Historia provinciae: журнал региональной истории (Dec 2023)
Camps for Prisoners of the Lithuanian-Soviet and Polish-Soviet Wars in the Territory of the RSFSR (1918–1922)
Abstract
The article is devoted to the study of the concentration camps and forced labor camps that contained prisoners of the Lithuanian-Soviet and Polish-Soviet wars in the territory of the RSFSR in the period from 1918 to 1922. As the main source base of this study, clerical and statistical materials were used: reports, returns, interdepartmental correspondence, materials of camp inspections; documents of the Main Directorate of Forced Labor, the Polish Department established under the political directorate of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, and the Polish Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(b). In addition, the article used the data obtained from personal petitions and collective statements of prisoners of war of various kinds. The article retraces the evolution of the camp system starting from the period of the First World War. With the establishment of Soviet power and the global change in the vector of domestic policy, a new camp structure was formed, which was transferred from the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs to the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the RSFSR. The updated camp system concentrated prisoners of the First World War, prisoners of the Civil War, prisoners of the new military campaigns in the Baltic states and Poland, and class enemies of the Soviet regime. Thus, the distinction between the concepts “prisoner of war” and “prisoner” inside concentration camps was unclear during the first years of the Soviet rule. The representatives of these categories were often held in the camps together and there were no differences in their custodial control and labor use. It was only by 1920–21 that the RSFSR had begun the process of concentrating the category of prisoners of war into separate camps and giving them an independent status. During the years of existence of the camp system of the NKVD of the RSFSR, about 40,000 prisoners of war from the Baltic states and Poland passed through it, of whom about 35,000 people were repatriated, and about 3,000 stayed in the RSFSR for various reasons.
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