Unzhlag Explained

57.7186°N 44.8158°WUnzhlag or Unzhensky ITL (Unzhensky corrective labor camp) (ru|Унжлаг, Унженский ИТЛ) was a camp of the GULAG system of labor camps in the Soviet Union. Named after the Unzha River, it has headquarters at the railway station Sukhobezvodnoye (Сухобезводное, Сухобезводная), Gorky Oblast. It operated from February 5, 1938 to 1960. The main operation was logging and wood processing industries, but also served a wide variety of other small-scale industries: construction, metalworking, railroad servicing, clothing, footwear, pottery production, etc. The camp had 30 sites (lagpunkts).^[1]

There is a small museum of Unzhlag on the private property of a local lore enthusiast Mikhail Shulegin in the village .^[2]

Notable inmates

• Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli (1887-1943), Azerbaijani statesman and writer (imprisoned 1940, died January 1943)
• Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, Lithuanian school girl deported in June 1941 who later wrote a memoir about her experiences
• Ahmad Jafarzade (1929-2000), Azerbaijani writer, brother of Aziza Jafarzade, who was imprisoned for his poem, "Hey, Yusif" ^[3] critical of Joseph Stalin. Ahmad survived the GULAG (both at Unzhlag and Kolyma), and after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, he published poetry that he had collected from fellow prisoners ^[4] and a description of the terror that Azerbaijanis had experienced in everyday life in 1937 ^[5] and the traditional tortures used to extract confessions in Baku's NKVD prison in the 1940s.
• Lev Kopelev describes his experience in Unzhlag in his book, To Be Preserved Forever.^[6]
• , Belarusian literary critic, publisher, and cultural activist; served some of his time in Unzhlag, among several other camps.
• , Russian revolutionary and Soviet statesman, Menshevik.

Notes and References

1. http://www.memo.ru/history/NKVD/GULAG/ "Система исправительно-трудовых лагерей в СССР"
2. https://ling.hse.ru/news/785425636.html Экспедиция фольк­ло­ри­стов в Ма­ка­рьев­ский район Костромской области
3. https://azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai141_folder/141_articles/141_ahmad_jafarzade_poetry.html "Hey, Yusif"
4. https://azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai141_folder/141_articles/141_bayati_poetry.html Laments in the Prison Camps: Collection by Ahmad Jafarzade
5. https://azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai141_folder/141_articles/141_ahmad.html Seven Days in 1937: The Trauma of Stalin's Early Repressions
6. Lev Kopelev, To Be Preserved Forever ("Хранить вечно"), 1976. Глава двадцать шестая. Сухобезводная. Унжлаг