Research topic: "Karlag Medical Service: people and destinies".

Author: Viola Dmitrieva

Abstract

I have always been attracted by the understudied pages of history, especially the topic of the functioning of the medical and sanitary service of the correctional camp, which was located on the territory of the Karaganda region, where I was born and live now. I was also interested in the fate of prisoners, who were working as doctors in the Karaganda correctional labor camp during the Stalinist regime of the 30s –to the 50s of the 20th century. There substantially is no information on this topic, so the project is based on working with the private files of prisoners, decrees, and orders that have been preserved in the Central Archive of the city of Karaganda.

At the beginning of the research work, I assumed that the prisoners of Karlag were in terrible conditions, because of which there were many sick people and there were not enough medical personnel for all the patients. To study this topic, I worked with archival documents, analyzed data, described and compared the conditions and fates of prisoners, as well as compared the chronology of events.

As a result of the conducted research, my hypothesis was confirmed. The living conditions of the Karlag prisoners were unbearable. Because of hunger and terrible living conditions, there were many sick people. 40.2% of prisoners are sick, temporarily unemployed people, 10.45% are disabled, and 10.15% are sick people with disabilities. Consequently, about 61% of the prisoners were sick and unemployed people. However, doctors who were real professionals with higher medical education stood up to fight diseases. There were not so many of them, but they fought for people's lives in the most difficult conditions, forgetting about themselves.

Without knowing the true past, it is impossible to build a future. There was a similar situation in other camps, so in the future, I would like to study and make a comparative analysis of the medical services of camps in other countries.