How our famous compatriots survived in prisons and camps

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In conditions that kill both body and soul, it is not easy to survive physically and morally. Many of the famous people were helped in this by creativity and intellectual work. The brilliant creations of the human mind are proof of this. The participation of others, the friendship, which began where, it would seem, there was no place for normal relations, also saved. It is difficult to choose as an example just a few of the prison stories that Russian history is so rich in.

Spirit work

As you know, "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow" by NA Radishchev brought the author into arrest, imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he was interrogated by Stepan Sheshkovsky, who was famous for his cruelty. And then a death sentence followed, replaced by a ten-year exile to Siberia.

While still in prison, Radishchev began to work on a book about Saint Philaret the Merciful - in fact, an autobiographical tale, veiled under a kind of non-canon life. There is no doubt that this work gave him the strength to withstand interrogations and the diseases that tormented him in the Peter and Paul Fortress.

In the Ilimsk prison, where Radishchev lived in 1790–1796, he became interested in mining, studied medicinal herbs, inoculated smallpox in peasants, and studied historical documents on the Petrine era.

Another prisoner of Petropavlovka, FM Dostoevsky, sentenced to death in the case of the Petrashevtsy circle and pardoned after staging an execution, was exiled to hard labor in Omsk, where he spent four years: from 1850 to 1854. To save himself in this terrible place, where even correspondence was forbidden, he was helped by a diary - "Siberian Notebook", in which Dostoevsky entered observations and reasoning about the life and customs of convicts and which later formed the basis of "Notes from the House of the Dead".

Russian anarchist Prince P. A. Kropotkin was also an outstanding geographer. Therefore, when in 1874 he found himself in the same Peter and Paul Fortress, Alexander II personally ordered that the scientist prisoner be provided with everything necessary for work.

This is how the "Research on the Ice Age" appeared, where the existence was proved and the locations of the future Kropotkin Barrier, Franz Josef Land and Severnaya Zemlya were named. Thanks to the discoveries of the anarchist geographer, Russia subsequently managed to assert its sovereignty over these polar territories. For the prince himself, mental work helped him morally hold out until the summer of 1876, when he made a daring escape from the prison department of the Nikolaev hospital.

The populist revolutionary N. A. Morozov spent about 30 years in prisons, and almost 25 of them - without interruption, in Petropavlovka, and then in the Shlisselburg fortress, from where he was released under an amnesty in 1905. But later he said: "I was not sitting in the fortress, I was sitting in the Universe."

Days, weeks and months in solitary confinement would merge into dreary timelessness. However, Morozov used them to learn 11 languages and write many works in various fields of science: chemistry, physics and mathematics, astronomy and aviation, philosophy and political economy. In the fortress Morozov developed an alternative historical concept, which, although it was later recognized as anti-scientific, found supporters and followers.

Nikolai Aleksandrovich independently cured himself of a disease typical for prisoners in those days - tuberculosis, which greatly astonished the prison doctors.

Daniel Andreev's mystical and philosophical treatise "The Rose of the World" was created for the most part in Vladimir Prison No. 2, otherwise known as the Vladimir Central. The prose writer and poet, the son of the famous writer L. N. Andreev, was arrested on charges of anti-Soviet activities on April 23, 1947 and released exactly ten years later, day in and day out.

"Rose of the World", published more than 30 years after the death of the author, tells about the history and structure of the Universe and is based on the insights that visited Andreev in prison. To pragmatic people, these insights may seem to be the product of a psyche shaken by adversity, but in any case, the treatise is an interesting and unlike anything literary work.

Human factor

“Elephant was my main university,” wrote Academician DS Likhachev. Of course, there is some bitter joke in these words. Nevertheless, Dmitry Sergeevich quite seriously asserted that his stay in the Solovetsky camp, where he was imprisoned in 1928 for participating in a "counter-revolutionary" student circle, had tempered his character. To survive and not break down spiritually, the young scientist was helped, among other things, by his comrades in misfortune - other "convicts". And these people were very different. The camp criminological office, where Likhachev worked, was headed by A. N. Kolosov, in the past the tsarist prosecutor, former university teachers and even the maid of honor of the empress worked there.

Another company for Likhachev was formed from hardened criminals who bore the nicknames "Snout" and "Apothecary". Together with "Ryl" - the burglar Vanka Komissarov, who once saved Dmitry's life, Likhachev founded an amateur theatrical troupe in the camp.

In 1973, film director and artist Sergei Paradzhanov was sentenced to five years of imprisonment in a strict regime colony under Article 121 of the RSFSR Criminal Code - for "sodomy". Often this article was used for reprisals against people disliked by the authorities for completely different reasons. Probably, the judges expected that the director would not leave the zone alive. And the calculation, most likely, would have been justified if Parajanov had failed to instill respect and sympathy with the rest of the prisoners. He not only entertained the convicts with drawings and handicrafts from improvised material, but also taught them how to draw and craft, read poetry to them aloud.

Once Parajanov's pencils were taken away. Then he began to make "thalers" from milk bottle caps: the foil was filled with resin, and portraits of Peter I, Gogol, Pushkin were applied on it. The colony administration sent several "thalers" to Moscow, hoping to prove that Parajanov had gone mad. But the answer was: "The convict is very talented."

Continuing the story of prisons, the secrets of the world's worst prison located in the middle of a tropical paradise.