Darya Andreevna Mamontova,
Master’s Student, Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Forced Labor in the Practice of Enforcing the Sentences in West Siberia in the 1920s
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2022-4-2
The paper is devoted to the study of the forced labor of the prisoners in the 1920s. The idea of the correction of the criminals by the labor involvement was crucial for the Soviet penal policy. Until 1924 it was regulated by legislative documents such as the decree of VTsIK, dated 17 May 1919, “On the forced labor camps” and the decree of the RSFSR People’s Commissariat for Justice, dated 15 November 1920, “The Regulations on general detention places”. In 1924 the Corrective-Labor Code of 1924 became the fundamental document in this sphere. All articles devoted to the labor were based on the articles of the Labor Code of 1922. It implied there was the legal support of the labor of the prisoners and those who were sentenced to the forced labor without detention. Based on the paperwork of the places of detention of West Siberia (Novonikolaevsk/Novosibirsk, Barnaul, Biysk, Omsk) the author analyzes the possibilities of the realization of the legal foundations of the forced labor organization in practice. Study shows that the conditions of the places of detention (material security, number of the employees, overpopulation in prisons) prevented them from full compliance with requirement relating to the labor of this part of the population. Furthermore the forced labor served as the mean for “normalization” of the work of these places of detention (elimination of the overpopulation in prisons and the lack of money) in the first place, not for correction. Despite all difficulties of the attempts of the realization of this idea of using and stimulation of the labor of the prisoners, it continued to exist in the 1930s – 1940s (on a reduced scale) even after the tightening of the Soviet penal policy’s foundations.
Publishing: 28/08/2022
The article has been received by the editor on 27/04/2022
How to cite: Mamontova D.A. Forced Labor in the Practice of Enforcing the Sentences in West Siberia in the 1920s // Historical Courier, 2022, No. 4 (24), pp. 22–31. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2022/ISTKURIER-2022-4-02.pdf]
Links: Issue 4 2022
Keywords: sphere of labor; penal policy; forced labor; the Corrective-Labor Code of 1924; West Siberia