Today is a sad anniversary. In 1919, the creation of a system of concentration camps began in Russia.
Below are some facts about it.
Tens of millions of people were in concentration camps
As of November 1921, 73,194 prisoners were kept in camps under the jurisdiction of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) of the RSFSR (i.e., the Ministry of Internal Affairs) and about 50,000 more were held in places of detention subordinate to the organs of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission.
According to the 1939 census, there were 1,682,000 people in the camps and colonies of the Soviet Union, 350,500 in prisons and on stages, and 990,500 in special settlements after deportations and dispossession. The total was 3,230,000. Human. The maximum number of GULAG reached in 1950 - 2.6 million prisoners of camps and colonies, 220 thousand prisoners of prisons and those who were on stages, 2.7 million special settlers (special settlers are people deprived of property and forcibly deported from their native places to specially created settlements in remote regions, with a difficult climate and living conditions; it was forbidden to leave the special settlement; in the mid-1930s, in special settlements, the annual mortality rate was 20-30%, children and the elderly were the first to die) - a total of more than 5.5 million. Human. Mathematical calculations and a study of the statistics of the movement of prisoners, estimates of the loss as a result of mass mortality and executions, show that in just 25 years, from 1930 to 1956, about 18 million people passed through the Gulag, of which about 1.8 million died.
Experience Solovki - " rational use" material assets, was successfully repeated by the SS in the Auschwitz concentration camp 20 years later
You can read about the order in the Katsap concentration camps from A. Klinger (Solovki penal servitude. Notes of a fugitive. Book. "Archive of Russian revolutions". Publishing house of G.V. Gessen. XIX. Berlin. 1928):
"things, clothes, and linen taken from ... shot people are given out. Such uniforms were brought to Solovki in a fairly large amount earlier from Arkhangelsk, and now from Moscow; usually it is heavily worn and covered in blood, since all the best Chekists are removed from the bodies of their victims immediately after the execution, and the worst and bloodstained GPU sends to concentration camps.But even uniforms with traces of blood are very difficult to obtain, because the demand for it is gradually growing - with an increase in the number of prisoners (there are now more than 7 thousand of them in Solovki) and as their clothes and shoes wear out, there are more and more naked and barefoot people in the camp."
The experience of Solovki - the "rational use" of material values, was successfully repeated by the SS in the Auschwitz concentration camp 20 years later. Its authors, or rather, "plagiarists", were hanged by the decision of the international tremonial in Nuremberg as war criminals. Solovetsky "pioneers" are buried on Red Square in Moscow in a mausoleum or near the Kremlin wall. http://www.solovki.ca/gulag_solovki/20_02.php
See also
- The camps, which later became concentration camps, first appeared on the territory of present-day Russia in 1918-1923. The term "concentration camp", the very phrase "concentration camps" appeared in documents signed by Vladimir Lenin.
Solovki is a terrible, shameful page in history Soviet Union. Broken destinies, crippled souls. More than a million tortured people. Now it is customary to hush up the shameful moments of the country's past. But HistoryTime thinks otherwise, and therefore today we will talk about the most terrible prison in the USSR.
In the beginning there was an ELEPHANT. Do not rush to smirk at such a funny abbreviation. Many citizens of the Soviet Union were afraid of this word, like fire. And how not to be afraid, if it denoted a place from which they did not return? SLON - Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp. Among the people - Solovki.
It was founded back in tsarist times - especially for the very first revolutionaries, members of the socialist parties. By the time they were imprisoned in the SLON, they were already hardened campers, but the Solovki amazed even them. Absolutely monstrous conditions, sophisticated mockery of the psyche and body ...
There were also criminals. But the most striking thing was that absolutely all the clergy were driven into this camp, which, after the ban on religion, continued to conduct services, give communion and confess the parish.
It is an unbearable torment to walk three of us through the swamp, holding in our hands a bow of a railroad bed weighing one hundred and sixty kilograms. By ten o'clock the three old men were completely exhausted. One of them, Kolokoltsov ... lay down on the ground with the words: “Better kill me! I can't do it anymore!..” Kolokoltsov died of a heart attack at about four o'clock in the morning.
In the second half of the 1930s, when the repressions reached their peak, many scientists, cultural figures, workers of the Comintern who were objectionable to the authorities were sent to Solovki ...
To understand what Solovki is, one can recall the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The Soviet camps, unfortunately, can be called their predecessors. Yes, there is clearly nothing to be proud of.
In desperation, many women kill their children and throw them into the forest or into the latrines, and then commit suicide themselves. "Mamoks" who kill their children are sent by the IDF to the women's punishment cell on the Hare Islands, five kilometers from Bolshoi Solovetsky Island.
Solovki became an "experimental" platform, where they developed the most sophisticated methods of punishment and interrogation, later used in the Gulag. Psychological pressure, physical torture, demonstrative executions... More than a million Soviet citizens passed through the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp from 1920 to 1939. Over a million! The vast majority, as they say, guilty without guilt, suffered from an unfair trial. Only a few hundred returned home. A few hundred out of a million...
People were shot during the day. Well, couldn't it be quiet at night? Why is it quiet? And then the bullet goes to waste. In daytime density, the bullet has educational value. She strikes like a dozen at a time.
They shot in another way - right at the Onufrievsky cemetery, behind the zhenbarak (the former hospice for pilgrims) - and that road past the zhenbarak was called that firing squad. One could see how, in winter, a man was led through the snow there barefoot in only his underwear (this is not for torture! This is so that shoes and uniforms do not disappear!) With hands tied with wire behind his back - and the convict proudly, straightly holds on with his lips alone, without help hands, smokes the last cigarette in his life.
In 1937, SLON was renamed STON - Solovetsky prison special purpose. And it really was a groan - a groan of the people suffering because of totalitarianism in their state.
In 1939, the history of STON was disbanded. It was as if Soviet citizens were given a breath of fresh air ... but it was immediately blocked. Chronicle began a new shameful page Soviet history and she became...
To be continued…
Reading time: 2 min
After reading the work of A. Solzhenitsyn "The Gulag Archipelago" I wanted to raise the topic of concentration camps in the USSR. The concept of "concentration camp" first appeared not in Germany, as many believe, but in South Africa (1899) in the form of brutal violence for the purpose of humiliation. But the first concentration camps government agency isolation appeared in the USSR in 1918 on the orders of Trotsky, even before the well-known Red Terror and 20 years before the Second World War. Concentration camps were intended for kulaks, clergy, White Guards and other "doubtful" ones.
Where were concentration camps built?
Places of deprivation of liberty were often organized in former monasteries. From a place of worship, from a hearth of faith in the Almighty - to places of violence and often undeserved. Think, do you know the fate of your ancestors well? Many of them ended up in camps for a handful of wheat in their pockets, for not going to work (for example, due to illness), for an extra word. Let's go briefly through each of the concentration camps in the USSR.
SLON (Solovki Special Purpose Camp)
The Solovetsky Islands have long been considered pure, untouched by human passions, which is why the famous Solovetsky Monastery (1429) was erected here, which in Soviet times was retrained into a concentration camp.
Pay attention to the book by Yu. A. Brodsky "Solovki. Twenty Years of Special Purpose" - this is a significant work (photographs, documents, letters) about the camp. The material about Sekirnaya Gora is especially interesting. There is an old legend that in the 15th century, on this bark, two angels beat a woman with rods, as she could cause desire among the monks. To celebrate this story, a chapel and a lighthouse were erected on the mountain. At the time of the concentration camp, there was an insulator with a bad reputation. Prisoners were sent to it to work out fines: they had to sit and sleep on wooden poles, and every day the convict was expected to be physically punished (from the words of I. Kurilko, an employee of the SLON).
The penitentiaries were forced to fall asleep dead from typhus and scurvy, the prisoners were dressed in bags, naturally, they were entitled to a terrible little food, therefore they differed from the rest of the prisoners in their thinness, unhealthy complexion. It was said that rarely anyone managed to return alive after the isolation ward. Ivan Zaitsev succeeded and this is what he says:
“We were forced to undress, leaving only our shirt and underpants on. Lagstarosta knocked on the front door with a bolt. An iron bolt creaked inside and a huge heavy door opened. To the right and to the left along the walls, the prisoners sat silently in two rows on bare wooden bunks. Tightly, one to one. The first row, lowering their legs down, and the second behind, bending their legs under themselves. All barefoot, half-naked, with only rags on their bodies, some are already like skeletons. They looked in our direction with gloomy tired eyes, which reflected deep sadness and sincere pity for us, newcomers. Everything that could remind us that we were in the temple was destroyed. The paintings were badly and roughly whitewashed. The side altars have been turned into punishment cells, where beatings and straitjackets are put on. but with a board for legs laid on top. In the morning and in the evening - checking with the usual dog barking "Hello!". Sometimes, for a sluggish calculation, a Red Army boy makes you repeat this greeting for half an hour or an hour. Food, and very scarce, is given out once a day - at noon. And so not a week or two, but for months, up to a year.
Soviet citizens could only guess about what happened on Solovki. So, to inspect the form in which the prisoners are kept in the SLON, the famous Soviet writer M. Gorky was invited.
“I cannot fail to note the vile role played in the history of the death camps by Maxim Gorky, who visited Solovki in 1929. After looking around, he saw an idyllic picture of the paradise life of prisoners and came to emotion, morally justifying the extermination of millions of people in the camps. Public opinion world was deceived by him in the most shameless way. Political prisoners remained outside the writer's field. He was quite satisfied with the gingerbread offered to him. Gorky turned out to be the most ordinary inhabitant and did not become either Voltaire, or Zola, or Chekhov, or even Fyodor Petrovich Haaz ... "N. Zhilov
Since 1937, the camp has ceased to exist, and until now the barracks are being destroyed, everything that can point to scary story THE USSR. According to the St. Petersburg Research Center, in the same year, the remaining prisoners (1111 people) were executed as unnecessary. Hundreds of hectares of forest were cut down by the forces of those sentenced to imprisonment in SLON, tons of fish and seaweed were caught, the prisoners themselves earned their meager food, and also performed meaningless work for the amusement of the camp staff (for example, the order "Draw water from the hole until it is dry ").
Until now, a huge staircase has been preserved from the mountain, along which prisoners were thrown off, reaching the ground, a person turned into a bloodied something (rarely anyone survived after such a punishment). The entire territory of the camp is covered with barrows...
Volgolag - about the prisoners who built the Rybinsk reservoir
If there is a lot of information about Solovki, then little is known about Volgolag, but the numbers of the dead are terrifying. The formation of the camp as a division of Dmitrovlag dates back to 1935. In 1937, there were more than 19 thousand prisoners in the camp, in wartime the number of convicts reaches 85 thousand (15 thousand of them were convicted under Article 58). During the five years of construction of the reservoir and hydroelectric power station, 150 thousand people died (statistics from the director of the Museum of the Mologa Region).
Every morning, prisoners went to work in a detachment, followed by a cart with tools. According to eyewitnesses, by the evening these carts were returning strewn with the dead. People were buried shallowly, after the rain, arms and legs stuck out from under the ground - local residents recall.
Why did prisoners die in such numbers? Volgolag was located in the territory of constant winds, every second prisoner suffered from pulmonary diseases, consumptive rumble was constantly spread. I had to work in difficult conditions (waking up at 5 in the morning, working waist-deep in ice water, and a terrible famine began in 1942). An employee of the camp recalls how they brought grease to lubricate the mechanisms, so the prisoners licked the barrel clean.
Kotlaslag (1930–1953)
The camp was located in the remote village of Ardashi. All the information presented in this article is the memories of local residents and the prisoners themselves. On the territory there were three men's barracks, one - women's. Basically, there were convicts under Article 58 here. Prisoners grew crops for their own food and convicts from other camps, and also worked on logging. Food was still sorely lacking, it remained to lure the sparrows into makeshift traps. There was a case (and maybe more than one) when the prisoners ate the dog of the head of the camp. Locals also note that prisoners regularly stole sheep under the supervision of escorts.
Local residents say that in these times they also lived hard, but they still tried to help the prisoners in some way: they gave bread and vegetables. Various diseases raged in the camp, especially consumption. They died often, were buried without coffins, in winter they were simply buried in the snow. A local resident tells how, as a child, he skied, rode down a mountain, stumbled, fell, broke his lip. When I realized what I fell on, I became scared, it was a dead man.