THE ESTABLISHMENT OF SOVIET “SHARASHKAS” IN THE EARLY 1930S: REASONS, INSTITUTIONS, PERSONS

Abstract

The problematic field of such a specific segment of forced labor as specialist design, technical departments and project bureaus which were created and operated under the OGPU auspices in the first half of the 1930s requires reinterpretation of its canonical research approaches. The paper considers the specific factors of the emergence of “sharashkas” network as an institutional manifestation and the result of stepped-up conservative subordination and forced exploitation by the Stalinist regime of the intellectual potential of the brainpower. The evolvement of the Special Bureaus was the embodiment of the basic characteristics of a mobilization-type campaign (the construct of “sabotage”, extraordinary measures of implementation, extensity, resource intensiveness, strife, unintended consequences). Throughout 1930–1934 imprisoned specialists became an object, a special accounting category and a target group for bureaucratic inter-agency negotiating between security and economic departments, and their deliverables were expropriated. The paradox of the full regime dependence of specialists on chekists and the inverse dependence of the latter on the results of the prisoners’ activities is observed. It is concluded that the established hybrid institution of regime labor comprised of all types of coexisting labor activity — service, compulsory, mobilization, forced — had no functional stability, prospects and capacity for selfdevelopment. An exception was the considered case of the creation of Design Bureau № 11 initiated by L. K. Ramzin, rearranged in 1934 into the Bureau of once-through boiler construction, which worked until the end of the Stalin era.