ON THIS DAY ·
Vladivostok transit camp
27 Dec 1938 — Prisoners at the Vtoraya Rechka transit camp waited for ships bound for Kolyma. The poet Osip Mandelstam died there, probably of typhus, after hunger and cold had weakened him. He had been arrested for a second time months earlier; four years before, a poem mocking Stalin had first sent him into exile.
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The moment in context
In June 1929 the Soviet leadership joined two ambitions: punishing prisoners and exploiting distant resources. On 27 June the Politburo, the party’s small ruling committee, which worked like a cabinet, assigned prisoners serving three years or more to camps run by the OGPU, the political police and a forerunner of the KGB. A July decree called for camps in remote areas ‘for the purpose of colonising these regions and exploiting their natural resources’. The people sent there would work to sustain their own imprisonment and help open up the empire’s empty regions.
From Gulag forced-labour camps, chapter 5 of The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953 (1936).
The place: Vladivostok transit camp — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Punishment was redefined as productive labour. Bolsheviks saw labour as a way to reform criminals and objected to the state paying to keep prisoners idle. At Solovki, opened in a former White Sea…
- The turn — The White Sea Canal, 1931–1933. The White Sea–Baltic Canal gave the regime an impressive demonstration, though its usefulness was another matter. Prisoners dug the first great…
- What it changed — A police empire with its own territory. Dalstroi governed Kolyma from 1931 to 1953, in the territory marked by dark hatching. There the NKVD was government, employer and jailer at once.…
Then ask the room: Was the Gulag primarily an economic institution or an instrument of political terror? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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