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

Legal Basis and Establishment

The legal foundation of kin punishment lay in Art. 58-1 of the 1926 RSFSR Criminal Code (redaction of 8 July 1934) and subsequent Soviet normative acts; the same article is also cited with the 8 June 1934 redaction date. The 8 June 1934 decree prescribed 5–10 years' imprisonment or five years' exile to remote areas of Siberia for family members living with a traitor or dependent on him, and 5–10 years with confiscation of property for those who knew of a planned escape and failed to report it. The Politburo decision of 5 July 1937 ordered all wives of convicted traitors confined in camps for 5–8 years and instructed the NKVD to organize special camps in the Narym region and the Turgai district of Kazakhstan, with children under 15 taken into state care.

NKVD operational Order No. 00486 of 15 August 1937, signed by Yezhov, ordered the repression of wives of traitors and of members of rightist-Trotskyist spy-sabotage organizations convicted by the Military Collegium and military tribunals from 1 August 1936, on the basis of detailed family files. Wives in de jure or de facto marriage were to be arrested (also divorced wives under specified conditions), while pregnant women, those with infant children, the seriously or contagiously ill and the aged were not arrested immediately, and wives who had exposed their husbands were exempted. Wives received camp terms of not less than 5–8 years by decision of the NKVD Special Conference, and the order initially directed that wives sentenced by the Special Conference serve their terms in the special detachment of the Temnikovsky corrective labor camp. The camp to which the wives of 'traitors' were first assigned was therefore not ALZhIR.

Operation and Scale

The camp was established as a detachment of the Karaganda labor camp (Karlag) in the settlement of Akmol (Malinovka), southwest of Akmolinsk (now Astana), on the basis of the NKVD order of 15 August 1937. It opened at the beginning of 1938 on the base of the 26th labor settlement as corrective-labor camp 'R-17', and echelons began arriving from 10 January 1938 (one account gives 6 January for the first prisoners). Special Settlement No. 26 had been established in 1931 for special settlers deported from Saratov oblast; deportees from Belarus (1932), Crimea (54 families, 1933), Moldova and Ukraine were later brought there, a different legal regime (administrative deportation) from camp imprisonment.

The recorded area of the site is disputed between the sources. ru.wikipedia states that the ALZhIR camp occupied 30 hectares, and a quoted memoir describes '30 hectares of land fenced with two rows of barbed wire'; en.wikipedia gives the total area as 30,000 hectares. These are not the same measurement and neither figure can be treated as settled.

In 1938 the camp held about 8,000 imprisoned women, including 4,500 ChSIR; another ~1,500 ChSIR were held in other Karlag detachments. Over 18,000 ChSIR women were arrested and sent to camps USSR-wide in 1938–1939 under Order 00486, and 25,342 of their children were taken away, so the '18,000' figure and the camp's own population are different statistics. More than 8,000 women were held there during the Great Patriotic War, and an estimated 600 women died in the camp.

The camp's regime was harsher than most Karlag detachments: several rows of barbed wire and guard towers. The first year and a half was a regime of 'special camp detachment' forbidding correspondence and parcels and prohibiting work in one's specialty, though women with needed professions were in practice employed in them; reeds from the lake were used to heat the barracks and for construction. From May 1939 the regime became a 'special restricted mode' allowing prisoners to write to and receive letters from their husbands and children. The climate of the Kazakh steppe was harsh: scorching 40-degree heat and clouds of insects in summer, 40-degree frosts in winter, and year-round steppe winds.

Children were kept in a separate barrack, the 'Mamkin dom' ('Mother's house'), under a nanny who was one of the camp's prisoners; mothers could be with their children after work, and on reaching age three the children were taken to orphanages. 1,507 children were born on its territory over the camp's existence, and from 24 April 1951 Soviet places of confinement began releasing pregnant women and women with children in the camp. This figure is disputed: Caspian Post (2024) attributes the births to guards' sexual violence, while ru.wikipedia and RFE/RL frame them as births in the camp including to pregnant prisoners; neither framing can be presented as settled fact. The camp's construction took from the local population a significant territory containing Kazakh auls and seven settlements with 'European' population (4,861 households, 21,979 people), all resettled to other districts of Karaganda oblast, and part of their livestock was requisitioned. Kazakhs threw the prisoners qurt, dried sour-milk balls, which guards mistook for stones; the women remembered it as an act of humanity (Gertrude Platais' account).

Name and Notable Inmates

The official designation was the '17th special female camp detachment' of the Karaganda ITL, and from 29 December 1939 the 'Akmolinsk detachment of the Karaganda corrective labor camp' (before that formally subordinate directly to GULAG). ALZhIR was a colloquial name used among the inmates, and '26th Point' (26-я точка) was another colloquial name, after the 26th labor settlement where the camp was sited. Inmates included the sister of Marshal Tukhachevsky, Elizaveta Arvatova-Tukhachevskaya; Anna Larina (wife of Bukharin); Yekaterina Kalinina (wife of Kalinin); Rachel Messerer-Plisetskaya (mother of Maya Plisetskaya); Ashkhen Nalbandyan (mother of Bulat Okudzhava); and Shukriyya Akhundzada (wife of Azerbaijani national-anthem lyricist Ahmad Javad), alongside writers such as the Russian Soviet writer Galina Serebryakova.

Closure and Memorialization

In Karlag's history the camp was liquidated at the beginning of 1950, and the 17th Akmolinsk camp detachment was closed in 1953; prisoners did not gain the right to return to their former homes until rehabilitation in 1958. On 31 May 2007 a museum-memorial complex opened near the site on the initiative of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, and memorial signs from 14 countries are installed before its entrance: Poland, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Korea, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Azerbaijan. In 2013 a monument to Korean women political prisoners was unveiled there, the 7th national memorial at the site; of the roughly 17,000 women held there from 1938 to 1953, several hundred were ethnic Koreans. In 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church glorified twelve women prisoners shot by verdict of the Karaganda oblast court at the camp on 20 April 1942 as New Martyrs.

Distinctions

Besides ALZhIR, at least three other 'women's' camps operated in the USSR: Temlyakovsky, 40 km from Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod); Dzhangidzhirsky, 100 km from Frunze (Bishkek); and Temnikovsky, at Potma in Mordovia, where in April 1942 there were 4,867 women prisoners (33.9% of the total), in January 1943 6,204 (41.6%) and in August 1948 4,371 (31.5%). The 26th Special Settlement on which ALZhIR was built had operated since 1931 under administrative deportation, a different legal regime from camp imprisonment. The ChSIR category punished people not guilty of the crimes imputed to others, grossly violating the principle of personal responsibility and guilt, and ran through the NKVD Special Conference rather than the courts.