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Voices beyond the Urals [The discovery of a central State archive*]
No full textGolfo Alexopoulos. Voices beyond the Urals: The discovery of a central state archive. The Center for Preservation of a Reserve Record is an enormous warehouse of state documents located in the western Siberian town of Ialutorovsk. It was built after the death of Stalin as a repository and not an archive, and was closed to researchers until 1992. The Center's primary and unique function is the maintenance and storage of microfilms or back-up copies (strakhovye fondy) of important archival documents from both the Tsarist and Soviet periods. In addition to the microfilms, however, the Center stores a vast collection of original documents, printed material, sound recordings and films which were moved to this remote site from their original storage in various central state archives in Moscow. This study is the first to list the contents of the Center's vast collection, but also seeks to illustrate the importance of the Center's holdings by focusing on a group of documents stored there, the case files and individual petitions of the lishentsy or the disenfranchised from the 1920s and 1930s. A systematic sampling of these petitions can help historians to explore a variety of new questions, such as the victim's response to repression and the ways in which political membership was contested and constructed in the new Soviet state.Golfo Alexopoulos. Des voix au delà de l'Oural : découverte d 'archives centrales d 'État. Le Centre de Conservation des Fonds de Sécurité (Centr Hranenija Strahovogo Fonda — CHSF) est un immense entrepôt de documents d'État situé dans la ville de Jalutorovsk en Sibérie occidentale. Construit comme tel à la mort de Stalin et non en tant que collection d'archives, il demeura fermé aux historiens jusqu'en 1992. Il sert uniquement au stockage et à l'entretien des microfilms ou des copies (strahovye fondy) d'importants documents d'archives des périodes tsariste et soviétique. Le Centre contient en outre une très grande collection d'originaux, publications, enregistrements sonores et films en provenance de différentes archives centrales d'État de Moscou. Cette étude dresse le premier inventaire du contenu de la vaste collection du Centre et cherche également à démontrer l'importance de son fonds en se concentrant sur un groupe de documents qui y sont conservés, à savoir les dossiers et les pétitions individuelles des lišency, ces personnes privées de leurs droits, entre les années 1920 et 1930. Un échantillonnage systématique de ces pétitions peut aider l'historien à explorer toute une série de questions nouvelles telles que la façon dont les victimes répondaient à la répression ou la façon dont l'adhésion politique se construisait et comment elle était contestée dans le nouvel État soviétique.Alexopoulos Golfo. Voices beyond the Urals [The discovery of a central State archive*]. In: Cahiers du monde russe : Russie, Empire russe, Union soviétique, États indépendants, vol. 40, n°1-2, Janvier-juin 1999. Archives et nouvelles sources de l'histoire soviétique, une réévaluation Assessing the new Soviet archival sources. pp. 199-215
Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin’s outcasts
Get PDFCet ouvrage est consacré à une étude détaillée des lišency, catégorie de population qui perdit ses droits civiques à la suite d’une série de décisions fluctuantes prises après la révolution. Il s’agit d’une recherche extrêmement approfondie, fondée sur une multitude de dossiers personnels, contenant en particulier les demandes adressées aux autorités par les lišency pour obtenir la révision de leur situation et la restauration de leurs droits. Les lišency étaient considérés, en effet, comme «..
Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin’s outcasts
No full textCet ouvrage est consacré à une étude détaillée des lišency, catégorie de population qui perdit ses droits civiques à la suite d’une série de décisions fluctuantes prises après la révolution
Epilogue
No full textThis concluding chapter examines the ways in which the Gulag was able to hide its true nature from the public eye. For most of its existence, the Gulag had operated under a heavy veil of secrecy. Routine silences and distortions made it possible for the violent exploitation to persist for decades. The chapter looks at the Gulag's methods of concealing information outright, as well as the manipulation of facts which did enter the public eye. Some of these methods are efficient enough to make present-day investigations into the Gulag rather challenging. In addition, the chapter also briefly discusses the gradual dismantling of Stalin's labor camp system, which began with the large-scale release of the Gulag's majority prisoner population.</p
Food
No full textThis chapter focuses on the ways in which the Stalinist regime willfully denied food to many prisoners and created an institution of mass starvation. Working citizens were an important part of the Communist regime, and this emphasis on labor was clearly stated in the popular slogan, “Whoever does not work, shall not eat!” The Stalinist regime took this Soviet work ethic to extremes by making hunger both an incentive in the Gulag and a punishment. The most productive earned more food, but they had to exert themselves more to receive more, and the Gulag ration was not sufficient to compensate for energy expended. The Stalinist leadership thus created a punitive and inadequate feeding system by design, which willfully starved less productive prisoners.</p
Prisoners
No full textThis chapter describes the kinds of prisoners the Gulag mostly employed and how they were perceived in the Gulag system. Contrary to popular belief, the majority of prisoners in Stalin's labor camps and colonies were not intellectuals, former communists, perceived spies and saboteurs, or other “counterrevolutionaries.” Most were ordinary workers and peasants, largely ethnic Russian and less educated, who had been arrested for routine Soviet crimes, such as workplace infractions, speculation, theft, or internal passport violations. This prisoner profile satisfied the Gulag's need for prisoners who could perform heavy physical labor. Bolshevik ideology made productive labor the defining feature of the Soviet citizen. This produced a system of values wherein the stronger represented the morally superior. In this worldview, frail and sick individuals constituted an inferior population.</p
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