Sharashka

Origins

The word 'sharashka' derives from the slang expression 'sharashkina kontora', 'sharashka's office,' roughly meaning a fly-by-night outfit or a shop run by con men. On May 15, 1930, the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy and OGPU issued a secret circular 'On the use in production of specialists convicted of wrecking,' ordering that convicted engineers be put to work inside OGPU premises for military production.

That same year, Leonid Ramzin and others convicted in the Industrial Party Trial formed the first special design bureau under the OGPU. The system was institutionalized in 1938 as the NKVD Department of Special Design Bureaus and expanded dramatically under Beria's 1949 order, which extended sharashka work into civilian R&D.

Notable sharashkas

• TsKB-29 ('Tupolev sharaga'): The largest aviation design bureau, where Andrei Tupolev designed the Tu-2.
• OKB-16 (Kazan): Rocket engine development; Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko worked here.
• Marfino sharashka: Communications and surveillance research; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned here, the setting for his novel In the First Circle.
• Sukhumi atomic sharashka: German scientists brought to the USSR worked on uranium isotope separation.
• Suzdal Intercession Convent: Biological weapons laboratory (BON), holding 19 plague and tularaemia specialists.

Character

Sharashkas were part of the Gulag system, yet living conditions were markedly better than in ordinary camps: laboratories replaced hard labor, and successful work could lead to release. Convict scientists' knowledge was an asset the state could not simply destroy, producing a peculiar institution: prison brain trusts run by the secret police. The system ended with the dissolution of the 4th Special Department after Stalin's death in 1953, though some sharashkas operated for several more years.