"It is impossible not only to provide for all the needs of places of detention caused by overcrowding, but also to feed prisoners": interdepartmental financial disputes on the eve of the birth of the Soviet camp system (1928-1929).

Abstract

The subject of the study is the financial and economic prerequisites of the hardware confrontation on the strategy and priorities of the development of the Soviet correctional labor system, observed at the turn of the 1920s-1930s. Archival documents of that era are analyzed, indicating that the NKVD of the RSFSR and its subordinate Main Directorate of places of detention in the specified period experienced an acute shortage of funds for the maintenance of constantly an increasing contingent of prisoners. The leadership of the People's Commissariat (V. N. Tolmachev) and GUMZ (E. G. Shirvindt) made significant hardware efforts to eliminate the shortage of monetary resources and, with the support of the SNK of the RSFSR, sometimes even acted bypassing the People's Commissariat of Finance of the RSFSR for these purposes. Therefore, including for this reason, it categorically refused to participate in the financing of measures to create new correctional labor camps under the auspices of the OGPU. At the same time, representatives of the NKVD opposed the very idea of expanding the camp system and transferring other categories of prisoners to the OGPU in addition to those convicted of counterrevolutionary crimes. The article also cites other archival documents, which, together with the rest of the sources analyzed in it, cast doubt on the well-established opinion that the head of the NKVD V. N. Tolmachev was one of the initiators of the project of transition to a mass system of camp organization of forced labor of prisoners in the USSR.