The Dubravny Camp, Special Camp No.3 (Дубравный лагерь, Особый лагерь № 3), commonly known as the Dubravlag (Russian: Дубравлаг), was a Gulaglabor camp of the Soviet Union located in Yavas, Mordovia from 1948 to 2005.
The Dubravlag was established on 28 February 1948 as Gulag special camp No. 3 for political prisoners by merging the Temlag camp and Temnikovsky children's colony, a camp complex of the Soviet Gulag system of forced labor camps. Yavas was founded in 1931 as the headquarters of the Temlag, which was named after the pre-existing nearby town of Temnikov. The Temlag's camp section in Yavas was separated from its industrial operations and incorporated into the new special camp named Dubravny, meaning "oak grove" in Russian. The Soviets established a number of camps in the Mordovian ASSR to hold individuals convicted of "particularly dangerous state crimes" specifically. The Dubravlag became a common destination for writers arrested for Soviet dissident activity at a time of extreme censorship in the Soviet Union during the late Stalin era.
In 1954, after the death of Joseph Stalin, the Dubravlag and many other camps of the Gulag system were converted into regular corrective labor camp (ITL). In 1960, the Soviet government dissolved the Gulag agency and Dubravlag was incorporated into the Soviet penitentiary system. By 1961, the Mordovia camps including the Dubravlag became the sole destination of those convicted of political crimes in the Soviet Union, and continued to function as a penal labor camp during the Khrushchev Thaw. However, the rise of Leonid Brezhnev in 1964 led to an increase in political repression in the Soviet Union and a resurgence in the number of political prisoners. Brezhnev's rule began with the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial, where the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were convicted of "Anti-Soviet agitation" in a show trial for their writings. In 1966, Sinyavsky and Daniel were both imprisoned at the Dubravlag until their early release in 1971 by Yuri Andropov, the Chairman of the KGB at the time.
Irina Ratushinskaya, Russian dissident, writer, and poet, described her years in Dubravlag in her book Grey Is the Color of Hope (1989, Vintage. ISBN0-679-72447-8)
