A torture memo: Reading violence in the gulag

Abstract

In 1952, Alexander V. Ivanov, a 32 year-old prisoner at the Pechorskii corrective labor camp (Pechorlag) in the Far North, wrote two letters addressed to Lavrenty Beria at the Soviet Council of Ministers. The first was intercepted by a camp official who harassed Ivanov for informing Soviet leaders about the torture of prisoners. Seeing that his petition had been seized, Ivanov wrote again. This time he gave his letter of December 3 to another inmate who, upon his release, smuggled the denunciation out of the camp and ensured that the letter journeyed hundreds of miles to the Kremlin in Moscow. "I was so nave," he wrote, "to view movies about the development of torture in capitalist countries and to rejoice that we had no such thing. But there is torture (pytki) and torment (istiazaniia), and they exist in Pechorlag."2 Ivanov’s petition captured the attention of its addressee. Beria not only read the letter but, on December 8, he gave it to the head of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), S. N. Kruglov, with the following note: "This isn’t the first sign3 [of a problem] from the ITL [corrective labor camp]. Carefully verify the stated facts, take measures against those guilty of these outrageous acts (vinovniki etikh bezobrazii) and report your results."4.