https://doi.org/10.31261/RSL.2026.36.01
The author discusses the circumstances surrounding the unlawful arrest and subsequent incarceration of Nikolay Zabolotsky. The research area covers the period from 19 March 1938 to the first weeks of February 1939, or the time of the writer’s stay in preventive custody until his arrival as an inmate at a Vostlag camp in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. The analysis addresses both the moment of his arrest by NKVD and the stages of investigation leading up to the issue of a conviction in which Zabolotsky was sentenced to five years of correctional labour at Soviet labour camps in the Far East. The source material is drawn from the writer’s memoirs written before 1958 and after his release, entitled The story of my incarceration (История моегo заключения). They form a reliable recollection of the brutality of the totalitarian system which stripped people not only of their dignity, but often also of their lives, on the basis of imaginary crimes and evidence fabricated by the secret police. Accounts of murderous interrogations, harrowing events in prison and the hellish train journey to the Vostlag provide the main accents of the criminal reality brutally faced and traumatically experienced by the author of The triumph of agriculture (Триумф земледелия) before he ended up in the camp.
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2026
Published: 2021-02-26
10.31261/RSL
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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