Abstract
This article uses archival materials kept in the Archive of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia. One of its main fonds is composed by former Soviet State Security (KGB) archive of the Georgian SSR. The materials used here describe in details the legislative base, POW-builders (facilities and scale), the exploitation of the POW workforce in agriculture, housing conditions of POWs as well as their physical conditions, and generate general conclusions regarding the conditions and functioning of the POW camps, revealing its role in the USSR economy and the assessment of the Soviet bureaucratic apparatus.
Highlights
Soviet deportations and genocidesDeportations were the basic repressive mechanisms used in the Soviet Union, together with mass murder, during Josef Stalin’s rule
The Administration of Soviet Camps, which was established on the basis of an order passed by the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union on April 7, 1930, year received a status of the Main Administration and was referred to as the Gulag
All regulatory documents may be grouped as central decrees, issued by central organs of the Soviet Union and reflecting the basic administrative directives of the camps, decrees related to nationalities, which reflect the tragic destiny of the representatives of different nationalities in Soviet camps, and decrees related with the
Summary
Deportations were the basic repressive mechanisms used in the Soviet Union, together with mass murder, during Josef Stalin’s rule. This might be understood in some cases even as genocides. Anne Applebaum offers a list of the main stages of human history in the introduction of her monumental book on the Gulag, when the exiles of unwanted people were considered as “obligation to society”. She appealed to the examples of ancient Rome and Greek, mentioned Socrates and Ovid, as well as the experiences of Great Britain, France and Portugal to testify that. According to the documentary sources, there were 72 receptive and distributive centers, more than 500 camps, 214 special hospitals and 322 camps for handling of repatriation of POWs, where more than 4 million POWs and approximately 300 thousand internees got throughout the USSR and other states
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