Document 31

Report on penal labor colony in Nizhni Novgorod, 10 August 1932

GARF, f. 1235, op. 141, d. 1369, ll. 84-81. Corrected original, typed.

To the Presidium of VTsIK, Comrades Kiselev and N. Novikov,

To the Procurator of the RSFSR, Comrade Vyshinsky,

A Report On Conditions at the Penal Labor Colony in the City of Nizhni Novgorod

The Nizhni Novgorod labor colony, built to accommodate eight hundred persons, had 3461 persons incarcerated in it on 1 August 1932. The overload is explained, first, by the fact that a lot of people are held for a long time under investigation and, second, by the fact that the people's judges hearing cases apply the full force of the law. For example, for embezzling one hundred rubles or for swindling someone out of six rubles and so many kopecks or the like they give one to two years of strict solitary confinement and, thirdly, by the fact that Moscow sends so many (there are instances of children being sent). The living accommodations look like the proverbial herring barrel packed with people. Iron bedsteads are ___* in number. Plank beds are furnished to ___ people, and the rest sleep on the bare floor. There are only mattresses for ____ persons in all, and no blankets or pillows. People sleep literally on bare plank beds. It's dirty and stuffy in the places of confinement.

The practice of confining prisoners by category is not always precisely observed. A worker, peasant, kolkhoz member brought for the first time to the House of Correction (Ispravdom) not infrequently finds himself among inveterate recidivists, prostitutes, and ruffians. For example, from rounds in the women's ward in one cell questioning revealed that here were repeat offenders and prostitutes with up to seven convictions, and here also were female factory workers and collective farmers with first convictions for stealing a goat, embezzling a hundred rubles, those still being investigated, and those simply taken into custody. During the inspection of the second ward, it became apparent that in Cell No. 1 among working people deprived of their freedom were four repeat offenders. All newcomers to Cell No.1 are subjected to a thorough search and under the threat of a knife have everything of any value whatsoever taken from them, not even mentioning the pieces of dried bread they bring with them which as a rule are plucked by robbers immediately after they arrive. The administration views this outrageous situation with great indifference, and for this reason among the prisoners prevailing opinion is that it's useless to complain. The head convict in the First Ward, Razin, is a recid [A designation, widespread in the 1920's and 1930's, for recidivist thieves.], in the Second Ward, Lapshin, a recid, in the Third, Fourth, and Fifth men convicted under paragraphs 162 and 193 of the Criminal Code [Article 162 concerned theft; article 193, the last one in the 1926 Criminal Code, incorporated the 1924 Regulations on Crimes by Military Personnel.], in the Sixth Rachkov, a recid convicted six times over, etc.

Prisoners communicate freely between cells; here too the possibility of theft is not absent.

At the House of Correction five oversight committees [Committees looking after the condition of prisoners' space consisting of representatives of various bodies and social organizations.] have been formed, their work goes on without proper leadership, committees' sessions are very rarely attended by representatives of the Worker and Peasant Inspectorate, of Soviet social organizations, of the Gorsovet (Gorodskoi sovet [City Council]), Komsomol, and the Zhenotdel (Zhenskii otdel [the Party's Women's Section]). At sessions up to eighty items are put up for consideration at one time. Oversight Committee No. 3 may serve as an example. At the session of 1 July of this year eighty three items were considered, the session of 29 June considered eighty six items. Using this approach, the work of an Oversight Committee becomes little more than pro forma, never going to the heart of matters.

The House of Correction has three hundred staff, thirty three of them are members or associate members of VKP(b), four Komsomol members. Of all the Communists, only one deals directly with prisoners and that in his capacity as secretary of the VKP(b) cell.

The political and educational work, the very core of the House of Corrections' existence, is carried out very poorly. This work is killed by prison work activities and by inaction on the part of the administration. For 3461 persons there are 760 newspaper subscriptions, 110 journal subscriptions. The club was designed for four hundred, 350 semi-literate persons are being taught. Vocational education was given to 263 persons in the first half of the year. The cultural service is wholly inadequate; it does not draw on the institutional and scientific strengths of Nizhni Novgorod. In their free time prisoners are pretty much left to their own devices. Observed were instances of card-playing, telling of far-fetched stories hostile to the Soviet authorities.

In quantitative terms the House of Corrections keeps growing, numbering now 3461 persons, of which 1750 are serving terms; 362 are prisoners in transit, and there are 1467 persons under investigation, or 46.6 percent of the total [The percentage is incorrect. It is actually 42.3 percent. For a still lower figure for persons under investigation see next page.] Among those under investigation are found many individuals who have been in prison four months or more without being indicted. After interrogations, a large number (up to sixty) of them [. . .] were sent on to the Procurator.[A list follows of eleven individuals under investigation by OGPU who had been in prison for two to eleven months without their cases having been initiated.]

Who are the term prisoners? Workers: 293. Hired hands: 85. Poor peasants: 184. Peasants of average means: 273. Collective farmers: 131. Kulaks: 395. Idlers: 91. Office workers: 125. Of the numbers cited, those especially for workers, collective farmers, poor and middling peasant stick out the most. Why has this happened? Conversations with the prisoners and checks done on sentences show that the people's courts were particularly generous in awarding prison terms for relatively small crimes. For example, for stealing a rooster an old woman of sixty five was given three years' exile in remote provinces of the USSR, for stealing a goat, two years' incarceration. For stealing boots a sixteen-year-old lad was sentenced to two years in prison, for forging a check for six rubles a year and a half sentence, for a 400-ruble shortage in accounting for an advance, two years, for a hunded-ruble shortage, one year. For selling a half-liter of water as vodka the sentence was two years, etc.

The distribution of crimes committed by the prisoners is: counter-revolutionary crimes, 83, gangsterism, 17, hooliganism, 232, bribery 43, job-related crimes 339, murder and bodily injury, 184, robbery and grand larceny, 212, cattle-theft 45, arson and property damage posing a threat to public safety 57, illegal production and sale of alcoholic beverages 11, malevolent price-increases, 63, and failure to fulfill required extra-hard work assignments, 111.

The age distribution of those arrested is: under eighteen, 83, age fifty to sixty, 119, over sixty, 82. The rest are between ages eighteen and fifty.

There are 1407 persons being detained pending investigation, 243 by the People's Court (Narsud), 173 by the interrogating unit, 119 by the Procurator, 723 by GPU bodies, 149 by other bodies.

In the case of GPU, the figure is now significantly reduced.

The stays of those being investigated in the House of Correction are: up to two months, 857, from two to three months, 229, and longer than three months, 321 persons.

As a result of my visits, prisoners and persons being interrogated submitted 780 appeals. All of these appeals have now been sorted by prisoner file and scrutinized by Members of the Krai Court and the Procurator. On their own authority they have already released several people from the House of Corrections. After being considered, all appeals remaining without satisfactory resolution will go to the KraiKK-RKI (Krai-Kontrol'nyi Komitet-Rabochii-Krest'ianskii Inspektorat [The Krai Control Commission and Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate]) where they will be reviewed anew; there's an agreement for this. All those petitions that pertain to VTsIK and the Procurator of the Republic will be sent there after an onsite investigation here has been completed.

Thirty-five appeals were received concerning the special prison block. In view of the fact that they all will be resolved locally, they were transferred to the OGPU Krai Chief.

From conversation with prisoners it turned out that many of them had filed requests to go home and help with the harvest. Of all those who so petitioned the Observation Committee released only fourteen for work in the fields.

The House of Correction's Industries

At the House of Correction the following enterprises function: a cabinet-making factory, a metalworking shop, shoe manufacturing and tailoring shops, a brick plant, cartage, a construction repair shop, and a crew that performs off-site work.

All together 1827 persons are occupied with production work, 334 persons do maintenance, and there are 82 guards and firemen. Involved with one type of work or another are 64.8 percent, not working are 35.2 percent.

The production plan for 1932 was expressed as the sum of sales prices, 3,203,249 rubles. For the first six months the target was 1,529,788 rubles, realized in the first six months was 852,123 rubles, or 56.38percent.

Labor output in man-days: according to plan 110,855 for the first six months, 79,741 days were actually put in, comprising 71.9 percent. Wages to be paid out (according to plan): 107,063 rubles, paid out (actual) were 76,742 rubles, or 71.67 percent.

In terms of labor productivity, seven rubles, sixty one kopecks for one day's labor (according to plan), the actual was the sum six rubles forty nine kopecks, or 85.87 percent. Average wage (according to plan), ninety seven kopecks per day, actually paid out was 96 kopecks, or 99.7 percent.

Wages are paid properly in the form of credit slips for merchandise in prison stores, since twenty five percent is retained for disbursement at time of discharge.

Total income for the first quarter of 1932 amounts to 93,860 rubles.

I am leaving out other areas of prison life from the present report in view of the fact that I was not able to familiarize myself adequately with them. I will say a few words about food. Prisoners who do not work receive 450 grams of bread, those that do eight hundred grams. Dinner is prepared in two cauldrons for those working and those not. Much unpeeled potato finds its way into the soup, delivery of food to the prisoner involves many stages. What finds its way to the prisoner is different from what was in the pot. That little fat that finds its way into the serving containers is all but lost in the process of pouring and ladling.

Medical care. For the whole colony four physicians are available, every day one physician is on duty at the out-patient receiving room. There are visits from 120 to 150 or more persons. Patients are received during a six-hour period. Clearly with a situation such as this one cannot say that the medical service is at a satisfactorily high level.

From all that is described the conclusion is obvious. With regard to the penal colony organizational measures must be undertaken, the number of service personnel must be increased. Decisive measures to speed up the interrogation process must be taken by the Office of the Procurator. All cases of persons under investigation must be audited. The verdicts and files of those convicted must be audited. Political and educational work must be raised to an appropriate level, and so forth [. . .]

VTsIK Presidium Instructor Novikov