Katorga
The katorga , derived from the Greek kateirgon ("to force"), was after the death penalty the most severe punishment in the Russian Empire , under which the convict was exiled and had to do forced labor . Mostly they were sent to the inhospitable areas of the country, such as Siberia and, from the 1870s, also to the island of Sakhalin at the easternmost end of the Tsarist empire. The prisoners also lost all civil rights ( civil death ) and were not allowed to return to European Russia even after the expiry of their term of sentence, but had to spend the rest of their lives in exile.
The katorga system can be found in two historically different periods: the tsarist katorga, which Peter the Great introduced in Russia, and the Stalinist katorga of the 1940s. Their nature, however, was quite similar. The Baltic Historical Commission describes the katorga of the Russian Penal Code of 1845 as follows: Katorga was the heaviest imprisonment ..., combined with the deprivation of all professional rights and loss of family and property rights (§ 29). It was either for life or early (4 to 20 years) and was carried out in mines, forts or factories. The same applies to the Katorga camps of the Stalin era. Jacques Rossi compares the two systems, whereby one can conclude from them that the Stalinist katorga was subjected to an even harsher regime.
history
Exile as punishment (ссылка - 'ssylka') was first to the Criminal Code of 1649 under Tsar Alexis I founded. In 1696, Peter the Great established the punishment of the katorga, which was not initially paid in Siberia, but was intended to help build a Russian fleet. It was not until 1767 that more and more prisoners were sent to Siberia to do forced labor there. With the de facto abolition of the death penalty under Tsarina Elisabeth in 1753, the number of Katorga prisoners continued to increase. The number of deportations rose even further from 1760 onwards, as aristocratic village owners now also obtained the right to send serfs into exile at their own discretion. The focus was on the exploitation of the numerous Siberian mineral resources such as gold, silver, iron and lead in ore mines. Until the middle of the 1850s, the mining district of Nerchinsk was the largest and most important detention center in Siberia, but thereafter it lost more and more importance, since the ore deposits were exhausted and the conditions in the camps deteriorated rapidly. For these reasons, a new mining district was set up in the Kara Valley in the following decades , but it was unable to accommodate the masses of prisoners either.
Especially as a result of the uprisings in Congress Poland between 1830 and the 1860s , the number of those sentenced to katorga increased massively. While initially mainly Russian nobles were banished due to political agitations and conspiracies, such as the participants in the Decembrist uprising in 1825, it was now mainly members of the rising intelligentsia who make up the largest proportion of the exiles. With the reforms of 1890, political prisoners and pure criminals were no longer separated, which led to conflicts in the camps. With the revolution of 1905 and the changed political conditions until the fall of the tsarist empire, mainly political prisoners like social democrats and social revolutionaries were sent into exile and forced labor. A total of around 1.5 million people were exiled to Siberia between 1807 and 1917. Exact figures are not available. The statistical data are inconclusive due to poor records.
When the tsarist empire collapsed with the February Revolution of 1917 , the practice of katorga also ended. In the period that followed, numerous prisoners returned from the eastern regions and a lively process of coming to terms with the events developed in Soviet Russia and the early Soviet Union . Exiles, victims, relatives and former staff published diaries, notes, memories and necrologists from the time of imprisonment. With the beginning of Stalinism and the establishment of the Gulag system , the relatively liberal and productive phase ended and the katorga was hardly discussed any further due to the clear parallels to the new prison system. It was only with the death of Stalin in 1953 and the subsequent de-Stalinization from 1956 that the topic moved back into the scientific focus. In the West, katorga research was hardly available until the 1990s and is mainly carried out through the work of Alan Wood.
Objectives
With the practice of exile and the katorga system, three main objectives were to be achieved. On the one hand, it served as a way of removing criminals and other undesirable people from European Russia, and thus fulfilled a social function. In addition to serious criminals, such as murderers, robbers and rapists, political activists in particular were banned and subjected to the heaviest punishments, since in the eyes of the tsar they represented a considerable threat to the autocracy system. Especially after uprisings or attacks, repression intensified and more people were banned for political crimes. Methods common today in the penal system that are supposed to enable rehabilitation were not known in the past. Since the katorga included exile for the rest of life, unwanted people were permanently removed from the western areas. It was inevitable that this would not eliminate crime, but only postpone it.
The second intention concerns the economic exploitation of Siberia and was particularly evident in the practice of using forced labor in factories or mines. The rich supplies of gold and silver should be used in this way. Since special areas were directly under the imperial family, the profits also flowed into the private property of the tsar. However, economic exploitation became less important over time, as certain deposits, for example in Nerchinsk , were exhausted in the middle of the 19th century and could not be further processed with the comparatively primitive mining methods.
The third aim of exile and katorga was to populate and Russify the vast and sparsely populated Siberian areas . This should also secure the border areas with China , which have long been controversial. Even after the Treaty of Nerchinsk , conflicts flared up again and again in the border region with China.
organization
The offenders and political prisoners convicted in western Russia were first collected in prisons and then had to walk in columns to Siberia. Since the destinations in Eastern Siberia were often thousands of kilometers away, such a journey could take several years. A distinction was made between criminals and political prisoners, some of whom were granted relief in prison. So they were allowed to travel by car. Women and children were also able to accompany the exiles into exile, but mostly had to endure similar hardships. Later, the marches were partially replaced by technical possibilities, for example by transport on ships or even later by the Trans-Siberian Railway . A well-known route in later times was St. Petersburg / Moscow - Nizhny Novgorod - Perm - Tyumen - Tomsk . The sections that were covered on foot were lined with stage prisons, which were regularly set up as night camps. The daily workload was approx. 25–30 werst (27–32 km), the column was idle every third day.
Before the trip, the prisoners were branded to prevent them from escaping and to clearly mark them as prisoners. Burn marks were made with glowing iron, for example, or the nose was slit open so that characteristic scars were created. One side of the head of the men was shaved, and prisoner clothing was mandatory. Shackles weighing several kilograms were also intended to prevent attempts to escape and to lower the inmates' morale. The stage prisons were in particularly poor condition, as hardly any financial means were made available to build adequate accommodation. Most of these camps consisted of only one large room with cots attached to the walls. Overcrowding persisted, so that some camps had to accept twice as many prisoners as intended. Most of the prisoners therefore had to sleep on the bare ground in dirt and vermin. Buckets were available during the night to replace the toilet, but they regularly overflowed. The general hygiene was extremely poor, so that infectious diseases, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases spread rapidly.
Dostoyevsky processed his experiences as a political prisoner from 1849 to 1853 in Siberia in notes from a house of the dead (published 1860-1862) and thus described the reality of the katorga at the time.
In the Russian Criminal Code of 1885, it was a punishment for political prisoners, in which they were sentenced to forced labor in labor camps . As a rule, the prisoners were exiled for life , although the forced labor ended a few years after the deportation . The delinquents then had to settle near the place of exile.
Anton Chekhov traveled to Sakhalin Island in 1890 to interview the deportees for three months. He described his experience in 1894 in the book "The Island of Sakhalin".
swell
- Anton Pavlovich Chekhov : The island of Sakhalin , travel report 1890 (original title: Остров Сахалин - Ostrov Sakhalin , translated by Gerhard Dick, edited and with notes by Peter Urban ), Diogenes, Zurich 1987, ISBN 3-257-20270-9 .
- Fjodor Michailowitsch Dostojewski : Notes from a house of the dead (original title: Записки из Мёртвого дома - Zapiski iz mertvogo doma , translated by Dieter Pommerenke), construction, Berlin 1983, ISBN 3-351-02304-9 .
- George Kennan : ... and the Tsar is far: Siberia 1885 (original title: Siberia and the Exile System , translated by Ingeborg Gronke, afterword by Helmut Grasshoff). Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1978 DNB 810437686 .
Representations
- Markus Ackeret: In the world of the katorga: the forced labor sentence for political delinquents in the outgoing Tsarist empire (Eastern Siberia and Sakhalin) . Eastern Europe Institute, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-938980-11-8 ( download as PDF, 2.1 MB, 166 pages ).
- Gentes, Andrew Armand: Exile to Siberia, 1590-1822 . Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2008, ISBN 978-0-230-53693-7 .
- Gentes, Andrew Armand: Exile, murder and madness in Siberia, 1823-61 . Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2010, ISBN 978-0-230-27326-9 .
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Baltic Historical Commission - keyword 'Katorga'
- ↑ Жак Росси: Справочник по ГУЛАГу , a publication of the portal memorial.krsk.ru, online at: memorial.krsk.ru/
- ^ Gentes, Andrew Armand: Vagabondage and the Tsarist Siberian exile system: power and resistance in the penal landscape, in: Central Asian Survey 30 (2011), pp. 407-421, here p. 407.
- ↑ Cathrin Meyer zu Hoberge, Penal Colonies - "a matter of the people's welfare"? , ISBN 3-8258-4512-5 , pages 13-14.