Early Soviet Forced Labor Construction Bureaus [‘Sharashkas’] as an Experiment of Combining Protective and Mobilization Practices

Abstract

This paper analyzes the experience and practices of creating in the early 1930s under the auspices of the OGPU the first institutional form of exploitation of the intellectual potential of imprisoned specialists in the scientific and technical field in the form of special technical / constructor bureaus (OTB/OKB), or the so-called ‘sharashkas’. The phenomenon of the emergence of them and the reasons for the relative short-term nature of their existence in the structure of the security agency is considered from three positions: in the hierarchy of authorities and management, ‘sharashkas’ caused a conflict of interests of economic departments with punitive ones; on the institutional side, they did not have the potential for sustainability and prospects for development; on the personal side, the marginal status of prisoners that arose influenced the creative biographies of scientists. Despite the practice of reviving these bureaus in the future, we made a conclusion about the dysfunctional nature of their formation and activities.