Katorga

Kátorga (ка́торга, from Greek: katergon, galley, or from Tatar: katargá, to die) was a penal system in Russia Imperial. Prisoners were sent to remote camps in the vast uninhabited areas of Siberia and subjected to a regime of forced labor. It began to be applied in the XVII century and after the fall of the Russian Empire it was continued by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution of 1917 with the Gulag until its abolition in 1960.^{[citation needed]}

Unlike concentration camps, the kátorga belonged to the judicial system of Imperial Russia, but both share the same main characteristics: confinement, very simple facilities (in which they differ from prisons) and forced labor, usually labor heavy that require little or very little skill.

History

Katorgas were established in almost unpopulated areas of Siberia and the Russian Far East where there were few populations and food. However, there were a few prisoners who managed to escape. Since those times, Siberia acquired its fearsome connotation with punishment, which was later reinforced by the Soviet Gulag system inspired by the Kátorga camps and extended to the Russian Far North. Life in the camps actually took place in extremely precarious conditions, where the prisoners worked exhausting days of more than 19 hours a day, without drink, heat or food for days, many of whom died within a few months. The tsarist regime had developed a system of katorga, or forced labor, where mostly left-wing intellectuals and communists were sent, reaching 280,000 prisoners in 1905. The tsarist prison system housed approximately one hundred and fifty thousand inmates on the eve of the Revolution. Russian.

The most common occupations in these fields were mining and construction work. A notable example is the Amur Chariot Trail (Russian: Амурская колёсная дорога).

Anton Chekhov, the famous Russian writer and playwright, visited the premises of a katorga in 1891, on the island of Sakhalin in the Russian Far East, and wrote about the conditions there in his book Sakhalin Island . In it he criticized the poor judgment and incompetence of the officers in charge, which had led to a low standard of living for prisoners, as well as waste of government funds and poor productivity.

Peter Kropotkin, while aide-de-camp to the governor of Transbaikalia, was in charge of inspecting the state of the area's prisons, and later described his discoveries in the book In Russian and French Prisons.

Influences

The British adopted a policy identical to katorga during the Boer War in South Africa, coining the term "concentration camps." Prussia adopted the same policy against a local insurrection in German southwest Africa in 1904, called Konzentrationslagern, where forced labor was also carried out.

In 1901, inspired by the Russian system, British officers copied the system of forced labor, which insufficient diets and deplorable hygienic conditions favored the appearance of contagious diseases (measles, typhus and dysentery) which, together with the lack of medical care properly, caused a large number of deaths. In total the British created 45 camps for Boers and 64 for black Africans where the elderly, women and children were sent. A post-war report concluded that 27,927 Boers, of whom 22,074 were children, and 14,155 black Africans died of hunger, disease and hardship in the British concentration camp system.

Notable Kátorgas

• Kátorga de Nérchinsk
• Kátorga de Kara
• Sakhalin Kátorga

Famous captives in kátorgas

• The writer Fiódor Dostoyevski (Fiodor Dostoievski, Fyodor Dostoyevsky)from 1849 to 1854, by anti-government activity against the Tsar Nicholas I. Dostoievski abandoned his leftist activities during this period and became deeply conservative and extremely religious. He witnessed this experience in one of his most famous works, Memories of the house of the dead.
• Piotr Kropotkin, prominent Russian scientist and anarchist.
• Iosif Stalin escaped twice in 1902 and 1908
• Decembrists
• Aleksandr Radíshchev
• Nikolái Chernishévski
• Tarás Shevchenko
• David Riazánov
• Fanni Kaplán