Historia provinciae: журнал региональной истории (Dec 2022)
Social portrait of persons mobilized for labor in the forced labor camps of the Urals, 1941–1946
Abstract
Since 2000, the Laboratory of Historical Informatics of Nizhny Tagil State Socio-Pedagogical Institute has been working on the project “Gedenkbuch: Book of Memory of the Repressed Russian Germans.” Within the framework of the project, collective monographs on the corrective labor camps (ITLs) of the Urals were published and an electronic database of about 100 000 persons was created based on the materials of record files of forced labor camps. The purpose of this article is to familiarize readers with the results of the comparative analysis of social portrait of the persons mobilized for labor in several camps in the Urals according to the generally accepted parameters related to the contents of the primary source, the latter being registration cards of special contingent in the archives of law enforcement agencies. Archival sources of the corrective labor camps of the Gulag and electronic databases that were compiled in the process of preparing the Books of Memory in the period from 1999 to 2021 constitute the information basis for creating a social portrait of repression victims and comparative analysis. The conceptual apparatus of new social history, prosopographical and historical comparative methods as well as methods of historical informatics are the main methodological tools of the research. The sources, dynamics and stages of the intake of persons mobilized for labor were determined; the range of nationalities that made up this contingent was identified, age and sex, place of birth, social origin, level of education, party affiliation, employment before mobilization were analyzed as well as causes and level of departure from the camp and mortality rate; the percentage of the arrested and convicted was established; the dynamics of demobilization and release from labor camps was traced. As a result of the study, the specific features of social portrait were revealed depending on the place, time, and production purpose of the camp. The composition of the special contingent of all camps was complex. It was represented by such categories as prisoners, persons mobilized for labor duty, prisoners of war, and internees. Numerically, prisoners and labor armyists predominated. Despite the special status of labor armyists, which was intended to somehow alleviate their situation, all of them were engaged in forced labor in the conditions of the camp regime together with the rest of special contingent. The labor of free employees constituted an insignificant percentage in the construction of industrial facilities and timber harvsting. The article focuses on the reconstruction of the social portrait of the persons mobilized for labor duty in certain labor camps of the Urals. The solution of this problem made it possible to reveal the generalized characteristics of the social portrait of labor armyists as a whole. Main socio-demographic characteristics of this category of special contingent are associated with Russian Germans and practically coincide with the results of the 1939 census. However, a fundamentally important difference is that our observations focus not on the German national minority within the USSR but on Russian Germans as a part of special contingent of forced labor camps. In accordance with this task, generalized characteristics of the persons mobilized for labor duty were revealed. The significance of the study is determined by the introduction into the historiographical circulation of prosopographical databases that were combined on the basis of comparative analysis.
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