“I Consider My Arrest Unjust”

Did a prisoner have any chance of early release from Stalin’s GULAG?

The J-Doc digital archive contains the case file of Shmul Borukhovich Ashkinazi, a native of the Polish town of Kazimierz Dolny who lived in Ladyzhyn. In 1938, he was sentenced to ten years in forced-labour camps, but in 1943 he was released early under a directive regulating the release of prisoners suffering from severe incurable illnesses.

Ashkinazi was arrested on 20 December 1937 as part of the NKVD’s “Polish Operation.” He was charged with anti-Soviet agitation under Article 54-10 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR and espionage under Article 54-6.

The formal grounds for his arrest were that Ashkinazi wanted to leave the Soviet Union, corresponded with relatives in Poland, and received money transfers from them.

The case file contains numerous procedural errors and typos — striking even against the background of “Stalinist justice.” NKVD officers confused dates: according to the documents, the suspect was supposedly interrogated before he had even been arrested. His surname was also recorded in several different ways: Ashkinazi, Ashkenazi, Ashkinazm — the version used in his Soviet passport — and even Ashkinadze.

By decision of the “dvoika,” Shmul Ashkinazi was sentenced to ten years in the camps and sent to serve his term in Kuloylag, in Arkhangelsk Oblast. If the word “luck” can be used here at all, then Ashkinazi was “lucky”: most of those convicted under the “Polish Operation” were sentenced to death.

From 1939 onward, Ashkinazi tried to challenge the verdict. He wrote to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the USSR Prosecutor’s Office, and other institutions. His letters reveal a man who understood the language of the Soviet system well. He called himself a Stakhanovite, wrote that he was “blameless before Soviet power,” pointed to violations of his “procedural rights,” and claimed that the real reason for his arrest was his fight against corruption in the leadership of the artel where he worked.

But his petition for review was denied.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, mortality in the camps rose sharply: supplies deteriorated, and hunger and disease became part of everyday life in the GULAG. In 1942, a directive was adopted regulating the release of prisoners suffering from severe incurable illnesses or mental illness.

In camp practice, such prisoners had medical acts drawn up for them: documents certifying that they could no longer work and had become a burden for the camp administration.

Formally, those convicted under “counter-revolutionary” articles were not supposed to be released in this way. In practice, however, exceptions did occur. In 1943, Shmul Ashkinazi was released.

His subsequent fate is unknown.