History of the ALZHIR Camp

It was for them that, under an NKVD order of December 3, 1937, the Akmola Special Division of the NKVD's Karlag was established on the basis of the so-called "26th point," a labor settlement. The first group of women with children aged one to three arrived in Akmolinsk on January 6, 1938. This camp was special. "ALZHIR," short for "Akmola Camp for Wives of Traitors of the Motherland," was the name the women prisoners jokingly gave it. Mostly they were wives of well-known state, political, and public figures: Aziza Ryskulova and her mother Arifa Yesengulova, Damesh Zhurgenyeva, Rabiga Asfendiyarova, the singer Lidia Ruslanova, the writer Galina Serebryakova, women from the family of the executed Marshal Tukhachevsky, the wives of the writers Boris Pilnyak and Yuri Trifonov, and the mothers of Bulat Okudzhava and Maya Plisetskaya.

The camp consisted of several adobe barracks, four watchtowers, and barbed wire. Throughout January and February, prisoners began arriving in a continuous stream. From Butyrka Prison alone, 1,600 women arrived. There was not enough room for the women prisoners. The new arrivals built their own barracks in blizzards and snowstorms, in heat and rain, and set up bunks in them. Instead of mattresses, they spread straw on the wooden planks. To heat the barracks, the women cut reeds, which were the main fuel for two winters. Orderlies stoked the stove with reeds around the clock, but it gave so little heat that the temperature in the barracks did not exceed 6 to 8 degrees. The first year and a half of the camp's existence was the hardest. Only in May 1939, after the operation against the wives of "traitors of the Motherland" was completed, were the prisoners moved from the special regime to the general camp regime. The main change was that the women were allowed the previously forbidden correspondence with the outside world.

Thanks to the forced labor of the women prisoners, Karlag's 26th point in a short time became a profitable, diversified farm and, in production indicators, took first place among Karlag's divisions. The prisoners' lives merged into one hopeless gray day: roll call in front of the barracks in the morning, then a ladle of thin porridge in the canteen. A ration of black bread, a scoop of watery soup, and a teacup of mushy porridge remained their unchanging diet month after month. Talking about food was strictly forbidden. In the remote steppe, the women created a production complex that not only supplied the camp with clothing and food but, during the war years, also provided the front with special uniforms. The camp had a garment factory, and later a workshop for machine-embroidered goods was set up.

Diversified agriculture occupied a significant place. The camp carried out seed selection and breeding, vegetable gardening expanded, and land reclamation work began. Irrigation ditches were dug in the fields, and a small power station was built. Alongside field crops and vegetable growing, land was set aside for melon crops, where watermelons and melons were grown. The women did gardening: they grew apple, pear, plum, and cherry trees, flowers grew in greenhouses, and poplars were planted along the barracks. Known or unknown, all of them deserve to be remembered. History remembers the Akmola camp in the former village of Malinovka, now Akmol in the Akmola Region. To this day, this place remains a silent witness to the human tragedy of the 20th century.