In the Russian language and culture,"former people" (Russian:Бывшие люди,romanized: byvshiye lyudi) are people who lost their high social status. The expression went into a wide circulation in theRussian Empire after the 1897 short story ofMaxim Gorky,Byvshiye lyudi (Бывшие люди), translated in English asCreatures That Once Were Men, about people fallen from prosperity into an abyss of misery. At that time, at the end of the 19th century, for Gorky, "former people" were objects of pity and compassion, but with the establishment of Soviet power, "former people" in a new sense became the target of various forms of persecution.
After theOctober Revolution, the expression referred to people who lost their social status after the revolution: aristocracy, imperial military, bureaucracy, clergy, etc.[1]
While the "former people" of Gorky were the object of pity and compassion, from the very first days of theSoviet power, the "former people" in the new meaning had become a target of severe persecution of various kinds. In fact, during the wave of repressions after the assassination ofSergey Kirov,NKVD carried out Operation "Former People", in the course of which during March 1935 over 11,000 of "former people" were arrested or deported fromLeningrad (whose Communist Party organization Kirov headed and where he was killed), according to Directive No. 29 of February 27, 1935, "On the eviction of a counter-revolutionary element from Leningrad and suburban areas to remote areas of the country.".[2] In April, NKVD chiefGenrikh Yagoda expanded[3] the scope of the operation to cleanse the border region ofLeningrad Oblast andKarelian ASSR from further 22,000 "formers". Further 8,000 were deported from the area during the so-called "passport operations".[4]
During the peak of theGreat Purge, the cleansing of the country from the "former people" was explained by the necessity to eliminate the "insurgence base" in the case of a war.[5]
The 1939NKVD Order No. 001223, which established the detailed bureaucratic procedures for keeping track of "anti-Soviet andsocially alien elements", defined the category of "former people" as follows: "former tsarist andWhite Army administration, formerdvoryans [Russian nobility],pomeshchiks (noble landowners), merchants and petty merchants, those who employ hired labor, industrialists, and others".[6]
The number of "former people" was in the millions. According to various estimates, in 1913 in Russia, there were between 22 and 35 million relatively wealthy people, counting both urban and rural population.[7]
HistorianDouglas Smith's book,Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy, traces the calamities of two representative aristocratic families, theGolitsyns and theSheremetevs.[8] Additionally,Amor Towles' novelA Gentleman in Moscow chronicles the tale of a former person imprisoned in the Moscow hotel Metropol for much of his adult life.
citing Иванов В.А. Миссия ордена. Механизм массовых репрессий в Советской России в конце 20-х - 40-х гг. (на материалах Северо-Запада РСФСР). СПб., 1997; Генрих Ягода: Сб. документов. Казань, 1997. С. 495 - 476
chapter 2
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