Features of evacuation of prisoners in the initial period of the Great Patriotic War

The issue of the evacuation of persons belonging to the special contingent during the Great Patriotic War was unavailable for a long time due to the inability to access the NKVD documents. The situation changed in the post-Soviet period after the declassification of the Gulag documentation, when scientists were able to thoroughly study the problem of moving prisoners in the general evacuation process. Consideration of this topic in the context of social and micro-history allows us to shift the focus from the economic dimension of evacuation processes to the motives and behavior of people in the extreme conditions of forced relocation. The examples cited by the authors confirm the thesis that evacuation was not a well-organized and well-regulated process and the plans for it changed during the war. Obviously, relocation of prisoners was not a priority task of the Soviet government, but it could not afford wasteful negligence of the potential labor opportunities that a colossal number of prisoners could offer. One of the serious problems was a significant number of prisons and corrective labor camps in the European part of the USSR’s territory that was occupied by the enemy in the first months of the war. The effectiveness of evacuation was more dependent on the actions of the local leadership of penitentiary institutions and the NKVD than on the directives of the central government. Specific features of evacuation of prisoners include restriction of freedom and being under escort at the time of transportation, which led to significant losses, for example, during the enemy air raids, as well as spontaneous character of providing food and medical care and lack of prospects for prisoners to change their social status and position at the place of their new location. To reduce the number of evacuated prisoners, at the beginning of the war the authorities went to the length of releasing those prisoners who were convicted of minor crimes (usually sentenced to 1 year or less). During the evacuation, the guards used extreme measures against the escorted prisoners, up to execution, most often in situations when further movement was difficult. Determining the exact number of prisoners who died during evacuation remains an open question.

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