The Soviet Union’s camp system took shape in the course of the industrialisation and collectivisation campaign at the start of the 1930s, when prisoners were an important manpower resource and massive social reorganisations generated large numbers of additional prisoners. During and after the Second World War, the camp network expanded into captured territories, including the Estonian SSR. By its nature, the camp network that was established in Estonia was a scaled-down copy of the Soviet Union’s camp system, yet it also had some distinctive features.
Correctional labour colonies under the jurisdiction of the union republics were meant primarily for the detention of persons who had been sentenced to imprisonment for less serious offences. While political prisoners ordinarily were not sent to colonies during the first year of Soviet occupation, this principle was discarded in the period after the Second World War. The relative proportion of political prisoners in Estonian SSR colonies consistently exceeded 10%.
The vast majority of prisoners sent to Estonian SSR colonies in the period under consideration consisted of persons who had been convicted of economic crimes, in other words ‘embezzlement of state and public property’. In terms of the duration of sentences, people sentenced to imprisonment for up to five years, which meant relatively ‘mild’ punishment in the context of the punishment policy of that time, formed the majority in Estonian colonies. Since it was not considered practical to send persons with short sentences to more distant camps, Estonians formed the majority in Estonian colonies in 1944–1954.
Just like the Soviet Union’s camp network as a whole, the union republic’s colonies were also closely integrated into the economic system, in which the manpower of prisoners had to be put to maximum use. Such a system provides grounds for arguing that the constant influx of prisoners as useful manpower was at least to some extent intentional in the repressive policy of that time. Needless to say, guilt as such became relatively abstract in such a situation. After Stalin’s death in March of 1953, the dismantling of the camp system in particular was one of the first reforms undertaken at the initiative of Minister of Internal Affairs Lavrenti Beria. It had probably already become clear to the persons involved that Stalin’s fixed idea of using the slave labour of prisoners was economically unprofitable – prisoners are not particularly motivated manpower under any system of government. Furthermore, a gigantic so-called contingent of prison guards had to be maintained to guard them. Those guards were of no benefit whatsoever to the national economy. Moreover, the network of Stalinist slave camps damaged the Soviet Union’s international reputation.