How many German concentration camps were there in the USSR? Mortality in the gulag. Guarded detention camp for women

More than 4 million people were exterminated by the Nazis in the crematoria and bonfires of the Auschwitz camp. This is evidenced by documents from the archives of the Russian FSB, published in connection with the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the camp by the Red Army.

As noted by Vladimir Makarov, a researcher at the Central Archives of the FSB of Russia, Candidate of Philosophy, Associate Professor, not all documents regarding Auschwitz were destroyed by the Nazis. In addition, the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry, which reached conclusions about the death of more than 4 million people at Auschwitz, relied on the testimony of witnesses, eyewitnesses and executioners.

He said, citing archival materials, that since 1940, 10 trainloads of prisoners arrived in Auschwitz every day from the occupied territories. Each train had 40-50 cars. There were from 50 to 100 people in each carriage, and 70% of new arrivals were destroyed immediately.

Only a small part of the healthiest prisoners remained in the camp as temporary labor in military factories and as experimental subjects for various kinds of medical experiments. They were destroyed later.

On the territory of Auschwitz, several pits measuring 60 by 40 meters and three meters deep were dug, in which corpses were also constantly burned. These fires burned constantly, notes Vladimir Makarov. Also in the FSB archives there are testimonies of those who designed the new crematoria.

As stated in the inspection report of the Auschwitz concentration camp by an expert technical commission from February 14 to March 8, 1945: in the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Germans organized a huge plant for the mass extermination of people, mainly by killing with the poisonous substance “Cyclone” and subsequent burning in crematoria or at the stake . Trains with people destined for extermination arrived at Auschwitz from all the countries that were occupied by the Germans - from France, Belgium, Holland, Yugoslavia, Poland, Greece and others.

As a result of a detailed study of drawings and documentation discovered in the Auschwitz concentration camp, a detailed study of the remains of blown up crematoria and gas chambers, on the basis of investigative materials and testimony from witnesses from among prisoners who worked in gas chambers and in crematoria, the commission found that only in crematoria during their existence, the Germans could destroy: 216 thousand people in 24 months in crematorium No. 1, 1 million 710 thousand people over 19 months in crematorium No. 2, 1 million 618 thousand people in crematorium No. 3 in 18 months of its operation, 765 thousand people during 17 months of operation of the furnaces of crematorium No. 4, and another 810 people were burned in 18 months in crematorium No. 5.

Based on investigative data, the commission came to the conclusion that “during the existence of the camp - from 1940 to January 1945 - there were five crematoria with 52 retorts with a capacity of about 270,000 corpses per month.” Each crematorium had its own gas chamber, where people of various nationalities were poisoned with the poisonous Cyclone gas.

The productivity of the gas chambers significantly exceeded the throughput of the furnaces and provided the maximum load when operating crematoria. In addition, there were two separate gas chambers, in which the Germans burned corpses on grand bonfires. Both of these gas chambers had a capacity of at least 150 thousand people per month.

The commission concluded that at least 4 million people were exterminated at Auschwitz; moreover, it is likely that the actual number of people who died here at the hands of German executioners is much higher.

“In the death camp, at least six million people were destroyed during its existence, including children, women, old men and women,” follows from the interrogation report of a mason worker at the Industry company for the construction of premises in the Auschwitz concentration camp, Pole Anton Honkisch, 1912 year of birth, native of the village of Kozy (Poland).

On January 26, 2007, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution No. 61/255, “Holocaust Denial,” condemning Holocaust denial as historical fact, and proclaimed it an international day of remembrance for victims of the Holocaust, Interfax recalls.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz, where it was previously thought that between 1.5 and 2.2 million people had died. However, new data released by the Russian FSB suggests that the number of victims of Auschwitz was much higher.

In January 2010, the forged camp gate sign was returned to the camp. with a cynical inscription (Work sets you free) has been located above the main gate leading to the Polish town of Auschwitz since 1940.There were signs with this slogan in many Nazi concentration camps, but the most famous is in Auschwitz. These letters were forged in a concentration camp forge. The author of the plate is Jan Livac, better known as "No. 1010". According to historians, as a sign of protest, the prisoners deliberately forged the slogan incorrectly: the letter "B" was turned upside down. After the war, the tablet became one of the main exhibits of the museum and its main symbol.

Vile parallels
If we compare the mortality rate in Nazi concentration camps with the victims of the Soviet penitentiary system of that time, in order to assess the reliability of the thesis about the crimes of Nazism, which supposedly have no analogues in world history, we get the following picture (figures are given in rounded figures): in 1938, 109 people died in the USSR in prison thousand prisoners (5.35% of the average staff), in 1940 - 41 thousand (2.72%), in 1941 - 115 thousand (6.1%), in 1942 - 353 thousand (24.9%) ), in 1943 – 268 thousand (22.4%), in 1944 – 114 thousand (9.2%). We should also not forget that during the war, many prisoners were transferred to the ranks of the Red Army (over a million people), a significant part of them died.
The Gulag guards numbered about 100-150 thousand people at different stages. According to data provided by the researcher of political repressions in the USSR V.N. Zemskov, in 1940 there was one guard for every 16 prisoners, in 1954 there was one for every 9. If we remember that the concentration camp guards did not exceed 30 thousand people, we can assume that the number of their prisoners was greatly overestimated during the trial.
At the same time, in the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp for the entire period of its existence (1937-1945), according to data from the Bolshoi Soviet encyclopedia, about 56 thousand prisoners out of 239 thousand died (that is, less than 25%).
It also makes sense to compare the numbers of military personnel who died in captivity. The current opinion, sometimes appearing in scientific publications, boils down to a statement of incredible mortality in German prisoner-of-war camps and very moderate mortality in Allied camps. However, official statistical research give a more complex picture:
“It is reliably known that 1,836 thousand people. returned from captivity after the end of the war, 939.7 thousand military personnel from among those previously missing and in captivity were called up a second time in the territory liberated from occupation, and 637 thousand, according to German data, died in fascist captivity. Of the remaining 1110.3 thousand people, according to our data, more than half are also dead (killed) in captivity. Thus, a total of 4,059 thousand Soviet military personnel were in captivity...”
At the same time, out of 3,777 thousand people. Over 545 thousand people died in captivity of the Nazis and their allies captured on the Soviet-German front. It should be borne in mind that almost 2 million of them were captured between January 1 and May 8, 1945, which was the reason for the relatively low mortality rate. There is evidence that of the Wehrmacht servicemen who were captured by the Soviets during the most difficult war years - 1942-1943 - less than 10% returned to their homeland. In the work of Volgograd researcher S.G. Sidorov there are detailed descriptions of the conditions of detention:
“A particularly difficult situation with food for prisoners of war developed during the counter-offensive. Soviet troops near Stalingrad and the liquidation of the boiler in the winter of 1942/1943. By February 22, 1943, over 90,000 prisoners of war were concentrated in Stalingrad alone, who were in extremely difficult conditions. There was not only a lack of suitable premises for their maintenance, but also fuel, seasonal uniforms, and transport. The situation was further aggravated by the fact that many of those captured were very exhausted during the time they were surrounded, up to 45–50% of them needed immediate hospitalization. Under these conditions, poorly organized, insufficient food and cold contributed to the increase in mortality among prisoners of war. Of the 91,545 prisoners of war concentrated in the Beketovsky camp, 108, as of June 10, 1943, 27,078 people died in the camp and special hospitals...” .
The death rate in the Gulag during this period, and its decline from 1944 onwards, also points to reasons for the high death rate in German camps other than the deliberate intent to exterminate as many prisoners as possible, which was imputed to the Nazis in the interpretation of the charges supported by the court.

We invariably associate the word “concentration camp” with Nazi “extermination factories.” Their names are known throughout the world: Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka... However, it all began much earlier, with the “reforging factories” of people that arose in Soviet Russia during the era of “war communism.”

Forced labor concentration camps owe their appearance in the USSR to the policy of “Red Terror”. The first Soviet concentration camps arose at the beginning civil war(from the summer of 1918), and those who escaped the fate of being shot as a hostage, or those whom the proletarian government offered to exchange for their loyal supporters, ended up there. In 1917, the function of suppression for the Soviet state was the main one, and in conditions of the civil war, of course, the leading one. It was explained not only by the resistance of the overthrown classes, but was also the main “stimulus” to work under the conditions of “war communism.” Already in the decree of the Council of People's Commissars of March 14, 1919 “On workers' disciplinary comradely courts”, punishments of up to 6 months in a forced labor camp were provided for violators of labor discipline and persons who did not comply with production standards without good reason.

At first, the Soviet authorities believed that the camps were a temporary necessity. She openly called them concentration camps or forced labor camps. They were temporarily located near cities, often in monasteries, from where their inhabitants were expelled. The idea of ​​​​creating camps was implemented in the decree of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of April 11, 1919 “On forced labor camps,” which for the first time legislated the existence of concentration camps. “In all provincial cities, forced labor camps should be opened, designed for no less than 300 people each...” This spring day can rightfully be considered the birthday of the Gulag.

According to the instructions, the following were to be placed in concentration camps: parasites, sharpers, fortune tellers, prostitutes, cocaine addicts, deserters, counter-revolutionaries, spies, speculators, hostages, prisoners of war, active White Guards. However, the main contingent that inhabited the first small islands of the future huge archipelago were not the listed categories of people. The majority of the camp residents were workers, “petty” intelligentsia, urban inhabitants, and the overwhelming majority - the peasantry. Having looked through the yellowed pages of the magazine “Power of the Soviets” (organ of the OGPU of the RSFSR) for April-June 1922, we find the article “Experience in statistical processing of some data on prisoners in concentration camps.”

The numbers are dispassionate; it is not for nothing that on the cover of one statistical collection, published even before the October Revolution, it was written: “The numbers do not know the parties, but all parties must know the numbers.” The most numerous crimes committed by prisoners were: counter-revolution (or, as these crimes were classified until mid-1922, “crimes against Soviet power") - 16%, desertion - 15%, theft - 14%, speculation - 8%.

The largest percentage of those convicted in concentration camps fell on the bodies of the Cheka - 43%, the people's court - 16%, provincial tribunals - 12%, revolutionary tribunals - 12% and other bodies - 17%. Approximately the same picture was observed in the Siberian camps. For example, prisoners of the Mariinsky concentration camp served sentences for counter-revolution (56%), criminal offenses (23%), failure to comply with allocation (4.4%), anti-Soviet agitation (8%), labor desertion (4%), malfeasance (4.5%). ), speculation (0.1%).

The first political concentration camps that arose on the basis of F. Dzerzhinsky’s proposal were the Northern Special Purpose Camps (SLON), which later became known as the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camps. In 1922, the government transferred the Solovetsky Islands, along with the monastery, to the GPU for the placement of prisoners from concentration camps in Kholmogory and Pertaminsk. SLON operated from 1923 to 1939. In the decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR dated March 10, 1925 (on the transfer of political prisoners to political isolation wards on the mainland), the Solovetsky camps were called “Solovetsky concentration camps of the OGPU.”

The Solovetsky camps became famous for the wildest arbitrariness of the local authorities, both among prisoners and OGPU workers. Normal phenomena were: beating, sometimes to death, often without cause; starvation and cold; individual and group rape of imprisoned women and girls; “exposing them to mosquitoes” in the summer, and in winter - dousing with water in the open air and beating to death captured fugitives and displaying the corpses for several days at the gates of the camp as a warning to their comrades.

A number of Solovetsky’s “achievements” became firmly entrenched in the repressive system of a totalitarian state: the definition of a political prisoner below a repeat offender, the provision of forced labor by extending sentences, after the expiration of the term, political prisoners and some repeat offenders were not released, but were sent into exile.

The first object of the future Gulag was the administration of the northern special-purpose camps of the OGPU. The official date of birth is August 5, 1929, place of birth is the city of Solvychegodsk. The northern group included 5 camps with total number There are 33,511 prisoners, a third of them have sentences that have not even entered into legal force. The tasks before the camps were the following: the development of the natural resources of the northern region by prisoners (coal mining in the Pechora and Vorkuta river basin, oil in Ukhta), the construction of railways and dirt roads, the development of forests. The created department was headed by August Chiiron.

In 1930, 6 directorates of forced labor camps (ITL) of the OGPU of the USSR were formed: the North Caucasus, the White Sea region and Karelia, Vyshny Volochok, Siberia, the Far East and Kazakhstan. There were 166 thousand people in the correctional labor camps of five directorates (excluding Kazakhstan).

Camps and labor colonies began to play an increasingly prominent role in the country's economy. The labor of prisoners began to be used in the implementation of large-scale economic projects, and economic authorities planned their activities taking into account the possibility of using their labor force.

For example, at a meeting in the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR on June 18, 1930, OGPU representative Tolmachev mentioned a system of applications for the labor resources of prisoners required to implement certain economic projects.

If in the USSR in 1928 about 1.5 million people were convicted of various crimes, then in 1930 - more than 2.2 million. The share of those sentenced to imprisonment for up to 1 year decreased from 30.2% to 3.5%, and those sentenced to forced labor increased from 15.3% to 50.8%. As of May 1, 1930, the system of correctional labor colonies included 57 colonies (six months ago there were 27), including 12 agricultural, 19 logging, 26 industrial.

A significant contingent of cheap labor engaged in forced labor was formed on the basis of dispossession of the rural population. Since February 1931, a new wave of dispossession swept across the country. To guide and control its implementation, on March 11, 1931, another special commission was formed, headed by Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR A. A. Andreev. This commission began to deal not only with dispossession, but also with the rational placement and use of labor of special settlers.

Due to the sharp increase in the number of convicts, the organization of the expulsion and placement of the contingent of special settlers arriving from the center of the country was entrusted to the organs of the OGPU-NKVD. In connection with the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” in 1932, the OGPU of the USSR developed a regulation “On the management of kulak villages” and approved the corresponding instructions.

Repressive actions continued after the completion of the main collectivization. On April 20, 1933, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR adopted a resolution “On the organization of labor settlements.” Who needed to be evicted in 1933, when the kulaks had already been liquidated? It was supposed to resettle city residents who refused due to passportization in 1932–1933. leave from major cities, kulaks who fled from villages, as well as those expelled in 1933 in order to “clean up” state borders, sentenced by the OGPU authorities and courts for a term of 3 to 5 years inclusive. To accommodate the arriving contingent, a huge network of special commandant’s offices was deployed throughout the eastern and northern regions of the country.

Camp complexes (territorial administrations) were scattered throughout the country and not only in the wilderness, but also in the capitals of the republics. By the end of the 1930s. there were more than 100 of them. Each one contained from several thousand to a million or more prisoners. Often, in remote areas of the country, the number of prisoners in the camp complex significantly exceeded the local free population. And the budget of another camp complex in many ways exceeded the budget of the region, region or several regions on whose territory it was located (the camp complex included from 3 - VladimirLAG, to 45 - SibLAG - camps).

The territory of the USSR was conditionally divided into 8 zones of deployment of territorial departments with subordinate forced labor camps, prisons, stages, and transit points.

To date, over 2,000 GULAG facilities (camps, prisons, commandant's offices) have been identified. The Gulag included the following types of camps: forced labor, correctional labor, special purpose, convict, special, camp research institutes. In addition, the “re-education system” included correctional labor, educational labor and children’s colonies.

The entire country was covered with a dense network of prisons and pre-trial detention centers of the NKVD. As a rule, they were stationed in all regional centers and capitals of the union and autonomous republics. There were over a dozen prisons and special purpose detention centers in Moscow, Leningrad and Minsk. In the country as a whole, there were at least 800 of these punitive institutions.

Transportation of prisoners was carried out in freight cars, which were equipped with solid two-tier bunks. Under the very ceiling there are two thickly barred windows. A narrow hole was cut in the floor - a bucket. The window was covered with iron so that prisoners could not widen it and throw themselves onto the path, and to prevent this, special iron pins were reinforced under the floor. The carriages had no lighting or washbasins. The carriage was designed for 46 people, but usually 60 people or more were pushed into it. During mass actions, trains of up to 20 wagons containing more than a thousand prisoners were formed; they followed the indicated routes outside the schedule, and the route from the central regions of the USSR to Far East lasted up to two months. Throughout the journey, prisoners were not allowed out of the carriages. Food was given out, as a rule, once a day or less often in dry rations, although according to the rules hot food was provided. Especially often, echelons left for the East after the “liberation campaign” of Red Army units in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus.

The “counter-revolutionaries” were met in numerous Gulag camps. As a rule, they were of the same type. An area fenced with three rows of barbed wire. The first row is about a meter high. Basic, middle row, - 3–4 m high. There were control strips between the rows of barbed wire, and four towers in the corners. In the center there was a medical unit and a punishment cell, surrounded by a palisade. The isolation ward was a capital room, partitioned into single and common cells. There were barracks for prisoners around. In winter, and even in the conditions of the Urals and Siberia, the barracks were not always heated. In such inhuman conditions, few of the prisoners lived to see the long-awaited freedom.

With the adoption of the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR “On NKVD camps” on June 15, 1939, the number of people who served their sentences increased, as it was envisaged “... to abandon the system of parole for camp contingents. A convict serving a sentence in the camps of the NKVD of the USSR must serve the full term established by the court.”

According to official statistics, as of March 1, 1940, the Gulag consisted of 53 camps, 425 forced labor colonies (including 170 industrial, 83 agricultural and 172 “contractor”, that is, those working on construction sites and farms of other departments), united by regional, regional, republican departments of correctional labor colonies, and 50 colonies for minors (colonies for children of “enemies of the people”).

The total number of prisoners held in the camps and forced labor colonies of the Gulag was determined, according to the so-called “centralized records” as of March 1, 1940, at 1,668,200 people. And this, of course, does not take into account those who were kept in numerous prisons, isolation wards, were in prison and were physically destroyed without being included in any records.

Due to the adoption of a number of emergency laws in 1940, it was possible to expand the Gulag system and bring the number of its inhabitants as of June 22, 1941 to 2.3 million people. During the period 1942–1943. due to the catastrophic situation at the front, by decree of the State Defense Committee, it was sent to Soviet Army more than 157 thousand former political prisoners. And during the 3 years of the war, only 975 thousand people from the multi-million population of the Gulag were released and transferred to the army.

After the victorious end of the war, the party and Soviet leadership of the USSR did not forget about the Gulag. And again, trains with repatriates who “collaborated” with the Nazi occupiers, that is, living in the temporarily occupied territory and surviving, rushed along the already beaten path to the East. The population of the Gulag again increased sharply.

In the post-war years, due to the reorganization of the organ system state security The Gulag was transferred to the jurisdiction of the USSR Ministry of Justice, headed by Lieutenant General I. Dolgikh (father of former candidate member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee V. I. Dolgikh).

As of October 1, 1953, there were 2,235,296 people in forced labor colonies and Gulag camps of the USSR Ministry of Justice. From March 1 to October 1, 1953, 165,961 newly convicted persons were admitted. During the same period, 1,342,979 people were released under amnesty, as well as after the end of their sentences. In fact, as of October 1, 1953, there were 1,058,278 prisoners left in camps and colonies.

The party leadership hastened to destroy even the very word GULAG, the ominous meaning of which had by that time already become known far beyond the borders of the USSR. In the fall of 1956, the continued existence of forced labor camps (GULAG) was considered inappropriate and, in connection with this, it was decided to reorganize them into forced labor colonies. No official decision about this has been published and it is unknown who made the decision. From October 1956 to April 1957, the “reorganized” Gulag was under the jurisdiction of the USSR Ministry of Justice under the new guise of “Corrective Labor Colonies.” Subsequently, he was transferred to the system of correctional labor institutions of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. On January 25, 1960, the Gulag was disbanded.

Based on materials: Igor Kuznetsov - historian, associate professor of the department of diplomatic and consular service of the faculty international relations Belarusian State University.

Related Posts: civil war, Gulag, Repression, terror

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After reading A. Solzhenitsyn’s work “The Gulag Archipelago” I wanted to raise the topic of concentration camps in the USSR. The concept of a “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 precisely in the USSR in 1918 on the orders of Trotsky, even before the famous Red Terror and 20 years before the Second World War. Concentration camps were intended for kulaks, clergy, White Guards and other “dubious” people.

Where were the concentration camps built?

Places of imprisonment were often organized in former monasteries. From a place of worship, from a center of faith in the Almighty - to places of violence and often undeserved violence. Think about it, do you know the fate of your ancestors well? Many of them ended up in camps for having a handful of wheat in their pockets, for not going to work (for example, due to illness), for superfluous word. Let's take a brief look at each of the concentration camps in the USSR.

ELEPHANT (Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp)

The Solovetsky Islands have long been considered pure, untouched by human passions, which is why the famous Solovetsky Monastery (1429) was built here, which in Soviet times was reclassified as a concentration camp.

Pay attention to the book by Yu. A. Brodsky “Solovki. Twenty Years of Special Purpose” - this is a significant work (photos, documents, letters) about the camp. The material about Sekirnaya Mountain is especially interesting. There is an old legend that in the 15th century, on this bark, two angels beat a woman with rods, since she could arouse desire in the monks. In honor of this history, a chapel and a lighthouse were erected on the mountain. During the concentration camp there was an isolation ward with a notorious reputation. Prisoners were sent there to work off fines: they had to sit and sleep on wooden poles, and every day the convict was subject to physical punishment (from the words of SLON employee I. Kurilko).

Penalties were forced to bury those who died from typhoid and scurvy; the prisoners were dressed in sacks; naturally, they were given a terrible amount of food, so they differed from the rest of the prisoners in their thinness and unhealthy complexion. They said that rarely did anyone manage to return alive from the isolation ward. Ivan Zaitsev succeeded and this is what he says:

“We were forced to undress, leaving only a shirt and underpants on. Lagstarosta knocked on the front door with a bolt. An iron bolt creaked inside and the huge heavy door opened. We were pushed inside the so-called upper penalty cell. We stopped in stupor at the entrance, amazed at the sight before us . To the right and left along the walls, prisoners sat silently in two rows on bare wooden bunks. Tightly, one to one. The first row, with their legs down, and the second behind, with their legs tucked under them. 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 take place.Where there is a holy altar in the temple, there is now a huge bucket for the “big” need - a tub with a board placed on top for the feet. In the morning and evening - verification with the usual dog barking “Hello!” It happens that, for sluggish calculation, a Red Army boy forces you to repeat this greeting for half an hour or an hour. Food, and very meager food at that, is given once a day - at noon. And so not for a week or two, but for months, up to a year."

Soviet citizens could only guess about what happened on Solovki. So, the famous Soviet writer M. Gorky was invited to examine the condition in which prisoners were kept in SLON.

“I cannot help but note the vile role played in the history of the death camps by Maxim Gorky, who visited Solovki in 1929. He looked around, saw an idyllic picture of the heavenly life of the prisoners and was moved, morally justifying the extermination of millions of people in the camps. Public opinion of the world was deceived by him in the most shameless manner. Political prisoners remained outside the writer's field. He was completely satisfied with the leaf gingerbread offered to him. Gorky turned out to be the most ordinary man in the street 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 the barracks are still being destroyed, everything that can indicate scary story THE USSR. According to the St. Petersburg Research Center, in the same year the remaining prisoners (1,111 people) were executed as unnecessary. By the forces of those sentenced to imprisonment in SLON, hundreds of hectares of forest were cut down, 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 ice hole until it’s dry ").

A huge staircase from the mountain has still been preserved, along which prisoners were thrown; upon reaching the ground, a person turned into a bloody something (rarely did anyone survive such punishment). The entire camp area is covered with mounds...

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 death toll is terrifying. The formation of the camp as a subdivision of Dmitrovlag dates back to 1935. In 1937, there were more than 19 thousand prisoners in the camp; in wartime, the number of convicts reached 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 Mologsky Region).

Every morning the prisoners went to work in a detachment, followed by a cart with tools. According to eyewitnesses, by evening these carts returned strewn with the dead. People were buried shallowly; after the rain, their arms and legs stuck out from under the ground - local residents recall.

Why did prisoners die in such numbers? Volgolag was located in an area of ​​constant winds, every second prisoner suffered from pulmonary diseases, and a consumptive rumble was constantly heard. I had to work in difficult conditions (getting up at 5 am, working waist-deep in icy water, and in 1942 a terrible famine began). A camp employee recalls how grease was brought in to lubricate the mechanisms, and the prisoners licked the barrel clean.

Kotlaslag (1930–1953)

The camp was located in the remote village of Ardashi. All information presented in this article is the memories of local residents and the prisoners themselves. There were three barracks for men and one for women on the territory. Mostly those convicted under Article 58 were here. Prisoners grew crops for their own food and convicts from other camps also worked on logging. There was still a catastrophic shortage of food; all that was left was to lure the sparrows into homemade traps. There was a case (and maybe more than one) when prisoners ate the camp commander’s dog. Locals also note that prisoners regularly stole sheep under the supervision of guards.

Local residents say that life was also difficult during these times, but they still tried to help the prisoners with something: they gave them bread and vegetables. Various diseases were rampant in the camp, especially consumption. They died often, were buried without coffins, and in winter they were simply buried in the snow. A local resident tells how he was skiing as a child, driving down the mountain, tripped, fell, and broke his lip. When I realized what I had fallen on, I became scared, it was a dead man.

It is incorrect to compare these values ​​with each other, primarily because the two are very different systems of forced confinement. The point, first of all, was that these systems developed and functioned differently, and the results of their activities were different.

The Nazi camp system began to take shape in 1933 (let’s ignore the period of creation of “spontaneous” SA concentration camps), and the first camps - there were very few of them (at first one, by 1938 - three, by the beginning of the war there were four) - were intended to isolate “enemies” Reich" and re-educating the latter into full members of the "people's community". Such an essential feature of the Soviet camp system as the economic exploitation of ITL prisoners did not appear in the Nazi camps immediately - only in 1937, it seems, the first attempts were made to commercially mine granite for construction projects of the Reich (and they failed). With the beginning of the war, the situation changed very dramatically - completely new types of camps appeared - work camps, factory camps (created during large enterprises); prison camps; finally, death camps - specifically created not for the exploitation of the labor of prisoners, prisoners of war or forcibly deported residents of occupied territories, but for the killing of racially alien elements, primarily Jews (this element was completely absent in the Soviet camp system).

The Soviet camp system, since the advent of the Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps, created in 1929, was created primarily as a system of exploitation of the labor of prisoners - in fact, this main department of the OGPU itself was created in pursuance of the resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR "On the use of labor of criminal prisoners." Of course, outwardly, the correctional aspect of the system came to the fore (the word “correctional” came first in the names of places of detention) - this was especially evident during the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal: the flower of Soviet literature was brought to the construction site, who wrote a collective book about how " before their eyes, the re-education of hostile elements into full-fledged members of the new socialist society was carried out" (I want to vomit a rainbow from these enthusiastic reviews), to stimulate "those who have taken the path of correction" it was developed the whole system measures that allow shock labor to bring liberation closer; even the very name “prisoner canal soldier” (shortened to the abbreviation z/k) seemed to make the prisoner not just deprived of freedom, but a participant in the battle for the creation of a new society. But the main one was still the operational component - and soon the system of the Main Directorate of the ITL NKVD of the USSR became one of the main contractors in the construction of a wide variety of important national economic facilities. Here we can see a certain similarity between the camp systems of the two dictatorships, but it is small - the difference in scale, and the different principles of “staffing” the camps with a contingent of prisoners, and the variety of tasks set before the German camp system during the war are also reflected. The Soviet camps included either criminals who received a sentence of three years or more, or political opponents of the regime, real or imaginary (who were convicted under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR and similar articles of the Criminal Code of other republics of the Union), and they ended up there only by a court decision (or quasi-judicial/extrajudicial bodies authorized by the Politburo/SNK/CEC), and forced labor - construction of communications routes, mining, etc. - was mandatory. The corresponding categories of prisoners in Nazi camps were placed in them by decision of the security police without judicial sanction (the Nazis did not create extrajudicial or quasi-judicial bodies like the Special Meeting of the OGPU or the “troikas”); the term of imprisonment was indefinite; their labor exploitation was not always provided for; and relative to the number of forcibly recruited foreign workers, prisoners of war or Jews, there were very few of them.

Now about the numbers. The largest proportion of those killed in concentration camps are victims of massacres and cruel treatment in death camps - there are just over three million people. The second most significant category of victims is Soviet prisoners of war, of whom especially many died in the first war winter, and the total number of victims in this category (executed and those who died from hunger, disease and other causes) exceeds two million people. Next come the foreign workers forcibly transferred to the Reich from the occupied territories, the inhabitants of these territories (the most numerous national contingents are Poles and citizens of the USSR), of whom from several hundred thousand to millions died during the war. Against this background, several tens of thousands of repeat criminals, members of opposition parties and groups, homosexuals, adherents of various religious denominations who died from various causes in concentration camps - located exclusively on the territory of the Reich - are simply lost. On the other hand, during the entire existence of the Gulag of the NKVD of the USSR, more than 1 million 600 thousand people died from all causes in its correctional labor camps, colonies and other institutions. And no matter how you try, any comparison will be incorrect - if we compare more or less similar categories of camps and prisoners (and these will be citizens of both states, convicted under criminal law or placed in a camp by order of the police), then Stalin’s camps contained only such prisoners (and their number reached two million), while before the war in German camps there were at most 20-30 thousand such prisoners, and during the war they constituted an insignificant group compared to the other categories mentioned above. Moreover, the mortality rate in Stalin’s camps in the most difficult years reached 15% of the total number of prisoners (that is, in some places relatively few people died, but in others the camps died out almost completely). On the other hand, if we take into account the activities of death camps and mortality in German prisoner-of-war camps, it turns out that in less than four years the Nazis killed several times more people than died in all of Stalin’s camps in 26 years (about how long the Gulag existed) .