Stolypin wagon

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Modern Stolypin wagon for transporting prisoners (2009)

A Stolypin wagon ( Russian столыпинский вагон ), or Stolypin for short , is a railway carriage from Russia . These wagons were named after the Russian statesman Pyotr Arkadjewitsch Stolypin .

As part of Stolypin's agrarian reform at the time of the Russian Empire , farmers who were supposed to open up Siberia for agriculture were transported to their destination in these railroad cars. The Stolypin wagons consisted of an area that was intended to accommodate the people to be transported, including the farmer and his family, and an area in which the livestock and agricultural equipment could be accommodated.

Prisoner cells in a museum Stolypin wagon (2012)

After the October Revolution of 1917, the wagons were used for a different purpose: Since they could comfortably transport large numbers of prisoners , they were used from this time to transport convicts on a large scale to the remote Gulag penal camps in Siberia. After renovation work, the guards have now been housed in the passenger area, and the area for cattle transport has been converted into cells. The occupants in the converted trains were often only given small cells with minimal freedom of movement, in which it was often not even possible to stand upright. Many reports from former Gulag prisoners deal with the transport by Stolypin wagon. Among other portrays Alexander Solzhenitsyn such inhuman prisoner transports in his work The Gulag Archipelago .

To this day, Stolypin wagons are still being used in Russia to transport convicts, a fact that many human rights organizations regularly complain about. The wagons currently in use are manufactured in Tver as model 614500 and are regularly manned by two train drivers and eight prison guards, the maximum prisoner capacity is 75 people in nine cells without windows.

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