Country: Russia

Group: Udmurt

Date Finalized: 4/21/2022

Team: Ryan Oakley (lead), Laura Haas, Rayna, Castillo, Gayle Deneb Bobadilla

Content Warning: slavery, discrimination, ethnocide, physical violence

Approximate Time Period: 1920-1940

            During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalinist repressions sent many Udmurts into the gulag system, which has a well established history of using forced labor.

            As part of a forced Christianization campaign in the 18th century, Czarist authorities banned the largely animist Udmurts from working in ironworks facilities and limited them to agricultural jobs.  Although this ban forced Udmurts to stay on their farms, it saved them from the ironworks, a work system tantamount to slavery. However, this ban denied the Udmurts an opportunity to modernize and played an important role, by forcing them to remain farmers, in the Stalinist repressions to come (Holland, 2014).

            In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Stalinist regime had become suspicious of agricultural workers and considered Udmurts “kulaks” (A pejorative Stalinist term that the regime often used against any and all agricultural workers.) Communist authorities rapidly collectivized Udmurt farms. Under a brutal program of “dekulakisation”, officials deported many Udmurts into the gulag system. As part of this collectivization, the Regional Executive Committee decided that the state should use “kulaks” for woodcutting and railroad work (Gabbas, 2017).

            The Stalinist regime also murdered or deported almost the entire Udmurt Intelligentsia, decimating the educated portion of Udmurt society. In 1937, authorities arrested and sent the first Udmurt novelist, Kedra Mitrei, into the gulag system, either to a gulag in Novosibirsk in Western Siberia (Holland, 2014) or to a gulag in Magadan (Wikipedia, 2021). Novosibirsk was a large urban center that hosted many of the Siberian labor camps (Bell, 2013). Magadan was a massive labor camp that used slave labor to mine gold (Nordlander, 1998).

            Presently, it’s unclear whether factories or farms target Udmurts for use as slave labor but there are worrying signs that residents of Udmurtia remain vulnerable to such abuses. In 2021, unknown persons in Moscow abducted a resident of Udmurtia, Ivan Yakolev, and enslaved him in a brick factory. After escaping the factory, he was offered a job as a shepherd then again forced into slavery on that farm (The Caucasian Knot, 2021).

            Data Quality: 2/3: While forced labor in the gulag system is well established and the deportation of Udmurts into that system is documented with reputable and scholarly sources, there is a shortage of specific evidence about what occurred to these Udmurts while in the gulags.

Sources

  1. Bell, W. T. (2013). Was the Gulag an Archipelago? De-Convoyed Prisoners and Porous Borders in the Camps of Western Siberia. The Russian Review (Stanford, 72(1), 116–141. https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.10683
  2. Gabbas, M. (2017). Udmurt Soil Upturned: Collectivisation in Soviet Udmurtia at the Turn of the 1930s [Central European University]. https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/gabbas_marco.pdf
  3. Holland, A. (2014, March 27). Trends in Soviet and Post-Soviet Udmurt Cultural Memory. GeoHistory. https://geohistory.today/cultural-memory-trends-udmurt/
  4. Nordlander, D. J. (1998). Origins of a Gulag Capital: Magadan and Stalinist Control in the Early 1930s. Slavic Review, 57(4), 791–812. https://doi.org/10.2307/2501047
  1. The Caucasian Knot. (2021, August 2). Resident of Udmurtia freed from labour slavery in Dagestan. Caucasian Knot. https://www.eng.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/56311/
  2. Wikipedia. (2021). Kedra Mitrei. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kedra_Mitrei