Soviet Gulag record cards ‘destroyed by secret decree’

ACTIVISTS have accused the Russian government of erasing Gulag victims from history after it was revealed that agencies were destroying Soviet prisoner records under a secret decree.

The director of Moscow’s Gulag museum complained to Mikhail Fedotov, the head of Vladimir Putin’s human rights council, that the interior ministry has been destroying cards containing the names of those repressed.

The Soviet obsession with bureaucracy meant that careful records were kept even as judges convicted millions of people to be shot or sent to the Gulag in trials lasting mere minutes.

But it has emerged that a secret 2014 decree signed by 11 government agencies allows officials to dispose of a prisoner’s card after his or her 80th birthday. This applies to a huge number of victims, as Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge began in 1936.

In response to a researcher’s request for information about the Gulag sentence of Fyodor Chazov in the far eastern Magadan region, the interior ministry there said his archive card had been destroyed and noted the decree’s stipulations.

Sergei Prudovsky, the researcher, told AFP yesterday he had contacted authorities in Magadan, where Soviet prisoners once mined gold, and “found out absolutely by chance record cards were destroyed” under an “official order” from 2014.

While President Putin’s government glorifies some of it’s Soviet history, like the space race, other elements are not. Yury Dmitriyev, a leading Gulag researcher was arrested in 2016 on child porn charges that many thought were motivated by his controversial work and politics. After public outcry, Mr Dmitriyev was not convicted on these charges, but still faces prison time.