Memorandum

On the violation of revolutionary legality and the condition of prisoners in the Krasnoiarsk corrective labor camp of the NKVD.

Following your orders, the deputy head of the OITK UNKVD of the Krasnoiarsk territory, Com. Lykhin, and I conducted, between 29 October and 26 November 1939, an investigation of the condition of prisoners in the Krasnoiarsk corrective labor camp and verified the facts of arbitrariness in the camp, referred to in the statement by prisoner Arkhangelsky.

We inspected the Nizhne-Poiminsk section and the Kansk, Ilansk, and Ingash camp divisions, containing 10,277 of the inmate contingents, with a total registered number of 14,993 prisoners (as of 25 November 1939).

1. Violations of revolutionary legality

In the course of the review of prisoner Arkhangelsky's statement and the questioning of a large number of prisoners and some civilian employees, we have uncovered a direct violation of revolutionary legality in the Krasnoiarsk camp in the form of systematic beatings of prisoners by the heads of the camp sections, armed guards, and inmates employed in the low-level camp administration.

The following facts support this conclusion.

On 20 July of this year, guards Noskov and Nikolsky captured prisoners Chuguev and Zhelomsky, who had escaped from camp section 4. At the time of the arrest, Noskov set a dog on them that bit them badly and tore their clothes. Upon Chuguev and Zhelomsky's arrival at the command post of camp section no. 4, guards Kulesha and Mikhailov beat them up badly. The beatings were witnessed by about fifteen civilian employees, including the head of the camp section, Astashenko, the platoon political instructor, Liashenko, several guards, and their wives. Kulesha and Mikhailov have been prosecuted. Liashenko was never punished for allowing the beatings and never reported the incident to the superior commanders of the armed guards. […]

On 2 June of this year, prisoners N. A. Ivanovsky and Giliam Mirzaev escaped from camp section 5. On the same day, they were captured by guards Shulga, Lazin, and another one, whose identity has not yet been established. The last one, according to Shulga, hit Ivanovsky with a rifle butt.

While under escort en route to the camp section, Ivanovsky and Mirzaev were met by the platoon political instructor, Gontovoy, who had set out to search for the escapees, accompanied by a group of guards and two civilian tractor drivers. They all attacked Ivanovsky and Mirzaev and beat them with sticks and rifle butts. They beat them so hard that they were brought to the camp section semiconscious.

In July, Ivanovsky was transferred to camp section 4, where armed guards Lutsik and Voloskov and the head of the detention cell, prisoner Kamolov, beat him up. In the process, Lutsik cracked Ivanovsky's skull with a revolver handle. […]

On 25 September, prisoners Ya. E. Archivasov, A. Z. Dmitriev, and Prokhor Ribtsun escaped from camp section 4. On the same day, they were arrested by the dog handler, Noskov. At the time of the arrest, all three were beaten up and bitten by the dog.

Beatings of prisoners in camp section 4 are commonplace. […]

The head of the detention cell, Kamolov, is closely connected with repeat criminals, whom he shelters from work in the cell. He passes food from the barracks to those in detention, sets up card games in the cell, engages in a sexual relationship with the prisoner Vishnevskaya, who is under investigation and is kept in detention, and maintains a close connection with armed guard Antipin, via whom he connects with his wife in Kansk (he has been removed from this position and sent to general works).

Assistant warden Popov is also closely connected with repeat criminals and has organized thefts in the camp section. In 1939, while head of the detention cell, he assisted in the escape of six prisoners and received 80 rubles for it (he has been removed from this post and sent to general works). […]

In the same camp section, in the summer, armed guard Mitin unexpectedly used a firearm at point-blank range and seriously wounded prisoner Ya. V. Podgaets. Mitin has been indicted. Podgaets is undergoing treatment in the hospital.

In October armed guard Ivanov illegally used a weapon and shot prisoner A. S. Kirillov in the Tinsky work zone.

Ivanov will be tried by the revolutionary tribunal.

In August the juvenile prisoners A. A. Chei and A. P. Trunin escaped from camp section no. 2. On the same day, they were arrested by the platoon commander, Fefelov (assigned to the school), and guards Ditkovsky and Eprintsev. The latter is currently a secretary of the Komsomol committee of the Nizhne-Poiminsk division. During the arrest, Chei and Trunin were stripped naked and beaten, and Chei was also made to munch earth. Materials on the beating of Chei and Trunin are filed in the third section of the Nizhne-Poiminsk division, but those responsible have not yet been indicted. […]

The case of the group beating of prisoners on 20 October in the detention cell of the camp section is exceptionally outrageous. The circumstances of the case are as follows.

One of the prisoners disassembled the furnace in the detention cell, climbed into the corridor, opened the cells, let all the prisoners into the corridor, and locked the outside door. (The detention cell is in the camp zone).

Having learned about this, the guard on duty, Maleta, sounded the alarm. The head of the camp section, Beba, platoon commander Briuzgin, and a group of armed guards arrived at the camp section. They armed themselves with axes and shovels, broke into the detention cell, and started beating all the prisoners there. […]

On 25 October, in the Tugusha work zone of the Ilansky OLP [separate camp section], guard Shevtsov, while escorting Tolstopesov's team to work, uttered an anti-Semitic remark to prisoner M. L. Shulshraiber. In response to the latter's remark that anti-Semitism was inappropriate for a Soviet guard, Shevtsov made Shulshraiber sit on a tree stump for five hours dressed only in a padded jacket, in the 30°C cold.

Upon returning to the camp, Shevtsov submitted a report saying that Shulshraiber had wrangled with him during work. The head of the work zone, Com. Tsapik, did not look into the truth of the matter and put Shulshraiber into a detention cell for three days. […]

The violation of revolutionary legality in Krasnoiarsk territory has its own history.

Starting in 1938, in several camp sectors (Punchet, Perezha, etc.), aside from beating the prisoners, such forms of torture as exposing semi-naked prisoners to mosquitoes and putting them on tree stumps for several hours half-naked were practiced. Those responsible were at some point indicted, and their cases reviewed by the military tribunal. […]

2. The situation with the camp regimen The prisoner regimen in the camp is extremely unsatisfactory. GULAG orders to prepare the camp for the winter have not been followed. They only started repairing barracks and insulating tents for the prisoners in November. For the most part, camp sections are in an unsanitary condition. Prisoners are lice ridden, and the barracks are filthy and bug-infested. The camp contingent is crammed together. In the Nizhne-Poiminsk section (section chief—Kashpitsky), up to 7,000 prisoners have 0.84 square meters per person, while the norm is 3 [square] meters. A large number of

prisoners sleep under the bunks and on the floor.

No more than 30–40 percent of the prisoners have bedsheets.

Some camp sections (Kansk OLP, third camp section, Aksha work zone) did not have bathhouses, which they have only now started to build. The capacity of the existing bathhouses is insufficient.

As a rule, camp sections have no dryers. Prisoners' clothes and shoes do not get dry, which leads to colds.

Supplies, especially of winter clothes, are far from adequate. Prisoners are already not taken to work owing to their lack of shoes and clothes. […]

The third camp section (head—Novikov) is in an exceptionally unsanitary condition. It is so crowded that in some barracks the space per prisoner is 0.61 square meters. There is no bathhouse. The food is inadequate for the healthy prisoners and those undergoing treatment in the hospital.

The existing hospital, housing more than 100 prisoners, is not fully provided with both a soft and a hard inventory. Room no. 7, with over forty patients (most of them with chronic tuberculosis) has two-tier bunks. The patients have no bedsheets and stay on bare bunks for months.

The mortality rate at the camp section is high. Given that fifteen– twenty prisoners die there each month, the section head, Novikov, had already by September prepared 150 graves for the winter. By the time of this investigation (4–5 November), there were 108 graves [left]. Prisoners also dig the graves.

The food supply for prisoners is unsatisfactory. The newly introduced food rations for prisoners have not been implemented in some camp sections (third, fifth, Ingash, Tugusha, etc.) owing to the lack of a sufficient assortment of products.

There are no fats in the camp at all. Meat and fish are supplied to the camp sections intermittently. For five months prisoners received no sugar.

3. The situation regarding camp discipline

Camp discipline is very poor. There is no opposition to any refusal to work. With rare exceptions, persistent refusers and disorganizers are not prosecuted.

In just four camp sections (Ingasha, Karagansk, Komendantsky, and no. 6) 909 workdays have been lost owing to refusals. […]

Brigandage, robberies, thefts, hooliganism, knifing, open resistance and threats to the camp administration and guards, gambling, drinking, and other criminal activities flourish in the camp.

In some camp sections (4, 5, Karagan, etc.), gangster and criminal elements undermine camp discipline and terrorize the rest of the prisoners. Robberies and thefts are commonplace. At the same time, the fight against crime and against violators of the camp regimen is very weak.

The actual practice is such that, even for open gangsterism, managers of the camp sections put a prisoner in a detention cell for only several days.

Workers of the local third department do not pay sufficient attention to crime and do not prosecute repeat violators of the camp regimen.

The following fact serves as an illustration. At the second camp section, prisoner Kopka categorically refuses to work, disrupts the entire camp contingent, engages in gangsterism and gambling, systematically offends camp administrators and the guards, and offered armed resistance to the camp section administrator on duty and the supervisor when they tried to put him in a detention cell. On 17 October he, armed with a knife, forced his way into the office of the head of the camp section, Com. Turovsky. On 25 October he injured prisoner Shakirov with a knife.

Instead of isolating and prosecuting Kopka as an active bandit and disrupter, he was appointed head of the team of juvenile criminals, according to the camp section boss, Com. Turovsky. This came at the suggestion of the workers of the third section of the Nizhne-Poiminsk division (head of the third section—Com. Yankovsky).

4. Detention practice. The detention regimen, regulated by the provisional instruction on ITL prisoner management, is systematically violated in the camp.

“Provisional instruction on the management of prisoners in the corrective labor camps of the NKVD USSR” was issued by the people's commissar of internal affairs on 2 August 1939. The instruction ordered the creation of central detention facilities and detention cells in the camp sections and regulated the application of detention. See Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG. 1917–1960, pp. 456–76.

Prisoners are put into detention cells in groups of fifteen–twenty, often as entire work teams, without adequate formalities and often for no reason.

In the fourth camp section (head of the camp section—Astashenko), during the third quarter, 720 people were put in detention. In October alone, out of a total number of 800 prisoners, 285 were put in the detention cell. Those put in the detention cell are stripped of warm clothes (quilted and padded jackets), which the cell manager keeps until the prisoner leaves it—in winter conditions.

Prisoners are put into the so-called eighth cell, which has no bunks or heat, dressed similarly.

At the time of the investigation of the fifth camp section, there were twenty-four prisoners kept in the detention cell for refusing to work. Twenty-two of them were kept in a chamber only 4.6 square meters big. After the inquiry, the provisional head of the camp section, Pavlov, had to release most of the prisoners as detained for no reason.

On 28 October, at the third camp section, prisoners Kim and Kremnev were put into a detention cell for refusing to report to work. Both were sick and had a doctor's release from work.

At the Karagansk camp section, they put nursing mothers with children in detention cells (Ponomareva, Sukhikh). Such things happen because it is guards and prisoners (supervisors, deputy supervisors, team leaders, etc.) more often than camp bosses who put people in detention and are, in fact, masters of the situation and capable of pursuing their own policy because of the lack of control on the part of the civilian staff.

The head of the sixth camp section, Shlykov, started to subject the regimen violators to such punishment as putting them in “the cold one” (a cell that is still under construction and has no heat at all). […]

As head of the first camp section, Shlykov badgered invalid prisoners. On 22 June he ordered all invalids to line up, stripped their upper bodies of clothes, inspected them, and selected seventy-eight people for hard labor, including all invalids with sedentary tasks and some complete invalids. He ordered them all to work in the forest on 23 June.

The next day, twenty-two people failed to report to work, and all were put in detention cells. […]

5. The situation of juvenile prisoners.

[…] The 170 juvenile prisoners in the camp

As of 1 October 1938, there were 258 juveniles in the Krasnoiarsk camp between sixteen and eighteen years old (GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1, d. 1140, l. 10).

are distributed in small groups in most camp sections. Their living conditions are inadequate, and most of them have no bedsheets. Newspapers and books are very scarce. There are no educational or cultural games.

In some cases, juvenile prisoners live with the adults, usually in the worst barracks.

Regular juvenile working hours are observed only in the second, fourth, and Karagan camp sections and the Tinskaya work zone. In other camp sections, they work the same hours (ten–eleven) as the adults.

There has been extremely weak cultural and educational work conducted among the juvenile prisoners, and their constant contact with the criminal element, because of inadequate living conditions, fosters theft, hooliganism, gambling, and sexual corruptness.

In the Karagansk camp section and the Tinskaya work zone, homosexuality is widespread among juveniles. In the Tinskaya work zone, seven people (with Cherevatov as their leader) are being prosecuted for sexual coercion, rape of prisoners, […] and gangsterism.

6. Work at the camp.

In the course of the review of the camp regimen, materials on the anti-state practice of systematic falsification in timber harvesting came up. Thus, in the former Ilansk division (head of division—Barats), in the fourth quarter of 1938, in the former Kasianovsky camp section alone, 20,000 cubic meters of timber were falsely added to the timber delivery report.

Such falsifications were made in other camp sections and were balanced out in the first days of January 1939.

A similar situation was found regarding fulfillment of the plan for the first quarter of 1939. The former head of the division, Barats, received instructions to falsify the first quarter plan from the camp administration head, Com. Shatov, and the head of the production department, Kravchevsky, and gave appropriate orders to the heads of the camp sections. For the Tugushinsky camp section, the falsification amounted to 8,000–10,000 cubic meters; in the Karagansk camp section, up to 5,000 cubic meters.

The falsification of the production plan for the first quarter of 1939 was balanced out in the first days of April 1939.

The camp administration, however, reported that the plan for the first quarter of 1939 had been fulfilled, and several workers, including Com. Shatov, received rewards for fulfilling the plan. […]