Gulag kilde: Rapport om en arbejdslejr i Nizhni, Novgorod af 10 august 1932.

To the Presidium of VTsIK, Comrades Kiselyov and N Novikov,
To the Procurator of the RSFSR, Comrade Vyshinsky,
A Report On Conditions at the Penal Labor Colony in the City of Nizhni Novgorod.

The Nizhni Novgorod labor colony, built to accommodate eight hundred persons, had 3.461 persons incarcerated in it on 1 August 1932. The overload is explained, first by the fact that a lot of people are held for al long time under investigation and, second, by the fact that the people’s judges hearing cases apply the full force of the law (for example, for embezzling one hundred rubles or for swindling someone out of six rubles and so many kopecks or the like they give one or two years of strict solitary confinement) and, thirdly, by the fact that Moscow sends so many (there are instances of children being sent). The living accommodations look like the proverbial herring barrel packed with people. Iron bedsteads are _____ in number. Plank beds are furnished to _____ people, and the rest sleep on the bare floor. There are mattresses for only _______ persons in all, and no blankets or pillows. People sleep literally on bare plank beds. It’s dirty and stuffy in the place of confinement. 

The practice of confining prisoners by category is not always precisely observed. A worker, peasant, kolkhoz member brought for the first time to the house of Coorection (Ispravdom) not infrequently finds himself among inveterate recidivises, prostitutes, and ruffians. For example, from rounds in the woman’s ward in one cell questioning reveled that here were repeat offenders and prostitutes with up to seven convictions, and here also were female factory workers and collective farmers with first convictions for stealing a goat or embezzling a hundred rubles, those still being investigated, and those simply taken into custody. During the inspection of the second ward, it became apparent that in cell no. 1 among working people deprived of their freedom were four repeat offenders. All newcomers to cell no.1 are subjected to a thorough search and under the threat of a knife have everything of any  value whatsoever taken from then, not even mentioning the pieces of dried bread they bring with them, which as a rule are plucked by robbers immediately after they arrive. The administration views this outrageous situation with great indifference, and for this reason prevailing opinion among the prisoners is that it’s useless to complain. The head convict in the first ward, Razin, is a recid (recidivist thief), in the second ward, Lapshin, a recid, in the third, fourth, and fifth men convicted under paragraphs 162 and 193 of the Criminal Code (article 162 concerned theft; article 193, the last one in the 1926 Criminal Code, incorporated the 1924 Regulations on Crimes by Military Personnel)), in the sixth Rachkov, a recid convicted six times over, etc.

Prisoners communicate freely between cells; here too the possibility of theft is not absent.
At the House of Correction five oversight committees (comprising representatives of various bodies and social organizations who looked after the conditions of prisoners’ space) have been formed, their work goes on without proper leadership, committees’ sessions are very rarely attended by representatives of the Worker and Peasant Inspectorate, of Soviet social organizations, of the Gorsovet (Gorodskoi sovet, city council), Komsomol, and the Zhenotdel (Dhenskii otdel, the party’s woman’s section). At sessions up to eighty items are put up for consideration at one time. Oversight committee no. 3 may serve as an example. At the session of 1 July of this year, eighty-three items were considered; the session of 29 June considered eighty-six items. Using this approach, the work of an oversight committee becomes little more than pro forma, never going to the heart matters.

The House of Correction has three hundred staff; thirty-three of them are members of associate members of VKP (b), four Komsomol members. Of all the Communists, only one deals directly with prisoners and that in his capacity as secretary of the VKP(b) cell.
The political and educational work, the very core of the House of Corrections’ existence, is carried out very poorly. This work is killed by prison work activities and by inaction on the part of the administration. For 3.461 persons there are 760 newspaper subscriptions, 110 journal subscriptions. The club was designed for four hundred; 350 semiliterate persons are being taught. Vocational education was given to 263 persons in the first half of the year. The cultural service is wholly inadequate; it does not draw on the institutional and scientific strengths of Nizhni Novgorod. In their free time prisoners are pretty much left to their own devices. Observed were instances of card playing and telling of far-fetched stories hostile to the Soviet authorities.