ALZhIR (Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland)

Background

NKVD Order No. 00486 of August 15, 1937 institutionalized the arrest and imprisonment of ChSIR, 'members of the family of a traitor to the Motherland.' During the Great Terror, wives and children of men arrested and executed as 'enemies of the people' were themselves sentenced to 5–10 years. Opened as the 17th special female detachment of the Karaganda corrective labor camp (Karlag), ALZhIR received its first prisoners in January 1938 on a 30,000-hectare site near Malinovka (now Tonkeris) in the Akmola region of Kazakhstan.

Scale and Conditions

Over the camp's existence, approximately 18,000 women passed through it, about 8,000 served full sentences, and roughly 4,500 held ChSIR status. During the first year and a half of 'special camp regime,' correspondence and parcels were forbidden and professional work was prohibited. Conditions eased to 'special restricted mode' in May 1939. Inmates lived in adobe barracks heated with reeds cut from a nearby lake, worked 12–14 hours a day in agriculture and construction, and were fed thin porridge and a slice of black bread. Some 1,507 children were born in the camp; infants were kept in a separate 'Mother's House' barracks under a prisoner-nanny and sent to orphanages at age three.

Name

The official designation was the 17th Akmolinsk special female camp detachment of Karlag, but inmates coined the acronym ALZhIR, Akmolinskiy Lager Zhen Izmennikov Rodiny (Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland). The acronym spelled 'Algeria' in Russian, a bitter irony the women remarked on. Another colloquial name was 'the 26th Point' (26-я точка), after the 26th labor settlement where the camp was sited.

Notable Inmates

Prisoners included the sister of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Anna Larina (wife of Nikolai Bukharin), Yekaterina Kalinina (wife of Mikhail Kalinin), Rachel Messerer (mother of ballerina Maya Plisetskaya), Ashkhen Nalbandyan (mother of poet Bulat Okudzhava), wives of Kazakh writers Saken Seifullin and Beimbet Mailin, and Shukriyya Akhundzada, wife of Azerbaijani national anthem lyricist Ahmad Javad.

Closure and Memorialization

The camp was closed after Stalin's death in 1953, though prisoners were barred from returning to their former homes until rehabilitation in 1958. On May 31, 2007, a museum-memorial complex for victims of political repression and totalitarianism opened near the site at the initiative of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. An 18-meter 'Arch of Sorrow' stands at the entrance, and 14 countries, including Korea, have erected memorials. In 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church canonized twelve women prisoners executed at the camp in 1942 as New Martyrs.