Concentration Camps of the USSR

· Persecution, KGB, Books, Siberia, USSR

B. Yakovlev, A. Burtsov.
Concentration Camps of the USSR (excerpts)

Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of the USSR
Research and Materials, Series 1, Issue 23.

Munich, 1955

The Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of the USSR was organized in Munich on July 8, 1950. The Institute is a free corporation of scholars who have left the Soviet Union and are engaged in scientific research on the USSR. The purpose of this research is to dispel the ignorance that exists regarding the USSR and to provide the democratic world with reliable data concerning the Soviet Union.
Any scholar or researcher may become a collaborator of the Institute, regardless of nationality or political convictions, provided that he is not a member of the Communist Party or a sympathizer. Therefore, all emigrants from the USSR with scholarly qualifications have the right to participate in the work of the Institute irrespective of their place of residence.
The Institute, currently located in Munich, is primarily a correspondence center for scholars who are emigrants from the USSR. The Institute publishes a scholarly journal (Vestnik of the Institute), monographs, collections of articles, a bulletin on socio-political life in the USSR, etc. The Institute also organizes conferences of scholars who are emigrants from the USSR and provides modest material assistance to these scholars in their research work.

The Institute for the Study of the History and Culture ol the USSR,
organized in Munich on July 8, 1950, represents a free corporation ol
scientists and men and women ol letters who have left the Soviet Union and
are now engaged in research on their homeland. The purpose of their work is
to push back the frontiers of ignorance by presenting to the democratic
world the truth about the Soviet Union.
Anyone engaged in scholarly investigation may become a collaborator of
the Institute regardless of his national or political affiliations provided
he is not a Communist Party member or sympathizer. All members of the Soviet
emigration who have scholarly qualifications are, therefore, eligible to
participate in the work of the Institute, irrespective of their places of
residence. The central office of the Institute, now located in Munich, is
primarily a clearinghouse for the emigre scholarship ol the USSR. In
addition to publishing journals and papers, the Institute sponsors
conferences on the USSR and gives modest grants-in-aid for research studies
by emigre’ scholars.

Preface

One of the greatest achievements of the 20th century is the “invention” of concentration camps. Prior to this, European national systems permitted the exploitation of labor only in legal ways. The serf was a cheap labor force and lived and worked in a special world of rights and obligations, in a world in which he was born and raised.

After the emancipation of the peasants and the proclamation of the equality of all people for the white race, great changes occurred. The cost of labor rose, and the ever-growing network of various social regulations and laws protected first the rights of minors, then all female and male labor without exception from exploitation by employers.

After the First World War, socialism of various stripes penetrated almost all European countries. There emerged socialism pure and simple, Christian socialism, and national socialism. Protected by laws and under all systems, the ever-growing working class turned into a significant social force that acquired state rights.

The Russian Revolution, at its very beginning, faced the task of raising its numerous peoples to the level of the peoples of Central and Western Europe through economic and social measures. The NEP can be called an attempt in this direction. Beginning in 1924, after Stalin came to power, changes occurred in all state policy. Arming on the economic, military, and ideological fronts commenced. Stalin would never have achieved his goals if workers had received the same social rights as their counterparts in Europe. Stalin’s slogan was: fulfill economic plans at the cheapest cost of means. Since the prices of means of production could not be reduced, the Stalinist leadership took the path of reducing the payment for labor. This is precisely what led to the modern system of slave labor, labor unknown to mankind since the construction of the Egyptian pyramids.

The end justifies the means, and in order to create a “proletarian paradise” on earth, millions upon millions of those very proletarians had to perish in unbearably hard slave labor. Credit must be given to Stalin’s practical mind: instead of feeding the whole mass of the arrested and convicted, isolating them from society, he used their physical strength without special expense to the state. In order to replenish the rapidly dying hordes of prisoners, the courts were tasked with creating new cadres of those “in need of social re-education.” Through mass arrests, a million-strong army of unpaid slaves was created for the construction of Stalin’s “proletarian paradise.”

The Soviet system of concentration camps reached a particular flourishing in 1945 and the years that followed on the territory of the USSR and the countries of Eastern and Central Europe occupied by it. By that time, the Soviet Union had received a huge influx of free slave labor in the form of countless hordes of prisoners of war captured during the Second World War. The USSR obtained the right to try prisoners of war and sentence them to long terms of imprisonment under its own laws. Making wide use of this right, the Soviet Union turned millions of prisoners of war into free labor. In the harshest climatic conditions, starving, dying from cold and deprivation, masses of prisoners of war shared the fate of local victims of communism, who could not even count on any help from outside.

Only from those who returned alive from many years of Soviet captivity did the free world gradually learn of the true state of affairs in the Soviet ‘paradise.’ One account after another was carefully collected. Lenin’s words about Russia as a “prison of peoples” took on a completely different tragic hue and meaning. Today we know for certain that in certain years up to 15 million prisoners were held in Soviet concentration camps. Even now, 10 million Soviet subjects and subjects of Western states are undergoing “re-education” in those same camps.

The value of this book lies in the fact that it summarizes and systematizes a vast amount of material about concentration camps, obtained from various sources: from former prisoners of war, defectors, refugees, and all other victims and witnesses of the use of slave labor in the USSR. The book’s value is further enhanced by the fact that it is accompanied by a detailed map of the location of the camps, drawn up with particular care and precision. All this together makes the book a convincing document that exposes the terrifying Soviet reality and truthfully incriminates the communist system.

Dr. G. A. von Metnits

Preliminary Author’s Remarks

Among the literature on Soviet concentration camps existing in the free world, a list of which is provided in our book, there is a large number of highly valuable works. In addition to and further development of these works—taking into account their little-illuminated aspects and, on a number of issues, the complete absence of data—we have conducted the present study.

Our work is divided into three sections. The first gives a brief description of the development of forced labor in the USSR and its legal and administrative-organizational aspects. The second, main section describes 165 individual camps. The third section includes, as an appendix, the principal laws that served and serve as the basis for both the organization of camps and the extraction of masses of people from Soviet society and their transformation into imprisoned slaves.

We are fully aware that our research only partially illuminates the legal and administrative-organizational issues of the Soviet forced labor system and only a portion of the vast, carefully concealed, and ever-changing camp network on the territory of the USSR. Nevertheless, we believe that both our general data and the rare documents we have found, as well as the specific information on individual camps, will prove useful to researchers, lawyers, and politicians.

As a rule, our entire work was based on testimony of living witnesses who had the good fortune to break free into the free world. The data collected among these individuals are from the second half of 1953 and the first half of 1954. Some data we took later, when the work was already in press. In addition, we consulted former Soviet citizens who, by a twist of fate, found themselves on this side of the Iron Curtain and who, in the past, were in some way connected with the issue under study. We also took into account all the literature we had collected on the subject.

In the diagrams, we included only what was confirmed by witnesses, but it must be assumed that these diagrams nevertheless have shortcomings and, of course, do not fully illuminate the complex and camouflaged apparatus of the GULAG and its branches. When drawing up plans or sketches of individual camps or maps of groups of camps, we relied exclusively on witness testimony.

As for the description of the camps themselves, we adhered to the principle of giving a brief description of the geographic and administrative location, climatic conditions, industry, and hence the use of prisoners’ labor. Where possible, we also provided the number of prisoners by camp and their subdivisions, but only on the basis of testimony from people who returned from there. It is quite understandable that these figures must be treated with caution; for no prisoner, with rare exception, was ever exactly informed of the number of prisoners in his camp point, camp, or camp group, nor did he know the number of camp points themselves.

In some cases we were unable to verify the correctness of the geographical names of camp points and settlements reported to us. These unverified names are marked in the text with the sign *.

In concluding our preface, we express our deep gratitude to all those who helped us in compiling our work, which has the sole purpose of truthfully and objectively investigating the system of concentration camps of the Soviet Union.

Section One

Chapter One. The Punitive Policy of the Soviet Union

1. The Soviet Court

Soviet criminal law has a fundamentally basic difference from the criminal law of the countries of the free democratic world. The main principle of criminal law in countries of the free world is the rule: only that which is directly prohibited by law is criminal; under Soviet criminal law, it is permitted to do only what is permitted, and everything that is not permitted is forbidden and, consequently, criminal1. In order to enable the prosecution, on a legal basis, of persons who have violated this principle, Article 16 on analogy was included in the Criminal Code. The text of this article is as follows:
“If a particular socially dangerous act is not directly provided for by this Code, the basis and limits of liability for it shall be determined with reference to those articles of the Code which provide for the most similar types of crimes”2.
On the basis of this article, any action or inaction of a Soviet citizen or a foreigner residing in the Soviet Union may be deemed socially dangerous by Soviet justice, i.e., transformed into a crime, even though it is not directly provided for by the relevant articles of the Soviet Criminal Code.
In order to complete the characterization of the Soviet Criminal Code, it is also necessary to pay attention to Article 7 and to the commentary on it, placed in the section of the Criminal Code “Article-by-Article Materials.” From the text of the article it follows that measures of social protection may be applied not only in relation to persons who have committed socially dangerous acts, but also in relation to those “representing a danger by reason of their connection with a criminal milieu or by reason of their past activity”3. Consequently, any person may be convicted solely on the ground that he is declared socially dangerous, without any establishment of his specific guilt. True, the commentary to this article limits the measures applied to such persons “only to exile or expulsion.” But this applies only to the courts: administrative bodies in their decisions are not limited by this commentary.
In the 1930s, so-called “militia troikas” operated, created under all regional militia directorates, which sent hundreds of thousands of people to camps as a “socially dangerous element” (SDE) on the basis of Article 35 of the Criminal Code (prostitution, persons without definite occupations, who had previously committed any crimes and served their sentences, etc.), where the criterion was not the crime committed at the given moment but behavior in the past4. The overwhelming majority of those convicted in this category were peasants who had evaded collectivization and moved to cities without documents.
Guided by these same principles, the Collegia of the OGPU operated, and now the “Special Board” of the Ministry of Internal Affairs acts in the same way, with the only difference from the “militia troikas” being that it convicts only the “counter-revolutionary element” (CRE).
It is interesting to trace the evolution of the application of measures of coercion to persons who have violated the norms of criminal legislation in the USSR.
Immediately after the end of the civil war, the Soviet Union began to implement the principle that there is no punishment in the USSR, but only measures of social protection of the Soviet state from unstable elements who have accidentally fallen into a criminal path, who should not be punished but corrected through re-education. In accordance with this, the 4th section of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (in the editions of 1922 and 1926) speaks only of measures of social protection, and not of punishments applied to persons who have committed offenses; the very word “crime” is excluded. At that time, prisons were renamed corrective labor houses. A special Corrective Labor Code was issued, regulating the rules for the detention of persons deprived of liberty in places of confinement. According to its articles, almost all the rights granted to workers by the Labor Code (8-hour working day, payment for labor, granting of leave, etc.) were extended to prisoners. Under the laws of this Code, prisoners with good behavior were granted leave to go home to visit their families; peasants were released for harvesting, etc. “This system not of punishment but of correction reached its maximum development by the end of the NEP. On March 26, 1928, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Sovnarkom, in their resolution, recognized it as inexpedient to apply short-term deprivation of liberty for a term of up to one year, and in connection with this Article 28 of the Criminal Code was amended5. At the same time, courts were instructed to replace deprivation of liberty for a term of up to one year with corrective labor under all articles providing for such deprivation. This was the culminating point of the implementation of the principle of education, not punishment. It must be noted here that, as a rule, convicted persons were to serve corrective labor at their place of work, and only in cases where the court specially stipulated this, corrective labor was served under the instructions of the bodies of corrective labor institutions. From persons serving corrective labor at their place of work, 20 to 25 percent was usually deducted from their wages6. During this period, conditional early release was applied very widely7; convicts usually served no more than half of the term determined by the sentence, and often only one third or even one quarter. Release was carried out as follows: first, a day of work was counted, subject to overfulfillment of the plan, as two days of the term of confinement, and when, as a result of such credits, the term served reached half of the sentence, the prisoner was conditionally released early.
From 1930 the situation began gradually to change. The terms of punishment under the most frequently applied articles of the Criminal Code, as determined by courts, sharply increased. Courts, under secret instructions of the Supreme Court, began to apply the maximum terms of punishment provided for by the articles of the Criminal Code. Finally, a new law was issued, known as the “Law of August 7, 1932.” Under this law, ordinary theft, which had entailed deprivation of liberty for a term of up to two years8, was now punishable by shooting, and only under mitigating circumstances could the court apply deprivation of liberty for a term of 10 years. In effect, this law classified a criminal offense (theft) as a political crime.
Starting with the resolution of May 8, 1934, the Central Executive Committee and the Sovnarkom of the USSR used the term “punishment” instead of “measure of social protection.” In the same year 1934, conditional early release was abolished, as was Article 56, which established it. After this, prisoners served the entire term determined by the sentence and could be released only through amnesty or as a result of a review of the case. As a result of these measures, the number of prisoners in corrective labor colonies alone, which were under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice, reached 800,000 persons (this information was officially communicated in a circular of the Union Prosecutor’s Office at the beginning of 1934); what the number of prisoners in the concentration camps of the OGPU was, this circular did not report, but it was undoubtedly greater than in the corrective labor colonies.
During the period from 1932 to 1934, Soviet punitive policy definitively abandoned the principles of education and switched to methods of punishment. The norms of the Criminal Procedure Code and the Corrective Labor Code ceased to be applied in the courts, and complete arbitrariness began in places of confinement. Convicted persons, in respect of whom the sentence had not yet entered into legal force, were immediately sent to concentration camps. Cases in which convicts, later acquitted by a higher court and subject to release, had to be searched for in concentration camps for a year or two became common.
From July 10, 1934, corrective labor colonies, which had previously been under the system of the People’s Commissariat of Justice, were transferred to the jurisdiction of the newly organized Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps and Labor Colonies (GULAG). This name was given to the former Directorate of Concentration Camps of the OGPU and the Directorate of Corrective Labor Places of Confinement of the People’s Commissariat of Justice. The OGPU was renamed the Main Directorate of State Security of the newly created NKVD. In the same period, the term “imprisonment” was introduced.
On April 7, 1935, the law “On Measures to Combat Crime among Minors” was issued. Under this law, the Central Executive Committee and the Sovnarkom decree:

“Minors, starting from the age of 12, found guilty of committing theft, inflicting violence, bodily harm, mutilation, murder, or attempted murder, shall be brought to criminal court with the application of all measures of criminal punishment”9.

This law began a series of laws on bringing minors to court for various crimes. On December 10 of the same year, a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was published “On Bringing Juveniles from 12 Years of Age to Justice for Unscrewing Rails and Placing Various Objects on the Rails.” Then followed the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of December 28, 1940, on liability for unauthorized departure of students from trade schools and for violating labor discipline10. And finally, on May 31, 1941, a decree was issued, completing the decrees “On Bringing Juveniles to Judicial Responsibility,” under which juveniles from the age of 14 are held liable for all crimes on an equal basis with adults. On July 26, 1940, a decree of the Supreme Soviet on absenteeism was issued, and almost immediately after it, on August 10, “On Liability for Petty Theft and Hooliganism.” Under these decrees, several million Soviet citizens were convicted. This entire process of evolution of legislation in the USSR was completed by the issuance of two decrees of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR:

1. of June 4, 1947 “On Criminal Liability for Theft of State and Public Property”;
2. also of June 4, 1947 “On Strengthening the Protection of Personal Property of Citizens.” These two decrees absorbed the laws of August 7, 1932, of August 10, 1940, as well as the following articles of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR: 59a, 116, 162, 166, 166a, 167, and 169 part II. On the basis of the new laws, for simple theft of private property, committed alone and for the first time, i.e., in the presence of mitigating circumstances11, a new measure of punishment was established — confinement in a camp for a term of 5 to 6 years instead of the 3 months previously applied12; for petty theft at the workplace, also under mitigating circumstances, — confinement in a camp for a term of 7 to 10 years instead of disciplinary sanction according to a specially established table by the People’s Commissariat of Labor13. Since the beginning of the 1930s, the work of extrajudicial repression bodies again became widely employed. Thus, from 1934, i.e., after the formation of the NKVD, special boards of regional, territorial, railway, water-transport courts began operating, convicting under Article 58 of the Criminal Code persons whose cases had been investigated by NKVD bodies. In 1936, so-called “Special Troikas” of the NKVD were organized in all regional cities, which were, as it were, branches of the “Special Conference” under the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR. The decisions of these “Special Troikas” are approved by the “Special Conference.” Their organization was prompted by the fact that the “Special Conference” itself could not cope with the enormous number of cases submitted to it. Despite the fact that under the law of June 10, 1934, the “Special Conference” could only impose deprivation of liberty, exile, and banishment for a term of up to 5 years, during those years the “Special Troikas” began to impose (and the “Special Conference” approved) first 10 years, then 15, 20, 25 years of confinement in concentration camps, and finally the supreme measure of punishment (VMN). Usually, relatives of those sentenced to VMN were informed that the latter had been sentenced “without the right of correspondence.” The decrees on the death penalty for the entire period of the existence of communist power in the USSR were as follows: The death penalty as a temporary measure (pending its abolition by the All-Union Central Executive Committee of the USSR) was introduced in early 1918 and, as a “temporary measure,” except for two official interruptions, remains in effect to this day (the first time the death penalty was abolished “at the proposal of the Cheka by decree of the Council of People’s Commissars” in 1920, but less than two months later this decree was repealed)14. The death penalty in the Soviet Union was carried out before World War II by means of shooting. But on April 19, 1943, by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR “On the Liability of German-Fascist Military Criminals and Their Accomplices,” new measures of punishment were introduced, namely the death penalty by hanging and hard labor. The decree was particularly widely applied and affected mainly Soviet citizens. On May 26, 1947, by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the death penalty was abolished15. However, by the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of January 12, 1950, the death penalty was again introduced in relation to “traitors to the motherland, spies, and saboteurs”16. And finally, by the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of May 6, 1953, the application of the death penalty (introduced by the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of January 12, 1950) was extended to persons who committed murder under aggravating circumstances17.

2. Bodies of Extrajudicial Reprisal in the USSR

On December 20, 1917, under the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR, a special body was established
called the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Speculation and
Sabotage. The draft decree on the organization of the VChK was drawn up by Lenin18.
The competence of the VChK mainly included: counterintelligence and the fight against
political opponents of Soviet power. The VChK waged this struggle by means of extrajudicial
reprisal. The role of the VChK as an organ of swift reprisal was especially great during the period of
so‑called war communism of 1917–1920. The terror carried out by this organ reached
particularly large proportions after the decree of the All‑Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars
“On Red Terror” was issued in September 1918. This decree granted the VChK unlimited
powers; even when the evidence gathered in a case was insufficient, the VChK
had the right to convict the arrested person. Such general grounds as belonging to
the “class of exploiters” or “for the intimidation of enemies of the revolution” were quite
sufficient for the physical annihilation of the intended victims. The involvement
of the arrested with the enemies of the revolution was determined “by the dictate of revolutionary
conscience”19 of the VChK officials.
The terror carried out by the VChK organs, especially on the periphery, reached such
proportions that it compelled the All‑Russian Central Executive Committee in the summer of 1919 to issue a special decree in
which an exact list was specified of crimes that could be
examined by VChK organs in an extrajudicial manner. According to this decree, the VChK
could consider, besides counter‑revolutionary cases, cases of banditry,
armed robbery and large‑scale embezzlement. The criminal‑procedural order
applied in the VChK organs was known in criminal law under the name of
investigatory, inquisitorial, or inquisitorial process. This process, as
is known, was applied in the Middle Ages. In this process, the conduct
of the investigation was shrouded in deep secrecy and was carried out in the absence of outside
persons; there were no parties in the process, and the case began on the basis of denunciations and
rumors, while the accused himself appeared at the judicial process only as an object
of investigation; the collected material was recorded in written form, and on
the basis of this same material, without any verification, a sentence was passed.
Lenin, as a jurist, remembered it, extracted it from the depths of history, and armed
his brainchild — the VChK — with this old, tested weapon of medieval despotism.
Departments of the VChK were organized in all provincial cities. At the same time,
in the Red Army, Special Departments of the VChK were organized, whose duties
included combating espionage. The handling of cases in the Special Departments of the VChK was even
more simplified than in the VChK itself: sometimes the entire inquiry material consisted of
a single protocol, which at the same time served as the decision on the application of
repression; there were cases where the protocol‑decision was formalized already
after the execution had taken place. The technique of conducting the inquiry was simple.
The investigator of the Special Department of the VChK conducted the inquiry into the case, and in
the decision he drew up he indicated the sanction he recommended; this
decision was immediately approved by the head of the Special Department.
The content of the investigation materials remained unknown to the person held
to account, and he learned of the punishment determined by the Special Department only at the moment the sentence was carried out. (These exactly the same
methods were used by the Special Departments of the Soviet army during the war of 1941–1945).
With the introduction of the New Economic Policy, in accordance with the
decisions of the Ninth Congress of Soviets of February 6, 1922, the VChK was reorganized into
the Unified State Political Directorate — OGPU. Within the OGPU,
“Judicial Collegiums of the OGPU” were created, and in regional centers “Special Troikas
of the OGPU.” The difference between the OGPU and the VChK lay only in the fact that the VChK exterminated
its victims without any formalization, while the OGPU had to formalize this same act
by transferring it to the Judicial Collegium of the OGPU, which, of course, had nothing in common with a court.
In these Judicial Collegiums of the OGPU, the case was heard without summoning
the accused and without calling witnesses to the sessions, i.e., according to the rules
previously applied in the VChK. The main distinguishing feature of the OGPU from the VChK was
that the OGPU did not consider criminal offenses, cases of which
were transferred to the courts, but even this rule was sometimes violated. All
counter‑revolutionary cases remained, as before, within the competence of the OGPU. The scale
of terror during the NEP period was somewhat mitigated and reduced, but this was
a temporary phenomenon: beginning in 1928, the activity of the OGPU again assumed
wide proportions.
By the law of July 10, 1934, the OGPU was incorporated as the Main Political
Directorate of State Security (GUGB) into the all‑union People’s Commissariat of Internal
Affairs (NKVD), created by the same resolution of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, and
some of the functions of the GUGB‑NKVD connected with the examination of
counter‑revolutionary cases were assigned to the military tribunals of the district, as well as
to special collegiums created at the regional, territorial, railway, and supreme courts,
the composition of which was fully staffed by NKVD officers. The result of the resolution of the CEC and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR of July 10, 1934,
was that the most dangerous counter‑revolutionary crimes were subject to
transfer for examination to the above‑mentioned judicial organs; the “Special
Board under the NKVD,” created by the same resolution, retained the right only
of limited extrajudicial reprisal, namely only the application of exile, deportation,
and confinement in a camp for a term of up to 5 years. Whether this resolution on
limiting the rights of the “Special Board” was put into effect, there is no exact data for
the period up to 1936; from 1936 it becomes known that the “Special Board”
again sentences to confinement in camps for terms up to 25 years and to
the death penalty.
The cases, the investigation of which was carried out in the NKVD organs, were distributed between
the “Special Board,” the special collegiums, and the military tribunals according to
the following principle: if the case materials contained formal grounds for
bringing to trial, the case was transferred to the special collegiums or military
tribunals — according to jurisdiction; if such grounds were absent, but at the same
time, in the opinion of the NKVD organs, the arrested persons were nonetheless subject (for
preventive purposes) to conviction, then their cases were transferred to the “Special
Board.”
By 1936, the “Special Board” was overflowing with such cases and itself
no longer had the physical capacity to examine them. Then in all regional
cities of the Soviet Union, departments of the “Special Board” were created, i.e.,
the same organs that had existed before the reorganization of the OGPU into the
NKVD were again restored, but then they were called special troikas of the OGPU under the OGPU directorates in
military districts. The difference was as follows: the OGPU troikas were only
attached to military districts, whereas now branches of the “Special Board” were created in
all regions, consequently, there were even more of them than before. In addition,
at the regional directorates of the militia, so‑called “militia troikas” were created, which sentenced to deprivation of freedom for terms up to 5 years,
but only the “socially dangerous” and not the “counter‑revolutionary” element. Under
the rubric “socially dangerous element” (apart from the criminal element) came
all persons who in any way violated the rules of the newly introduced
passport system. This applied to registration rules in general and especially to
the restricted zones of the capitals, regional cities, and large industrial centers.
The number of those convicted by these “militia troikas” throughout the entire
USSR, it seems, reached one to two million persons. As an example,
one can cite the fact that in a concentration camp located on the
eastern shore of Kaporsky Bay (110–120 km west of Leningrad),
in the middle of 1930, out of 18 thousand inmates held there (15 thousand
men and 3 thousand women), about 40 percent were persons convicted for
violating the passport system, and for the most part convicted in an extrajudicial
manner. These troikas were created mainly for the reason that
the “Special Board” and its regional branches were overcrowded with cases of persons
charged with counter‑revolution.
The maximum development of the activity of the “Special Board” was reached in the
period of the Yezhovshchina (1936–1938). What number of people were sent to
concentration camps during this period is unknown, but it can be said with complete certainty
that it equals not one but several million persons (in the
camps, those arrested during the Yezhovshchina were called the “Yezhov intake,” as
distinct from the previous “intake,” which was called the “Kirov intake,” i.e.,
consisting of those arrested after the murder of Kirov throughout 1935: Kirov
was killed on December 1, 1934). The intensified activity of the “Special Board”
continued until the end of 1938, i.e., until the removal of Yezhov from the post of People’s
Commissar of Internal Affairs; after that it decreased somewhat, but not for long.
From the beginning of the war in Europe, the work of the NKVD again began to assume mass
proportions. This became especially noticeable from the start of the Finnish war and the annexation of
Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, when the NKVD, besides intensifying repressions
against the population of the old regions of the Soviet Union, began to carry out
large‑scale repressions to cleanse the territory of the newly annexed regions of
anti‑Soviet elements. This campaign began with the arrests of so‑called
“osadniks” (the name for Polish military settlers‑colonists in Western
Ukraine and Western Belorussia). The application of repressions against the “osadniks” was
only a pretext for a broad purge of the entire population of Western Ukraine and Western
Belorussia. This fact is sufficiently evident already from the
circumstance,. that the number of those arrested in these regions reached 13
percent20 of the entire population, while at the same time the number of “osadniks” hardly
exceeded 2–3 percent of the population. All this work was carried out by the GUGB‑NKVD
and formalized by the “Special Board.” After Western Ukraine and Belorussia,
it was the turn of the Baltic republics as well.
With the beginning of the Second World War and the declaration of martial law in almost
the entire European part of the Soviet Union, the activity of normal civilian
courts essentially ceased completely. Almost throughout the entire USSR, people’s and
regional courts were abolished and in their place regional and
district military tribunals were formed. The activity of these tribunals proceeded under
the direct control of the NKGB organs and they were only formally subordinated to
the People’s Commissariat of Justice. This concerned the rear areas of the Soviet Union, while in
the frontline zone all judicial proceedings were in the hands of the Special Departments of the armies, i.e.,
in effect, in the hands of the same NKGB.
In the second period of the war, great work began on cleansing the
territories that had been under German occupation of the “counter‑revolutionary element,” and
after its conclusion, a check of Soviet citizens deported by the Germans began.
All this work was carried out by the organs of the Ministry of State
Security. The People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs was divided in 1941 into
the People’s Commissariat of State Security (NKGB) and the People’s
Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD).
In the second period of the war, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued
a decree on April 19, 1943, introducing new punitive measures — the death
penalty by hanging and hard labor. This decree received especially wide
application. Measures of repression under this decree were carried out mainly
by the organs of the Ministry of State Security, i.e., by its “Special
Board,” and to a significantly lesser extent by military tribunals, which were also under the de facto control of the MGB. The investigation in all these
cases was conducted exclusively by the MGB.
An extended interpretation of the application of the decree of April 19, 1943,
by the MGB organs assumed exceptional proportions. In the overwhelming majority
of cases, the practical application of this law had nothing in common with the actual
content and purpose of the decree of April 19, 1943. Any
slightest contact of Soviet citizens with the Germans in the areas occupied by them
was qualified by the military tribunals and MGB organs as “passive treason”
or “collaboration with the Germans.” Such “crimes” as washing linen for Germans
or working in a German kitchen or cleaning premises occupied by Germans
were subsumed under the effect of this decree. Convicted for these “crimes”
were usually women and adolescents who, in order not to die of hunger, had been
compelled to work for the Germans. For this they were recognized as “accomplices
of war criminals” and sentenced under the decree to hard labor in camps
for terms up to 20 years. Persons who in fact had any connection
to the administration organized by the Germans in the occupied regions (village elders,
burgomasters, etc.) were sentenced to death by hanging.
Special commissions of the MGB, with the participation of visiting sessions of military tribunals,
carried out swift reprisal. On the same scale and with the same
motivations, this decree was applied by MVD organs against “Ostarbeiters” and
soldiers of the Soviet Army who had been in German captivity. Their guilt also
in most cases was qualified as “passive treason” with all
the consequences arising from this circumstance and entailed
hard labor or hanging. According to the most modest estimates, under the decree of April
19, 1943, no fewer than three million persons were convicted21.
From all this it follows that the methods of struggle of the Soviet power against its
opponents subsequently remained exactly the same as they were in the
initial period of its existence. Only the names of the organs
conducting repressions changed — VChK, OGPU, NKVD, MVD, MGB. In their actions there is not even a shadow
of law. They carry out the annihilation of millions of people, sparing neither women nor
children, both those suspected of guilt and, for preventive purposes, those
who, in the opinion of the Bolshevik leaders, are not only dangerous and
hostile at the present moment, but may become dangerous or hostile in the future.
Such is the path from 1917 to 1954 of the evolution of Soviet judicial
legislation, its application, and extrajudicial repressions.

1 Article 6 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. Criminal Code of the RSFSR.
State Publishing House of Legal Literature, p. 5, Moscow, 1950.

2 Ibid., p. 10.

3 Ibid., p. 5, Article 7.

4 Ibid., pp. 21–23, Article 55.

5 Ibid., p. 16, Article 28.

6 Article 30 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. Criminal Code of the RSFSR,
State Publishing House of Legal Literature, Moscow, 1932, pp. II, 87, 88.

7 Ibid., p. 20, Article 56.

8 Article 162, Paragraph “d” of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. Criminal Code
of the RSFSR, State Publishing House of Legal Literature, Moscow, 1950, p. 105.

9 Article-by-Article Materials to Article 12 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR,
Criminal Code of the RSFSR, State Publishing House of Legal Literature, Moscow, 1852, p.
82.

10 Criminal Code of the RSFSR, State Publishing House of Legal Literature, Moscow,
1950, p. 164.

11 Ibid., p. 30, Article 48.

12 Ibid., p. 105, Article 162, Paragraph “a”.

13 Note to Article 162 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, Moscow, 1932,
p. 61.

14 Estrin A. M. Principles of Soviet Criminal Law. Publishing House of the 1st
Moscow State University, Moscow, 1930.

15 Gazette of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, No. 17, 1947.

16 Ibid., No. 3, 1950.

17 Pravda, No. 127, 7.V.1954.

18 Lenin V. I. Works, 3rd edition, Vol. XXII, Party Publishing House of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks),
Moscow, 1937, pp. 120–126,

19 Paragraph 22 of Chapter VII of the “Regulations on Revolutionary Tribunals”,
Collection of Statutes, 1919, No. 13, p. 132.

20 Brazhnev A. School of the Oprichniki, “Posev”, No. 31, 5.VIII.1951.

21 Semenov N. The Soviet Court and Punitive Policy, published by the Institute
for the Study of the History and Culture of the USSR, Munich, 1953, p. 131.

3. Courts of the Soviet Union

* Table. — S. V.

Name of Court
Period of Operation
Jurisdiction
Location

1 Local People’s Courts
1918–1922
Ordinary criminal offenses
In uyezds and small towns

2 Revolutionary Tribunals
1918–1922
Counterrevolutionary crimes and particularly important criminal cases
In guberniyas and large cities

3 Revolutionary Military Tribunals
1919–1922
Military crimes

4 Revolutionary Military Railway Tribunals
1920–1922
Cases of railway and water transport
At railway administrations

5 Supreme Court of the USSR:

a) Civil Collegium
1922–1954
Highest appellate court for republican courts and particularly important cases

b) Criminal Collegium
1922–1954
Highest appellate court for republican courts and particularly important cases
legia
nyi sud for republican courts and
particularly important cases

c) Railway Collegium
1923–1954
Appellate court for railway line courts

d) Water Transport Collegium
1922–1954
Appellate court for water transport basin courts

e) Military Collegium
1922–1954
Appellate court for military tribunals, military districts, military
fleets
In each Union Republic

6 Supreme Court of a Union Republic:

a) Civil Collegium
1922–1954
Appellate court for krai and oblast courts and hearing of particularly important
cases

b) Criminal Collegium
1922–1954
Appellate court for krai and oblast courts and hearing of particularly important
cases

7 Krai and Oblast Courts:
in each krai and oblast

a) Civil Collegium
1922–1954
Appellate court for people’s courts and for particularly important cases, as a court of first instance

b) Criminal Collegium
1922–1954
Appellate court for people’s courts and court of first instance for cases in which
the death penalty may be imposed, and for counterrevolutionary cases

8 People’s Courts
1922–1954
Criminal cases under all articles where the death penalty cannot be
imposed, except for counterrevolutionary and civil cases
One or several in each district, if the district is large

9 Military Tribunals of Military Districts
1922–1954
Appellate court for numbered military tribunals and court of first instance
for Art. 58, paragraphs 1-a, 1-b, 1-c, 6, 8, and 9 of the Criminal Code
In each military district

10 Numbered Military Tribunals
1922–1954
Cases of military crimes and cases of servicemen in general (in peacetime
only those where the death penalty is not imposed)
In military units (usually in divisions)

11 Military Tribunals of the Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs attached to Military
Districts
1922–1954
Appellate court for military tribunals of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for
departments of military districts and court of first instance under Art. 58, paragraphs 1-a, 1-b, 1-c, 6,
8, and 9 of the Criminal Code for MVD personnel
In each military district

12 Military Tribunals of the Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for Individual
Military Districts
1934–1954
Major and other crimes committed by servicemen of the Ministry
of Internal Affairs (including fire protection and places of confinement)
In each oblast on the territory of the given military district

13 Military Tribunals of Naval Fleets
1922–1954
Appellate court for military tribunals, departments of the fleet tribunal, and
court of first instance under Art. 58, paragraphs 1-a, 1-b, 1-c, 6, 8, and 9 of the Criminal Code
Several attached to each military tribunal of the given naval fleet

14 Military Tribunals of Departments of Military Tribunals of the Fleet
1922–1954
Major and other crimes of servicemen of the navy
Several attached to each military tribunal of the given naval fleet

15 Railway Courts
1922–1954
Official crimes of railway personnel
At each administration of a railway division

16 Water Transport Courts
1922–1954
Official crimes of river and maritime transport personnel
At each administration of a separate water basin

17 Special Collegia of Railway and Water Transport Collegia
of the Supreme Court of the USSR, Supreme Courts of the Republics, and krai and oblast courts
1934–1938
Hearing of all cases in which the investigation was conducted by NKVD bodies, mainly
for counterrevolutionary crimes

Chapter Two. A Brief Description of the Emergence and Development of Camps in the USSR

1. The Period of Creation and Subsequent Expansion of the Camp System (1918–1927)

On April 15, 1919, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, signed by its chairman M. I. Kalinin, issued a decree “On Forced Labor Camps”22. This decree legalized two provisions that had accompanied the 18-month existence of the Soviet republic, namely: a) the establishment of the camp system and b) the establishment of forced labor. The extent to which these provisions were implemented is clear from the fact that the decree stipulated the organization of forced labor camps “at the Administrative Departments of the Provincial Executive Committees”23, i.e., all provincial committees were thereby obliged to establish camps. The organization and administration of the camps were entrusted to the Gubernia Chekas (Provincial Extraordinary Commissions); camps in districts were opened with the permission of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs24.

Already in this first decree on camps it was stipulated that escape from them “shall be subject to the most severe punishments”25. But the text of the decree of April 15, 1919, apparently proved insufficient, and on May 17, 1919, a new expanded decree “On Forced Labor Camps” was published, signed by the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee V. Avanesov26. The decree was worked out in great detail and contained the following sections: a) organization of camps, b) camp administration, c) guard detail, d) sanitary and medical supervision, e) regarding prisoners, f) accommodations. It is necessary to note that for a first escape, a tenfold increase in the term of imprisonment was established, and for a second escape the Revolutionary Tribunal had the right to apply the death penalty27.

This decree laid down all the basic principles of forced labor, which became an integral element of the state life of the Soviet Union and gradually transformed into the currently existing system of slave labor.

The year 1919 was not only the year of legalizing the system of forced labor in camps; it was also the year of identifying and registering a significant group of the population of the USSR, the first part of which was immediately imprisoned in camps, the second part was physically annihilated in all subsequent years, and the third part continuously filled and still fills the concentration camps of the Soviet Union. We have in mind the “Decree of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs on the procedure for registering former landowners, capitalists, and persons who held responsible positions in the tsarist bourgeois system (instruction),” issued on September 26, 191928.

Thus, the texts of the first and second decrees established in 1919 in each province (and sometimes in a district) forced labor camps, and a special instruction of the NKVD defined the category of the population that began to fill these camps. There were 97 provinces and regions in Russia29. Since no administrative and geographical reforms had yet been carried out in 1919, it must be assumed that the number of camps (not including district ones) in that year was 97.

One of the first camps for political prisoners was the camp on the Solovetsky Islands. Immediately after its creation, subsidiary camps began to be formed: Vaginraksha in Kem and Popov Island in the White Sea (the latter served as a transit point to Solovki). The system of these camps was called USLON (Administration of Solovetsky Special Purpose Camps).

When creating the first camps, the Soviet leadership came to the idea of using camp prisoners as a labor force for the exploitation of forest tracts in Karelia, Siberia, the Pechora region, and mineral resources in Ukhta, Pechora, Vaygach Island, Siberian mines, etc.

A gradual expansion of the camp network began. Prisoners were brought into uninhabited areas sometimes hundreds of kilometers away from administrative centers, into the taiga, tundra, and onto islands. Their first task was to build premises for the administration and guards, and for themselves huts, dugouts, barracks; to fence the camp with wire, and then to begin exhausting physical labor in the forest, in adits, on log floating, etc., which for the majority of camp inmates ended in death.

The composition of prisoners in the period 1918–1927 consisted mainly of:

1. representatives of the Russian aristocracy and the state apparatus of pre-revolutionary Russia who had not managed to emigrate abroad;
2. captured and not exterminated participants of the White Army;
3. representatives of the white and black clergy who refused to renounce their ecclesiastical rank, as well as a large number of nuns;
4. persons belonging to various sects;
5. those accused of serious political crimes but not shot. This category mainly included representatives of the old intelligentsia;
6. “NEPmen,” i.e., individuals who during the NEP (1921–1928) organized private enterprises (mainly commercial);
7. major repeat offenders accused of serious criminal and repeated offenses;
8. bandits. This category was especially prominent in the post-war years and the years of the NEP. It consisted not of professionals of the criminal world, but of young people thrown off the tracks of normal life, who had no opportunity to enter higher educational institutions and chose the path of chasing easy profits. This category, in the language of the camp authorities, was called the “criminal-bandit element,” and together with the other seven categories listed above, constituted the contingent of prisoners held under the harshest camp conditions;
9. the category officially called in the language of the camp authorities “sotsblizkiye” (elements politically and socially close to the Bolsheviks). This category consisted of those sentenced under domestic articles (embezzlement, violence against minors, first-time theft, etc.) and performed the duties of internal camp administration: work allocators, brigade leaders, educators, managers of food and clothing warehouses, internal camp commandants. To this category were also assigned those accused under Article 35 of the Criminal Code (see text of article in appendix);
10. Soviet military personnel and Chekists accused not of political crimes but of abuse of authority, moral decay, etc. From this category were formed the camp guards, the paramilitary guard (VOKhR), the internal camp investigative and counter-intelligence section.

The general orientation of internal camp policy toward prisoners in this period boiled down to creating a “decorum of propriety”—an awareness of the existence of Soviet power in reality30. Prisoners were forbidden to engage in anti-Soviet conversations, but political re-education work with them was not conducted. Among the intellectual elite that formed in all large camps, conversations, talks, and discussions of a political nature were held in narrow circles, conducted at a high intellectual level. The camp counter-intelligence section constantly tried to recruit informers from among this intelligentsia. But those recruited (mainly through blackmail and threats) were sooner or later identified through open talk that so-and-so had become a “stool pigeon,” which led to the rapid transfer of the exposed person to another camp.

2. The Period of Creation of Prison Camps to Support Major New Construction Projects (1928–1934)

The period of 1928–1934 was marked by the addition of numerous camps to those already engaged in exploiting the country’s natural resources. These new camps were established to supply the major state construction projects that were carried out through the exploitation of the prisoners’ physical and intellectual labor. This is how the systems and administrations for the construction of the White Sea Canal in Karelia, Svirstroy in the Leningrad Oblast, Nivastroy on the Niva River near Kandalaksha, the Tuloma Arctic Hydroelectric Station near Murmansk, the Kotlas–Ukhta railway line in the Komi ASSR, the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), and others were created.
By the end of this period, large construction projects (also based on the exploitation of prisoner labor) were beginning in the central regions of Russia; however, these projects received prisoners convicted under common criminal articles or political prisoners with the mildest charges (for example, Article 56, paragraph 10 of the Criminal Code, i.e. anti-Soviet agitation).
The element most “dangerous” to the Soviet leadership was concentrated during this period on the Solovki Islands, in the Ukhta-Pechora camp system, and at the White Sea-Baltic Combine;
the intermediate element, with shorter sentences, was sent to BAMlag and to Siberia in general; and, finally, the light element was sent to the large construction projects in the central regions of the country.
The prisoner population in the camps during this period was supplemented by the following new political categories:

1. de-kulakized peasantry;
2. prominent specialists and scientists convicted as a result of the “wrecker” trials of the Industrial Party, the sugar-industry specialists, the oil specialists, and the purges of the Academy of Sciences and other scientific institutions. (One interesting detail concerning the accusations of wrecking against this category: until 1933, defendants were required to confess to wrecking activities in favor of France, while from 1933 onward, the confessions had to be in favor of Germany);
3. representatives of national parties and clandestine national organizations that had been formed: Russians, former members of socialist parties, Kondratievites, Azerbaijani Musavatists, Ukrainians from the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU), Georgian Social Democrats, Jewish Zionists, etc.;
4. foreign communists who had come to the Soviet Union for Comintern work and had become disillusioned with Soviet communist reality;
5. Soviet communists belonging to various party deviations: Trotskyists, Bukharinites, etc.;
6. young people accused of preparing terrorist acts against Soviet leaders, and, first and foremost, against Stalin. This category, which was very large in terms of its numbers, included mainly young people between the ages of 16 and 20;
7. a numerically large category of prisoners sentenced under the law of August 7, 1932, for the theft of state property;
8. border-zone populations accused of political crimes: espionage, preparation of sabotage, assisting crossings of the border, etc.;
9. artists;
10. Soviet citizens accused of contacts with foreigners.

The administrative structure within the camps during this period boiled down to the following. The camp commander was usually an officer of the OGPU–NKVD troops (in very rare cases, a military man or Chekist convicted under a common criminal article). External camp security was carried out by the VOKhR (armed guard), and in camps of particularly high importance – by servicemen of the NKVD troops. This external guard always lived outside the camp and performed its external security duties – escorting prisoners to and from their work sites and supervising them while they worked; inside the camp, supervision of the prisoners was carried out by the commandant’s detachment, which consisted of a commandant and his assistants – prisoners from among the “socially friendly.”

By the beginning of the period described, the torment and beating of prisoners by the camp authorities – which usually consisted of former Chekists, military men, and long-serving prisoners who had won the favor of higher authorities – had reached their limit in most camps. Prisoners were severely beaten, made to stand undressed on tree stumps in the forest in winter, or exposed “for the mosquitoes” in summer, etc., and all of this was a mass phenomenon. A known case occurred when an inspection commission from Moscow carried out an investigation in the Solovetsky camp system. Several particularly “outstanding” camp commanders were shot; this halted the arbitrary rule of the lower authorities for several years and somewhat improved the prisoners’ regime.

In subsequent years, “work credits” were introduced for prisoners, which reduced their sentences for shock-work performance. A prisoner who performed his work at a shock-work pace could reduce his sentence by 18, 30, or 45 days per quarter. This difference in credits was initially determined by the degree of the prisoners’ initiative in work and their participation in the camp’s cultural-educational activities. However, it was not long before the 45-day credit began to be awarded only to common criminals who were “socially friendly”; the 30-day credit was given to political prisoners with mild charges, while political prisoners convicted of espionage, sabotage, and terror were left with the 18-day credit per quarter.

During this period of the camps’ existence, political prisoners were allowed to work according to their specializations (accountants, engineers, scientific workers, artists, actors, librarians, etc.), but only after they had worked a corresponding period at hard physical labor. However, this was possible only in large camp administrations. In camps remote from administrative centers, the prisoners’ situation remained exceptionally difficult.

In timber floating, timber loading, timber felling, earthworks, etc., every prisoner was required to meet an extremely arduous daily quota that could be fulfilled only by a physically strong person who had engaged in physical labor his entire life and possessed skill in a particular type of such work. The percentage of quota fulfillment was reflected proportionally in the receipt of food rations. Someone who fulfilled 70 or 50 percent of the quota received 70 or 50 percent of the ration. If the quota was fulfilled by only 30 percent, or if work was refused, the prisoner received a bare minimum consisting of 300 grams of bread and a cup of “balanda” – thin soup. Constantly failing to meet the quota led to a constant reduction of the ration, complete exhaustion, illness, and, as a rule, death.

To this must be added that work was not interrupted in the summer by the heaviest rain, or in the winter by the severest frosts. The working day reached 12 hours in summer, while in winter it was shortened somewhat for forest workers because of the early darkness and the fear of prisoners escaping during work. It was not uncommon for the distance from the camp to the work site to be 10–15 kilometers, which prisoners covered on foot.

Even if, in certain periods, the authorities and guards did not resort to beating the prisoners, the psychological state of the latter, due to spiritual depression, the severity of the work, and constant malnutrition, was so depressed that many, in extreme despair, deliberately injured themselves during work in the forest – chopping off their fingers, toes, and even entire hands, while in winter they consciously undressed and froze their feet. This phenomenon assumed mass proportions and was called, in camp administration parlance, “self-mutilation” (samorubstvo). A serious struggle was begun against the self-mutilators. Their sentences were, as a rule, extended for so-called “camp sabotage”: 5 years were added to a 10-year sentence, and 3 years to sentences of 8 and 5 years. Yet the phenomena of self-mutilation and self-induced frostbite were never fully eradicated; prisoners simply began to inflict injuries in such a way that it would appear to have occurred not by their own fault but as a result of an accident (falling trees, trimming branches, etc.).

Those who refused to go out to work were locked in the camp’s internal isolation cell; in winter, it was not heated, and when placed there, prisoners were stripped down to their underwear. In some isolation cells, instead of plank beds, thin beams had been hammered together, on which it was agonizing to sit; this was referred to as being sent “on the slats.”

The main groups who died in the camps were the elderly and the youth. The youth died because the spirit of contradiction and resistance was keener and more active in them. They more often flatly refused to work, sat in the internal isolation cells, caught colds, and died en masse from tuberculosis, pneumonia, and other diseases.

Release from work by the medical section for reasons of illness was granted only in cases of elevated temperature; diseases that caused weakness and a drop in temperature did not qualify for release, and anyway, the medical section could not always discern the sick condition of prisoners, because there were very few heads of remote work details who had a genuine medical education. The heads of medical sections were usually orderlies.

Occasionally, after a particularly harsh winter season, “weakling units” were organized in the camps, which were employed on lighter work while receiving an undiminished ration.

As a rule, in the camps, the 70–80 percent of political prisoners was usually mixed with 20–30 percent of recidivist criminals. This was done for specific reasons. The external guard and camp authorities did not interfere in the internal life of the camp, and absolute lawlessness reigned inside. The relatively small percentage of recidivists continuously terrorized the political prisoners, mercilessly robbing and beating them, which is why the political prisoners were reluctant to remain in the camp during working hours, even when the opportunity presented itself; the majority of criminals, on the other hand, did not go to work without any serious consequences for themselves. In this way, the arbitrary rule and beating of political prisoners by the authorities and guards were, in effect, delegated to the criminals.

The situation of women prisoners convicted under political articles was especially difficult in the camps. For those who had children, it was particularly hard because their children were sent to children’s homes or became homeless waifs. Women convicted under political articles were forced to live in barracks together with female criminals, prostitutes, and thieves. At night, the women’s barracks were usually turned into brothels, because the “socially friendly” prisoners, who represented the camp administration and were fattened on stolen camp rations, used the women’s barracks as places for their amorous diversions. The position of a political woman became even more unbearable if she had an attractive appearance: refusal to comply with amorous demands usually meant being transferred to conditions of utterly intolerable labor.

It is necessary to note the extraordinary degree to which prisoners were informed about what was happening in other camps and about the fate of other prisoners. This was based on the fact that prisoners who had already been incarcerated for many years were constantly being transferred from one camp to another.

3. Period of deteriorating conditions for political prisoners, ending in brutal repressions (1934 — 1938)

This period is characterized by the following influx of prisoners:

1. an extraordinarily numerous and diverse contingent, from professors to rank-and-file workers and collective farmers, resulting from the purge of 1936 — 1938;
2. a category of senior Communist Party and state apparatus officials and members of their families, imprisoned during the purge and accused of state treason;
3. replenishment of the category of “terrorists”;
4. a category of Chekists convicted under a political article in connection with the murder of Kirov and the removal and destruction of Yagoda and Yezhov;
5. military personnel imprisoned in connection with the purge and trials in the Red Army;
6. young people aged 12 to 16, thrown into camps based on decrees on criminal liability of minors;
7. former workers and employees of the Chinese‑Eastern Railway who came to the USSR from Manchuria after the sale of the railway to China.

The deterioration of the situation for political prisoners began with the murder of Kirov. Those convicted on charges of terrorist activity and working in their field of specialization were entirely transferred to general physical labor in remote sectors. New cases were opened against many, and many received additional prison terms. In 1936 — 37, all political prisoners, with rare exceptions for points 10 and 11 of Article 58 of the Criminal Code with short sentences, were removed from specialized work and transferred to general labor.

In late summer 1937 the most terrible period for political prisoners began. After the Tukhachevsky trial, a wave of repression swept through the camps. A commission from the 3rd Department of the GULAG came to each camp and, on the spot with the camp authorities and the heads of the local 3rd Section, reviewed the cases of political prisoners. A rapid sorting was carried out. First, prisoners were sorted out who, in the commission’s opinion, were subject to execution. They were placed in groups into isolation cells, then taken away or led away to be shot, which usually took place near the camps. Even if this group was taken far from the camp, the fate of those taken away was absolutely clear to the other inmates, since those leaving the camp went without their belongings, and their property remained in the camp’s storage facility. One of the largest mass exterminations was the shooting of a huge transport of political prisoners taken to the “Popov Island” camp in the fall of 1937. On Popov Island all the prisoners’ belongings were left behind, and afterward none of those led away were ever seen again in the camps.

After sorting and shooting the first group, the commission began selecting a second group, who were sent (with their belongings) to the most arduous sectors, situated far from settlements and lines of communication. From the third group of political prisoners recognized as loyal during the inspection, camps for general labor were formed located near the centers of divisions and directorates, and camps serving various construction projects.

Prisoners who were in the camps during this period estimate that in some camps 25 percent of political prisoners were shot, 35 percent were sent to distant strict‑regime camps, and about 40 percent were reassigned. But the official “norm” given by the GULAG for this campaign was set at 10 percent of the total number of prisoners.

The principle of distributing prisoners into these three groups was as follows. The distribution was made by the commission, which was guided, apparently, by information on prisoners obtained from local workers of the 3rd Section. The point of Article 58 and the camp character reference were taken into account. Often the term did not play a decisive role: there were cases where inmates in the same camp had been convicted in the same case, and it often turned out that it was not the main defendants in the trial with long sentences who were shot, but defendants with shorter sentences who had manifested themselves as anti‑Soviet or for some other reason had incurred the hostility of the camp authorities.

On the whole, prisoners convicted on charges of armed uprising, espionage, terror, and sabotage, i.e., under points 2, 6, 8, and 9 of Article 58 of the Criminal Code, were shot and sent to punitive distant assignments.

Prisoners of the second group, sent to remote camps, were not released at the end of their terms. Credits for shock work were completely annulled; at the same time, within the camps themselves, without any judicial procedure, significant numbers of prisoners had their sentences extended; many were transferred to the closed isolation units that had then begun to be organized. During this period, prisoners lost all hope of being released.

At the end of 1938, in connection with the arrest of Yezhov and the appointment of Beria, some prisoners who had served beyond their terms were released by a special order from Moscow. December 1938 was the month of the greatest release of old prisoners. But in that same year, prisoners with new sentences began arriving at the camps, sentenced to 15, 20, and 25 years of imprisonment31.

22 Collection of Laws 1919, No. 12, p. 124. Published in Izvestia of the All‑Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets, 15.IV.1919, No. 81.

23 1st point of the decree «О лагерях принудительных работ», 15.IV.1919.

24 1st and 2nd notes to the first point of the decree «О лагерях принудительных работ», 15.IV.1919.

25 4th point of the decree «О лагерях принудительных работ», 15.IV.1919.

26 Collection of Laws 1919, No. 20, p. 235. Published in Izvestia of the All‑Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets, 17.V.1919, No. 105.

27 37th and 38th points of the decree, 17.V.1919.

28 Collection of Laws 1919, No. 47, p. 459. Published in Izvestia of the All‑Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets, 26.IX.1919.

29 Mendeleev D. Toward an Understanding of Russia, Buenos Aires, 1952, pp. 136 — 138.

30 Berner N. Internal Emigration and the Intelligentsia on Solovki,
Manuscript, Archive of the Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of the USSR, Munich.

31 Decree of the Central Executive Committee and Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, 2 October 1937, published in the Collection
of Laws of the USSR, No. 66, p. 297.

4. Pre-War Years in the Prison Camps (1939–1940)

This period was marked by a new influx of prisoners arrested during the Yezhovshchina but held back in investigative prisons.
Information about the closed isolation facilities created in these years is contradictory. It appears that none of those held in them managed to reach the free world. These isolation facilities were established in various remote parts of the Soviet Union. According to a number of reports, the prisoners there were not forced into hard labor and, upon entry, became “numbers,” losing their identifying data.
During this period, the prison camps were replenished with the following contingents:

1. Polish officers who escaped the Katyn extermination;
2. prisoners of war released from Finnish captivity;
3. deportees from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
   In 1940, mass executions were carried out in the camps according to a norm specified by the GULAG—5 percent of the total number of prisoners.

5. Prison Camps During the Second World War (1941–1945)

With the onset of war in the Soviet Union, a new wave of repressions began, extending to former prisoners and to that category which, for “preventive” reasons, was supposed to be removed during the wartime period.
However, due to the enormous confusion that occurred, especially in areas to which the front line was approaching, many former prisoners managed to evade it in one way or another (by changing their place of residence, by accelerated voluntary enlistment in the army through other military commissariats, etc.).
Terrible was the fate of political prisoners held under investigation in cities toward which German troops were advancing. Most of the political detainees under investigation could not be evacuated in time and were exterminated en masse in the cities abandoned by the Red Army. Information remains about mass shootings in the prisons of Dnepropetrovsk, Kiev, Gomel, Minsk, Vinnitsa, and others. In Kiev, two railway cars of political detainees who could not be evacuated were burned.
Characteristic of this period is the release from camps of common criminals and offenders sentenced for everyday crimes, with their enlistment in the army “to defend the motherland.” Many military personnel, including high-ranking officers, who were imprisoned on political charges, were also sent to the active army during the war as a means of “atonement for their guilt before the motherland.”
During the war, the prison camps were replenished at the expense of:

1. German colonists living on the territory of the USSR;
2. “encirclement survivors” (soldiers and officers who broke out of German encirclement or escaped from German captivity);
3. residents of areas liberated from the Germans, suspected of connections with the Germans or even of loyal attitudes toward them;
4. representatives of certain nationalities who collaborated with the Germans in one way or another during the occupation (Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, Karachais, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, etc.);
5. German prisoners of war.
   In 1941, mass executions were carried out in the camps according to a norm specified by the GULAG.
   The regime for prisoners in the camps deteriorated to the extreme.

6. Prison Camps in the Post-War Period (1945–1954)

The prison population increased greatly in the postwar years. Added to the previous makeup were:

1. former members of General Vlasov’s army;
2. participants in national military units that fought on the German side;
3. “Ostarbeiter” workers, returned from Germany;
4. Soviet prisoners of war “liberated” by the Allied forces and the Red Army;
5. elements hostile to communism from Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia;
6. German and Japanese prisoners of war;
7. repatriated “Soviet patriots.”

In the postwar years, conditions in the camps were very harsh, especially with regard to food. Due to the shortage of labor after the war, prisoners had to service not only construction projects and the exploitation of natural resources but also newly created and relocated industrial centers. Reports that the average work output of prisoners in 1946–1948 did not exceed 40 percent are explained by the prisoners’ extreme despair; a large percentage of them had endured hard years of captivity, Ostarbeiter camps, war, and prolonged starvation. But the most important factor was that, after the victorious war against Hitler’s Germany, the prisoners lost all hope of release for years to come. The majority of the USSR population, and thereby the prisoners, believed that liberation from Bolshevism was possible only with the help of the free world. Moreover, the vast majority thought that this help would be disinterested, that is, the free world would come to the aid of the USSR’s population and prisoners like a knight, a champion of good, outraged by the evil that accompanies Communism, and that the free world would pursue no material aims in doing so. It was precisely this hope that the prisoners lost after the war. What remained was complete hopelessness.

In the camps, the average work output of prisoners engaged in physical labor usually amounted to 60–70 percent of the established norm. Naturally, the lowered output in the postwar years (40 percent) entailed a further deterioration of the already meager food supply and led to very high mortality.

Attitudes toward prisoners in the camps during the postwar period were very poor. In the period 1948–1950, conditions in the camps improved somewhat: upon fulfilling a certain percentage of the norm, they began to issue 800 grams of bread instead of the previous 300 grams. They also began to pay wages in the amount of 10–20 rubles, and in some cases even 40 rubles a month. During this period, stalls were opened where prisoners could buy bread, jam, margarine, and tobacco with money.

Beginning in 1950, further improvements in the prisoners’ regime were introduced. The average daily food ration for a prisoner took the following form:

0.800 kg of bread,
0.020 “ fat,

0.120 “ groats or flour products,
0.030 “ meat or 0.075 fish (or sea mammal),
0.027 “ sugar.

Bread is handed out directly, and hot food is prepared from the remaining products, consisting of soup once or twice a day and 200 grams of kasha. Since 1952, the acute shortage of bread in the camps has ceased to be felt: in closed isolation units, the bread ration grew from 300 grams to 500–600 grams per day. Prisoners who exceeded the norm on physical labor began to receive 1,000–1,200 grams of bread per day and an additional bonus dish, but, as before, labor productivity was stimulated by the size of the food ration: those who do not fulfill the norm receive a reduced ration.

In many camps during these years, the range of goods in the camp stores was expanded. Gingerbread, sugar, cigarettes, and even some clothing items appeared. In some more well-appointed camps, so-called ‘people’s kitchens’ were organized, where hot food was prepared and sold to prisoners. The number of those weakened by hunger and work in the camps became significantly fewer, and they were immediately sent to special weak-prisoner detachments or to invalid camp units.

Prisoners who fulfill the norm on physical labor and those working in their specialty receive monetary compensation. The amount of earnings in 1953–1954 was in some cases quite high. The system of payment is as follows: from the prisoner’s wages, the cost of his upkeep, food, uniforms, and other expenses is deducted. This deduction varies from camp to camp and ranges from 450 to 500 rubles per month. Part of the remaining earnings is credited to the prisoner’s personal account, and part is given to him in cash, sometimes reaching between 40 and 200 rubles per month. In a number of camps, prisoners performing camp maintenance work or invalids are paid up to 20 rubles per month.

According to a number of reports, medical care in the camps improved. In many places, the staff of civilian doctors and medical assistants increased. The standard for releasing sick prisoners from work was raised. Near the camp administrations, hospitals were built that provided decent care, including X-ray facilities, and even had medications such as penicillin. The attitude of civilian doctors toward prisoners was not bad.

The regime in recent years, while remaining strict, has significantly improved compared to the war and postwar years. According to a number of reports, the tyranny of the criminal element came to an end; since 1952 (apparently on the basis of Gulag orders), harsh measures have been taken in a number of camps against criminals who terrorized political prisoners. From the end of 1953, in many camps, criminals began to be separated from political and ‘everyday’ prisoners. It must be noted that in the postwar years overall, the number of Soviet citizens sent to camps decreased sharply compared to prewar years, mainly due to the decline in the political contingent.

Among the camp and prison inmates, there is a fairly large number of old emigrants who voluntarily returned to the homeland. Warmly welcomed, after some time they were arrested and received various camp sentences. Among them were many who arrived in the USSR from France in 1945–1946.

After Stalin’s death and Beria’s execution, despite the fact that the amnesty did not provide for the release of political prisoners, their situation in the camps improved; the attitude of the guards, according to the latest information, became better.

Analyzing the political events of 1953, one must assume that a certain number of old prisoners were released: at present, a number of workers who had been sent to camps of full isolation for long terms during the Yezhov purge of 1937–1938 have reappeared in the political and public life of the Soviet Union.

The internal struggle within the Soviet ruling elite undoubtedly led to a large number of arrests and camp confinements. However, it can be said with certainty that even after Beria’s removal and execution, these arrests did not have the former character of a campaign with predetermined control figures. Anti-government activity, which intensified after Stalin’s death, also resulted in some replenishment of the prisoner contingent, but again, these arrests apparently did not have the former mass prophylactic character.

The reports of improved conditions in the camps concern only that part of them which, in some way, sometimes very conditionally, is still connected through communication with the internal life of the country. But there are camps about whose life nothing is known. Whether conditions there have improved to some extent or whether they continue to grind down human lives at an accelerated pace remains a mystery.

It can be stated with full certainty that the current improvement in the camps is a temporary phenomenon, caused by particular considerations of the Soviet government. Such periods—short-term and long-term, widespread and territorially limited—have occurred before. The camp system and slave labor are the consequence of the punitive policy of the Soviet leadership, inextricably linked to the ideological doctrine on the basis of which all actions are carried out. And without ideological changes there can be no changes in actions. There are no ideological changes in the doctrine of the Soviet leadership; consequently, there can be no changes in punitive policy, i.e., in the camp system with its slave labor.

According to a number of indications, one of the reasons for which the Soviet government permitted a number of relaxations in the camps is the shortage of people. The Bolsheviks, in pursuit of their goals, always generously sacrificed human lives; apparently, this led to colossal population losses, and now ‘a person has become more valuable.’ But we repeat that this change is not fundamental, but purely conjunctural: we are certain that in a number of camps the ‘price of a person’ has remained the same, i.e., equal to zero.

Chapter Three. Prisons

It is extremely difficult to give a standardized description of the regime in Soviet remand prisons and prisons for convicts. The regime varies depending on the main purpose of the institution, its proximity to or distance from major centers of the country, the character and abilities of the MVD officials in the given city, and the category of prisoners held in that prison. Based on a number of recent accounts, one can outline in general terms a typical regime, mainly that of Soviet remand (pretrial) prisons.

1. Remand Prisons of Oblast, Krai, and Republic Level

In the cells of prisons of this type, pretrial detainees are usually held in such numbers that maintaining even minimum hygienic conditions becomes impossible. Often a cell that, according to sanitation norms, is designed for 30 people will hold double or triple that number of prisoners. This occurs not only because of the shortage of prison space and the large number of prisoners, but also out of a deliberate intention to place detainees in conditions that weaken their moral and psychological resistance during the investigation.
In this type of remand prison, those accused of political, criminal, and “everyday” (domestic) offenses are held together, but solitary confinement or confinement in a punishment cell is also practiced. Detainees are sent to solitary cells mostly in cases where the aim is to isolate them from other prisoners, to deprive them of the moral support of comrades, and to weaken their will to resist. Prisoners are transferred to the punishment cell as a penalty for infractions committed in the prison: damaging state property, failing to obey an order, arguing with the authorities, talking loudly or singing, etc. In the category of prisons described, transfer to solitary or a punishment cell is, in most cases, a temporary measure.
In their cells, pretrial detainees usually sleep on wooden plank beds, sometimes double-tiered – upper and lower. In more well-appointed prisons, the plank beds may be built as berths for four people – two lower and two upper places.
Cells are disinfected with a strong-smelling solution; special powdered agents are used against insect parasites. According to a number of accounts, lice and bedbugs, thanks to newly discovered antiseptic agents, have ceased to be a scourge for prisoners in many Soviet prisons. Once every ten days, detainees undergo sanitary processing consisting of a bath and a haircut with hair clippers. In the remand prison, no special prison uniform is issued; prisoners remain in their own clothes. Belts, shoelaces, suspenders, and metal objects are confiscated to prevent suicide attempts.
The windows in the cells are fitted with bars on the outside; usually, metal “hoods” (deflectors) are attached to them, which block the view of what is happening outside and leave visible only a portion of the sky at the top of the window.
During the day, prisoners relieve themselves in the “parasha” – a slop bucket placed near the cell door. At five o’clock in the morning, after the wake-up call, and in the evening at eight o’clock—and sometimes at night—the entire cell’s inmates are taken out to the latrines, where washing up also takes place. In the morning and evening, and sometimes at night, a roll call of prisoners is conducted in the cells.
Once a day, all pretrial detainees in the cell are taken out into the inner prison yard, where in pairs and under the supervision of guards they walk in a circle. The duration of these exercise periods varies in different prisons from 10 to 30 minutes.
Food in the remand prisons consists of a bread ration of 300–500 grams, issued at 7 a.m. together with boiling water; lunch at 1 p.m., usually consisting of a poor vegetable or fish soup and a small portion of kasha (pearl barley, barley, or coarse buckwheat); and supper at 7 p.m., also consisting of soup or kasha. Detainees in remand prisons may receive food packages and parcels of clothing, which are thoroughly checked by the prison staff. For a long time, an unwritten law has existed in Soviet prisons that requires the inmates of a cell to set aside a certain percentage of food packages for comrades who do not receive them. The distribution of these products among those in need is carried out by a group of long-held detainees, usually called the “kombed” (Committee of the Poor).
Correspondence with relatives and visits with pretrial detainees in prisons are permitted only in exceptional cases and, most often, only after sentencing and transfer to a transit prison. In some prisons, detainees are given paper and pencils to write applications and complaints to the relevant judicial bodies.
Informers are often planted in cells, chosen from among suitable detainees for this purpose. Their job is to watch everything that happens in the cell. Sometimes they are placed there for the specific observation of and conversation with someone among the cell’s occupants. In prison slang, these informers are called “stukachi” (stool pigeons), “nasedki” (literally ‘brood hens’), and sometimes “seksoty” (the latter is completely incorrect, since these informers are not “secret collaborators” but are selected from among the detainees and used temporarily by the investigation bodies). As a rule, they do not cause much harm to the prisoners: the keen eye of Soviet people quickly recognizes them, and despite the strict prison regime, inmates—especially the criminals—often give them a good beating.
Detailed searches of cells are carried out from time to time. Books are rarely issued in prisons of this type. In the cells, inmates play chess, checkers, dominoes, and cards—very often homemade ones. In most prisons, however, these games are prohibited.
Because of poor food, unsanitary conditions, longing for their loved ones, and fear for their fate, the state of pretrial detainees is very grave, especially if the pretrial detention lasts a long time. This period is so agonizing for prisoners that they often receive the final sentence with complete indifference.
Remand prisons are under the jurisdiction of GULAG—the Main Administration of Places of Confinement of the MVD of the USSR.

2. Internal Prisons and Isolators of Regional, Territorial, and Republican Significance

Internal prisons and isolators hold pretrial detainees accused of political crimes. The regime in prisons of this type is very strict. Upon entering an internal prison, the detainee is stripped naked and thoroughly searched. Correspondence with the outside world and visits are not permitted in internal prisons.
However, the sanitary conditions and food in these prisons are considerably better. In prisons of the capital order, detainees sleep on beds with bedding (but lying on the beds during the day is forbidden). Food and clothing parcels are generally not allowed. Detainees who have money are permitted, once every 10 days, to order the purchase of foodstuffs and toiletries within a small sum, ranging from 10 to 20 rubles. In most prisons, money is usually taken away and in its place a receipt is issued, against which settlement is made.
The number of prisoners in a cell is limited; there are cells for 4 and even 2 detainees; solitary confinement is frequently practiced. With the special permission of the investigator, detainees may use the prison library.
Despite the better conditions of food and better observance of sanitary rules, the well-being of those held there is significantly worse, and they are always glad if, after the completion of the preliminary investigation, while awaiting sentence, they are transferred to a pretrial detention prison of the general regime, or, after sentencing, to a transit prison.
In the cells, the light is not turned off at night. The prison guards constantly observe the prisoners through a peephole in the door, which in prison slang is called a “volchok.” To lower the psychological resistance of the detainees, they are usually interrogated at night. The prison is guarded by MVD troops. Isolation in internal prisons is complete. When summoned to the investigator, the detainee is led through the prison corridors in such a way that he sees no one except the guards among those held in the prison. When summoned for interrogation, the guard enters the cell and says only the first letter of the person’s surname; the detainee must give the full surname himself. In many internal prisons, the guards communicate with one another in the corridors using signs, most often finger snaps. The characteristic sound of internal prisons is these snaps and the constant clanking of door locks.
The USSR Internal Isolator for the most important political detainees is located in Moscow and is distinguished by a particularly strict regime. It was built according to a special design. Inside the prison building there is an empty space, around which cells, mainly for solitary confinement, are arranged on several floors. All the cell doors face toward the center of the interior space. This type of prison architecture is called a “ship” among prisoners.
In large cities, internal prisons have special premises where executions are carried out.

3. Special Purpose Prisons

Special purpose prisons hold pretrial detainees or persons who have already been sentenced and are serving their terms. Prisoners in special purpose prisons belong to the category of especially important criminals.
The category of special purpose prisons also includes “special isolators,” where convicted persons classified as the most important state criminals are held under extremely strict conditions, without any contact with the outside world.

4. Interrogation Methods

The foundations of interrogation methods for those under investigation were laid as early as 1917 by the VChK. Gradually refined, they formed a system that is still used to this day. True, the application of physical and psychological methods of influence during investigation (depending on the situation in the country) may be massive, as was the case in 1937–38, during the war or post-war years, or abates somewhat and is carried out only in individual cases. Since 1953–54, a decline in the mass application of this interrogation system has been observed, but overall it must be said that it was used, is used in individual cases now, and will be used when, from the perspective of Soviet jurisprudence, the necessity arises.
Soviet investigation in remand prisons and camps employs the following interrogation methods, forcing the person under investigation (regardless of whether man or woman) to confess or to give false testimony against themselves:

1. swearing;
2. damaging and destroying letters and photographs of relatives;
3. falsification of testimony in protocols;
4. reduction of rations during interrogation;
5. threats to witnesses giving testimony in favor of the accused;
6. mock execution;
7. confiscation of tobacco;
8. threat of a penal brigade;
9. offering cigarettes and food, then beatings;
10. proposal to denounce comrades;
11. deprivation of the right to receive letters;
12. refusal to allow the use of exculpatory material;
13. threat of deportation of relatives;
14. feeding on herring without anything to drink;
15. interrogations after midnight;
16. defecation into one’s own food bowl;
17. use of force when signing;
18. prohibition of speaking during interrogation;
19. threat with a revolver and whips;
20. threat of the punishment cell and torture;
21. 36-hour interrogation with changing interrogators;
22. beating with rifle butts, rubber truncheons, coal shovels, sticks, rulers;
23. kicking until unconscious;
24. punching in the lower abdomen;
25. knocking out teeth;
26. beating until unconscious and, after revival, repeated beatings;
27. use of finger vises;
28. cold punishment cell;
29. punishment cell where one can only stand;
30. 5 days in a hot chamber;
31. 10 days in a cellar;
32. 4 hours in a water cell followed by transfer to a heated chamber;
33. locking in a small cellar with dripping water;
34. concrete dark cell;
35. earthen cellar;
36. locking in narrow wall closets;
37. water cell with a 500-watt electric lamp;
38. wrapping in a fur coat in a heated chamber;
39. confinement in darkness;
40. standing for many hours in a corner of the room;
41. half-hour standing at attention;
42. stand up and sit down;
43. hour-long nighttime interrogations under searchlights;
44. standing by a hot stove;
45. 14 days of arrest in darkness;
46. interrogation over many days without medical assistance;
47. standing “hands up” facing the wall for 2–2½ hours;
48. dousing with ice water;
49. insufficient clothing in freezing temperatures;
50. being in the cold without the ability to move for 12 hours;
51. being barefoot, without a shirt on a cement floor;
52. cells where at night the screams of the tortured are heard and where the walls are covered with blood;
53. sitting on a bottle that deeply penetrates the rectum;
54. beating on the head with a log or revolver;
55. jamming fingers in a door;
56. use of red-hot pincers;
57. burning with matches.
    In Moscow there is a special institute where the most important criminals are subjected to “treatment” by psychologists and hypnotists.

5. Transit Prisons and Distribution Camps

Prisoners who have received their sentences and must serve them in corrective labor camps are transferred from remand prisons first to transit or staging prisons. When a sufficient number of convicts have gathered in the transit prison, they are sent to distribution camps, where “sorting” takes place and they are divided into groups destined for dispatch to various camps.
For the North of the USSR, such a distribution point is the Kotlas camp. This point dispatches prisoners to camps located on the White and Barents Seas, as well as to camps in the territory of the Komi ASSR, the Nenets National District of Arkhangelsk Oblast, parts of the Kola Peninsula, and the Yamalo-Nenets and Khanty-Mansi National Districts. In summer, transportation to these areas is carried out by barges along rivers, and in winter by trains. For supplying workforce to the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East, the assembly point is reportedly Kharkov, from where transports go to Krasnoyarsk, where prisoners destined for Norilsk, Dudinka, Igarka are transported along the Yenisei by special steamships. It can be assumed that besides Kharkov, there is yet another assembly point, i.e., a transit prison, in the central part of the USSR.
Prisoner transports intended for the Far East go by train to Vladivostok, from there to Nakhodka, where they are reloaded onto steamships and proceed by sea to Okhotsk, Magadan. Some of these transports, destined for Kolyma, Magadan, Kamchatka, and Sakhalin, go via Khabarovsk to Nikolaevsk, and from there by sea to the above-mentioned points. In winter, prisoners are sometimes transported by airplane.

6. Peculiarities of Camp Language

Imprisoned intelligentsia in Soviet camps speak impeccable Russian. The criminal element, in turn, speaks a special thieves’ slang, known as “blatnoi language.” The majority of political prisoners who are peasants and workers, party members, young people, and those convicted of everyday offenses speak ordinary Sovietized Russian. Because in camp everyday life and work all these strata are in constant contact, a distinctive language has developed in the camps, reflecting the essence of camp existence and the psychology of the prisoners. Thieves’ cant had a considerable influence on the formation of this camp language. It is not without interest to cite a number of special camp expressions:

Tufte — shoddy work or even complete idleness, disguised deceptively by a
show of work supposedly done.
Tufteet — to pretend to work while actually doing nothing.
Filon — a person who has refused to work, a lazybones.
Filonit — to loaf; to pretend to work.
Dokhodiaga — a prisoner who, from heavy labor and poor food, has lost
his health and become weak.
Dokhodit — to lose strength and health. The final point of this concept is
death. The perfective form “doshel” means — “died.”
Zagnut’sya — to die.
Ogonyok — a young guy who has lost strength and health. The expression is often
used for boys from the criminal world who are physically
beginning to “fade out.”
Fitil’ — a young guy, a boy, approaching
death from hunger and labor.
Vtykat — to work.
Pridurok — a “bytovik” (common-criminal prisoner) working in the camp in an administrative position.
Samorubstvo — deliberately maiming oneself at work out of utter
despair and a desire to become incapacitated.
Samorub — a person who deliberately injures himself.
Stukach — an informer recruited by the authorities from among the prisoners.
Stuchat — to inform.
Liagavyi — a prisoner suspected of secret spying for the camp authorities. The expression entered camp language from criminal slang,
where it means a person who has become involved with the investigative bodies
of the criminal investigation department and betrays his comrades.
Liagash — in criminal slang, an investigator, a militia officer
or criminal investigation officer.
Milton — an extremely common nickname for a militiaman.
Pushchen v raskhod — shot (executed).
Ballony — logs.
Ptikha — daily bread ration.
Payka — bread portion.
Shrapnel — pearl barley porridge.
Pinsha — cod (fish).
Katushka — the maximum prison

The expressions “concentration camp,” “forced labor camp” are not official terms in the USSR and exist only in the language of prisoners and opponents of the Soviet regime. In Soviet administrative and political language, concentration camps are called “corrective labor camps.” The organization and management of the camps is carried out by the GULAG of the MVD USSR. GULAG — Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Labor Settlements — was created on June 10, 1934, under the NKVD; currently the GULAG is subordinated to the MVD (see figs. 1 and 2). The main departments of the GULAG that govern the fate of prisoners are:

1. political,
2. personnel,
3. 3rd operational department,
4. camp guard (VOKhR),
5. registration and distribution (URO),
6. cultural and educational (KVO),
7. procurator of the GULAG,
8. court,
9. administrative and economic (AKhO),
10. sanitary. In addition, the GULAG has a number of auxiliary and production departments:
11. supply,
12. inspection,
13. planning,
14. financial,
15. transport,
16. technical,
17. forestry,
18. agricultural,
19. mining,
20. construction,
21. general industrial,
22. veterinary. Several peculiarities in the organizational structure of the GULAG must be noted. The first and main peculiarity is that the head of the political department is formally subordinate not to the head of the GULAG but directly to the Organizational Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Through this channel the general political line of the party on the organization and direction of camps and control over its implementation is carried out. This shows that the ideological inspirer of the entire system of concentration camps and slave labor is the Central Committee of the CPSU, i.e., the Soviet government itself. The MVD, which is so often viewed in the free world as the main source of evil, is in this case only an obedient conduit and executor of the directives given by the government. The second peculiarity is that the head of the GULAG is a deputy minister of the MVD. This position predetermines that all camps, wherever they are territorially located, bypass the republican, regional and territorial offices of the MVD and are subordinated directly to the MVD USSR. And, finally, the third peculiarity is that although the court and the procurator of the GULAG are formally subordinated to the Supreme Court and the Procurator General of the USSR, in fact they are completely subordinate to the head of the GULAG and, in direct accordance with the general position of the legal system in the USSR, carry out all work both in conducting investigations and in handing down sentences upon direct instructions of the MVD. Almost all camps in the USSR are subordinate to the GULAG; the exception is a small number of small-volume, so-called “local” camps, which are subordinated either to local administrative bodies or to the Ministry of Justice. Under the MVD USSR there are several main administrations that are closely connected and coordinate their work with the GULAG:
23. Main Administration of Places of Confinement (GUMZ),
24. Main Administration of Prisoners of War and Internees (GULVI),
25. Main Administration of Railway Construction (GUZhDORS),
26. Main Administration of Highway Construction (GUShOSDOR).

2. Camp Management (Camp Group)

The next lower level after the GULAG is the camp management (camp group). In Soviet terminology, the concept of a “camp” usually encompasses a camp system created either on a territorial or on a production principle. Thus, the camp management (camp group) is, as it were, a combine covering a certain, sometimes very large territory and directing various types of economic activity on it (exploitation of natural resources, construction projects, industry, etc.) or conducting one special and large-scale production. This camp management (camp group) has the following organizational structure:

camp management (camp group), which has camp divisions, which are divided into camp points, having, in turn, camp sectors.

Naturally, camps for any special purpose do not have such an extensive system. In special cases, a camp is an administrative unit without subdivisions, but the overwhelming majority of camps nonetheless have the structure described. From what has been said, it is clear that beneath the official Soviet juridical term “camp” there are usually dozens of actually existing separate camps. If we consider a “camp point” or, as it is often called, an OLP (Separate Camp Point), and further a “camp sector,” as a separate concentration camp – since it normally constitutes an isolated entity – only then can one ascertain the total number of camps in the USSR.

The administration of a camp (camp group) has departments corresponding to the departments of the GULAG; some departments that exist in the GULAG may be absent from the administrative system: for instance, the administration that brings together a system of timber-cutting camps will lack a mining-industrial department, etc.

The main functions of certain departments of camp (camp group) administration are as follows:

1. Political Department exercises the overall direction, i.e., carries out the general line of the Party, influencing the work of all departments, including the work of the administration’s leadership. The chief of the Political Department is subordinate only to the chief of the GULAG Political Department.

2. Personnel Department carries out general records, appointments, and transfers of all supervisory and civilian-hired staff of the political and operational departments; records, appointments, and transfers of court, procuracy, and guard personnel are handled by other agencies.

3. 3rd Operational Department performs the following functions: it checks and monitors the political reliability of both prisoners and civilian-hired workers, as well as of guard units, and conducts investigations to combat political and economic sabotage. The general oversight activity of this department is very broad and in a number of functions overlaps with the work of the Political Department. The chief of the 3rd Department of the administration is subordinate directly to the 3rd Department of the GULAG.

4. Guard Department (VOKhR) carries out the organization of external camp security, escorts prisoners during internal transfers, convoys them to the work site and back to camp, oversees them during work, conducts searches for escapees, etc. (The escorting of prisoners from transit prisons to camps and between the latter is performed not by VOKhR but by convoy troops of the MVD). The VOKhR contingent consists of recruits who have completed their army service and free civilians, as well as former prisoners sentenced under common-crime articles, mainly former workers of the GPU, NKVD, MVD, or the Soviet army. (If the camp holds prisoners convicted under points of Article 58 who are “dangerous” from the leadership’s viewpoint, they are guarded by MVD troops.) The chief of VOKhR is organizationally subordinate to the GULAG, on security lines to the chief of the camp-complex administration, on operational measures (cordon and search operations, repression of uprisings, etc.) to the chief of the 3rd Department, and on political lines to the chief of the Political Department. The number of VOKhR guard-riflemen depends on the camp’s importance, the terrain, and the number of prisoners. Normally, this amounts to 3–5 percent of the total number of prisoners. In special cases, this percentage is raised to 8 percent, but only with GULAG permission.

5. Registration and Distribution Department (URO) maintains the card index within the administration system. It directs the transfer of prisoners according to special directives concerning them and according to their utilization at one or another work site; it is in charge of the reception and release of prisoners.

6. Cultural and Educational Department (KVO) organizes and directs cultural-educational work among prisoners: the publication of wall newspapers, the staging of concerts, the showing of films, the organization of competition, the development of amateur activities, etc. Formally, all this work is aimed at the “re-education” of prisoners, but in essence it is aimed at raising labor productivity.

7. The court and the prosecutor formalize the investigative cases conducted by the operational departments against prisoners accused of “counterrevolutionary” activity or sabotage in the camp. Formally, they are subordinate to the court and prosecutor of the GULAG; in fact, they are subordinate to the camp chief. The camp court and prosecutor have the right to investigate and sentence only in cases involving prisoners. Cases involving camp leadership, guards, and civilian-hired employees are tried by local courts of the MVD troops.

These departments, along with all others of an auxiliary nature – some of which are directly subordinate to the camp chief, while another part stands in a complex relationship with him (i.e., in some cases formally subordinate to him but receiving work instructions from other agencies, and in other cases the reverse) – constitute the administrative organ that actually manages the camp, i.e., (a) establishes the camp regime and enforces it; (b) organizes the labor of prisoners and carries it out.

All this work pursues two aims:

1. the implementation of punitive policy vis-à-vis prisoners, which in the final analysis boils down to the physical annihilation of the absolute majority of them;
2. the achievement, by any means, of the production tasks set by the country’s leaders.

3. The Camp

Thus, the camp administration (camp group) has branches,
which, in turn, have individual camp points (OLP), i.e.
directly camps. The OLP in turn consists of camp sectors. The OLP
or camp sector assign brigades and work details. In the branch
administration and in the camp itself (camp point), there is an administrative
division corresponding to the combine management, only instead of the name
“department” in the branch administration and in the camp (camp point), the
name “section” is used. During the construction of new railway lines, OLPs or
camp sectors are often called “columns” or “routes.”
There are no political departments in the branch administration or in
individual camp points. Their functions are performed by the deputy chief
of the branch or OLP for political affairs.
The 3rd Section in the camp, besides its immediate functions, handles
the secret recruitment of informers from among the prisoners and directs their work,
and also carries out searches, inspections of parcels, etc.
Individual camp points are usually surrounded by several barriers of
barbed wire. Along the fence line, watchtowers are placed at set intervals.
The camp is guarded externally by an armed guard, located on the towers
and patrolling along the fence. In a number of camps,
the guard is supplemented by guard dogs, usually serving a specific
section of the fence on a moving chain or accompanying the patrol (see fig.
3).
In the GULAG system, there are also separate facilities that are not part
of any administration system and are subordinated directly to the GULAG in
Moscow. Such facilities are usually military construction projects, sites
for the extraction of especially valuable minerals, closed-type isolators
for especially serious political prisoners, special camps where scientists
serving political sentences conduct important scientific work, etc.

Camp Card Index

The card index of prisoners is kept exclusively in the camp; the GULAG in Moscow
registers only the total number of prisoners. The camp card index divides
prisoners into three categories: 1) political, 2) criminal, 3) domestic offenders, and
by terms: a) up to 5 years, b) up to 10 years, c) up to 15 years, d) up to 20 years, and e) up to 25
years.
The “files” of prisoners are registered under their number and, when transferred to
another camp, follow with them. In the new camp, they automatically
receive other numbers. These files consist of a copy of the sentence, a card with
personal data and special instructions.

Composition of Prisoners

Prisoners in the camps are divided into political, criminal, and domestic offenders.
Political prisoners in turn are divided into categories depending on the
special instructions determined by the GULAG. Special instructions usually determine
placement in one or another camp system with a heavier or lighter regime
and reinforced or relaxed guard. Special instructions also determine the right
to correspondence, its deprivation, receipt of packages, etc. These instructions can
change (be eased or become more severe) during the serving of the term. Special instructions
follow the prisoner throughout the entire term of their sentence.
Prisoners are also subdivided depending on their fitness for
physical labor.

Categories of Regime

All prisoners are divided into certain regime categories. The concept
of “regime” includes all the material and psychological conditions that
accompany a prisoner’s life day and night, throughout weeks,
months, and years. The purposes of the regime are not at all educational; the regime must,
by eradicating individuality, transform the prisoner into an obedient robot
that must yield maximum productivity. If the regime leads
the prisoner to death — that is an entirely natural outcome.
According to a number of reports, the following categories
of regimes currently exist in the camps:

1. general regime,
2. strict regime,
3. penalty regime,
4. isolator,
5. free unconvoyed regime.

The so-called “unconvoyed” category has the right, by special
passes, to leave the camp without a convoy and to move freely outside the camp, and
sometimes to go on official business trips. Such prisoners often
hold managerial positions.
Prisoners, by decision of a special department of the GULAG or the Administration, may be
transferred from one regime category to another. The determination of regime for
a prisoner is made taking into account: a) the article under which they were convicted, b) the term
of conviction, and c) behavior.

Camp Daily Schedule

The camp daily schedule is structured approximately as follows:
4 a.m. — reveille;
4–5 a.m. — morning breakfast, bread distribution, morning roll call;
5 a.m. — assignments and departure for work (in winter, the assignment is made
somewhat later);
7 p.m. — return to camp (in winter, return to camp occurs
earlier);
7–8 p.m. — supper;
9 p.m. — evening roll call.
In a number of cases, prisoners working at a specific production
site or within the camp area also receive a hot lunch. Those not receiving lunch
take with them the bread ration received in the morning.

Food

Food is divided into a series of categories: a special category for managerial
staff and engineering-technical personnel (ITP), for patients in the hospital,
for shock workers, for those who have fulfilled their quota, a general category, a reduced one,
a penalty one, and a punishment-cell one. Specialists and administrative-economic personnel
receive better food and live in separate barracks with some “comfort”;
this category does not exceed 10% of prisoners.
Throughout the existence of camps in the USSR, the food norm has always been
the “carrot and stick” in prisoners’ lives: it always depends on the amount
of work performed and on labor productivity; the harder a prisoner
works, the more they get, but this “more” is never
sufficient for the normal life of a healthy person.

Mail

Prisoners who have no special instructions regarding this may receive letters and parcels. Prisoners themselves may write once a month; in some camps — twice a year. The 3rd Section may deprive a prisoner of the right to correspondence and receipt of packages for a specified period. All correspondence, upon receipt and dispatch, passes through the censorship of the 3rd Section; for foreign mail, all letters undergo additional censorship in Moscow.

Camp Numbering

Each camp has its own permanent GULAG number. Camp subdivisions are numbered with Roman numerals, OLP (Separate Camp Points) with Arabic numerals; for example, 243/I-6 means it refers to the 6th OLP of the 1st subdivision of Camp No. 243. In addition to the GULAG number, camps have a so-called postal number for the USSR. Camps holding prisoners from among POWs have a special number for abroad. For instance, Dzhezkazgan has: main number 39; postal number for the USSR — 391, 392; for abroad — 5110/34 (for German and Austrian prisoners). Sometimes the postal number is identical to the GULAG number. In 1954, camp numbers ranged from 1 to 600. In addition, there is also a numbering for so-called construction sites where prisoner labor is used. These construction sites have numbers from 500 to 600.

4. Correctional Labor Colonies, Settlements, and ITK for Children

a) ITK — correctional labor colony is essentially the same as a correctional labor camp, but houses primarily prisoners with sentences of up to two years. These colonies are located throughout the Soviet Union and are under the jurisdiction of local or union-level MVD administrations. b) Settlements. Soviet citizens accused of political offenses not deemed serious enough to warrant isolation in a correctional labor camp are sent to exile settlements. Such exiles are usually sent to a specific locality where they can work in their specialty and live freely, though without leaving the territory of that locality and must regularly report to the local MVD. In some cases, exiles are required to reside in specially designated places without contact with the local population. In the post-war years, deportations to special settlements reached enormous proportions. Sent there from regions liberated from the Germans were families accused of loyalty to the occupiers; representatives of a number of nationalities who collaborated with the Germans; and people resettled from various parts of the USSR for various political reasons. Today, special settlements in some parts of the USSR cover considerable territories. They also contain former prisoners who, for reasons of political ‘unreliability’ or other grounds, are still not subject to full release. c) Correctional labor colonies for children. These hold minors accused primarily of criminal offenses; minors sentenced for political crimes are usually held in ITL (correctional labor camps) together with adults.

Concentration Camps of the USSR

Alphabetical list of concentration camps32

No. Camp Name

1. Abakan
2. Abez-Inta (group of camps)
3. Aim
4. Aktyubinsk
5. Aldan
6. Alma-Ata
7. Andijan
8. Arkhangelsk
9. Askold (island)
10. Astrakhan
11. Asha
12. Ayan
13. Baku
14. Belomorsk
15. Berezovo
16. Birobidzhan
17. Bodaybo
18. Borovichi
19. Bureya
20. Byugyuke
21. Vaigach (island)
22. Velsk
23. Verkhoyansk
24. Verkhne-Uralsk
25. Verkhny Ufaley
26. Vilyuysk
27. Vitim
28. Vologda
29. Volkhov
30. Vorkuta (group of camps)
31. Vytegra
32. Gorky
33. Dzhezkazgan (group of camps)
34. Dnepropetrovsk
35. Elabuga
36. Erofey Pavlovich
37. Zayarsk
38. Franz Josef Land (islands, group of camps)
39. Ivanovo
40. Ivdel
41. Izhevsk
42. Izvestkovy
43. Iman
44. Irkutsk
45. Ishimbay
46. Kagan
47. Kazan
48. Kamchatka
49. Kandalaksha (group of camps)
50. Karabash
51. Karaganda (group of camps)
52. Karakas
53. Karaul
54. Kargopol
55. Kashin
56. Kemerovo
57. Kyzyl-Orda
58. Kirov
59. Kolyma (northern group of camps)
60. Commander Islands (Bering Island)
61. Komsomolsk
62. Kopeysk
63. Kostroma
64. Kotlas
65. Krasnovodsk
66. Krasnoturyinsk
67. Krasnoyarsk (group of camps)
68. Kuibyshev
69. Kuloy
70. Kungur
71. Kurgan-Tyube
72. Kuril Islands
73. Kyzyl
74. Kyusyur
75. Leningrad
76. Leninogorsk (former Ridder)
77. Magdagachi
78. Magnitogorsk
79. Mariinsk (group of camps)
80. Makhachkala
81. Medvezhyegorsk
82. Mezen
83. Miass
84. Molotov
85. Molotovsk
86. Morshansk
87. Moscow
88. Nalchik
89. Naryan-Mar
90. Nikolayevsk
91. Nikopol
92. Nizhne-Tambovskoye
93. Novaya Zemlya (island)
94. Novosibirsk
95. Nordvik
96. Norilsk (group of camps)
97. Olekminsk
98. Omsk
99. Orsk
100. Ostashkov
101. Pakhta-Aral
102. Petrozavodsk
103. Petropavlovsk
104. Pechora (group of camps)
105. Plesetsk
106. Rezh
107. Rugozero
108. Salekhard (group of camps)
109. Salyany
110. Sama
111. Saransk-Potma (group of camps)
112. Sakhalin (group of camps)
113. Sverdlovsk (group of camps)
114. Svirstroy
115. Segezha
116. Semipalatinsk
117. Solikamsk (group of camps)
118. Solovetsky Islands
119. Sortavala
120. Sretensk
121. Stalingrad
122. Stalino
123. Stalinogorsk
124. Stalinsk
125. Starodub
126. Suoyarvi
127. Sukhumi
128. Suchan
129. Syzran
130. Tavda (group of camps)
131. Tayshet-Bratsk (group of camps)
132. Tashkent
133. Tbilisi
134. Tetyushi
135. Tiksi
136. Tikhvin
137. Tobolsk
138. Tomsk
139. Tula
140. Tura
141. Turkestan
142. Turukhansk
143. Tyumen
144. Uglich
145. Ulyanovsk
146. Ulan-Ude
147. Uman
148. Uralsk
149. Ust-Kamenogorsk
150. Ust-Vym (group of camps)
151. Ust-Mil
152. Ust-Ukhta (group of camps)
153. Ufa
154. Fergana
155. Frunze
156. Khabarovsk
157. Kholmogory
158. Chardzhou
159. Chelyabinsk
160. Chita
161. Chkalov
162. Shadrinsk
163. Shcherbakov
164. Yakutsk
165. Yaroslavl

32 For convenience in locating camps on the map, the entire territory of the USSR has been divided into zones, designated by Roman numerals from I to VIII. Opposite each camp is the corresponding zone number (see fig. 4 on p. 71). Using this, one should look for the camp’s location on the map.

* The zone numbering has been omitted by me, due to the lack of a camp map of the USSR. — S. V.

List of concentration camps marked on the map but not described in the text as individual camps33

No. Camp Name

1. Akmolinsk
2. Allaikha
3. Aleksandrovskoye ….
4. Balychygan
5. Belushye
6. Vanz
7. Vereshchagino
8. Verkhne-Imbatskoye ..,.
9. Veslyana
10. Goraly
11. Zhigansk
12. Irgiz
13. Kizel
14. Knyazh-Pogost
15. Kozhva
16. Kolbashevo
17. Kokchetav
18. Krasnouralsk
19. Kuznetsk
20. Kurya
21. Kustanay
22. Mayor-Krest
23. Mirnoye
24. Monchegorsk
25. Narym
26. Nizhniye Kresty
27. Nizhny Tagil
28. N. Shadrino
29. Ozhogino
30. Penza
31. Podkamennaya Tunguska
32. Pomori
33. Pokur
34. Pokcha
35. Prokopyevsk
36. Ramenskoye
37. Revda
38. Savinobor
39. Seymchan
40. Sredne-Kolymsk
41. Stanchik
42. Stolbovoye
43. Syktyvkar
44. Tayga
45. Taldy-Bulak
46. Tebulyak
47. Totma
48. Turinsk
49. Ust-Vorkuta
50. Ust-Kamchatsk
51. Ust-Kulom
52. Ust-Port
53. Ust-Srednikan
54. Ust-Usa
55. Ust-Shchugor
56. Khonu
57. Chelkar
58. Chusovoy
59. Ekibastuz-Ugol

33 In the text these camps are marked with an *.

Description of individual concentration camps of the Soviet Union (in alphabetical order)

1. Abakan

The city of Abakan, center of the Khakass Autonomous Oblast (part of Krasnoyarsk Krai in East Siberia), is situated on the Abakan River where it flows into the Yenisei. Abakan is connected by a railway line to the Trans-Siberian mainline and serves as its terminus. The city has a river port on the Yenisei and an airport.
Abakan lies in a mountainous zone. The climate is sharply continental, with severe winters. Winter lasts on average about eight months. The average January temperature is −16°C, July +20°C. Annual precipitation is 200 mm.
There are 28 industrial enterprises in Abakan: a brickworks, furniture factory, railway depot, etc. Coal is mined in the Abakan district. The Abakan River is gold-bearing; logging is also rafted down it; additionally, it is used for irrigation of the Abakan steppes, which are now under cultivation.
The camp number is unknown. The number of camp sections and the number of prisoners are also unknown. Prisoners work primarily in coal mines.

Abez is an urban-type settlement within the Komi ASSR, situated on the Kotlas–Vorkuta railway line, approximately 200 km from Vorkuta. During the Second World War, the settlement grew into a sizable populated point. This was greatly facilitated by the commissioning of the Kotlas–Vorkuta railway line, as Abez became a transshipment hub for freight from the railway to the water route along the Usa River. The “Abez” railway station has an extensive system of sidings leading to the river port facilities. The settlement of Inta lies to the west of Abez, about 100 km away, off the Vorkuta–Kotlas railway line. (…)

* Further in the book there are descriptions, maps, and diagrams of 160 camps. The number of prisoners (when it was known to the authors) ranged from 2,000 people in small camps to 20,000 people and more in large camps. — S. V.

162. Shadrinsk

The town of Shadrinsk, the administrative center of a district in Kurgan Oblast, is located on the Iset River; it lies on the Sverdlovsk–Kurgan railway line.
The climate of the region is continental with a severe winter that lasts about eight months. The average temperature in January is −15°, in July +18°. The annual precipitation is 450 mm. The district lies in the forest-steppe belt.
The town has an aluminum plant; logging operations are carried out in the Shadrinsk area.
The camp is listed under No. 514/2. The administration is located in Shadrinsk. The number of prisoners and the number of camp sectors are unknown. The prisoners work in logging and industry.

163. Shcherbakov

Shcherbakov, one of the towns of Yaroslavl Oblast, is a significant river port on the Volga and a major railway junction.
The climate of the region is continental. Winter lasts more than five months. The average temperature in January is −10°, in July +18°. The annual precipitation is 550 mm. The district lies in the forest belt.
In Shcherbakov there are a number of enterprises: precision and printing machinery plants, an aircraft plant, shipbuilding yards, rope factories, and a well-developed flour-milling and sawmilling industry. Shcherbakov, as a Volga transshipment point, has a large number of wharves, which have recently been intensively equipped with technology.
The camp is listed under No. 259 and is located 14 km from the town. The number of prisoners is small, mainly women with short sentences — up to three years; they work chiefly for garment factories. In some camp sectors, sewing workshops have been set up; where there are no workshops, prisoners are taken to work under escort. The escort contingent is small: approximately one armed guard with a dog for every 100 prisoners. Besides the women’s camp sectors, a camp sector for specialists is known; prisoners in this sector are employed on work connected with the reconstruction of the Shcherbakov Hydroelectric Power Station. This same camp sector also houses prisoners working in the town.

164. Yakutsk

Yakutsk, the capital city of the Yakut ASSR, is situated on the left bank of the Lena River, 1,815 km from its mouth. It is connected by regular steamship service to the town of Kirensk and by air service to the city of Irkutsk. Overland roads lead: to the south — to the railway station “Tyndinskaya,” to the east — to Ayan and Okhotsk, to the north — to Verkhoyansk.
The climate of the region is sharply continental. Winter lasts more than six and a half months. The average temperature in January is −40°, in July +18°. The annual precipitation is 250 mm. The district lies in the taiga zone.
The district’s economy: agriculture and hunting. The camp number is unknown. The administration is located in Yakutsk. The number of prisoners and camp sectors is unknown. There are transit camps for supplying labor to areas north of Yakutsk (Verkhoyansk, Ust-Aldan, etc.). The prisoners work mainly on railway construction; according to a number of sources, it can be assumed that the direction of this railway line is: Yakutsk–Olyokminsk and Yakutsk–Ayan.

165. Yaroslavl

The city of Yaroslavl, the center of Yaroslavl Oblast, is located on the upper Volga; it is a railway junction on the Moscow–Arkhangelsk line.
The climate of the region is continental. Winter lasts more than five months. The average temperature in January is −10°, in July +18°. The annual precipitation is 550 mm. The district lies in the forest belt.
In Yaroslavl there are chemical industry enterprises, a synthetic rubber plant, a rubber combine, a truck factory, machine-building and tool plants, and a number of textile industry enterprises.
The camp is listed under No. 82. The administration is located in Yaroslavl. The number of prisoners and the number of camp sectors are unknown. The prisoners work at the city’s industrial enterprises and in its outskirts.

Documents Establishing the System of Forced Labor in the USSR

Decree of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets on the Creation of Forced Labor Camps36

1. Forced labor camps shall be established under the Administrative Departments of the Gubernia Executive Committees.
   Note: 1) The initial organization and management of forced labor camps shall be entrusted to the Gubernia Extraordinary Commissions, which will hand them over to the Administrative Departments upon notification from the center. 2) Forced labor camps in uyezds shall be opened with the permission of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.
2. Those individuals and categories of persons against whom decisions have been issued by the Administrative Departments, Extraordinary Commissions, Revolutionary Tribunals, People’s Courts, and other Soviet bodies empowered to do so by decrees and orders shall be subject to confinement in forced labor camps.
3. All persons confined in the camps shall be immediately assigned to work at the request of Soviet institutions.
4. Escapees from the camps or from work shall be subject to the severest penalties.
5. For the management of all forced labor camps throughout the territory of the RSFSR, a Central Camp Administration shall be established under the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs in agreement with the All‑Russian Extraordinary Commission.
6. The heads of forced labor camps shall be elected by the local Gubernia Executive Committees and confirmed by the Central Camp Administration.
7. Funds for the equipment and maintenance of the camps shall be allocated by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs through budgetary procedures via the Gubernia Executive Committee.
8. Medical and sanitary supervision of the camps shall be entrusted to the local Health Departments.
9. The People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs is instructed to develop detailed regulations and instructions within two weeks from the date of publication of this resolution.
   Signed: Chairman of the All‑Russian Central Committee M. Kalinin. Secretary L. Serebryakov.

Published in No. 81 of the Izvestia of the All‑Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets, April 15, 1919.

Decree of the All‑Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets on Forced Labor Camps37

1. The organization of forced labor camps shall be entrusted to the Gubernia Extraordinary Commissions, to which the housing department of the local Executive Committee shall provide suitable premises.
   Note. Depending on local conditions, forced labor camps may be established both within city limits and in estates, monasteries, manors, etc., located nearby.
2. After a camp has been organized, it shall be transferred to the jurisdiction of the department of the respective Executive Committee, with the permission of the Forced Labor Department of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.
3. In all gubernia cities, camps with a capacity of at least 300 persons each must be opened within the time limits specified by a special instruction. Responsibility for failure to comply with this provision shall rest with the gubernia Extraordinary Commissions.
   Note. In uyezd cities, camps may be opened with the special permission of the Forced Labor Department.

Camp Administration

4. The general administration of all forced labor camps on the territory of the R.S.F.S.R. shall be vested in the Department of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.
5. The responsibilities of the Department of Forced Labor shall include:
   a) the drafting of regulations, instructions, and rules for the organization and administration of camps;
   b) the submission of periodic reports and accounts on camp activities;
   c) the preparation and submission of estimates for camp maintenance, the determination of camp administration staff levels, etc.;
   d) the approval of camp commandants from candidates put forward by local Executive Committees;
   e) general oversight of camps in economic, financial, and administrative matters;
   f) the inspection of camps;
   g) the resolution of all questions relating to the organization and administration of camps;
   h) the opening of camps in uyezd towns;
   i) the transfer of prisoners from one camp to another;
   j) the authorization of workshop facilities within camps.
6. The Department of Forced Labor shall be headed by a chief, who shall be a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.
7. The Department of Forced Labor shall be divided into the following sub-departments:
   a) Administrative — responsible for the general administration of camps, their personnel, the collection of statistical information, and other matters not assigned to the other sub-departments;
   b) Organizational and Instructional Sub-Department — responsible for the organization of camps, the instruction of camp administration staff, supervision of their activities, etc.;
   c) Economic Sub-Department — responsible for the economic affairs of camps, forced labor, repairs, and construction within camps.
8. The closest supervision over the general activities of camps shall belong to the Administration Department of the local Executive Committee.
   Note: As regards the sanitary arrangements of camps, accommodations, and the conditions under which prisoner labor is used, the right of supervision shall be granted to other relevant departments of the local Executive Committee.
9. Each camp shall be headed by a camp commandant, who shall be selected by the local Executive Committee and approved by the Department of Forced Labor of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. The camp commandant shall be responsible for maintaining order in the camp and for the precise execution of all decrees, instructions, and orders issued by the central authority. All camp employees and prisoners shall obey the orders of the camp commandant.
10. The camp commandant, being directly subordinate to the Administration Department of the local Executive Committee and, temporarily, to the Extraordinary Commission, must submit a brief report on the camp’s activities, the number and movement of prisoners, escapes, and all special incidents occurring in the camp every two weeks to the Department of Forced Labor.
11. The camp commandant shall have the right to impose disciplinary penalties on prisoners in accordance with the procedure provided for in a special instruction. The commandant shall appoint and dismiss camp employees.
12. The immediate assistants to the camp commandant shall be: the camp chief of supply and the chief of forced labor.
13. The duties of the chief of supply shall include the provision of food supplies, heating, and lighting for the camp; attending to the clothing needs of prisoners and those employees who receive government-issue uniforms; supervising the repair of premises; and managing all economic affairs of the camp.
14. The duties of the chief of forced labor shall include:
    a) the organization of prisoner labor both inside and outside the camp;
    b) the equipping of workshops, in cases where their establishment has been authorized by the Department of Forced Labor;
    c) the provision to prisoners of the necessary implements, tools, raw materials, etc., for work;
    d) supervision of the timely and conscientious performance of work;
    e) the solicitation and acceptance of orders for prisoner labor.
    Note: Orders may be accepted only from Soviet institutions;
    f) the release of prisoners for work outside the camp at the request of Soviet institutions;
    g) the keeping of records of the time worked by each prisoner, the accounting of prisoners’ earnings, and the payment of wages.
15. The office work of the camp shall be assigned to a chancellery comprising a chief clerk, a treasurer-accountant, scribes (calculated at one scribe for every 100 prisoners), and typists (calculated at one typist for every 300 prisoners).

Guard Detachment

16. Direct supervision of order in the camp shall be assigned to the guard, consisting of a guard commander, his assistant, two squad leaders, and a guard detachment.
17. The number of guard personnel shall be determined by the number of prisoners, with the provision that, in camps where the number of prisoners does not exceed 300, two guards shall be allotted for every 15 prisoners; for every 10 prisoners above 300, one guard shall be allotted.
18. One half of the guard detachment shall be designated for guard duty inside the camp, while the other half shall guard and escort prisoners when they are outside the camp.
    Note: In case of necessity, the number of convoy personnel may be increased at the expense of the interior guards, and vice versa.
19. The duties of the guard commander shall include: a) supervision of the proper performance of guard duty by all members of the detachment; b) supervision of the maintenance of order by prisoners; c) prevention of breaches of discipline by them; d) supervision of outside persons entering the camp; e) the assignment of detachment members to be present during visits; f) acceptance of parcels and keeping records of items received, which shall be handed over by inventory to the chief of supply; g) searching newly admitted prisoners and prisoners returning from work.

Sanitary and Medical Supervision

20. General supervision over the sanitary condition of the camp is the responsibility of the Health Department of the local Executive Committee.
21. Direct sanitary oversight and provision of medical care to prisoners are entrusted to a doctor and a medical assistant (feldsher) appointed by the Health Department of the local Executive Committee.
22. The doctor’s duties include: visiting the camp at least twice a week, examining and treating the sick, questioning prisoners about their state of health, monitoring the sanitary condition of the camp premises—especially the kitchen, living quarters, latrines, etc.
    Note: in cases of sudden illness the doctor may be summoned at any time.
23. The medical assistant (feldsher) must be permanently stationed at the camp, manage the infirmary and pharmacy, provide medical assistance to prisoners, examine newly arrived prisoners, and supervise the quality of food intended for preparation.
24. An infirmary shall be set up at the camp, with 15 beds for every 300 prisoners, and a first‑aid kit.

Concerning Prisoners

25. Persons indicated in Art. 2 of the general regulations on camps (Collection of Laws 1919, No. 12, Art. 124) are subject to confinement in forced labor camps, with the exception of: a) persons who, by resolutions of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, are to be confined in special camps for the entire duration of the civil war; b) persons suffering from chronic illnesses and organic deficiencies that render them completely incapable of work.
    Note: Incapacity for work is determined by the administration of the local camps upon a doctor’s conclusion.
26. Female persons and minors shall be held in special camps for each category.
27. Persons subject to confinement in camps enter the camp together with a copy of the court sentence or order, which must indicate: the surname, first name and patronymic of the prisoner, the name of the institution by whose order the prisoner was forwarded, the designation of the crime for which he was convicted, the time the sentence was passed, and the term of confinement.
28. Immediately upon the prisoner’s arrival at the camp, information about him is entered on special cards made out in three copies, of which one is placed in an alphabetical register, another is kept with the prisoner’s file, and the third is forwarded to the Department of Forced Labor.
29. Each prisoner has in the camp office his own personal account and a book, in which his earnings are entered as income, and the portion of the camp’s upkeep chargeable to him and expenses incurred by the prisoner from his own means (insofar as these are permitted by the camp rules) are entered as expenditure.
    Note: Camp upkeep expenses, in accordance with Art. 35 of this instruction, are distributed among the prisoners in such a way that the upkeep of the camp is covered by the labor of the prisoners when the latter are at full complement.
30. All penalties imposed on prisoners are noted in the prisoner’s file.
31. All prisoners must be assigned to work immediately upon arrival in the camp and engage in physical labor for the entire duration of their stay there. The type of work is determined by the camp administration.
    Note: For individual persons, with the permission of the local departments of administration, the substitution of intellectual labor for physical labor may be permitted.
32. An 8-hour working day is established for prisoners. Overtime and night work may be introduced in compliance with the rules of the Code of Labor Laws (Collection of Laws 1918, No. 87–83, Art. 905).
33. The food ration for prisoners must correspond to the nutritional norms for persons engaged in physical labor.
34. Remuneration for the labor of each prisoner is paid according to the rates of the trade unions of the respective localities. The cost of the prisoner’s upkeep (food, clothing), expenses for housing, maintenance of the camp administration, and guards are deducted from the prisoner’s earnings. The total amount of such deductions may not exceed three-quarters of the wages.
35. The upkeep of the camp and the administration, when the camp is at full complement of prisoners, must be covered by the prisoners’ labor. Responsibility for any deficit is placed on the administration and the prisoners in accordance with a special instruction.
36. The extent, type, and procedure for imposing disciplinary penalties on prisoners are determined by a special instruction.
37. For a first escape, the prisoner’s term of confinement is extended to ten times the length of the original term of confinement. For a second escape, the guilty parties are brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal, which has the right to determine the punishment up to and including the supreme measure of punishment.
38. To prevent the possibility of escape, collective guarantee may be introduced.
39. All prisoners elect an elder, one for the entire camp, who acts as mediator between the prisoners and the administration.
40. For refusal to work without valid reasons, the prisoner is subject to punishment in accordance with a special instruction.
41. All orders of the camp administration must be immediately carried out by the prisoners. Every prisoner is granted the right to file a complaint about improper actions of the administration. For this purpose, a complaints book shall be kept in every camp, which is held by the camp elder and presented to the Department of Administration and to persons authorized to inspect the camp.
42. Visits with prisoners may take place only on Sundays and holidays, for close relatives (wife, children, father, mother, brothers, and sisters) without special permission. Visits with other persons may be permitted on the same days with special permissions from the Departments of Administration.
43. The delivery of food products to individual prisoners is not permitted. All delivered products must go into the common pot.
44. For prisoners who demonstrate exceptional diligence, it may be: 1) permitted to live in private quarters and report to the camp to perform assigned work; 2) their term of confinement may be shortened by the Department of Forced Labor of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs upon the recommendation of the Department of Administration of the local Executive Committee.
    Note: Point two of this article does not apply to persons confined in the camp by sentences of judicial institutions: these persons may be released before the end of their term in accordance with the general rules on early release.

Housing

43. The premises intended for forced labor camps must be fully suitable and meet hygiene and sanitation requirements. Note: A separate facility shall be set aside for the guard detail within the camp area.
44. Prisoners are housed in camps, depending on the size and layout of the buildings, in common or individual single cells.
45. Camps are set up in places isolated from other premises and buildings.
46. Each cell is furnished with all items necessary for the housing of prisoners. Note: To prevent epidemics, the construction of continuous plank beds is prohibited.
47. Baths, laundries, and disinfection chambers shall be set up at the camps. Note: Should it be impossible to construct a special bathhouse at the camp, prisoners must be taken to city bathhouses no fewer than twice a month. Signed: For the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets V. Avanesov. Secretary A. Enukidze.

Published in No. 105 of the Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets on May 17, 1919.

Decree of the NKVD on the procedure for registering former landowners, capitalists, and high-ranking officials of the tsarist regime38

In execution of the decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of September 23, 1919 (Collection of Statutes, 1919, No. 47, Art. 458), the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs orders all Executive Committees to carry out the registration of the persons specified in the Council of People’s Commissars decree in the following manner:

1. The following are subject to compulsory registration: a) officials of former governments holding a rank not lower than Actual State Councillor, former officer ranks of the Special Corps of Gendarmes, former prosecutors, assistant prosecutors, chairmen and members of judicial chambers, ministers and assistant ministers, directors and vice‑directors of departments, senators, members of the State Council, governors, vice‑governors and governor‑generals, chiefs of police, district police officers, city governors, chairmen of provincial and district zemstvo boards, members of provincial zemstvo boards, city mayors of provincial and district towns, members of town councils of provincial towns; b) former owners of any enterprise that employed no fewer than twenty workers and employees; c) former chairmen or members of the boards of joint‑stock companies that had a fixed capital of no less than half a million rubles; d) persons who owned no less than one hundred dessiatins of land or a house valued in 1916 for tax or insurance purposes at over fifty thousand rubles.
2. Persons subject to registration are obliged, within two weeks of the receipt of this instruction locally and its publication, to submit in person or through others (but not by mail) to the Administration Department of the district or city Executive Committee a written application in two copies, signed by them, containing the following information: a) First name, patronymic, surname, age, and current address; b) previous social, official, and property status that makes registration obligatory for the given person; c) current occupation, employment, source of livelihood; d) composition of the person’s family, indicating the first name, patronymic, surname, age, occupation (current or former), and address of each member, and also indicating all absent family members with all the above‑mentioned information insofar as it is known to the applicant. Note. For the purposes of this section, family members are understood to include parents, spouses, natural and adopted children, and siblings.
3. To receive written applications from persons subject to registration, the Administration Department of the Executive Committee shall designate duty officers who will receive applications daily from ten o’clock in the morning until four o’clock in the afternoon during the period set for registration, and shall issue a receipt for the application indicating the date and the number under which the application has been registered.
4. The Administration Department shall enter the submitted information into a special register and, upon completion of registration, shall forward a list of all registered persons to the Provincial Executive Committee.
5. After the expiration of the specified two‑week period, the district and city Executive Committees shall immediately forward by mail or by courier all applications received by them (one copy of each) to the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, notifying it by telegraph of the time of dispatch and the corresponding reference number. Second copies of the applications shall be kept in the Executive Committee where the given person was registered.
6. Executive Committees have no right, on the basis of the information submitted to them, to make any entries in the passports of registered persons or to issue them special identity certificates in place of passports.
7. Responsibility for the accurate and timely execution of this instruction by the district Executive Committees is assigned to the provincial Executive Committees. Signed: Deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs M. Vladimirsky.

Published in No. 214 of the Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets on September 26, 1919.

Definition by the Criminal Code of a socially dangerous act against Soviet power39

(Below are some basic provisions and individual articles of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR under which the bulk of the inmates of the Soviet Union’s concentration camps were convicted — B. Ya.)

6. Socially dangerous is any action or inaction
   directed against the Soviet system or violating the legal order
   established by the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government during the transitional period to the communist system.
   Note. An action that, although formally falling under the elements of any article of the Special Part of this Code, is, due to its obvious insignificance and the absence of harmful consequences, devoid of a socially dangerous character, is not a crime.
7. In respect of persons who have committed socially dangerous acts or
   who pose a danger due to their connection with a criminal milieu or by reason of their
   past activity, social protection measures of a judicial-correctional, medical, or medico-pedagogical
   character shall be applied.
8. If a specific act that constituted a crime at the time of its commission
   under Article 6 of this Code has, by the moment of its investigation or consideration in court, lost its socially dangerous character due either
   to a change in the criminal law or solely by virtue of a changed socio-political situation, or if the person who committed it, in the opinion of the court, can no longer be deemed socially dangerous by that moment, such act shall not entail the application of a social protection measure against the perpetrator.
9. Social protection measures are applied for the purposes of:
   a) preventing new crimes by the persons who have committed them,
   b) influencing other unstable members of society, and
   c) adapting those who have committed criminal acts to the conditions of communal life in the
   state of the working people.
   Social protection measures cannot have as their purpose the infliction of physical
   suffering or the humiliation of human dignity and set themselves no tasks of retribution and punishment.

(It is noteworthy that Article 9 of the Code declares that
social protection measures in the USSR cannot have as their purpose the infliction of physical
suffering or the humiliation of human dignity and set themselves no tasks of retribution and punishment. — B. Ya.).

Determination by the Criminal Code of the Possibility of Applying Punishment to Persons Who Have Committed a Specific Crime40

1. According to the general meaning of Soviet criminal legislation, punishment
   may be imposed by a court only if the defendant is found guilty of
   committing a specific crime. Thus, under Article 6 of the Fundamental Principles
   of Criminal Legislation of the USSR and the Union Republics, punitive measures
   may be applied in judicial proceedings only to persons who foresaw or
   should have foreseen the socially dangerous character of the consequences of their
   actions. Consequently, by the direct meaning of this article, punishment may be
   applied by a court, in the presence of intentional or reckless guilt, only to a person
   who has committed a specific socially dangerous act or omission.
   Hence, by virtue of this article, the possibility of applying punishment by a court
   to persons not found guilty of committing any particular crime is excluded.
   Likewise, subparagraph “d” of Article 6 of the Fundamental Principles of Criminal Procedure of the USSR and
   the Union Republics establishes that criminal prosecution may not be
   initiated, and an initiated prosecution may not be continued and shall be terminated
   at any stage of the proceedings in the absence of corpus delicti in the actions of
   the accused. Thus, also according to the meaning of this law, the application
   of punishment by judicial procedure requires the existence of a specific crime
   committed by the accused.
   From the above-mentioned general rule, the Fundamental Principles contain a derogation
   only with respect to exile or expulsion. Under Article 22 of the Fundamental Principles,
   punishment in the form of exile or expulsion may be applied by a court sentence, upon
   the proposal of the procurator’s office, to persons recognized as socially dangerous, regardless
   of their being brought to criminal liability for the commission of a specific
   crime, as well as in cases where they have been acquitted by the court of the charge of committing
   a specific crime. This rule is reproduced in the criminal codes of a number of union republics (Art. 34 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR,
   Art. 29 of the Criminal Code of the Byelorussian SSR, Art. za of the Criminal Code of the Turkmen SSR, Art. 38 of the Criminal Code of the Uzbek SSR, Art. 36 of the Criminal Code of the Georgian
   SSR, Art. 35 of the Criminal Code of the Armenian SSR).

(According to Article 22 of the Fundamental Principles of Criminal Legislation41
punishment in the form of exile or expulsion is applied by courts to certain persons
even if they are acquitted by the court for lack of corpus delicti in their
actions, i.e., on formal grounds, yet at the same time are, in the court’s opinion, a socially dangerous element. — B. Ya.).

Application of Articles of the Criminal Code by Analogy42

(Article) 16. If a particular socially dangerous act is not directly
provided for in this Code, the grounds and limits of liability for
it shall be determined by applying those articles of the Code that
provide for the most similar crimes by nature.
(On the basis of this article, any person who has committed an act
not prohibited by the Soviet Criminal Code but which, at the free discretion
of the court or investigative authorities, may be deemed dangerous for the Soviet state,
is brought to trial and convicted under some article of the Criminal Code
most appropriate to that act, i.e., the principle of analogy is applied in such a case. — B. Ya.).

On Social Protection Measures *) Applied under the Criminal Code with Respect to Persons Who Have Committed a Crime43

20. Social protection measures of a judicial-correctional character are:
    a) declaring to be an enemy of the working people, with deprivation of citizenship of the union
    republic and, thereby, of citizenship of the USSR, and mandatory expulsion from
    its territory;
    b) deprivation of liberty in corrective labor camps in remote
    localities of the USSR;
    c) deprivation of liberty in ordinary places of confinement;
    d) corrective labor work without deprivation of liberty **);
    e) forfeiture of political and certain civil rights;

*) In the resolutions of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, beginning with the resolution of May 8, 1934 on supplementing the Statute on State Crimes with articles on treason to the motherland (SZ USSR No. 33, art. 255), the term «punishment» is used instead of the term «measure of social defense of a judicial‑correctional nature».

**) In accordance with the fact that the Corrective Labor Code of the RSFSR, approved by the All‑Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR on August 1, 1933 (SU No. 48, art. 208), replaced the term «forced labor» with the term «corrective labor», and in most subsequent legislative acts, particularly in the amendments to the Criminal Code, the same replacement was also carried out (SU 1934, No. 9, art. 51; No. 27, art. 157; No. 42, art. 259, and others), it has been carried out throughout the entire text of the Code.
e) expulsion from the limits of the USSR for a term;
f) expulsion from the limits of the RSFSR or from the limits of a particular locality with mandatory settlement in other localities or without it, or with prohibition of residence in particular localities or without such prohibition;
g) dismissal from office with prohibition from occupying one or another position or without such prohibition;
h) prohibition from engaging in one or another activity or trade;
i) public censure;
j) confiscation of property — full or partial;
k) monetary fine;
l) imposition of the obligation to compensate for the harm caused;
m) warning. (May 20, 1930, SU No. 26, art. 344).
Note. The Supreme Court of the USSR, the Supreme Court of the RSFSR, territorial and regional courts, railway and water transport courts, and military tribunals have the right, in respect of persons convicted of the most dangerous crimes, to determine deprivation of liberty in the form of imprisonment in prison. (September 20, 1936, SU No. 20, art. 131).

(To Article 20 of the Criminal Code, by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of April 19, 1943, hard labor was introduced as a measure of punishment. — B. Ya.).

21. For combating the most serious types of crimes threatening the foundations of Soviet power and the Soviet system, until repeal by the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, in cases specifically indicated by articles of this Code, execution by shooting is applied as an exceptional measure for the protection of the state of working people.

(To Article 21 of the Criminal Code, by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of April 19, 1943, as a form of the death penalty, in addition to shooting, hanging was introduced. — B. Ya.).

22. Persons who have not reached the age of eighteen at the time of committing the crime, and women who are pregnant, may not be sentenced to execution by shooting.
23. Deprivation of liberty is established for a term from one year to ten years *), and in cases of espionage, wrecking, and acts of diversion (Articles 58‑1a, 58‑6, 58‑7, and 58‑9 of this Code) — for longer terms, but not exceeding 25 years.

*) See the Decrees of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of June 4, 1947 (pp. 71 — 72) and of June 9, 1947 (p. 74).

Deprivation of liberty for a term of up to three years is served in general places of confinement. Deprivation of liberty for a term of three years and above is served in corrective labor camps.
In exceptional cases, having found that a person sentenced to deprivation of liberty for a term of three years or more is clearly unfit for physical labor or, by the degree of his social danger, does not require assignment to a corrective labor camp, the court is entitled to substitute the camp with a general place of confinement by a special ruling on this matter in the sentence. (May 20, 1930, SU, No. 26, art. 344; May 20, 1938, SU, No. 11, art. 141).

(By the Decree of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR of October 2, 1937 (to Article 28 of the Criminal Code) the maximum term of deprivation of liberty was increased from 10 to 25 years. — B. Ya.).

30. Correctional labor without deprivation of liberty is imposed for a term of one day to one year.
    The time spent serving correctional labor, including at the convict’s place of work, shall not be credited toward total length of employment, length of service for determining qualifications, or length of employment entitling one to pensions and other benefits and advantages (wage-rate bonuses for long service, supplementary leave, etc.) under the legislation of the USSR and the RSFSR.
    Payment of wage-rate bonuses for long service shall be suspended during the period of serving correctional labor. (20 August 1935, S.U. No. 20, art. 192).
    Note. Correctional labor without deprivation of liberty shall not be applied to middle, senior, high, or junior extended-service cadre commanding personnel of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, or to regular cadre enlisted personnel of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. Instead, such military personnel shall be subjected to arrest for a term of up to two months, served in accordance with the procedure established for military personnel serving disciplinary arrest. (30 November 1930, S.U. No. 61, art. 749).
31. Removal from the limits of the RSFSR or from the limits of a particular locality, with compulsory settlement or with a prohibition on residing in other localities, or without those restrictions, in conjunction with correctional labor, may be applied by a court to those convicted persons whose continued presence in the given locality is deemed socially dangerous by the court.
    Removal from the limits of the RSFSR or from the limits of a particular locality, with compulsory settlement in other localities, is imposed for a term of three to ten years; this measure, as a supplementary one, may be applied only for a term of up to five years. Removal from the limits of the RSFSR or from the limits of a particular locality with compulsory settlement in other localities in conjunction with correctional labor may be applied only as a principal measure of social defense. Removal from the limits of the RSFSR or from the limits of a particular locality, with a prohibition on residing in certain localities or without such restriction, is imposed for a term of one to five years.
    If one of these measures is imposed by a court as supplementary to deprivation of liberty, the term of this supplementary measure fixed by the court commences on the day the imprisonment is served.
    Those sentenced to removal from the limits of a particular locality with compulsory settlement in other localities who are serving deprivation of liberty in correctional labor camps shall, after serving their term of deprivation of liberty, be settled in the camp area for the period during which they are deprived of the right to freely choose their place of residence. They must be allotted land or provided with paid work. Removal from the limits of the RSFSR, as well as removal from the limits of a particular locality in all its forms, may not be applied to persons who have not reached the age of sixteen. (20 May 1930, S.U. No. 26, art. 344).

(Under Article 35 of the Criminal Code, “socially dangerous elements” were convicted in an administrative procedure, i.e., without trial — by special police troikas created under oblast police directorates. This category included: persons who violated the passport system, those who fled from collective farms, etc. — B. Ya.).

Definition by the Criminal Code of a Counter‑Revolutionary Crime44

58*). Any action directed toward the overthrow, subversion, or weakening of the power of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviets and the workers’ and peasants’ governments of the USSR, of the union and autonomous republics elected by them on the basis of the Constitution of the USSR and the constitutions of the union republics, or toward the subversion or weakening of the external security of the USSR and the fundamental economic, political, and national achievements of the proletarian revolution, shall be deemed counter‑revolutionary.
By virtue of the international solidarity of interests of all working people, the same actions are also deemed counter‑revolutionary when directed against any other state of working people, even if not part of the USSR (6 June 1927, S.U. No. 49, art. 330).
58‑1a. Treason, i.e., actions committed by citizens of the USSR to the detriment of the military power of the USSR, its state independence, or the inviolability of its territory, such as: espionage, disclosure of a military or state secret, going over to the side of the enemy, flight or escape abroad — shall be punished by
the supreme measure of criminal punishment — execution with confiscation of all property, and under mitigating circumstances — by deprivation of liberty for a term of ten years**) with confiscation of all property (20 July 1934, S.U. No. 30, art. 173)***).

*) Chapter One was put into effect from the time the Statute on State Crimes, adopted by the 3rd Session of the III Convocation of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR on 25 February 1927, came into force (S.Z. USSR 1927, No. 12, art. 123).

58-1b. The same crimes, committed by military personnel, are punishable by the supreme criminal penalty—execution by shooting with confiscation of all property. (July 20, 1934, SU No. 30, art. 173).
58-1c. In the event of the escape or flight abroad of a military serviceman, the adult members of his family, if they in any way contributed to the treason being prepared or committed, or even knew of it but did not report it to the authorities, are punishable—
by deprivation of liberty for a term of five to ten years with confiscation of all property.
The remaining adult members of the traitor’s family who lived together with him or were dependent on him at the time the crime was committed—are subject to deprivation of electoral rights and exile to remote areas of Siberia for five years. (July 20, 1934, SU No. 30, art. 173).
58-1 g. Failure to report by a military serviceman of a treason being prepared or committed—entails—
deprivation of liberty for ten years.
Failure to report by other citizens (non‑military personnel) is prosecuted under art. 58-12. (July 20, 1934, SU No. 30, art. 173).
58-2. Armed uprising or incursion for counter‑revolutionary purposes onto Soviet territory by armed bands, seizure of power at the centre or in the localities for the same purposes and, in particular, with the aim of forcibly detaching from the USSR and a separate Union republic any part of its territory or abrogating treaties concluded by the USSR with foreign states, entail—
the supreme measure of social defence—execution by shooting or declaration as an enemy of the working people, with confiscation of property and deprivation of citizenship of the Union republic and, thereby, of citizenship of the USSR, and banishment from the boundaries of the USSR for ever, with the possibility, under mitigating circumstances, of reduction to deprivation of liberty for a term of not less than three years, with confiscation of all or part of the property. (June 6, 1927, SU No. 49, art. 330).
58-3. Contact for counter‑revolutionary purposes with a foreign state or with individual representatives thereof, and likewise assistance in any manner whatsoever to a foreign state that is in a state of war with the USSR or is carrying on a struggle against it by means of intervention or blockade, entail—
the measures of social defence specified in art. 58-2 of this Code. (June 6, 1927, SU No. 49, art. 330).

**) See art. 28.

***) Art. 58-1a – 58-1g were introduced into effect from the time of coming into force of the Decree of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR of June 8, 1934 (Collected Laws of the USSR No. 38, art. 255).

58-4. Rendering any kind of assistance to that part of the international bourgeoisie which, not recognizing the equality of the communist system replacing the capitalist system, strives for its overthrow, as well as to public groups and organizations under the influence of or directly organized by this bourgeoisie, in carrying out hostile activities against the USSR, entails — deprivation of liberty for a term of not less than three years with confiscation of all or part of property, with increase of the penalty, under especially aggravating circumstances, up to the supreme measure of social defense — execution by shooting or being declared an enemy of the working people, with deprivation of citizenship of the union republic and, consequently, citizenship of the USSR and expulsion from the territory of the USSR forever, with confiscation of property. (June 6, 1927, Collection of Laws No. 49, Art. 330).

58-5. Inducing a foreign state or any public groups therein, through communication with their representatives, use of forged documents or other means, to declare war, intervene armed in the affairs of the USSR or other hostile actions, in particular: blockade, seizure of state property of the USSR or union republics, rupture of diplomatic relations, rupture of treaties concluded with the USSR, etc., entails — the measures of social defense specified in Article 58-2 of this Code. (June 6, 1927, Collection of Laws No. 49, Art. 330).

58-6. Espionage, i.e., the transmission, theft or collection for the purpose of transmission of information that by its content constitutes a specially protected state secret, to foreign states, counterrevolutionary organizations or private individuals, entails — deprivation of liberty for a term of not less than three years, with confiscation of all or part of property, and in cases where the espionage has caused or could have caused especially grave consequences for the interests of the USSR — the supreme measure of social defense — execution by shooting or being declared an enemy of the working people, with deprivation of citizenship of the union republic and, consequently, citizenship of the USSR and expulsion from the territory of the USSR, forever, with confiscation of property.
The transmission, theft or collection for the purpose of transmission of economic information that does not by its content constitute a specially protected state secret, but is not subject to disclosure under a direct prohibition of law or by order of heads of departments, institutions and enterprises, for remuneration or free of charge, to the organizations and individuals mentioned above, entails — deprivation of liberty for a term of up to three years. (June 6, 1927, Collection of Laws No. 49, Art. 330).
Note 1. Specially protected state secret means the information enumerated in a special list approved by the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR in coordination with the councils of people’s commissars of the union republics and published for general information. (June 6, 1927, Collection of Laws No. 49, Art. 330).
Note 2. With respect to espionage by persons mentioned in Article 193-1 of this Code, Article 193-24 of the same Code remains in force (January 9, 1928, Collection of Laws No. 12, Art. 108).

58-7. Undermining of state industry, transport, trade, monetary circulation or the credit system, as well as cooperatives, committed for counterrevolutionary purposes by the corresponding use of state institutions and enterprises or by obstructing their normal activities, as well as the use of state institutions and enterprises or obstruction of their normal activities, carried out in the interests of former owners or interested capitalist organizations, entail — the measures of social defense specified in Article 58-2 of this Code. (June 6, 1927, Collection of Laws No. 49, Art. 330).

58-8. Committing terrorist acts directed against representatives of Soviet power or activists of revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ organizations, and participation in the execution of such acts, even by persons not belonging to a counterrevolutionary organization, entail —

the measures of social defense specified in Article 58-2 of this Code. (June 6, 1927, Collection of Laws No. 49, Art. 330).

58-9. Destruction or damage, with counterrevolutionary intent, by explosion, arson or other means, of railway or other routes and means of communication, means of public communication, water supply, public warehouses and other structures, or state or public property entails —

measures of social protection specified in Article 58-2 of this Code. (June 6, 1927, S.U. No. 49, Art. 330).

58-10. Propaganda or agitation containing a call for the overthrow, undermining, or weakening of Soviet power or for the commission of individual counter-revolutionary crimes (Articles 58-2 — 58-9 of this Code), and likewise the dissemination or manufacture or keeping of literature of the same content, shall entail —
deprivation of liberty for a term of not less than six months.
The same actions committed during mass disturbances or with the use of religious or national prejudices of the masses, or in a military situation, or in localities declared under martial law, shall entail —
measures of social protection specified in Article 58-2 of this Code. (June 6, 1927, S.U. No. 49, Art. 330).

58-12. Non-reporting of a reliably known counter-revolutionary crime being prepared or committed shall entail —
deprivation of liberty for a term of not less than six months. (June 6, 1927, S.U. No. 49, Art. 330).

58-13. Active actions or active struggle against the working class and the revolutionary movement, manifested while holding a responsible or secret (agent) position under the tsarist regime or with counter-revolutionary governments during the civil war, shall entail —
measures of social protection specified in Article 58-2 of this Code. (June 6, 1927, S.U. No. 49, Art. 330).

58-14. Counter-revolutionary sabotage, i.e., deliberate failure by anyone to perform certain duties or intentionally negligent performance thereof with the special purpose of weakening the power of the government and the activity of the state apparatus, shall entail —
deprivation of liberty for a term of not less than one year, with confiscation of all or part of property, with increase under especially aggravating circumstances, up to the supreme measure of social protection — execution by shooting with confiscation of property. (June 6, 1927, S.U. No. 49, Art. 330).

(Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR deals with all types of counter-revolutionary crimes provided for by the Soviet Criminal Code. Paragraphs 58-1 and 58-1v merit special attention.
Paragraph 58-1 establishes that, by virtue of the international solidarity of the interests of all working people, actions directed against any other state of working people, even if not part of the Soviet Union, are also considered counter-revolutionary. Consequently, any person taking part in a civil war in a foreign state against communists or acting against the communist party (regardless of which country’s citizen they are), as soon as they fall into the hands of the Soviet authorities, is brought to trial under Article 58 of the Criminal Code and sentenced to deprivation of liberty or to the death penalty.
58-1v establishes that adult members of the family of a “traitor to the motherland” who lived together with him and were dependent on him at the time the crime was committed, even if they did not know about the impending treason, are subject to deprivation of electoral rights and exile to remote regions of Siberia for five years, and if they assisted in any way or even knew about the impending or committed treason but failed to inform the authorities, they are punished by deprivation of liberty for a term of five to ten years, with confiscation of all property. This provision implements the principle of vengeance of the Soviet state against innocent relatives, family members of the one who violated this law.
Under Article 58 of the Criminal Code, millions of people have been sentenced in the USSR, comprising the majority of the “population” in the country’s camps. — B. Ya.).

Definition by the Criminal Code of other crimes against the order of administration45

60. Non-payment within the established time of taxes and fees for mandatory assessed insurance, despite the existence of the possibility to pay, in the event that enforcement measures in the form of property seizure or sale of seized property at auction have been applied at least once in the previous or current assessment year, shall entail —
    for the first time —
    a fine in the amount of the same payments;
    for the second time —
    corrective labor for a term of up to six months or a fine in double the amount of the same payments.
    The same actions committed by a group of persons by prior agreement, as well as committed, even without prior agreement, by persons belonging to households classified by special laws (on the basis of the Regulation on Agricultural Tax) as kulak households, or by persons subject to income tax under Schedule No. 3 —
    deprivation of liberty or corrective labor for a term of up to one year or a fine not exceeding ten times the amount of the payments due. (March 30, 1930, S.U. No. 16, Art. 192).
61. Refusal to perform duties, all-union tasks, or production of work having all-union significance, —
    a fine *), imposed by the appropriate authority up to five times the value of the assigned task, duty, or work:
    for the second time — deprivation of liberty or corrective labor for a term of up to one year;
    the same actions committed by kulak elements even for the first time, or by other persons under aggravating circumstances: conspiracy of a group of persons or offering active resistance to the authorities in the implementation of duties, tasks, or work, — deprivation of liberty for a term of up to two years with confiscation of all or part of property, with or without exile. (February 15, 1931, S.U. No. 9, Art. .102).

*) Fines for failure to fulfil compulsory deliveries, etc., are imposed by the court under a special procedure (Collection of Laws of the USSR, 1937, p. 120).

(As can be seen from the text, Article 60 provides for punishment for non-payment of taxes and fees within the established deadline despite having the ability to do so; Article 61 — for refusal to perform obligations, all-state assignments or production of work of all-state significance.
Under Articles 60 and 61, part three, so-called “kulak elements” were brought to responsibility, i.e., peasants assessed individually with agricultural taxes during the collectivization period or by way of so-called “firm assignments.” These peasants, in addition to the agricultural tax, were given assignments for loan subscription and other levies. Upon fulfillment of the first assignment they were given a second; upon fulfillment of the second they received a third. This continued until the peasants could no longer fulfill the assignments, after which they were brought to judicial responsibility for non-fulfillment. As a rule, the court sentenced them to various terms in concentration camps with confiscation of property.
Under Article 61, responsibility was mainly imposed on peasants of average means who did not want to join collective farms. They received firm assignments for the delivery of grain, potatoes, meat, eggs, milk, and even berries and mushrooms, as well as for timber procurement and hauling. All these assignments were so large that the peasants could not fulfill them. The scale of these assignments can be judged from such examples: for one cow a peasant received an assignment to deliver 3—4 or even 5 thousand liters of milk per year to the milk collection station, while the cow could produce at most fifteen hundred liters over the entire year. The village soviets that gave these assignments knew this, yet no certificates from veterinarians that the dairy cow gave two or three times less milk, or that the cow was sick or barren, served as justification either before the court, at the trial, or subsequently in cassation instances. The only way out for the peasant was to join the collective farm, because all who joined it were completely freed from the firm assignments received, whereas persons who refused to join were brought to court for non-payment of taxes.
Thus, in 1931–1933, millions of peasants who did not want to join collective farms were convicted by “people’s” courts as “malicious defaulters of state assignments.” As a rule, the accused were sentenced to deprivation of liberty for a term of two years with confiscation of property and, in most cases, with subsequent exile to remote areas of Siberia or the North of the European part of the Soviet Union. The convict’s property was taken over by the collective farms, and the family was thrown out into the street.
After 1933, when collectivization was completed, Articles 60 and 61 of the Criminal Code completely disappeared from judicial practice. — B. Ya.).

Law of 7 August 1932 on the Protection of Socialist Property46

Lately, complaints from workers and collective farmers have become more frequent about the theft (stealing) of goods on rail and water transport and the theft (stealing) of cooperative and collective-farm property by hooligan and generally anti-social elements. Equally, complaints have become more frequent about violence and threats by kulak elements against collective farmers who do not wish to leave the collective farms and who work honestly and selflessly to strengthen them.
The Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR consider that public property (state, collective-farm, cooperative) is the foundation of the Soviet order, it is sacred and inviolable, and people who encroach upon public property must be viewed as enemies of the people, wherefore a decisive struggle against plunderers of public property is the foremost duty of the organs of Soviet power.
Proceeding from these considerations and meeting the demands of workers and collective farmers, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR decree:
I.

1. To equate in their significance goods on rail and water transport to state property and to strengthen in every way the protection of these goods.
2. To apply as a measure of judicial repression for the theft of goods on rail and water transport the highest measure of social defense — execution by shooting with confiscation of all property, with substitution under extenuating circumstances by deprivation of liberty for a term not less than 10 years with confiscation of property.
3. Not to apply amnesty to criminals convicted in cases of theft of goods in transport.
   II.
4. To equate in their significance the property of collective farms and cooperatives (harvest in the fields, public reserves, livestock, cooperative warehouses and stores, etc.) to state property and to strengthen in every way the protection of this property from plunder.
5. To apply as a measure of judicial repression for the theft (stealing) of collective-farm and cooperative property the highest measure of social defense — execution by shooting with confiscation of all property, with substitution under extenuating circumstances by deprivation of liberty for a term not less than 10 years with confiscation of all property.
6. Not to apply amnesty to criminals convicted in cases of theft of collective-farm and cooperative property.
   III.
7. To wage a decisive struggle against those anti-social kulak-capitalist elements who employ violence and threats or preach the use of violence or threats toward collective farmers with the aim of forcing the latter to leave the collective farm, for the purpose of forcibly destroying the collective farm. To equate these crimes to state crimes.
8. To apply as a measure of judicial repression in cases concerning the protection of collective farms and collective farmers from violence and threats on the part of kulak and other anti-social elements deprivation of liberty from 5 to 10 years with imprisonment in a concentration camp.
9. Not to apply amnesty to criminals convicted in these cases.

Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR M. Kalinin
Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR V. Molotov (Skryabin)
Secretary of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR A. Enukidze
7 August 1932

(The above resolution is known as the “Law of August 7.” This law was a turning point in the history of the development of Soviet jurisprudence. Before its introduction, a so-called policy of “correction” was pursued; after it, the era of “punishment and intimidation” began. The concentration camps were filled with millions of prisoners, exiled for stealing a kilogram of bread, a liter of milk, gleaning ears of grain left on collective farm fields after the harvest, or picking a head of cabbage left in a vegetable garden. Factory workers were exiled to concentration camps for taking home from work scraps of boards, a few nails, a spool of thread, or any waste lying in the factory dump.
The minimum sentence under this law was 10 years. — B. Ya.)

Law on the Replacement of the Supreme Penalty (Execution by Shooting) with Deprivation of Freedom for up to 25 Years47

1. The criminal legislation in force in the USSR and the Union republics establishes deprivation of freedom for a term not exceeding 10 years as a criminal penalty for combating espionage, sabotage, attempts to organize explosions, train wrecks, arson causing human casualties, and other acts of diversion, and for the most serious types of state crimes — the supreme penalty (execution by shooting).
   With the aim of further combating such crimes and giving the court the opportunity, for these crimes, to choose not only the supreme penalty (execution by shooting), but also deprivation of freedom for longer terms, the Central Executive Committee of the USSR resolves:
2. To amend Art. 18 of the “Basic Principles of Criminal Legislation of the USSR and the Union Republics” by establishing deprivation of freedom for a term not exceeding 25 years as a criminal penalty.
3. To propose that the central and executive committees of the Union republics bring their legislation into conformity with this resolution.
   (Resolution of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR of October 2, 1937, Collected Laws of the USSR, No. 66, Art. 297).

(As follows from the text of the resolution, the motives for replacing execution with an increase of the term of punishment to 25 years were humane intentions. But under the existing conditions in the camps of the USSR, a 25-year imprisonment is, of course, the same death, only slow. — B. Ya.).

Decree on Bringing Minors to Criminal Liability48

$1. For the purpose of the swiftest elimination of crime among minors, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR resolve:

1. Minors, starting from the age of 12, convicted of committing theft, causing violence, bodily harm, mutilation, murder or attempted murder, shall be brought before a criminal court with the application of all criminal penalties.
2. Persons convicted of inciting or involving minors in participation in various crimes, as well as coercing minors to engage in speculation, prostitution, begging, etc., shall be punished by imprisonment for not less than five years. (Resolution of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR of April 7, 1935, Collected Laws of the USSR, No. 19, Art. 155).
   $2. Minors, starting from the age of twelve, convicted of committing acts (unscrewing rails, placing various objects on rails, etc.) that could cause train wrecks, shall be brought to judicial responsibility with the application of all criminal penalties. (Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of December 10, 1940, “Gazette of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR”, 1940, No. 52).

(The law of April 7, 1935 was the first law on bringing minors to judicial responsibility. If earlier minors were sent to concentration camps only by decisions of extrajudicial bodies, now, under the new law, the admission of minors to concentration camps acquired wide dimensions on “legal grounds.” — B. Ya.).

Decree on Bringing to Criminal Liability Students of Trade, Railway and FZO Schools for Violation of Discipline and Unauthorized Leaving of the School49

Students of trade, railway and FZO schools, for unauthorized leaving of the school, as well as for systematic and gross violation of school discipline resulting in expulsion from the school, are subject, by court sentence, to confinement in labor colonies for a term of up to one year.
(On the basis of this decree, minors were sent to concentration camps for violation of discipline and unauthorized leaving of schools, regardless of their age, provided only that they were students of trade and railway schools. According to the law on labor reserves, children from the age of 14 are mobilized into these schools, but it is known from practice that even 13-year-olds ended up in these schools. — B. Ya.).

Decree on Bringing to Criminal Liability Minors from the Age of 14 for All Crimes50

3. Establish that minors shall be brought to criminal liability starting from the age of 14 for crimes not covered by the Resolution of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR of April 7, 1935 “On Measures to Combat Crime Among Minors” and the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of December 10, 1940 “On the Criminal Liability of Minors for Actions That May Cause Train Wrecks.” (Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of May 31, 1941, “Gazette of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR”, 1941, No. 25).

(This decree effectively concluded the series of resolutions and decrees of the government on the criminal liability of minors for intentionally committed crimes. — B. Ya.).

Decree on Bringing to Criminal Liability Minors Not Only for Intentional Crimes, But Also for Negligent Ones51

4. From the submission of the Prosecutor of the USSR and the resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the USSR dated March 20, 1941. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR establishes that the Supreme Court of the USSR, when considering cases of crimes committed by minors as provided for by the decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR dated April 7, 1935, “On Measures to Combat Juvenile Delinquency,” proceeds from the fact that minors are subject to judicial liability only in cases where they committed a crime intentionally.
   The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR clarifies that such application by the Supreme Court of the USSR of the decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR dated April 7, 1935, “On Measures to Combat Juvenile Delinquency” does not correspond to the text of the law, introduces restrictions not provided for by law, and contradicts Article 6 of the Fundamental Principles of Criminal Legislation of the USSR and Union Republics, according to which criminal liability arises both in cases of intentional commission of a crime and in cases of negligence.
   The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR proposes that the Supreme Court of the USSR apply the decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR dated April 7, 1935, “On Measures to Combat Juvenile Delinquency” in strict accordance with the text of the law and with the current criminal legislation of the USSR.
   This Decree does not abolish the established procedure for serving sentences by minors in children’s corrective-labor colonies. (Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of July 7, 1941, “Vedomosti of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR,” No. 32, July 18, 1941).
5. See resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the USSR of February 17, 1948, No. 4/2/U “On the Application of Decrees of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of July 4, 1947, in relation to minors.”

(By this decree, minors who have committed a crime bear responsibility for them on an equal basis with adults. — B. Ya.).

Decree on the Transition to an 8-Hour Working Day, a 7-Day Week, and the Prohibition of Unauthorized Departure of Workers and Employees from Enterprises and Institutions52

Pursuant to the submission of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR decrees:

1. Increase the duration of the working day for workers and employees in all state, cooperative, and public enterprises and institutions:
   from seven to eight hours — at enterprises with a seven-hour working day,
   from six to seven hours — for jobs with a six-hour working day, with the exception of professions with hazardous working conditions, according to lists approved by the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR,
   from six to eight hours — for employees of institutions,
   from six to eight hours — for persons who have reached 16 years of age.
2. Convert work in all state, cooperative, and public enterprises and institutions from a six-day week to a seven-day week, counting the seventh day of the week — Sunday — as a day of rest.
3. Prohibit the unauthorized departure of workers and employees from state, cooperative, and public enterprises and institutions, as well as the unauthorized transfer from one enterprise to another or from one institution to another.
   Departure from an enterprise or institution, or transfer from one enterprise to another or from one institution to another, may be permitted only by the director of the enterprise or the head of the institution.
4. Establish that the director of an enterprise and the head of an institution have the right and obligation to grant permission for a worker or employee to leave the enterprise or institution in the following cases:
   a) when a worker, female worker, or employee, according to the conclusion of a medical-labor expert commission, cannot perform the previous work due to illness or disability, and the administration cannot provide him with other suitable work in the same enterprise or institution, or when a pensioner who has been granted an old-age pension wishes to leave work,
   b) when a worker, female worker, or employee must cease work in connection with his enrollment in a higher or secondary specialized educational institution.
   Maternity leave for female workers and female employees is preserved in accordance with current legislation.
5. Establish that workers and employees who have unauthorizedly left state, cooperative, and public enterprises or institutions shall be brought to court and, by sentence of a people’s court, shall be subject to imprisonment for a term of two to four months.
   Establish that for absenteeism without a valid reason, workers and employees of state, cooperative, and public enterprises and institutions shall be brought to court and, by sentence of a people’s court, shall be punished by corrective labor at the place of work for a term of up to six months, with a deduction from wages of up to 25%.
   In connection with this, abolish mandatory dismissal for absenteeism without valid reasons.
   Propose that people’s courts consider all cases referred to in this article within no more than five days, and execute the sentences in such cases immediately.
6. Establish that directors of enterprises and heads of institutions, for evading bringing to court persons guilty of unauthorized departure from an enterprise or institution, and persons guilty of absenteeism without valid reasons, shall be brought to judicial liability.
   Also establish that directors of enterprises and heads of institutions who hire persons evading the law who have unauthorizedly left enterprises and institutions shall be subject to judicial liability.
7. This Decree shall enter into force on June 27, 1940.

(This decree completely eliminated all the freedoms of workers and employees won as a result of the revolution. Workers and employees were deprived of the right to leave their place of work, and for unauthorized abandonment of work they were subjected to imprisonment by court sentence for a term of 2 to 4 months, while for absenteeism without valid reasons they were sentenced to corrective labor at their place of work for up to six months, with a deduction from wages of up to 25%.

In practice, the application of this law assumed such forms that any lateness to work of more than 20 minutes entailed being brought to trial; no reasons were considered valid; a late train, tram, or bus, illness of relatives, etc., were not taken into account; a mother whose nursing infant fell ill, failing to come to work, was brought to trial and went to prison together with her child. As an example, one can cite the fact that in Leningrad, in the women’s prison located at 9 Arsenalnaya Street, in the autumn of 1940 about a thousand women with nursing infants were imprisoned. Students who had taken jobs during vacations and left them in September without the permission of the directors of the enterprises and institutions where they had worked during the vacations, because they needed to begin classes at their educational institutions, were brought to trial and sentenced to imprisonment for unauthorized departure from work.

In total, several million people were convicted under this decree throughout the USSR. This law remains in force today, but in practice it is almost never applied. — B. Ya.).

Decree on the consideration by courts of cases of absenteeism and unauthorized departure without people’s assessors53

To establish that cases of absenteeism without valid reasons and of unauthorized departure from enterprises and institutions shall be considered by people’s judges alone, without the participation of people’s assessors. Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR M. Kalinin. Secretary of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR A. Gorkin. Moscow, the Kremlin, 10 August 1940.

(The above decree effectively turned the judicial process in cases of unauthorized departure and lateness from a judicial act into an administrative one, resolved solely by a state official. — B. Ya.).

Decree on criminal liability for theft of state and public property54

For the purpose of establishing unity of legislation on criminal liability for theft of state and public property and intensifying the fight against these crimes, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR resolves:

1. Theft, embezzlement, misappropriation, or other stealing of state property — shall be punished by confinement in a corrective labor camp for a term of seven to ten years with or without confiscation of property.
2. Theft of state property committed repeatedly, or likewise committed by an organized group (gang) or on a large scale — shall be punished by confinement in a corrective labor camp for a term of ten to twenty-five years with confiscation of property.
3. Theft, embezzlement, misappropriation, or other stealing of collective farm, cooperative, or other public property — shall be punished by confinement in a corrective labor camp for a term of five to eight years with or without confiscation of property.
4. Theft of collective farm, cooperative, or other public property committed repeatedly, or likewise committed by an organized group (gang) or on a large scale — shall be punished by confinement in a corrective labor camp for a term of eight to twenty years with confiscation of property.
5. Failure to report to the authorities a reliably known intended or committed theft of state or public property, provided for in Articles 2 and 4 of this Decree — shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term of two to three years or exile for a term of five to seven years.

(Following the issuance of this Decree, the “Law of 7 August 1932” and the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR “On criminal liability for petty thefts at work and hooliganism,” in its first part, ceased to have effect. The punishments provided by them were absorbed by the norms of the above Decree. In addition, the following articles ceased to be applied: 116, 162, 165, 166, 166‑A, 167 and part two of Article 169 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR and the corresponding articles of the criminal codes of other Union republics of the Soviet Union, since the crimes provided for by them came to be punished more severely under the new Decree. As an example, one can point out that whereas previously for petty theft at work, according to the note to point “E” of Article 162 of the Criminal Code, only a fine was imposed, under the Decree of 4 June 1947, for the same offence confinement in a corrective labor camp for a term of seven to ten years was prescribed. — B. Ya.).

Decree on the abolition of the death penalty55

The historic victory of the Soviet people over the enemy demonstrated not only
the increased might of the Soviet state, but above all the exceptional
devotion to the Soviet motherland and the Soviet Government on the part of the entire population
of the Soviet Union.
At the same time, the international situation in the period since the
capitulation of Germany and Japan shows that the cause of peace can be considered
secure for a long time, despite the attempts of aggressive elements
to provoke war.
Taking these circumstances into account and meeting the wishes of the trade
unions of workers and employees and other authoritative organizations, expressing
the opinion of broad public circles, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR
considers that the application of the death penalty is no longer necessitated in
peacetime conditions.
The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR decrees:

1. To abolish in peacetime the death penalty, established for
   crimes by the laws in force in the USSR.
2. For crimes punishable by death under existing laws,
   to apply in peacetime imprisonment in correctional labor camps for a term
   of 25 years.
3. For death sentences not carried out prior to
   the issuance of this Decree, the death penalty shall be replaced, by ruling of
   a higher court, with the punishment provided for in Article 2 of this
   Decree.

Decree on the Application of the Death Penalty to Traitors to the Motherland, Spies, and Subversive Saboteurs56

In view of statements received from national republics, from trade unions,
peasant organizations, and also from cultural figures on the need
to amend the Decree on the abolition of the death penalty so that this Decree does not
extend to traitors to the motherland, spies, and subversive saboteurs,
the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR decrees:

1. By way of exception to the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of May 26,
   1947, on the abolition of the death penalty, to permit the application to traitors to the motherland,
   spies, and subversive saboteurs of the death penalty as the supreme measure of punishment.
2. This Decree shall enter into force from the day of its publication.

Decree on the Introduction of the Death Penalty for Premeditated Murder57

In the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR

Taking into account petitions from citizens and public organizations for the application of
the death penalty to murderers and in order to strengthen the protection of citizens’ lives, the Presidium
of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR extended the effect of the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme
Soviet of the USSR of January 12, 1950, “On the Application of the Death Penalty to Traitors to
the Motherland, Spies, and Subversive Saboteurs” to persons who have committed premeditated
murder under aggravating circumstances.

36 Collection of Decrees, 1919, Moscow, 1920, p. 80 (the book
is in the library of the Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of the USSR, in
Munich).

37 Ibid., p. 128.

38 Ibid., p. 301.

39 Criminal Code of the RSFSR, Gosyurizdat, Moscow, 1952, p. 4.

40 Ibid., pp. 81–82.

41 Fundamental Principles of Criminal Legislation of the USSR and Union
Republics, Gosizdat, 1927, Moscow–Leningrad, p. 131.

42 Criminal Code of the RSFSR, Gosyurizdat, Moscow, 1952, p. 6.

43 Ibid., p. 7.

44 Ibid., p. 18 ff.

45 Ibid., p. 26 ff.

46 Decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of August 1932, see “Pravda” of August 8,
1932.

47 Criminal Code of the RSFSR, Gosyurizdat, Moscow, 1952, p. 84.

48 Ibid., p. 82.

49 Ibid., 1950 ed., p. 164.

50 Ibid., 1952 ed., p. 83.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid., 1950 ed., p. 157.

53 “Pravda”, August 11, 1940.

54 Criminal Code of the RSFSR, Gosyurizdat, Moscow, 1952, p. 71.

55 Ibid., p. 70.

56 Ibid., pp. 70–71.

57 “Pravda”, May 7, 1954.

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Ratmirov I. M. Gorky on the White Sea Canal, “Voice of the People,” No. 33 (37), 1951.

Ratmirov I. 10 Years in a Soviet Concentration Camp, “Volya,” No. 2, 1952, pp. 26–28.

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Ratmirov I. The 12th Column of Gorshorlag, “Voice

Impressions of a Frenchman in Moscow and Leningrad, Novoye Russkoye Slovo, No. 15 (360), New York, 1954.

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List of Foreign Literature Used

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