note that the Gulag simply needed to be transferred to a system similar to the civilian economy. But despite the introduction of new incentives, detailed elaboration of tariff schedules, and production standards, self-sufficiency of the Gulag could not be achieved; Labor productivity of prisoners was lower than that of civilian workers, and the cost of maintaining the system of camps and colonies increased.

After Stalin's death and a mass amnesty in 1953, the number of prisoners in the camps was halved, and the construction of a number of facilities was stopped. For several years after this, the Gulag system was systematically collapsed and finally ceased to exist in 1960.

Conditions

Organization of camps

In the ITL, three categories of prisoner detention regime were established: strict, enhanced and general.

At the end of the 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 for light physical work and individual physical labor. .
• Prisoners who had severe physical disabilities that precluded their employment were classified in the fourth category - the category of disabled people.

From here, all work processes characteristic of the productive profile of a particular camp were divided by severity into: heavy, medium and light.

For the prisoners of each camp in the Gulag system, there was a standard system for recording prisoners based on their labor use, introduced in 1935. All working prisoners were divided into two groups. The main labor contingent that performed production, construction or other tasks of this camp constituted group “A”. In addition to him, a certain group of prisoners was always busy with work that arose within the camp or camp administration. These, mainly administrative, managerial and service personnel, were classified as group “B”. Non-working prisoners were also divided into two categories: group “B” included those who did not work due to illness, and all other non-working prisoners, accordingly, were combined into group “G”. This group seemed to be the most heterogeneous: some of these prisoners were only temporarily not working due to external circumstances - due to their being in transit or in quarantine, due to the failure of the camp administration to provide work, due to the intra-camp transfer of labor, etc. , - but it should also include “refuseniks” and prisoners held in isolation wards and punishment cells.

The share of group “A” - that is, the main labor force, rarely reached 70%. In addition, the labor of free-hired workers was widely used (comprising 20-70% of group “A” (at different times and in different camps)).

Work standards were about 270-300 working days per year (varied in different camps and in different years, excluding, of course, the war years). Working day - 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):

1. Bread 700 (800 for those engaged in heavy work)
2. Wheat flour 10
3. Various cereals 110
4. Pasta and vermicelli 10
5. Meat 20
6. Fish 60
7. Fats 13
8. Potatoes and vegetables 650
9. Sugar 17
10. Salt 20
11. Surrogate tea 2
12. Tomato puree 10
13. Pepper 0.1
14. Bay leaf 0.1

Despite the existence of certain standards for the detention of prisoners, the results of inspections of the camps showed their systematic violation:

A large percentage of mortality falls on colds and exhaustion; colds are explained by the fact that there are prisoners who go to work poorly dressed and with shoes; the barracks are often not heated due to lack of fuel, as a result of which prisoners who are frozen in the open air do not warm up in the cold barracks, which entails flu, pneumonia, and other colds

Until the end of the 1940s, when living conditions improved somewhat, the mortality rate of prisoners in the Gulag camps exceeded the national average, and in some years (1942-43) reached 20% of the average number of prisoners. According to official documents, over the years of the existence of the Gulag, more than 1.1 million people died in it (more than 600 thousand died in prisons and colonies). A number of researchers, for example V.V. Tsaplin, noted noticeable discrepancies in the available statistics, but at the moment these comments are fragmentary and cannot be used to characterize it as a whole.

Offenses

At the moment, in connection with the discovery of official documentation and internal orders, previously inaccessible to historians, there is a number of materials confirming repressions, carried out by virtue of decrees and resolutions of executive and legislative authorities.

For example, by virtue of GKO Resolution No. 634/ss of September 6, 1941, 170 political prisoners were executed in the Oryol prison of the GUGB. This decision was explained by the fact that the movement of convicts from this prison was not possible. Most of those serving sentences in such cases were released or assigned to retreating military units. The most dangerous prisoners were liquidated in a number of cases.

A notable fact was the publication on March 5, 1948 of the so-called “additional decree of the thieves’ law for prisoners,” which determined the main provisions of the system of relations between privileged prisoners - “thieves”, prisoners - “men” and some personnel from among the prisoners:

This law caused very negative consequences for the unprivileged prisoners of camps and prisons, as a result of which certain groups of “men” began to resist, organize protests against the “thieves” and the relevant laws, including committing acts of disobedience, raising uprisings, and starting arson. In a number of institutions, control over prisoners, which de facto belonged and was carried out by criminal groups of “thieves”, was lost; the camp leadership turned directly to higher authorities with a request to allocate additionally the most authoritative “thieves” to restore order and restore control, which sometimes caused some loss controllability of places of deprivation of liberty, gave criminal groups a reason to control the very mechanism of serving punishment, dictating their terms of cooperation. .

Labor incentive system in the Gulag

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 visits, 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.)

For prisoners who complied with the regime, performed well at work, or 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.

In addition, the foreman, in relation to a well-working prisoner, could petition the foreman or the head of the camp to provide the prisoner with the benefits provided for Stakhanovites.

Prisoners who worked using “Stakhanov labor methods” were provided with a number of special, additional benefits, in particular:

• accommodation in more comfortable barracks, equipped with trestle beds or beds and provided with bedding, a cultural room and a radio;
• special improved ration;
• private dining room or individual tables in a common dining room with priority service;
• clothing allowance in the first place;
• priority right to use the camp stall;
• priority receipt of books, newspapers and magazines from the camp library;
• permanent club ticket for the best place to watch films, artistic productions and literary evenings;
• secondment to courses within the camp to obtain or improve the relevant qualifications (driver, tractor driver, machinist, etc.)

Similar incentive measures were taken for prisoners who had the rank of shock workers.

Along with this incentive system, there were others that consisted only of components that encouraged high productivity of the prisoner (and did not have a “punitive” component). One of them is related to the practice of counting to a prisoner one working day worked in excess of the established norm for one and a half, two (or even more) days of his sentence. The result of this practice was the early release of prisoners who showed positive results at work. In 1939, this practice was abolished, and the system of “early release” itself was reduced to replacing confinement in a camp with forced settlement. Thus, according to the decree of November 22, 1938 “On additional benefits for prisoners released early for shock work on the construction of 2 tracks “Karymskaya - Khabarovsk”, 8,900 prisoners - shock workers were released early, with transfer to free residence in the BAM construction area until end of the sentence. During the war, liberations began to be practiced on the basis of decrees of the State Defense Committee with the transfer of those released to the Red Army, and then on the basis of Decrees of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (so-called amnesties).

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. Cash bonuses were paid to prisoners “for all work performed in forced labor camps,” while prisoners could receive the money they earned in their hands in an amount not exceeding 150 rubles at a time. Money in excess of this amount was credited to their personal accounts and issued as the previously issued money was spent. Those who did not work and did not comply with standards did not receive money. At the same time, “... even a slight overfulfillment of production standards by individual groups of workers...” could cause a large increase in the amount actually paid, which, in turn, could lead to a disproportionate development of the bonus fund in relation to the implementation of the capital work plan. 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. Activated disabled people employed in piecework work were paid according to the piecework rates established for prisoners for the amount of work actually completed by them.

Memories of survivors

The famous Moroz, the head of the Ukhta camps, stated that he did not need either cars or horses: “give more s/k - and he will build a railway not only to Vorkuta, but also through the North Pole.” This figure was ready to pave the swamps with prisoners, he easily left them to work in the cold winter taiga without tents - they would warm themselves by the fire! - without boilers for cooking food - they will do without hot food! But since no one held him accountable for “losses in manpower,” he for the time being enjoyed the reputation of an energetic, proactive figure. I saw Moroz near the locomotive - the first-born of the future movement, which had just been unloaded from the pontoon IN HANDS. Frost hovered before the retinue - it was urgent, they say, to separate the couples so that immediately - before the laying of the rails! - announce the surrounding area with a locomotive whistle. An order was immediately given: pour water into the boiler and light the firebox!”

Children in the Gulag

In the field of combating juvenile delinquency, punitive corrective measures prevailed. On July 16, 1939, the NKVD of the USSR issued an order “With the announcement of the regulations on the NKVD OTC detention center for minors,” which approved the “Regulations on the detention center for minors,” ordering the placement in detention centers of adolescents aged 12 to 16 years, sentenced by the court to various terms of imprisonment and not amenable to other measures of re-education and correction. This measure could be carried out with the sanction of the prosecutor; the period of detention in the detention center was limited to six months.

Beginning in mid-1947, sentences for minors convicted of theft of state or public property were increased to 10 - 25 years. The Decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of November 25, 1935 “On amending the current legislation of the RSFSR on measures to combat juvenile delinquency, child homelessness and neglect” abolished the possibility of reducing the sentence for minors aged 14 - 18 years, and the regime was significantly tightened keeping children in places of deprivation of liberty.

In the secret monograph “Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies of the NKVD of the USSR” written in 1940, there is a separate chapter “Working with minors and street children”:

“In the Gulag system, work with juvenile delinquents and homeless people is organizationally separate.

By decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR on May 31, 1935, the Department of Labor Colonies was created in the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which has as its task the organization of reception centers, isolation wards and labor colonies for homeless minors and criminals.

This decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People's Commissars provided for the re-education of homeless and neglected children through cultural, educational and production work with them and their further sending to work in industry and agriculture.

Reception centers carry out the process of removing homeless and neglected children from the streets, keep the children in their homes for one month, and then, after establishing the necessary information about them and their parents, give them appropriate further direction. The 162 reception centers operating in the GULAG system during the four and a half years of their work admitted 952,834 teenagers, who were sent both to children's institutions of the People's Commissariat for Education, People's Commissariat of Health and People's Commissariat of Security, and to the labor colonies of the NKVD Gulag. Currently, there are 50 closed and open labor colonies operating in the Gulag system.

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 have been 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:

1. Metalworking,
2. Woodworking,
3. Shoe production,
4. Knitting production (in colonies for girls).

In all colonies, secondary schools are organized, operating according to a general seven-year educational program.

Clubs have been organized with corresponding amateur clubs: music, drama, choir, fine arts, technical, physical education and others. The educational and teaching staff of juvenile colonies number: 1,200 educators - mainly from Komsomol members and party members, 800 teachers and 255 leaders of amateur art groups. In almost all colonies, pioneer detachments and Komsomol organizations were organized from among the students who had not been convicted. On March 1, 1940, there were 4,126 pioneers and 1,075 Komsomol members in the Gulag colonies.

Work in the colonies is organized as follows: minors under 16 years of age work daily in production for 4 hours and study at school for 4 hours, the rest of the time they are busy in amateur clubs and pioneer organizations. Minors from 16 to 18 years old work in production for 6 hours and, instead of a normal seven-year school, study in self-education clubs, similar to adult schools.

In 1939, the Gulag labor colonies for minors completed a production program worth 169,778 thousand rubles, mainly for consumer goods. The GULAG system spent 60,501 thousand rubles in 1939 on the maintenance of the entire corps of juvenile criminals, and the state subsidy to cover these expenses was expressed in approximately 15% of the total amount, and the rest of it was provided by revenues from the production and economic activities of labor colonies . The main point that completes the entire process of re-education of juvenile offenders is their employment. Over four years, the system of labor colonies employed 28,280 former criminals in various sectors of the national economy, including 83.7% in industry and transport, 7.8% in agriculture, 8.5% in various educational institutions and institutions.”

25. GARF, f.9414, op.1, d.1155, l.26-27.

GARF, f.9401, op.1, d.4157, l.201-205; V. P. Popov. State terror in Soviet Russia. 1923-1953: sources and their interpretation // Domestic archives. 1992, No. 2. P.28. http://libereya.ru/public/repressii.html

A. Dugin. “Stalinism: legends and facts” // Word. 1990, No. 7. P.23; archival

). There were the following ITL:

• Akmola camp for wives of traitors to the Motherland (ALGERIA)
• Bezymyanlag
• Vorkutlag (Vorkuta ITL)
• Dzhezkazganlag (Steplag)
• Intalag
• Kotlas ITL
• Kraslag
• Lokchimlag
• Perm camps
• Pechorlag
• Peczheldorlag
• Prorvlag
• Svirlag
• Sevzheldorlag
• Siblag
• Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp (SLON)
• Taezlag
• Ustvymlag
• Ukhtizhemlag

Each of the above ITLs included a number of camp points (that is, the camps themselves). The camps in Kolyma were famous for the particularly difficult living and working conditions of prisoners.

Gulag statistics

Until the end of the 1980s, official statistics on the Gulag were classified, researchers’ access to the archives was impossible, so estimates were based either on the words of former prisoners or members of their families, or on the use of mathematical and statistical methods.

After the opening of the archives, official figures became available, but the Gulag statistics are incomplete, and data from different sections often do not fit together.

According to official data, more than 2.5 million people were simultaneously held in the system of camps, prisons and colonies of the OGPU and the NKVD in 1930-56 (the maximum was reached in the early 1950s as a result of the post-war tightening of criminal legislation and the social consequences of the famine of 1946-1947).

Certificate of mortality of prisoners in the Gulag system for the period 1930-1956.

Certificate of mortality of prisoners in the Gulag system for the period 1930-1956.

Years	Number of deaths	% of deaths compared to the average
1930*	7980	4,2
1931*	7283	2,9
1932*	13197	4,8
1933*	67297	15,3
1934*	25187	4,28
1935**	31636	2,75
1936**	24993	2,11
1937**	31056	2,42
1938**	108654	5,35
1939***	44750	3,1
1940	41275	2,72
1941	115484	6,1
1942	352560	24,9
1943	267826	22,4
1944	114481	9,2
1945	81917	5,95
1946	30715	2,2
1947	66830	3,59
1948	50659	2,28
1949	29350	1,21
1950	24511	0,95
1951	22466	0,92
1952	20643	0,84
1953****	9628	0,67
1954	8358	0,69
1955	4842	0,53
1956	3164	0,4
Total	1606742
*Only in ITL. ** In correctional labor camps and places of detention (NTK, prisons). *** Further in ITL and NTK. **** Without OL. (O.L. - special camps). Help prepared based on materials EURZ GULAG (GARF. F. 9414)

After the publication in the early 1990s of archival documents from leading Russian archives, primarily in the State Archives of the Russian Federation (former TsGAOR USSR) and the Russian Center for Socio-Political History (former TsPA IML), a number of researchers concluded that for 1930-1953 6.5 million people visited forced labor colonies, of which about 1.3 million were for political reasons, through forced labor camps in 1937-1950. About two million people were convicted under political charges.

Thus, based on the given archival data of the OGPU-NKVD-MVD of the USSR, we can conclude: during the years 1920-1953, about 10 million people passed through the ITL system, including 3.4-3.7 million people under the article of counter-revolutionary crimes .

National composition of prisoners

According to a number of studies, on January 1, 1939, in the Gulag camps, the national composition of prisoners was distributed as follows:

• Russians - 830,491 (63.05%)
• Ukrainians - 181,905 (13.81%)
• Belarusians - 44,785 (3.40%)
• Tatars - 24,894 (1.89%)
• Uzbeks - 24,499 (1.86%)
• Jews - 19,758 (1.50%)
• Germans - 18,572 (1.41%)
• Kazakhs - 17,123 (1.30%)
• Poles - 16,860 (1.28%)
• Georgians - 11,723 (0.89%)
• Armenians - 11,064 (0.84%)
• Turkmens - 9,352 (0.71%)
• other nationalities - 8.06%.

According to the data given in the same work, on January 1, 1951, the number of prisoners in camps and colonies was:

• Russians - 1,405,511 (805,995/599,516 - 55.59%)
• Ukrainians - 506,221 (362,643/143,578 - 20.02%)
• Belarusians - 96,471 (63,863/32,608 - 3.82%)
• Tatars - 56,928 (28,532/28,396 - 2.25%)
• Lithuanians - 43,016 (35,773/7,243 - 1.70%)
• Germans - 32,269 (21,096/11,173 - 1.28%)
• Uzbeks - 30029 (14,137/15,892 - 1.19%)
• Latvians - 28,520 (21,689/6,831 - 1.13%)
• Armenians - 26,764 (12,029/14,735 - 1.06%)
• Kazakhs - 25,906 (12,554/13,352 - 1.03%)
• Jews - 25,425 (14,374/11,051 - 1.01%)
• Estonians - 24,618 (18,185/6,433 - 0.97%)
• Azerbaijanis - 23,704 (6,703/17,001 - 0.94%)
• Georgians - 23,583 (6,968/16,615 - 0.93%)
• Poles - 23,527 (19,184/4,343 - 0.93%)
• Moldovans - 22,725 (16,008/6,717 - 0.90%)
• other nationalities - about 5%.

History of the organization

First stage

On April 15, 1919, the RSFSR issued a decree “On forced labor camps.” From the very beginning of the existence of Soviet power, the management of most places of detention was entrusted to the department of execution of punishments of the People's Commissariat of Justice, formed in May 1918. The Main Directorate of Compulsory Labor under the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs was partially involved in these same issues.

After October 1917 and until 1934, general prisons were administered by the Republican People's Commissariats of Justice and were part of the system of the Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Institutions.

On August 3, 1933, a resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR was approved, prescribing various aspects of the functioning of the ITL. In particular, the code prescribes the use of prisoner labor and legitimizes the practice of counting two days of hard work for three days, which was widely used to motivate prisoners during the construction of the White Sea Canal.

The period after Stalin's death

The departmental affiliation of the Gulag changed only once after 1934 - in March the Gulag was transferred to the jurisdiction of the USSR Ministry of Justice, but in January it was returned to the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs.

The next organizational change in the penitentiary system in the USSR was the creation in October 1956 of the Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Colonies, which in March was renamed the Main Directorate of Prisons.

When the NKVD was divided into two independent people's commissariats - the NKVD and the NKGB - this department was renamed Prison Department NKVD. In 1954, by decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, the Prison Administration was transformed into Prison department Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR. In March 1959, the Prison Department was reorganized and included in the system of the Main Directorate of Prisons of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Gulag leadership

Heads of the Department

The first leaders of the Gulag, Fyodor Eichmans, Lazar Kogan, Matvey Berman, Israel Pliner, among other prominent security officers, died during the years of the “Great Terror”. In 1937-1938 they were arrested and soon shot.

Role in the economy

Already by the beginning of the 1930s, the labor of prisoners in the USSR was considered an economic resource. A resolution of the Council of People's Commissars in 1929 ordered the OGPU to organize new camps for the reception of prisoners in remote areas of the country

The attitude of the authorities towards prisoners as an economic resource was expressed even more clearly by Joseph Stalin, who in 1938 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:

In the 1930s-50s, Gulag prisoners carried out the construction of a number of large industrial and transport facilities:

• 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;
• a number of railways (Transpolar Railway, Kola Railway, tunnel to Sakhalin, Karaganda-Mointy-Balkhash, Pechora Mainline, second tracks of the Siberian Mainline, Taishet-Lena (beginning of BAM), etc.) and highways (Moscow - Minsk, Magadan - Susuman - Ust-Nera)

A number of Soviet cities were founded and built by Gulag institutions (Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Sovetskaya Gavan, Magadan, Dudinka, Vorkuta, Ukhta, Inta, Pechora, Molotovsk, Dubna, Nakhodka)

Prisoner labor was also used in agriculture, mining, and logging. According to some historians, the Gulag accounted for an average of three percent of the gross national product.

No assessments have been made of the overall economic efficiency of the Gulag system. 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 the war, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Chernyshov wrote in a special note that the Gulag simply needed to be transferred to a system similar to the civilian economy. But despite the introduction of new incentives, detailed elaboration of tariff schedules, and production standards, self-sufficiency of the Gulag could not be achieved; Labor productivity of prisoners was lower than that of civilian workers, and the cost of maintaining the system of camps and colonies increased.

After Stalin's death and a mass amnesty in 1953, the number of prisoners in the camps was halved, and the construction of a number of facilities was stopped. For several years after this, the Gulag system was systematically collapsed and finally ceased to exist in 1960.

Conditions

Organization of camps

In the ITL, three categories of prisoner detention regime were established: strict, enhanced and general.

At the end of the 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 for light physical work and individual physical labor. .
• Prisoners who had severe physical disabilities that precluded their employment were classified in the fourth category - the category of disabled people.

From here, all work processes characteristic of the productive profile of a particular camp were divided by severity into: heavy, medium and light.

For the prisoners of each camp in the Gulag system, there was a standard system for recording prisoners based on their labor use, introduced in 1935. All working prisoners were divided into two groups. The main labor contingent that performed production, construction or other tasks of this camp constituted group “A”. In addition to him, a certain group of prisoners was always busy with work that arose within the camp or camp administration. These, mainly administrative, managerial and service personnel, were classified as group “B”. Non-working prisoners were also divided into two categories: group “B” included those who did not work due to illness, and all other non-working prisoners, accordingly, were combined into group “G”. This group seemed to be the most heterogeneous: some of these prisoners were only temporarily not working due to external circumstances - due to their being in transit or in quarantine, due to the failure of the camp administration to provide work, due to the intra-camp transfer of labor, etc. , - but it should also include “refuseniks” and prisoners held in isolation wards and punishment cells.

The share of group “A” - that is, the main labor force, rarely reached 70%. In addition, the labor of free-hired workers was widely used (comprising 20-70% of group “A” (at different times and in different camps)).

Work standards were about 270-300 working days per year (varied in different camps and in different years, excluding, of course, the war years). Working day - 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):

1. Bread 700 (800 for those engaged in heavy work)
2. Wheat flour 10
3. Various cereals 110
4. Pasta and vermicelli 10
5. Meat 20
6. Fish 60
7. Fats 13
8. Potatoes and vegetables 650
9. Sugar 17
10. Salt 20
11. Surrogate tea 2
12. Tomato puree 10
13. Pepper 0.1
14. Bay leaf 0.1

Despite the existence of certain standards for the detention of prisoners, the results of inspections of the camps showed their systematic violation:

A large percentage of mortality falls on colds and exhaustion; colds are explained by the fact that there are prisoners who go to work poorly dressed and with shoes; the barracks are often not heated due to lack of fuel, as a result of which prisoners who are frozen in the open air do not warm up in the cold barracks, which entails flu, pneumonia, and other colds

Until the end of the 1940s, when living conditions improved somewhat, the mortality rate of prisoners in the Gulag camps exceeded the national average, and in some years (1942-43) reached 20% of the average number of prisoners. According to official documents, over the years of the existence of the Gulag, more than 1.1 million people died in it (more than 600 thousand died in prisons and colonies). A number of researchers, for example V.V. Tsaplin, noted noticeable discrepancies in the available statistics, but at the moment these comments are fragmentary and cannot be used to characterize it as a whole.

Offenses

At the moment, in connection with the discovery of official documentation and internal orders, previously inaccessible to historians, there is a number of materials confirming repressions, carried out by virtue of decrees and resolutions of executive and legislative authorities.

For example, by virtue of GKO Resolution No. 634/ss of September 6, 1941, 170 political prisoners were executed in the Oryol prison of the GUGB. This decision was explained by the fact that the movement of convicts from this prison was not possible. Most of those serving sentences in such cases were released or assigned to retreating military units. The most dangerous prisoners were liquidated in a number of cases.

A notable fact was the publication on March 5, 1948 of the so-called “additional decree of the thieves’ law for prisoners,” which determined the main provisions of the system of relations between privileged prisoners - “thieves”, prisoners - “men” and some personnel from among the prisoners:

This law caused very negative consequences for the unprivileged prisoners of camps and prisons, as a result of which certain groups of “men” began to resist, organize protests against the “thieves” and the relevant laws, including committing acts of disobedience, raising uprisings, and starting arson. In a number of institutions, control over prisoners, which de facto belonged and was carried out by criminal groups of “thieves”, was lost; the camp leadership turned directly to higher authorities with a request to allocate additionally the most authoritative “thieves” to restore order and restore control, which sometimes caused some loss controllability of places of deprivation of liberty, gave criminal groups a reason to control the very mechanism of serving punishment, dictating their terms of cooperation. .

Labor incentive system in the Gulag

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 visits, 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.)

For prisoners who complied with the regime, performed well at work, or 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.

In addition, the foreman, in relation to a well-working prisoner, could petition the foreman or the head of the camp to provide the prisoner with the benefits provided for Stakhanovites.

Prisoners who worked using “Stakhanov labor methods” were provided with a number of special, additional benefits, in particular:

• accommodation in more comfortable barracks, equipped with trestle beds or beds and provided with bedding, a cultural room and a radio;
• special improved ration;
• private dining room or individual tables in a common dining room with priority service;
• clothing allowance in the first place;
• priority right to use the camp stall;
• priority receipt of books, newspapers and magazines from the camp library;
• permanent club ticket for the best place to watch films, artistic productions and literary evenings;
• secondment to courses within the camp to obtain or improve the relevant qualifications (driver, tractor driver, machinist, etc.)

Similar incentive measures were taken for prisoners who had the rank of shock workers.

Along with this incentive system, there were others that consisted only of components that encouraged high productivity of the prisoner (and did not have a “punitive” component). One of them is related to the practice of counting to a prisoner one working day worked in excess of the established norm for one and a half, two (or even more) days of his sentence. The result of this practice was the early release of prisoners who showed positive results at work. In 1939, this practice was abolished, and the system of “early release” itself was reduced to replacing confinement in a camp with forced settlement. Thus, according to the decree of November 22, 1938 “On additional benefits for prisoners released early for shock work on the construction of 2 tracks “Karymskaya - Khabarovsk”, 8,900 prisoners - shock workers were released early, with transfer to free residence in the BAM construction area until end of the sentence. During the war, liberations began to be practiced on the basis of decrees of the State Defense Committee with the transfer of those released to the Red Army, and then on the basis of Decrees of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (so-called amnesties).

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. Cash bonuses were paid to prisoners “for all work performed in forced labor camps,” while prisoners could receive the money they earned in their hands in an amount not exceeding 150 rubles at a time. Money in excess of this amount was credited to their personal accounts and issued as the previously issued money was spent. Those who did not work and did not comply with standards did not receive money. At the same time, “... even a slight overfulfillment of production standards by individual groups of workers...” could cause a large increase in the amount actually paid, which, in turn, could lead to a disproportionate development of the bonus fund in relation to the implementation of the capital work plan. 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. Activated disabled people employed in piecework work were paid according to the piecework rates established for prisoners for the amount of work actually completed by them.

Memories of survivors

The famous Moroz, the head of the Ukhta camps, stated that he did not need either cars or horses: “give more s/k - and he will build a railway not only to Vorkuta, but also through the North Pole.” This figure was ready to pave the swamps with prisoners, he easily left them to work in the cold winter taiga without tents - they would warm themselves by the fire! - without boilers for cooking food - they will do without hot food! But since no one held him accountable for “losses in manpower,” he for the time being enjoyed the reputation of an energetic, proactive figure. I saw Moroz near the locomotive - the first-born of the future movement, which had just been unloaded from the pontoon IN HANDS. Frost hovered before the retinue - it was urgent, they say, to separate the couples so that immediately - before the laying of the rails! - announce the surrounding area with a locomotive whistle. An order was immediately given: pour water into the boiler and light the firebox!”

Children in the Gulag

In the field of combating juvenile delinquency, punitive corrective measures prevailed. On July 16, 1939, the NKVD of the USSR issued an order “With the announcement of the regulations on the NKVD OTC detention center for minors,” which approved the “Regulations on the detention center for minors,” ordering the placement in detention centers of adolescents aged 12 to 16 years, sentenced by the court to various terms of imprisonment and not amenable to other measures of re-education and correction. This measure could be carried out with the sanction of the prosecutor; the period of detention in the detention center was limited to six months.

Beginning in mid-1947, sentences for minors convicted of theft of state or public property were increased to 10 - 25 years. The Decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of November 25, 1935 “On amending the current legislation of the RSFSR on measures to combat juvenile delinquency, child homelessness and neglect” abolished the possibility of reducing the sentence for minors aged 14 - 18 years, and the regime was significantly tightened keeping children in places of deprivation of liberty.

In the secret monograph “Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies of the NKVD of the USSR” written in 1940, there is a separate chapter “Working with minors and street children”:

“In the Gulag system, work with juvenile delinquents and homeless people is organizationally separate.

By decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR on May 31, 1935, the Department of Labor Colonies was created in the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which has as its task the organization of reception centers, isolation wards and labor colonies for homeless minors and criminals.

This decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People's Commissars provided for the re-education of homeless and neglected children through cultural, educational and production work with them and their further sending to work in industry and agriculture.

Reception centers carry out the process of removing homeless and neglected children from the streets, keep the children in their homes for one month, and then, after establishing the necessary information about them and their parents, give them appropriate further direction. The 162 reception centers operating in the GULAG system during the four and a half years of their work admitted 952,834 teenagers, who were sent both to children's institutions of the People's Commissariat for Education, People's Commissariat of Health and People's Commissariat of Security, and to the labor colonies of the NKVD Gulag. Currently, there are 50 closed and open labor colonies operating in the Gulag system.

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 have been 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:

1. Metalworking,
2. Woodworking,
3. Shoe production,
4. Knitting production (in colonies for girls).

In all colonies, secondary schools are organized, operating according to a general seven-year educational program.

Clubs have been organized with corresponding amateur clubs: music, drama, choir, fine arts, technical, physical education and others. The educational and teaching staff of juvenile colonies number: 1,200 educators - mainly from Komsomol members and party members, 800 teachers and 255 leaders of amateur art groups. In almost all colonies, pioneer detachments and Komsomol organizations were organized from among the students who had not been convicted. On March 1, 1940, there were 4,126 pioneers and 1,075 Komsomol members in the Gulag colonies.

Work in the colonies is organized as follows: minors under 16 years of age work daily in production for 4 hours and study at school for 4 hours, the rest of the time they are busy in amateur clubs and pioneer organizations. Minors from 16 to 18 years old work in production for 6 hours and, instead of a normal seven-year school, study in self-education clubs, similar to adult schools.

In 1939, the Gulag labor colonies for minors completed a production program worth 169,778 thousand rubles, mainly for consumer goods. The GULAG system spent 60,501 thousand rubles in 1939 on the maintenance of the entire corps of juvenile criminals, and the state subsidy to cover these expenses was expressed in approximately 15% of the total amount, and the rest of it was provided by revenues from the production and economic activities of labor colonies . The main point that completes the entire process of re-education of juvenile offenders is their employment. Over four years, the system of labor colonies employed 28,280 former criminals in various sectors of the national economy, including 83.7% in industry and transport, 7.8% in agriculture, 8.5% in various educational institutions and institutions.”

25. GARF, f.9414, op.1, d.1155, l.26-27.

GARF, f.9401, op.1, d.4157, l.201-205; V. P. Popov. State terror in Soviet Russia. 1923-1953: sources and their interpretation // Domestic archives. 1992, No. 2. P.28. http://libereya.ru/public/repressii.html

A. Dugin. “Stalinism: legends and facts” // Word. 1990, No. 7. P.23; archival

"On forced labor camps", which marked the beginning of the creation of the GULAG - the Main Directorate of Forced Labor Camps. In documents of 1919-1920, the basic idea of ​​camp content was formulated - work “to isolate harmful, undesirable elements and introduce them to conscious labor through coercion and re-education.”

In 1934, the Gulag became part of the united NKVD, reporting directly to the head of this department.
As of March 1, 1940, the Gulag system included 53 ITL (including camps engaged in railway construction), 425 correctional labor colonies (ITC), as well as prisons, 50 colonies for minors, 90 “baby homes.”

In 1943, convict departments were organized at the Vorkuta and North-Eastern camps with the establishment of the strictest isolation regime: convicts worked extended working hours and were used for heavy underground work in coal mines, tin and gold mining.

Prisoners also worked on the construction of canals, roads, industrial and other facilities in the Far North, Far East and other regions. Severe punishments were applied in the camps for the slightest violation of the regime.

Gulag prisoners, which included both criminals and persons convicted under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR “for counter-revolutionary crimes,” as well as members of their families, were required to work without pay. Sick people and prisoners declared unfit for work did not work. Teenagers aged 12 to 18 years were sent to juvenile colonies. The children of imprisoned women were housed in “baby houses.”

The total number of guards in the Gulag camps and colonies in 1954 was over 148 thousand people.

Having emerged as a tool and place for isolating counter-revolutionary and criminal elements in the interests of protecting and strengthening the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the Gulag, thanks to the system of “correction by forced labor,” quickly turned into a virtually independent branch of the national economy. Provided with cheap labor, this “industry” effectively solved the problems of industrialization of the eastern and northern regions.

Between 1937 and 1950, about 8.8 million people were in the camps. Persons convicted “for counter-revolutionary activities” in 1953 made up 26.9% of the total number of prisoners. In total, for political reasons during the years of Stalinist repression, 3.4-3.7 million people passed through camps, colonies and prisons.

By a resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR dated March 25, 1953, the construction of a number of large facilities carried out with the participation of prisoners was stopped, as not caused by “urgent needs of the national economy.” The liquidated construction projects included the Main Turkmen Canal, railways in the north of Western Siberia, on the Kola Peninsula, a tunnel under the Tatar Strait, artificial liquid fuel factories, etc. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR dated March 27, 1953, about an amnesty was released from the camps about 1 .2 million prisoners.

The resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR dated October 25, 1956 recognized “the continued existence of forced labor camps of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs as inappropriate as they do not ensure the fulfillment of the most important state task - the re-education of prisoners in labor.” The Gulag system existed for several more years and was abolished by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on January 13, 1960.

After the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book “The Gulag Archipelago” (1973), where the writer showed a system of mass repression and arbitrariness, the term “GULAG” became synonymous with the camps and prisons of the NKVD and the totalitarian regime as a whole.
In 2001, the State University was founded in Moscow on Petrovka Street.

The material was prepared based on information from RIA Novosti and open sources.

While the Nazi camp system's propaganda campaign received widespread publicity, the Soviet Union's penal camps received only brief mention in the international press.

The following summary is an attempt to highlight some of the facts.

The Russian Revolution, masterminded by the trio of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, and financed by international bankers, especially Kuhn Loeb, was Jewish from the very beginning. Their intentions, in which they succeeded, were to destroy the basis of the existing society in Russia by destroying both the peasantry and the aristocracy. In this case, the Gulag, forced labor camps, played a decisive role.

Many of Stalin's henchmen, such as Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich, were Jewish internationalists, as were most of the women around him. In 1937, Jews numbered only 5.7 percent of the party, but they constituted a majority in the government, where many of them used Russian pseudonyms.

On September 5, 1918, Dzerzhinsky was given instructions to carry out Lenin's policy of red terror. By the end of 1919 there were 21 registered camps in Russia, and at the end of 1920 there were 107.

In the early 1920s, the Soviet Union created two separate prison systems. The regular prison system, which dealt with criminals, and the "special" prison system, which dealt with "special" prisoners: that is, priests, former tsarist officials, bourgeois speculators, etc., and which came under the control of the Cheka, later known as the GPU, OGPU, NKVD and finally the KGB. Ultimately, these two systems would merge and work according to the principles of the latter.

In the last decades of the Tsarist regime, when Russia was undergoing belated industrialization, no one made an attempt to explore and populate the far northern regions of the country, although they were already known to be rich in minerals. The climate was too harsh, the potential for human suffering too great, and Russian technology too primitive. The Soviet regime, however, was less concerned about such things.

The Solovetsky Islands are an archipelago in the White Sea. The monastery complex served as a prison before. The Solovetsky monks kept the tsar's political opponents in prison.

In 1945, in a lecture on the history of the camps, the chief administrator of the system argued that the camp system began on Solovki in 1920, and not only the camp system, but also the entire Soviet system of forced labor began there in 1926.

The Solovetsky camp united other Soviet prisons on the island. The conditions of cruelty and comfort were probably more extreme than in other places due to the special nature of the prisoners and guards. Such camps were clearly unprofitable from the very beginning.

By November 10, 1925, the need to make better use of prisoners was obvious, but it was only with the advent of Nastal Aronovich Frenkel that a change in concept occurred. He was a Jew who mysteriously rose from the position of a prison guard to one of the most influential Solovetsky commissars with the blessing and support of Yagoda - a Jew, the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, that is, the head of the NKVD.

In Solozhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, it was Frenkel who personally came up with the plan where the amount of food given to prisoners depended on the amount of work done, and he tried to run the camp as a functioning enterprise. This murderous labor system would destroy the weaker prisoners within weeks and cause untold numbers of deaths.

Prisoners were transported by rail to the east and north in conditions so horrific that it is hard to imagine. They were crammed into carriages without basic amenities and with minimal amounts of food and water.

In 1929, the Soviet regime also accelerated the process of collectivization of agriculture. A vast upheaval that was deeper than the Russian Revolution itself. In an incredibly short period of time, rural commissars forced millions of peasants to abandon their small plots of land and join collective farms, driving them off the land that their families had cultivated for centuries.

The transformation permanently weakened Soviet agriculture and caused terrible famines in Ukraine and southern Russia in 1932 and 1934. A famine that killed between six and seven million people. Collectivization forever destroyed the connection between rural Russia and the past.

Was this, simply, a harbinger of "globalization"? An echo of the general idea of ​​​​the destruction of the connection between people and the land, the destruction of peasants and aristocrats?

By the mid-1930s, there were 3,000,000 prisoners in the Gulag system, dispersed among about a dozen camp complexes and several smaller detention centers.

Their existence was not completely secret, but no one, however, spoke about it openly. Beginning in 1929, the OGPU took part in the development of the Soviet Union, planning and equipping geological expeditions that explored coal, oil, gold, nickel and other metals that were under a layer of permafrost in the tundra of the Soviet Arctic and subarctic far north.

Prisoners were sent to areas where there was nothing, no housing, no training, no proper tools, meager supplies and freezing temperatures.

Khrushchev spoke of 17 million deaths in forced labor camps between 1937 and 1953.

According to another source, the number of those exiled to camps in the USSR was 28.78 million. How many of them died? It is impossible to say for sure, since no sufficiently reliable mortality statistics have been published.

And now? In whose hands are the fruits that cost the death and suffering of millions? A look at the names of modern Russian oligarchs provides the answer. Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky, Abramovich, Gusinsky, Friedman - all Jews.

Mention or concern for the plight of Israel's Palestinian victims is another omission in the international press.

The idea of ​​a conspiracy, an attempt to seize global power, no doubt sounds like some kind of science fiction story. Before you dismiss this idea, you need to ask the following questions:

Why the desire to control the media?
Why financial control?
Why economic control?
Why evidence of Jewish involvement in revolutions?

Regardless of the answer, the fact remains that, at this time, control of the world and everything in it is being quietly seized by people whose motives are suspect.

Anti-Semitic view? No, just the desire to find that elusive substance - the truth. There is no doubt that there are many Jews who are not aware of the aspirations of their kind. In any case, the term "anti-Semitic" is a misnomer, since it refers to many Semitic peoples who are not Jews, and who are themselves victims of the same policies, while it must be added that the statement that all Jews are Semites is incorrect. Many of them are descendants of Khazar Ashkenazis from northeastern Russia, which casts further doubt on Israel's legitimacy to exist.