Both during the First World War and during the Great Patriotic War, prisoners of Russian and Soviet penitentiaries wrote petitions to send to the front. However, contrary to popular belief, they were very rarely satisfied. Tatyana Polyanskaya, senior researcher at the Gulag Museum, explained how prisoners arrived at the front at this time as part of the Hour of Speak program.
Were prisoners sent into combat during the First World War?
Historians who more or less dealt with this issue testify that military departments and ministries received many requests for pardon from prisoners with requests to send them to the front, including from representatives of the nobility. For example, people like Vladimir Leto-Mikhailovsky, who was imprisoned in a fortress in Blagoveshchensk for falsifying school documents. He writes in his petition that he has experience of serving in the army – which is not surprising, since all noble children have been there.
It would seem that this prevented him from being sent to the front. But a resolution was written on his request: “to leave without consequences”, and even the postscript “to deprive him of his military rank”. That is, they decided to go even further and remembered that it turns out that he was not deprived of it.
Soldiers on the battlefield in the First World WarTASS
The petitions of individual peasants who were under investigation for theft are known. For example, a peasant writes that the investigator does not have enough evidence against him and demands that the case against him be closed and that he atone for his guilt at the front with blood.
All of this was tied to the 1914 patriotic push at the start of the war. At the same time, literally isolated cases are known when such requests have been granted.
I think the supreme power was very frightened by the most powerful revolutionary movement that was developing in the country.
We know that the 1905 revolution did not solve the main problems of the Russian Empire. The State Duma was convened, but Nicholas II repeatedly dispersed it. In fact, they are coups d’etat, because he did not act according to the law.
Therefore, the authorities were afraid to send former prisoners to the army. A work of agitation and propaganda was already beginning to be done there, especially among those who had arrived at the front. People from the environment of the proletariat who worked in the factories and factories joined the revolutionary circles, and here too the former political prisoners would continue their work with the military masses.
Moreover, the number of prisoners was not so large. The statistics tell us of 157,000 people. If we exclude murderers, thieves and bandits, there are not so many left. For them, perhaps, it would be necessary to form a kind of separate military units, where these people would go, but why?
What was the situation of prisoners at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War
On June 22, 1941, the Great Patriotic War began. A joint directive of People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Lavrenty Beria and USSR Prosecutor Bychkov is issued. It prescribed that those convicted of particularly dangerous state crimes should not be released from the camps, even if their prison term had ended. The directive applied to those serving time for counter-revolutionary crimes, banditry, robbery, murder, etc.
In addition, it was forbidden to send parcels and correspondence with Gulag prisoners. This is a very important point, and it will later affect the death rate in the camps during the war years.
TASS
We have in our archives many camp letters sent home by prisoners. Most of the time they write about food – they say, please send onions, bread, millet, whatever. It was almost impossible to survive on the camp rations. The cancellation of packages immediately leads to catastrophic mortality in the camps. During the existence of the Gulag from 1930 to 1956, 2 million people died. Of these, the years of the Great Patriotic War counted one million (mainly in 1942-43).
In 1943, the authorities came to their senses a little. The war drags on, the economy of the Gulag is on a war footing. To execute the plan, it was necessary to feed the prisoners, and therefore parcels were allowed again.
At the beginning of the war, already on June 22, many convicts of counter-revolutionary crimes began to write petitions to the head of the camp and above with a request to let them go to the front. They are all denied.
In general, being sent to the front was a great privilege. Entering the camp, especially for the most ordinary ordinary person who did not come from the criminal underworld, was a terrible shock. It’s a particular world, a particular daily life with its own laws, with its own morality, even with its own language, to which it was difficult for him to adapt. In order to survive, one had to break the self-approved standards of morality and ethics.
So, of course, people were looking to go where it was possible to feel like a person, a person. It could be done in the army. There is a commander above you, you are a soldier, but the level of relations is always different from that of the camp, where you are nobody and nothing at all. And if you die, at least you’ll know why.
Did prisoners fight during the Great Patriotic
In 1941, the Supreme Soviet issued two decrees, one on July 12 and the other on November 24. The first decree provided for the liberation of camps located in territories under martial law. The second has expanded its list.
Certain categories of people have been released. These are first of all pregnant women or women with young children, as well as women sentenced to short sentences for official and economic offences. After the liberation, the men subject to mobilization, of course, went to fight in ordinary rifle units.
Semi-criminal elements also found their way to the front. Authorities found loopholes not to, but for ordinary thieves and pickpockets there were no such options.
In general, prisoners could write a petition to send to the front, but each case was considered individually. Doomed for political reasons, too, of course, wrote them, but mostly without success. According to the November 24 decree, those with some combat experience or former military personnel were also subject to release. In this case, their cases were also considered individually.
One can cite the example of the writer Vladimir Vasilievich Karpov, who was convicted under Article 58 (treason) and who was previously the editor of the magazine Novy Mir. He was released from the camp. As he himself says, a separate unit was formed from the volunteers, who ended up in the military registration and enlistment offices. From there, many of them were sent to the front. Karpov was cleared of his criminal record, he became the commander of a reconnaissance company and later received the title Hero of the Soviet Union. Such cases were not isolated.
Leonid Dorensky / TASS
Murderers and bandits were extremely rarely released. Although, for example, Yevgeny Vesnik remembers that when he was for some time the commander of a penal unit, he ordered former prisoner Vasily Kuznetsov to eliminate an enemy firing point. He did, and as proof, according to his own ideas, he brought a machine gun and the head of a German, so that they would believe him. Vesnik presented him with the Order of Glory.
Why did the crime rate soar after the war?
Several factors could play a role here. Indeed, the prisoners who were released from the camps and sent to the front, and then returned from the war, merged with Soviet society and became free.
On the other hand, a large number of men returned home, often young, who after these years survived because they shot well. Psychologically, no one worked with them. The country was in ruins, they had to feed their families and their children. They needed to find a job.
Don’t forget that these people had the psychology of a winner. So he came back, survived, his whole chest is in orders and medals, but there’s nowhere to work. Do not approach him as concierges or drivers. Often, in order to survive, they started stealing or engaging in other illegal activities.
As for the directly criminal elements, the thieves who engaged in theft, they returned to society and were usually again confused with the old ones and ended up in camps. And the criminals, who did not fight, began to fight those who fought and thus betrayed the law of thieves, starting to serve the state.
Of course, there were plenty of guns in the country and people who knew how to use them. All this has contributed to the increase in the number of crimes.
The opinion of the author may not coincide with the opinion of the editors.
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