Unique photos of the children's colony of the NKVD

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Photos from this album are published for the first time. Creating such albums was a very popular pastime among the NKVD officers. Photo sessions, as they would say now, of course, were staged. The photographer had to capture the happy faces of the prisoners who confidently embarked on the difficult and, at times, thorny path of correction.

In this case, imprisoned children. Many of them have just turned ten years old. Cards and explanatory notes to them from our album confirm this fact. As, for example, a photo of classes in 5 "a" class.

"School. cl. 5 "A" in the classroom in the team No1 ". Source: "Dilettant"

And this is not the only evidence that the album opens to us. On one of its pages is a photograph of a certain Karpov-Vorobyov. The inscription on the back reads: “In memory of Yu. P. Belsky.

Penza. School of Music. I course. 14. III.52 years. " Another photo is a panoramic view of the city of Kungur in the late 60s. On the reverse side there is an inscription: “g. Kungur, Perm region st. Gogol d. (Hereinafter space) Lived from August 1941 to October 1945 ". The children's colony in Kungur was located just on Gogol Street.

It can be assumed that the album belonged to Yu. P. Belsky, who pasted into it in 1952 a photograph sent by a childhood friend Karpov-Vorobyov.

Photo of Karpov-Vorobyov with a note on the back. Source: "Dilettant"

Photo of Karpov-Vorobyov with a note on the back. Source: "Dilettant"

The snapshot of the labor colony leadership makes it possible to establish the estimated period when these pictures were taken. On the jacket of the NKVD officers, we see shoulder straps, they appeared in the Soviet Army after the reform at the beginning of 1943, respectively, the photographs were taken after this period.

"Labor Colony Leadership". Source: "Dilettant"

Immediately after the departure of the family of Yu. P. Belsky from Kungur in November 1945, a prosecutor's check began in the labor colony No. 1 of the NKVD Directorate for the Molotov Region. Her acts have preserved for us some facts from the life of the children's zone.

So, in response to the request of the USSR Prosecutor's Office "On the detention of juvenile prisoners in camps and correctional labor colonies" dated 1945-03-01, the prosecutor of the Molotov region replies: "In most cases, minors are shod and dressed in pea jackets of adults.

Shoes and clothes are not the first season of wear, all restored, therefore they do not look good, as they are dirty, worn out. … The situation is similar with food. The outfits for meat, fish, butter, sugar were sent by the GULAG with a delay, … therefore, it is not possible to receive food on time. Therefore, some products are replaced by others … As a result, the calorie content is not maintained."

The children's colony was located on Gogol Street

The menu of the Kungur labor colony No. 1 for November 1945 has also survived, which is the same for several weeks: “breakfast: soup from cereals and nettles; lunch: soup with cereals and nettles, omelet; dinner: cereal soup, tea”. In addition, the control weighing revealed an underweight in the bread ration and a complete absence of vegetables.

It is known that by the beginning of the war, 1717 children were kept in the Kungur children's colony, 500 more than the camp barracks could accommodate. In the documents of the NKVD, there is such a concept as "the limit of filling the camp", which means - the number of bunks, clothing and food. During the years of mass repressions, 1937−38, the number of prisoners increased sharply, the "filling limit", as in our case, was significantly exceeded. That is, in fact, 500 children of the Kungur colony did not have an individual sleeping place.

However, let us return to the photo album, in it we also find several names of the "socially dangerous children" who were kept in the colony. For example, an acrobatic sketch performed by the pupils of the group No. 2 Kovalenko and Safronov is captured.

In the distance, right behind the participants in the etude, the barbed wire is clearly visible, which surrounded the entire children's area with two residential barracks and production facilities along the perimeter. In a number of other photographs, we also see the imposing fences surrounding the "children's area" and the "production area".

"Brass band". Source: "Dilettant"

It must be said that in this case, the “collectives” were the units in which there were juvenile prisoners, each of the units was located in a separate residential barrack. The children slept on bunk wooden planks. These bunks can also be seen in our album in the photograph of the red corner of the group No. 1 in the left corner of the photograph.

For staged photography, they were shyly covered with a colorful curtain. The acts of the prosecutor's inspections, which will take place here in 1945, will record the following fact: children in the Kungur colony were housed in two barracks with 4-bed bunks of the "carriage system".

The camera lens also captured the stern faces of adolescents, examining the unworthy behavior of their fellow prisoner at a comradely trial. The inscription on the page of the album tells us that we are witnessing a meeting of the conflict commission in team number 1.

The album also records the practice of using child labor in heavy industries. We see footage of a sawmill working in the children's zone. A teenager in a work uniform is also captured in the engine room of a power plant generator. The surviving documents allow us to assert that child labor was also used in felling. The children's colony had its own cutting area. It is also known that the Kungur colony had its own tannery, shoe factory, button accordion and knitwear shops, two agricultural farms in the suburbs.

Children of both sexes were kept in the Kungur children's colony at the same time. In the photographs we see both boys and girls. The documents also confirm this fact: in 1934, there were 800 "inmates" here - the so-called prisoners of the labor colony, of which 210 were girls.

The children of the repressed were under special supervision

The photographs from the album also show a large number of heavy equipment that was used in the colony. Naturally, the children, due to their age, could not serve her. From the acts of the prosecutor's inspections for June 1945, we learn that adult prisoners convicted under Article 58 worked in production as heads of shops, foremen and highly qualified workers.

This fact, according to the prosecutor, had an extremely harmful effect on the younger generation. The matter came to the attention of the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR Boris Obruchnikov. The latter, by his order, allowed adult prisoners convicted under Article 58 to work in the children's colony in the city of Kungura.

“Acrobatic circle. count No1 ". Source: "Dilettant"

Since 1930, most of the "inmates" of the colony were so-called "socially dangerous children". That is, children whose parents were repressed for counter-revolutionary activities by the NKVD.

Such children were under special supervision and criminal cases were instituted against them for the slightest offenses. So, in 1938, several inmates of the Kungur colony were accused of "terrorist intentions."Further, a quote: "… at night they got together, talked about the taiga, about the books they had read, about the possibility of building a hyperboloid of the engineer Garin's system, … with the help of which it would be possible to destroy the workers of the NKVD."

At the beginning of 1940, a whole department was organized at the colony to contain convicted minors for being late for school or work. Many children fell under the Decree of August 7, 1932 "On the protection of property of state enterprises, collective farms and cooperation and the strengthening of public (socialist) property." On the basis of this document, people were sent to a camp for 10 years for stealing a handful of grain or several potatoes.

Vyacheslav Degtyarnikov