QUESTIONS OF HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE FORMATION AND FUNCTIONING OF THE GULAG SYSTEM

This article examines the historiography of the formation and functioning of the GULAG prison-camp system. It is known that more than 20 camps were created on the territory of Kazakhstan, which covered almost all regions of the republic with their network. Of great interest are the studies of Russian and foreign scientists, who, based on a large archival material, were able to conduct a thorough analysis of the process of creating and developing the GULAG. Kazakh researchers also contributed to the coverage of this issue, revealing the features of the structure and activities of the camp system in the territorial borders of Kazakhstan. It should be noted that correctional labor camps to a large extent played the role of economic entities, rather than institutions for the re-education of criminal elements. In addition to criminality, in the 1920s and 1950s, there were people in the camps who were convicted on false and far-fetched charges. This article is not a complete overview of the problem under study and requires further study. The article was prepared in the framework of the scientific project No. AR08856940 «Prorvinsky and Astrakhan camps in the GULAG system: history, memory, heritage (1932-1950))».

THE SITUATION OF PRISONERS OF WAR IN KAZAKHSTAN AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR

As a result of the Second World War, representatives of various European and Asian nations, former soldiers of the German and Japanese armies were sent to the USSR labor camps as prisoners of war. Prisoners of war were accepted as unpaid labor in industrial and construction units, as well as in the defense enterprises of the USSR. During the operation of the camp system, there were problems with the provision of food to prisoners of war, the lack of adequate housing, which led to the deaths of prisoners of war. The main issue raised was the situation of prisoners of war working in camps on the territory of Kazakhstan.

Making History Visible

While interned by the Nazis in Belgium and Bavaria during World War II, the little-known Surinamese artist Josef Nassy (1904–76) created a series of paintings and drawings documenting his experiences and those of other black prisoners. Nassy’s artworks uniquely register the presence of Caribbean, African, and African American prisoners in the Nazi camp system. While the Nassy Collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cannot render transparent a wartime experience that has gone largely unrecorded, it illustrates how shifting from a textual to a visual lens can enable an unremembered history to enter our field of vision, thereby generating an alternative wartime narrative. After tracing Nassy’s family history in Suriname and the conditions of his European incarceration, this essay discusses two paintings that demonstrate the significance of visual art in the context of black civilian internment—for both the artist-prisoner and the researcher.

Atomized urbanism: secrecy and security from the Gulag to the Soviet closed cities

This article recovers the early history of the Soviet ‘closed city’, towns that during the Cold War were absent from maps and unknown to the general public due to their involvement in weapons research. I argue that the closed cities echoed and appropriated features of the Stalinist Gulag camp system, principally their adoption of physical isolation and the language of obfuscation. In doing so, I highlight a process called ‘atomized urbanism’ that embodies the tension between the obdurate reality of the city and the goal of the state to obliterate that reality through secrecy. In spatial terms, ‘atomized’ also describes the urban geography of these cities which lacked any kind of organic suburban expansion.

1953 Amnesty According to GULAG Statistics: Its Structure and Dynamics

The article studies the dynamics of 1953 amnesty and analyzes its structural characteristics. The 1953 amnesty was the largest in the entire history of the Soviet penitentiary system. Therefore, it is of particular interest to know the stages of the prisoners’ release process and the way such a large-scale problem could be solved. The author focuses on the structure of prisoners to be released as well as the structural changes of prisoners caused by the amnesty and their impact on the system as a whole. Despite a large number of domestic and foreign studies addressing the GULAG, the process of amnesty implementation has not been studied as it is yet. The author traces the implementation of the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium Decree dated 03.27.1953 "On amnesty." The methodological basis for the study is statistical analysis of data on the implementation of the release plan. The result of the study is the conclusion that the 1953 amnesty was a turning point in the functioning of the USSR camp system. However, its process was uneven and accompanied by a number of difficulties caused by the need to carry out serious control and accounting work and involve additional sources to make decisions on the release of individual prisoners.

Prorva Island camp: a forgotten island of the GULAG Archipelago

Despite a significant number of works devoted to the history of the GULAG, the problem of the formation and functioning of small regional camps in the areas where the camp system was not widespread still remains practically uncovered both in Russian and in foreign historiography. Fishing camps in the Caspian Sea region remain practically unstudied. The Prorvinskii correctional labor camp also known as the Prorva Island camp (Prorvlag) is among them. The aim of this study was to fill the gap in the historiography of the GULAG, to reveal the causes and conditions of the formation of the fishing camp complex on the shores of the Northern Caspian Sea, to analyze the industrial activities of Prorvlag, and to determine the location of individual structural subdivisions of the camp. The study is based on the documents from the archives of the Main Administration of Places of Confinement (Glavnoe upravlenie mest zaklyucheniya, GUMZ) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR (GARF, F. R-9414) supplemented by a considerable collection of other publications. The underlying methodological principle is the critical analysis of the entire body of factual material and the new archival documents in the first place. It has been established that in 1932, the OGPU received a new fishing area for its future use, the Prorva district located in the northeastern part of the Caspian Sea. For the purposes of its development and further organization of fisheries, a correctional labor camp was established there, with its administration originally stationed on Prorva Island in the Caspian Sea. The camp, which functioned from 1932 to 1940, included several subcamps, camp stations, and camp detachments. Among the prisoners, there were many fishing specialists who were convicted of various counter-revolutionary crimes. The camp had a fishing fleet of 1 115 units, production workshops for its maintenance, and coastal and floating fish factories. All the products produced by Prorvlag were sold within the GULAG system. It has been revealed that the OGPU established the Prorva Island camp in order to create its own base for supplying the camp population with fish products, since in 1932 the state stopped supplying camps with fish. The prisoners who developed the new fishing area in the most difficult climatic, domestic, industrial, and sanitary conditions made a significant contribution to the development of the Kazakhstan sector of the Caspian Sea.

Transformation of camp system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR in accordance with the Decree of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics “On the Changes to the Development Plan of 1953”

The subject of this research is the examination of the first stage of reforms of camp economy: its transformation after adoption of the Decree “On the Changes to the Development Plan of 1953”. The goal of this work consists in determination of consequences of the large-scale reduction of the economic activity of the GULAG. The question of impact of the Decree on the Changes to the Development Plan upon economic activity of forced labor has not previously been the subject of a separate research. The author analyzes the incidence of reduction of economic activity of the GULAG, as well as generalizes the data on the activity and fate of the forced labor camps assigned to the constructions under liquidation. The conclusion is made that the changes to the development plan of 1953 became the first and crucial step in the GULAG reforms, which predetermines its final liquidation in 1960. After adoption of the decree, work was immediately halted on twenty largest construction objects of the GULAG, combined cost of which amounted to 49.2 billion rubles.

Counterterrorism in British India

On the night of April 18, 1930, some 100 armed revolutionaries calling themselves the “Indian Republican Army” mobilized in Chittagong, a seaport city in East Bengal near the Burmese border, just prior to launching multiple raids on British colonial sites. The Chittagong Armory Raid of 1930, modelled after the 1916 Irish Easter Rising, sparked a renewed period of terrorist activity in India, along with the increasing involvement of female revolutionaries as assassins. The British Government of India responded with a multipronged approach to counterterrorism that included the pursuit of another international treaty to control gun-running, stricter anti-terrorism legislation, and the ability to arrest and detain militants indefinitely. Whitehall disagreed with the anti-terrorism policies promoted by Delhi policymakers, especially the creation of a vast detention camp system to imprison alleged terrorists, as it embarrassed them internationally and legitimized Gandhi in the eyes of Indians and Britons.

Rosyjskie. Europejskie. Oświecone. Rozumne. O obecności Rosji w Azji Środkowej (i nie tylko)

The author of the paper, using tools developed by postcolonial researchers, discusses the works of twentieth-century Russian writers. The setting of these texts is in the territory of Central Asia, Siberia or the Caucasus, constituting one of the factors defining them as the so-called Eastern text of Russian literature. Although most of the writers come from the other parts of Russia and – in most cases – are of Slavic descent, they know these regions quite well. These writers, however, are little interested in the problems of indigenous peoples, as long as they are not related to nationwide issues such as industrialization, collectivization or the labour camp system. The issues of destruction and loss of cultural identity, subordination, enslavement and exploitation of the local population are often omitted. The main characters in the works of Russian writers are invariably Russians, and their reference point is the Russian (Soviet) state.

The Extent and Nature of the Camp System

This chapter gives a broad overview of British imperial internment, stressing its globality. It first looks at internee numbers both within Britain and in the Empire as a whole. It then develops a camp typology which includes specially built environments such as Knockaloe, military establishments and forts, old factories, and prison islands. Some of these structures were permanent, others only temporary. The chapter then tackles cultural life within camps, as well as conditions and the notorious barbed-wire disease. The chapter moves on to a detailed examination of two areas of the British Empire which have attracted limited attention from scholars of internment during the Great War in the form of Canada, where attention has tended to focus upon Ukrainians rather than Germans, and the West Indies and Bermuda.