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In the study of the history of Soviet camps, there are still serious gaps; in particular, there are no works that reveal the history of the creation and functioning of the camp system in the Caspian region. This study fills the gap in historiography and provides answers to the topical issues of the location of some camp units, reasons, goals, objectives and conditions for the creation and operation of the camp com-plex in the Kazakhstan region of the Caspian Sea. The source base of the study is the documents from the fund of the Main Directorate of Camps and Places of Incarceration of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR of the State Archive of the Russian Federation. The article shows that from the middle of 1932, in the course of solving the problem of creating their own supply base, the OGPU camps began to intensively develop the fishing industry. The GULAG got a new fishing area - Prorva located in the north-eastern part of the Caspian Sea. For catching and processing fish, there was created the Prorva labor camp which functioned from 1932 to 1940; it was initially subordinated to the GULAG OGPU and stationed in the Kazakh ASSR on the island of Prorva in the Caspian Sea. One of the largest units was the Guryev camp with the population of up to 2 thousand people; it was located in the area of the town of Guryev, Kazakh ASSR. The prisoners were engaged in fishing and provided them-selves with fish, the supply of which to the camps was cut off from 1932. The study reveals that the prisoners settled down in the Caspian fishing region of Kazakhstan in extremely difficult climatic, living and working conditions; they made a significant contribution to the provision of camps and colonies with food, since all products manufactured by the Prorva labor camp were sold in the GULAG system.

Despite a significant number of works devoted to the history of the GULAG, the problem of the formation and functioning of small regional camps in the areas where the camp system was not widespread still remains practically uncovered both in Russian and in foreign historiography. Fishing camps in the Caspian Sea region remain practically unstudied. The Prorvinskii correctional labor camp also known as the Prorva Island camp (Prorvlag) is among them. The aim of this study was to fill the gap in the historiography of the GULAG, to reveal the causes and conditions of the formation of the fishing camp complex on the shores of the Northern Caspian Sea, to analyze the industrial activities of Prorvlag, and to determine the location of individual structural subdivisions of the camp. The study is based on the documents from the archives of the Main Administration of Places of Confinement (Glavnoe upravlenie mest zaklyucheniya, GUMZ) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR (GARF, F. R-9414) supplemented by a considerable collection of other publications. The underlying methodological principle is the critical analysis of the entire body of factual material and the new archival documents in the first place. It has been established that in 1932, the OGPU received a new fishing area for its future use, the Prorva district located in the northeastern part of the Caspian Sea. For the purposes of its development and further organization of fisheries, a correctional labor camp was established there, with its administration originally stationed on Prorva Island in the Caspian Sea. The camp, which functioned from 1932 to 1940, included several subcamps, camp stations, and camp detachments. Among the prisoners, there were many fishing specialists who were convicted of various counter-revolutionary crimes. The camp had a fishing fleet of 1 115 units, production workshops for its maintenance, and coastal and floating fish factories. All the products produced by Prorvlag were sold within the GULAG system. It has been revealed that the OGPU established the Prorva Island camp in order to create its own base for supplying the camp population with fish products, since in 1932 the state stopped supplying camps with fish. The prisoners who developed the new fishing area in the most difficult climatic, domestic, industrial, and sanitary conditions made a significant contribution to the development of the Kazakhstan sector of the Caspian Sea.

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