Perceived through the lenses of torture and incarceration of the author, Alexei Marinat's confessional literature provides the reader with a legacy of the reconstitution of Gulag reality, the right to freedom and to remembrance. The memoirs of the diarist A. Marinat are a form of autobiographical writing that records multiple forms of collective torture to gain confession about the experience of the diarist while under the regime of terror. Author's testimonies tend to illustrate the full extent of alienation from the point of view of a survivor who managed to record the terrible realities of communist persecution, recovering collective memory and acting as a true advocate of the individuals who suffered from this oppressive regime. The statement of the well-known historian Pierre Nora stating that memory is blind to all but the group it binds tends to support the relevance of collective memory, exploring the right of confessional literature to be considered a rich documentary source, a traumatic experience common to a generation of political prisoners and dissidents.
The article considers the little studied issue of Russia's penitentiary system development in the 1st quarter of the 18th century. Referring to a variety of sources, such as laws, documentary sources and memoirs of foreigners who visited Russia between the mid-17th — 1st quarter of the 18th century, the author reconstructs the living conditions of prisoners in order to determine the scale of influence of Peter the Great's reforms on the main principles of prison organization and the prisoners' confinement conditions. A comparative and historical analysis helps establish the frequency of imprisonment as a punishment during the period in question, and refers to the differences there existed in the confinement of convicts in the second half of the 17th and the 1st third of the 18th century. The study of primary sources and assessments of prisons contained in the historical books has shown no drastic changes in incarceration conditions during Petrine transformations. As in the previous century, the main contradiction in the life of prisons was the lack of the government's attention to the problem of funding and a tendency to dictate strict requirements to the guarding of convicts. Nevertheless, unlike in the 17th century, prisoners had more opportunities to earn their living as their labour was used in factories and they did other hard work. ; Статья посвящена малоизученным вопросам развития пенитенциарной системы в России первой четверти XVIII столетия. Основываясь на данных, содержащихся в нормативных правовых актах, документальных источниках и воспоминаниях иностранцев, побывавших в России в середине XVII — первой четверти XVIII в., автор реконструирует условия содержания заключенных с целью выяснить, насколько реформы Петра Великого повлияли на основные принципы организации тюрем и образ жизни заключенных в них арестантов. Сравнительно-исторический анализ позволил выявить частоту использования тюремного заключения как одного из видов наказаний того времени, а также обратиться к характеристике различий, существовавших в содержании колодников во второй половине XVII и первой трети XVIII в. Изучение источников и оценок состояния тюрем, содержащихся в историографии, показало отсутствие серьезных изменений условий содержания арестантов в России эпохи Петровских преобразований. Как и в предыдущем столетии, основным противоречием существования мест заключения являлось отсутствие внимания государства к проблеме их финансирования при стремлении диктовать жесткие требования к охране колодников. Правда, в отличие от XVII в. арестанты имели больше возможностей заработать на свое содержание, так как их труд очень часто использовался в заводских и иных вспомогательных работах.
