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“IT IS HARD TO DIE WITH THE UNDESERVED ‘COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY’ STIGMA”. THE REFLECTION OF REPRESSIONS IN THE COMPLAINTS OF PRISONERS AND THEIR RELATIVES ABOUT RETRIAL, 1938–1939

The article is dedicated to the texts of the complaints of prisoners and their relatives about an unfair conviction during the NKVD “kulak” operation. They are stored in the investigative cases of the repressed Muscovites in the State Archives of the Russian Federation. The complaints have a three-part structure with the “true” (according to the complainants) motives of conviction (slander, actions of the investigator), arrest reasons and their relationship with each other, and the arguments proving human innocence. The author analyses the differences in the understanding of the reasons of repressions in the texts of the prisoners and their relatives. The convicts realized a clear connection between the social origin and the fact of arrest, their relatives did not consider that reason to be significant and believed that labor merits were more important than the origin. Their petitions are more biographical, the convicts themselves paid considerable attention to the explanation of each official charge. The relatives more often believed in the “mistakes” of the NKVD while conducting arrests, the prisoners explained the repression as a revenge of the colleagues or neighbors. The mass terror was only intuitively recognized by the complainants; they transferred the responsibility for it onto ordinary citizens – the “snitches” and investigators who fabricated the cases.