The ‘Prisoners of Perm Political Camps’ database based on name lists of prisoners of each of the three Perm political camps: Perm-35, Perm-36, Perm-37 and prisoners’ records which were copied at the Data Center of Perm Regional Department of Internal Affairs, and some tens of charging documents and judgments from some prisoners’ archived investigatory records which were made available to the staff of Perm-36 Memorial Center. The former prisoners’ memoirs, accounts and recollections were also used.
The database comprises a personal case for each and every prisoner throughout the period Perm political camps existed, 1972 through 1992. Each case comprises a reference about the prisoner based on the camp accounts and information from all available sources. Separate folders hold scans and transcripts of camp records, photos and copy documents from archived investigatory records and public prosecutor’s supervision files.
Perm-35, Perm-36 and Perm-37 made a unified system of political camps. Not infrequently, prisoners were transferred from one camp to another, or even to a third one. The nature of the available sources does not allow to list each camp’s prisoners individually and quite accurately throughout their history, but, where available, information about the prisoners’ individual camp-to-camp transfers is included in personal references which are contained inside the cases.
‘Annals of Extreme Events in Perm Political Camps’ database (Это новый раздел. База данных «Хроника чрезвычайных событий Пермских политлагерей» – АН)
The ‘Annals of Extreme Events in Perm Political Camps’ database provides information about unjustified punishments, wrongful acts, administrative abuse, lawlessness and repression administration and staff of Perm political camps applied to prisoners.
Some acts were provided for by the security documents but often misapplied such as deprival of the right to purchase food and primary commodities in the camp stall, and to receive parcels, deprival of visits, punitive confinement, ward confinement, punitive/ward confinement involving low diet 9 ‘b’ which is recognized as starvation torture by the international law, and canceled in USSR in 1987, reconviction to serve some of the term in prison. Totally wrongful acts were also applied: insults, correspondence restriction, forfeiture of personal effects, cold tortures, poor-quality food, failure to provide healthcare, violent acts, and battery.
The database also provides information about facts of the prisoners struggling for their rights: formal complaints of the administration to higher authorities, up to the Office of the General Prosecutor of USSR and CC of CPSU; informal individual and joint complaints and addresses to the same entities and international bodies; individual refusals to work and joint strikes, individual and joint hunger strikes; actual transfer to prisoner-of-state status, denial of Soviet citizenship.