The excessive everyday life of the GULAG special settlements in 1933: the Siberian dimension

The review is devoted to the documentary collection “Special (labor) settlements of Western Siberia in 1933: everyday life of the commandant’s settlements, the Nazi tragedy,” compiled by S.A. Krasilnikov and O.V. Filippenko. It publishes more than 80 documents, full of valuable information about the intentions and results of the exile settlement policy. Documents identified in the State Archive of the Novosibirsk Region, the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation and the Central Archive of the FSB of Russia paint a vivid picture of the unsuccessful penal colonization of the Narym north in the early 1930s. This was an unexpected result for the authorities of efforts to cleanse the cities of the central part of the country and border areas from “déclassé elements.” The documents provide an opportunity to look into the everyday life of two worlds of a special settlement – peasant and urban “déclassé”. It follows from them that constant “excesses,” despite their obvious costs, acted as a routine accompaniment of the most important management actions. The central government considered countless “ordinary” criminal actions on the ground (illegal arrests, expulsions, confiscations against peasants and all kinds of “former people”) as necessary, designed to push the layers unnecessary to socialism to the margins of life. A closed hierarchical system based on the directives of the center gave rise to and developed the arbitrariness of the performers, embodied in published documents.