Intourist: The state travel agency of the Soviet Union. Founded in 1929 by Joseph Stalin and run by NKVD officials, its purpose was to control foreigners’ access to Soviet territory and travel within the state. In 1933, it merged with the Soviet state company Hotel, adding hotels, restaurants, and transportation to its services.
Ispravdom: Meaning “house of correction” in Russian, ispravdom referred to any of the correctional facilities, prisons, and labor camps that the Soviets set up in order to carry out penitentiary sentences. Although the Soviet Penal Code envisaged forced labor not as a punishment but as a means to reform the individual, in practice, the labor camps proved to be extermination facilities. The Gorky labor camp, built for eight hundred inmates, housed 3,461 prisoners in 1932. This increase was due first to the long preventative prison sentences meted out; second to the fact that sentences were determined according to the type of offense, rather than its magnitude, so that a sentence for the theft of hundreds of rubles was the same as for stealing five; and third to the mass influx of prisoners from other parts of the state. In time, the attempts to instill civic-mindedness among the inmates through education and labor policies (in 1932, in the Gorky ispravdom, the state provided 760 newspaper and 110 journal subscriptions, instruction to 350 illiterates, and vocational training to 263 inmates who requested it) gradually gave way to mass transfers by the OGPU of political prisoners to the forced labor camps, known as gulags. These were mostly located on the Siberian steppes, where the extreme weather, food shortages, disease, and hard labor decimated the prisoner population. The total number of documented deaths in the correctional labor camps and colonies from 1934 to 1953 stands at 1,053,829. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the historian and Nobel literature laureate, estimated that the Bolsheviks murdered some 70 million people, excluding those killed in war, a further 44 million—a total of 114 million people from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 to Stalin’s death in 1953. Just in the year from 1937 to 1938, more than 1.3 million people were sentenced to death.
NEP: The New Economic Policy was proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who defined it as state capitalism. The state continued to control foreign trade, the banks, and heavy industry, but allowed some private enterprises and businesses to be established. The decree of 1921 required farmers to hand over a certain quantity of their produce to the government as a tax in kind. Other decrees perfected the policy and expanded it to include some industrial enterprises. The New Economic Policy was abolished and replaced by Stalin’s first five-year plan in 1928.
Prohibition: The term commonly used to denote the ban on the manufacture, importation, and sale of alcoholic beverages, in force in the United States from January 17, 1920, to December 5, 1933. Since the law did not penalize consumption, people found ways to continue drinking alcohol, whether through the lucrative black market, or by collecting prescriptions authorizing the use of alcohol for medical purposes.
Sabotage: In 1928, the OGPU launched its first major anti-sabotage operation in the Donbass, implicating eleven operational managers and 20 percent of the engineers and technicians. Most of them were sentenced to death. Thereafter, the secret police centered its attention on the more than two thousand members of the Industrial Party (Prompartiia), trying its leaders in 1930. Most of its members were incarcerated. Foreign workers were a common target of these accusations. In 1934, Andrey Vyshinsky, the state prosecutor, was forced to issue an order to stop the local prosecutors from making scapegoats of the factories’ engineers and managers because production was being affected. The detained technicians were sent to sharashkas, laboratories staffed by prisoners under the strict control of the secret police within the Fourth Special Department of the NKVD. Previously termed Experimental Design Bureau, they received more than a thousand scientists, engineers, and technicians who worked in them, chained to drawing boards.
Torgsin: The Russian acronym of torgovlia s inostrantsami, meaning “trade with foreigners.” The term referred to the network of state-run stores where foreigners could buy goods that were banned or restricted for Soviet citizens. These products included food and other rationed essentials, as well as luxury items. Although the vast majority of the customers of these stores were foreigners, their products could also be sold to Soviets, provided that they paid in jewels, gold, or dollars, since the purpose of these establishments was to obtain hard currency for the state. This led to the development of a black market for currency as a means to gain access to restricted goods.
Working hours: From 1929 to 1931, in the Soviet Union the weeks were changed from seven to five days. Sunday, the traditional Christian day of rest, was eliminated, and instead, workers were organized into five groups, each assigned a roman numeral (I to V) or a color (yellow, pink, red, purple, and green), with each group allocated a different day of the week to rest. A year consisted of seventy-two five-day weeks plus an additional period of five public vacations, making a total of 365 days. The change was intended to improve productivity and working conditions. A working week consisted of four days on and one day off. In 1931, the week was changed to six days, a system later abandoned to return to the seven-day week in June 1940. The working day was eight hours, including a one-hour lunch break.
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