Soviet Prisoners Research Articles

“Russenlager” and forced labour. Soviet prisoners of war in Bremen - “home” as a reference for historical memory Creating an exhibition on a voluntary basis: a case study

This article focuses on emotional approaches within the framework of the exhibition “Russenlager” and Forced Labour in Bremen. Having traced local events and circumstances related to general historical topics, we expose on 14 displays a network of camps of Soviet POWs (“Russenlager”), work commandos, places of labour and the profiting companies in Bremen. Accordingly, ‘home’ is the emotional core, combined with a face-to-face approach presenting individual Soviet POWs, depicted on facsimile registration cards, issued by the Wehrmacht, which we use as guides through the exhibition. Another biographical approach extends into the present, involving the contact with a relative of a Soviet POW, who was forced to work in Bremen until he perished.Key words: Soviet POW, forced labour, collective memory, home, emotional approach.

'If I Ever Have to Go to Prison, I Hope it's a Russian Prison': British Labour, Social Democracy and Soviet Communism, 1919-25.

Through the inter-war period, the USSR became an example of 'socialism in action' that the British labour movement could both look towards and define itself against. British visitors both criticized and acclaimed aspects of the new Soviet state between 1919 and 1925, but a consistently exceptional finding was the Soviet prison. Analysing the visits and reports of British guests to Soviet prisons, the aims of this article are threefold. Using new material from the Russian archives, it demonstrates the development of an intense admiration for, and often a desire to replicate, the Soviet penal system on the part of Labour members, future Communists, and even Liberals who visited Soviet Russia. It also critically examines why, despite such admiration, the effect of Soviet penal ideas failed to significantly influence Labour Party policy in this area. Finally, placing these views within a broader framework of the British labour movement's internal tussles over the competing notions of social democracy and communism, it is argued that a failure to affect policy should not proscribe reappraisals of these notions or the Soviet-Labour Party relationship, both of which were more complex than is currently permitted in the established historiography.

Insight into Prison Camp Novels by Estonian Writers

The article focuses on the Estonian novels depicting Soviet prison camps in the 1940s and 1950s. For a long time the Soviet prison camp theme was not publicly discussed in Estonia due to political reasons. Texts dealing with prison camps could appear in print only outside the Soviet Union. The most notable of these are the novels by Arved Viirlaid. The Estonian prison camp novels can be seen as “the literature of testimony”, to use the term by Leona Toker. Dramatic historical events are written down to record the events and to show the inhumane nature of the Soviet society. These records of the dramatic past follow certain patterns and create certain self- and heteroimages that are analysed in the article. The goal is to map themes, motifs and characteristics in such novels, concentrating on various taboos and rules in the prison camp environment. A prison camp is a closed territory within a closed territory; prison camps can be seen as small models of the Soviet society. Prison camp novels provide a detailed view of the environment of the prison camp, its inhabitants and activities. The lives of prisoners whirl around labour and food. The crucial thing is to survive, which often leads to moral decline, e.g. stealing or cheating. However, there are certain lines Estonians do not cross, e.g. cannibalism or homosexual relationships with superiors. Estonians are always depicted as political prisoners (not common criminals) and heterosexuals, while Russians are portrayed mainly as criminals and often also as homosexuals.

Breaking free from the prison walls: penal reforms and prison life in revolutionary Russia

This article examines the attempts of early Soviet penal reformers and criminologists to turn prisons into institutions of discipline and rehabilitation for their inmates. Their proposed reforms championed a proletarian prisoner who with individual attention would become a full member of Soviet socialist society. However, the lack of resources and short sentences, alongside the upheaval of civil war, undermined these reforms with the result that early Soviet prisons became the mirror image of the humane, modern institutions that reformers had envisioned.

О БИЛИНГВИЗМЕ ПЕРЕВОДЧИКОВ СОЦИОЛЕКТНЫХ ТЕКСТОВ

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of professional translator’s bilinguism from the point of view of sociolinguistics. The correlation between the types of translator’s mistakes and the degree of translator’s language skills, his/her professional experience and sociolect nature of the source text are analyzed. The article deals with a specific substandard fragment of the Russian language - Soviet prison speech, which is studied with the method of sociolinguistic analysis. The major results of our research are as follows: the evaluation of the degree of a translator’s professional bilingualism should take into account polysocilectal nature of the language of the source/target language. Furthermore, it requires from the translator mastering of the two types of “intralinguistic capacity”: excellent knowledge of both literary and substandard (sociolect) varieties of the source language, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the knowledge of the target language and skills in handling the specificity of the original sociolect text if there are no lexical means for its rendering into the target language.

Not an Ordinary Man: Ivan Nikitich Kononov and the Problem of Frontline Defection from the Red Army, 1941–1945

The question of Red Amy soldiers crossing the lines to the Germans during the German‐Soviet war of 1941–45 has long obsessed historians. Some have treated all Soviet prisoners of war as deserters to the enemy, while others have tried to minimize the phenomenon. This paper explores newly available evidence from German and Soviet sources in an empirical exploration of the reasons, the extent, and the problems of the process of switching allegiance at the frontline.

Nieznany kurier Piusa XII. Analiza postawy katolickiego misjonarza w sowieckim więzieniu i procesu jego rozpracowywania przez NKGB

An Unknown Courier of Pope Pius XII. An Analysis of the Stance of a Catholic Missionary in a Soviet Prison and the Process of Investigating Him by the NKGBA major part of this article is based on recently rendered available sources from the SBU State Archives in Kyiv and reconstructs the last months in the life of Father Jerzy Moskwa (1910– 1941) — a Jesuit missionary and courier of Pius XIII and Metropolitan Andrzej Szeptycki (Andrey Sheptytsky). Arrested in January 1941 during his trip from the Vatican to Lviv, Father Moskwa was interrogated by the NKGB and invigilated by two co–inmates, whose detailed reports make it possible to expand knowledge about the methods and techniques applied by the Soviet services, the political and missionary plans of the Vatican involving the Soviet Union, and the infiltration of the Church in Eastern Galicia. Moreover, they comprise a study of a confrontation of the stand of a zealous Christian, represented by Father Moskwa, and Soviet mentality represented by Yevhen Hromovenko, former chief of the Intelligence of Soviet Ukraine, whom the Jesuit was converting in the cell to Christianity.

‘Slowing down the going-away process’ — Tom Stoppard and Soviet Dissent

Tom Stoppard is a playwright most noted for his ferocious wordplay and playful approach to reality. In the 1970s and 1980s, his concern for like-minded prisoners of conscience in the Soviet bloc informed his activism on their behalf, utilising his public profile in an attempt to reposition their plight in the West. Stoppard’s activism was largely informed by his involvement with a number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working to publicise human rights violations in the Soviet Union, who provided him with the most up to date information on these abuses, and gave him access to dissidents. This article explores Stoppard’s activism on behalf of Soviet prisoners of conscience, highlighting the impact that these organisations had on his activism. Through an assessment of Stoppard’s efforts, it highlights the important role that NGOs and celebrity politics played during the cold war.

Prison Camp No. 29 for Prisoners of War from the Second World War on the Territory of Kazakhstan between 1943–1949

This article is the first publication of materials about Pakhta-Aral prison camp No. 29 for prisoners of war. The fate of prisoners of war (both Western and Eastern) remains largely unclear. One reason is because the camps for prisoners of war were subordinated to an extremely closed and classified structure - the GUPVI. To some extent, Pakhta-Aral was an untypical prison camp in the Soviet prison camp system. While most prison camps were established to support industry or resource extraction with labour, then a far smaller number of prison camps were connected to agriculture. The Pakhta-Aral camp was opened as a workforce supply for the cotton growing collective farms of Kazakhstan. Interestingly, archival data show that the need to supply the camp with food and clothes added some liberal aspects to camp life. Some researchers argue that prison camps were a model for the so-called 'non-Gulag' society, but the Pakhta-Aral camp shows that at least some civic practices were adopted where they helped to improve the functioning of the camp.

Russian

Russian

Aleksei Tikhomirov, “Luchshii drug nemeckogo naroda”, kul´t Stalina v Vostochnoi Germanii (1945‑1961 gg.) [“The German people best friend” : The Stalin cult in East

In June 1951, the security service of the German Democratic Republic arrested an East German citizen. The member of the People’s police had attracted the Stasi’s attention for several reasons. In private conversations with colleagues the former activist of the East German socialist youth organization FDJ repeatedly had boasted about his crimes against Soviet Prisoners of War. In addition, again and again he had swaggered about his ideas of racial German superiority and advantages of Hitler’s ...

Использование труда советских военнопленных в Норвегии в годы Второй мировой войны

Использование труда советских военнопленных в Норвегии в годы Второй мировой войны

The Dead Bodies of Bobruisk, Belarus 1941–45

This paper traces the massacres of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war in November 1941 in the city of Bobruisk, Eastern Belarus. Sparked by a current memorial at one of the killing sites, the author examines the historic events of the killings themselves and presents a micro level analysis of the various techniques for murdering and disposing of such large numbers of victims. A contrast will be shown between the types of actions applied to the victims by the German army, SS, police personnel and other local collaborators, reflecting an imposed racial hierarchisation even after their death.

Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus

For decades after the end of the Second World War, the military of Adolf Hitler’s Germany was a myth, referred to using images of bravery, soldiering ability and personal honour. It was not until the 1990s that this concept was finally overthrown, as international research documented the participation of the Wehrmacht in a complex of ideologically motivated crimes against humanity. In the context of the war against the Soviet Union, the close cooperation of German military and paramilitary formations in the Holocaust, the mass starvation of Soviet prisoners of war and the brutal conduct of so-called ‘counterinsurgency’ are of key importance for the understanding of the genocidal policy of the Third Reich. In his work Marching into Darkness, Waitman Wade Beorn draws on the findings of authors such as Christopher Browning, Christian Gerlach and Father Patrick Desbois. He explores the contribution of German soldiers to the elimination of the Belarusian Jews and other crimes of Nazi occupation by establishing a unit-level perspective. Beorn aims to demonstrate the reasons for the complicity and the increasing involvement in mass violence during the second half of 1941. This approach is not limited to military history but also includes the perspective of the victims, the complex relations between military and civil authorities and impressions from the author’s own fieldwork at killing sites.

Eastern Auxiliary Guards at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Spring 1943

To solve insurmountable manpower shortages in its concentration camp guard forces, the Nazi ss turned in early 1943 to an untapped, highly experienced and brutal source. Former Soviet prisoners of war recruited in 1941 and 1942 and trained at the Trawniki training camp in Poland, had effectuated the mass murder of over one million Jews in the three Operation “Reinhard” killing centers in about 9 months. By early 1943, however, some of those guards had come to doubt the wisdom of their collaboration with the Nazis, and deserted to the partisans. ss authorities decided to solve manning shortages in concentration camps by transferring 150 Trawniki guards to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in March 1943. By failing to accommodate the foreign auxiliaries’ discontent, Auschwitz’s commandant faced his own mass desertion three months later. Berlin’s response to events at Auschwitz fundamentally reconfigured the relationship between the ss and its eastern guards in the Reich’s entire concentration camp system. About 1,500 Trawniki-trained guards eventually entered the camp system and served loyally until the Reich’s end. In coming to know their Slavic clients, the “new Soviet men,” the Nazis abandoned collaboration and turned to hierarchical discipline and integration with their own German guards.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP: DAVID ROUSSET AND THE LIMITS OF APOLITICISM IN POSTWAR FRENCH THOUGHT

In 1949, French intellectual David Rousset publicly called on Nazi camp survivors to bear witness to the existence of a “concentration camp universe” in the Soviet Union. Rousset, a former Buchenwald internee and an influential author, demanded that his fellow survivors identify in unqualified terms with the suffering of Soviet prisoners. Even as he colluded with Cold War governmental agencies, Rousset claimed that the imperative to oppose concentration camps existed “beyond” political or ideological commitments. This essay analyzes the arguments about suffering, politics, and memory made by Rousset and his contemporary critics, notably Jean-Paul Sartre. It responds to Rousset's admirers who have overlooked distinctive aspects of his project: his rhetoric of apoliticism, his demand for complete identification with victims, his exclusive interest in limit-case abjection as opposed to injustice in general, his interpretation of the Nazi camps that centered on forced labor rather than on genocide, and his avoidance of the language of human rights.

Głód w latach 1932–1933 w historiografii ukraińskiej i w konstrukcji nowoczesnego mitu fundacyjnego Ukrainy

The author analyses the contemporary narrative of the Great Famine of 1932–1933 (Holodomor) in Ukraine in two contexts: the policy towards the state’s memory after 1991 and academic historiography. The first part of the article points to the fact that the Great Famine has become a modern foundational myth of Ukraine. The myth is compared with the myth of Sweden, which also relates to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history and the fight to ensure food self-sufficiency of the nation. However, the messages of these myths turn out to be different. While in Sweden it expresses the society’s successful fight for the fruits of the earth, in Ukraine it has remarkably martyrological connotations – from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, the neighbouring nations and states have been playing the roles of perpetrators of poverty and misery of the Ukrainian people. The second part of this paper is devoted to the analysis of differences in the interpretations of the Great Famine made by two contemporary Ukrainian historians: Stanisław Kulczycki and Heorhiy Kasyanov. The former has eventually come to the conclusion that the Great Famine was caused by the genocidal policy of the Soviet authorities towards Ukrainians as a civic nation (2008). On the other hand, Kasyanov claims that the Great Famine was triggered unintentionally by the state authorities. In his opinion, it resulted from the chaos of forced collectivization policy, and then was used by Moscow to break the emancipatory aspirations of the Ukrainian elite. While the author admits that the second of these interpretations is more relevant, he does not fully agree with Kasyanov’s postulates regarding the way of presenting the disaster to the public. The “antropologization” of the narrative would be convincing for academic historians, but others would find it hard to understand. According to the author, the Great Famine was the second largest disaster caused by man in the history of Europe, next to the extermination of Soviet prisoners of war and the population of the occupied territories of Eastern Europe by the Third Reich. As such, it marks the history of Ukraine in a special way. The author agrees with Kasyanov’s criticism of presenting Holodomor as the genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by Russians.

Tabud ja reeglid. Sissevaateid eesti laagriromaani

The article concentrates on Estonian novels depicting Soviet prison camps in the 1940s and 1950s. The goal is to map themes, motifs and characteristics in such novels, concentrating on various taboos and rules in the prison camp environment. For a long time the Soviet prison camp theme was not publicly discussed in Estonia due to political reasons. Texts dealing with prison camps could appear in print only outside the Soviet Union; the way Estonians saw these historical events and hellish experiences were depicted mostly in exile novels. Most notable are the novels by Arved Viirlaid (b. 1922), e.g., Kes tappis Eerik Hormi? ( Who Killed Eerik Horm? ) (1974), Surnud ei loe ( The Dead do not Read ) (1975), Vaim ja ahelad ( Mind and Chains ) (1961). Estonian prison camp novels can be seen as “the literature of testimony”, to use the term by Leona Toker. Dramatic historical events are written down to record the events and to show the inhumane nature of Soviet society. These records of the dramatic past follow certain patterns and create certain self- and hetero-images. A prison camp is a closed territory within a closed territory; prison camps can be seen as small models of Soviet society. Prison camp novels give a detailed view of the environment of the prison camp, its inhabitants and activities. Two central aspects are labour and food; the life of the prisoner whirls around these. The most important thing is to survive, which often leads to moral decline, e.g., stealing, cheating. However, there are lines Estonians do not cross, e.g., cannibalism or homosexual relationships with superiors. Estonians are always depicted as political prisoners (not common criminals) and heterosexuals, while Russians are portrayed mainly as criminals and often also as homosexuals. Another important component of the image of the Estonians is their enterprising spirit and ability to manage even under very difficult conditions. Therefore, several oppositions can be identified, e.g., Estonians vs . Russians; political prisoners vs . criminals; heterosexuals vs . homosexuals; civilized vs . barbaric, etc.

Example of human individual identification from World War II gravesite

This paper presents the procedure elaborated by our team which was applied to the mode of identification of Red Army soldiers who were taken as prisoners by the German Army during World War II and deceased in captivity. In the course of our search the unmarked burial of ten Soviet prisoners of war was found. Historical, anthropological and genetic research conducted by us led to the personal identification of nine of them, including two by means of DNA analysis.

Re-Visiting the Site of the Former Soviet Prison Camp in Tambov

This article examines visits by French people to the former Soviet prison camp in Tambov, Russia, where Alsatians-Mosellans men were imprisoned during World War II. Because the memory of these prisoners of war, conscripted by force into the German army during the war is disappearing together with the witnesses, some survivors organized in the 1990s journeys to the Tambov former prison camp, called “pilgrimages.“ There are currently two kinds of pilgrimages: pilgrimages for survivors of the camp and their close relatives and pilgrimages for grandchildren of former Tambov inmates. This article suggests that the pilgrims, confronting their past, are engaged with a process of identity making, and that pilgrimage provides pilgrims with the opportunity to confront their grief for the dead or their sense of injustice and to let go of the past. The article concludes that with the pilgrimage the value of Tambov as a place of death is re-evaluated.