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Handmade "Lyubochka" doll, Potma Camp (Mordovian ASSR), 1941.

The prisoner Alexandra Stogova made the doll for herself as a reminder of her daughter. While she herself was imprisoned in the camp, her daughter volunteered to fight at the front and earned various high distinctions. A. Stogova (1899-1981), Russian jurist and philologist, sentenced in 1938 to five years of forced labour, camp in the Mordovian ASSR.

Source: "Memorial" Collection, Moscow.

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Handmade "Lyubochka" doll, Potma Camp (Mordovian ASSR), 1941.

The prisoner Alexandra Stogova made the doll for herself as a reminder of her daughter. While she herself was imprisoned in the camp, her daughter volunteered to fight at the front and earned various high distinctions. A. Stogova (1899-1981), Russian jurist and philologist, sentenced in 1938 to five years of forced labour, camp in the Mordovian ASSR.

Source: "Memorial" Collection, Moscow.

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Handmade "Lyubochka" doll, Potma Camp (Mordovian ASSR), 1941.

The prisoner Alexandra Stogova made the doll for herself as a reminder of her daughter. While she herself was imprisoned in the camp, her daughter volunteered to fight at the front and earned various high distinctions. A. Stogova (1899-1981), Russian jurist and philologist, sentenced in 1938 to five years of forced labour, camp in the Mordovian ASSR.

Source: "Memorial" Collection, Moscow.

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Handmade "Lyubochka" doll, Potma Camp (Mordovian ASSR), 1941.

The prisoner Alexandra Stogova made the doll for herself as a reminder of her daughter. While she herself was imprisoned in the camp, her daughter volunteered to fight at the front and earned various high distinctions. A. Stogova (1899-1981), Russian jurist and philologist, sentenced in 1938 to five years of forced labour, camp in the Mordovian ASSR.

Source: "Memorial" Collection, Moscow.

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View from the interior of a barrack, embroidery by an anonymous female inmate of a "corrective labour camp", Inta (Vorkuta Region), late 1940s.

Source: "Memorial" Collection, Moscow.

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Liberties and Contact to the Outside World

The inmates' will to live was dependent primarily on two factors: contact to one's family and the existence of at least a small degree of privacy.

Inmates sought modest liberties to counter the rigorous organization of camp life. The crafting of objects by hand helped to preserve a minimum of individuality. Religious faith could also help maintain mental stability. Sometimes friendships or romances developed. Inmates were rarely granted the chance to receive visits from their families. The receipt of letters and packages was of vital importance. The chief administration of camps strictly regulated postal traffic and limited it more and more as the years went on.

What and how did prisoners tell their families about their experiences?

Letter from the prisoner Sofiya Kandalova

Letter from the prisoner Sofiya Kandalova to her family on a piece of cloth smuggled out of the camp. Camp in the Tayshet Region, 1939

S. Kandalova (1902-1940), arrested in 1938 as the wife of a "traitor to the Fatherland" and assigned to five years of forced labour without trial; initially imprisoned in Temnikovsk Camp (Mordovian ASSR), later in the Tayshet Region; died in the camp in 1940

Source: "Memorial" Collection, Moscow

Translation of the letter

"[...] in those camps we all lived like members of a family, and nothing was lost. But now I'm in an ordinary camp where all kinds of things happen. Here it is more difficult to live and work. The workday is ten hours, there it was only eight. I don't know where I will work yet, they rounded up a lot of nurses, but there isn't work for all of us. I'll probably have to do general work [...]."

Report by Johanna Harms

[...] but the guards had keen eyes. What would happen if they discovered one of the pages?

Report by Johanna Harms, 1982 (1:30 min.) in German

J. Harms (1908–1979), went to work for the Christoffel Mission for the Blind in Tabriz (Iran) in 1937, Soviet occupation of Tabriz in 1941; sentence to ten years of forced labour, imprisonment from 1942 to 1952 in Temnikovsk “corrective labour camp” (Mordovian ASSR), released in 1952, banished to Aralsk (Kazakhstan), departure for the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955

Source: Johanna Harms, Im finstern Tal. Erinnerungen aus dem Lagerleben in Russland, Hermannsburg, 1982