A truly unique exhibit – the only striped prisoner’s uniform from the camp to the outside!   Upon release, all the prisoners of the special regime always changed out of their striped clothes into their regular used gray ones.  But with this jacket and its owner it was a different story.

In February 1987, writer and dissident Leonid Borodin, a high-security prisoner of Perm-36 camp, was transported to the KGB detention center in Moscow. The wheel of perestroika, however, was already turning and the smell of freedom was wafting in, and Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, had already declared that the USSR had no political prisoners. And the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee had already decided to release Soviet political prisoners.

In the summer of that same year, 1987, Leonid Borodin was released directly from the detention center, and although his wife brought him civilian clothes, he took his striped recidivist uniform along with his other belongings, despite the objections of the guards.

In 2002, Viktor Shmyrov, director of ANO Perm 36, met in Moscow with Leonid Ivanovich Borodin, editor-in-chief of Moskva magazine. It was then that the former ZK of Perm-36 gave him his jacket, which added to the museum’s collection.

The photo of the jacket was taken from the “Virtual Gulug Museum” website (http://www.gulagmuseum.org).

To date, the fate of the exhibit is unknown.

Book of acquisitions at the “Perm-36” museum. , vol. 1, main fund

Книга поступлений экспонатов в музее “Пермь-36” , т.1, основной фонд