Sharashka
Sharashkas (singular:
The scientists and engineers at a sharashka were prisoners picked by the Soviet government from various camps and prisons and assigned to work on scientific and technological problems. Living conditions were usually much better than in an average taiga camp, mostly because of the absence of hard labor.
The results of the research in sharashkas were usually published (if published at all) under the names of prominent Soviet scientists without credit given to the real researchers, whose names frequently have been forgotten.[citation needed] Some of the scientists and engineers imprisoned in sharashkas were released during and after World War II (1939-1945) to continue independent careers; some became world-renowned.
History
On May 15, 1930, the
In 1930 Leonid Ramzin and other engineers sentenced in the Industrial Party Trial were formed into a special design bureau under the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), which was then the Soviet secret police.[citation needed]
In July 1931, the OGPU seized control of the Intercession Convent in Suzdal and the following year created a special prison laboratory (known as the Bureau of Special Purpose or BON) where around nineteen leading plague and tularaemia specialists were forced to work on the development of biological weapons. Colonel Mikhail Mikhailovich Faibich, a specialist in typhus, was the first director of BON. The laboratory was in operation until 1936, when the scientists were transferred to a Red Army microbiology facility on Gorodomlya Island on Lake Seliger.[4]
In 1938,
In 1949, the scope of the sharashkas significantly increased. Previously the work done there was of military and defense character. The MVD Order No. 001020 dated November 9, 1949 decreed installation of "Special technical and design bureaus" for a wide variety of civilian research and development, particularly in the "remote areas of the Union".[5]
The 4th Special Department was disbanded in 1953.[citation needed]
Notable sharashka inmates
- Robert Ludvigovich Bartini(or Roberto Oros di Bartini) an aircraft designer and scientist.
- Valentin Glushko, a chief rocket engine designer. (His biography at MN)
- Leonid Kerber, an aircraft radio equipment designer.
- gravitational slingshot.
- Lev Kopelev, a writer, another inmate of Marfino (a prototype for Rubin from In the First Circle)
- Sergei Korolev, an aircraft and rocket designer, later the chief designer for the Soviet space program.
- Vladimir Myasishchev, an aircraft designer.
- Vladimir Petlyakov, the chief designer of the aircraft families Pe and VI (The Petlyakov aircraft).
- Nikolai Nikolaevich Polikarpov, an aircraft designer (arrested for a brief period).
- Leonid Ramzin, the inventor of the straight-flow boiler
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a writer. His novel In the First Circle is a vivid account of life in sharashka Marfino.
- Léon Theremin, a pioneer of electronic music, the inventor of the theremin and a passive eavesdropping device.
- Nikolay Timofeev-Ressovsky, a geneticist and radiobiologist (His biography at genetics.org).
- Andrei Tupolev, the chief designer of the aircraft families Tu and ANT.
References
- ^ Compare: Словарь русского арго
- ISBN 5977507534, p.24
- ^ ЛАГЕРНАЯ СИСТЕМА И ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИЕ РЕПРЕССИИ (1918-1953), Л.П.Беляков
- ISBN 978-0-19-092885-8.
- ^ "Приказ МВД СССР об организации "шарашек", a Memorial webpage (retrieved January 2, 2014)
- L.L.Kerber, Von Hardesty, Paul Mitchell, Stalin's Aviation Gulag: Memoir of Andrei Tupolev and the Purge Era (ISBN 1-56098-640-9.
External links
- Maj David R. Johnson, USAF. "Review of Stalin's Aviation Gulag by Leonid Lvovich Kerber". Aerospace Power Journal. Retrieved 2007-06-23.
- The database of research and design establishments of the Soviet defence industry, 1927–67 by Keith Dexter, The U. of Warwick.